Division Zero

by Matthew S. Cox

  Kirsten looked off to the side, biting her lip and picking at her sleeve. “I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.”

  Eze laughed. “Everything we do is out of the ordinary, though it would have been nice if they gave you a little backup.”

  “Yeah.” She fidgeted. “But they were―”

  “I read your report.”

  She had sent it in only seconds before he called her, but then again his talent with technology had no doubt ‘absorbed’ the substance of what she sent.

  He leaned back in his chair. “Division 5 ran into something they have no answers for. A Class 1 doll experienced a severe malfunction at the Lyceum Hotel. There was a death and a few serious injuries. Command thinks there is a connection to other incidents with dolls going haywire over the past few weeks.”

  “Five?” She blinked. “I’m guessing there’s more to it than just a Class 1 doll… how could they fail to handle that?”

  “Oh, the unit has been put down. The problem was what they saw in the AI when they dumped the memory―or rather didn’t see. They could not find a reason for what happened, so they want us to conduct a thorough review just to cover all angles.”

  She could not resist his contagious smile. “Okay. Machines aren’t my thing, but I’ll go have a look at it.”

  “Please. I am sure you will do fine.”

  orian sat on the hood of the patrol craft with his arms folded, waiting in the garage. He flashed a broad smile as Kirsten appeared at the end of the row and walked over. Seeing her fumble at the door one-handed, with an egg sandwich stuffed in her mouth and coffee balanced in the other hand, he laughed. Nudging the door up with her knee, she sank into the seat and brought the car online. She turned to glare at him; the sight of the Kaiser roll protruding from her mouth only added to his amusement. The cabin filled with the audible presence of technology as its systems powered up. A hundred little lights winked on in sequence.

  She grumbled through her breakfast as she set the coffee down and took a nibble. It’s a miracle…. All the gadgets and shit in this car and they still find room for six cup-holders within reach of the driver’s seat. Two more bites filled in the seconds the car took to come online. The sandwich once again parked in her mouth as she needed both hands to maneuver to the exit.

  “Morning, Kirsten.” Samir leaned out of the gate booth with a big grin.

  She nodded at him, still chewing. He was fourteen now, she had known him since his parents had abandoned him here when he was five. Like Captain Eze, his psionic talents involved machinery; hence, he was assigned to motor pool despite his young age, due to being as much of a prodigy with mechanical things as she had been with ghostly ones.

  “Has she given you any trouble?” Samir indicated the car with a wave.

  Kirsten choked down an insufficiently chewed lump of food. “No, why would he?”

  “That patrol unit got shot up pretty bad a few years ago. After it came back from the rebuild, a lot of other agents had problems with it. It wouldn’t start, had steering issues, the lights, sirens, and the radio would turn on without warning… that kinda stuff. I never could feel anything wrong with it.”

  “It’s been perfectly normal for me.” She looked around as if missing a joke.

  Samir leaned on his elbows, looking the car over. “I guess some cars just have a personality, s’pose she likes you.”

  Kirsten laughed. “I just hope he keeps on liking me. Now if you’ll let me out, I’m supposed to be going code three.”

  “Sorry.” He recoiled back into the booth and hit the button to raise the gate while flashing a nervous smile.

  “Don’t worry about it, not like I’m on a tac squad. The dead won’t get deader if I’m a minute late.”

  Easing the sleek patrol craft out onto the street, she hit a button and the narrow bar lights on the roof flooded the area with rapid camera-flashes of azure light. Soon, the airborne hovercar headed in the direction of the Lyceum Hotel.

  “Nice kid, that Samir.” Dorian glanced at the boy. “They should at least let him grow up before they put him to work.”

  “He’s learning mechanic skills; it’s more like tech school.” Kirsten shrugged. “You remember Heather?”

  “That other astral sensate? Yeah I think I saw her once; didn’t she move to the East coast?”

  “Yeah… They sent her out into the field when she was thirteen. They said they had no one else strong enough. So stupid, they wouldn’t let her carry a weapon either.”

