His phone buzzed, and Justin looked over. "That'll have to be turned off when we're filming. It won't interfere with anything on the floor, but you've got to focus on the things you're monitoring," he said. Elliot shrugged apologetically.
"It'll be the wife, or the partner," he said with a one-sided smile. Justin's eyebrows ratcheted up a notch, then Elliot shook his head, "No, my partner at the force. Morrigan Roth. I think you met her too."
Justin grinned. "Black hair, curves like this?" he said, gesturing in an hour glass, "Married to your charming mon Capitane behind the final beta of CORETEX?" Elliot inclined his head in assent. It wasn't public knowledge that Roth had been discovered to be a clone. It wasn't public knowledge that Jack Harper, his first partner, was changing his name to Harper Wraithschild either – distancing himself from everything that had happened in these last few months and years. All of this had happened and was piling up.
Elliot suddenly felt weary. "That's the one." He rubbed his eyes tiredly and Justin smiled, offering him a cup of coffee that had just been placed before him and nodding to the person brining it. Elliot scooped it up, wrapping his fingers around it.
"Typical," Justin sighed. "Could you give me her number do you think?"
"Are you, or have you ever been suspected of being a clone?" Elliot asked. He saw Cerys stiffen, and grinned inwardly. He was playing it exactly as he should, and he knew it. Justin rumpled his nose.
"No…" he said, part disgustedly, part...something else. Something Elliot couldn't quite peg what he heard. There was a small hint of reverence, and an edge of something else.
"Well, that's part one of getting her number," Elliot said, "The second part, is telling me in your own words how you're being used for acts of sexual deprivation, slavery or other things that would be considered to be an illegal, immoral or indicative of any crime in Darkness. And then I'd refer you to her,” Justin stared, then shook his head slowly. "Otherwise, no". Elliot patted him on the shoulder. "And you're not her type," he added with a rueful grin.
"And she's married to that superhero Captain," Justin muttered. Again, that edge. There was something vaguely nagging at the back of his head, but he couldn’t deal with it.Justin turns to the screens in front of him, and shrugged. Elliot was about to change the topic, when his phone rang. Justin smiled, and moved off a distance, as Elliot answered his phone, just as it was completing its last ring. "What's up?" he asked,
"Answering service is now offline for two hours." came the automated response. Please proceed to a secure location and log out." Elliot swore, then waved a hand at Justin, gesturing towards the door. Justin nodded, tossing him a clipboard.
"Print file summaries of changes to the dosing of the prisoners...and some other miscellaneous stuff," he said. Elliot frowned.
"I thought everything was locked once we were live?"
"These were approved but we had a transmission issue - there's some flare activity going on between here and the city, and it's caused issues with..."
"Got it," he said, waving off the rest of the conversation. He slipped next door, then, looking at the red boxed information, walked back slowly. Justin looked up from the keypad he was focused on with almost a guilty glint in his eyes. He blinked and it was gone.
"What's this note?"
"Checking if you've got tech that inhibits clotting. One of the main reasons that things were changed today was to allow us to use the clotting factor inhibitor...makes for better viewing if the blood is splashing around," he said casually. Elliot sighed.
"It's a limited inhibitor?" he clarified.
"Might be?" Justin said.
"What do you mean 'might be'?" Elliot said, the sharp edge in his voice causing the room's thrum to drop into silence.
Justin shrugged, and gestured to another tech beside him, before rising and removing Elliot from the room by an elbow.
"I mean, Claudia is in charge. I get dumped with doing the checks, but she is in charge. I'd really appreciate it if you made my job a little bit easier. I'm only in charge of compliance, and ONLY because I'm the only person that can use the compliance system built into the prison. It's really not that difficult. I just need you to confirm that you've never been under a factor five quarantine, and that you've never been involved in the cases listed, and we can move on as if it never happened," he said, softly.
"I can't confirm or deny cases," Elliot countered flatly. Justin growled as he continued, "unless it's for internal use only. As in, only here." Just nodded, relieved. That relief was odd – he was reacting without thinking and that worried him.
"I will personally destroy your paperwork as 'checked locally'. In fact, if you like, I can input your answers, and see if you're still cleared for the floor, then delete the whole package myself."
"I'll keep the paperwork, with my own, if that's all the same to you." The counter was met with Justin stopping in his tracks. “What?”
Justin sucked in a breath, and hissed, "UCPS is clear on whether we're allowed to remove paperwork. You shouldn't even have been allowed your own in here. That was an oversight. I need to either keep or destroy - I can't let you leave with them, because if you lose them, or there's another...incident at your apartment," Elliot winced, "we can't guarantee that the press won't get them. And with the codes at the top," he said, gesturing to a string, "you can access stuff you're not supposed to be able to outside of the unit. And we didn't print this on tear strip, so I can't let you remove it, at all. Or deface it by tearing it," he said, holding up a hand.
Elliot mulled it over before shrugging and reading it again.
“Seriously, no argument?” Justin said, narrowing his eyes.
