Authors: Benjamin Sperduto
The 88th Floor
The
88
th
Floor
By Benjamin Sperduto
Expanded Ebook Version
© 2014 Benjamin Sperduto
Original Version Published
in
Techno-Goth Cthulhu
, edited by
Mark Anthony Crittenden, Red Skies Press,
2013.
© 2013 Benjamin Sperduto
Cover Image
“
6 Hearts” by George
Cotronis (2012)
“
What a fucking
mess.”
Rees nodded and took a drag from his
cigarette.
“
Where the hell is
forensics?” he asked.
“
They’re on the way, sir.
Still running behind after that bombing on Highland this afternoon,
I guess. You heard anything else about that?”
Rees hadn’t.
“
Everybody’s saying it’s
another terrorist attack,” the patrolman said. “I hear the SICA
guys aren’t letting anyone near the blast site.”
“
Figures.” The city’s
intelligence agency had a well-deserved reputation for not playing
well with others.
Rees checked his phone.
3:26 AM.
“
You ever see one this
bad, sir?”
Rees looked at the mangled, bloody corpse
sprawled across the floor just a few feet away. He drew deeply from
his cigarette again.
“
Why don’t you go see
what’s keeping the lab boys?”
“
They already
said–”
“
I know what they said.
Just humor me, okay?”
The patrolman nodded and walked over to
where a few other officers were busy blocking off the area. It
wasn’t a difficult crime scene to secure, considering they were
eighty-eight stories above the streets inside the unfinished
Sircotin Technologies building. The night work crew had already
been sent home.
Rees knelt beside the victim. All that
remained of the face was a twisted clump of flesh and bone that was
fused together as if the head were partially melted. The hands and
feet weren’t much better, little more than misshapen stumps. Then
there was the blood that had poured out from at least half a dozen
bullet wounds.
“
Poor bastard. What the
hell happened to you?”
“
Detective Rees,” a cool,
monotone voice said, “please step away from the victim.”
Rees stood up and raised his hands.
“
Relax, Morgan,” he said.
“I didn’t touch anything.”
He turned to face Doctor Morgan, one of the
department’s more experienced forensics experts. The digital pupil
of his left eye narrowed, focusing intently on one of Rees’s
hands.
“
You are contaminating my
crime scene, Detective Rees.”
Rees glanced at the cigarette and quickly
extinguished it.
“
Sorry,” he said. “Old
habits, you know?”
“
I am quite afraid that I
do not. Now, if you would kindly step away from the victim I can
begin my examination.”
“
Yeah, sure,” Rees said.
There was no use trying to say much of anything to Morgan these
days. Rees had known him for years, but even he had a hard time
telling where the man ended and the machine began.
The doctor’s face betrayed no reaction to
the disfigured corpse.
“
Interesting… ” he
said.
Rees could do little but wait patiently as
Morgan activated his sensors and data recorders to examine and
catalogue every minute detail of the scene. His gaze strayed away
from the corpse and took in the details of the unfinished room.
“
When was the victim
discovered?”
“
About an hour ago,” Rees
said, still examining the room. For such an expensive project, the
workmanship was awfully shoddy. He wondered if the crew had
something against straight lines. “We got an anonymous call and a
patrolman dropped by to check it out.”
Morgan didn’t indicate whether or not he
heard the answer, but Rees knew he had. The bastard could listen in
on every conversation within five blocks if he wanted to. Rees knew
better than to take being ignored personal and was surprised Morgan
had even bothered to spare the miniscule processing power required
for simple conversation. It really didn’t bother him since most of
his attention was still on the layout of the unfinished
eighty-eighth floor. The more he looked at it, the more he thought
he discerned a pattern to its odd angles and edges. Something kept
tugging at his peripheral vision, an image that almost took a
definite form before flickering away when he looked at it
directly.
Morgan analyzed the corpse for some time,
running thousands of calculations inside his cybernetic brain. He
then injected a small vial of nano-bots into the body that were
designed to crawl through the bloodstream and transmit a detailed
analysis of its condition. Lastly, he opened another vial of
nano-bots beside the corpse and allowed them several minutes to
spread over and scan the immediate area.
Rees was getting drowsy by the time Morgan
spoke to him again, his whirring servos and humming circuits
lingering just beneath his voice.
“
I have completed my
examination, Detective Rees. Quite a remarkable case, I must
admit.”
“
Remarkable?” Rees asked.
“How’s that?”
“
As of this moment, I am
afraid that I still have yet to identify the victim.”
“
What? You didn’t get
anything from a DNA scan?”
“
No,” Morgan said. Rees
wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected frustration in the
digitized voice. “While it is not unheard of to occasionally
encounter an individual whose genetic code is not registered in the
national databanks, I have never seen a sample returned as
completely negative.”
“
What does that
mean?”
“
It means, Detective Rees,
that your victim’s DNA does not register as human.”
That was definitely something Rees had never
heard before.
“
How is that possible?” he
asked.
“
I do not
know.”
That, as far as Rees knew, was also a
first.
