***
Forensic Nanopathology –the practice of using nanoscale mechanisms and techniques in postmortem investigations of sudden, unexpected death.
--excerpt from The Law Officer’s Professional Compendium of Standards and Definitions, United States Department of Justice and Rehabilitation, October 2048
“Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.”
Aldous Huxley
1.
“The Scene of the Crime”
It was hard to drop into Tootsie’s Bar after a long day watch in Forensics and have a beer and swap lies with your partner, when your partner was all of eighty-four nanometers tall. That was the problem Detective Lieutenant Stan Benecky, of Greater Atlanta PD’s ANAD Squad, had with the whole deal. In the good old days, when Benecky was a street cop working Robbery or Vice or Counter-Twist, even when he had been detailed to Cyber Crimes back in ’46, you could still hold your head up at Tootsie’s, catch some of the ribbing of the regulars and give it back just as well.
Now Stan Benecky was just a lonesome washed-up gumshoe, talking to himself over beer and peanuts, while the rest of the Department went head over heels about autonomous nanoscale assemblers and containment systems and quantum strategies. Benecky liked to get his hands on stuff—how the hell could you get your hands on a device…an organism…a mechanism…thingy that was smaller than a virus and million times more powerful?
Benecky had spent a lot of time at Tootsie’s lately, thinking. Dreaming, really. Retirement. Some rustic cottage on the beach, a nice fast boat twenty feet off the back porch, a well-stocked fridge and a few full immersion flim fantasies to plug into, when he wanted to. See, that was the problem, and Cooter, the bartender, wasn’t the only one that saw it. Stan Benecky wasn’t cut out for the new stuff. ANAD or not, quantum processors be damned, and hang all the fullerene effectors and electron bond disrupters. Benecky wanted to see the blood and feel the corpse and cuff the perps just like cops had always done.
Then came the day Rafeeq Khan died and Lieutenant Stan Benecky thought this might well be his last chance.
The call came in when Benecky was knocking down a few “walking dogs” and sodas at the Varsity. He swallowed what he could and answered the call. It was Captain Sheffield, Violent Crimes, and Captain Emmitt, Forensic Services.
Get your squad together and get up North. The Rafeeq Khan mansion in Roswell. The kid’s deader than dirt, shot up with some kind of automatic weapon, and there’s going to be a hell of a stink when the Chief and the Mayor hear this.
Rafeeq Khan, you see, was the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since Clark Gable.
Khan was a native son, born right in the projects Eastside, who’d made good in the megaball wars and become the highest paid professional athlete in the history of the universe. With megaball’s World Bowl less than two days away, and Khan the prime-time prince of the playing field for the favored L.A. Barons, about a billion fans and sports press and hangers-on had their eyes on the “Flash’ day and night, scrutinizing every little nose pick the kid attempted.
Now Rafeeq was dead, murdered the Captain said, and the Department wanted Benecky and his ANAD team on the scene immediately.
The squad had been formed a couple of years ago, long before Benecky was exiled to the unit. It ran like a machine, just fine without him. By just about anybody’s reckoning, Forensics-ANAD had worked several hundred cases by the time the Lieutenant had showed up.
Benecky wiped his mouth free of mustard and hand waved his two human assistants to the van. His mind was reeling with imaginary headlines. With Khan dead and the big game less than forty-eight hours away, everything he did was going to be under the biggest microscope the world had even seen. Microscope, hell, he muttered to himself. More like a quantum flux imager.
For the next few days, Stan Benecky figured he’d know all too well what it was like for ANAD…living life in the glare of something that could see right down into the blurry guts of atoms themselves.
For once, he might have something to share with his infinitesimal partner.
Khan’s place was a veritable Babylon of ostentation, with fountains and turrets and columns. The place was surrounded by cops, and the ever-present fans, sniffing something was up, had already begun to clot the driveway and roads around the mansion.
Benecky pulled into the circular drive. With him came Sergeant Marianne “Deeno” D’Nunzio, the squad’s interface controller and Sergeant Hoyt Wade, the CQE. That stood for containment and quantum engineering, sort of a glorified valet and butler to the ANAD device. Benecky was OIC, Officer in Charge. The trio went in, Sergeant Wade wheeling the mobile containment device. TinyTown, they called it.
Sheffield and Emmitt were in the media room on the top floor of Babylon. There sprawled on the tile floor in a spreading pool of blood lay the Flash himself, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, gaping chest and stomach wounds still oozing red. A dull black TEK-12 lay next to his feet.
Crime scenes talked, if you knew how to listen, and this one screamed Violent Demise, loud and clear. The ANAD squad had shelves and shelves of records, detailing the minutiae of death in all its gruesome glory. Ever since he had come to the squad, Benecky had found a strange kind of fascination with all the ways people thought up to dismember and dispatch themselves.
Benecky watched for a moment as the forensic bots scuttled around the crime scene, documenting everything, photographing samples, measuring ballistic angles. A lattice of laser light marked off the crime scene. Data poured into Emmitt’s eyepiece, scrolling down the lens over her right eye.
She indicated the TEK-12. “Bots detected something weird. According to the first path reports, Fareeq Khan died at or around 1:00 this morning, give or take a few dozen minutes.” She tapped her eyepiece. “I’ve got hypostasis starting about that time—normal discoloration, along with normal desiccation of tissue.”
Benecky bent down to examine the corpse. A stitch of bullet wounds stretched in a line across his chest and rib cage. Rigor mortis was still evident, though Khan’s arms had begun to loosen as muscle decomposition set in. “Appears to be a distance wound, Captain. Clean margins, no fouling or stippling. I’d say an entrance wound, from the abrasion around the holes.”
“Bots agree,” said Emmitt. “But there’s a problem…with the time of death. Ballistics bots say the TEK 12 wasn’t discharged until around 3:00 this morning. Easily an hour or two after the time of death.”
Benecky looked up, nearly backing into one of the mechs as it scanned the marble floor for fiber and trace evidence, crunching its DNA matching routines on the fly.
“You’re saying he wasn’t killed by the weapon.”
“Exactly.” Emmitt indicated the ANAD squad. “Something or someone else killed Rafeeq Khan. Something that hasn’t turned up yet. That’s why you’re here. We have to do an ANAD insertion. These bots can’t find anything outside.”
Benecky nodded. “Sure thing, Captain. Sergeant—“ he called to Wade. “Prep for deploy right away.” Wade wrestled the TinyTown cylinder through the herd of bots and parked next to Khan’s head. Benecky helped D’Nunzio set up the Interface Control panel, wondering for the hundredth time about this business of in situ autopsy. The Department’s lawyers had yet to agree on the legal niceties of invading the dead with a trillion programmable replicants. Somehow, it seemed a bit improper, but that was for the big guys to sort out. Benecky had a job to do and he buckled down to it.
If Emmitt wanted a nanographic probe of Rafeeq Khan’s private parts, who was he to say no?
“While you’re prepping, here’s the case details,” said Captain Sheffield. ‘Shef’ was a dinosaur out of Violent Crimes, nearly thirty years with the force. Hibernating bears had nicer personalities.
“Witnesses say Khan came by the mansion a little after ten o’clock last night. You know how it goes…a small harem of female admirers along with him. Big game??
?s two days away and the Flash can’t afford to miss curfew tonight. So he’s out stirring up the honey pot, hitting every disco and club in town and decides to head home with his catch. Timeline is important here.”
“Witnesses deposed already?”
“Most of them. We got several on tape, bots did the genetics already, and they’re being treated as suspects too. Carl Cutler, for one. Agent for the Flash. He’s the one that reported the incident. Lisa LaVelle, principal squeeze for the man. She came by later, but before twelve midnight. That’s important.”
“Hell hath no fury, Captain—“
“Yeah, we thought of that. But she’s not the only suspect. Turns out the Flash also spent some time last evening with—get this: Rupert Jones.”
Benecky blinked. “Rupert Jones? The Seagulls’ coach?”
“The one. Think that might jazz up a few sports reporters tomorrow morning? Once they find out the Barons’ ace megaballer spent a few hours with the opposition coach.”
Benecky helped Wade initialize the IC panel. “Mr. Khan keeps interesting company.”
