The Shadow Fixer

by Matthew S. Cox

  Seth led her through several hallways and sliding glass doors marked ‘authorized personnel only’ to a small security station acting as a mini lobby in front of the executive conference rooms. Holographic signs at the entrance to the conference area announced a ban on all personal electronics beyond this point.

  A woman in a security jumpsuit seated at the counter smiled at them. “Hey, Seth.” She looked at Kirsten, her smile weakening.

  Kirsten braced for the usual nasty comment about psionics.

  “Oh, please tell me they’re not thinking of outsourcing security.”

  Seth laughed. “Nah, Jamie. Lieutenant Wren is NPF, not a security contractor on a tour.”

  Jamie’s expression mirrored Kirsten’s relief.

  “Wow.” Jamie looked her over. “Since when do the cops wear black? Are you like special forces or something?”

  “At my size?” Kirsten laughed. “I’m with Division 0.”

  “Oh, wow.” Jamie gave Seth a creepy look. “Who’s getting brain scanned?”

  Kirsten blinked. “Brain scanned?”

  “They don’t really do brain scans.” Seth went around behind the desk, gesturing for Kirsten to follow. “I don’t think the VPs would even ask and I’m sure Division 0 wouldn’t go sniffing around people’s brains because the bosses thought someone might be committing espionage.”

  “Yeah, that’s a big no.” Kirsten held a hand up. “We don’t raid people’s thoughts except in the most extreme circumstances, and someone in a suit not trusting their employees isn’t extreme.”

  “Wow, so you guys can read minds?” Jamie blushed, looking away from her.

  She either thinks I’m pretty… or she’s embarrassed for thinking we’re dangerous. Kirsten sighed mentally but didn’t peek into the woman’s mind.

  Seth tapped at one of the screens, bringing up a blue-toned video showing the interior of a large conference room. “What counts as extreme?”

  “Not all psionics can, but telepathy is the most common ability. Extreme is cases where someone is going to die if we don’t look at what a suspect is thinking.”

  Dorian laughed. “The paperwork is totally not worth it to use for small stuff.”

  “Here we go.” Seth pointed at the holo-panel, then moved a slider to fast forward a few minutes in before letting it play.

  Sixteen bright orange-yellow heat forms filed in and arranged themselves in seats around the table. A minute and eighteen seconds after the last person sat, a dark blue shape exuded from the wall. It started off as a formless cloud, but gradually took on a more human outline. The head, torso, and arms of a fairly large man stood out in obvious clarity, while the legs remained more of an indistinct foggy mass.

  “Yeah. Definitely a spirit.” Kirsten pointed at the legs. “A live person in a thermal suit wouldn’t be a cloud below the waist.”

  “Could it be a psionic hiding from the cameras?” asked Seth.

  Kirsten scrunched her face, thinking. “I can’t say with a hundred percent certainty it isn’t. However, we’ve never documented anything like this as the result of a Technokinetic using their abilities to hide from electronic systems. They wouldn’t appear at all.”

  “Whoa.” Jamie stared at her. “You guys can delete yourself out of videos?”

  She exhaled. “There is no need to panic. Approximately eight percent of the population has psionic abilities, though it could be as high as ten considering those who don’t come forward. Among people with psionic abilities, Technokinesis is fairly uncommon. Less than twenty percent of psionic individuals display some degree of influence over electronics. The ability to remotely affect recording devices not to register them is… pretty hard to do. I’m not a techno, so I can’t really explain it in too much detail, but it sounds like a pain in the ass from what I’ve read.”

  “So, twenty percent of eight-to-ten percent of people might be able to pull a vampire and not show up on cameras.” Seth shifted his jaw side to side. “Yeah, doesn’t sound like it would be a real problem.”

  “Also, that ability does nothing to stop live people from seeing them. They’d only be invisible to cameras. No one in the room is reacting to him.” Kirsten again pointed at the foggy mass. “I’ve seen plenty of ghosts on thermal. This one is either fairly recent or lazy.”

  “How so?” asked Jamie.

  “Do you have a thermal view on us right now?”

  Both Seth and Jamie nodded.

  “Put it on a screen.” Kirsten smiled.

