Schism (1-2)

First Out

Paul watched from the oily street as the saccharine colored lights from ambulances, firetrucks, and police cars bounded over the dank, pulsing scene of the accident. Unlike the other officers, the hood of his blue mackintosh lay between his scapulae, exposing him to the acidic rain that pounded down from the muggy September night. Later, he expected to find his blond hair brittle as spun glass, poking out of an irritated scalp. Didn't matter. He was far more uncomfortable with it on.  Stepping onto the sidewalk over a clogged gutter, he let two paramedics rush by him. He watched as they picked up a wet, limp body from the gritty cement and laid it on a stretcher. One covered the corpse with a blanket that bloomed red in several places while another fastened it with straps. They had a half dozen more to pack away before they could be done. Paul wondered what those people were thinking before the car had careened into them. Did they have a second between the pain of impact and shock to ask whatever it is a dying person asks himself?

Off to the side, a circle of wet, bedraggled people Paul assumed to be the tenants of the darkened building had formed around a police officer who had her hands up in a placating gesture that was having no effect on their undulating clamor. Hopefully the police woman would be able to cull out one valuable piece of information from all the noise. Paul wasn't optimistic though as under normal conditions there was a culture of reticence and distrust of police. Especially when a potential murder was involved.

An officer with crossed arms over a barrel chest stood on the stoop that led into the confines of the building. Paul looked at him a moment, then past him. Either the car that had plowed into it or the geomagnetic storm had knocked out power to the building because the electricity for the rest of the North East had been up for half and hour. Both occurrences had probably contributed to the decrepit apartment's further degradation. A lighting tripod had been set up in narrow foyer, silhouetting more busy shapes, dryer variations of the ones that moved around beneath the canopy.

Paul's eyes stayed on the car as he walked parallel to it. The roof had puckered like a pair of split, anemic lips, right down the middle under a chunk of bricks. Smeared across the driver's door, streaks of coagulated blood shone blackly against the white light that flooded the area from more of the squat tripods. Through the broken driver side window, Paul spotted something strange. The car appeared totally empty, just a frame encasing nothing. It was then he noticed the spindle of rebar that needled through the windshield in over a dozen places, making it droop like moth eaten cloth.

“Detective Mardel,” the hulking blue form on the stoop shouted.

“Yeah.”

“They're waiting upstairs. Third floor.”

“They told me in the message,” Paul grunted and crossed into the building.

The foyer smelled of cigarettes and stale air. Breathing in, he could taste dust collecting in the back of his mouth, making him salivate so his tongue didn't stick to his palate. Blinding white light from the tripod tore at his eyes and he had to lift a hand in defense against the glare. A chrome glint brought Paul's attention to a pile of cheap furniture that had been tipped and thrown against the wall. Chairs, an end table, and a rotten couch engaged in an inanimate orgy. Blobs of foam pushed out of torn imitation leather like the innards of a bloated, dead animal. Paul wondered if this had been left here since the flood riots. He shook his head slowly.

The officers in here were dressed in similar blue rain slickers, but they wore blue surgical masks that obscured even more of their faces. They were a ragtag knock-off of better funded crime scene investigation units. One of the blue humanoids emerged from a doorway to Paul's right, trailing the smell of concrete dust. Before the door had clanged shut, Paul managed to catch just a sliver of linoleum floor littered with gray debris and the crushed front end of the car jutting awkwardly into the building. Paul turned away and found the stairs that led up to the reason he was called here.

#

Paul stopped in front of the open doorway where a blue form knelt, peeling a metallic strip from the mottled door knob. The figure turned its nondescript face up to Paul and nodded then went back to work. It must have sent out a ping through the Grid for his identification then sent it to whoever was leading this team which meant he could just wait for whoever it was to find him. He imagined the signal passing through his skin and being picked up by the receiver/transmission component made of conductive strips of organic polymer that lined his ribs which linked into a number of cell-based computation units then fed into his brain via a bundle of thick nerves.