“They’re all witnesses and suspects, until we can prove otherwise. This case is deader than that corpse, until we definitively establish the cause of death.”
“ANAD’s ready in all respects, Lieutenant,” Wade said.
Benecky glanced inquiringly over at Emmitt. The Forensic Services chief nodded. “Secure all forensics for the time being,” she called to the SI techs running the scan. Then she turned back to Benecky: “Permission to launch.”
It was a whole new way of case investigation and it gave Benecky the willies, he didn’t mind telling you. They were making up tactics as they went along. Somewhere miles behind them, the Department lawyers and the DA were huffing and puffing to keep up.
It was enough to give any normal cop the creeps.
“Okay, Sergeant,” he said. Benecky patted down the incision D’Nunzio had just made in the corpse’s chest. “Subject’s prepped and ready.”
Wade handed him the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment cylinder. Inside, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler ticked over, ready to be released.
“Steady even suction, Lieutenant,” Wade told him. He knew Benecky often got a case of the shakes about now. Why don’t you just let the pros handle this? “ANAD’s ready to fly.”
“Vascular grid?”
“Tracking now, sir. We’ll be able to follow the master just fine. I’ll replicate once we’re through the capillary walls.”
“Watch for capillary flow,” D’Nunzio warned. “When the capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up.”
“Yeah, like slogging through molasses. ANAD’s inerted and stable…ready for insertion.”
Benecky held the injector as steady as he could. When it was done, he would be more than happy to back out and let the techs handle the matter. D’Nunzio and Wade ate this stuff up. Benecky would have been happier writing parking tickets, or maybe collaring rapists.
The insert went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the replicant into Khan’s capillary network as high pressure. Deeno got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes’ run on its propulsors brought ANAD to a dense mat of capillary tissue. The sounder image settled down on the IC display.
“Ready for transit, Lieutenant. Cytometric probing now. I can force those cell membranes any time.”
Benecky used ANAD’s acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam, probing for weak spots. “There, Deeno…right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that’s a lipid duct, I’d bet a hundred bucks. Try there.”
She stole a glance at Wade. The man’s learning, keep your shirt on. Deeno steered ANAD into the vascular cleft in the membrane. She twisted her right hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot herself forward. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. She tweaked the picowatt propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid.
“Aortic cavity, Lieutenant. Just past the Islet of Duchin, I’d say. Looks like we’re in. Where are we going today?”
2.
“Carl Cutler”
Start Fourier Transform:
Start Delacroix Transform;
Start Trace Matching….
“Carl, baby, I’m telling you…this thing ain’t working right. You got to do something for me. Soon—“
Carl Cutler is sitting in an overstuffed divan in the media room. Rows of wall screens play great movies, sports clips, porno flicks, and visual pablum on the walls behind him. Carl is nursing a drink.
“Hey, Flash…don’t sweat it, okay? Don’t get all tied up in knots. I’ll get the programmer in here in the morning.”
“No…I mean like now! I’ve been having trouble breathing all night—“
“Maybe that’s because you’ve got Du—De—what’s her name--?”
“Duwanna.”
“Whatever…you’ve had her sitting on your chest for the last half hour. Sweetie, why don’t you take a break, go to the ladies’ room, freshen up a bit—“
A statuesque ebony beauty with cornrows and a pouty mouth, slides off and stands up, stretching the full length of her six-foot frame. She slides out of the room.
Cutler puts down his drink. “So what’s ailing you, Flash? Pre-game jitters?”
“Shit, no, man…it’s this…thing—in my head. PEP or whatever you call it. Wish to hell I’d never had the thing put in. Hurts like crazy.”
Cutler gets up, comes over, bends over and peers into the eyes. “Flash, baby…without the Performance Enhancement Package, you’re just a dried-up, old, run-of-the-mill megaballer. Fifth string, junior squad, on waivers before you know what hit you. Capish? Look…we spent millions on it. You got the friggin’ Rolls-Royce of PEP treatments. Had to have it all: Foreign Object Damage module, Cardiovascular Booster, Alveolar thingamabob, hyper-contractile fast twitch super-duper multiplier, the works. Even sprang for that new neural hot-key access. You got it all. So what is it, kid? What the hell’s ailing you?”
“My chest…I don’t know, it’s like I get out of breath real easy.”
“Duwanna’s that good, is she?”
No, man…this is for real…I suck but I can’t get no breath—“
(The imager blurs, shot through with streaks of light, peculiar starbursts and fragments of hazy, out-of-focus visuals all jumbled up. The speaker crackles with static.)
“Damn…we lost that trace.”
Stan Benecky glared in disgust at the IC panel. “Can you get it back, Deeno?”
Sergeant D’Nunzio shook her head. “Faded out…we didn’t have a good gradient to follow. I’ll backtrack—“
Captain Sheffield was there too, standing beside Benecky. “Eerie, isn’t it? Seeing things through a dead man’s eyes.”
“Gives me the creeps,” Benecky admitted. “But it seems to work. Couldn’t tell you the theory behind it…except that we have about ten to fifteen hours of window after death. When rigor mortis begins wearing off, brain tissue starts decomposing fast. The traces just vanish.’
Sheffield bent down over the cold, lifeless body of Rafeeq Khan. The ANAD tube was suctioned to an incision in his chest. The rest of his wounds were dry and caked with clotted blood.
“I never get over this circus trick…we can really play back memories of a dead person?”
“Not exactly,” said Sergeant Wade. He was helping D’Nunzio sniff out new traces for ANAD to follow. “We just put ANAD inside the deceased and replicate a few trillion times. Then we put the whole herd in ‘bloodhound’ mode and go hunting.”
“What exactly are you hunting for?”
“Everybody makes memories the same way. It’s called Long-term Potentiation. One
of the chemical signatures of LTP is a molecule called glutamate…helps open a second voltage-gated channel inside the post-synaptic membrane—“
Benecky held up his hands. Wade was always showing off. “Let me, Sergeant. The Captain here speaks English. What it boils down to is that we can construct crude renditions of memory traces existent in the deceased’s brain, up to about ten to fifteen hours after death. Squad’s been doing it for two years now. ANAD shuttles around inside his head like a bunch of bees, sniffing out calcium sinks in every neuron, looking for equal concentrations, down to the parts per trillion. Everywhere that concentration is equal is a pathway, burned in, a memory trace. ANAD follows it, sends back data on whatever it finds—calcium levels, sodium levels, activation times, lots of stuff. We can re-construct a very crude version of what originally laid down that track. Then we put it on the imager, cobbled out of visual and auditory sensory traces, in this particular case. They’re the easiest.”
“It’s sort of like painting somebody’s portrait from their shadow,” added Captain Emmitt. She was glad Sheffield was interested. They got precious few chances to show off ANAD to the brass as it was. Trouble was they had to show off mastodons like Benecky too. “An echo of a memory, if you like.”
Sheffield watched the imager. “I do like. But we lost it. Why?”
“Unknown,” said D’Nunzio. Her fingers were flying over the keyboard, managing ANAD’s configuration, checking parameters. “Somehow, we lost the trace…just petered out. It happens. All you can do is backtrack to a known point, and start sniffing again.”
Sheffield stared from the imager display to Khan’s still body and back again. He half expected to see the Flash twitch or move a leg or something. “So where is ANAD now?”
Benecky was keen to keep the upper hand on his geeks. Wade and D’Nunzio occasionally drifted off into outer space with all their explanations. It took an old street cop to keep their feet planted on Earth. “Here’s the vascular grid, Captain—“ he fingered the IC display to the side of the imager. The grid was a 3-D iconic image of Khan’s skull. –I’d say…right about here…basal hippocampus region. Most of the herd’s about a hundred thousand microns anterior to the lateral septum.”
“We’re picking up something,” D’Nunzio muttered. As Benecky watched over her shoulder, hoping to learn something more to impress the Captain with, Deeno steered ANAD through a bog of dendritic branches. Dense forests of axon fibers clouded the imager, now slaved to ANAD’s electromagnetic sounder. “—strong trace…this one’s holding, looks like—“
“Stay with it,” Wade encouraged her. He squatted down to massage ANAD’s configuration, soup up the sensors.
