SINdicate

by J. T. Nicholas

  Most people never really saw this side of the city. Maybe twenty percent of the population of New Lyons lived in squalor, but it was a contained squalor, shunted off to neighborhoods that people had long since given up on and isolated from anywhere “decent” folks might find themselves. We were firmly on the wrong side of the tracks, and what happened here, how people lived here, wasn’t really New Lyons at all. At least, not to the people who weren’t confined to these neighborhoods. No, this was the unmentionable little secret of the city—and every city had them.

  I couldn’t blame Tia for the tension. It wasn’t just natural—it was sensible, even advisable. In this part of town, people were divided in many ways, but the most important way was also the simplest: in the LNW, you were either predator or prey. I didn’t know enough about Ms. Morita to say with certainty into which category she might fall, but awareness and caution were good practices either way. But good practice or not, at least for the moment, she didn’t have to fear. “You can relax,” I said, hoping to ease her worries. “This isn’t the best district, but we’ll be safe. From the locals, anyway.”

  She turned her head from the window and away from what passed for scenery. The tension in her body didn’t ease in the slightest, but there was no tremor of fear in her voice as she said, “Where are we going? Or, if you tell me, will you have to kill me or something?”

  I shrugged. “An old restaurant. Out of business. But big enough to hold everybody.” We were getting close now. Parking in this part of town wasn’t a problem—at least not finding a space. Having your car still be in one piece when you returned to it… Well, that was another issue. Car theft was all but impossible—any lawful owner could disable and lock down their vehicle with a single swipe across their screen—but vandalism from the have-nots to the haves was as prevalent a problem as ever. It helped that the car looked like it had already suffered that vandalism, but I needed to find an as out-of-the-way spot as possible, to avoid the dangers of idle hands.

  “Everybody?” Tia asked, surprised. “Who’s everybody?”

  “Oh,” I said with a grin, “just a few friends of la révolution.”

  “You weren’t kidding,” she said about fifteen minutes later. I’d found a relatively concealed spot for the car about half a block away. We’d received a few hard looks on the walk, but no one bothered us. I might not have been a cop or a soldier anymore, but I still walked like one, and most of the people looking for an opportunity to make trouble could see that. The synthetics had seen us coming—the benefits of keeping a good lookout—and the door opened as we approached. Our transition from street to building was smooth and “if you blink you miss it” fast, and the door was swinging shut behind us and the beams being put back in place as Tia spoke.

  Dozens of faces stared at us as we entered. I was a known quantity, accepted, if somewhat separated. Tia was something else. Pretty as she was, she lacked the almost preternatural beauty of many of the faces that watched us from the tables, booths, and cots—the beauty of the Toys, custom designed to please. Athletic as she was, she couldn’t compete physically with the hard, muscled frames of the Drones designed for manual labor. Even the Domestics with their carefully designed flaws were better put together than most humans, myself and Tia included. Tia was, in fact, very human looking, and to the people gathered in this room, her human nature constituted a threat.

  The irony of the synthetics judging her simply for being human was not lost on me—but neither was the perfectly practical and justifiable reasoning behind that judgment.

  Silence had drifted out from our arrival like ripples spreading on the calm surface of a pond. Now we stood on the edge of that pond, awash in a wave of worried faces. It was more than a little disconcerting, and Tia’s cheeks were slowly coloring. She managed to look out over the crowd, not lowering her gaze, but not singling anyone out with it either, despite the discomfort she must be feeling. As someone who had felt the weight of that collective stare, I was impressed.

  “This is Tia Morita,” I announced to the assemblage. “She’s here to help us find answers, to help us find out who left the…surprise…on our doorstep this morning.” Shit, had it only been this morning? “She’s here to help, people.”

  Judging from their faces, they remained unconvinced, but a slight stir of conversation started once more as the synthetics began to turn away from us.

