Six people sit around the dinner table: two men, three women and one little girl, all are dressed up in their Sunday best. Which is funny because it’s not Sunday, it’s Tuesday.
Their suits are all neat and clean, shirts ironed, ties tidily tied, shoes shined, party hats on their heads. Everyone is smiling. One big happy family. No arguments. No temper tantrums.
No one moves. No one says a word.
The silence is beautiful.
Full of love.
The sound of running water comes from a room off to the side, interspersed with snatches of VR jingles: Fruity Pops. Poppa Steve’s Family Pizza. CheatMeat—the tasty cloned treat. The singing isn’t loud: just someone entertaining himself, whistling along softly to the bits between the words. Whistling while he works.
Through in the bedroom there’s a stain, exactly eight pints of O rhesus negative wide. There’s another one on the hall carpet, next to the cupboard. The rest is slowly disappearing down the plug hole, in a froth of pink, soapy water.
And last, but not least, there’s the birthday girl. She lies curled up in front of the VR terminal, hands and feet tied behind her back, a wire in the back of her sinful head. She
stopped struggling half an hour ago; now she just lies there, shivering and sobbing while a wholesome, computer-generated fantasy flickers inside her retinas.
Eighteen years old.
Filthy, dirty, impure…lovely…
She’s not as lucky as the ones sitting around the table.
For her death is still a long, long way away.
Outside, on the roof, the heat was overpowering. Three steps off the escalator and sweat was beading on Will’s forehead. Over to the west, clouds were beginning to form: the rains were coming. About bloody time. After the oppressive, drawn-out summer, it would be nice to come up here and just stand in the downpour. Let everything wash away. But right now it was like standing in a frying pan.
He hurried along the rooftop walkway, heading for landing bay twelve: where Lieutenant Emily Brand and a nice cold beer were waiting.
She was standing with her back to the hangar door; dress uniform replaced by a plain, concrete-grey jumpsuit, the sleeves knotted round her middle, showing off neon-red sports webbing, muscled arms and broad shoulders. He watched her pull a Shrike from the Dragonfly’s port weapons pod—shifting the heavy air-to-target rocket as if it were made of papiermâché.
She was every trooper’s fantasy: early thirties, five foot six, athletic, strong chin, freckles, button nose…Her team took great delight in winding up newcomers: fanning the fires of their ardour, knowing full well that Emily would only put up with so much before beating the crap out of the poor sod.
The last one ended up with a broken arm, three missing teeth, and concussion.
Emily might scrub up well, but she was
not
the sort of person you messed with.
Will stepped into the shade of the hangar. It wasn’t
that
much cooler in here, but being out of the sun made him feel less like a slice of bacon. ‘It’s half five: where’s that beer you promised?’
She hooked a thumb over her shoulder, towards the Dragonfly they’d taken to Sherman House yesterday. ‘Help yourself.’
Will unlocked a hatch on the Dragonfly’s hull marked ‘W
ARNING
: E
NGINE
C
OOLING
S
YSTEM
’. A six-pack of brown plastic tubes nestled in a homemade hammock between the coils and the burner. It had taken Emily about two months to get it positioned
just
right. Too close to the coils and you got beercicles, too close to the burners and you got an engine compartment full of boiling foam and melted plastic.
He popped two loose from the mesh and threw one over.
Emily caught it and held the cool container against her forehead. Sighed. She ran the tube through her close cropped hair and down to the nape of her neck. ‘Can’t remember summer ever going on this damn long…’
‘Cheers.’ Will pulled the tab and swigged a mouthful of cold, dark-brown beer. ‘Won’t be much longer: Monsoon’s on its way. They’re saying Thursday, Friday at the latest.’ He slumped down onto a box of pod rockets. Loosened his tie. ‘God…that’s better.’
‘Serves you right for wearing that ridiculous suit the whole time.’
‘Privilege of rank: you get to “set an example”.’
‘Get to sweat like a pig in a sauna too: sod that.’ She leaned back against the Dragonfly’s dented hull and stared at him for a bit. ‘You know,’ she said at last, ‘you look like shite.’
‘Good’, I’ve been practising.’
‘Trust me, you can stop practising. You’ve reached perfection in the “looking like shite” stakes. They ever decide to make “looking like shite” an Olympic sport, you can rep resent Scotland. You’re gold medal material.’
Will took another swig and smiled. ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ Emily crossed her arms and examined the scuffed toe of her grey boot. ‘How’s the new girl getting on?’
‘Jo?’ He suppressed a beer-fuelled burp. ‘OK, I suppose. Get the feeling this liaison job is a bit more…
difficult
than she’d expected.’
‘Yeah, everyone thinks it’s all glamour, heroism, and medals…’ Emily looked away. ‘Want to see why the crash kit wouldn’t work yesterday?’
