Alice nodded. “It was getting a bit too rowdy in there for my liking.”
“I know what you mean.” Vicki took a moment to catch her breath. “Is it okay if I walk with you?”
“Sure.”
It took only a couple of minutes of casual conversation for Alice to diagnose Vicki as a chronic worrier. She may have been only seven years Alice’s senior, but Vicki seemed strangely old-fashioned, almost middle-aged. A sixty year old stuck in a thirty-three year old body.
“It’s such a terrible thing to have happened to that poor woman,” Vicki said. “I haven’t been able to sleep since I heard the news. It could have been any one of us.”
“I don’t think we have anything to worry about just yet,” Alice told her.
“You don’t?”
“I spoke with one of the crime reporters at my work. He assured me that everything about this case points to a terrible accident. No foul play, nothing sinister suspected at all.”
Vicki shook her head. “I don’t know why I put my name down for that stupid lottery. I did it on a whim. I figured I’d forget all about it, and then in fifty years’ time I’d find out I’d won and have all this money to share with my grandchildren. I didn’t think anyone would die within the first week.”
Alice thought Vicki actually did have grandchildren when she first said this, before realizing she was speaking in hypothetical terms.
“Maybe that’ll still happen,” Alice said. “Naomi’s death was just an anomaly. If she’d died a month earlier, before any of this had started, none of us would have given it a second thought.”
“Still, you don’t know what other people are capable of, do you?” Vicki fidgeted nervously with the locket around her neck. “What would they be willing to do for a hundred million dollars? You and I probably wouldn’t kill anyone for any amount of money, but there are people out there who would. I know it’s wrong to judge someone based on their appearance, but I’m afraid Carson might be right about Roque Fenton. He looks like he might be dangerous.”
“All we have so far is one death,” Alice reminded her. “It’s pointless to waste time worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet.”
“What about that poor man in the wheelchair? The one with no legs. Christopher, I think his name was. If someone wanted to get to him, he wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Alice let out a silent sigh. Vicki seemed like a nice enough person, but she got the impression she was someone who worried that the sun might not rise tomorrow morning.
“Vicki, the odds of someone going around murdering every other person in the lottery and getting away with it are so statistically improbable that it’s not even worth discussing.”
“How do you mean?”
“Think about it. One person killing twenty-six without the police catching them first? That’s never going to happen. About eighty-five percent of murderers are apprehended within the first forty-eight hours. And with the sophistication of today’s forensic technology, along with the volume of surveillance the police have at their disposal, unsolved murders are exceptionally rare. There’s like five or six a year. You might be able to get away with one or two, if you’re extremely careful and smart – and Roque Fenton doesn’t appear to be either – but there’s no way anyone could possibly get away with twenty-six.”
Alice wasn’t one hundred percent certain about the veracity of her figures. She thought she heard something like this on one of those true crime documentaries, and they sounded about right. Cold cases these days were virtually non-existent.
Regardless of their accuracy, Vicki seemed comforted by this knowledge.
They chatted some more as they walked – about Vicki’s job, about the weather, about her pet Jack Russell terrier. Alice continued to probe Vicki with polite questions, doing her best to steer the conversation away from anything too unpleasant.
Ten minutes later, they arrived at the front of Vicki’s apartment building.
“Thank you so much for everything.” Vicki pulled Alice in for a tight hug. “I know can overreact sometimes. I think I just needed someone to talk to.”
Alice smiled. “Hey, no problem. It’s a strange time for all of us.”
“Here.” Vicki rummaged through her purse for a pen. “I’ll give you my number.”
Alice held up her hand. “There’s no need.”
“If you want to meet up again. You know, for coffee or something.”
“I mean, I already have your number. We all have each others’ numbers. They came in that package they gave us.”
“Oh, of course.” Vicki let out a chirpy laugh, then hugged Alice once more.
The two parted ways, moments before Alice’s own APhID lit up with an incoming call.
She looked at the screen. It displayed a string of garbled text. Someone was calling her through a scrambler, trying to mask their whereabouts.
She answered.
“Hey, it’s me.”
She heard Lachlan’s voice. It was slightly disguised – it was filtered through a manipulation device – but she could tell it was him.
“I just got your message,” he said. “Is everything okay?”
After all that had happened over the past few days – the lottery, the drama with her rejected article, the footage from the memory stick, and Naomi’s sudden death – it had completely slipped Alice’s mind that she had left a message for her brother, asking him to call her back.
“Oh, yeah,” she replied. “I just needed your advice about something. Actually, it’s not really that important anymore.”
“Okay. Cool.”
A drawn-out pause followed. Ten seconds in, and the conversation had already hit a wall. Neither one wanted to discuss the elephant in the room that was Lachlan’s present status as a fugitive.
Alice leaned up against the front of the building. “So ... where abouts are you?”
“I’m ... I can’t really talk about that right now.”
“Are you, uh, planning on finishing up that, um, project you’re currently working on anytime soon?”
Another pause.
“I really can’t discuss that either. Not right now. Sorry.”
