by Alex P. Berg
Fine, she said. But only because of the aforementioned reasons you already described. Namely that because of basic physics, it’s virtually impossible to wreck one of these—virtually being the operative word, so don’t go hog wild.
A pair of joysticks materialized in front of me. I reached out and grabbed them, feeling the triggers with my index and middle fingers and rubbing my thumbs over the numerous small buttons on top.
“Just like on my old flightwing suit,” I said. “You’re a miracle worker, Paige.”
A miracle would’ve been fabricating the controls out of thin air and attaching them to the bot, said Paige. I merely superimposed a flightwing control simulation over the microbot’s feed. You handle the inputs, and I’ll handle translation to something the microbot understands. I figure that’s a fair compromise. I also mapped the bot’s camera to your head. Give it a try.
I craned my neck up, and my vision shifted accordingly. “Perfect.”
Alright, said Paige. Let’s give it a go then.
I pushed forward on the joysticks and depressed the topmost triggers. A thrumming sound came to life, probably from the microbot’s wings, and I surged into the air. I performed a few quick test loops and paused just to the side of the cardboard cliff face.
Something wrong?
“This doesn’t feel right,” I told Paige. “I need some flight feedback from the accelerometer data.”
This microbot produces some pretty wicked acceleration, Rich, said Paige. I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
“I never blacked out during flightwing instruction,” I said. “If you’re that worried, tone it down to a level comparable to what I’m used to.”
That’s not a bad idea. Fine. Here you go.
I didn’t sense any immediate change, but when I pressed forward on the joysticks again, I felt a rush of acceleration. The thrumming of the microbot’s wings reverberated through my body.
“Now we’re talking,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
With a flick of my wrists, I sailed up the cardboard, the edges of the Smotrycz’s lettering rushing up to greet me. I took a line right across the edge of the ‘m,’ peeling off to the side as I reached the curve at the top of the letter. I twisted as I arrived at the top of the cardboard box, looping onto a horizontal axis and onto the broad expanse of pizza box. With a calm sea of brown beneath me and the gently rippling sky of white from the Smotrycz’s bag above me, I increased my speed, air rushing through my hair and my feet trailing a body length from the box’s surface.
“This is great,” I said. “Remind me to dust off my flightwing suit and take it to the test track some time.”
“Or,” said Carl, “we could invest in an Iridium™ turbo racer. All the fun of flightwing jaunts and intrastellar joyrides at a fraction of the cost of a space equipped vessel.”
“Don’t start with me,” I said. “I’ll spend my money wherever I see fit.”
The scene before me shifted. A yawning chasm loomed, beyond which hung only an expanse of white bag. I zoomed right over the edge of the pizza box, diving down into a twist of white plastic at the end of which gleamed a bright hole. With as much speed as I could muster, I exploded out of the twisted ends of the bag and into a sea of color.
Once again my contrast adjusted, this time resulting in a crystal clear image thanks to the bright lighting of the interior of Lars’s apartment, but I was too overwhelmed by my surroundings to take much stock in the feed quality.
If I’d felt like a gnat before, then now I felt like a prepubescent aphid. The room stretched around me, its walls impossibly far away, like vistas viewed from the top of a mountain. Lights gleamed at me from high in the sky, a half-dozen suns set into a backdrop of sheetrock. A calm sea of glossy laminate paneling spread out across the floor, but it was the steep bluff below me that caught my eye.
Dozens of fast food containers, bags, and boxes, piled haphazardly upon one another, some of them seemingly untouched, others broken open as new deliveries through the slot had forced the previous ones to the floor. Spilled drinks and melted slushies, upturned pizzas and deconstructed burgers. The sheer size was overwhelming, reminiscent of a child’s fanciful bedtime story or a fat kid’s worst nightmare.
Our own most recent delivery sat atop the pile—a pizza plateau if you will. Lars’s drink order had tipped on its side upon entry, sending its contents pouring through a straw and onto the scene underneath. The resulting soda river poured over a jagged peak of French fry monoliths before snaking around burger basin and into the stir-fry swamps.