Please don't let Darmin be on this, he begged to the emptiness in his head while he slid past the figure and into the small apartment.

It was sparse to say the least; it could have been almost ascetic had it not been for the clutter that was piled in lopsided mounds around the room. The kitchen was a scrap yard of containers: Mexican, Chinese, burger joints. Some blue person sorted through the mess, handling each slimy container with pinched fingertips despite the gloves. In a cramped bathroom, two blue figures jostled back and forth, trying to maneuver. When one would crouch, the other would stand and vice versa, like pistons. And then, in a chair by the door to the bedroom, like a corrupted nucleus surrounded by scampering blue electrons, was the corpse.

The head hung over the back of the swivel chair, letting auburn hair fall back from a pock marked forehead in which dull green eyes stared out past Paul's shoulder. A drying trail of vomit extended from the corner of his mouth. Paul guessed that he might have been around mid to late twenties and, judging by the apartment, was at most barely bobbing above poverty line.

“Detective Mardel,” a muffled voice said from beside him. He turned and recognized the eyes at once though the rest of the face was covered in a surgical mask. They were small little beads that squinted and opened like a valve of some kind, slurping in the world around it like a tick. Right now it was Paul's tick and all he wanted to do was get the tweezers and yank its blue, skinny little head out of his skin.

“Darmin. So, what have you got?”

“His name's Thomas Drole. Funny situation he got himself into, huh?” Darmin chuckled with a sound that should have belonged to a sticking ignition. 

Paul suppressed a wince at the attempt at humor and continued. “Who found him?”

“Pretty much anyone who crossed this floor. From what we've heard so far, the car hit the building so hard it knocked some doors open and whata-ya know, behind door number three was our corpse.”

“I take it there are no witness statements.”

“Try getting anything out of these assholes. That's why I stuck the rookie on it. Give her a sense of who she's protecting and serving.”

“Have a cause of death?”

“Can't say yet,” Darmin said, now composed. “No external wounds of any kind. No detectable trauma. In fact, the rat was still wired into his external memory console.” Paul checked each aspect of the scene as Darmin flung it out.

“Nice array isn't it?” Paul asked, moving closer to examine the make.

“Bet your ass. Don't know who he had to service to get it but, man! I wouldn't think they'd even give someone like him an advertisement pay-off system.”

Paul blew air from between pursed lips. “It's an Mnemos Legacy model I think. You'd be serving ad-space for the rest of your life and probably of your kids' for that matter to pay off this kind of hardware.” Paul became self-conscious of the advertisements others saw when their systems pinged him. Having a whole network of artificial nerves and organic computing modules running through his body wasn't so bad but having everyone know that his cells had been cultured, converted into processing units, then implanted back into him for a price he couldn't pay was an embarrassment that nagged him.

“Well, we'll turn it on once we get it back to the lab so we'll find out how deep our little coffin dweller was in,” he heard Darmin say in an ebullient voice. “It's gotta be stolen,” he added.

Paul looked at the flat black machine lying on the rough table surface. It was a simple plastic rectangle. Along the front of it little inert LEDs caught the hazy light of the room and reflected it back in sharp points. A power button was set into the middle of the face-plate, its unlit symbol a dark blotch. The transdermal electrodes ran from a port on the far side of the machine and terminated in two adhesive knobs that still clung to the cooling skin of what used to be Thomas Drole.

“Total space case I bet you,” the exasperating voice said. “When we pump his guts, we'll find a fiesta of colors from some street corner pharmacy. He probably stumbled on a bad combo and didn't know enough to pull out of whatever he was doing.”

Maybe, Paul thought. It wouldn't exactly be the first time he'd seen a Grid-skid mixing and matching his pills like a game of Russian Roulette, spin the cylinder, and hit a live round while completely absorbed in another world.

“What a waste.”

“Huh?” Darmin blurted.

“Nothing. Do you have a possible time of death?”