“No argument,” Elliot said. Justin nodded his head and turned away. Same code as the top of the document Cassidy handed me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"He's still fighting conditioning," Justin said, watching him leave the room. "And making aberrant..."
"He's not," Claudia said. "Not making aberrant calls I mean," she added, casually stirring her coffee with a long thin stick. She pulled it out of the cup, and licked it.
“He’s phoning his wife…” he said. She nodded.
“Yes, since he started receiving vaccinations for this project, he’s been phoning his wife.” "You’re…rolling him back? Why?” he said, shocked. She made a gesture, turning slightly towards a cell.
“Our lord provides,” she said with a smile. “And didn’t give you the information, so you don’t need to have it,” she added. “But if you must know, it’s easier for him to fail to notice, to fail to object, when he thinks he’s reliving the time, instead of living it. Neurotic as it sounds, he’ll think he’s being passive because it doesn’t matter.” Her smile was smug, and she began twirling the glass stirrer. It sparked under the light.
“That's pretty obvious," he said, quirking an eyebrow.
"What is?" she asked, coyly.
"The DNA ribbon you've got in that glass. I mean, the average person wouldn't recognize it, but the slow copper might," he said, throwing back the words she'd used to describe Elliot earlier in the day. She grinned.
"I'm counting on him recognizing it. That's when I'm going to drive the pick into his eyeball and kill him. He doesn't need to be alive to be cloned - Cerys should have a map and scan of the information we need."
"He won't like that."
Claudia grinned, a death-mask smile that took in everything in the room in ghoulish silence.
"And if your bomb works as planned, is it possible that anyone will even know?" she asked. She tucked the stirrer away, licking her lips and looking in the direction of Elliot, who was hanging over the banister rail, looking down on the prison pensively, phone held to his ear.
"That's not the point," he said, eyes flicking between Elliot and the screens. Watching as they reconfigured. Watching as Elliot talked to his wife.
PART TWO
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The phone on the other end of the handset beeped - Ellio
t got his answering machine again, as he half expected. Hope that he'd hear Beth's sweet voice - hope that she was home and safe sunk into his bones, chilling him.
"Hi Beth, its Elliot. I hope you're home by now, I've seen on the FLASH that there are traffic problems between the office and the house. I bet you can't wait till maternity leave either." The voice paused, and then continued "I thought I'd invite Harper over, for one last game before the baby gets here. We're really not going to have time after she arrives, I guess." There's another pause and Elliot finally continued in a softer, quieter voice, "I'm sorry I had to take this job, but I get leave after this, and we'll get to spend more time then, everything will be OK. I'm calling because answer service is going down here for two hours, so if you call me when I get home, it'll connect to the office instead. I won't be back there before I come home to you...." He paused again, then continued, "Morri told me that if you needed her, all you need do is call, and I'll be home after this is all over." A final pause. "Love you babe"
Beep.
Elliot put his phone away, after turning and leaning on the glass wall, looking over the 'sound floor' below. The prison was once a two level affair - the bottom floor open and wide beneath their feet, the walls at the side holding a balcony. Now, the room was just one level, the bar of concrete showing the old floor above. The line was almost a tide mark, and Elliot noticed that the white walls were roughly painted to there.
The bottom floor was now a glass maze, packed from all edges, with booms and joists spread wide over them like boughs of a tree. Boom mikes and cameras flowed around them, lights strung in lantern configurations. The lowest one was about 30 meters above the main floor. Technically, he supposed, a prisoner could jump from the top of the fleximatter maze - that was, if it didn't collapse, electrocute him, or worse.
He blinked and began to gaze around - he couldn't see any blind spots, though he knew they were there. He began to line up the images and information on screen. They weren't in any discernible order - there was no pattern to the feeds versus the grid, but all of them are covered. He mentally ticked off each view, lining it up with what he could see from the two edges he could slowly pace.
This gangway was purely decorative - he'd been told originally, they'd filmed some of the shots as if the presenter was above the maze, and he thought the first balcony might have been a candidate, but the footage he’d seen had fleximatter walls in place, and he realized, looking around, that he couldn’t see the talent now, and yet, on one of the banks of monitors in front of Justin, he could see them talking animatedly. Interesting, he thought, not as straight-shooting as they’d claimed. This is supposed to be a contained set.
Fleximatter was going to box over the whole maze, but then the cameras wouldn't work - testing had shown that nine times in ten, the prisoners would jump, pull the cameras and use them as weapons. So they'd had to solve a few issues, including eventually finding a new form of fleximatter. It was almost crystalline for the show, but to save power, it was slightly opaque for now, the internal system dulling the walls to ensure that none of those being lead into their cells and rooms could see one another. Elliot watched as one of them was lead into his cell, the silence flowing behind him like a pall.
The floor lit up and Justin came over, bringing with him his smart pad and the shimmer flooded over the top, opaque, then crystal clear. A prisoner was being led in, and as Elliot looked down he tapped a couple of information boxes before leaning over and casually handing Elliot the pad.
