“You've got quite the setup here, Felix.” Vanessa purred over the music. Snapping me out from my focus, I flinched and shuddered strong enough to slosh coffee on my hand. I looked around, worried my reverie had been in the office, but I was still at home, except somehow Vanessa slipped into the apartment, wearing full work garb. Probably easy to do over the music I'd been blaring. Complex synthesized chord progressions helped me focus on these kinds of problems. It helped me get into the mindset of too many concurrent things.
I muted the music and willed the ripplesuit to clean off my hand. She stepped back and looked around the room, amused. "You do recall ACL’ing me here, right? When you hadn't been in the office for a while I got worried. And then you missed the stimshow you suggested we go to last night." She turned back to me, with a frown now. "You've also been ignoring your display."
When I noticed her eyeing the screens, I blanked them all. She was even more shocked at that, looking to me with questioning, indignant eyes. I preempted the next question.
"Before you ask, just think about under what circumstances I would not be in the office, I would be hiding theoretical case files from you, and would be unable to discuss what was happening, if that were what I was doing." She paused at that, pulling her hands back to her side.
"I understand," she said slowly, meaningfully, "and I hope you are able to work at the office again soon. If you're not too busy with... things, we should do dinner tonight." Her eyes flitted towards the bed. "Or perhaps just meet elsewhere."
I stood up, leaving the treacherous coffee at rest. This was something Phirenaius hinted at, was that it may cause strain. Whether he knew Vanessa was a friend or an occasional bedfellow, I'm not sure. But seeing the hurt in her eyes when I had to hide something, that started to make me realize just what I had signed up for.
"That sounds great, Vanessa. I'd love to do that. You give me a time and I will meet you there. Or maybe we can meet at your place, if you're so inclined. But for now, I have to... " I trailed off, at a loss for words.
"Yes, I can see you're busy. I'll see you tonight at local 7. We'll go to the new noodle bar." She nodded, then turned to leave. It was a formal tone. I knew the tone, she was annoyed that I was hiding things, but she also picked up that I couldn't say anything. At least her being familiar with our policies she understood why I couldn't. But I know that feeling. I've been on the other side, and it's frustrating.
After she left, I set a timer for an hour before or meeting time, to make sure I broke away and prepared for a meal out. Noodle bars were popular this cycle. Several new food locales switched to it and provided some spectrum of crafted foods. Some specialized in long, thin kinds in a salty broth, and others in heavy thick sheets in a variety of sauces and toppings. This one advertised plenty of odd shapes and custom cooking. I think she chose it just because it wasn't Novost-owned. Independent restaurateurs still started up from time to time, sometimes franchised from a bigger group, other times just a new Sprawl denizen trying to make a living outside of the Novost control. Besides trendy, I think it was high value this round for nutrition scores. Vanessa had been scoring well on her meals lately.
Pulling back up the work screens, I felt a bit guilty. I was looking at this case primarily from how I could learn about me. It's why I sank so many hours and nights into it. But the primary objective was to find out why Travis died now, not five years ago. Vanessa gave me a wake-up call, which was probably her intention. She was also a good investigator, after all. Not answering my messages and such a few days after getting called in, from a party I was distant at? She made the right call.
I cleared my digital workspace, and pulled up the relevant notes from the current case. Travis has been reported dead, along with some unknown number of other people, in the polar south of the city. There were only scattered body fragments left, which was gruesome in its own right, but I had to review it. Preliminary ballistics calculated it was around 12 cubic centimeters of a high-grade chemical explosive. It was enough to carbonize most materials in close proximity, and the rest were charred remnants. From the bio screen we isolated at least two other DNA patterns.
But this is where things get weird. The area where it was found was an unallocated maintenance corridor in a dense residential sector. Most schematics of the area show it as utility space, but it didn't have the normal piping or conduits expected for it. It was also suppose to be walled, and there were no apparent indicators that the previous walls has been removed recently. It looked like the whole corridor has been rebuilt to act as a meeting space. The blast ripped through the walls around the center, blistering out into adjacent units. There was one other bystander who had a limb mangled by it, but he was full resident and was having his leg regenerated. For pain management, they induced a comatose state, and he'd be out for at least 36 hours. So he wouldn't be of help for an interview until then.
The blast pattern and carbon makes it look like the explosive detonated between two of the people, Travis and one of the others. The third was nearby, but not as close. Based off the spread, looks like it was a targeted charge. I queued up some additional blast pattern calculations to see what shape the charge may have been, maybe give a better understanding of what was happening. But there was only so much I could learn from a blast, especially in an effectively sterile room, so I needed to expand the scope.