“I’m altering config—“Deeno said in a low voice. “It’ll help us sort out the traffic—lots of chem crap around here—“
“First signs of decomp,” said Benecky. “We better hurry, if we’re going to get anything out of this.”
“I’m trying, Lieutenant.” Deeno glared at the imager, flexed her fingers around the hand controllers. She let ANAD finish changing config, noting that all the other trillion mechs slaved to the master had done likewise, then maneuvered the device into the sheltered lee of a dendritic ‘breakwater’—sniffing for calcium, sodium, anything it could follow, grabbing molecules left and right, until at last, Deeno cracked the barest hint of a smile. Deep inside the cold, still brain of Fareeq Khan, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler blazed away at incredible speed, spasmodically sorting and advancing along the barest whiff of a chemical highway.
Seconds later, a green light illuminated alongside the screen. The sparky haze began to part—ANAD sent back a signal indicating readiness—
Start Trace Matching….
“Ow! Hey…watch it, man…that ain’t no friggin’ TV remote you’ve got there. That’s me!”
Carl Cutler is squatting next to his face…hesitantly punching buttons and tapping keys on some kind of palm-sized remote control device. It’s the PEP controller.
“Sorry, Flash…my finger slipped…I think that was the Alveolar Exchange…what the hell did you say the channel was for Cardio Boost? You know I don’t exactly do this every day, you know.”
Jitters and shudders and loud groans. Arms flail, then the room tilts and turns ninety degrees. Now the ceiling is sideways. Duwanna’s disappointed face seems to appear. It’s sideways too. She bends down.
“You okay, baby? You look a little pale—“
“I’m …man! It hurts like a busted knee…worse even…I can’t get any breath and…Jesus! My chest is about to open up…what the hell are you doing, man?”
Carl Cutler waves Duwanna back. In a low voice, he mutters, “Sorry, Flash…it’s just business, see. You really ought to think about that offer…you gotta branch out, man. Become a brand name.”
The room steadies for a moment, as Cutler stabilizes the PEP controller. “I ain’t got time to be promoting no hamburger stands, man. The ball game…that’s my life—“
Cutler was experimenting again, pressing buttons on the controller. Khan’s vision blurs—his hands wave in front of his face, fighting off imaginary flies—“You think you’re going to live forever? One injury, Flash...that’s all it takes. Look at what happened to all the greats, every sport: Lou Gehrig, Gamal Khaleed, Muhammad Ali, Namath…it was injury that got ‘em. Or disease. I’m just trying to look out for you, you know. Big Daddy. You invest in this hamburger chain, make a few appearances, let ‘em use your name and face…pretty soon, you’ve got more money than you know what to do with. It’s insurance, for Chrissakes. For when you can’t play anymore—“ for emphasis, he pressed one more button on the PEP remote.
“Owww…shit, man. Cut that shit out…give me that thing—“ A hand swings for the unit but Cutler backs away, still trying out buttons. “You’re supposed to be helping me…my lungs…I just can’t breathe—“
Stan Benecky was sorry for the kid. He’d seen this kind of leech before, in a lot of cases. Watching the imager replay grainy snapshots of memory traces, he had the feeling he was watching himself, like from a great height or something. God’s eye view and all.
Flash, I know what you’re saying. He let Deeno and Wade tweak ANAD, pick up the fading chemical trail. Sniffing our glutamate sinks…that’s what they were good for.
It was eerie. Rafeeq Khan was the world’s greatest megaballer. Awards and MVP trophies and championship rings, even two World Bowl cups to his name. And he still had to deal with lowlifes like Carl Cutler.
Jesus, he’s just like Sheffield, always trying to push me into something new, something that’ll make the Department look good. Stuff he knows I can’t do.
It was true. Captain Sheffield always had some scheme going. The ANAD Squad was just the latest. Once, Shef had even tried to force fit Benecky into Cyber Crimes. Make him into some kind of hacker sleuth. It was like trying to teach a circus bear the trapeze. A street cop belonged on the street, dammit! Not in a laboratory.
Shef and Captain Emmitt were always doing things like that, Benecky reflected. Just ‘cause you had a classic ’99 Honda didn’t mean you could take it out on the drag strip and do the quarter mile in 6.1 seconds. You had to treat your people right. Benecky had never been treated right.
“—looks like we’re losing that trace,” Deeno said. “ANAD’s not picking up any more glutamate concentrations.”
Emmitt studied the vascular grid. “Can you reset for different levels? Try probing deeper in the basal hippocampus? How deep have you gone?”
“No trail has taken us through here—“she pointed to a finger-shaped slice of nerve issue in the center of the image. “Dentate gyrus…it goes through the entorhinal cortex. We can sniff around, see what comes up.”
“Do it,” Sheffield ordered. “We need the evidence. DA’s really on my tail to make a case today…before the game. All those millions of fans out there…wanting to know
what happened to the kid.”
Captain Emmitt sat down at the IC panel. “Sergeant, break off a formation for reconnaissance of the wound sites. We need facts of tissue and organ damage, entrance or exit wound, time of entry, lots of facts. If the TEK-12 didn’t kill him, what the hell did?”
“And who fired the weapon anyway?” Sheffield added. “And why?”
Wade’s fingers played over the keyboard, while Deeno worked the controllers. He sent commands to the ANAD master bot, deep inside Rafeeq Khan’s brain, to begin replicating a new template. Moments later, part of the formation detached and made its way to the sternum of the corpse, sniffing out blood and lymph trails as it reconnoitered the first of seven separate impact wounds from the frangible, steel-jacketed rounds. Inside of ten minutes, ballistic data as well as nanoscopic imagery of the fragments and resulting damage were sent back to the IC, courtesy of ANAD’s pyridine probes.
Benecky felt like a dinosaur, unable to do anything useful. While Wade worked the ballistics exam, Deeno puttered with chemical traces in the kid’s lifeless brain, sniffing out more trails to follow. Sparks and sputters flashed on the screen, snatches of things they had already seen. Benecky was more and more unnerved by the whole process, though this was hardly the first time.
Playing out scratchy, grainy traces gave him the strangest sensation of seeing his own life on display. It always had. For two years, he’d been repelled and attracted at the same time. He’d watched scores of recorded traces, a spectator to every kind of ghastly death you could imagine. It made him nervous and uncomfortable, that the Squad could even do this without a warrant, let alone be so callous about it. He wondered if ANAD could sniff out such traces on a living person.
It made you think, and Stan Benecky didn’t like to think. You didn’t last twenty-two years on the Force by thinking. You beat the bad guys by reacting, being faster than they were. Sometimes you made mistakes. It went with the territory. Truth was, Stan Benecky had built up a lifetime’s worth of deceits and indiscretions and mistakes by reacting fast, on instinct and letting the facts fall out later. Twenty years ago, the Department wanted that kind of cop. Now, they wanted big brains like Deeno and Wade, weasels like Sheffield—always trying to look good for the Chief or the Commissioners. And Emmitt—Krystal Emmitt, now there was a work of art. Emmitt was the one who’d moved him into ANAD Squad in the first place. Talk about bears and trapezes. It was a setup to fail. And, after twenty-two years, that kind of failure could only lead to one place.
Kid, Benecky stared down at the deathly pale face of Rafeeq Khan, I know how you feel. You can’t trust anybody these days.
Wade waved his hands in the air. “Take a look at this, will you?” The IC imager showed jagged clumps of something, big as buildings, floating in and out of view. Tendrils of tissue made the scene look like a tropical forest flattened by a hurricane. “Tissue’s drying out…but these are TEK-12 fragments. See the mechs…behind those tissue tears?”
Wade pointed to the devices, station-keeping in formation, molecule by molecule repairing the damage, stitching a long gash in the pulpy mass closed. “Assemblers, basically. Like little ANADs.”
“What are they doing?” Benecky asked.
“I’m guessing it’s part of Khan’s PEP system. Performance Enhancement Package. Probably his foreign object damage module. See how the mechs are repairing those peptide chains? Grabbing atoms and making collagen, pretty as you please. The guy’s dead as dirt but the system’s still at work, trying to repair the damage.”