"Heads-up, here's one of yours," he said. Elliot didn't move, just raised an eyebrow at his corpse-quiet arrival. He reached out and took the pad.
"I give in, how did you do that?"
"Do what?" Justin smiled. "When you're required to do certain things in here - and when you work with Claudia - you learn to walk as quietly as possible, and to modulate your tone in certain ways." Elliot nodded in appreciation.
He pointed at an orange and purple line flowed, ebbing across the floor from another door. Glass panels moved, the feeling of bass in Elliot's feet suggesting vibrations at least, but no noise rumbled this far up.
"While the purple shows, he's subdued," Justin murmured, falling in beside Elliot's elbow, leaning against the balcony. “Orange for convict, naturally,” he added, tapping some more buttons. As the man was escorted to the edge of his cell, the orange edges highlighted around his room. “We’re the only ones that can see the colors, as in, they’re only visible at a distance for now. Obviously,” he said, turning his back and leaning, “the colors will be on the actual map later, rather than on the floor. Don’t want the prisoners following breadcrumbs.” Elliot tapped some boxes on his screen.
"If the red shows, we'll lose a prisoner quick smart if there's no cell within six feet to bundle him into," Justin added. "There are several stages in between of course," he added and Elliot nodded.
"What happens if he gets to red?"
"Right now? The androids would put him down. During the show? The floor will electrify. It won't be pretty, but that said, during the show, it's much harder to hit 'red'. Make sense?"
Two wardens, their walk marking them as androids - moved through the banding purple, their steps showing green in their wake. The floor flashed as the prisoner stepped out onto it, and then turned purple.
Justin murmured again. "It's keyed to your nanites. It'd show green if you were on certain areas of the floor - or yellow. Orange if you weren't authorized, but you are. There would also be a beam light following you across the whole floor if you were somewhere unauthorized. The civvies - the survival specialists - they're in an area that doesn't light up unless someone that shouldn't be in there crosses into it. At which point the floor lights black and red."
"And then?"
"And then all specialists key themselves into a cell and swipe to lock," he answered, "and we cut to a commercial because we plan to have at least a minute of banked material and time to react and...subdue the interloper."
Elliot watched as the man was led, mostly calmly to his cell. When he stopped and tried to drag his feet, the android at his back gave a low warning, and the floor beneath his feet changed color, a darker orange, lined in red at the edges. He noticed that the man moved again, slightly faster, skittish. He moved into his cell faster, then turned, glaring at the impassive droid. Justin looked at him, and it was his turn to raise an eyebrow.
"Oh, I forgot you haven't been here for the subduing of the first prisoner...those droids carry electro-kinetic shocks in their fingertips,” Elliot whistled low, then looked back over the edges of the room he was examining. "So, if they stop," Justin continued casually, "they get a shock, right to their kidneys. There has been a lot of 'clean up on Aisle 3' moments today," he said with a fierce, nasty laugh. Elliot just looked at him, frowning a little. He’d read about the electro-kinetics, and couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. His brain felt tarry, like he was being sucked down.
Above, strung over the cells, in the middle of the web of joists and bands and bars, was the control room - stairs strung, jewel-lit and highlighted from the entrance to the room. Elliot knew, come game time, they'd withdraw, and vanish into the gloom to prevent escapes. It was unlikely that the prisoners would jump for them - but, then again, it had been unlikely that they'd even be here. And the more he saw, the more uncomfortable he became. Something was off, but he couldn't tell what.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The phone, still cradled in his hand, beeped once. He flipped it open again, unfolding the origami device, and looking at the brightening screen. Morri's color band and image flashed twice. Message then. He folded one corner down, then, after a pause condensed it back into the small cube, before slipping it into his pocket again. It locked with the edge of his pocket, the light tingle against his hip softer than the hard, sharp one-shot from his badge. It had been a long time since he’d felt that from heavy subdued inertia in his pocket, but his badge was disconnected.
He leaned forward, eyes closed. Cool g
lass against his forehead, he blinked tiredly, before looking around. The short, squat hall lead to the stairs - he could see where the stairs would withdraw from, the edge a squint line of fairy lights under the lead riser. But something wasn't looking right.
He reached into his pocket again, stroking the edge of his phone. Maybe Beth would be home by now. Maybe she was still stuck in the endless traffic loop that ran around the three districts, dissecting the zones he operated in from the zone she operated in. Maybe she’d gone to grab food. Or had a late night appointment. He couldn’t remember.
Central, where CORETEX and CAMPUS was located, also housed the courts. The main ones and the District hubs on each edge. A broad plaza spread over the space between, with verdant grass courses, and a lake, edged and perfectly manicured landscaping creating a buffer and quiet space. Inside the buildings though, it was anything but quiet, anything but calm - but outside, would be a facade of perfection. Of serene silence. Central was the cleanly picked, perfectly trimmed, made up face of the city, and nothing would ever change that. The broad quadrangle led to three districts - the largest of which also split by the highway - the edge path out of the city itself.
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