“
There are, however,”
Morgan said, “a number of unidentified toxins in the victim’s
bloodstream. It is possible that these toxins could have an adverse
affect on the DNA scan. I will need to examine the victim more
thoroughly and subject its blood to a number of tests before I can
tell you more.”
Rees didn’t bother to ask about the
implications of the corpse not being human.
The case was already weird enough.
“
What about the injuries
to the hands and face?
“
To put it simply,
Detective Rees, they are the most unusual I have ever encountered,
but they did not cause the victim’s death. He was shot eight times,
with two bullets puncturing the heart, two hitting the stomach, one
in the skull, and the three remaining bullets becoming lodged in
the spinal column. Standard sidearm nano-rounds.”
Rees couldn’t believe there were still
people stupid enough to commit murder with a modern gun. Every
firearm manufactured within the last fifty years fired a caseless,
computerized bullet that recorded the time and location from which
it was fired. The bullet also carried the registration information
of the gun that fired it and the DNA coding of whoever pulled the
trigger. There were still a few antique lead-spitters floating
around on the streets, but most of them had been confiscated and
melted down as part of the government’s crackdown on illegal
firearms.
Morgan continued.
“
The first bullet was
fired at precisely 2:33:21 AM and struck the victim’s heart. The
next six rounds were fired quickly, within a span of ten seconds,
but the bullet to the skull was fired a full five minutes later.
All eight rounds were fired at point blank range. The weapon was
fired by a Sircotin Technologies executive named George Vandum,
Vice-President of Optics Research and Production.”
That certainly wasn’t the kind of suspect
Rees had expected, but considering that the case involved a body
with melted flesh that might not even be human, he wasn’t about to
let anything surprise him.
“
Do we have a current
address on him?”
“
Yes,” Morgan said. “I
have already transmitted my report to headquarters and filed a
warrant for his arrest.”
“
Oh,” Rees
said.
“
Do you have any further
questions, Detective Rees?”
“
No, I can get anything
else I need from your report.”
“
Do you require a
hardcopy?”
Rees nodded and felt fortunate that the
department hadn’t yet made it a requirement for all officers to
have datachip implants. He was one of only a handful who weren’t
wired in any way.
Morgan reached up to the tiny computer drive
plugged into the back of his skull and produced a small piece of
plastic that he handed to Rees. He looked at it.
Case #4563367-6638 Dr. L. S. Morgan.
“
Good night,
Detective.”
As the doctor left, his assistants entered
the room, each one snatching up something Morgan had indicated was
worth taking back to the lab, including the body. They were
finished in less than five minutes.
When the elevator door closed behind them,
Rees slipped the chip into his coat pocket and lit another
cigarette.
“
Right to the point,
aren’t they, sir?”
Rees glanced at the patrolman and thought he
seemed a little too eager for his own good.
“
Yeah,” he said. “Have to
beat them to the scene to get a decent look at anything these
days.”
“
So what do we do
now?”
“
It’s out of your hands.
Go get some sleep and try to forget about it.”
“
What about you,
sir?”
“
Me?” Rees took a deep
drag from his cigarette and then shrugged his shoulders.
The patrolman made his way to the elevator
and Rees’s gaze drifted back to the jagged corners and uneven walls
of the eighty-eighth floor.
“
Hey, let me ask you
something,” he said.
“
Yes, sir?”
“
This floor look strange
to you? Like they didn’t put it together right or
something?”
The patrolman looked around a moment and
shook his head.
“
No, sir; looks pretty
solid to me. Maybe you should think about getting some
sleep.”
The patrolman’s eyes shimmered as the light
struck them. Artificial, Rees thought. Maybe it was time to trade
up, after all.
“
Yeah, maybe you’re
right.”
***
It was nearly dawn by the time George Vandum
was taken into custody and brought back to the station for
questioning. Rees had tried to get some sleep at his desk after
getting back from the crime scene, but the constant activity around
him made it difficult. He felt horrible. It was getting harder for
him to keep up with the department’s eighteen-hour work shifts,
especially since he stubbornly refused to get a neural regulator
nanochip implanted when the workday was officially increased. He
still found the notion of putting different parts of the brain to
sleep throughout the day a little too unnatural to be of any
good.
The arresting officer explained to him that
the suspect was found cowering in the closet of his uptown
apartment, but Rees was so tired that he didn’t hear most of the
details. He allowed himself to be led through the corridors of the
station to the interrogation room where Vandum was being held.
For a man who was supposed to be one of
Sircotin’s big shots, George Vandum didn’t inspire much confidence
in the corporation’s brain trust. He looked more strung out than
Rees felt.
“
No lawyer, Mr.
Vandum?”
He said nothing as Rees sat down.
“
You are aware that you’ve
been charged with murder, right?”
No response.
“
Mister Vandum, I’m
Detective Rees, I conducted–”
“
Rees?” Vandum asked,
looking at him for the first time. “Detective Nicholas
Rees?”
Rees reminded himself again that he wasn’t
going to be surprised by anything.
“
Yeah, do we know each
other?”
“
No. I’ve heard your name
once or twice.”
Rees wasn’t sure how that was possible,
seeing as how he’d been lucky enough to keep his name out of the
media spotlight.