She marched around to the far side of the ship. Will hauled himself to his feet and followed.
‘Shite.’ There was a tattered hole in the hull, about the size of a small child, just in front of the starboard air intakes. Pipes, wires, and cables blackened and torn.
‘Outer casing slowed it down a bit, but there was still enough oomph left to roast the controller circuits. Whole thing’s completely fucked; it’s a miracle your new girl got it working again.’ Emily’s voice dropped. ‘Two minutes earlier and we might have saved Stien…’
Will peered into the hole. ‘What was it?’
‘Best guess? One of the old P-Seven-Fifties. Probably the same one that took a chunk out of Floyd’s shoulder. Damn thing must be an antique.’
They walked back to the hangar’s entrance together, standing just out of the sun’s reach.
‘Funny the way it works out, isn’t it?’ Emily snapped a pair of shades over her eyes. ‘Team before us were in and out, not even a whiff of trouble.’ She smiled. ‘Mind you, spent two days getting the blood out of their drop bay.’
‘Tell me about it. I remember this one time…’ He stopped
as his brain caught up with what she’d just said. ‘Wait a minute, why did they have to clean the drop bay?’
‘Told you: all that blood. Gets gummed up in the mesh flooring and if you don’t get rid of it sharpish, the whole ship smells like fusty black pudding and rotting—’
‘No. I mean why was it covered in blood?’
She shrugged. ‘They tramped it in from the scene. Lieutenant Slater said the flat looked like an abattoir—had to sponge the guy’s wife and kids into their body-bags.’
‘But…’ He frowned. ‘The Kevin McEwen murder? Flat forty-seven one-twenty-two? Two doors down from where we were yesterday?’
She nodded and took another swig of beer. ‘Killed his wife and kids, then topped himself.’
‘But I
saw
the place. It was clean.’
‘So? Services probably sent in a sanitation team. Stripped the whole thing back to the plasticboard and repainted. Big deal.’
Something in Will’s stomach lurched. ‘Who was the investigating agent?’
‘I think it was Brian. Why are you so—’
But Will had already clicked his throat-mike, ‘Control, this is Hunter, where’s Agent Brian Alexander?’
‘One moment, sir…’
There was a small pause, and then,
‘He’s overseeing SOC at the Martian Pavilion with DS Cameron. I’m not getting any response from his phone—must have the scanners running. You want me to give him a message?’
‘Tell him I want to see him in the reconstruction suites, soon as he gets back.’ Will killed the link and dropped his half-drunk plastic in the nearest bin. ‘Got to run. Thanks for the beer.’
‘You’re welcome…’
Blood. Everywhere. On the floor, up the walls, spattered across the ceiling. Will fumbled with the sizing band on the
dusty VR headset one of the technicians had dug out of the stores for him. The old-fashioned gloves weren’t helping, the wires kept getting tangled in the straps…
Flat 47-122 looked nothing like Will remembered it. There were holes in the recording: fuzzy blobs of no data caused by interference, but nearly everything else was stained red. An avatar stood next to him: a muscular, computer-generated man with hair hanging down to the middle of his back—which was either wishful thinking, or a serious case of self-delusion. A dark-blue label floated above its head with ‘A
GENT
A
LEXANDER
’ written on it.
Will walked forwards and touched the scarlet-stained wall, the glove giving a small tingle of feedback as he ran his fingertips across the pixel-perfect wallpaper. ‘Are you
sure
this is the right apartment?’
The avatar that didn’t look anything like Brian nodded. ‘Trust me, it’s no’ the sort of thing you forget. Bits of body all over the shop, blood everywhere. Aye, this is it alright.’
The carpet beneath their computer-generated feet was almost black with blood, the SOC team’s footprints still clearly visible in the matted fabric. Over by the door, something that had once been a father of two was sprawled against the wall.
‘So where’s the rest of him?’
Brian’s avatar pointed downwards. ‘You’re standing in it.’
And that’s when Will realized what the fist-sized lump lying beside his left foot was. ‘Wonderful…’
Kevin McEwen’s lower half coated the middle of the room, what was left of his torso acting as a doorstop. Mrs McEwen was smeared across the tiny kitchen, the two children all over the second bedroom. Will worked his way from room to room, just as he’d done when he’d visited the real apartment yesterday.
How on earth could this be the same place? The flat he’d seen was spotless; this was straight out of a cheap horror film.
The murder weapon was lying behind the sofa, power lights flickering in the reconstruction. Will gave it a cursory once over and then went looking for the VR unit. It was lying on the floor, the casing battered and cracked, as if someone had smashed the thing repeatedly against the wall until it was little more than a large, electronic maraca. Will bent down and picked the computer-generated replica off the carpet, his gloves tingling in a half-hearted attempt to simulate weight and texture. One of the headsets was bent into a perfect figure of eight, the lenses cracked, the cables ripped from their sockets, leaving small tufts of multicoloured spaghetti behind.