“Opinion,” asked Sheffield. He studied the image, pored over the ballistics and pathology results from ANAD’s inspection of the first wound site. “Did the kid die from TEK-12 rounds or not?”
Wade shrugged. “We don’t have all the wound sites covered. But based on what ANAD’s returned, and the fact that the kid’s damage controller is still working, I’d say no way. Mechs would have fixed up any organ or tissue damage pretty quick, within minutes. As long as his blood pressure doesn’t drop too far, or oxygen flow to the brain stays stable, my guess is he would have survived this wound for sure. We’ll have to look at the others.” Wade turned around in his seat, bent down to the floor, where several of Khan’s wounds had noticeably shriveled. “See that…the bots missed it somehow.” Wade withdrew a clean sani-stick from his pocket, lightly dipped it in the tacky residue staining the marble floor. He gave the pen to Benecky. “Lieutenant, if you would secure that in an evidence bag. Probably got trillions of mechs in it.”
“Do that,” Sheffield said. He faced Emmitt and Benecky. “If the TEK-12 didn’t kill, what did?”
“PEP failure?” Emmitt put out. “We got the last trace on record showing Carl Cutler fiddling with it.”
Sheffield glared at Benecky. “What’s your take on this, Lieutenant? This is your squad.”
Benecky figured he’d better play it safe. It was always safer to agree with Shef. Even if he was a weasel. “Street sense tells me not to overlook anything, sir. We’d better scope out the entire PEP system. The whole works. See how it functions. And what can go wrong with it—“ he asked Wade. “Who’s the resident expert on these things?”
Wade thought for a moment. “I know a little about it, Lieutenant. But Maloney down in Twist and Counter-Bio is the real genius. Big-time gene tweaker, he is. We need him up here.”
Great…another geek. “I’ll make the call,” Benecky offered. “Then—“but Deeno interrupted all of them, her hands waving them quiet.
“—hey—I got something, just like you said.” She pointed to the imager, then to the vascular grid. ANAD’s main formation had navigated deeper into Rafeeq Khan’s basal hippocampal region, probing subcortical layers of the kid’s brain. “Entorhinal cortex…it’s just a whiff, but the glutamate level’s right. Calcium sink here…and here…and here…something potentiated this path and it’s recent.”
“Match traces and follow it,” Benecky didn’t have to tell her. He felt another cold shudder as Deeno adjusted the gain and commanded ANAD to begin sniffing its way along the newest trace.
Start Trace Matching….
3.
“Lisa LaVelle”
“Baby this isn’t working and we both know it. Don’t lie to me…you know I always know it when you lie to me.”
Lisa LaVelle’s pouty face shakes her head. Her arms are crossed. She stands in the doorway to the media room, her eyes shooting bullets.
“Aw, c’mon baby…you know it ain’t like that. I’m your squeeze…always was, always will be. C’mon over here.” A hand pats the leather sofa, after putting down the TV remote. “We’ll talk...get reacquainted, you know?”
Lisa LaVelle walks right over and bends forward, revealing a big valley of cleavage. She reaches out and slaps him across the face. Eyes tear up and the room jostles before he reaches out and grabs her hand, recoiling for another slap.
“Hey now, sugar—“
“Don’t you be sugaring me…all hot and sassy…look at you! You got it written all over you…my God, ‘Feeq, you think I’m stupid?”
Nothing is said.
“Huh…you think I’m just some dumb broad…I can smell her perfume all over you…what kind of crap is that anyway…smells like Wild Ice…don’t you be telling me she wasn’t here—“
The room shifts and the main screen comes clearer into view. He’s gotten up, padded over to a wet bar recessed in the paneled wall. Hands expertly mix something fruity and pink, coat the rim of the glass with salt. He hands the marguerita over, sauntering like a cat toward Lisa. Lisa stands arms folded, facing away. She doesn’t take the drink. The glass is sniffed, then set down on a table.
“Feeq…this ain’t the first time…I’m getting tired of this shit. I can’t even leave the house but you got some little tramp half your age over here. You ever hear of rape? You think I don’t know what you do here when I’m gone…partying all night, boogieing
with anything that moves her hips, booty-dancing while I’m at work…what kind of animal are you, anyway?”
“Baby…it ain’t like that…you got to start trusting me…shit, don’t hold out on me now…big game’s two days away…coach says we have to get while we can…you know, re-laaaax like. C’mon over here to the couch…let’s talk.”
Lisa LaVelle shows him nothing but teeth, the cockeyed grin of a tiger before it pounces. “Honey child…you must have that PEP thing jazzed up to the max, big time. You don’t even think straight anymore…you’re worse than that damned dog of yours…at least he doesn’t try to hide anything…going after every bitch in the neighborhood.”
“—baby—“
Lisa turns away, snatches up her purse and starts to extract something—“—don’t baby me, jerk…I’m gonna put an end to this one way or another—“
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Deeno said. Her fingers massaged the joysticks, backtracking ANAD through a dense thicket of axon fiber. Peptide and phosphate chains dangled liked beads off the processes. “—looks like we lost that one. Just petered out…I thought I could back up and find a new path.” She shook her head. “Trail’s gone cold. ANAD shows declining glutamate levels. Calcium gates are vanishing all over the place.”
Benecky nodded. “Decomp setting in. Keep trying, Deeno…we need as much as we can get.”
“Sure thing, Lieutenant.”
Benecky turned from the IC panel, eased by Captain Emmitt—she was deep in an argument with Sheffield on whether the Squad needed a warrant to go further—and stooped down beside Rafeeq Khan’s rigid body.
Sorry for you, kid. Women are like that, sometimes. Like walking through a minefield. One wrong step and ka-blam! It’s like they have ESP or something. Maybe they read minds too. You can’t hide anything from a woman.
It made him uncomfortable. Suddenly, Stan Benecky wanted to get the hell out of the Khan mansion, run as far and as fast as he could. My God, she was just like Natalie. The broad could have been Natalie.
Sixteen years of marriage, and the great ship was foundering on the rocks. The last meeting with Devon, the attorney, had been a little Hiroshima, all tears and shouting and accusations. Acrimonious, Devon called it. Irreconcilable differences, she cried through her handkerchief—she must have brought a drawer full of them. Yeah, I’m not perfect. I’ve had a few—evenings out.
Affairs.
Not affairs. A drink. Some talk. A peck on the cheek. You know how it goes. My God, woman, I work all hours of the day and night. I get tired. You’re asleep when I get home. Or out…at the theater, playing make believe with Donald Whatshisname?
I’m studying to be an actress…you know that…it’s not the same—
Yeah, sure, whatever. Late hours, being passed over for promotion, thrown onto this ANAD thing with no warning. I’m depressed, for Chrissakes! We never do anything, we never go anywhere….
You’ve always been jealous of me trying to have a career—
Yeah, while my own falls apart like stale bread.
Benecky stared down at Rafeeq Khan, then shook his head.
Sorry, kid…but it’s weird. You and Lisa, me and Natalie. I guess you could say we’re pretty bitter over things, who should have custody of what, and then there’s Shelley, all of twelve years old. We argue. Like you two. I moved out. I wasn’t getting any sleep anyway. Now…well, the Stanfield isn’t exactly Paradise Island, is it? But it’s quiet mostly. Got one room, a hot plate and the bed sags. Oh, yeah, and I got me a satellite and a flim hookup…Jesus, that cost about six months’ salary. Full-immersion shit…you ever done that around here, kid?
Suddenly, Benecky stood up. “Deeno?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Move over…I want to drive for awhile.”
D’Nunzio cocked her head at a queer angle, sort of smiled. Benecky had seen the look before. It said: dinosaurs died out already…think you can handle ANAD, Lieutenant? Think you’re up to it? You can’t even handle sixteen years of marriage…and Natalie’s a lost cause.—
But Deeno said nothing. She slid aside, let the Lieutenant take over. “I’m following that trace, sir—“ she waved at the potentials graph over the imager screen. Calcium, sodium, glutamate, serotonin levels. It was a 3-D highway through imaginary gravity wells of chemicals projected on the display. “—just steer as close to the dark green line as you can…ANAD does the rest.”
“Programmed for constant glutamate fields?”
