Below you will find the first two chapters of my debut novel Connection Terminated. If you enjoy it, sign up for my email list for future chapters and the full release!
CHAPTER 1 – KAIN
He drew hard on the synthetic cigarette, exhaling the thick vapor slowly through his nose.
“Claire, gimmie an update.” The dashboard screen beeped and lit up, revealing an overhead view of several men loading boxes from the back of a light gray van and into another in the middle of a dark alleyway.
Kain took another long draw as he leaned in closer, the vapor filling the car around him like a sleazy night club..
“Sir, the buyer has arrived, and they are exchanging the merchandise,” Claire said, her smooth female voice sounding deceptively human, especially for an A.I. She piloted a small recon drone high over the alleyway where his car sat around the corner from the illicit deal.
A group of local augmentation jackers secured someone willing to sell them Protomet-172, a special enriched metal used in manufacturing human augmentations: arms, legs, organs. Anything these days was replaceable or upgradeable, and like most tech it created a seedy back-alley market demand for low-cost knockoffs.
A highly regulated material, only a few companies possessed the coveted license to buy, manufacture, and sell Protomet-172. Black market sightings a rarity, Captain Moore assigned Kain to the task of tracking the seller down before it landed in the wrong hands. Unregistered augmentations caused rampant issues as of late, and a shipment of this size posed an imminent threat (and a sizable profit) if Kain failed to stop them.
“Do a thermal scan of the area, I don’t want any surprises this time.” A moment later a view of the two vans appeared on the screen, a mixture of green and orange with spots of hot red floating in between.
“Should I connect you to the Captain and call in reinforcements?”
“I love that you know the answer already but feel compelled to ask me anyway,” he said, taking another deep drag on his cigarette.
Kain groaned as he mulled the idea over.. Protocol dictated for him to contact the station and report his meetup. The 322’s would be dispatched, a group of heavily augmented soldiers whose purpose was to handle what would be a messy situation such as this. Kain knew better, but he also didn’t care.
The memories of his dream the night before roamed still fresh in his mind, and he wanted something to help distract him.
The same nightmares haunted him on and off for years, ever since his deployment. They’d go away for a while, but they were more frequent recently. He needed to talk to someone, to get some help beyond the basic medication he took. Kain never used the medical benefits from his service. Less of a matter of pride and more of a lack of time than anything else. Or at least that’s what he told himself.
“Claire, prepare for combat recon.”
If an A.I could complain, Claire certainly would have. But she gave a calm and soft, “Yes, Sir,” like always. He didn’t need the risk, but after years and years of training off-world and two-and-a-half tours of duty, the rush of combat called to him like a distant lover. He craved it. Yearned for it.
Kain finished the cigarette and stepped out of the car, throwing the smoke cartridge on the ground as it flashed and evaporated. He pressed his thumb against the truck of the car. It beeped once and popped open.
“How many are we looking at?” he asked. He pulled out and loaded his rifle—a personal item not normally afforded to detectives. His good buddies down at the armory had set him up with a complete package a while back, off the books.
“Sir, I count seven men,” she said. Kain paused for a moment at the words, contemplating the situation, but continued putting on his body armor and getting the rest of his gear ready.
Once he finished, he pulled a final box out of the trunk. The small metal case contained four small metal syringes, each filled with a bright green liquid.
“What’s my estimated tolerance today,” he pulled one syringe out and closed the case, setting the thin metal injector on the trunk lid. He stared at the liquid inside, transfixed. He wiped his palms on his pants as he picked it up again, twisting it slowly between his fingers.
“Sir, by my calculations you will have approximately eight minutes of enhanced physical movement.”
“Shit.” A whole minute less than last time. “You sure?” he asked.
“Sir, based on your body mass and frequency of usage—” she began before he cut her off.
“Yeah, yeah ok.” The drugs made him feel like the street trash who shot hacked-together chems into their system for a quick high. But it would be suicide to try and go at it without them, and he needed the stims to even the odds. It was a constant back-and-forth battle between what he knew was right and what deep down he knew he wanted.
He glanced up over the car at the vans parked only a few dozen yards away. He knew they wouldn’t be there much longer. Time to move.
Closing the trunk, he moved to the mouth of the alley. He took a deep breath and lifted up his shirt sleeve, the crook of his arm already riddled with little dark dots. He pressed the applicator against his arm and hit the button, the needle shooting the drug into his veins with a soft click.
