It was raining like forty days and forty nights outside the floating city and the tumult of artificial clouds rolled and tumbled like an angry surf. Static discharges of purple blue raked across their bundled darkness like sudden claw marks from an invisible storm beast. From where he stood, it was difficult for Detective Cain to look up at the murder victim without being pelted in the face with rain so cold it slapped him like sleet. But in the phosphorescent glow of the hovering crime scene lights, he could still make out the crossed feet fixed to the wooden pole. A Jelly like ring of Android blood had hardened around the ugly blunt head of the spike that held them in place.
“This is going to be a long night,” said Cain.
Cain didn’t like long nights.
But his orders were clear. Wrap it up fast, before it got out of control. He tilted his black fedora hat to one side and let the rain sluice down its bill.
“Doesn’t look like suicide,” said Elaine.
She’d been dead six years, but it was still good to hear her voice.
“Ya’ think?” said Cain.
“Hey, can we get an evidence dome over this place?” she shouted.
Her voice cracked so suddenly across the rain soaked crime scene that it sounded like angry thunder. Two three headed crime bots swung immediately to face Cain. They seemed annoyed. It was hard to tell for sure with their square heads and no face. Maybe it was the way they snapped back to taking ground samples as though they hadn’t heard a word she’d said. Caine wondered for a moment at the absurdity of crime bots, then turned back to his dead friend. She was perched at eye level. A screen about the size of his hand suctioned onto a piece of magnetic glass fixed to the end of a telescopic pool attached to his shoulder harness.
“I hope they short circuit,” she told him. “I hate them.”
“Here comes the CSC,” he said, tilting his head toward the newcomer.
Surprisingly, the figure hustling toward them seemed human. He held a static field umbrella that was doing a credible job of keeping the rain off his head. Keene wished he’d remembered to bring one. Elaine had been carping at him about it since the minute they set foot on this rainforest of a world.
“He’s the crime scene coordinator?” Elaine asked in surprise.
“Guess so,” said Cain.
“What is he, twelve? He’s not even old enough to fly a car.”
“You sure turned conservative since you died,” said Cain.
“Yeah, and you should have been smart enough to bring a static field umbrella. I told you like six times the weather was going to suck.”
“Seven,” said Cain.
“Whatever.”
The guy who looked like to be a gangly teenager from a distance turned out to be a gangly adult up close. Maybe in his late thirties, but definitely a little worn looking, as though each year added from the time of his birth was really three or four years. Like the Methuselah kids. But accelerated aging didn’t mean much anymore.
These days, thought Cain, they were growing replacement body parts faster than the hamsters had babies. Having the body of a twenty or thirty year old was easy enough to pull off if you could forget what you knew. His precinct captain used to tell him that the layered memories of people who live longer than the Jesus people could easily cause insanity. Memories weighed something, he maintained, and eventually they got heavy enough to break down the sturdiest minds. So, making use of replacement body parts was more like a curse, he told Cain, who listened, but didn’t have opinions on such things. Old people had opinions. Young people had possibilities.
“I’m so glad you’re here, Detective Cain,” said the man. He had long blue hair and deep set yellowish green eyes that gave him an intense, vampiric look.
“It’s my job,” Cain replied, jerking his chin toward his shoulder. “This is Detective Elaine Bauder.”
“Oh,” said Poe. “Oh, my.”
Apparently, he was not familiar with the use of the digitally reborn in police work, although it was becoming increasingly popular back on earth.
“My name,” the man said quickly, “is Jim Poe.”
“What?”
A vicious gust of wind and rain blew away his words.
“Jim Poe. My name is Jim Poe,” he tried again, louder this time.
“You’re the crime scene coordinator?”
“The what? Not hardly… I’m the people’s commissioner for world 1217—this world. I removed the CSC because of the nature of this… situation. First, I need to know what happened here, and then I can decide whether to bring in the police.”
“Then why are we here?” asked an irritated Cain.
But he knew why. The Algorithm had sent them.
“Look up, detective Cain,” shouted the commissioner. His voice shook, and his words sounded like they were forced through a reverb unit. “Go ahead. Look at the body. Tell me what you see. I need a narrative to tell the people—something to explain this.”
“A narrative?” asked Elaine. “Why?”
Even the digitally dead could express disgust with a question mark, thought Cain.
The commissioner looked uncomfortable responding to the tiny screen perched near Cain’s shoulder.
“A story backed up by the special investigations unit would have credibility. Even your lies have credibility. I… I mean, we… need a story that is validated by an outside agency such as yours with the authority to tell the truth.”
“Validated?” said Cain. “We’re detectives. We solve murders. We don’t make up stories.”
“He needs you to lie convincingly for him,” said Elaine. “He’s a scared little politician.” The look on the commissioner’s face would have terrified Elaine if she were still alive. Dead, she wasn’t impressed.