They still didn’t know what caused VR syndrome, but they knew the symptoms well enough. Something goes very wrong with Kevin McEwen’s brain chemistry. Then, one day, the only escape he has from his shitty life—the public virtual reality channels—goes on the blink. Maybe his VR unit blows a fuse, or maybe one of his kids tries to stick a slice of buttered toast in the drive, whatever, it doesn’t matter: the results are the same. Kevin McEwen goes out, gets himself an old MZ90 and kills every last member of his family.
Will took another look at the room. The bloodstains. The chunks of meat. The big holes of nothing in the corners of the room, where the walls joined the ceiling, jagged with interference. ‘It’s a bloody awful recording.’
‘What do you expect? Every SOC team kicks seven shades of shite out the machinery. I’m no’ surprised it’s buggered.’
Will closed his eyes and pictured the place he’d visited: a cramped, scrupulously clean rabbit hutch without so much as a stain on the carpet.
‘It didn’t look anything like this yesterday.’
‘We really need some new SOC kit. Any chance you could have a word with the Demon Dwarf? Buy somethin’ that actually bloody works?’
‘The place was spotless.’
‘Aye, well, this is how it looked Sunday when we picked up the stiffs: freshly decorated in “internal organ red”. James threw a hairy when he saw the state of ma suit.’ Brian’s Avatar shrugged. ‘Maybe Services redecorated? You know, givin’ it the once over for the next lot of poor bastards.’
‘If they did, they used recycled wallpaper. There were shadows on the walls where pictures used to hang.’
‘Nah, look at it: there’s no way you’d
ever
get that crap off the walls. Them stains is there to stay. Must’ve been a different flat.’
Will took his headset off and the crime scene disappeared, replaced by a bland beige room. ‘Not unless there’s two flat one-twenty-twos on the forty-seventh floor.’
Brian was sitting in the corner, both eyes a milky shade of grey. ‘Even if it was the same place—and I’m no sayin’ it was mind…’ He reached up and unplugged the jack from the socket in the base of his skull. ‘But if it
was
, why the hell would anyone bother to make it look like it’d been lived in for years?’
‘That’s what I intend to find out.’
The décor in Director Smith-Hamilton’s office was probably meant to be ‘restrained executive chic’, but to Will it just looked like a Martian theme pub. The walls were clad in burnished bronze, hand-crafted rivets picked out in delicate verdigris. Genetically engineered pot plants sat on the deep ochre carpet, their manmade fronds an oasis of green and red in the shining dessert. The director sat in leather splendour behind a sandstone desk big enough to sleep six, toying with a two-foot holo of Mars.
‘I’m sorry, William, but it’s out of the question,’ she said, flipping the planet on its axis. ‘We’ve had too many incursions into Sherman House already. Look what happened yesterday!’
He shifted in his chair, and tried to explain the situation for the third time. ‘But—’
‘Give it a couple of weeks to cool down. Let them get back to their little routines. Then we can look at a small expedition, one that doesn’t involve anyone getting shot.’
‘There’s definitely something going on at Sherman House. We’ve got two confirmed cases of VR syndrome and a disappearing crime scene. Flat forty-seven one-twenty-two was a
bloodbath
when Agent Alexander’s team collected the first set of bodies, but three days later—’
‘It was clean. I know, you said.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment. ‘Look, William, whether you go back to Sherman House today or next week, the room will still be there. There’s no point risking lives for the sake of a couple of days.’
‘But—’
‘I understand your need to get to the bottom of this, and I admire your determination, but my decision is final.’ She pushed the holo away and stood, frowning down at him. ‘Until the situation at Sherman House has stabilized, there will be no more Network intrusions. Is that understood?’
Will sighed. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Good.’ The frown vanished, replaced by a beaming smile. ‘I’m glad we had this talk, William, it’s so seldom we get to discuss ongoing cases. Tell me…’ She teetered around the desk, took his elbow, and escorted him to the door. ‘How is Detective Inspector Cameroon getting on?’
‘Detective Sergeant Cameron is doing fine.’
‘Excellent. Well, don’t let me keep you.’ And with that she closed the door.
Will counted all the way to ten before he started swearing.
‘Bastarding shite-bags!’ The pig-faced man glowers up at the sky, as if it’s God himself who’s just crapped down the back
of his overalls. A one-sided Rorschach inkblot in stinky grey and white.
His partner grins. ‘Don’t know what yer whingin’ about. On you it looks good.’
‘Fuckin’ birds…’ Pig-Face shoves another halfhead into its bay in the back of the Roadhugger. The halfhead stumbles—falls like a bag of potatoes onto the dirty metal floor.