“Exactly. Very good, sir. That’s what we’re doing.”
Benecky snarled. He wanted to drive ANAD himself, sniff out some traces on his own. Maybe the kid’s got something that’ll help me and Natalie. Of course, that was self-serving. Probably ridiculous. The traces were just re-constructed shadows of what the kid had actually seen and heard. Just artifacts. No better than the marriage therapist and his play-acting scenarios.
He wanted to try anyway. Khan was a ‘live’ subject, or had been. You just couldn’t get a bigger high than sniffing out new traces on a freshly dead corpse. He’d seen so many of the recorded ones in the stationhouse archives that he knew them all by heart, kind of like favorite movies. Benecky grasped the controllers and pulsed ANAD’s propulsors. The gravity well display showed him veering off course…nothing down that road.
“Dead end, sir,” Deeno suggested. “Try coming back the other way.”
He played ANAD pilot for awhile, entertaining himself with grainy snatches of memory traces flickering on the screen…painful hits in megaball games, the championship ceremony two years ago, the night Duwanna showed him her newest moves…nothing helpful. But he kept looking, a voyeur fascinated at the window.
“Lieutenant, I want a detachment detailed to look at those PEP sites.” Captain Sheffield had been standing behind him for what seemed like hours. “We need to focus on that as the main culprit.”
Benecky stood up straighter. He shook himself out of the daze. “Yes, sir… I’m right on it, sir.” He focused on the imager, on driving ANAD’s master bot toward points that Emmitt had highlighted on the vascular grid. “Which site first, sir?”
Sheffield was thinking. “We’ve got to consider what the evidence is telling us. PEP is a possible culprit.”
Emmitt cocked her head. “Malfunction?”
“Or something deliberate. What exactly did the kid have in his PEP suite?”
Emmitt checked her eyepiece, let the data scroll down. “Records show he had pretty much a full set: Cardio Boost, Respiratory Boost, Enhanced Triphosphate Burner, neurocontrol level 5. Like Cutler said on that trace: the Rolls Royce of PEP units.”
“That may be the key—“ Sheffield pointed at Emmitt, snapping his fingers. “What you just said—Cutler knew what he had.”
“And he was playing with the controller,” Benecky piped up.
“Ah—here’s Maloney.” Sheffield waved the Lieutenant from Twist/Counter Bio over. Maloney was an investigator in genetic crimes, tracking down rogue or illegal sequences, crooked enhancers, fly-by-night labs. He was hairy as a grizzly bear, and he smelled. “Lieutenant, got a hot one here.” Maloney waddled up beside Benecky. They exchanged glances. “Kid’s got PEP. Full suite. Just how does this crap work anyway? We think some kind of malfunction might have contributed to death.”
Maloney sucked on the ends of his fingers. Benecky couldn’t watch; no telling where those had been recently. “Performance Enhancement’s like a turbocharger. Or maybe a complete makeover would be more accurate. What’s he got?”
Emmitt showed him the forensic record. Maloney borrowed an eyepiece, whistled as the data scrolled. “Jeepers…even neuro. Plus the latest in Respiratory Boost. That’s cutting edge stuff. Just barely legal, too. We’re working a case now, garage lab down in Florida. Caught ‘em horsing around with germ line genetics, trying to sequence some kind of weird cetacean genes, gives the recipient the lung power and heart
of a blue whale. Couple of deaths already…pretty gruesome stuff.”
“This genetic?”
“Not really,” Maloney said. “Mostly mechs. Pretty tame, but it takes great rocket science to engineer.” He saw the vascular grid, went over to it. “Right here—“ he fingered the dark lump of Khan’s cold dead heart. “PEP puts a few zillion programmable nanobots inside the myocardium. They work just like a construction crew—fighting off the free radicals, beefing up heart muscle tissue, clearing veins and arteries of plaque, zapping occlusions and thrombus blobs all over the place. Neat stuff…but pricey.”
Sheffield was intrigued. “We found some traces in the kid’s memory. He complained in his last few hours of difficulty in breathing.”
“Really?” Maloney went back to the forensic record the path bots had worked up. “Says here the kid’s got Respiratory Boost too. Normally that means alveolar pumping. Mechs are inserted with a program to boost the efficiency and capacity of the oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange…the alveolar sacs. When it’s done right, you get a sizeable increase in anaerobic range…and the stamina of a racehorse.”
Benecky was already guiding ANAD through the corpse’s capillary network to the trachea and diaphragm. A tiny dotted red line highlighted his progress on the grid.
Deeno found herself smiling at Benecky’s lack of skill. He kept getting the master bot stuck in dead end capillaries and had to backtrack. She stifled a few snickers.
Sheffield was growing impatient. “Benecky, do you know anything? Put us here—“ he fingered the outline of Khan’s main alveolar duct, at the tip of a large bronchiole.
Deeno slid in beside him. “Let me help, sir.” Her fingers took the hand controllers, deftly navigated the body’s chest wall network and motored upstream against a viscous flow to the first of the alveolar sacs. “Picking up debris , all around…” she increased sounder resolution. Now, ANAD’s view resembled flying in a sleet storm. “Must be muscle decomp—“
Maloney bent to the imager. “Maybe…definitely tissue cells.”
“Lieutenant,” Sheffield cleared his throat. “We’re looking for evidence of foul play…malfunction…deliberate sabotage.”
The imager skewed, buffeted by the heavy flow. Maloney sucked loudly on his fingers, as he focused. Benecky decided to give the man some room and slid out from the IC panel.
“I’ll be damned…that is alveolar tissue…I recognize the phosphate chains…but they’re all unzipped…not bacterial at all. This isn’t normal decomp at all.”
“No,” agreed Deeno. “Damned weird, if you ask me…all the molecules are cleaved in the same place, right at the phosphates.”
Maloney was muttering under his breath. “Could be a malf…I’d have to see the specs on this booster…see what it’s supposed to do.”
“Question for all of you,” Sheffield asked. “Is this accidental? Or deliberate?”
Benecky had an idea. “We could replay that trace from earlier…where Cutler’s screwing around with the PEP controller. Maybe we missed something.”
“Or maybe we can scare up another scent of a trace,” Deeno surmised. “But we’ll have to reconfigure ANAD. Glutamate levels are declining fast.”
“Do it,” Sheffield ordered. “This PEP system could be the key to the whole case.”
Ten minutes later, Benecky and Deeno had coded a new template for ANAD and sent the commands to the device. Inside of a few minutes, the entire formation had rebuilt its pyridine probes to sniff ever fainter trails of glutamate molecules. Benecky insisted on piloting the device, tweaking its propulsors to follow the path. He had to steer carefully, to keep ANAD from disturbing the faint trails. Finally, he caught the barest whiff of a path, a ghostly outline of a nearly vanished memory.
Start Trace Matching….
4.
“Rupert Jones”
The Cobalt Club was unusually crowded for so late at night. Gawkers and groupies were thick as weeds around the front door. Hands were outstretched, pencils fluttering, arms, menus, anything not bolted down, and some things he really didn’t want to see. He signs autographs, pushes his way steadily against the resistance of the crowd, finally bursts into the clear.
They’re in the back, just like Duwanna had said. He sees them, huddling in a booth in the corner, faces strobed with flickering lights from the dance floor. He decides he wants to surprise them. He accepts a drink from a flirtatious well-wisher, gives the waitress a peck on the cheek, grinning his biggest grin at her tight pants, and moves like a stalking cat through writhing bodies on the perimeter of the dance floor. They don’t see him.
He wonders as he slices through the crowd, a bow wave of admirers rippling out from him, what Carl Cutler’s doing at the Cobalt Club. Rupert Jones is in his face; they’re having the usual animated conversation. Free agency, maybe? A big new offer. He’s got to know.
Nearer the booth, he tweaks his hearing, shaking his head just so, to get the audio booster on, sniffing out their voices like a Big Ear satellite, processing and listening, mostly listening. He’s juiced with liquor, hands forever reaching out for autographs, to shake his hand, just to touch him, but he ignores them, fends them off and just listens.
