Existence Oblivion

by Kai Ellory Viola

  The three each shared the view that crime scenes, and crime investigation wasn't 'giving the dead a voice' or 'a face' or anything else. It was closure, for everyone involved - hollow, guilty, boned out and burned into each person that was touched by it like a deep, covered over scar. Morrigan's theory was the most elegant of all - the hearts that were now being weighed in the afterlife, also held scars and chunks that had been removed, or deformed because they'd been in contact with a crime scene. Elliot was less elegant - you got scared and scraped and stabbed and mugged and beaten up, by everything. The act of walking down a street that triggered memories were a tiny death in your head, and that your mind was a constant crime scene. Nothing would ever fix that, and that those hearts that go forward for weighing, by Morri's standards, would be so chipped, shriveled, and damaged that they'd be a sliver of what they were. A small, tiny pile of ash.

  His was nothing – empty. His chest a cavernous space where the blood pooled and drained in ebbs and flows. Tide had been in for a while, and the space was filled with pain, and blood - anger drowning in there because the hole was filling in. It'd drown, then rise up again, from out of nowhere, gibbering and out for different blood - had its fill of his, so it'd go looking for others to punish, to make suffer. To mar like him - tear out their hearts, let them drown and rise up agonized, till there was nothing left and everyone felt the same. Then he'd have someone, anyone to talk to. He looked into the glass, grimaced and sighed. Another, longer draft of his now rapidly diminishing pint, feeling it settle acrid in his stomach, and tried to turn his thoughts away from the internal angst that Morri would describe as "Hand *staple* forehead". She thought the angst was pointless, but she had other things to worry about.

  "Another round?"

  Jack scrunched his face slightly, and Elliot could see the considering flicker in his eyes; weighing up the pros and cons of staying for another pint, or moping at his flat, waiting for her to call. Weighing up the need to stay with his friend and his need to be alone. Elliot frequently felt himself doing the same thing, and felt his thoughts cloud and obscure the light of friendship, just for a second as he considered where to walk, in the dark shadows or letting the grief, anger burn off in the light that friends brought. There were no border lands, no half and half - he was either there, or not. The borderline between his pain and the group pain tended to blur. So sometimes shadowing away, playing mindless games on his old and unshielded VR setup – even with its inherent risks - was his freedom, his escape. And if he really wanted to kill himself it was as easy as removing one last layer of security, ramping the biomimetic to maximum and chasing down one of the ghosts in Cyberia. Beth had stayed those impulses, but here they were, slinking back, belly down on the splintered, half sanded floor of a room that was once a nursery and he needed to redecorate and was back to being his VR world setup. Slinking through the wires, pulling his fears and ecstasies behind it, birthing them out in a bloody mess and leaving them orphaned for him to take in and take to heart.

  "I'll stay for one more, but only if we toast," Jack told him, the expression of someone patiently repeating himself woven across his smile clouded face.

  Morrigan nodded, one absent hand reaching up behind her and unclasping her hair, the long, impossibly straight black tumble covering the exposed port just above the knot at the top of her neck. Elliot absently noted her decoupling the wire flowing down under one breast of her coat, and slithering it away, with the box, into her bag. She was distracted, annoyed, wary, watching Jack's back as it disappeared into a sea of other detective and police backs. The blue line between him and the bar, not really thin as bouncer-thick, immovable and set in stone.

  He reached over, touching her free hand, and she recoiled slightly.

  "What's up?" he said, softly.

  "Conviction is in," she said, avoiding his eyes. Elliot felt an inch of tension ratchet up, his chest feeling and throat feeling tight, shaky suddenly, before her eyes came up, relief spilling into them as tears built at the edges, before she added, "Guilty on all charges." She blinked, viciously wiping a hand up over her eyes. There was an element of pain hiding in the words she said now.

  "He's been identified as a clone," Pleasure at a job well done and pain that her husband had been charged – that the man she thought was her husband was a lie. A shell. He slowly relaxed again and patted her hand.