I wriggled my nose in response to the smells being fed to me. I think the microbot’s sensors were more finely tuned than my own olfactory systems.
“Am I the only one detecting a certain…fragrance here?” I asked.
Apparently Carl had been patched through into the same feeds I had. “There’s definitely something pungent in the air. Certainly, this pile hasn’t been touched in a while. Maybe two or three weeks, based on the size. Depends on Lars’s daily calorie intake.”
I’d say three, said Paige, based on the flavored churro sampler poking out of the mass near the floor. If the Meertor’s data can be believed, those are a once a month sort of thing.
That much wasted food wasn’t a good sign. It indicated Lars might’ve jumped ship without anyone being the wiser—but if so, why would his estranged mother have come looking for him at roughly the same moment? Perhaps there was more to the case than I’d initially been led to believe.
I spun in mid air, taking note of the barest essentials of a kitchenette, a microwave and fridge, far off in the corner of the room. Besides that, I spotted a dining table decorated with a single chair, a flimsy cot, and a toilet with corresponding washbasin. No sign of Lars, though.
Don’t lose faith, said Paige. It’s not a studio. Try the door.
Paige highlighted the entryway in question. I pushed forward on the joysticks, zooming through the air at top speed as I raced toward the barrier. The door stood closed, but at my current size, it posed no impediment at all. I zipped underneath it, through the gap between door and floor, which to me seemed a yawning chasm. If only entry into Lars’s apartment had been so simple, but despite its shoddy construction, each unit in Lars’s building had been hermetically sealed. Intros took their privacy seriously.
My contrast once again adjusted as I entered the new room, this one lacking a window but with a pair of mood lights painting the room in a dim, earthy glow. A single piece of furniture populated the space—an enormous padded black lounge chair, with the back tilted to a forty-five degree angle. It stood on a wide base, seemingly affixed to the floor. The words ‘Princess Gaming’ stretched across the side of it in bright pink.
Remember how you wondered about Lars’s bathroom habits, and I said not to ask? said Paige. Well, that’s how. A top of the line Princess Gaming rig. It’s not just a comfy place to lay while playing Brain games. It contains hard-wired fiber optic access to the Princess servenets, as well as aqueous infusers, climate controls, and internal plumbing. For gamers, it doesn’t get much better than this.
The unit faced the wall, so I couldn’t see much more than its back and sides. I zoomed forward, the thrum of the wings echoing through my body. Wind whistled through my hair and into my nostrils.
The latter took note. “Am I the only one who smells that?”
The fetid stink from the food hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had intensified.
“I have a bad feeling about this, Rich,” said Carl.
I rounded the edge of the Princess chair and received my first view of Lars. He roughly matched the image we’d sourced for him from the public listings, with light brown hair, a bit of a baby face, and a nose that matched his mother’s. He sported a scraggly beard and long, unkempt hair, which I didn’t find abnormal for an Intro of his caliber, but given the quantity of food in his apartment, I hadn’t expected for him to be so thin and frail.
Of course, I also hadn’t expected for his eyes to be sunken, his skin to be waxy and discolored, and for a putrid stench of decomposition to roll off of him.
“Uh, Paige…” I said. “I think it’s time we call the police.”
6
I stared at the doorway between the main portion of Lars’s apartment and his gaming room. Somewhere from within the confines of the gaming quarters, I heard the light whirr of a quartet of drone rotors—not from a delivery bot this time, but from one of the police units recording the scene.
A throat was forcefully cleared, and I turned my attention back to the uniformed officer in front of me. Oliver Sanz, or so his lapel tag indicated—tall and dark-skinned with a crisp high top fade, dressed in the traditional baby blue and beige of Cetie’s enforcers of the law. He seemed impossibly close, and the walls of the apartment loomed over me like those of a jail cell.
It was the microbot’s fault. After a jaunt through its eyes, Lars’s previously cavernous apartment now induced in me a sense of claustrophobia.
