Harbinger

by Matthew S. Cox

  Dorian glanced at the room. “Maybe it was consensual until the guy left her tied to the bed?”

  “Consensual sex gone wrong?” asked Kirsten.

  “The woman claims not to remember how she got here at all. One minute, she’s home, the next, here.” Sergeant Burke headed for the door. “C’mon. She’s still in there waiting for you. Medics already checked her out and got all the samples a detective could ask for.”

  She shivered.

  “Another thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense—at least until I saw the weird part—is the earlier video. The vic stepped out of a PubTran car, already naked, and wandered around the courtyard here until the suspect grabbed her.”

  “Threatened somehow?” asked Kirsten. “She have kids or something who someone would hurt if she didn’t do this?”

  Burke raised her left arm and a small holo-panel opened above it. “That would make sense, but nothing about this makes sense. The victim, Mia Sanchez, is still here. She thinks something paranormal happened. Asked for a Zero. No criminal record, single, no kids. Age twenty-three, residence is in Sector 244, a fair ride away from here.”

  “That’s not a cheap place to live,” muttered Kirsten while following the sergeant inside to a room every bit as foul and dingy as she expected.

  Her skin prickled with a charge of supernatural energy, primarily emanating from the bed. Crap. This one’s strong. If not for the clingy uniform covering her to the wrists, all the hairs on the backs of her arms would’ve stood on end, not from fear, but from the intensity.

  “This one is going to be… interesting.” Dorian wandered past a small table with a chair by the window, then peered into the bathroom. “Seems the spirit kept itself in one place.”

  A woman with a rounded face and light brown skin sat on the foot end of the bed, wrapped in a grey police-issue blanket. Flashing pink glowed from a NanoLED tattoo on her left cheek in the shape of a heart. A few tiny blue lights winked in and out under her hair behind her left ear. Her expression gave off clear shock. She barely reacted to them approaching her. Every ten seconds, all five fingernails on the visible hand clutching the blanket to her chest changed color.

  “Miss Sanchez?” asked Kirsten.

  “You’re a psionic.” The woman moved only her head, turning it to look at her.

  Kirsten nodded.

  Humanity flooded into Mia’s formerly lifeless expression, a slow fade from sub-sentient doll to actual person. “Oh, thank you! I can stop concentrating now.”

  “Concentrating?” Kirsten stepped closer, peering around the room.

  “I’m pretty sure something possessed me, so I was shielding my mind.”

  Kirsten skimmed the woman’s surface thoughts, but sensed no psionic ability whatsoever. Though, Mia did believe concentrating intently on the image of a closed fist against a black background would keep ‘evil stuff’ out of her.

  Dorian approached the bed, holding his hands out, palms down. “I have the distinct impression anyone who attempts a psychometric reading from this bed is going to need therapy.”

  “That strong?” asked Kirsten with a raised eyebrow.

  Mia glanced at her. “What?”

  “Oh. I’m talking to someone else.” She smiled.

  “No…” Dorian grinned. “Merely from being in this place. The things that’ve happened on this bed would probably break the minds of hardened killers. Though, whatever spirit was here has a lot of power. Enough that I suspect anyone who sleeps in it will have interesting dreams.”

  “Someone else?” Mia shrank in on herself.

  Kirsten tapped her forearm guard to start active recording. “Please, don’t worry. My partner is a spirit. Please tell me everything you can remember.”

  “That’s good.” Mia again looked where she thought Dorian might be. “If it comes back, she can fight it.”

  “He,” said Kirsten, suppressing a smile. “You’re not in any danger now. I can see spirits, too.”

  “Yes. The one from the NewsNet. The Moon thing.” Mia smiled. “I’m glad they sent you.”

  “Looks like someone has a fan club.” Dorian chuckled.

  “I was home.” Mia looked down. “I’d just gotten offline from work and went to the kitchen to make myself something to eat. A hand grabbed my ass. I screamed and spun around, but nothing was there. So, I figured I’d imagined it. Sometimes, spending ten hours plugged into the net can cause phantom sensations. The same hardware that makes the GlobeNet feel real can do things when you’re out.”