  “Would you let a thirteen year old have an E90?” Dorian clucked his tongue. “Still, they shouldn’t have put her out there. I’m surprised command gambled with lives like that. Why didn’t they send you?”

  “That was Burckhardt’s call.” Kirsten frowned. “I was only six then. They had no idea who I was.” Her gaze fell off to the side. “I wish they did…”

  He laughed, trying to cheer her up. “I bet they’d have sent you instead of her if they did.”

  The absurdity of it carried with it a nugget of doubt. If they needed a ghost destroyed, Deputy Director Burckhardt just might have considered a six-year-old Kirsten to do it. Her combination of psionic gifts created a rare and dangerous weapon against astral beings.

  I’m not sure he would have cared, even if I didn’t know how to use the lash back then.

  Her words rode upon a fake chuckle. “Yeah, I guess they would have.”

  The car banked around the side of a gleaming skyscraper, coating the building with a flickering shimmer of blue from the emergency lights. Faces appeared in the windows as people looked over, curious at the sight of an all-black police vehicle.

  The coffee slid out of the cup holder during the turn, but floated up into the air and leveled off before it could burst open in her lap. She grabbed it as fast as she could move her hand, but Dorian had already levitated it out of harm’s way.

  “Thanks for that.”

  “Hey, we’re still cops. Wasting coffee is a class-A felony.”

  They exchanged a laugh, and soon she came in for a landing in the parking lot of the hotel. Division 1 patrol cars dotted the area around two immense armored assault vehicles pulled right up to the steps. On the roof of each A3V, a Division 5 trooper kept a hatch-mounted 30mm cannon trained on the door. They looked quite disappointed at not having been given a chance to use them.

  Kirsten killed the bar lights and hopped out, letting the door sink closed behind her as she walked up the steps through the crowd of police. Most of them moved with haste out of her path or looked away to avoid eye contact. Where someone else might have gotten a power trip, she felt a stab in her chest as the label of “outcast” sunk in deeper. Terrified faces turning away sent her gaze to the ground and made her feel alone in a swarm of people, wondering if mother had been right.

  The scent of burned ballistic propellant wafted inside the lobby, manifesting in drifting clouds of smoke near the ceiling. Patrol officers had several clusters of civilians cordoned off in groups: some employees, some guests, and some poor people who had just been passing by when everything hit the fan.

  She spotted sergeant’s markings on one man’s armor and walked over. “Morning, sergeant. What can you tell me?”

  Dorian sidled up alongside her, unimpressed by the half-controlled chaos.

  Sgt. Reed turned, giving her a head to toe glance, unimpressed by the angel-faced woman staring up at him. He moaned, exasperated. “And you are?”

  She shoved her ID in his visor as her eyebrows slid closer. “Agent Kirsten Wren, Division 0 I-Ops.”

  The burly sergeant’s confidence eroded at the pace of snow in a stream of piss. He leaned his weight away from her, his face paled, and his fingers picked at his belt.

  “Uhh. Doll went schizo and tore some poor bastards up. We got two confirmed dead and three on their way to Grove Hospital.”

  “I got that already from the sit rep. Sounds like something that D5 could handle, obviously there’s more to it. Let’s try this again. Wh
y did this get punted to us?”

  His trepidation waned as the cop-talk slipped her into his comfort zone. With a wave of his hand he indicated a crew toward the back of the room. “Div 2’s been all over the smokin’ scrap and can’t figure out why it freaked. Guess they got desperate and are hoping you can voodoo the truth out of it.”

  “Damn, I left my sacrificial chickens at home.” She stomped around him, not even caring about the face he made. Idiot probably thinks I’m serious.

  In the back of the room, a basic doll body lay sprawled on the ground in the middle of a patch of nanobot-infused fluid, made in the image of a woman in her twenties with brown hair and a perfect figure. The charred and tattered remnants of a housekeeper’s uniform clung to its half-molten form, arms bloody up to the elbows. Seams and gaps in the face and limbs left no doubt of its nature.

  A sense of something abnormal at the back of the lobby slowed her step.