The effects hit instantly. His arms and legs bulged inside his clothes as his muscles expanded. He hit the switch on the side of his vest releasing the helmet which popped up from his collar and swung down over his face. It wrapped around and connected behind his head with a metal snap. The heads-up display on the visor appeared, showing the alley across from him as Claire marked each hostile on the screen.
He took a moment to steady his breathing and Kain’s mind flashed back again to his dream: the black water engulfing him, his body thrashing violently against the enclosing darkness swirling and surrounding him and filling his lungs. He struggled for air, for control, but the water was too strong, and he sank down into the crushing abyss.
Kain raised his rifle and started jogging toward the vans. His heart raced, pumping hard from the juice. His muscles itched with energy, his mind sharp and focused. Not as strong an effect as it used to be, but very intoxicating nonetheless, and he barely noticed himself grinning.
As he got closer, he raised his badge. The holographic screen popped up and displayed his credentials large enough for them to see.
“Gentlemen, can I see some permits for that merchandise?” he called, scanning the group carefully, trying to map the path each man would take when things went south. One man turned, pointed at Kain and shouted to the others. Seconds later a volley of bullets erupted in his direction.
Shit.
Kain broke into a full run, speeding across the space between them in an instant. He reached the first van and planted his feet hard, throwing his full weight against the front of it. The van skidded backward on its mag wheels, and he heard the deep thud as it hit two of the men on the other side.
The whole scene became a blur of chaos, gunfire, and smoke. The drugs dulled the world around him, letting him think and see faster and clearer then he would have been able to otherwise. Claire buzzed far overhead, giving him a beat-by-beat update of the surrounding scene. He swung out from behind the van, carefully shuffling sideways as he fired meticulously, each round assigned to its target with precision.
His death waltz.
The dance of calculated and rhythmic destruction whose instructions sat ingrained deep within his bones. Alive, seeing the world as vibrant and clear as ever. He kept his breathing heavy and even, his muscles demanding as much oxygen as possible.
More gunfire, and two of the men dropped in a spray of blood. Click, empty. He slung the rifle and pulled out his pistol. Bullets slammed into the side of the van he crouched behind. He returned fire. Exploding clatter rang out as his bullets tore through the metallic kneecaps of two more of the men. They were shitty street augs and not military spec limbs built to withstand small arms fire. The men collapsed to the ground, their metal body parts leaking fluid and refusing to respond.
More shots, Kain counted each bullet until he was out of ammo. He tried to keep his head clear and focused, but he struggled to breathe, his chest and lungs aching.
Only one smuggler still stood, a massive man decked out with three augmented limbs. Kain wondered how cranked past the standard tolerance they were, making it easy to rip him apart in seconds.
He strode forward. Kain tried to brace his feet for combat, but his leg muscles gave out. He stumbled backward and fell, barely catching himself as the rest of his muscles hit their peak and shut down. The massive smuggler drew nearer, his large metal fist pulled back. Panic started in his chest and rose into his throat.
A hammer slammed into Kain’s head. The sound of the man’s metal arm colliding with his helmet made his ears ring. The screens flickered hard, threatening to shut off. Another hammering blow and the metal mask bent inward, cutting into his lip. Something in his jaw popped, exploding pain through his neck. Blood dribbled down his chin. Kain reached into his pocket and barely got hold of the metal puck inside. Bringing it up, it beeped, attaching itself with a snap to the smuggler’s arm as it swung towards Kain’s face. Kain pointed at the nearest van. The puck beeped again and yanked the large man away, pulling him through the air and slamming him into the side of the van with a deep crunch.
Kain let out a huge sigh and collapsed on the ground. Red hot pain filled his body, pulsating in waves with every breath. A warmth ran over his arm from a large bullet hole in his right shoulder.
“Ok, now you can call backup,” he said and then passed out.
#
A few hours later Kain walked into the station, and towards his captain’s office. Several of the other officers glanced at him as he walked by, murmuring under their breath and pointing to the large bandages wrapped around his arm. He tried his best to block them out, but he caught one or two phrases “…dude has a death wish,” and “…with his condition too? Just reckless…” Kain brushed past the group of onlookers in the hall, refusing to acknowledge their glaring.
He knocked on the door and a moment later it slid open to reveal a rather extravagant-looking office. Metal shelves packed with old dusty books and awards lined the walls. Pictures of a man shaking hands and giving out commendations littered the large desk that sat in the middle of the room.