“—to do it soon,” Rupert Jones is saying. Jones is General Manager of the Orlando Seagulls, fierce and implacable opponents of the Barons. They will meet in three days, on the playing field. Megaball war…a bloodbath, the sports press has already decided. No prisoners taken. “—tonight if you can, Carl. I’m paying you enough.”
“Okay, okay—“Cutler holds up his hands. “The money’s fine…I’ve just got to find the right moment…you know how Flash is…always got the ladies around and about a million other groupies.”
Jones’ face is grim. He blinks nervously, the effect enhanced by the dance floor strobes, a jerky stop-action movie. “Will it work? I mean…so he won’t suspect anything?”
Cutler waves him off. “No sweat…I’m the one who convinced him to get Pepped anyway. It’s a snap…just a matter of programming. Truth is—Flash doesn’t know all that much about it. Me, the team trainer, Delaney—that reserve back—that’s all. Press a few buttons and zap…he’s got the stamina of a cheetah, runs all day, anaerobic capacity of a hundred men. Push a few more buttons and—“ Cutler chuckled, clearing his throat, “—the kid’ll suffocate just trying to score with Duwanna or whatever her name is. Like night and day. That’s all it takes.”
Jones looks around. “This can’t ever be traced back to me, you understand. Not ever.”
Cutler shrugged. “You want more guarantees—“ he hold his hand out, rubs his fingers together. “More dinero. It’s that simple.”
Jones gets mad. “Don’t try to shake me down, Cutler—I’ve got more than enough ways to—“
Stan Benecky lost the trace, just when it was getting interesting. “Damn,” he swore under his breath. He was always losing it. He pulled ANAD back along the faint glutamate highway, let the device probe for faint puffs of the molecule. Nothing. It was gone.
“It just petered out,” he said. “Vanished.”
Deeno was sympathetic. “It happens, Lieutenant. Put ANAD in sniffer mode, let him poke around in that region. You’re just in the anterior locus of the hippocampus…we haven’t tracked up the dorsal side yet—“
Sheffield was thoughtful. He looked around at the assembled team of forensic specialists. “Opinions? Have we got a new suspect here?”
The argument lasted half an hour.
Benecky shrugged at the record ANAD had made of Khan’s memory traces. “It’s reconstructed from patterns of glutamate residues.” That made Deeno wince. She started to say something but didn’t. “It’s an echo of the real thing. You can’t trust it.” Part of him wanted to believe this was true, that a person’s memories and thoughts couldn’t be violated like this. But he did spend hours at a time in the trace archives too, titillating himself
with other people’s dying memories, relieving his former street life like it was yesterday.
Sergeant Wade disagreed. Benecky wasn’t surprised. “It’s well documented, Lieutenant. We know what the errors and variances are. That gets factored into the analysis. It just supplements other forensic evidence…helps us reconstruct the cause and mode of death. Legal questions are just a lot of squishy civil rights crap anyway. We need ANAD to fight crime today…it’s that simple.”
Simple for you, Benecky thought.
Captain Sheffield said, “I’m for whatever helps us get a conviction and helps the Department make its numbers. It makes us look good. It’s cutting edge. Defense attorneys have a hard time refuting visual and sensory evidence straight from the brain of the deceased. It’s still the best weapon we’ve got for solving the tough cases. The public demands it.”
Krystal Emmitt glared at Benecky. “Right. We’ve always been the poor stepchild in Violent Crimes anyway. ANAD makes us look good. Our conviction rate is higher with ANAD evidence—“
“-when the judges allow it—“Benecky threw in.
Emmitt shrugged. “The DA likes it. Magistrates and judges like it, most of them. Defense attorneys hate it. We can process more cases. Resolve things faster. It’s efficient and effective. And we don’t have to share the glory with the feds or their crime lab.” She didn’t have to add: And we can weed out Neanderthals like Benecky and make the squad a smoothly running machine, with me at the top.
Maloney was still studying the traces. “Could be a problem with PEP programming. Or a straight failure. We’ll need to sample those mechs…do further analysis.”
“The Deputy Chief wants a list of suspects by the end of the day,” Sheffield reminded them. “This looks like our best shot.”
The argument went on, pros and cons, upside and down. Benecky amused himself with replaying segments of the ‘Rupert Jones trace, running the conversation between Jones and Cutler over and over again. It hit home. Too close to home.
Benecky remembered waltzing into the Varsity a few months ago, hoping to get out of the hot sun and grab a chili dog and fries. Sheffield was there, with Emmitt; he saw them both in a corner booth, craning his neck to see over the crowds. Stan Benecky didn’t think of himself as a suspicious paranoid creep, like some of the younger squad hotshots did, but then they didn’t have Shef for a boss either.
He watched the staticky blur of Khan’s memory trace, jerking along frame by frame, as Cutler and Rupert Jones made their plans and did their conniving. More and more it came to him, Shef and Emmitt were just like that, weren’t they? He’d gotten his tray and worked his way through the crowd and found a stool at a counter nearby. Even in the din of the noontime crowd, his ears were well trained enough to pick up snatches.
“—ANAD unit—“
“—Benecky—“
“—your problem—“
Not long after the chance encounter, he’d found himself yanked off the street after all those years in Violent Crimes and stuck with a bunch of teenagers in something called the ANAD Unit. No longer a street cop, he found the assignment something like being in school…on final exam day. A whole new language. New procedures. New rules to follow…don’t do this, don’t touch that, load this template, replicate, park on that protein…it was like he’d landed on another planet and Sergeants Wade and D’Nunzio were aliens.
Benecky resented the change. It was nothing but punishment. He resented having to forget everything twenty years on the Street had taught him.
Shef was the real culprit. He was worse than what the Flash had gone through, worse than all the sycophants and groupies and slimeball agents and promoters.
Captain Dwayne Sheffield had no use for anyone who couldn’t help him move up in the Department. He’d never made any bones about his aspirations to be Chief of Police. Benecky had long thought of Shef as little more than a well-dressed ‘snake’, with the morals of a weasel. Anybody who made the ‘snake’ look bad or got in his way was lower than dirt to the Captain. And Stan Benecky was just the kind of opinionated dinosaur that was always getting the Department in trouble. When Shef took over Violent Crimes and found out that Benecky wouldn’t grovel like a wet dog, Benecky was out of Violent Crimes faster than he could say bingo. He was re-assigned to SI Forensic Services instead and became Captain Emmitt’s problem.
The argument was still going on behind his back, so Benecky stepped back through some of the memory traces ANAD had recorded. He paused the grainy images of Duwanna…whatever her name was…and checked out the tight, strapless clingy kind of nothing she was almost wearing. Kid, he muttered to himself, this girl’s nothing but trouble…but I guess you know that already. What was it Sergeant Wade had said the other day? ‘If only we could plug ANAD into the limbic circuits too…sniff out a few emotional traces. Be just like feeling what the suspect felt—“
Leave it to Wade to think up creepy stuff like that.
So, for being too good at his job and not groveling enough to the new boss, he got dumped in Captain Emmitt’s lap. Krystal Emmitt…the very words made him cringe. Emmitt had always thought of Benecky as little more than some kind of weird contagious disease, something to be shunned and kept out of sight until it died. She put him in charge of the ANAD squad, not because he was qualified, but because she knew that if he failed spectacularly enough, she could dump him without the usual departmental repercussions.
It was like dropping an old dog in a litter of puppies. Puppies with big teeth.
Oh, it was true enough…the ANAD squad had good people. It could practically run itself. Emmitt made sure Benecky was pretty much a figurehead, bypassing him every chance she got and dealing directly with Deeno and Wade. And to be sure, Benecky more than reciprocated the disgust. To get back at her, and Shef, he managed to insinuate himself into every little detail of the squad’s operation. He learned all about managing configurations, and hot-dogging pyridine probes on balky molecules and safing the beast inside its containment cylinder and a hundred other things. And to Emmitt’s surprise, Benecky had done okay as a squad leader. But she was persistent, Benecky knew. You could tell by the way she looked at you, one eyebrow arched higher than the other. If she kept sandbagging him with impossible demands on high-profile cases, one day he’d trip up and then she could use him as a sacrificial lamb. That’s what Benecky expected too.
That’s why Emmitt had called him to work the Rafeeq Khan case.