  A heavyset, older woman paced by the elevator, making the occasional glance at all the commotion. She had dark skin, black hair, and sad, frightened eyes. Blood oozed onto her uniform from an arm-sized hole straight through her chest. Only a spirit could still be walking around with such a massive wound. Her presence changed Kirsten’s course away from the tech crew, waving as she approached.

  “Hello?”

  “You see me?” The ghost’s echoing voice held a mild Spanish accent. “I need a doctor but no one is helping.”

  Kirsten offered a sympathetic look and made her body tangible to ghosts. Taking the woman by the hand, she spoke in a comforting tone. “I am sorry to tell you this ma’am, but you are beyond the reach of a doctor.” She hesitated, hating this part the most. “Ma’am, you were killed.”

  Ghosts of those who died violent and unexpected deaths often did not realize what happened. Depending on how she handled it, this woman could either find peace or wind up an angry haunt in the hotel for a long time.

  “I want to find justice for you. Can you tell me anything about what happened?”

  “Look at the Zero spook, talking to the wall.” A voice drifted over from one of the patrol officers.

  The ghost of one of the victims is here, you asshole. Kirsten projected her words into his mind; her anger made it loud enough to be painful, an effect similar to shouting an inch away from his ear.

  Dorian smirked at the man, watching him grab his head and wince. “No manners.”

  The woman looked at Dorian for a moment. “Dead? No. I… uhm… I was coming down out of the back hall with my cart. The doll, she was just standing in the lobby, not doing anything, with blood on the skirt.”

  “What happened next?” Dorian lifted an eyebrow.

  “I walked over to see if maybe something wrong with it. When I touch its arm, it start shaking. I thought maybe it get wet, it felt cold.”

  Cold did not prove anything, but it could be a sign.

  “Then it went crazy. It punch me in the chest.” The housekeeper wailed, tapping her fingers on her bloodstained dress. “I crawl away, an’ it leave me alone an’ went after other people.”

  In as soothing a tone as she could muster, Kirsten theorized the first hit had been a fatal one, and everything that happened afterward, the woman had witnessed as a ghost. “I will find who did this… you don’t have to linger here and suffer. Go to the people you love.”

  Kirsten often heard the dead talk about a place opposite from where the Harbingers would take a soul. Her mother would have called it Heaven, but that implied a singular patriarchal entity on a throne. Everything she had witnessed indicated a place of light, but none of the spirits she had ever spoken with knew much about it.

  “If you hear voices calling you, go to them. They are waiting for you,” said Kirsten.

  “In Heaven?” asked the ghost.

  Kirsten tried hard not to scowl. “I… have no idea, it’s…” She sagged, defeated. “I don’t think it’s the Heaven you’re thinking of, but it is a place of happiness.”

  “Who’s to say for sure?” asked Dorian.

  Kirsten smirked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what if this supposed ‘god’ is beyond any mortal’s ability to comprehend? The sublime light they see; it may very well be God. Who are we to say what it is?”

  “Felix?” the housekeeper called off to the left.

  Kirsten turned back to her. “Who is Felix?”

  “My husband, he was killed years ago.” The housekeeper sobbed.

  Kirsten patted her on the shoulder. “You have no reason to be sad. If you hear him calling you, go to him. You can be with him again.”

  The spirit turned and wandered off, calling out for her husband. Kirsten watched her go about twenty yards before a glimmer of shifting silver light obscured her form and faded to nothing. The word Felix repeated several more times, growing fainter with each occurrence until it stopped. Kirsten cried a little, vicarious joy at the woman’s reunion with her family.

  “Can you say that’s not Heaven?” Dorian grinned.

  She frowned. “Yes, there is true evil, and yes, there is its opposite. I don’t think man-made gods and satans have anything to do with it. No more than Old Man Winter makes it cold in December or a rabbit runs around and craps eggs on your holographic lawn in the spring.” Her face reddened. “Cold is cold because that’s how nature works. The light and the dark are the same thing… just intangibly so.”

  Dorian grinned. Kirsten got as passionate about debunking religion as her mother had been about beating it into her. He stopped short of saying it, not wanting to make her that angry.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  After she calmed, she walked up to the techies crowded around what remained of the doll. A number of portable machines ringed the area, connected via wires to points inside the open faceplate. Forensic techs lifted blood samples from its arms and holovids from the surrounding area. Dorian followed her over to the pack of techies, busy among a milieu of various scanners, wires, and portable workstations.

  She walked up and looked them over. “Who’s in charge of this?”

  A thirtyish woman in a grey-blue jumpsuit stood up to clasp hands, throwing some of her black hair off her face with shake of her head. “Chief Technical Officer Li Xiao.”

  Ugh. CTO… we’re the same rank. Am I supposed to salute? Shit, she’s shaking hands. Run with it.

  “Agent Kirsten Wren,” she replied. “What have you found?”

  Li folded her arms over a datapad. “It’s an Intera Corporation Model 3A domestic; a fairly run of the mill unit for this sort of work. Rudimentary AI, no personality, It’s basically a Vac-Droid with legs. The system logs indicate an Abend occurred about two minutes before the security vids show the doll going crazy. The recording of internal memory stopped with the Abend; like it powered off.”

  Kirsten lifted a single eyebrow. “Abend?”

  Tech Xiao rolled her eyes. “Abnormal end, unexpected shutdown.”

  “Couldn’t a hacker have killed the onboard systems? These dolls have a wireless connection to the hotel network, don’t they?”

  “Yes, that’s possible… but if a hacker was involved, the memory would still have recorded the event. Most dolls save audio and video logs from their surroundings for liability reasons; this model keeps the most recent three hours.”

  “You sound like you’re trying to will the situation into not being something for you to handle.” Dorian teased.

  Kirsten sighed. “Just being thorough.”

  “Understood,” said Li. “Anything else you need from me or my team?”

  “Are these A3 domestics often equipped with motor boosts that make them strong enough to crush a person with one punch?”

  Xiao’s eyebrows lifted as she shook her head. “No way. It’s illegal for a sub-sentient unit like this to have its strength boosted to such levels. Even the self-aware AI’s, with citizenship, have to get permits. I’m not sure why you’re asking. This particular unit has no strength au
gmentation, just basic Myofiber. It’s only about as strong as an average adult man.”

  Kirsten looked at the spot where the housekeeper’s ghost had been. “Did you review the security footage? It killed the housekeeper with one punch. I could see the wall through the hole.”

  Hesitating, Li’s eyes traced to the main door and then back to Kirsten. “But the body was removed an hour ago… how did you…”

  “Her ghost was still over there.” Kirsten pointed over her shoulder with a thumb.

  Li’s voice traced off to a whisper. “They said old lady… I figured her for a frail older woman.”

  “She might have been fifty, and far from frail. She took one heck of a punch. What about the other victims, the survivors? Do their injuries line up with how strong this doll should have been?”

  “I haven’t seen any of the victims, Agent Wren, I’m picking through circuits. The medical crew left with the bodies before I got here. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Not right this second, but please give me a minute before you take off in case something comes up.”

  Li chuckled and stooped over the wreckage. “Oh, we’ll be here for a few hours yet.”

  Kirsten paced around the doll. The frame sprawled on the ground with two large holes scorched through the chest. From the extent of the damage, one of the Division 5 crew must have tagged it with an ABR20. Kirsten frowned, shaking her head at how they never hesitated to point a gun made to take out Class 5 military-grade cyborgs at things like this. They should call them Division Overkill, not Five. She squatted and put one hand on the doll’s shoulder, careful not to put her knee down in the fluid saturating the carpet.

  She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind, searching for any strange feelings. While she lacked talent at clairvoyance, and had no ability to take psychometric readings, her sensitivity to the astral realm allowed her to detect a residual presence on the parts. It gave her the impression a paranormal force had touched it within the past few hours. Granted, it could also be latent psionic energy. Either way, she knew Division 0 had to be involved.