  "It'll all be OK," he said, awkward silence sneaking in directly behind. She shrugged and mouthed 'tomorrow,' before slamming back the last of her wine in a sharp gulp.

  Jack reappeared in a sliding pop from the wall of bodies, so she continued to pack everything away, to avoid anyone's stare. Elliot realized, looking around the tables that several were staring – a few whispering and gesturing, their ports plugged in, the news spreading along the spine of instant knowledge, and suddenly most people knew what Morri did. And she was right; tomorrow it would all hit the fan. Tonight though, it was the misfit bunch, together again.

  Jack plonked the tray down on the table, unclenched a hand, and spilling change back into a worn-edged jeans pocket, before bundling back down into a seat. He could make anywhere look like the single most comfortable place in existence, simply by cozying down into a chair. Meeting each of their eyes, he raised a. Jack paused for a couple of seconds, staring into the glass of amber liquid before him – his eyes holding the hushed tones of mourning, while his hands caressed the liquid that he was using to dull the pain. He took a deep breath, looked up, and then let it all out in one.

  "A toast?" Morrigan asked, picking up her own glass and he blinked, blushing guiltily. Elliot too, reached forward and cradled one warm glass, his hands chilled as he knew what was coming next. His mouth began to numb too – a thick tongue in his mouth that couldn't say anything, just look over mutely while waiting for Jack's words.

  "To fallen friends... and lovers gone before us. To the ones we lost, the ones we left, and the ones that got taken away," Jack paused, then looked down, and said quieter, "to Beth,"

  Elliot picked up his whiskey shot, noting that Jack had also brought glasses of water for everyone, and another pint for him, another glass of darker liquid (cola, possibly laced) for Morrigan, and definitely *just coke* for him, the tray a set of three districts that spoke volumes about nothing, and everything about their personalities, each towering glass overwhelming the smaller shot - the taller, a glass of work, the smaller, their personal concerns. It was only fitting that he toasted with the smaller first.

  "Sláinte", before tossing it down his throat, feeling it burn all the way down before exploding into a ball of pain, and loss and remorse. And it was at that point he realized his choice was 'VR machine' or 'work'. Sanity would choose VR machine, to end the pain - insanity, would chose work, for distraction, to prolong it all.

  "Gotta go," Elliot suddenly said, picking himself up off the metaphorical floor in his head, and left before they could say anything else.

  They want to do this once a year.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He didn't head home. Not straight away. He'd heard a whisper from one of the Desk Sergeants - another aficionado of a scene they shared. And he wanted to investigate.

  The file still tucked in his messenger bag, Elliot ducked down and out of the main routes in District 1, choosing some careful alleys and ramshackle paths between the remains of civilization - dumpers that stank of barely aged food and the undercurrent of vomit or other waste - alleys with pools of urine and rancid water from broken waste pipes. The frontages were always pristine, and it always amazed Elliot that he was just three steps from 'civilized' Darkness, and yet, back here, the fetid stink of what the city really was oozed in and out of doorways like a malicious drunk going home to break his kid's neck, because he could. After a while, he turned off the crime overlay that was twitching in the background, watching the myriad of number tags slide by - with the occasional merciful gap where nothing had happened. Alley mouths were traffic spills, the numbers vomiting out and juxtaposing one anot
her for room, the stacks toppling and splitting into streams and rivulets of incidents - numbers that tagged everything from rapes and murders to muggings and people taking a leak in public. He suspected the latter was one of the most under prosecuted crimes ever - the police only responding when it was deliberately and blatantly in front of them, or was on a crime scene. In the case of one hapless idiot that Elliot had collared several years previously, evidence.