Benecky had sympathy for the kid. You and me, pal. We’re in this together. One way or another, we’ve got a lot to teach each other.
Yeah, he thought. You’re dead. And I will be.
Ever since he’d been exiled to the ANAD squad, he’d found a small measure of comfort down in the squad’s archives, reviewing and re-reviewing old disks of ANAD traces from past crimes. It was a pastime of sort, maybe a hobby even, though Emmitt muttered it was something more than that.
In the two years he’d been with the squad, he’d found a few favorites. Sheila and her wacko husband Rick, the one with the industrial meat cleaver. Sheila’d never gotten an iota of respect from the jerk. There were others too.
The Coastal Pacific derailment…there was a whole shelf of nothing but that. The squad had rolled through the dead like farmers harvesting tomatoes on that case. Lots of soap-opera stuff there.
And, of course, Susan Longley and the mystery assailant. Lurid details all over the newspapers for weeks and they didn’t know the half of it. Late at night…coming home from a modeling engagement. Dark as sin. The frantic blows…and there were worse than that.
It was cathartic for Benecky. He could be a street cop again. The vice-roy of Violent Crimes. Avenger of victims. It was always a breath of fresh air to see and smell real people, real feelings, real death and set off to hunt down the perps like the wild beasts they were. That’s why Stan Benecky had a badge. Now…they’d practically neutered him, stuck
in some Frankenstein’s lab with a pair of big-brained weenies who couldn’t collar a crook if their lives depended on it.
Then, like a lightning bolt, the connection hit him. He watched as Sheffield and Emmitt spun out their scenarios, throwing out motives and methods, hoping something would stick, that somehow the forensic facts would fit the theories.
To Stan Benecky, though, watching replays of Rafeeq Khan’s dying memory traces, the truth was suddenly quite clear. And it was clear because he had lived through the same thing.
Rafeeq “The Flash” Khan was a young and extraordinarily gifted athlete, the world’s greatest megaballer by far. He was also a young man under a lot of pressure, the pressure of fame and fortune, and the pressure Carl Cutler and Lisa LaVelle and Rupert Jones put on him. A different kind of pressure. Pressure to branch out, extend the brand name of Rafeeq “The Flash” Khan to wider and wider audiences. Pressure to lend his name and image to more and more crap, sleazy half-baked ideas, jeans and shoes and hamburgers and sportswear and cars and vacation resorts and orbiting casinos and so on and on, until it seemed at times that Khan’s high-cheeked, doe-eyed face was everywhere, as common as air.
But to Stan Benecky reviewing the traces, it was clear that Rafeeq Khan wanted only to play the game. The kid lived for megaball. Sure he had the mansions and the limos and the private jets. Hell, he even owned some unpronounceable island in the South Pacific. But when he really studied the kid, he was just an athlete, an athlete who’d somehow become an industry to himself. It was Cutler and all the others who wanted to make him something he wasn’t. Something he couldn’t be.
Jesus, Benecky thought. It’s just like me. I was happy in Violent Crimes. I was good at my job. I made cases. I got convictions. But Shef wanted more. Rafeeq Khan was mutated into something he didn’t want to be. Stan Benecky was yanked out of Violent Crimes and fired off to another planet called ANAD. Khan was happy just playing megaball every weekend. Stan Benecky was happy as a foot cop, cleaning up downtown and the convention district every day. So like Sheffield and Emmitt putting the squeeze on Benecky to make the ANAD squad, Cutler and his cronies had put the squeeze on Khan.
Only, somehow, it had backfired.
Sheffield was still holding court. “Work with me, people. Just a scenario.” He went over to Khan’s pale, lifeless body. “Cutler wants Khan to agree to some endorsements. The kid doesn’t want to. Too much distraction. It’s business. It’s money. Big money. Along comes Rupert Jones, general manager of the Orlando Seagulls.”
“With even bigger money,” Emmitt theorized.
“Exactly. And Jones makes an offer. Do something…de-tune Khan’s PEP system if you have to—so the kid isn’t up to speed in the big game. Give my Seagulls a chance. Here’s the offer. And Cutler’s eyes get as big as pizzas. So he agrees—“Sheffield turned to Maloney. “We’ll have to see if ANAD’s evidence support this, but I think it will—“
You ought to know, Benecky thought.
“—so Cutler gets Khan alone, half drunk, juiced up from a few hours with some tart named Duwanna. And he tries to program the kid’s PEP suite, just a tweak, mind you. De-tune the kid a little. But something goes wrong. Cutler makes some mistakes. He winds up killing the kid.” Sheffield was warming to his story. “’Oh, shit,’ he thinks…’now what have I done.’ He’s killed the golden goose, that’s what he’s done. So he panics. He tries to make it look like a conventional murder.” Sheffield retrieves the bagged TEK-12, brandishes it around. “Uses this to blow holes in the kid for good measure…like some burglar broke in and offed the kid. Then he calls in the report.”
Emmitt nodded. “I like it. We’ve got memory traces of Cutler playing around with the PEP controller.”
“And Khan listening in on some kind of talk between Cutler and Jones,” Benecky put in.
“Exactly. Maloney--?”
The Lieutenant from Twist/Counter-Bio was hunched over the interface control panel. “We’ve got ANAD’s quantum flux imager booted up. Wade here showed me how. Look at this—“ He pointed to graphs of data from the nanoscale device, now systematically probing the deteriorating alveolum of Khan’s bloody chest cavity.
The image was blurry, like a snapshot of a sunken freighter taken underwater.
“Looks like a junkyard,” Sheffield commented.
“In a way, it is, Captain. You’re looking at sorting rotors, devices the PEP mechs assembled when the suite was first installed. Tiny little nanoscale pumps. They push oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules across this membrane here. Only the sorting rotors are like turbochargers. They increase the efficiency of the exchange…a few million times. This is what gives the kid his stamina.”
“Why do they look like that?” Emmitt asked.
Maloney smiled a devilish grin. “Because they replicated wrong. Instead of pumping molecules across the membrane, they’ve been built to different recipe…programmed opposite to what they’re supposed to do.”
“Meaning—“
“Meaning instead of acting like pumps, these babies were programmed and replicated to work like caps. Blocking the exchange. They’re so efficient, they could easily suffocate a man in minutes.” Maloney looked up from the imager. “The kid suffocated to death. Acute oxygen deficiency here—inside the alveolum. There’s your smoking gun.”
“Then he didn’t need the TEK-12,” Sheffield said. “Why bother? That’s what I don’t understand.”
“To cover it all up, Captain,” Benecky volunteered his insight. “He made a mistake. Rupert Jones paid him to ‘de-tune’ the kid, make him a bit more human, if there is such a thing. Cutler tried to do it. But he made a mistake with the PEP controller. Then he panicked, tried to cover it up and make it look like a conventional murder. Using the TEK-12.”
Emmitt was reviewing the forensics on DNA type. “Bots are agreeing, Captain. We’ve got high probability match with fiber evidence on the weapon itself. We’ll need to do the same thing with the PEP controller. My guess is Benecky’s right.” She glared at him, her eyes saying lucky guess, Lieutenant.
Sheffield ticked off what they had on his fingers. “Okay, let’s wrap up the crime scene. We’ve got memory trace evidence and probable DNA evidence that Cutler tampered with Khan’s PEP controller. We’ve got memory trace evidence of a motive for Carl Cutler and Rupert Jones. We’ve got a DNA match on fiber evidence from the gun. Maloney—you got anything else?”
The twist investigator was already downloading files from ANAD’s probing. “No anomalies in Cardio Boost, Captain. That area’s clean. Same for Neuro Control and the other modules. Looks like the problem’s in Respiratory Boost.”
Sheffield seemed convinced. Emmitt too. “Then Cutler’s our man.”
“With Rupert Jones as an accessory,” Benecky threw in.
“Right. I’ll get the VM booted up…see if we can get an arrest warrant.”
The Captain went off to his squad car, firing up the Virtual Magistrate. Maloney tagged along, to download evidence files to the server downtown. Inside of five minutes, the VM had crunched all the data and spit out the necessary paperwork.