  “Yes, I’m aware of the phenomenon,” said Kirsten.

  “It felt like someone kept touching me everywhere, running a hand up inside my legs.” Mia squirmed.

  Kirsten did as well, unable to help but think of Konstantin. “The touch felt normal, not icy?”

  Mia offered a weak nod. “But, still nothing was there. So I figured Yavne might’ve pranked me with a pervert soft.”

  “Yavne?” Kirsten added another line to her notes. “Who’s that?”

  “Eli Yavne. He’s one of the IT people where I work. Likes to play games, but it’s not usually like him to go sexual like that. He does goofy stuff. So, I’m pretty sure at that point my headware had a glitch. Invisible fingers started tweaking my nipples and, umm… going other places.” Mia blushed. “But there’s nothing in the room with me so, I figured it’s all in my head. Made it damn hard to put food together, so I decided to go lie down and run a diagnostic on my headware.”

  Kirsten nodded.

  “When I got to my bedroom, Blot—my cat—hissed at me and ran out. That’s when I knew it had to be a wraith or something. I tried to call you guys, but it’s like he knew what I was about to do. Everything went black.”

  “He saw you going for your NetMini?”

  Mia tapped her head. “No. I’ve got an internal one. The instant I thought about making a call, this wave of cold hit me and I blacked out. Next thing I know, I’m in here tied to the bed and some guy I’ve never seen before is climbing off me. I was so freaked out I couldn’t say anything until he left. Hit my panic button. I couldn’t move, and I didn’t scream.”

  “Smart move.” Dorian shot a dark look at the doorway. “The critters who live out here would’ve come running, and not to help.”

  “The police told me I took a Pub car here, naked. I don’t remember anything after blacking out at home.” Mia reached up and wiped tears off her cheeks. “I’m kinda freaked out that I’m not freaking out more. Did he do something to me? I should be going crazy or something, right?”

  Kirsten initiated a telepathic link. Phantom hands caressed and squeezed her body, echoes of a memory in the other woman’s head. Mia’s intent to initiate a VidPhone call from a cybernetic implant preceded time skipping forward to her emerging naked from a PubTran car, struggling for control of her body as some outside force made her walk toward the building. She screamed in her head, alternatively ordering and begging whatever it was to let her go. It compelled her to wander back and forth by the rooms, approaching groups of dosers who all clapped and whistled at her exhibitionism, cheering her on. Neko-modders, people who added cat ears, tails, claws, and such, often walked around nude all the time, so the sight of Mia streaking surprised them only due to her lack of extra body parts.

  Sharing that memory made Kirsten erupt in blush.

  Mia, as well, shivered with embarrassment inside, though the entity controlling her appeared to savor the feeling of vulnerability. It kept her walking around for a while until a filthy man in his later thirties came out of nowhere and grabbed her from behind, knife at her throat. She struggled in the halfhearted way a bad actress filming an assault scene in a cheesy holovid might, not making any real effort to get away. All the while, the real Mia trapped inside the prison of her own flesh shrieked and screamed, feverishly trying to invoke the panic button in her headware.

  He selected a door apparently at random and kicked it in. Mia screamed in her head while the entity continued to pretend-struggle.
The man tore cord from the window blinds and tied her spread-eagle to the bed. Once she could no longer move, the entity struggled harder, savoring the sensation of confinement as well as Mia’s genuine terror.

  Mia stared at the grimy, cracked ceiling, unable to do anything but shriek inside her thoughts as the man climbed on top of her. Kirsten skipped ahead in the memory, having no desire to relive the entire scene. She jumped to the point where the man climbed off her and staggered out the door.

  Coldness washed over Mia’s body, left there spread eagle for whoever else might find her next. The entity made her squirm and struggle for a little while before, evidently sated, it released its control. Mia fought the cords holding her down, but couldn’t move, or even sit up. The storm of emotions raging in the woman’s head almost forced Kirsten to break the connection. She’d endured a similar mix of fear, guilt, and shame from her encounter with the man who gave her food so long ago. She forced herself not to think about how horribly wrong that could have gone.