The desk itself had a large holo-screen up replaying Claire’s footage of the bust from earlier. The department issued Claire to him not only to help with his lack of technical capacities, but also to monitor him, given his history of “reckless behavior.”
The holoscreen disappeared. Behind it sat Captain Phillip Moore, a large and stern-looking middle-aged man. His massive white beard reached down in direct contrast to his clean-shaven head. He’d been Kain’s superior ever since he joined the force and had even championed him to make detective despite the whispers and backroom comments about Kain’s condition interfering with his work. Stunts like today didn’t help his case.
“Sit,” Moore said, his voice deep and gruff, his mouth stretched tight across his face. Kain sat through several conversations like this before, and Kain wondered if this one would be as explosive as the last.
“Captain, if I can—” Kain began, but the captain closed his eyes, mouthing the words again. Kain sat and braced himself for the onslaught of yelling.
The captain met Kain’s eyes and instead of going off on him as he expected, the words came out calm and soft. “Third time in the last four months Kain. Third time our guys had to come to scrape you off the ground barely conscious and beat to shit.”
His voice made Kain uncomfortable, gentler and more comforting than he used to. Kain preferred the yelling.
“What do I have to do to get you to stop trying to kill yourself, huh? When are you gonna figure out you can’t charge into these situations, half-cocked and full of that shit you keep pumping yourself with and expect to make it out every time?” He gestured to Kain’s arm, the injection mark still red and puffy from earlier.
“You don’t understand…” Kain began. He wanted to explain, to make sense of it, to put reason behind his actions even though he himself barely understood them half the time.
“I get it,” his captain said. “I understand. What you’ve done and what you’ve seen off-world. The mark it left on you. I get that. I know it’s difficult,”
“Do you?” Kain said, the words coming out much harsher than he intended. “Do you know what it’s like being the only fully human detective out there? Shit, maybe the only fully human person in the city. Do you know what it’s like knowing you only get one set of lungs? One heart? One liver? One set of arms?” His eyes flashed down to where the Captain’s own augmented arm sat against the desk, a gift from his wife on their twentieth wedding anniversary last year.
“While everyone else runs around with the freedom and comfort in knowing they can swap out their failed pieces for new ones? Hell, most do it for fun. You know what it’s like being looked down upon by your peers because you can’t lift a car or scan an entire building with upgraded retinas? Having everyone treat you like a delicate flower that needs protecting because you don’t get a second chance?” His voice shook, hands balled up tightly into fists. The anger raced through him. Always the same. The resentment boiled up fast in his chest, itching to explode out of him. He took a deep breath to try to calm down.
“There are new developments in neurological medicine every day—” The captain began but Kain shook his head.
“There’s no fucking cure, and there won’t be one,” he said, his voice flat now. “They’ve taken gallons of my blood over the years. I’ve had hundreds of tests run and they still don’t know what the hell happened.” He stood and reached for the door, trying not to let his anger spill over anymore.
“Wait,” the captain called to him.
Kain Paused.
“There was a murder up near the westward hills last night, some teenager. His parents are pretty upset. I want you to look into it, ME’s are reporting something strange is going on. Take the drive to cool off.”
Kain turned again, not caring if the captain had finished speaking, and continued through the door and back into the hall.
CHAPTER 2- KAIN
New Metro was a vast marvel of its time, a vast and expansive vista of progress and technology. It was the last great beacon of humanity on earth. It served as the blue planet’s main hub for all trade and business with the other remaining cities and the colonies on Luna and Mars. Built in what used to be the northern Midwest of the United States, it sat tucked in the middle of the border that used to separate the US and Canada. Years of rising sea levels had consumed over half of the continent’s land mass and pushed the population together into a concentrated bubble with New Metro in the center.
New Metro was diamond shaped, with the Dead Sea on the south and the empty deadlands everywhere else, littered with radiation and debris from years of war and famine.
It was born out of necessity and sustained by greed. A final place for humanity to make its stand on Earth. It wasn’t meant to be permanent, only a place to gather up and house those left until enough of the outer colonies stabilized enough to support them and future generations.
New Metro had thrived. The city had built its way from the bare necessities to a mega metropolis in only a few decades. With the invention of the augmentations, sickness and disease dropped dramatically, and the population soared until laws passed that required a D36 license to reproduce to keep the city from collapsing under its own rising population.
