II. Mind and flesh

A new world has a new breed of crimes and nothing is as it seems.

II. Mind and flesh

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Lower District: Infotainment Slum

In a more shady part of town, two men stood hunched over the body of a girl. Well, technically a girl, if you looked at it from a biological point of view.

"He got roughed up real bad", the detective mumbled with a tone that almost sounded like appreciation of fine craftsmanship.

Only his closest friends and colleagues recognized it as a simple expression of sardonic humor, which was one of the reasons he had never made it very far up the career ladder of the police force. Instead, he had stagnated somewhere near the upper crust of the common footmen, having the rank of Detective Sergeant.

"He... she... oh well. He definitely complained with lots of artful insults, when he got back to his main body. I really don't know why they allow rich freaks the use of remote-controlled clone bodies for crap like that."

His partner, a young-looking man in his late forties, still had a weak stomach when it came to cases like these. Especially when he thought about the paperwork that would follow.

"Wearing a tankjob as fine as this and walking down Tickler Alley is an invitation if you ask me. Man must be a masochist or had his brain spliced all to hell most likely."

"Most likely, yeah."

"I wonder what he will say when we tell him the body is still alive."

"And pregnant too."

This voice belonged to a female officer who had been evaluating snapshots of the crime site from her office.

"Elza, don't just hack into our Meta location like that. I've told you... what... ten million times?"

"One thousand seven hundred and forty-four times, Kelly. Oh yeah, it's Kell, isn't it? You don't seem to like your real name, even though it's just so cute. The sample is growing inside that body as we speak. Really disgusting the way he roughed that fine shell up. Maybe I'll scrape it out and use it as a spare. Or you could have it if you catch more bullets than..."

Kell gave a thankful nod to his partner as the connection was forcefully severed:

"I owe you a cold one, Jim. Never shuts up, that one. And the way she shifts from one sick joke to the next..."

"You just love it", came the dryly amused reply.

"No icebreaker for you after all. Feh... let's finish this picnic and catch the ride home."

"You make me sick."

"yeah, yeah, let's go. Elza probably can't wait to properly analyze that thing inside and I don't want anything more to do with it."

"I don't even want to think about it."

"Paperwork is on you, buddy."

Their conversation continued as their outlines began to take on a soft blue-white hue, then blurred and vanished. Being simple policemen, they had to take the cheap route through the Meta. Sucks every time you get out and notice an advert has been stuck in your head on the way through an unsecured data stream. However, these two would arrive with a little less than before.

A strange creature that looked like a cross between a giant fly and an octopus disentangled itself from the Meta control node they had just used. It felt entirely pleased with its handiwork. As would be its master, it thought.

Glowing briefly, the PET homed in on its master's location and activated a Meta jump, which would transfer all of its existence into energy and back to matter at the destination. It liked taking the paths through the deep layers, where you had to fight off hijackers at every turn. Also, its target was there, deep down among the dust of ages.

The two policemen were none the wiser when they rematerialized at headquarters in Central District. They hadn't felt any particular urge to further investigate the case in the first place. Now, they felt positively thrilled about the prospect of having at least a few hours of Ascension Day which, after all, was supposed to be a holiday.

Kell wiggled a finger in his left ear hole as if that would help him dislodge the commercial for self-heating underwear from his troubled brain. His colleague Jim eyed him with a mixture of pity and mirth. He hadn't been left unscathed by the cheap Meta transfer as well, but at least his spam had under-clothed pretty women in it rather than old men complaining about the modern day cousin to arthritis.

"Here we are, wasting our precious day off with cleaning up some rich bugger's mess, and all we get for it is a salary that won't even keep a man alive for a few more decades", Kell complained.

Jim nodded dutifully, neither encouraging nor ignoring his partner when that mood took him, as it usually did after a long day of bloody work. His own family was actually rather rich. Enough so that he could probably live for several hundred years without exhausting the petty cash.

The choice of becoming a policeman had caused quite an outrage among his relatives, foremost his parents and older sister, who had groomed him for a career as a technical advisor for the High Council, the ruling body of the city, just like his father. He had excelled in all the necessary subjects at school and successfully took the final exam at the record age of only fifteen.

He had taken the attainment test without telling anybody and signed the contract for a 10 year term of service directly after being declared to be "of age". Those had been different times when New London was still growing rapidly and the people flooding in from North Africa were a mixture of pioneers, criminals and cannibals. Quite often all three combined.

These days, the horrors of the past were reduced to stories used to frighten children and to liven up a pub at night. Crime had been brutal and straight-forward. Now it was a lot more twisted and tended to involve hushing up anything that might bother the proverbial upper crust of the city. All for the sake of "public law and order".

One of the reasons Jim Borne and Troy Kelly were such a good team was their shared interest in what they called "bending the rules". This usually meant leaking seemingly random pieces of information to the more radical Meta news publishers.