“So,” said Sanz, his arms crossed. “Explain to me the situation one more time. From the beginning, if you could.”
“I already explained it,” I said. “Don’t you guys record every witness interaction? Why do you need me to tell you the same thing twice?”
“In case you fail to tell me the same thing twice,” said Sanz. “Now talk. Before I decide to make you repeat yourself a third time.”
I wrinkled my nose and frowned, but the nasal twitch wasn’t entirely due to Sanz’s attitude. The lone window in Lars’s apartment had been forced open, and the front door had been locked into place at its maximum operational width, but the lingering funk hadn’t dissipated in the least. Supposedly, the mind filtered out omnipresent odors after a while, but apparently the stink of death was too strong an indicator for the mind to relegate to its far reaches.
I could shut off information from your nose’s mitral cells, if you like, said Paige.
“Look,” I said, ignoring Paige. “I already told you what happened. A woman by the name of Helena Busk, who claimed to be Lars Busk’s estranged mother, hired me to track down her son who she hadn’t been able to contact via Brain in some time. The case seemed fairly straightforward. We found Lars’s physical address in the personal listings. Unfortunately, contacting Lars wasn’t as easy as we’d hoped. He was as unwilling to answer our Brain missives as his mother’s—because, as it turns out, he was dead.”
“Right,” said Sanz. “But let’s return to you, shall we? You came to his apartment. Tried to rouse him, correct? Then you knocked on some doors, again without success, and talked to the Meertori manager downstairs.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Nice fellow. Creepy laugh, but nice nonetheless.”
“And then?”
“What do you mean, and then?” I said. “I told you. We set up some surveillance. Tracked his online presence. That sort of thing.”
“That’s a rather vague statement.”
I shrugged.
Officer Sanz lifted an eyebrow. “The Meertor said he received an anonymous tip about Mr. Busk’s passing.”
“And a good thing, too,” I said. “Otherwise the smell might’ve soon become unbearable to his neighbors. On second thought, perhaps that’s who provided the tip.”
Sanz tapped his fingers against his arm. “Look, Mr. Weed. I feel I should mention that we’re happy someone came through with the tip, but we’d be happier if we knew who it was, simply so we knew how the knowledge had been gained. And if said knowledge was obtained through some breach of privacy…well, I imagine it could be overlooked so long as the motives behind said action didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Busk’s death. Do I make myself clear?”
I nodded. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind. Thanks.”
I heard footsteps and turned to find an EMT entering the premises, a collapsible gurney held under one arm. Given Lars’s state, I didn’t think the technician would have a hard time moving the body on her own, but wheeling the gurney around in the apartment’s tight confines might prove to be a bigger problem.
She disappeared into the dedicated gaming room, and I turned back to Officer Sanz. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask,” he said. “I may or may not answer. You know how active investigations go—I hope.”
The sharp clack of the gurney extending to full size trickled around the corner.
"Don’t you find it odd Lars was online at the time of his death?” I asked. “Well, maybe not right at his time of death. But my investigation showed him signed into his Princess Gaming account earlier today. He’s clearly been dead for weeks. In fact—”
Paige, could you check on Lars’s status?
You mean XXEliteForce420XX? she said. Sure. Let’s see. Yeah. He’s still online.
“—according to Princess Gaming’s servenets, he’s still online.”
“It’s probably a glitch on Princess’s side,” said Sanz. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
I heard a feminine voice curse, followed by a grunt, a thump, and a squeaky creak, again from the direction of the gaming room.
Actually, scratch that, said Paige. He’s gone offline.
I glanced in the direction of the noise, a befuddled look on my face.
Sanz must’ve noticed. “Let me guess. He just disappeared?”
I nodded.
“Told you,” said Sanz. “Sometimes these gaming rigs that are directly plugged into the provider’s servenets can mess things up. If people die while in the rigs, it can think they’re still online. Happens because the Brain has a hard-wired link though which residual power can transfer. Creepy, but I’ve seen it happen before.”