  Dorian sigh-chuckled. “You know, some telepaths can make themselves functionally invisible to people.”

  “Yeah, but they also have legs. And wouldn’t appear cold on camera.”

  Jamie tapped a few buttons and another holo-panel opened.

  The two Lyris Corporation security officers stared at the screen for a few seconds before noticing a faint blue silhouette where Dorian stood beside Kirsten.

  “Your partner.” Seth looked back and forth from the screen and Dorian a few times. “Awesome.”

  “His legs are solid because he’s been around for a while and has a strong sense of self-image. It takes effort to hold shape.”

  “Squeak,” said Dorian.

  She glanced at him.

  “Guinea pig.”

  “Huh? What’s that?”

  “Pardon?” asked Seth.

  “Talking to my partner.”

  Dorian whistled. “Wow. Guinea pigs were medium-sized rodents stereotypically used as test subjects for experiments.”

  “Are they rodents or pigs?”

  “Rodents.”

  Kirsten furrowed her brow. “Kinda dumb they call them pigs.”

  He sighed.

  She turned back to Seth. “Can you show me this room?”

  “Yeah. It’s empty now.” He swiped a hand at the thermal video, shutting the holo-panel off, then headed through the ‘no personal electronics beyond this point’ sliding glass doors into a long corridor between two walls of floor-to-ceiling frosted glass. Small silver placards bearing room numbers stuck out from the walls by the entrance to each conference room, a near seamless door-sized glass panel.

  “What do you guys do about cybernetic implants?” asked Kirsten. “I get you don’t want people recording sensitive meetings on their NetMinis, but lots of people have headware.”

  “Yeah. Easy. In order to gain access to these meetings, they have to accept monitoring. We don’t ban company-issued NetMinis since those are monitored.”

  Dorian rolled his eyes. “I’m sure every executive is compliant with the monitoring requirement.”

  She smiled.

  Seth stopped by ECR-3. The glass slab door swung inward, revealing an executive conference room with seating for twenty-five. Silver-and-white chairs around the table looked like they belonged in a high-performance sports hovercar. A small metal dot stuck up from the surface of the white-glass table in front of each seat, holo-emitters most likely.

  The room held a faint paranormal energy, but no spirits.

  Kirsten walked around the table three times, mentally searching for lingering traces. The spot where the cold figure stood for over an hour gave off a moderate paranormal imprint. However, the dent Dorian punched in Nila’s wall more than doubled it. Even Nila sensed the energy in it, and she lacked any Astral Sense ability.

  A spirit definitely stood here, but he had to be totally calm. Maybe even bored.

  “Mind if I check the rest of these rooms?” asked Kirsten.

  Seth raised his arm to the side in a ‘be my guest’ gesture.

  She went room to room in the conference area, finding no spirits or detectable amounts of spectral energy residue. Fifteen or so minutes later, Seth met her in the hallway where she stopped to type in some notes for the incident report.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  “I’m certain a ghost visited the conference room during the meeting, but the energy he left behind is weak. My guess is he’s a random spirit who happened to wander b
y during the meeting and decided to hang out. Could be, he’s related to someone in the meeting and came to say goodbye, but maybe not. If he’d come to say farewell, he would’ve left a stronger imprint. Whoever this ghost is, he had little emotional investment in being there.”

  Seth pursed his lips. “So… real ghost. Huh. First time one showed up with people around.”

  “That he knows of.” Dorian feigned innocence. “The man simply stood there.”

  “True,” said Kirsten.

  “Pardon?” Seth looked around as if searching for Dorian. “Talking to him again?”

  “Yeah. You’ve observed ghostly phenomenon in empty rooms on the security cameras, but if a spirit didn’t affect solid objects, no one would know they existed. Well, except for thermal.”

  “Uhh…” Seth whistled. “Yeah. We’ve only got thermal on sensitive areas.”

  Kirsten smiled. “Not trying to scare you. Just saying… a ghost existing in a room with people isn’t necessarily unusual for this building. Maybe they only swat stuff around in empty rooms.”

  “Oh. So… should we be concerned?”

