Division Zero

by Matthew S. Cox

  “What about inflating the global economy? It’s still illegal. Didn’t you swear an oath to uphold the law? If people just manufacture credits, they lose their value.”

  “Dorian, have you ever run into a situation where what’s right and what’s legal didn’t always match up perfectly?”

  An odd glimmer shone in his eyes. “Once or twice.”

  “I think it’s a greater crime he’s trapped in the wrong body. Cybernetic modification is cheaper but it could weaken or rob him of his psionic abilities. Plus, anyone looking at him would know he had been modified. The way he’s doing it, he’s got a new life ahead of her.”

  “Clever, but he should get a job.”

  “Oh, sure, and pay for it when he’s about to retire. Look, I know you’re not comfortable with it, but he’s just human like everyone else. What are you smiling at?”

  “I’m just pondering the hypocrisy of an atheist following God’s law over man’s law.”

  “Oh don’t start that. It has nothing to do with the old man in the sky.”

  “You are one of the few good people left in the world.” Dorian gave her a genuine smile. “Do you really think he will stop stealing even after he gets it done? He grew up among the transients, crime is all he knows.”

  She gave him a hurt look. “I lived down there, too… and I don’t steal.”

  He patted her shoulder. “You’re very resilient.”

  A shiver ran down her arm and chased the memories away. “Besides, mech-apts find legitimate work easily, and I’ll check up on her.”

  The patrol craft circled around and came to rest at the center of a shimmering cluster of Division 1 blue-and-whites with their emergency lights on. The night air brushed cold against her face as she squinted through the glare. Just next to the waiting area, a handful of police officers interviewed a line of civilians. The first six, including a little girl, dripped with blood. A dull silver maglev train sat motionless forty meters down the rail while Division 2 techs swarmed it like remoras on a shark. A ring of Division 5 men in heavy armor surrounded a male doll in a maintenance jumpsuit by the terminal convenience store. It held a mop and looked at them as if it wondered what they wanted.

  “Mr. Barrington has a boo.” The little girl held up a blood-soaked teddy bear as Kirsten approached.

  Dorian sighed. “That kid will be in counseling till she’s forty.”

  Kirsten looked back at him with a gaping mouth. “Honestly? Have you no tact?” She mimed giving it a stimpak injection, making the girl smile.

  A Division 1 officer edged past her to hand the child some hot cocoa as Kirsten set about interviewing them one by one. All had the same story. The janitor doll ambled along its route, mopping the platform until the train came streaking around the corner. Then it grabbed some poor schmuck and threw him in front of it. That Maglev was not scheduled to stop at this station, so it had not slowed down. Mercifully, the child had not seen anything, having been absorbed in a video game on her NetMini. When Kirsten realized the civilians could tell her nothing of use, she went over to the technical team examining the tram cars.

  “You guys find anything yet?”

  “The victim’s dead.” A man standing astride the rail with a sensor unit in his hand looked up.

  “No shit.” Kirsten rubbed the bridge of her nose, not in the mood for sarcasm. “Have you ever seen someone survive a hit like that?”

  He laughed. “Once, but he was a full conversion Borg, the hit did more damage to the maglev than the dude. From what we can tell, the doll walked by with its mop, saw the tram approaching at around two hundred miles per hour, and it picked some random guy and threw him out over the rail.”

  “Yeah, I got that part already.”

  “After that it just went back to mopping like nothing happened.”

  Dorian glanced back at the civilians, looking relieved. “At least it didn’t grab the kid.”

  Kirsten fixed him with a desperate stare. “Don’t even joke about that.”

  “I’m serious.” The tech blinked. “It just went back to mopping.”

  She thanked the tech and approached the Division 5 crew, interrupting a discussion about what to do with the unit. Despite its current placidity, half of them still wanted to shoot it.

  She slipped between them toward the doll. Before she could touch it, two meaty hands caught her. Kirsten’s body went rigid at the feeling of fingers digging into her arms; old instincts braced for a beating.

  A man’s voice crackled over the armor’s speaker. “Careful!”

  Her feet left the ground as they hauled her willowy form into the air. On her feet again, she yanked away from their grip, showing her ID with a glare.

  “I need to inspect it.”

  They smiled at her attempt to look menacing.

  “This thing hasn’t been declared safe yet. I can’t let you near it, even if you do outrank me.”

  She fumed.

  A miasma of gore caught her eye, slurping along the rail. A flat, face-like patch peeled up at the front end and twisted around to look at her. She grimaced at the sight; it looked like just his skin after everything else had been blasted out of it.

  “Let me know when you do, I need to check it for traces of psionic interference. The longer you make me wait the more useless it gets.”

  Sergeant Hawthorne frowned. “Okay, fine, it’s your pretty little ass that’ll be in a sling if this goes tits up.”

  Tits and ass… is that all they think about?

  She shoved past them again. “The programming didn’t do it.”

  Kirsten put her hand on the doll. It glanced about, acting confused. Her mind reached out in search of any paranormal energy and found strong latent anger infused with the mechanical body. She knew for a fact a ghost had touched it.

  “Sergeant, this unit was subjected to external paranormal influence. The doll itself is not at fault. Take it to the lab and have its memory core analyzed if you want, but you won’t find anything. Unless the ghost comes back, the doll is harmless.”

  She walked away as they restarted their discussion of the janitor’s fate and their superstitions.

  Typical. Don’t understand it? Burn it.

  She crossed to the monorail where the patch of flesh oozed along, its eyes locked on a woman coated in blood.

  “Hey.” Kirsten called out. “Over here.”

  The flap of skin with eyes pivoted toward her. He slithered up to her boots, blinking.

  “Okay, pal…” Kirsten squatted. “Let’s have a little chat about something called residual self-image.”

  He blinked again.

  “You are a ghost, as I assume you can tell from the fact you’re about an inch tall and six feet across. Yes… I can see you but to be honest, you’re kinda nasty right now. As a ghost, your appearance is based on your sense of identity. Most look like they did at the moment of death because it’s a powerful burn into their psyche.”

  He flapped his head in an attempt to nod.

  “In some cases, having a bullet hole or a knife sticking out is to be expected. Unfortunately, you look like a pizza with eyes. Pardon my bluntness.”

  The skin flap turned at Dorian’s laughter.

  Kirsten sighed. “Try to think of yourself like you were before the train.”

  The specter closed his eyes and shuddered. The head inflated to three dimensions, but the rest of him remained a mess.

  “Well, that’s something. Look, maybe it would be easier for you to just move on and skip the whole ghost thing altogether. If you’re still here due to some unresolved issue, tell me what I can do to help.”

  The head nodded at a woman among the civilians and moaned. “Wife.” The voice seemed weak and undulating in volume, typical for a new spirit learning how to speak.

  “You want me to tell her something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Can you tell me if you saw anything strange after you died?”

  He struggled to keep his head inflat
ed. “A man. Go through floor and fly away. White coat. Nose.”

  “Thanks.”

  Dorian nodded. “Sounds like a ghost.”

  The flat man blinked at Dorian. “Big nose.”

  Kirsten bowed. “Now I know why you got into I-Ops.”

  She sat with the wife, playing translator with her dead husband. Initial skepticism faded as she relayed his words and shared things only he knew. Within minutes, the woman sobbed on Kirsten’s shoulder. After a long rambling discussion about some money he had hidden away for their son’s schooling, the appeased haunt vanished in a flash of silver light. Kirsten stayed with her until she composed herself enough to go home.

  “That was nice of you.” Dorian sidled up alongside her.

  “I couldn’t leave him like that.” She shuddered. “That was ghastly.”

  “Yeah, just a little.” He winced. “So what now?”

  “I want to check out the doll from the boardroom.”

  aleful fluorescent light saturated the tiny grey-walled room on the other side of the transparent barrier. A slender, violet-haired figure in a bright prison jumpsuit shivered in her seat behind a swath of glare on the window. The woman’s fingers teased at the ends of her hair just above her belt, as high as her manacled hands could reach. The thick plastisteel restraints looked ridiculous in their size, despite knowing they held a doll.

  So perfectly human.

  Kirsten watched the woman’s chest as it rose and fell with phantom breaths. Red circled her eyes as if she had been crying, but it had no tears to shed. A nebula of orange-violet reflected on the chrome table. The amount of pity she felt for a machine astonished her. Could it be terrified of its own fate, or had this artificial mind developed the capacity for remorse? The report indicated the memory core stopped recording during the time of the event, as if the doll had blacked out.

  It had to be the same entity from the tram.

  The proud smile Captain Eze gave her when she explained her findings from the PubTran station still hung in her mind’s eye. Kirsten tapped her foot, waiting for her escort to arrive. Division 5 would not let her in there without backup, even if she did not want it. She offered an impatient glance at Dorian, who just shrugged and stood with his hands folded behind him.

  The sharp hiss of the door behind her made her jump. Two hulking armored figures moved into the room, toting their ever-present ABR20s, guns as big as her leg. She backed into the glass, caught off guard by their aggressive entry. One keyed in a code to open the interrogation room and motioned for her to go in. The other remained in the front area and observed through the partition. The way he kept his finger along the trigger, and the weapon just short of aimed at the doll, made her wonder how explosive a sneeze could be. Kirsten rounded through the door, eager to put some distance between her and a pair of 20mm rifles.

  The room felt like empty space, her psionic senses blind to the simulacrum seated before her. It lacked the feeling one gets when in the proximity of another human being, replaced by a whisper of simulated sadness in mechanical eyes. Kirsten slid into the seat opposite the doll. It stared wider, pleading… begging.

  The subtle trace of thin gold letters spelled out ‘Intera - Maya 6’ around her teal irises dispelling the perfect illusion. This latest generation of Intera self-aware dolls had been on the market only a few months and had to be worth a few million credits. Dorian seemed unimpressed. He did not regard things like this as anything more than machines. This being of plastisteel bones and Myofiber muscles had run out of tears, though the look on its face all but had Kirsten doing it for her.

  “Hello Deirdre.” Kirsten swept her hand over the datapad, shoving her way through luminous green text. “I’m trying to figure out what happened.”

  Deirdre looked down into her lap and her lip quivered. At this distance, she felt eerily real. Not like the one from the hotel, a rickety thing that whirred when it walked, Deirdre recognized her own existence. Jerky inhuman motion replaced with natural smooth glances, sniffles even, a face capable of exactly recreating human moods, and the capacity to learn.

  “I read the scan report. Some of the things your body did are outside the parameters of your capabilities.”

  “They don’t believe me.” The woman looked to the side, ashamed.

  Dorian frowned. “She’s good, should get an Emmy.”

  “What can you tell me about that day?” Kirsten calmed her with a glance.

  “I don’t remember. One moment I was walking through the door with the reports, and then I was dancing naked on the table. I don’t know what’s more embarrassing.” She squirmed, staring at the restraints. “These are more embarrassing.”

  “Oh that’s convenient.” Dorian shook his head. “It probably purged its memory banks once it got caught.”

  “Look, Deirdre…” Kirsten looked back at the Division 5 guard. “Are those cuffs really necessary? She’s not a danger.”

  “Protocol, Agent Wren. I don’t want to deal with the paperwork if she has another episode.”

  “She won’t. If what I think is going on is true.”

  “What do you mean?” Deirdre leaned forward, her voice desperate.

  “Please just tell me as much as you remember.” Kirsten edged closer, offering a placid smile.

  Both Cyborg Interdiction officers tensed up. “Be careful, Agent.”

  Deirdre cringed when they yelled, and kept her eyes on the floor. “I was on my way into the boardroom with the operations reports for the second quarter financials. I remember seeing static… lines of color in the air.” She tried to make a hand gesture in front of her eyes but her wrist snapped to a halt two inches from her waist. “It looked like I walked past a large generator with an EM field.”

  Kirsten nodded. “Then what?”

  “It cleared up, but as soon as I pushed the door open it happened again. I went blind for a second, all black. The next thing I remember, I was standing on the conference table, my clothes were off and I was dancing. There was blood on my hand and people running around screaming. Michael, the CFO, had a light pen sticking out of his chest and he stared at me with the most awful look. Everyone ran. I hid under the table until the police came.”

  Deirdre shuddered, making sounds like crying but no tears fell from her eyes.

  Kirsten disregarded Dorian’s golf-clap as she slid to the section of the report with that video. The security holo played in a tiny window. “So you lost about fifteen minutes, then?”

  “I suppose that’s right.”

  Kirsten turned to the guard behind her. “This tech report says all of her onboard systems logged a power down state at the time, but there was no sysboot record when she came back online.”

  “Sounds right.” He shrugged.

  Kirsten gave him a pointed stare. “Does it sound normal?”

  He shook his head. “Far from it, that’s why you’re here. It’s a bios-level process. The hardware cannot fail to record a sysboot if she powers off and on.”

  Kirsten nodded, walking around behind to put her hands on Deirdre’s shoulders, and surveying the doll’s body. Her mind reached out like a hand fumbling along the wall of a dark room in search of a light switch. A thread brushed her thoughts, a gossamer tingle across the midline of her brain. Her power coiled about it like a finger caressing a dangling string. The residual trace held none of the anger she found at the tram, but it could be due to the amount of time elapsed since the event.

  “This doll―” She corrected herself, glaring at Dorian. “Deirdre was attacked by a paranormal entity. Something took over her body for a few minutes, just like at the tram.”

  “What does that mean?” Deirdre ventured a cautious peek.

  Kirsten smiled. “It means humans are not the only things that can be possessed by ghosts. You will not be declared dangerous. I am going to recommend release. You can take these things off her, without the ghost in her she’s no stronger than a normal woman.”

  The man in the doorway gasped. “Yo
u gotta be shittin’ me. We can’t call it safe till we know what happened. You serious?”

  “Very.” Kirsten got up to leave. “A ghost possessed this doll. I’m still trying to work out the why of it; but who knows… it could just be pissed off at the world.”

  He folded his arms and loomed. “Really, a ghost?”

  Kirsten stood her ground. “Yes. A ghost. They are real, heck there could even be one within arm’s reach of you right now and you’d never even know it.”

  “Wouldn’t that be funny,” quipped Dorian.

  The Div 5 officer shifted and glanced around. “I’m not sure my sergeant is going to accept Casper as an excuse for what happened.”

  “Has Deirdre been anything but complaint since you detained her?”

  “No.”

  “Have the techs found any mundane reason to explain what happened?”

  He made a stymied face. “No.”

  Dorian moved up to Kirsten’s side. “You know the Maya series dolls were named for the goddess of illusions, because they look and act so real? Are you sure it isn’t trying to trick you?”

  Kirsten exhaled at him again, but kept her eyes on the guard. “Believe me or not, hackers and AI’s can’t fake a paranormal imprint. Deirdre is not to blame. If I have to, I’ll get Captain Eze on the vid right now. Please start the release process. Treat her like a victim of a hostage taker. If it helps you explain it to her employer, just tell them a hacker did it. The concept and result are the same, just the means are different.”

  With a resigned sigh, the guard motioned for Deirdre to get up. She stood, wobbling, and shuffled with them into the holding area beyond.

  “What is your problem with dolls?” Kirsten fixed Dorian with a stare once they got out of earshot of the room.

  He smiled. “What is your problem with religious people?”

  “You have no idea what it was like.” Kirsten tromped toward the Division 0 wing.

  Dorian walked alongside. “Do you think it is right society creates these things that are so close to us the law considers them people?”

  “What, like some kind of ‘God creates man, man creates dolls’ thing?” She kicked a piece of trash into the wall. “I dunno… They are machines, they don’t have souls. When they are destroyed, there’s no ghost.”