This was how most calls played out between Alice and Lachlan these days. Lachlan was in hiding, wanted for his role in Emilia Ulbricht’s kidnapping, and so they could only ever converse using general terms.
Every call made anywhere in the world was monitored by automated bots, and certain words and phrases were programmed to trigger red flags. Even saying Lachlan’s name in conversation, or using keywords like “kidnapping” or “Discordia”, would be enough to attract unwanted attention.
Suspicious calls were immediately traced, and the conversation sent to law enforcement officials for further analysis.
“Hey, I might–”
A truck roared past, and Lachlan’s words were drowned out by the noise.
“What?” Alice jammed a finger in her ear. “I didn’t catch that last bit.”
“I said I might be around your way sometime soon. We should catch up then.”
“Sure, that sounds–”
The line dropped out, and the call abruptly ended. Their allocated thirty seconds – roughly the amount of time it took for a call to be traced – had expired.
An appropriate ending, Alice thought, considering the way Lachlan dropped in and out of her life with arbitrary frequency. He certainly took after their father in that respect.
She put her APhID away, then stepped away from the curb to cross the road.
Alice tried to think back to the last time she had seen Lachlan. It would have been months ago. Many months. Maybe even a year.
Her relationship with her brother had been unconventional right from the start, but that was to be expected given that they were half-siblings born two weeks apart. They grew up on opposite sides of the city, each enduring childhoods where stability was in short supply. Both were raised by single mothers. Very occasionally, there was a father who made fl
eeting cameo appearances in their lives. Their paths crossed only on very rare occasions growing up, and it wasn’t until the last few years that they really connected with one another.
More than ten years had passed since either one had any contact with their father. This suited them just fine.
As adults, Alice and Lachlan’s lives couldn’t have become any more divergent. Lachlan got to have all the fun and adventure with his Discordia pals, gallivanting around the world and living like a band of vagabonds. He never devoted a great deal of thought to his own future. He was like water; always finding the easiest route through life.
Alice was his polar opposite. If a friend had to describe her in one word, it would be sensible. Alice wore sensible clothes and shoes, and had a sensible haircut. She worked a sensible job, ate sensible meals, drove a sensible car and went to bed at a sensible hour. She was resigned to her sensible life, each day a sensible facsimile of the one before it.
Now it was time to return to her sensible home.
She had taken one step out onto the road when she was startled by a sudden loud noise behind her.
It was a kind of a slap and a crunch. Like the sound of an open palm striking bare skin, combined with a heavy boot crushing a soda can. But many times louder. It was a sound unlike anything she had heard before, and one she would never fully be able to erase from her memory.
What happened next played out in slow motion.
A piercing shriek rang out. It came from a woman on the opposite side of the road. She looked straight at Alice, screeching at the top of her lungs as if possessed by demons.
To her left, a few feet away, an elderly woman walking her chihuahua was overcome by a case of spontaneous hysteria and collapsed to the ground.
Chaos infected the area at the speed of sound. Several people ran towards Alice. She saw the terror reflected in their eyes. Others ran away.
She turned to look behind her.
Subconsciously, she knew what she was about to see. She didn’t want to look, but it was almost as if she was forced by an unseen hand. Like she no longer had control over her own actions.
A crumpled body lay in a heap, in the exact spot Alice had stood less than five seconds earlier.
A grotesque mess of twisted limbs, surrounded by a fast-forming puddle of blood. A shattered body that had plummeted from a great height, until it came to an abrupt stop when it collided with the pavement. Whoever this was – or whoever it used to be – they would not be immediately identifiable.
But even without looking, Alice knew who it was.
OFFICER FILMED IN DRUGS STING
The Daily Ink
5 September, 2065
A senior police officer has been caught red-handed selling illicit drugs back to the dealer they were confiscated from.
Hidden camera footage obtained by The Daily Ink shows Officer Eric Brook, a respected veteran with over twenty years’ service, handing five large packages of counterfeit Xylox to a known drug dealer. In exchange for the “lemon drops”, he receives an envelope bulging with cash.
Each package appears to contain approximately ten thousand pills with a combined street value of more than $200,000.
Officer Brook and the dealer, whose identity was obscured in the footage, appear to enjoy a relaxed and friendly rapport, which has led to speculation they may have been involved in this sort of activity for a period of time. The officer can even be heard joking that their transaction was “like stealing a new pair of shoes, then returning them to the store the next day for a refund”.
The damning footage has cast doubt over the integrity of the police force, which has been mired in numerous corruption scandals in recent years. An anonymous source within the force has claimed that this sort of behaviour was commonplace, and in some cases even encouraged.
The police force’s two major corporate sponsors, the AFX Entertainment Group and the Aqua Bar restaurant chain, did not respond to our request for comment.
[Subscribe now to view the full story]
Chapter 8
A stream of froth shot out as Dinah Gold popped open the bottle of champagne. “I think it’s time for a celebration!” she declared.
She poured two glasses; one for herself and one for Alice.
Alice noticed that Dinah had inadvertently snapped the top off the bottle rather than pop the cork. This was another troubling sign that Dinah’s robotic hand was in urgent need of servicing.