A crash of broken glass shot through the room from the kitchen, wiping the first part of what Darmin said away with it. “-during the geomagnetic storm.”

Paul turned and stopped at the threshold that opened into the shallow bedroom. 

“We've found mostly data slides in there. Some hacked storage systems, illegal software. Porn. Typical stuff.”

Another blue clone had stacked orange, plastic squares on the rumpled, slightly yellow and stiff sheets of the bed. In another pile, several obsolete hard drives were laid out. The clone was picking up one slide at a time and passing them under a dark, flat wand that led down through a thick cord to a bulky case that stood on the floor next to the clone's khaki pants legs. He wondered how much longer the data collector would be functioning. It had been dumped on them by its producer, SpecTools, after they had come out with a new, more dependable series that didn't have the bad habit of destroying the original copies.

He walked back, feeling Darmin's eyes perforating him as he resumed his place before the corpse. There was something eery about the way it looked back at him while connected to his exterior memory unit. The thought of what he was doing before he'd died tantalized Paul. People don't just die. There was always something unfinished. There was always that one thing that they were going to do, about to do. What was Thomas going to do before he died? What was he looking for?

Paul placed his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, letting himself get lost in thoughts as they popped up. Before he could get far, he remember the company he was in. He straightened up and turned, noting how the air tasting particularly sour around where Darmin stood. He could picture the smirk that worked Darmin's pale lips beneath the round mask, the myopic amusement Darmin must find in his small cues and quirks.

“How soon will you be loading your findings onto the network?” Paul said, staring past the thin blue tick that had picked up a tattered gaming magazine and was thumbing through the pages. Darmin didn't stir.”When will I be getting the data?” Paul said, louder.

The polished marbles of Darmin's eyes slid over and locked onto Paul. The small gaze seemed to snap a photo with a little blink, then refocus and meander around the room. “I think we're done here.” He clapped his gloved hands. When they didn't produce the crisp and authoritative sound he desired, he pulled them off and tried again. This time the sound sparked and the clones stopped their work. “Alright everybody,” he shouted, his cheeks pulling up the straps that held the mask to his face, “pack it up. The medics will pack the stiff.” Again, the corrosive laugh. Little nervous giggles emerged from here and there around the room but they never meshed.

“Great to have you stop by!” Paul heard as he strode to the exit. He found a certain measure of comfort in being alone in the darkened hall, away from that room and its business. The power still hadn't been turned back on and maybe never would. He splayed his fingers, feeling the tendons tense, pull at their moorings. On either side of him, doors stood open into dark rooms where things stood in charcoal outlines. It would probably cost too much to fix whatever had been burned or broken. He could picture these rooms six months down the line, the torn wallpaper hanging like charred skin from a body caught in a fire. Rats would scurry around squatters picking through whatever the former tenants had forgotten to take with them.

#

The dermatrodes made the connection to the output pad under the skin of Paul's left forearm. His unique, assigned genetic key signed him into the department's secure network. His onboard biocircuitry system sent a series of electrical pulses to the occipital lobe of his brain, activating several pathways. Form came first, atavistic, and crude. As the program worked in more detail, differentiated  solid shapes into carved outlines, color became noticeable. It was like a colony of algae taped in time-lapse, a spreading pale blue and yellow that covered the three-dimensional image of the NYPD shield then fell away into a nimbus white expanse.

When the entire system had loaded, a small, low-res rendering of the NYPD shield spun at the top of his vision. A command box hung in the bottom right corner, superimposed over a small beige box surrounded by inlaid, metallic trim that was beginning to peel away. A small interactive ticker floated above the external modem, advertising the page for Klein Systems. From a column of large, blocky icons that trailed down the left side of his vision, Paul selected the Department Section list, dialing straight into the forensics system. A short list of cases he'd worked on appeared in gray. At the top, a pulsing green dot marked the case he'd just been logged into. He opened the link and a loading screen popped up in a misty cloud that obscured the sight of the processors slowly compiling resources into a coherent display.