  He kept walking, the smile of amusement playing on his lips for a few paces, before he focused on the here and now. The DVD in his messenger bag burned cold at his leg, the weight and the force of it pulling at his subconscious. The file - the official one - was tucked with his DJ kit, and as he walked, he fingered its edges. In another pouch, away from the rest of his stuff, a skin key pouch that would only open for him, the easy matter forming an impenetrable seal and tricking prying fingers into believing there was nothing in there, was another file, the DVD, rendered flexible for now by his pouch, and several other notes that he had downloaded or grabbed from evidence using the pass code on the CORETEX band on top of his official file. He was legally entitled to see everything to do with the case - it was just increasingly rare for people to access physical evidence instead of examining it in CORETEX.

  Elliot had often argued with Jack that CORETEX was essentially, a non-tool. It interpreted based on its own filters: those filters might be built by prevailing knowledge, pop culture or whatever else it used to calculate its algorithms, but sometimes hands-on was best. And knowing that, knowing that hands on was the most important element of existence, knowing the escape of being in person, in reaching distance of others experiencing the same as him, knowing that it was almost as potent as VR, Elliot escaped to here.

  The loud bass pump covered even the hardest of vibrations from cell phones. The raves were conducted in shielded, nulled rooms, which had temporary transceivers that took the room off the grid for one or more days. Elliot knew it was illegal and he should report it, but how could he when his biggest rush was going there, playing for the crowd. He dropped his one-time access key at the door, with bouncers who nodded curtly behind dark, obscuring hoods, then raced home again, dodging through alleys and back streets, filling his mind with the set that he was going to play.

  Escaping again. Always escaping.

  He arrived home with six minutes to spare, sliding into the partitioned, hidden room where his VR equipment was kept, slip-twisting through the narrow gap that someone looking over it would think was simply a poorly constructed corner in a cupboard, shoving the wall out of the way and edging through. His narrow shoulders stuck for a second and he relaxed, waiting for the wall to move out a little bit more before pushing through, into a four by four square, practically concealed from the outside. He'd made it by carefully rearranging the floating walls that made these apartments so popular.

  Need an office? A nursery? Clone a wall then pull it to the place you wanted it. Didn't need it? Empty the room, collapse it back.

  To make a room like this though took good, old-fashioned brickwork. That had to match the exterior walls. Elliot built it, then stored all of his VR and DJ equipment in it, playing sets when he heard about them. Three minutes to go and he was loaded into the VR machine, unshielded, walking the wide VR roads, and then....the set. Freedom was gained once in a blue moon, and while he knew that this might be something he shouldn't do, it was also something that he needed to. It ached in his bones - the deep need to create and spin overwhelming him.

  The music was tingling in his fingers. He hurried into his partition, pulling it almost closed behind him, stripped to the waist, and connected up his gear. Sensors slid against his skin in lover's brief kisses, each trailing up his body to his throat, and then, reverentially, he pulled the helmet up over his head. It moved and tingled briefly, almost alive against his skin.

  The sensation continued down his torso in a shudder as the green lights inside his helmet booted up. Everything invaded him - pulling him into the world before him that laid out in tiny squares, which blended and blurred, stained green, flickering blue, then red, then settled into a view of the dance floor....

  Elliot - or eDJ as he was known in this sphere - was breaking the law. But, it was how he'd met Beth all those years ago, and was perfectly useful when they needed someone undercover. Every cop had some vice - Morri's was less obvious unless you saw her stripped down to her underwear - the scars and scrapes showing whip lines and burns. Of course though, she inflicted them too. It wasn't exactly giving as good as she got - it depended which side of the equation she was on, but it balanced in her head. Elliot was a DJ - a virtual one because that's where the purity of the music was all important. He wouldn't DJ at the death parties - that would be crossing the line, but if he couldn't see what was going on, he wasn't breaking the policies of the department to step in.