  “This way.” I led her across the room, conscious that as we approached, conversations died down, only to start up once more in our wake. When we reached the swinging doors to the kitchen, I gestured for Tia to go before me.

  I’d done my best to re-create the autopsy rooms that had been an unfortunate but unavoidable part of my career with NLPD. My best, I had to admit, was pretty shitty. Instead of a vacuum-enabled autopsy table, the best I could offer was a stainless steel food prep table. Instead of the precision instruments, I had put together an amalgam of cast-off cutlery, an assortment of pliers, and a couple of power tools. The resultant array more closely resembled the torture implements of a vid-villain from a horror stream than any type of medical facility.

  Tia surveyed the scene, a slight frown tugging at her lips. “This is…rudimentary.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Sorry. Best I could do. Is it workable?”

  “For what? An actual forensic autopsy? Of course not. I may be able to give you cause of death, provided it’s nothing we actually have to run tests for. And maybe recover any trace evidence that was lost when you moved the body. Beyond that? This is Stone Age stuff, Campbell. And I’m afraid you’ll get a Stone Age answer.” Her speech pattern had changed, becoming more clipped, more business-like. A little like a med student doing rounds; a little like New Lyons Medical Examiner Dr. Fitzpatrick when he was in a particularly foul mood. “Maybe…maybe…if you had let me bring my tools, I could do something.” She picked up a filleting knife from the table. I’d spent some time sharpening the blade—it might not have been quite as sharp as a scalpel, but the edge had been honed near to razor-thinness. But it only earned a frown and a shake of the head.

  Then Tia sighed. “Where’s the body?”

  I glanced over to the industrial refrigerator, but given her assessment of my efforts, couldn’t quite bring myself to say the words.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, right? You crammed the body into a fridge?”

  “Look, we weren’t exactly spoiled for choice, okay? It was that, or let it sit out here at room temperature for the past,” I did some quick mental math, “eighteen hours.”

  “Do you have any idea how many contaminants are likely to be found in that?” she pointed indignantly at the offending appliance.

  “We cleaned it first,” I muttered.

  “Just get me the body.”

  I opened the fridge and stared full into the face of my morning’s unexpected—and unwanted—delivery. The fridge had a solid six feet of interior space, and I’d pulled out all the shelving and drawers, so my mystery stiff had plenty of room to—forgive me—chill out. The temperature had done the work to slow the decomposition process, but I’d yet to come across a dead body that smelled good. I wrinkled my nose as I levered the corpse out, flinching at the chill that had settled into the flesh. Rigor mortis had set in, so I had to half drag, half walk him to the table. It wasn’t very dignified for either of us, but it had to be done. I placed the corpse as gently as I could upon the table, then wiped at the sweat that had beaded on my forehead during the transit. The deceased’s clothing remained undisturbed—at least as much as it could be after being transported first from the crime scene to the call center, then the call center to the restaurant, and then—the final indignity—in and out of the fridge.

  “You searched the clothing?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet. Things…kind of got away from us. I gave him a preliminary pat-down. Nothing thorough.”

  “Well maybe you should catc
h up with them. I do people, not things.”

  I let that one pass—had to, really, considering that she’d agreed to come here in the first place. “Right.” I reached for the dead man’s pockets.

  “Not like that,” Tia said.

  “What?”

  “Disrobe the cadaver. Then you can search at your leisure. It’s not like I can do what I need to do with a fully clothed body.”

  I hesitated. Sure, dealing with the dead wasn’t that far out of my wheelhouse. I’d dropped a few bad guys back in the Army, and even with the declining murder rates, my career as a cop had showed me more bodies than most. I’d had to handle them, of course, for investigative purposes. Then there’d been Fowler. No amount of bleach would have fixed what dealing with that guy did to my clothes. So, yeah, I’d dealt with my share of dead people. But undressing them?

  “Are you my assistant, or not?” Tia asked with a tart eyebrow and a twitch of the lips that suggested a suppressed grin.