The chair creaked when Paul sat back, huffing at the delay. In the interim time though, he thought about the apartment. He scratched his head, pulling little shards of hair away on his hand which he wiped on his pants. His thoughts didn't get far into the strangeness of the scene he'd walked into when the optic output showed a series of files. He knew the one he wanted and immediately entered the report file detailing collected electronic evidence. There had been the data slides and hard drives from the bedroom and the Mnemos and onboard internal circuitry from the body in the main room. He read through the list of items collected.

Fourteen data slides (150 Terabytes each) Location: Bedroom

Three rotational hard drives (2: 1 Terbyte; 1: 10 Terabytes) Location: Bedroom

Klein Systems Direct Track Biocomputer Array

Then nothing. Paul furrowed his brow. Darmin hadn't cataloged the new Mnemos memory system that had been found with the corpse. He exhaled through his nostrils and leaned against the chipped edge of the composite board desk. At least there was nothing logged from the kitchen. The team's sloppiness and Darmin's hasty retreat played in Paul's favor. Darmin could only notice what he could pick at, what he could exploit. He'd never be able to pick up on the way those green eyes stared back towards the kitchen. There was something he was going for, a last unfinished to-do.

For now, all Paul could do was speculate what it was that he had been going for. Could be that Darmin was right, that he took a bad combo and realized what was happening. Maybe he had been rushing to his stash, trying to piece together what he'd taken so he could figure out how much shit he was in. Could be something else. Speculation wasn't going to help. He needed to get back to the scene. Only this time the tick and his legion of blue blobs wouldn't be looking over his shoulder everywhere he went.

In the mean time, he had to get in touch with Darmin and find out why the rest of the evidence hadn't been entered into the system. The windows in his head imploded out of existence, replaced again by the white background and clunky items. The display faded out, just a slight dimming in the contrast, like a cloud passing in front of the sun. Paul blinked and turned his eyes upwards, holding his breath. The bars of bare fluorescents held a steady illumination. Some of them had strands of blue ribbon twisting within them, others only blinked fitfully. Then, in unison, they faded, rebounded, and winked out.

Again, the chair protested as he threw his back against the hard foam. Bright letters announced that the network connection had been lost. The building had been retrofitted with a patchwork electrical system and frighteningly, much of the system was from the turn of the century. It was a veritable miracle that there wasn't a power failure every other day but it looked like the evening's geomagnetic storm had thrown the system over the edge.

Several storms usually struck a week now. Paul wasn't sure exactly how it worked, but he'd heard that somehow the upper atmosphere was weakening, letting too much radiation from the sun in. The end result were changes in the magnetic pulse of the Earth that interrupted everything from communications to vast swaths of the electric grid. There was nothing that could be done about it so instead a centralized system for sending an alert when one of these outbursts was imminent was created. Manhattan's system would have triggered warning lights and started flashing countdowns on every machine connected to the Grid, letting everyone know that they risked the safety of anything still drawing power when the pulse hit them. The car that had plowed into the building probably never got an instruction package to warn the driver that time was running out. With no power steering or Sonar Assist, momentum just let the chips fall where they would, even if that was a busy sidewalk or a dim corridor.

The, “labs,” were just across the Castle Hill border, in the Story Avenue industrial park. The clock in the left corner of his vision told him that it was close to nine. The traffic would be light which meant he could be there in maybe under an hour. If he didn't find the Mnemos in the evidence locker, Paul would have to ride through another case that got filed under Unsolved. Another death would disappear into the developing mass grave of Soundview with no explanation for it. He looked up at a window near the ceiling. Glass shards of rain clung to the other side of the pane but it didn't look like any more would be joining them.

In My Father's Carnal House

A wall of obscenities. Everywhere and every imaginable configuration. The background of Sammy's site had been covered with layers of these words. No matter how many pages she went through, there was always more of them to find. Then, off the main message boards, there had been a whole collection of pictures. Pornographic depictions of vulgarities constructed a patois of every imaginable contortion the human body could be twisted into. Another area of the site was locked up and unresponsive while the code governing the text layout on the Activism board was an unrecognizable jumble.