“This bottle of 2054 vintage Dom Perignon comes courtesy of Mr. Solomon Turner himself,” Dinah said. She flashed a wide smile that gave the impression of a dozen extra teeth. “To congratulate us for our outstanding work!”
Alice caught the scent of the champagne as Dinah handed her the glass. It had a fragrance of roses and money.
Dinah raised her glass in the air. “Here’s to a great double act.”
This abrupt change of heart hadn’t gone unnoticed by Alice. For as long as they had worked together, Dinah had shot down every one of Alice’s story pitches if they fell outside her narrow area of expertise. It was only last week that Alice was being hauled over the coals for stepping outside the bounds of her role as a lowly desk lackey. Now Dinah was acting as if this was her idea all along.
But Alice could hardly blame Dinah for wanting to claim a slice of the credit. The fallout from her story on the corrupt police official and the illicit drug deal had been extraordinary. By some estimates, more than forty percent of the population viewed the story on the day of publication, and The Daily Ink received its best numbers in more than a decade.
The officer depicted in the footage was arrested and charged less than an hour after the story broke. The force was plunged into damage control, with chief commissioner Maximilian Yu ordering a full-scale corruption inquiry.
It was the scoop of a lifetime, and everything Alice had always dreamed of. She had been elevated to the role of office celebrity over the past couple of days; the junior copywriter who had somehow stumbled across the story of the year. She was dizzy from the roller coaster ride of attention and acclaim.
Yet despite the triumph, she was having trouble enjoying any of it. The events from the past week were still fresh in her mind.
Two deaths, Naomi and Vicki, so close together.
She struggled to keep her mind focused on her work. No matter what she did to try to block it out, the image of Vicki’s body lying on the sidewalk, minutes after she last spoke to her, replayed over and over.
Despite the official line, Alice couldn’t shake the feeling that these two tragedies were somehow linked.
The police maintained that Naomi Duke’s death was an accident, most likely the result of a malfunctioning surveillance craft, and there was nothing to suggest anything untoward had occurred. Oddly enough, any potentially incriminating footage from surrounding surveillance crafts was unavailable due to what the operators described as “unforeseen technical issues”.
They were still investigating the circumstances surrounding Vicki’s shock death, but for now they were going on the theory that it was all a terrible accident. Vicki appeared to have slipped on a wet surface inside her home and fell into the railing on her balcony. The railing gave way, and she plummeted twenty-one stories to her death. Foul play could not be ruled out at this stage, but they were yet to find any evidence to support such a notion.
Alice provided a brief statement to police, telling them she walked home with Vicki after Naomi’s funeral, although she wasn’t entirely forthcoming with her information. She neglected to tell them about the lottery, or that the last thing Vicki talked about was how she feared for her life. She didn’t know why she chose to withhold these details. Maybe she didn’t think it was relevant. Or maybe if she did, that would be like confessing to her own culpability.
She had become mildly obsessed with both Naomi and Vicki over the past few days. She sought out as much information as she could about these two women and the bizarre circumstances in which they both died, poring over every
last detail. She didn’t know what she was looking for exactly. A clue, maybe. Some sort of evidence that would lead to a logical explanation as to how this could have happened.
It wasn’t so much the two sudden deaths that bothered her. It was the sheer incomprehensibility of them both. She needed to locate some sort of order in amongst all the chaos.
There was a brief silence in the room, and Alice suddenly became aware that Dinah had stopped talking. Worse, Dinah now had an expectant look on her face, like she had asked a question and was awaiting Alice’s response.
“Uh, sure,” Alice said, smiling and nodding her head. She hoped this was what Dinah wanted to hear. “Absolutely, of course.”
“That’s great,” Dinah replied, pouring herself a second glass of champagne. “If you keep producing work of this standard, you can expect to see your opportunities expand in the coming year.”
Alice continued to smile and nod, a gesture that usually answered most questions in life. She pretended to take a sip of her champagne, then emptied her glass into a pot plant when Dinah’s back was turned.
“This is your moment, Alice,” Dinah said after finishing her second glass in two sips. “Enjoy it.”
Dinah then handed Alice her first ever bonus check.
The Daily Ink didn’t make a habit of paying its staff any more than they absolutely had to, but a bonus system had been introduced a few years back with the aim of incentivizing its workforce. If a story attracted a certain number of views, the employee would receive a commensurate amount of the generated advertising revenue.
These bonuses usually only amounted to a few extra dollars here and there. Enough for a meal at a reasonably-priced restaurant. Nothing to get too excited about.
And so Alice did all she could to keep her cool when she saw that she was being paid the equivalent of six weeks’ wages for something that had taken her half a day to write.
The rest of her day was spent enveloped in a kind of daze. This all felt like a dream – a peculiar, acid-strength dairy-fueled dream, complete with bizarre wish fulfillment, an absence of logic, and inexplicable non sequiturs. Her career was taking off in the most unexpected of ways, just as these strange events were happening all around her. This almost felt like it was happening to someone else, and she was watching it all unfold from afar.