  Mia had no idea where she was or how she’d gotten there, but assumed the area to be bad based on the horrid condition of the room. She focused on a thought pattern totally alien to Kirsten—invoking a cybernetic implant—that set off a panic button inside her head, then lay back and waited, hoping with every ounce of her being that the next person to walk in the still-open door would be a cop. None of it seemed real to Mia laying there helpless in a dive motel room. Another feeling Kirsten knew all too well. It had taken her two days after she traded herself for beef stew before she believed she hadn’t dreamed it.

  Kirsten released the telepathic connection and stood there for a few seconds letting her brain acclimate to the present.

  “Done?” asked Mia.

  “Yes.”

  “Why am I so calm? That really happened to me, didn’t it?”

  “It did. You’re in shock still. A MedVan should be on its way here for you already. I just need to do one little thing and then I can clear you to leave the scene.”

  “What’s that?” Mia wiped her face with the blanket.

  “I’d like to try and get a sense of the paranormal entity involved. That works best with physical contact, but I only need to hold your hand.”

  “Okay.” Mia offered her left hand, the only part of her other than her face not covered by grey fabric.

  Kirsten clasped it, focused on her astral sense. The spectral ‘fingerprint’ of an entity flooded her mind, none she had encountered before. Every ghost had a certain mix of feelings they triggered whenever she ‘read’ their presence. In this case, she felt somewhat like a deer hung up to be cleaned, with a hunter standing behind her, knife at her stomach. Coldness mixed with an electric tingle on her tongue, and an almost overwhelming mania.

  She abruptly let go of Mia’s hand, shuddering.

  “Is that bad?”

  Kirsten swallowed. “Not for you. This one’s going to be a mess. Doubt I’ll be able to convince him to stop.”

  “You arrest ghosts?”

  “No. If I can’t convince them to stop doing whatever, I… either umm, dispel them or they go to the bad place.”

  Mia nodded.

  Kirsten glanced up at Sergeant Burke. “I’ve done all I can here for now. Can someone help her get home? Unless she wants to go to a med center.”

  “They had medics see me already. I’m… actually, I’d like to go to my parents’ place. Can someone drop me there?” asked Mia.

  Burke waved another officer over. “Bill, mind giving her a ride? Need a few more minutes with the LT.”

  “Sure.” Officer Parks—Bill—eyed Mia’s toes sticking out from the blanket. “It’s pretty foul out there, ma’am. You don’t want to go outside barefoot.”

  Mia fidgeted. “I don’t really want to be in here barefoot either. The rug is sticky.”

  Kirsten shivered.

  Officer Parks moved as if to pick the woman up. When Mia nodded, he scooped her into his arms and carried her outside.

  “Okay, the real reason we called you is here.” Sergeant Burke extended her left arm, showing the holo-panel. “Check this out.”

  The eight-by-twelve inch screen displayed video of the motel exterior via Citycam. Burke tapped her finger to the middle, starting playback. A few seconds later, the door to this room opened, revealing the man Kirsten saw from Mia’s memory. He adjusted his belt on the way out, paused on the sidewalk in front of the door long enough to take a hit from an inhaler, then wobbled off.

  “That’s the guy,” said Kirsten.

  “Yeah, we know. Already picked him up. You’d have thought we were ghosts the way he looked at us.” Sergeant Burke laughed. “No one ever expects us to show up in a grey zone. Umm, the guy’s culpable right? He wasn’t compelled or anything?”

  Kirsten shook her head. “No, that guy deserves everything you can charge him with. The spirit didn’t make him do anything.”

  “Okay. Here’s the interesting part.” Burke resumed the video.

  About a minute after the living man left, a blurry male form glided out from the door as if walking away, vanishing into nothingness a short distance into the parking lot.

  “Is that legit? Not like some hacker messing with us?”

  “Based on what I saw in her memories and the feeling I’m picking up in the room, yeah. I’m convinced a malign spirit possessed her and purposefully put her in a situation at high risk for assault of a sexual nature.”

  “Yeah, this motel is notorious for that.” Sergeant Burke shook her head. “And damn. What a sick bastard. Even executing these sons of bitches ain’t enough to protect people?”