  “This is because I made you leave your clothes at the cemetery, isn’t it?”

  She said nothing, but I saw a flash of white between her lips, and her eyes twinkled.

  “Maybe next time, get a girl a bra?” was her prompt reply.

  Chapter 7

  The deceased’s clothing, after the unpleasant task of removal, yielded nothing of interest. While I examined each garment, Tia began her work. It was not my first time in an autopsy room, but I was generally called in after the lion’s share of the work was done, and I was not looking forward to the process. The restaurant simply didn’t have the facilities to minimize the attendant mess associated with the practice.

  To my surprise, the diminutive medical examiner’s assistant talked aloud as she worked. “Beginning visual examination of the deceased.” She proceeded to make observations, speaking in clear, concise terms, narrating her actions as if a recorder were capturing every word. Which, I realized, was probably what she was used to. It made for a sort of pleasant background noise—as long as I didn’t listen too closely to the medical jargon.

  I had finished with the clothing—nothing of note—and moved on to the process of trying to identify the body. With some help from Tia, I had scanned the corpse’s fingerprints and even taken some detailed shots of his face and dental structure. I had long since lost access to the local and federal databases, so the fingerprints and dental records were of marginal use. I took them more from habit than anything else.

  The facial picture, however, was more promising. Facial recognition software was one of the structural underpinnings of the entire net. The name and tag searches that had once powered the ego of society had given way to more complex algorithms as pictures and video replaced text for the majority of content online. Now, most search engines parsed images and audio files as readily as they did text. I didn’t have full access to the camera networks that sat like a governmental web over New Lyons, but I didn’t really need them. There were zettabytes of pictures and videos that everyday citizens posted in a near-continuous (or in the case of lifebloggers, actually continuous) stream, and they were almost invariably tagged with longitude and latitude coordinates. People much smarter than I had long ago written the programs to upload an image and then try to find the person represented within a given geographic location.

  I got that search running. I knew it might take a while—there was a lot of data to sift through, after all, and my burner phone wasn’t exactly bursting with the kind of raw processing power needed to shorten the task. With the search underway, I turned my attention back to the physical evidence.

  I was going through the clothing a third time when Tia said, “Detective… Look at this.”

  I dropped the pair of khakis back on the small cart I was using as a table and looked over at Tia. She hadn’t started cutting yet, I was thankful to see. But she had asked me to help roll the body onto its stomach and was using what looked like a barbecue skewer—the ringed end rather than the pointy one—to push at the surface of the skin on the man’s back. I stepped up beside her, conscious of her closeness but trying to ignore it as I stared at the corpse.

  With her left hand, Tia had pressed the steel ring into the flesh of the body’s back, causing a small ridge to form. In her right, she held the filleting knife, its needlelike point pressing into, but not quite breaking, the skin.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  She pressed the knife a little more firmly, drawing my eyes to it. “Here. Just above the tip of the knife. Do you see it?”

  I frowned, peering down. There was a small red circle, no more than a few millimeters in diameter, just beyond the tip of the knife. It was visible only because the skin around it had already taken on the pallor of death, exacerbated by the pressure from the skewer. “Injection site? Maybe cause of death?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tia replied. With the tip of the knife, she began rapidly tapping other points on the victim’s back. “Here,” she said, touching the body just between the shoulder blades. “And here. Here. Here. One more here.” She kept going, until all told, she had identified fourteen puncture wounds. “If you were going to kill someone via an injection, I don’t think you’d need to try more than a dozen times.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed. “Torture?” It didn’t seem likely. Sure, getting stabbed in the back wouldn’t be a picnic, but the body was in too good condition for any serious torture to have taken place. Still, better to ask the expert.

  “No. The coloration of the injection sites suggest they were done postmortem. I’ll know more on that when I open them up, but I’m pretty confident.”