“Troll Company bastards,” Sammy mumbled into the din of the Aurora Spark club.

She pushed an errant strand of dyed red hair back to its place on top of her head and logged in with her moderation rights. She was the dark-skinned Valkyrie who would deliver the site from the squalid hands of the interlopers. In the physical world, beneath the obscene digital wall, another, made of sweat and flesh throbbed and jostled. They were a kaleidoscope of bioluminescent implants that looked like the best tryptamine trip one could hope for. Above the human sea, a thick mist of advertisements sparkled. Every one of them was for Klein Systems. However, Sammy wasn't there for the dancing; she needed a solid and fast connection and her apartment was not meeting either of those requirements. The Aurora Spark club was the best venue in town when you were stuck in Soundview territory. No one asked what you were doing. Just sit in a booth far back from the dance floor and away from the bar with its girls flaunting cheap flashing pectoral implants and the guys with back-room installed skeletal muscle tracers.

Resuming her work, she took a look at the stripped down, code skeleton. Someone had torn off her favorite background and applied a multiplier with no upper boundary to the invading words. What the hell's Hex doing?, Sammy wondered. He, or possibly she, should have been on this. At least the regular contributors seemed to be holding their own, even taking on those who had fallen right into the trap of rage the Troll Company had engineered.

RingoBar says: O my gotz! I am like the leet hax! Get a life and stop coming here.

DJSequence says: Don't bother with the Troll Company bro. Bunch a virgins with nothing better to do than sit in their parent's basement, think they're cool on the web, and wank.

RingoBar says: Doesn't matter. I'm sick of noobs thinking they're internet tough guys and ruining on us! Man if I ever found one of you dicks this would look like nothing.

Beneath his post, a grainy picture showed what looked like human remains. Sammy honestly couldn't tell since a lot of it was just raw, shredded bands of muscle with plumes of yellowish adipose tissue smeared over bleached sand. Sammy readjusted the point of view so that it panned down. Out of the pile of gore, a single, leg poked out. It was long and thin, the knee bent as if it had been in the process of running. She tried to imagine just from the photo what the rest of the girl or maybe young boy must have looked like.

DJSequence says: Really poor taste man. The sheriffs are taking a holiday today aren't they? Will someone please ban these twats?!?!

Your wish is my command, Sammy thought. She added RingoBar to the permanently banned list. Though the site was supposed to be rough around the edges, it was a way to consolidate what was happening, not to mock it. Somewhere along the line, the world had caught its own version of AIDS, right around the time humans were finally on to how to defeat their own. The entire planet had gone through fevers and chills, trying to kill as much of the infection that covered and poisoned it as possible. The problem was that the infection was them, humans. The other problem was that those that didn't succumb to the droughts, the ice storms, and the diseases not seen for decades had to face the mass migrations, the camps, and the factions that warred for the scant resources. The mainstream media in the countries that had enough resources to compensate had played it down. Flip to any news source and you'd find the latest development in CytoCorp's line of products or how some Japanese car company was buying what remained of the American industrial complex. And if you scrolled to the bottom of the page, there might be a little blurb about a camp that spread for miles, like a massive festering pustule of terrified, starving humanity. Of course there wouldn't be pictures. Just the statistical assessment of how many square miles it took up and how medical aid was spread too thin to do much good. There were stories hidden in those numbers, stories she considered herself fortunate that she had escaped.

That's when Sammy had had the idea to get the pictures. As many as she could from where ever she could. People had shown up, been sickened but kept looking. After three years, she had over seventy thousand hits and almost twenty thousand posts on record. After the first year, she'd run into problems funding the server. Trafficking ad filters wasn't bringing in enough money but she wasn't going to let the site fold. Looking at room after room of carnage, suffering, and the outrage and empathy it provoked in people had made her feel connected. She was doing something for all those people that would simply disappear; she was telling someone, screaming it in lurid snips of media into the swirling expanses of the Grid and people were calling back. But when she'd put out her hand, there wasn't such an overwhelming response.