  “Oh, it usually is.” Dorian folded his arms. “Some of them just don’t get the message the first time and need a second death.”

  Kirsten glanced sideways at him. “It’s pretty rare that a criminal executed for their crimes turns into a dangerous spirit. Ghosts are weak at first and easily overtaken by… certain other entities who are, for lack of a better metaphor, like the trash collectors of the spirit world. Even if they aren’t dark enough to attract that kind of attention, it often takes decades for them to build up enough power to affect the living in any way, much less do something like this. If I had to guess, I’d say this one’s more than a century old.”

  Sergeant Burke shuddered. “That’s so messed up. Like, I’ve got two black belts, some minor augs, and I still don’t wanna be alone in this part of town. How the hell do you fight off something like this?”

  “Are you asking me personally or about women in general?”

  Burke laughed. “Well, I figure you got some tricks most of us don’t. Meant that rhetorically. Is there anything us norms can do?”

  “Well, Miss Sanchez had some cybernetic implants, but I don’t think its enough to make her more vulnerable to psionic or spiritual influence. Usually, the intent to resist a ghost trying to take over your body is enough. It’s incredibly difficult for them, and they almost always need the person to allow them in the door at first. Once they’re in, getting rid of them is a little trickier, but this one’s got enough power to kick that door down, so to speak.”

  “Shit.”

  Kirsten set her hands on her hips, frowning at the empty room. “I gotta find him fast. This son of a bitch is going to ruin lives.”

  “I’m sure he already has.” Dorian glared at the door.

  4

  Squeezy

  Fortunately, the scene didn’t take up as much time as Kirsten feared it would.

  She’d spent about half an hour sniffing around for any spectral trace of where the entity went, as did Dorian, but found nothing she could use to follow. The video capture of the blurry spectral form outside the motel room offered a reasonably detailed hint of a face. After sharpening it as much as possible, she started a search in the system.

  Evan had already eaten dinner at Nila’s, so Kirsten ’semmed a grilled chicken sandwich, munching on it while helping him with some homework. The third-grade math wasn’t too bad, though th
e history homework baffled her. It didn’t seem right that nine-year-olds had to learn about the Synthetic Revolt that ultimately led to the AI Sentience Act and a ban on companies manufacturing fully-sentient synthetics or dolls.

  He seemed to understand she’d never learned any of that stuff, so their session turned into something akin to a pair of kids working together on an assignment that they both struggled with. His introductory robotics and electronics coursework might as well have been written in upside-down Russian, though he didn’t seem to have difficulty with it. Kirsten thought back to the basic forensics training she’d received and wondered if the boy could calculate the angle of a distant shooter or estimate the power of a rifle based on damage pattern. That had seemed so impossibly difficult at first, but had become almost as easy as speaking. She sat there quietly watching him fill out diagrams, selecting the best component to use for a given role.

  Who would I be if I’d grown up like a normal person?

  Once he finished the last of his work, they migrated to the living room to watch episode seventy-nine of Monwyn the Liberator. The titular wizard had helped most of the Wild Elves escape physical captivity in the Shadow King’s realm at that point, and the story involved their continued fight to remain free, warring with the armies of darkness.

  Evan snuggled into her side, his attention absorbed entirely by the 150-inch holographic portal into another world. His bony little shoulder at her side made her think of Rafael, probably alone in a small, plain room behind a locked door. She’d never been stuck in the secure dorms, nor had she so much as visited them on a tour. At twelve, when she’d first been found by Division 0, no one had even mentioned them to her. Of course, once her talent screen came back positive for Mind Blast and Suggestion, she got ‘the talk.’ Most people considered Astrals harmless, but a ‘severely abused’ child with both of those abilities wound up on a watch list.

  She wondered if that’s where her expectation that Rafael may ‘go bad, hard’ if she let him down came from. Some staff at the dorms had watched her like a ticking bomb. Up until they told her she possessed those powers, she hadn’t known. She never used either of them in the dorms, but if she’d known about Suggestion back home… Mother would’ve gone away. Kirsten would’ve commanded her to leave and never come back. Maybe she could’ve been happy with Dad. How such a passive, nice man wound up with a monster of a woman like that, she would never understand.