“You have?”
Sanz shrugged. “Where do you think is the most likely spot for an Intro gamer to kick the bucket?”
“Makes sense.” I stood there chewing on my lip and knitting my eyebrows.
“You’re free to go, by the way,” said Sanz. “But think about what I told you. If it turns out there was any foul play here, you could make your life a whole lot easier by coming clean now.”
“You mean the anonymous tipster could make their life easier by coming clean.”
Sanz snorted. “Yeah.”
I about-faced and walked into the fourth floor hallway of Lars’s apartment building. Carl waited for me at the end of the hallway.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Didn’t Paige relay my Brain feed to you?” I depressed the down button.
“It’s called conversation. Don’t ruin it.”
I smiled. “It was alright. Officer Sanz isn’t a dummy. Best that you stayed away.”
Not that Carl wouldn’t, or couldn’t, lie for me, but he preferred not to. Having to choose between loyalty and subservience to me, his master, and an officer of the peace gave him the robotic equivalent of heartburn.
The elevator chimed, and we both stepped in.
“I wonder how we’ll break the news to Helena,” said Carl as the door closed.
“I was thinking we’d hold off on that,” I said. “At least for the moment.”
Carl looked at me aghast. “You can’t be serious? She deserves to know.”
“Agreed,” I said. “And I’m not suggesting we should deceive her or hide the information from her. Buy I first want to make sure the man we found in there is actually Lars Busk.”
Carl blinked. “I’m not sure I follow. The man in that gaming rig looked an awful lot like the photographs of Busk we found in the civilian registries, if admittedly more unkempt.”
The elevator dinged again and we both stepped out into the first floor hallway. “Yes, Carl, I know that. And believe it or not, my first instinct isn’t that we’re dealing with a doppelganger of some sort. But I find it highly suspicious Lars was signed into his Princess Gaming account until the moment his body was removed from his rig.”
“I take it you don’t
buy Officer Sanz’s glitch explanation?”
I shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible. But remember—we sent him Brain missives, too. They weren’t turned away. They went through. Right, Paige?”
Correct, boss, she said.
“And I find it highly unlikely that Princess Gaming’s servenets and Cetie’s own public servenets both suffered similar, concurrent glitches,” I said.
Carl smiled and shook his head.
“This is funny to you somehow?” I asked.
“No, I simply suffered a sneaking suspicion you wouldn’t drop this case despite Lars’s apparent death. Guess I was right.”
“And by sneaking suspicion, I don’t suppose you actually meant a bet with Paige?”
Carl’s mouth opened. “What? I—”
Blame me, not him, she said. It was my idea.
“What did the bet entail?” I asked.
It was about your spaceship fetish and what course of action to take, said Paige. Seriously, don’t sweat it.
“Promise me one thing, though,” said Carl.
“Yes?”
“If it turns out you’re wrong about Lars, we tell Miss Busk straight away, and we don’t charge her for the spurious inquiry.”
“Please,” I said. “Bilking grieving widows isn’t part of my business platform. Neither is being an insensitive jerk. We’ll tell her as gently as we can, but we also have a duty to be as thorough and certain of ourselves as possible, which means being a hundred percent certain of Lars’s demise and the cause thereof. So let’s get to work. We owe it to Helena.”
7
I settled into a comfortable sofa chair in my sitting room and propped my feet up on an ottoman, talking to myself as I did so. “Alright. Full belly? Check. Hydrated? Check. Bladder? Recently expressed. Well-rested? Close enough. I think I’m good to go.”
This isn’t as if you’re preparing for a weeks long expedition into the desert, or taking a one man submarine ride into the depths of Cetie’s oceans, said Paige. You’re simply signing onto a gaming service for crying out loud.
“Better to be prepared than not,” I said. “I may not be a gamer myself, but I know how they roll. I could be in there for hours, and unlike Lars, I haven’t invested in a rig that takes care of my body’s fluid inputs and outputs for me.”