  A dark thought occurred to me—if I wanted to stop a budding revolution, a nice chemical or biological agent delivered to the headquarters of said revolution seemed like a good-enough way to get things done. And what better way to deliver said agent than by body-packing it within a corpse delivered to the door? Knowing that the people inside would have no choice but to… I cut off that line of thought as borderline paranoid, but more importantly, ridiculous. The “better way” would have been to toss the agent through one of the many windows at the call center. Or set a convenient fire. No need for cloak-and-dagger bullshit. But that did lead to another thought….

  “Are they just injection sites or is there…something there?” I asked.

  “Good question, Detective. Shall we find out?” She passed me an ear-loop mask—I had managed to salvage a few from an old first aid kit—and I pulled it on. She settled her own mask into place. “Beginning incision.”

  The filleting knife, despite not being purpose-built for the task at hand, parted the flesh easily enough. Tia started with a small, X-shaped incision over the injection site. She then transferred the barbecue skewer to her right hand and, using the point as a probe, inserted it into the wound. She made several small, delicate adjustments, applying subtle pressure to the makeshift probe. “I’ve got something,” she said. “Hold this.”

  “What?”

  “The…skewer. Hold it steady, just like I’ve got it now. I need a reference point. Or is the big bad detective afraid of a little autopsy work?”

  I didn’t justify that with a reply, instead shifting closer to Tia and taking hold of the probe. I could just feel the resistance against the beveled tip of the steel skewer, indicating that there was something more than flesh and sinew there. Tia retrieved the filleting knife. Holding it at about a forty-five degree cant in her hand, she began making a long, smooth incision, following a line that moved from the inserted probe and across the skin of the decedent’s back in an even, arrow-straight path. I couldn’t tell what guideline she was following, but there was no hesitation in the cut, and the pallid flesh parted easily beneath the blade.

  “Forceps,” she said as she placed the knife on the table.

  I stared blankly for a moment.

  “Give me the needle-nose pliers,” she reiterated wit
h an exasperated sigh.

  “Right.” I grabbed the pliers and offered them to her. I had to look away as she dug the business end into the incision, working the handles.

  “I’ve got something,” she said. “Retracting.”

  She eased the pliers from the wound, and I tried not to wince at the sound it made. There was a reason I was a cop and not a doctor.

  “I’ve almost got it,” she said.

  With a final wet, sucking sound, the object came free. It was a long, narrow rod of metal, too rigid to be called a wire but not tapering like a needle or similar implement. It reminded me of something, and I racked my brain to try and place it.

  “What in the world is this?” Tia asked, dropping it into a shallow baking dish. She used a repurposed mustard bottle that I had washed and filled with water to spray a steady stream over the blood-darkened object, washing away the blood.

  It revealed a bright, shiny copper sheen. That tugged at a memory from long ago, back in my service days, when some of the forward operating bases were being built from the ground up. Most of them were quick pre-fab structures—structures that required a certain amount of mechanical assembly. It wasn’t quite the same, but… “I think it’s a welding rod.”

  “A what?” Tia asked.

  “A welding rod. Welders use it…” I hesitated. “Shit. I don’t know exactly how they use it. I was a grunt, not a machinist. But it’s part of what welders use when joining metals.”

  “Odd,” Tia said, her voice soft, thoughtful. “Why use a welding rod?”

  “I don’t know. Are they all the same?”

  “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  She worked quickly, but with a precision and economy of movement that was almost spellbinding. In my course of martial arts studies, I had come across more than one practitioner of one flavor or another of kung fu, and they all espoused the same wisdom—kung fu wasn’t necessarily a martial discipline. It was instead a quest for perfection in all that you did. For some, that was the application of the martial aspects of the art, but for others it was focusing on the mundane, on the everyday tasks, or on whatever drove you. Regardless of whether she had ever thrown a punch, in watching Tia work, I could see that her kung fu was in wielding medical instruments, even improvised ones. And her kung fu was strong. She was wasted as Dr. Fitzpatrick’s assistant.