Sheffield tore off the warrant and held it up to the brightening morning sky like a work of art. “Perfect. I’ll notify all units. We should be able to locate Mr. Carl Cutler pretty quickly. After all, the big game’s less than two days away.”
5.
Lieutenant Stan Benecky helped Deeno and Wade pack up the IC panel and safe the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler. The extraction and safing took five minutes. After ANAD was safed and inserted back inside TinyTown, Benecky had a question for his comrades.
“This memory trace matching gives me the creeps. Any chance this technique could be used on somebody alive…without them knowing about it?”
Deeno was storing gear inside TinyTown’s compartments. She shook her head. “No chance, Lieutenant. Absolutely not. We’d h
ave to re-tune ANAD, teach him a whole new bag of tricks.”
“Plus, you’d need to render the perpetrator unconscious, do the injection. ANAD’s sounder doesn’t have that great a range. You couldn’t control him, unless you had all this gear with you. The perp would know something was up. You’d have to keep him out.”
Deeno was certain. “Just wouldn’t work, Lieutenant. But maybe we can miniaturize this stuff, put it in some kind of palm-sized remote. Then you’d be in business.”
On the ride back to the precinct house, Stan Benecky thought. Wade and Deeno had both been emphatic. ANAD would never work on a living person, at least not the memory tracing function. A little too emphatic, he figured.
Now he really was suspicious.
They got back to the precinct station and logged in the gear. Benecky completed the reports and then waved the techs off.
“I’m headed for Tootsie’s. Want to come along?”
“No, thanks,” said Wade. “We’re going to troubleshoot some glitches I saw with ANAD’s replication program. Looks like the config manager’s acting up again.”
Benecky wasn’t surprised. The techs practically slept with the damned thing.
He sat alone at the bar, nursing a stiff gin, oblivious to the happy hour crowd. Benecky pulled out the flim eyepiece and put it on, watching a replay of a wrestling match he’d seen a million times: Ace Awesome versus The Volcano. Bodies slamming all over the place. Like old time police work…he missed the stuff. ANAD Unit just wasn’t the same. You couldn’t see anything…except through the imager.
ANAD was the key. As he sipped at the gin and watched Ace Awesome do the flying leg slam one more time, he was sure of one thing. Somehow Emmitt and Sheffield had used ANAD to sniff out things about Benecky that he’d just as soon keep under wraps. Indiscretions. Poor judgments. Mistakes. Stuff that every cop worth his badge had done…nothing big, mind you, but fallout that had built up like a coating of dust. Money taken under the table for ignoring offenses…carousing with a few local tarts…shaking down informants…the kind of stuff that was understood to be part of the job.
It was a shakedown, anyway you sliced it, and Stan Benecky had decided it was time to fight back. He’d seen something today, a sort of revelation that ANAD had shown them. Rafeeq Khan had been shaken down too. The kid never had a chance.
But I know how to put the squeeze on Mr. ANAD, he told himself. So right then and there, at Tootsie’s, with his gin and wrestling flim, Benecky made the decision. Natalie would have been amazed. “So you finally decided to get off your fat ass…make something of yourself, huh?”
Yes, indeed.
That night, when the graveyard shift was drowsing through some late night movie and the night duty sergeant at the desk was half asleep, Benecky slipped into the stationhouse and made his way to the Containment chamber in the basement.
He used his flashlight to find the TinyTown cylinder. Inside, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler ticked over, content within stable pressure and temperature and nutrient limits.
Not for long, pal. Benecky deftly navigated the containment cylinder’s systems, shutting down nutrient flow, power, monitoring systems—always one step ahead of the unit’s self-protection circuitry just like Wade had shown him, until finally, the cylinder was dead and inert. The thing was like a programmable virus anyway—half mechanism, half organism, as Wade called it. ANAD would die a quick and painless death, severed from its umbilical cords.
In less than five minutes, it was all over. He stood there fidgeting with his hands, wondering if he ought to mourn, say a few kind words to the damn thing. He decided not to.
Leaving containment, he couldn’t help wondering if he’d done the right thing. All Stan Benecky ever wanted to be was a cop. A decent cop, helping others with their lives. Maybe that’s why mine is so messed up, he thought. Some kind of weird equivalence principle. My life for others. He headed up from the basement, bantered briefly with the duty sergeant in Motor Pool, then emerged into a humid, sultry, smothering night in the middle of the city. Lights from towers blazed away in all directions. Horns honked. People laughed.
Benecky walked the streets, just like he used to do. It felt good but a nagging thought gnawed at him.
Had he just destroyed his best chance to stay with the Force? Was ANAD the ticket? But which way would the ticket have taken him: in the door or out the door? Stan Benecky finally decided he didn’t care. He just walked on.
Maybe it was just paranoia. Occupational disease of the law enforcement world. Whatever it was, he couldn’t rest, couldn’t find peace, even in a brisk stroll through the downtown convention district, passing knots of drunken tourists careening all over the sidewalks.
He went back to the stationhouse, more determined than ever. He had always been a bit squeamish every time the Unit processed a case and ran the memory tracing, re-creating the deceased’s last hours like some old newsreel footage. It gave him the willies.
But the truth was he learned a bit more about himself every time he did it. Maybe that was part of the same equivalence principle. Your life for mine. It was like being a voyeur at an X-rated movie theater, like when you were a kid and you sneaked in to the flim palaces and squeezed three at a time into one of the cocoons for an afternoon’s full-immersion fantasy.
Back at the stationhouse, he found the duty sergeant completely asleep, snoring loudly over a spread of funnies on his desk. He let himself into the basement, returned to the Containment chamber.
ANAD was dead and gone, that much he was sure of. He’d also probably pulled the plug on any real chance to work the street again. That was simply a cold, hard fact you couldn’t get away from. But the records were still there. Rafeeq Khan was just the latest. Benecky found the interface control panel neatly stashed away on a shelf and pulled it down, booting up the device. Then he located the disks; there were scores of them. Recorded memories from murders and assassinations and drug deals gone bad and traffic accidents and jealous husbands and kidnappings and fires and bombings and rabid dogs and suicides.
A whole library of last moments, just waiting for him to browse and fast forward and replay and think. Mainly to think.
He’d spent most of his free time lately, reviewing old memory trace disks, vicariously living the life of a street cop again. But he’d killed ANAD dead and for good…he had to. Sheffield and Emmitt were bound to use it to bust him, given half a chance.
It’s here somewhere, Benecky told himself, as he fired up the first disk. The IC imager sparked to life, a hearth of light in an otherwise darkened room. Grainy, jerky images filled the screen. He read the disk cover label, not really caring whose life had been snuffed out on this one. Not by chance, it was a familiar one.
Longley, S.P. / 31 March 2055 / White Female, Apx 35 yrs / Cause of Death: Blunt Force Trauma to Cranium (PathBot)/
Benecky settled back to watch. He was thirsty and wished he’d kept the last dregs of the gin he’d left at Tootsie’s.
The answer was here, somewhere in these records. He was sure of it.
Your life for mine, went the tired old police refrain. To protect and to serve.
Deep in the basement of the Tenth Precinct stationhouse, by the light of a flickering monitor, Lieutenant Stan Benecky was finally a young badge once again, completely engrossed in a desperate fight against the bad guys. Drug dealer or enraged boyfriend, it didn’t really matter what happened. Or to who.
All that mattered was that it happened. And Benecky would once more be a real public servant, over and over and over again.
END
The Mullinex Particle
Introduction
Dr. Richard Mullinex is a researcher with a mission. He’s searching for something that may or may not exist, except in his mind. If he finds the object of his search, the discovery may upend Science forever. If he doesn’t find it, the failure may upend Dr. Mullinex. S
ometimes, scientists strive so hard to make a career-changing discovery that they can almost “will” the discovery into existence. To some, this is a form of falsifying the data…and, of course, that does happen. But as Heisenberg noted in his Uncertainty Principle, when we’re dealing with entities at the level of quarks and subatomic particles, what’s real and what isn’t may be as much a matter of opinion as anything.
Dr. Mullinex finds at the end of the story that he himself was the real object of his experiments.
Or as Enrico Fermi once said, “There are two possible outcomes. If the result confirms the hypothesis, you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.”