  The bit that made it illegal was the VR system - and it was only illegal for policemen that jacked onto CORETEX. It would be easy to use a body as a delivery system, carrying a virus, and CORETEX needed to be protected at all costs. Elliot used to neatly sidestep this by saying that he never worked on CORE, but times were changing. And with that change came the pain and the cost of sacrifice. And he had. Right up until his DJ sets. So, instead, he made sure his firewall shield was active and current - costly, but it could be provided by the right people in the department. And that was the other thing he thought Cassidy had warned him off - that unspoken void after 'I won't be here'. They knew about this equipment and her sanctions of the external firewall pass pockets, and that she would have no control over it from now on.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Elliot felt weird, sitting in a lecture theater in the cadet area of the building, but he had to. Assignment came with three weeks of training, discussion, meetings… endless meetings. Today, they were reintroducing the premise, but this time, he was jacked into CORE2, the alt-core for the city. The one that most policemen didn't use because it was designed to do things that CORE shouldn't.

  "When Big Brother fell out of popularity in the early 00's it was replaced with ever more 'realistic' reality TV shows, till the need for this was replaced with a need for fantasy. In an attempt to resurrect the old format some diehard fans filmed themselves locked in with a recently released murderer. The person to get out got the money at the end. Needless to say they were slaughtered. Footage was mostly lost from this event, though some was finally found in the ruins of the building that the 'event' apparently took place in. Leaked footage became the most watched online. After consultation, a 'sanctioned' version by the UCPS (United coalition of Prison Services) was established."

  Elliot sighed. This was ancient history, something that anyone that watched TV would know, and those working in the UCPS were taught by rote. Even the police were involved in this. Those that fought back when arrested, cop killers, those that committed especially heinous acts, were flagged, at booking for assessment for this. Judges could even order it at sentencing. Elliot had probably personally nominated 40 or 50 people for this, and of them most had been listed on the UCPS database for use with little fuss.

  Experiments, game shows, anything that required warm human bodies with no rights.

  Elliot looked over at the presenting lecturer, wishing he'd just handed his badge in three weeks ago. It was stupid, and he knew it, be this wasn't police work – this was 'I'm a mug, and I'm here to sanction something that morally I know is wrong, because I'm being paid to.’.

  Not just the pro-forma nominations, they were something that Elliot had wrestled with and had been assured were not necessarily designed to kill off participants. But this....it sat uneasily with Elliot - Big Brother with Blood; that was how his chief had dubbed it. Beth had squealed excitedly when he'd told her, she loved this kind of thing. She'd devoured the notes like candy, her eyes aglow, before bombarding Elliot with questions - was it going out live - would he tell her about it - and making him promise to call on every break. Elliot on the other hand, having r
ead and kept the 'contestant' sheet from her didn't sleep as easily. There was no sleep in that bed, not after all he read and saw.

  The first run had been aborted early, after the human rights activists demanded a pardon for the winners. They had, they reasoned, earned it. Human rights kept trotting out rules and appeals, till the whole thing was brought down again.

  The second run, after those appeals, was five years later - and 12 years after the third run of Reality 24 - a project much like Big Brother and other TV shows. Reality 24 followed people interactively - each viewer choosing which cameras to correlate, compile and consume. Each person taking part would find their votes tabulated, captured and registered - competitors ranked by views, viewers and an algorithm that made sense only to the programmers. But, there was still the actual vote nights - the first one a breathless affair in Central Square with ceremony and celebration. When they tried to add prisoners to the mix, or to do it in a jail, the results were unbroadcastable. Reality 24 went bankrupt, and Elliot thought, like everyone else, that it had simply crashed. Turned out though, they'd been sued by six prison rights groups – and yes, they were bankrupt, but that the exec that conceived and commissioned it, before he'd killed himself, had been charged with the deaths of 29 prisoners at the hands of the six they'd followed. Plus, retroactively, the victim funds collapsing because they hadn't been funded as promised, but the channel had deeper and darker connections than anyone knew at the time. All revenue had been syphoned, somewhere, and Elliot knew, deep down, when it finally got to investigative recall, Morri would be involved in there somewhere. And he would. It stank of the religious lunacy that followed Nate Naire and the trafficking that they fought daily. That three year avalanche though…It had been a distant rumble.