They would have been caught a long time ago had it not been for a certain computer genius who kept the internal department off their trail. Elza Chen was "a damn nuisance", as they would both agree on quite readily, but cracking into any kind of system came as easily to her as breathing.

She also didn't know the meaning of a "day off". When she wasn't busy with work, she always had one or more of her little so-called "projects" going. Or maybe it was the other way round, and she just made time for work between experiments. No matter, she always got the job done and that was all that mattered to the department chief.

Right now, she was probably doing just that, Jim thought as he followed his colleague toward the door. The pub was beckoning and to hell with the paperwork. His steps quickened as he passed through the safety doors and out on the pavement, then they were swallowed by the throng of the evening crowds.

New London, Central District

Whistling a tune while her hands were busy on the inside of a corpse, Elza always felt the most comfortable. Sometimes she wondered if, had she not become one of the most renowned pathologists, she might have had to become a very active serial killer.

She finished transferring the embryo from the victim into the observation sphere and started removing the compromised parts of the host body. This one would become her favorite for sure. She had already ordered replacement organs with her own specifications.

Being a police force CSI technician didn't really pay enough to be able to afford regular rejuvenation, so she had to take what she could get. Clone bodies were only authorized to people with severe physical disabilities or those imbued with the supreme virtue of financial solvency, but this was a nice loophole.

When somebody decided to throw away a perfectly fine clone, there was no law preventing her from taking it for herself. She had already begun imprinting the brain with her general personality, childhood memories and other important details.

After getting the new parts, all that was left to do was a complete neural download and implanting relay nodules that would link up with her consciousness. Then she could put her main body in limited stasis and use this one instead.

Aging of her real self would be limited to less than 4% and, in a way, she would be even more immortal than those rich bags with their rejuv treatments. After all, if she got killed, even if her entire body was turned to ashes, she would just wake up from the stasis capsule with a little bit of trauma. Nothing too bad.

As she cleaned and disinfected herself, she took one last look at her handiwork. None of her colleagues ever ventured down here into her ghoul's lair. Probably even Jack the Ripper himself would break out into tears at the sight, though whether in horror or out of joy she could not tell.

"Can't close her up 'til I get those organs...", she mumbled as she locked the lab and made her way upstairs to her regular office. The chief would be quite surprised. Whoever or whatever had raped that female body had definitely not been human.

In a few more days the incubator would give her a good idea of what they were actually dealing with, but judging from the DNA scans it had to be pretty monstrous. Just the right thing for her then. She could almost picture it emerging from that artificial womb and calling her mommy.

She locked the lab and armed the security system. On her way to the lift tube she pondered how to spend the rest of her evening. By the time the lift had deposited her on the small deserted parking deck, she had decided to do a bit of adventuring in Elsewyrd, one of her favorite Meta games. She loved the fantasy setting. Her character was, of course, a necromancer.

The sky lanes were almost empty these days. More or less everybody used Meta transfer instead, which was practically free and instantaneous. Elza didn't like it though. The idea of all her thoughts and secrets being transmitted through a data stream seemed far too risky. Who could tell what might be read or tempered with along the way.

The small red metal disc was in her mouth almost before she noticed it herself. She geared up as her vision cleared beyond normal human capacity. The shakes would be bad in a few hours, but she could just take some sleepers then and to hell with tomorrow. The freezer was full of replacement bodies anyway so she could blow this one without worrying too much.

Her apartment was a small cubicle less than 3 meters across, but stacked with the latest tech and a Meta connection you could use to teleport a mammoth. The chair in the middle was workbench, entertainment center, bed, kitchen and even bathroom. She used its hygiene-related functions only while her mind was in Metaspace and didn't care to know the details.

As she relaxed into it, the Meta engaged and she found herself standing on a green meadow. "Pynk Wroth has entered The Northern Grasslands", a voice stream muttered somewhere in the back of her mind. Sometimes she really regretted the choice of name. For once, it made it totally impossible to play together with colleagues. If anybody ever found out she used an alias like that, she would have to kill them. She was serious, too.

There was lots of junk but one message in the inbox caught her eye:

"Found your dog. Meet me at the usual place."

The code was simple, she had been looking for information on in-game daemon deployment and someone had offered to do even better than that. Getting your very own daemon was a tremendous and rare honor, so there were lots of people who tried to get one in more shady ways.

The meeting was in two hours, and she set a timer to remind herself, while taking a short trip into a nearby dungeon. The only thing that had puzzled her was the last line of the message: "Don't worry about delivery, we made sure that you are properly tuned."

A small indicator on the wall slowly changed from green to yellow, then it turned red and began to flash. The warning was only low priority, because Elza had an unlimited bandwidth plan. Then it returned to green as if nothing had happened.

Enzymes split proteins, chemical payload penetrated into the bloodstream and information reached the brain. A drug could do so much more than heighten senses. It could also unlock doors you never knew you had. When the upload from the Meta started, no firewall engaged, no safeguards were triggered. The package had been accepted and delivered into Elza's mind.