The pathologist has little more than head-scratching to offer in regard to the less common-or-garden chemicals found in the girl’s system, apart from to hazard that they are possibly some sort of bespoke neurochemical, and therefore suggestive of behavioural modification – “Though modifying her behaviour to do what, precisely, beats me, I’m afraid” – so these have had to be sent off to the municipality’s central labs for more specialised analysis. He will keep Percy posted.
“And her implant?” Strangely, given its potential importance, this is almost an afterthought, just as he’s heading out the door, and he wonders why the pathologist hasn’t brought it up. “Was there anything on it?”
“No idea.” There is a rattle as the pathologist rummages around in a set of drawers behind him, turns and holds out a little translucent plastic box containing a small black sliver. “This seems pretty bespoke too. Or at least, our boys could make nothing of it. So either it’s been damaged in the fall, or else it’s not open to gentlemen callers – this gentleman, anyway. Maybe your lot will have better luck.”
Percy takes the box and rotates it in the cool light of the lab, which glints off its intricately ridged surface in accents of crimson red and neon blue. It looks standard enough, more or less, though perhaps more delicate than he’s seen before. The gossamer strands of the neural interface fall limply from the slim black shard like the tentacles of a dead jellyfish – and here too veined with the same harsh reds and blues. Reflexively, he finds his fingertips tracing his own implant, the small buried beads of the pressure pads, the subcutaneous filaments splicing with the optic nerve, before – as they would have done with the girl’s – branching out into the cerebral cortex and spidering away into the hippocampus. So, presuming it had not in fact been damaged in the fall, the girl’s implant should provide a record of her last thoughts, her recent memories and feelings, even – depending on storage capacity – some visual record of her final moments. He’ll send it off to the Company’s own central labs, but if it is encrypted – as the pathologist has implied – then breaking that could take some time, assuming that’s even possible.
“A box of mysteries indeed,” continues the pathologist. “A whole cartload of enigmas!”
And each of which are travelling in different directions: a beautiful, cosseted, drug-addicted, one-year-old, adult virgin.
“Well, thankfully, it’s your problem now.” Oldcastle grins, and wanders off back to his desk, whistling.
And so, with little else to do but await the test results, as well as the footage, data and witness statements from the Arc, Percy heads back to the hotel. He finds the wired-glass hutch at reception staffed by a different, but equally distracted young woman, heads straight through to the elevators, and from there to his room. The hotel never gets any busier, regardless of time of day, and apart from the woman searching for Antonio, he has yet to cross paths with another guest (though the young lady in question was certainly not that). Could be off-season, but he’s beginning to suspect that The Empire has no seasons, on, off, or otherwise.
He takes a shower in an attempt to rid himself of the lingering scent of eau de cadavre, contorting and twisting in the cramped little cubicle in a forlorn attempt to achieve full immersion. Why do they make these spaces so tiny, the jets so weak? Midway through the water cuts out, and he has to fumble at his temple, shampoo stinging his eyes, tapping and blinking to confirm he wants to pay for an extra five minutes. Ironic, really, that such a substance should be rationed and metered, when outside the walls it is its local overabundance that is of most concern.
He eventually emerges feeling more drained than refreshed, but at least relatively clean, and flops back onto the bed. He should update the case report logs, but a deep languor has begun to creep through him, and the next thing he knows he is snorting upright in a disoriented panic, his flailing arms fighting off the weight of some grabbing, clinging force, as it attempts to drag him down into the darkness … but which is now itself already slipping away, descending back into the dream abyss unnamed, as the dim light of waking gradually returns.
He checks the time: four hours! He’s lost the whole afternoon.
He leans over to the window and twitches back the curtain, the sceptic in him seeking visual confirmation of the time lapse, but the gloomy fog has returned, or else it never left, its grey sea interrupted at irregular intervals by lamplights dimly congealing out of its uniformity, which could make it almost any time of day or night. He is half-tempted to go back to sleep, to attack his duties afresh in the morning, but his stomach has other ideas. His interface informs him that Market Square, just two bridges over, offers “an eclectic selection of street food and fusion cuisine that any visitor would be a fool to pass up”, and driven more by hunger than the desire not to be considered foolish, he heads out.
The truth is a less appetising spectacle, the shabby little stalls mostly shuttered and closed, the grubby food barges bobbing darkly, unstaffed and unlit, their gangplanks withdrawn. The only holdout is a curiously branded little seafood place, strictly speaking also unstaffed (by anything human, anyway), and hosting a small gaggle of patrons at its few small tables. He wanders up to the interactive menu-board, its mythologically themed offerings promising everything from “Neptune’s rissoles” to “jerked mermaid”, the latter asterisked: “not guaranteed not to contain substances not described” – too many negatives for Percy’s nap-addled brain to process, but which is all, he is (relatively) sure, merely a humorous way of disguising that all produce comes from the same lab-meat factory down the coast. Halfway down the menu, there is the reassuring promise of something that might be fried potatoes, drizzled with what is basically a spicy sauce – curry and chips? – and topped off with what claims to be “deep-fried walrus whisker”. But it represents the least alarming option, and there being no other places open, with a few taps he opts for that and a bottle of ginger beer.
“Well, well, if it isn’t my old friend Antonio.”