“Look at that,” he hissed. He was pointing directly up at the body again. “He was murdered. Brutally murdered. The citizen savior is dead. What do you expect me to tell the people of this world?”
Scalding red light flared up suddenly behind Poe. The sudden brutal sound of heli-cranes grinding cut through the storm’s smoldering fury like a sonic buzz saw.
“Why are they here?” shouted Cain.
“What?”
Cain leaned in toward the commissioner and shouted directly into his ear, “I said, why are they here?”
“When I give the word,” shouted commissioner Poe, “they’ll take this entire mess and drop it down the Space Hole. It’s too dangerous to leave out in the open.”
“Not happening,” shouted Cain.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said it’s not happening. That scaffold and that body are evidence.”
Cain put a heavy emphasis on the word evidence.
“Spell it for him,” said Elaine. “and then tell Mister Not-A-Clue to get an evidence Dome over this park before whatever evidence is left washes away.”
At that moment, the ground suddenly tilted one degree and Cain felt instantly nauseous.
Instinctively, commissioner Poe reached out and grabbed hold of Cain’s coat. His eyes opened wide with terror. The static umbrella shorted out with a pop and the smell of burned metal filled the space between them. The water that now slid down the commissioner’s face made it look like he was made of melted wax.
“Did you feel that?” he screamed.
“Let go of my coat,” shouted Cain. “And call off those heli-cranes before I shoot them down myself.”
Cain put both hands against the commissioner’s bony chest and tried to push the scrawny man away, but Poe’s fingers grasped the detectives coat so fiercely that he couldn’t.
“Let go, you little creep,” shouted Elaine.
“We have to purify this park,” said commissioner Poe, gesticulating wildly, “or this whole world will blow apart.”
Without looking where he was pointing, he nonetheless jabbed his official finger up toward the crucified Android known as the Jesusmaton. As he did so, thunder crashed against the night and temporarily drowned out the noise from the heavy cranes. At the edge of his vision, Cain saw the crime bots huddled together as though they were called to the act by some primitive herd instinct. Something, he thought, was very wrong in this world.
And he was already tired of world 2017. He was tired of the rain. He was tired of the noise. And he was already tired to death of the people’s commissioner. On top of that, the ear-grating noise of the heli-cranes was driving him crazy. And the thunder? The thunder was a ragged breath warning of a dying man. Coming. Violence and death, they were coming their way. This world was cursed. He looked up again at the crucified android. Its wrists and ankles were spiked to the wood. Someone had to have used a bolt gun on the thing. And his skin was so cut up, it looked like he’d been whipped with barbed wire.
Yeah, thought Cain, it was going to be a long night.
“If you don’t let go and back off,” he said, “I’m going to shoot you in the foot.”
Commissioner Poe stared back at him with wild eyes.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “judgment is… judgment is…”
In one corner of the man’s mouth, Cain saw bubbles of white foaming spittle appear.
“Shoot him,” said Elaine.
The commissioner stared at Elaine for a moment, and was about to say something to her, but then he shook his head and stared back at Cain.
“Does she have to be here?” Poe asked. “She’s…she’s unclean.”
Poe let go so slowly it was like he’d forgotten how to work his fingers. When they were fully disengaged, he stepped back two steps and plucked nervously at his collar, like a jungle primitive probing for leeches.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “it’s been very stressful here since we found the body. Very stressful. The population is near the boiling point.”
“I take it you don’t get a lot of murders around here,” said Cain.
He still wanted to blow a hole in the man’s foot. He would get cut from the Outer World Police, but it was still tempting.
“We see our share of murders, detective,” said Poe angrily.
Cain didn’t really like drama. Especially on a cold, dark night while he was standing in rain soaked shoes and starting to get the shakes from the bitter blasts of wind.
“Hurry up, will you?” said Cain. “We’re going to drown out here if you keep stalling.”
Commissioner Poe turned and waved his arms upward at the crucified android in frustration. “It’s him,” he said. “This is going to destroy everything we’ve worked to accomplish. Everything was going so well. World 1217 has been doing fantastically well until now—Until some reprobate had to go and murder the Jesusmaton.”
“You can’t murder something that’s already dead,” smirked Elaine.
“That Jesusmaton was alive.”
“Please,” said a disgusted Elaine.
A terrified gust of wind shot past them in desperate flight from unseen dangers. Cain reflexively clenched his teeth and shuddered. Elaine screen read a sudden 20 degrees Celsius drop, and then a painfully gradual increase in temperature.
“She wants to know how you could be sure he was murdered?” asked Cain. “And what is wrong with the weather here? And this is the Jesusmaton, the savior of your world? What’s he doing dead? Why don’t you just resurrect him, so he looks like he’s alive?”
The highest appointed official of world 1217 stared back at detective Cain and his ghostly partner with deadly serious eyes.
“If Judas had a hand in this,” said Poe, “he’ll wish he had the chance to hang himself before we get our hands on him.”
- Author notes
- Critique away on this one.
- Story length
- short story