Hosting the server had been difficult as the size and complexity of the site exploded. She'd rigged up an impromptu distribution system across a dozen cheap data slides but the site had simply gotten to be too much and teetered on the edge of crashing. Then, with options drying up,  she'd gotten an invite to a secure block. Hesitantly, she'd accepted, cruising to the nondescript location out by a collection of obsolete router/emergency stream subroutines. The program had been inconspicuous. It had a simple graphical key pad overlay that covered one obsidian face of it. In the message, she'd been given the code and she entered it in. Once the key had been accepted, she got a message from an anonymous source agreeing to help fund the project. He (she always felt it was a he) had said that he felt admiration for someone who would put together a site dedicated to those that had been ruined by irresponsible progress. She'd appreciated his concern and generosity considering his condition was like her own. Despite choosing a covert spot and having some good security measures, he still had left his IP coordinate cache number hanging out. She'd sent him an IPCC falsifier and told him she never wanted to see another scrap of his personal information again. To her, he would always be just Hex. He'd thanked her for watching out for him and she'd thanked him for giving the site more time.

From there, they'd worked together putting together a testimony to the hidden sufferings of their species. They'd written programs together to secure the site against the Troll Company. Predictably, the marauders would find a way past it and they'd have to return the back-up of the site. This time, they'd reeked havoc and no one had stopped them.

Sammy's tired eyes played tricks on, generating strange hazy orbs that oscillated in the corners of her vision. The new program Hex had given her had kept her up all night. He'd sent it to her, asking that she check it out and tell him what she thought. It was a courtesy between hackers to investigate any program they were given and told to run; past dissatisfied customers were sometimes slow to forgive and quick to settle scores on botched jobs with crippling force. Sammy wasn't exactly sure if that was the case with Hex's new program but she knew she'd never seen a hack like it. Its structure was redundant, violent even. The main code kernel was stored in the upper quarter of the program. The rest of it was an ugly mess of base-level instructions. Its structure was so densely packed that altering one part would change another, creating a tidal wave of mutations that would render it useless to her. Still, she hadn't felt quite safe storing it in her internal memory modules and had decided to save it to her external memory system.

Well, he'd better be on later, she thought. The blaring music cut out, leaving just the vivacious screams of the crowd demanding more from the DJ which was just a library of music set to shuffle. It made the atmosphere more exciting to think of someone up in the booth spinning old vinyls. Sammy found it harder to concentrate on what she was doing without the steady blur of music drowning out the sporadic hoots that from the floor.

She deleted the offending words from the command line then accessed her picture file. A search bar slid in from the side of the window into which she typed, “violet_daze.” A reticle popped up in the center of the screen before accelerating outwards in a perfect Fibonacci spiral. Pictures were knocked out of its path as it moved deeper in the folder. The reticle was just a blur now, a trail of light that formed a spectral circle. She felt an almost physical jerk when it stopped on the picture she had wanted. Her vision filled with a delicate fractal pattern made entirely out of violets. They stretched into the darkness, connected and recapitulating theoretically to infinity. It was an incredible structure made by a contributor whose family was still in the roughest hit parts of Africa. If Sammy's system had been powerful enough, she could have plummeted maybe a thousand orders of magnitude down the deliciously detailed lattice of crisp flowers without encountering a single tear or discrepancy.

With the file name entered into the background bracket, she went into the picture sector of the site. A level at a time, she selected all traces of the Troll Company's presence then hit the delete button. She had a back-up system at her apartment she could use to restore the site back to what it had been yesterday. That was the best she could do since the geomagnetic storm had canceled the automated back-up schedule. In the meantime, she flipped back to the top page and wrote a note apologizing for the defacement.