  “Doubtful.” Kirsten swiped a finger across the holo-panel above her forearm guard, closing it. “If the spirit wanted to cause trouble, he’d have left a much stronger imprint on the room.”

  “Cool.” Seth fake-wiped sweat from his forehead. “At least I don’t have to check every security system on the floor to explain how someone got in here. Thanks. Sorry if it wasn’t anything exciting.”

  “Fine. Totally fine.” She followed him out of the secure conference room area. “Love the quiet ones. Way better than the alternative.”

  “Umm.” Seth smiled pleadingly. “Can you please give me something official stating a ghost was here so I can convince my manager not to make me audit every system in the building?

  Kirsten grinned. “Of course. Unnecessary work sucks.”

  “Like reports,” muttered Dorian.

  Ugh. Worst part of the job. Thirteen pages of needless crap for every damn Inquest. “Seriously.”

  * * *

  The elevator closed behind Kirsten and Dorian, whisking Seth off into the building.

  She gazed around the parking deck, searching for paranormal energy. A faint sense of spiritual presence came from the left. It didn’t feel like the same spirit as the conference room, so she disregarded it. West City had tons of ghosts, the vast majority benign.

  “Two in one day.” Dorian started walking toward the patrol craft. “Highly unusual, though I suppose we should be grateful both happened to be tame.”

  “No doubt. My second day as an active agent, I had six haunt calls.”

  “Six? Wow…”

  Kirsten sighed. “Yeah. Didn’t know it at the time, but the Wharf Stalker’s presence stirred them up. He made other ghosts stronger and agitated just from being nearby. Like, totally passive sweet spirits would get all chaotic and dangerous merely for being close to him.”

  The whirring of an ion thruster drew her attention to the right. A footlocker-sized delivery bot zoomed across the parking deck toward the elevators. Such a sight ordinarily wouldn’t have demanded more than a second or two of acknowledgement, but this one appeared to be going too fast for indoors.

  She shook her head, muttering, “Idiots.”

  A man walked out from between two parked cars, directly in the bot’s path.

  “Look—!” shouted Kirsten.

  Whud!

  The delivery bot struck the man in the head, spraying blood on the column and swatting him to the floor. It fishtailed, swaying side to side from the force of the hit, but stabilized before crashing into a column or parked car.

  “…Out.” Kirsten blinked. “Shit!”

  Undeterred, the bloody delivery bot kept right on flying for the doors.

  “Dispatch, need a MedVan at my location stat.” Kirsten ran to the guy lying on the floor.

  “Unbelievable,” muttered Dorian.

  The front left region of the man’s skull appeared cracked, his jaw and nose broken. She hastily injected him with four stimpaks in hopes of stopping the bleeding. No ghost sat up out of his body yet, a good sign.

  Light washed over her. Kirsten cringed, expecting to peer up at a spirit. Reluctantly, she looked up—at a twelve-inch orb bot. Multiple holo-panels surrounded it like the petals of a flower, all showing advertisements for medical supplies, rapid-care MedVan protection plans, and a few lawyers.

  “Seriously?” Kirsten frowned. “Comm, dispatch, need a medical unit to my location ASAP.”

  The orb bot drooped as if ashamed of itself, then popped back up, adding another panel hawking helmets. She smirked at it.

  “Copy, lieutenant,” said an adult woman’s voice from her armband.

  A pssh came from the elevators.

  “Whoa, the bot’s covered in blood,” said a woman.

  Kirsten looked.

  A blonde girl and two boys, all about eighteen or nineteen, stood by the delivery bot making squeamish faces. Likely, someone sent the interns down to pick up lunch or catering for a meeting. One of the guys began unloading giant sub sandwiches from the flying box-bot.

  “Speedy-Nom…” Dorian whistled. “They got ‘speedy’ down. Wonder if the food’s any good?”

  Rips in the victim’s face foamed pink as the nanobot-laced fluid reached the injury site, mending the skin. His jaw quivered, realigning itself—a little. Stimpaks could only do so much, after all. None of Kirsten’s psionic abilities were of any to help, so she gave him another injection and knelt there holding his hand.

  Once empty, the delivery bot closed its front hatch and pivoted around, flying for the parking deck exit.

  “Bot,” yelled Kirsten. “Stop! Get back here. You hit a guy.”

  It kept flying away.

  “Police!” shouted Kirsten.

  The delivery bot didn’t even slow down.

  Kirsten pulled her E-90, sighted, and fired, missing by a few feet, drilling a hole in a column. She tried again, hitting the wall. Her third shot clipped the ass end of the bot, slicing into its rear left ion thruster, causing a spinout crash. The wayward bot slammed into the plastisteel floor upside down and slid into the wall amid a hail of orange sparks.

  “Flight system error,” said a male voice from the bot.

  Her two missed shots left tiny holes in the building’s wall; hopefully, the laser used most of its power getting out of the building and didn’t damage any passing hovercars.

  “Dispatch, I also need a Div 1 patrol unit here to clean up a dangerous delivery bot.” She scowled at the smoldering wreckage. “Stupid, reckless damn companies. They probably disabled the safety systems to shave a few seconds off delivery time.”

  The advert bot switched its ads from medical supplies and helmets to anger management services.

  Kirsten pinched the bridge of her nose.

  Dorian cracked up.

  5

  Worked Out

  Eager to keep her promised appointment, Kirsten set the Lyris Corporation incident report aside for later.

  She hurried through the PAC to the secure dormitory, where Division 0 housed criminally inclined psionic youths. The whole concept of it bothered her for more reasons than the simple tragedy of children who needed to be kept behind locked doors. Radicals often accused the UCF of being a ‘fascist military police state.’ Compared to the countries it used to be, the United States and Canada, perhaps it did sorta count as one. For the most part, Kirsten tried not to dwell on the negatives. Her country was way better to live in than the ACC. Of course, the ACC had a ‘kill on sight’ policy regarding psionics, so it made preferring one over the other a simple decision. As scummy as corporations could get in the UCF sometimes, they could do whatever they wanted overseas. When the corporations were the government, the people had no protection.

  However, the reality of the secure dormitory painted a black cloud over her idealism.

  The unofficial mission of Division 0 involved
keeping a positive face on psionics for the world to see. Consequently, anyone who had psionic powers, as well as a strong inclination to use them criminally, ended up being held in detention for undefined terms. It didn’t matter what legal sentencing guidelines said, the government would hold a psionic in custody as long as it took to ensure they wouldn’t do anything to turn the public against psionics as a whole.

  Fortunately, most kids who ended up in the secure dorms came in for relatively tame offenses like simple assault or gang warfare. Once given a chance at a life where they didn’t have to literally fight for survival, most adjusted. Psionic orphans picked up for minor crimes like shoplifting usually went straight to the normal dorms, not treated like suspects at all unless they had bad attitudes. The few truly disturbed individuals had a lifetime of incarceration to look forward to. Or, worst-case scenario, a mind wipe from Commander Ashford.

  Kirsten had been visiting Rafael Esparza, the ten-year-old she’d brought in a few months ago, on a regular basis. The boy had Suggestion—a power set which made the brass nervous—and he’d used it on a pair of Division 1 officers, forcing them to point their weapons at each other. Rafael hadn’t acted out of malice or even as a sick prank. His older brother was murdered not long after their parents died, leaving him a street orphan, and he felt the police ignored the crime.

  Since she’d—more or less—solved the case, the boy had no further problem with police. Kirsten couldn’t say for sure she’d found the exact person responsible for Juan Miguel’s death, though she and Officer Solomon—mostly Solomon—wiped out the entire pack of Diablos connected to it. Part of her believed the ‘black bishop’ had been the one who personally murdered Rafael’s older brother, and he died a rather gruesome pyrokinetic death.

  So, Kirsten felt secure in telling the boy his brother’s killers had been brought to justice.

  Except for the ‘compliance band,’ an electronic bracelet equivalent to wearing a remote-control stunrod, Rafael didn’t seem to mind the secure dorms. One of the chaperones tried to scare him into obedience on his first day by telling him how the compliance band would shock him so bad he’d wet himself. Months later, the boy still practically trembled in fear it might go off accidentally. Due to his smallness, they’d put it on his left ankle instead of his wrist. He’d gotten into the habit of limping around, afraid to disturb it for fear of activating it.