At first he doesn’t recognise her – now apparently off-duty, having ditched her business suit for jeans and an insulated jacket, her hands thrust deep out of the cold into its capacious pockets, wisps of her dark hair escaping from under a woollen bobble hat. It is the travelling librarian from yesterday. There is a shorter, fair-haired girl stood next to her, yet to clock off, and bravely and unseasonably attired only in a short dark skirt, a skimpy, spangly top and vertiginously high heels.
“Still not Antonio, sorry,” he corrects.
“Well I said isn’t, didn’t I!” She grins. “So what brings you out on this fine evening, Not-Antonio?”
He motions his head at the food stall. “Tea.”
She nods at the wisdom of this.
“See, that’s a working class thing, that. To call dinner, tea. I do that. Where you from, then, Not-Antonio? I’m going to say north of Knightsbridge.”
“Somewhere around there.”
She gives him a mock-offended look. “Fine, be coy. Me, I’m an open book. Wide open.” In support of this assertion, she removes her pocketed hands to spread them far apart in a manner that makes her companion snicker. “What you down here for, then? If I may pry.”
“Business trip.”
“Ah.” The woman nods to her companion. “We get a lot of them, don’t we, Trix? Business men.”
There is a snatch of sailor’s hornpipe, and his food appears, bustled out by a corny little automaton sporting eye patch and tricorn hat. He is relieved to find that the walrus whiskers are merely some sort of crispy seaweed, itself as much a stranger to the briny deeps as the mermaid flesh. He gathers up some condiment sachets, a disposable napkin and fork, and sets off, ignoring the two women giggling and whispering behind him, with the resolute air of a tourist on a stroll, determined to take in the sights – well, those not eaten by the fog.
The Arc is the first to come good. He awakes next morning to a little notification icon on his interface: he has mail, of the actual physical kind.
He jogs down to reception and the same surly girl he had first seen on check-in actually meets his eyes, he now being deemed worthy of her interest; physical mail must be a rarity. She motions below him and a little drawer beneath the counter slides out, containing a small cardboard package. The data.
Retreating back to his room to explore it, he removes the outer packaging and sets its contents on top of the bed: a small dark-grey rectangle, that immediately lights up in response to his proximity, a groove around its middle brightening to fluorescent blue, and which proceeds to pulse as he confirms permission for the upload of the data to his implant. He opens the digital manifest: footage, statements, access logs, a message. He taps open the last; Director Caulden’s well-tended face appears and a video starts to play.
“Good day, Inspector. I trust your enquiries are going well. I include what footage we have been able to assemble – it’s not much, I’m afraid. There are also a couple of witness statements that we’ve been able to acquire – I don’t know if you want to verify these in person – as well as what data we have relating to access points. Please do get back to me with any follow-up questions.”
He smiles his tight smile and is gone.
The footage is indeed depressingly meagre: some random shots of a white shape fluttering by a service drone like a phantom – but at what height? Would it be possible to estimate a point of origin from the speed at which she passes the drone? But again, she might have hit obstacles before that, slowing her descent.
No footage up or down the central shaft itself, extraordinarily – Percy can’t believe they don’t have that – only some final shots of the sickening moment of impact from the stationary cams in the foyer. There is no relevant external footage, no sign of her finding a way into the building. “Not much” is right. A confirmation of the time of death, at least, only four minutes off the AI’s estimate: 3:11 am.
There are two witness statements, both brief, one from the same charmless head of security that had been the first to examine the body and seal off the area, and one from a resident that had been walking through the entrance foyer pretty much as it happened, his head turned after hearing the thud. Neither of them are especially useful.
The access logs at least supply a ray of hope: a service door, in a surveillance blind spot, somehow opened from outside some thirty minutes before the incident. It must be her. If he had footage of the surrounding external area, perhaps he could confirm her making her way to the Arc. But that would make it a municipal concern.
He calls up a map of the Arc on his interface. Even if she had gotten access through the service door, she’d have had to make her way up – through the service shafts or staff elevators, maybe? Are there no sensors or surveillance on these either? He suspects the Director may be holding out on him.
He sighs. Something to follow up regarding the how part, at any rate, but still no clue as to motive or identity. But at least he knows, now: he’s been looking in the wrong place. For if she did in fact come from Outside, then maybe Outside is where he should begin.
“That was quick work.”
“Don’t thank me,” says Oldcastle. “Thank the AIs. Little guys love their facial reconstructions. And I told you, didn’t I?” He grins. “Might print that one out for my wall.”
Percy closes the video link with the pathologist, and Falstaff is replaced by Ophelia: the blue eyes are now joined by a little up-turned nose and full, childlike lips; fittingly, a face of purity and innocence – now lost.
Is this what she really looked like? Anyway, it’s something to go on.
Now to go in search of the other girl.
It doesn’t take Percy long to find her. The virtual boulevard is as stereotypically sleazy as he’s anticipated, with all the brazenness of an Amsterdam or a Hamburg, and none of the local colour. And there she is, almost sweet next to the more graphic offerings, gyrating robotically around a pole, her long dark hair flying out as she whips her head around as she spins, covered by the artful moves and gestures that tease but do not reveal, and dressed only in thong, heels and suspenders. It’s on a loop, he realises, the same moves coming round again as he watches. Payment authorised and booking confirmed, he sits on the bed waiting, wondering if he’ll have the temerity to claim this on expenses.
“Well, well,” she says, when he opens the door to her some twenty minutes later. “Do my eyes not deceive me? If it isn’t Not-Antonio.”
Too many negatives.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi/fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. All instalments are free, but you can support my writing by taking out a paid subscription, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments.