All Against All

by Nathan Allen

  Alice stopped and turned back. “Yes?”

  A hint of a smile formed on Detective Olszewski’s face. “Well played.”

  GUN CREEP GETS 33 YEARS

  The Daily Ink

  6 October, 2067

  A convicted sex offender was yesterday sentenced to thirty-three years’ jail after being found guilty of the production and distribution of hundreds of illegal firearms.

  Police raided the Carling Crescent home of Joel Ozterhauezen in March after he was arrested for indecently exposing himself to a group of preteen girls outside a concert by pop group Level 1.

  During the search they uncovered a cache of homemade weapons, along with equipment, parts, hundreds of homemade bullets, and blueprints for constructing the weapons. They also seized over $300,000 in cash.

  Police estimate that Ozterhauezen had assembled and sold approximately four hundred improvised firearms over the past ten years.

  “Mr. Ozterhauezen is a danger to society, and we are pleased that he will be off the streets for many years to come,” Detective Charlotte Olszewski said after the sentencing. “We believe he was responsible for a significant proportion of the illegal weapons on our streets; weapons that in many instances were as dangerous to the user as they were to the intended victim.”

  In sentencing Ozterhauezen, Judge Jillian Doherty took into account his lack of remorse, his not guilty plea, and a prior conviction for lewd behavior during a children’s beauty pageant.

  He will be eligible for parole in 2092.

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  Alice was an unmitigated wreck when she left the police station. The lottery may have officially concluded, but her nightmare was far from over.

  The enormity of what had happened seemed to hit her all at once, plowing into her like a speeding locomotive. She realized how close she had come to death, and how she had been saved by nothing more than dumb luck.

  It was the middle of the night. Daybreak was still several hours away.

  Her body shivered as she made her way down the neon-drenched street, compulsively checking over her shoulder every thirty seconds. She half-expected someone to emerge from the shadows to bash her over the head with a crowbar.

  She told herself over and over that the threat had passed and she no longer had anything to fear. But her subconscious mind remained unconvinced. She had been on twenty-four/seven high alert for so long that it had become like a default setting. Her adrenaline levels were off the charts. Her entire body vibrated with paranoid anxiety.

  She knew of only one thing that could take the edge off: Xylox, and copious amounts of it.

  She raided her pockets for cash and found less than twelve dollars in change. Barely enough for three lousy pills.

  Desperation was rapidly setting in. The fumes in her system were fast becoming a distant memory.

  Three hours earlier, she had enough pills in her possession to last more than six months. That was until Morgan went and got himself shot, and she had to flush the lot before the cops arrived.

  She scoured the area for an ATM. Her plan was to withdraw every last cent from her account and buy up as much counterfeit Xylox as she could get her hands on. Goliath was gone now, which meant a major pill shortage was imminent. She wanted to stockpile as many lemon drops as she could before the streets ran dry.

  She found an ATM inside a nearby convenience store. She flirted with the idea of buying food, since it had been about two days since she’d last remembered to eat. But she decided to check how much money she had first. She had to get her priorities in order, and her body’s craving for Xylox far outweighed its necessity for food.

  She swiped her card and pressed her palm against the biometric scanner.

  She selected account balance.

  She waited for her request to be processed. Payday was yesterday, but there could sometimes be delays with her wages going through.

  The clerk behind the counter eyed her like a hawk. Alice didn’t blame him for being suspicious. A xombie inside his store in the early hours of the morning usually spelled trouble.

  A moment later, her updated balance displayed on the ATM screen.

  It read $104,676,415.32.

  Later that day, Dominic Massa’s net worth increased by a further $770 million. This was due to the fact that he was the only member of the Consortium to correctly pick Alice Kato as the winner of the lottery.

  While the money was a nice bonus, it was a mere drop in the ocean for the real estate tycoon with a personal fortune of over $600 billion.

  As with all the other contests the Consortium ran, the money was a secondary concern. The biggest prize was the bragging rights.

  Officer Schultz saw the light on inside Detective Olszewski’s office when he arrived for work the following morning. He tapped lightly on the door.

  “Have you been here all night?” he said.

  Detective Olszewki waved him away. Her focus remained on her screens as she scrutinized every frame of the security footage from Alice Kato’s apartment. Hidden cameras covered almost every angle, and they showed what happened exactly as Alice had described it.

  “I don’t know about this, Schultz,” Olszewski said, shaking her head. “Something about this just doesn’t feel right. Everything seems a little bit ...” She paused as she tried to summon the appropriate adjective. “Off.”

  Schultz looked at the footage over her shoulder. “How do you mean?”

  “Don’t you think her story was a bit too neat?”

  The rookie cop shrugged his shoulders. “Very little about what I’ve seen over these past few months has made a whole lot of sense to me. Why, what are you thinking?”

  “I was just thinking ...” Olszewski hesitated for a moment. “What if the gun belonged to Alice Kato?”

  Schultz leaned in closer to examine the footage. “Do we have any proof to support this?”

  “No, it’s just an idea I’m putting out there. Here, look ...”

  She brought up the feeds for each camera.

  “She had eleven cameras set up in her apartment, but we never see where Morgan Compston pulls the gun from. One minute he doesn’t have it, the next he does.”

  Olszewski leaned back in her chair. She was doing her best to rearrange the myriad of thoughts and information swirling through her sleep-deprived brain into one cohesive theory.

  “What if this was some kind of test?” she said. “What if Alice left the gun out for Morgan to find, knowing that it would backfire on him? That way he gets eliminated from the contest, but he’s the one responsible for his own death. She doesn’t harbor any guilt because he tried to kill her first. He pulled the trigger on himself.”

  Schultz lifted his eyebrows in admiration for his boss’s astuteness. “Do you really think she’s that clever?”

  “I’m not sure,” Olszewski said with a resigned shrug. “I think she may have been a touch brighter than we gave her credit for.”

  Despite her decade of experience, Olszewski never quite managed to get a good read of Alice Kato. Even now, she was still none the wiser as to whether Alice was a complete innocent caught in a wretched situation, or a skilled liar manipulating everyone around her.

  “Have forensics run their tests yet?”

  Olszewski pulled up the report on her screen. “Her fingerprints weren’t on the gun. Only his were.”

  Schultz ran his eyes over the report. “It says here that her DNA was found on the weapon.”

  “So?”

  “So that means it could be hers.”

  “The gun was in her apartment, Schultz. She came into contact with it. Of course her DNA is going to be on the weapon.”

  Olszewski knew it was futile pursuing the matter any further, and that she was only doing this to satisfy her own curiosity. Even if she was able to build a solid case against Alice Kato, nothing would ever come of it. Alice was now unimaginably wealthy, and there was little point in pursuing someone in a court of law when that person c
ould afford a battalion of lawyers.

  She blew out a lungful of air. The past year-and-a-bit had been a trying time for her, both professionally and personally. Turning up for work every day, not knowing what kind of senseless war crime was awaiting her, combined with the fact that there was nothing any of them could do to put a stop to it. It took its toll after a while.

  She was glad this whole contest was finally over. Until the next one, in about three years’ time.

  “Do you want to know what I think?” Schultz said.

  Olszewski spun her chair around. “Lay it on me.”

  “It is of my professional opinion that you’ve done enough police work for one day.”

  This managed to arouse a smile from the detective.

  “And I think you’ve devoted enough time to this case already. Go home. Someone else can take over from here.”

  “Don’t worry,” she sighed. “I don’t plan on spending any more time here than I absolutely have to.”

  Schultz left the office a short time later, and Detective Olszewski packed away her belongings. But there was one more thing she needed to do. It was her most important task for the week.

  She called her husband to tell him the good news: the lottery had come to an end, and she would finally get her life back.

  She also told him that the criminal known as Goliath was believed to be dead.

  She then instructed him to book their holiday to the Maldives for the earliest date possible.

  And even though she knew this pushed the boundaries of professionalism, she celebrated by emptying the remainder of her bottle of vodka into her morning coffee.

  Chapter 35

  Alice was half asleep, dozing in front of the TV, when the sound of her front door opening jolted her wide awake.

  Her eyes snapped open. She held her breath and listened. She heard nothing but silence.

  She tiptoed out of her bedroom and peeked around the corner. She couldn’t see anyone, but it was too dark to know for sure.

  She took another step. She ran her hand over the wall until it fell across the light switch.

  “Hello, Alice,” a voice said, just as the lights flickered on. “Didn’t wake you, did I?”

  She spun around.

  The shock of the moment assaulted her. Impossible. This could not be happening.

  Christopher Gibson.

  He was alive. He was inside her apartment. And he was massive.

  He towered over her, now almost eight feet tall.

  He had finally lived up to the Goliath name.

  Since their last encounter, Christopher had undergone a number of significant cosmetic alterations. He had a robotic right arm plugged into his shoulder socket in place of the one he lost in the explosion. He’d also voluntarily had the left one removed and replaced, just to balance it out. His body now boasted the complete set of four android limbs.

  A clutch of wires spilled from the computerized implant at the back of his head, snaking down and connecting to the sphere of silicon circuitry and blinking LED lights lodged in his chest cavity. A titanium exoskeleton provided the impenetrable exterior to his electronic interior.

  His body now contained more metal and plastic than flesh and bone. He was officially more machine than man.

  Alice stared at the monstrosity before her, this irresponsible collision of science and nature. She tried speaking, but her words evaporated the moment they passed her lips, so Christopher spoke for her.

  “I know, I know, I’m supposed to be dead,” he said. “Technically, I think maybe I still am. But they’ve made some tremendous advances in the field of anatomical emulation technology. As long as you have the money, there isn’t much they won’t do for you.”

  Alice acted on instinct. She made a move to run for the door, but Christopher’s CPU-powered brain was much too fast for her. His robotic right arm shot out, extending to double its length. Alice felt a mechanical claw clamp around her neck.

  “I guess this means the lottery is still in progress, doesn’t it?” Christopher said. “So if you don’t mind, I’d like to reclaim my prize money.”

  The pressure on Alice’s throat was air-tight. She gasped desperately for breath, but to no avail. Her feet left the ground and kicked in mid-air.

  There was a sickening crunch when Christopher’s vise-like grip crushed her windpipe and vertebrae like a Styrofoam cup.

  The last thing she saw was Christopher’s gap-toothed smile, as the world around her faded away to nothingness.

  The contest may have wrapped months ago, but Alice’s mental state continued to deteriorate. She assumed that once it was all over her trauma would come to an end. Little did she know, it was just the beginning.

  Flashbacks and delusions were an everyday ordeal. Hallucinations were indistinguishable from reality. Panic attacks were triggered by the most innocuous events.

  She flinched at every shadow, refused to answer the door or her APhID, and believed that everyone she encountered was out to get her.

  Plagued by survivor’s guilt, sleep eluded her for days on end. When it did come, it was only in fits and starts.

  Even her prolific Xylox use did nothing to help her. Despite its reputation as a panacea, there were some ailments that even Xylox was unable to alleviate.

  This fact did nothing to curb Alice’s rampant pill-popping, though. Unlimited funds allowed her to lock herself away from the world and anesthetize herself all day, every day. And so that was exactly what she did. Days blurred into weeks, then into months.

  She had moved out of her old place and into a luxury new penthouse apartment suite in an upmarket district of the city. It was fitted out with security cameras, hi-tech alarms, a panic room, and round-the-clock guards – all of which did nothing to make her feel the slightest bit safer. The wounds inflicted by fourteen months of psychological napalm were still raw. Demons had taken up residence inside her head, and they showed no sign of checking out anytime soon.

  Friedrich Nietzsche is credited with coining the phrase, “Whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”.

  He later contracted syphilis. This led to migraines and attacks of blindness, then eventually dementia and paralysis.

  It may not have killed him, but by no means did it make him stronger.

  GOLIATH DEAD!

  VICTIMS OF CRIME CELEBRATE AS POLICE CHIEF CONFIRMS DEMISE OF NOTORIOUS URBAN WARLORD

  The Daily Ink

  18 November, 2067

  “Goliath”, the barbaric underworld figure who imposed a one-man reign of terror on city streets for the past six years, is dead.

  Police commissioner Maximilian Yu confirmed the infamous murderer, drug lord, pimp, organ trafficker and intellectual copyright infringer was killed last month during an altercation at a disused slaughterhouse, believed to be his base of operations.

  “Investigations are ongoing, and we are continuing to piece together the exact set of circumstances regarding what happened that night,” Commissioner Yu informed the media at a press conference today. “We are unable to go into specific details at this stage, other than to say that it appears Goliath was killed during a raid on his hideout, possibly by a rival crime syndicate.”

  The demise of Goliath, who was believed to have controlled as much as ninety-eight percent of the counterfeit Xylox market in the city and surrounding districts, and was wanted in connection with over three hundred murders, was welcomed by social services groups and victims of crime advocates.

  Police are yet to confirm the identity of the man behind the “Goliath” persona, however The Daily Ink can exclusively reveal that his name was Bourke Alexander Nation, a thirty-nine year old former special needs teacher and peace corps volunteer.

  The share price for Elixxia Pharmaceuticals, the company that produces Xylox, surged fifty-three percent on the news to close at $93.66.

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  Chapter 36

  The cruel irony of the lottery was finally
revealed to Alice a short time after she received her millions.

  The instant the money was deposited into her account, Alice was admitted into that most rarefied of groups. She was now one of the mega-wealthy, in the top 0.0001 percent of the population. Just like the Consortium. She had become one of them.

  It was the final sting in the tail, and one she did not see coming.

  This, she came to realize, was what troubled her the most. She was haunted by everything she had been through over the past year, and the money hung around her neck like a hundred million dead albatrosses. Her newly-acquired affluence may have been her cocoon from the world, but it was also a prison from which she could never escape. She would wake up every morning and see the opulent lifestyle she was living, and memories from her year in hell would come flooding back. It was a constant reminder of the lives lost, and what she had been forced to do to survive.

  It was blood money, and she needed to get rid of it.

  The Consortium assumed that Alice would do what the winners from the previous three lotteries had done, which was disappear and live out her life in unfettered luxury. That was the last thing she wanted. The only thing she wanted was to move forward with her life and put the past year behind her, but that was impossible when she was surrounded by the spoils of her trauma.

  Purging the money would prove to be a lot harder than she had anticipated. She didn’t want to just throw it all away. Only by doing something worthwhile would the healing process begin.

  She could have offloaded it by giving it all to a charity. But that would only provide a short-term fix for a much larger issue. For any lasting changes to take effect, the problem would need to be attacked at its source.

  So she came up with a plan. Something she believed was a much more appropriate use for all her money, and a better way of exorcizing her demons.

  Lachlan presented his two forms of valid identification to the burly security guard in the lobby of the Sapphire Blue apartment complex. The guard failed to notice that both were forgeries. He passed through the metal detector and consented to a rather invasive pat down before being given the all-clear.