I tried to pull all the local monitoring segments, see if I could re-create the pedestrian traffic. It was a tight residential corridor, no autocab traffic directly to it, and only winding service halls leading to it. The building wasn't even freestanding anymore, from the densification of the adjacent shops and housing. Most walls were connected, or reinforcing each other. I opened a few of the maintenance notifications for these, but a handful out of thousands wouldn't tell me much. And there wasn't any easily indexable materials on them for this building alone, so I'd need some other pivot point.
Bio scanners were frequent in the area, but none of them were tied to cameras or geotags, so apart from a general vicinity, I had no idea who went where. Taking all of the scanners within a 4 block radius yielded 4,682 distinct genetic markers over the 24 hour window surrounding the detonation, which at least included the hour prior to the detonation when Travis arrived. Still too much volume, and apart from spot checks, I'd need something better to refine it with. I'd filter tenants, but maybe they did live there. It would explain how they knew the corridor was available. But still, that seemed tenuous.
I leaned back in my chair, stretching my hands above my head, getting all sorts of pops from joints. "Huh." I looked at my hands blocking the ceiling, something felt like it was at the edge of reach. "There were no other marker hits for the two other strands."
Genetic markers were odd, they weren't a full genomic sequences, but just a few base pairs that are distinct enough to tag a person. These get categorized and mapped, like a serial number for humans, and stored in the respective federated databank. It was sort of like a hash, collisions were possible, but unlikely. Lots of DNA was repeated sequences, but those didn't make sufficient markers, so the markers were just the distinct portions. Travis was tagged from the remnants found, and reviewing the scanners found the marker presence.
So maybe the problem was not that they weren't on record, though that was part of it, but that they weren't even marked. Markers were an active thing on a person. They mapped to a system, but they still had to have some physical representation. These two may have blocked their markers, or never even had them. I queried to see where the common marker injection points were for humans in Novost, and other Feds. Hands and shoulders looked like the predictable spots. I requested what they communicated with, but that was flagged as sensitive and Phirenaius would have to approve access. Maybe this is what he meant when the medical results were odd.
In the mean time, if something were blocking more than just theirs, there should be a noticeable dip in the scanner results during that window. I kicked off another job to populate each scanner with active markers by 10 second intervals to see what patterns would emerge. Outliers could be quickly calculated, but those were still prone to error. Math was exact, people weren't.
I stood up and stretched while several screens monitored progress. Usually these were blazingly fast operations, but sometimes they needed to fetch archived data, or go through approval chains. I think those chains were intentionally delayed, but I couldn't prove it. Or wouldn't, since it gave time for a bit of pacing and another cup of coffee, and a quick meal. While the fabbing box prepared a nutrient bar for me, this one flavored and textured like a beef steak and mild cheese wrapped in a pastry, I paced the room.
Vanessa's comment about my setup made me contemplate it again. The room was modest. I didn't find much in the way of furniture to adorn it, but I had plenty of shelves littered with objects. Some from past investigations, others trinkets from parties and trips around Novost. Little things to remind me of events that I remembered. But there was one shelf, on the other side of the room, that held items from the other Felix, or whoever. Those were pieces I had momentary recognition of, where something called to me from it, some cross amnesia synesthesia. Food was my primary trigger, pulling in smells and tastes from something I couldn't place. This steak and cheese thing was one of them. It didn't count for many dietary points, and Im sure Vanessa would criticize me for it, but it felt good. Those liquors did too, but I didn't need that right now.
Some data trickled in, showing me more strange results. But one bit of interest was that there was a noticeable gap where the number of active markers dipped. This was a usable pattern. I expanded the field of search for other intervals with a noticeable drop, to see if I could get some associated camera spots or other trackers. Now that I knew there was some way the bio scanners were being avoided, there was something to work with. Dense housing like this lacked most other visual processors, so proximity scanners were the common solution. It also meant if someone found a way to defeat, or at least mask those, then picking a meeting spot where the scanners could be blinded made for an idea locale.
I added some annotations to the case file. This gave strong evidence that the room was used for unsanctioned trades within the Epsilon Sprawl. In the middle of typing some theories and pulling financial transaction records for Travis to try and correlate things, a new query returned, with a high priority notice. The DNA for the other two humans showed neither were marked, as I suspected, but that one was kinetically-active. That just changed things dramatically, and before I could even review it, Phirenaius was already trying to contact me.