The city had grown by such a rapid pace that pollution choked the air and natural light out at an alarming rate, and while the massive recycler buildings helped, they were far too few to make any real difference. It gave everything a slight bittersweet feeling to have so many beautiful lights and advanced technology covered with a thick layer of grime and smoke.
Claire stopped the car at the top of the hill where several other officers stood gathered in various groups processing different parts of the scene. A perimeter of holotape ran around a large portion of the hill that flickered bright red and blue warnings as it marched around the area. The lights from the large billboards floating above everything cast an eerie shadow over the space where the murder took place.
Kain paused for a moment before getting out, contemplating starting another cigarette, but decided against it even as the stress triggered the itch started in the back of his throat, goading him to give into the temptation.
He walked towards what appeared to be the victim’s car parked in the middle of the small clearing. A trail of tiny markers led to a covered body. Blood crept out and covered the half-dead grass for a few feet in every direction.
“Yo, Detective!” One of the younger officers, Mike, motioned over to him. The word wriggled inside his mind like an insect caught in a closed window. He rarely ever did any true ‘detecting’. Machine learning processed and stored everything in a database somewhere. The human aspect of the job dwindled by the day. Kain ignored the itching feeling in his mind and passed through the holotape. His badge chimed as he approached the body.
The young cop stared at Kain for a moment, making a strange out-of-focus face as he attempted to open a neural link connection with him. After a brief second, the officer looked down at the ground, his face turning red.
“Aw shit, sorry…uh, what do you know so far?”
“Gimme all of it,” Kain said, pushing down his urge to feel insulted and instinctively reaching into his jacket for a smoke. He rolled the thin metal tube between his fingers before deciding against it and putting it back in the case. Kain lifted the cover some. The kid looked young, high school age or so. About a dozen large stab wounds were scattered around his chest.
The boy had not died easily.
Kain put the cover back and took a sharp breath, pushing the image down, burying it there amongst the sea of bodies already trapped inside his mind.
He’d seen his fair share of death on other planets—men and women caught up in various rebellions and attempted hostile takeovers. Those hardly phased him anymore. He became hardened to it long ago, taught to suppress emotions and get the job done. But kids…the kids always bothered him, no matter how many times. Maybe his humanity wasn’t completely gone from him yet.
“Ah, let’s see. We got a white male, seventeen, six foot one. Multiple close-range stab wounds with a medium kitchen knife.” Mike said, reading the holoscreen as it floated off the small terminal in his palm. Kain spotted a series of up-close photos of the wounds in the report, spots of bright red amongst the text.
“Any suspects?” Kain asked, looking at the trail of blood across the grass that ended at a picnic blanket.
“Oh, they didn’t tell you?” the young officer said. “We have the perp right over here. She’s the one who called it in, actually.”
Kain turned around puzzled. Several officers gathered around a young girl, only sixteen years old. She sat huddled over, hands cuffed in front of her, shaking in the cool air, the wind making the small lights of her skirt phase on and off.
“She called it in?”
“Yeah, she claims she’s got no memory of killin’ the guy. She blacked out suddenly and woke up standing over him with the knife. Funny thing is, we plugged right in and watched the feed and get this, there’s a fifteen-minute window where there’s just…nothing. Blackness. No neural data, audio or nothin’, right around the time he would have died. Super weird shit. Wanna see?”
The detective inside him wanted to, craved something strange and different from his boring and mundane, but the rest of him wasn’t so sure. He hated watching feeds.
“Yeah, hit me.” he said, praying he wouldn’t regret it. The officer went back to the van and grabbed a large dusty case and brought it over. Opening it, Kain saw the ancient bulky headset that would allow him see, hear, and sense what the victim experienced. It wasn’t near the clarity or sensation that a direct neural interface would be, but he didn’t have any other option.
Kain gingerly put the headset on, tightening the straps hard enough that little white spots appeared in his vision for a moment. The officer plugged the other end of the thick cable into the tablet and cued up the feed. The lasers in the headset shot the feed through Kain’s eyeballs and onto his brain and drool slipped out of the corner of his mouth. His body went numb and fell away, and in its place another sensation came forth, filling his mind and all his visions and thoughts of someone else.
Nothingness filled the world. An empty void without shape and color. She tried to think, to do anything, but her mind was empty. Not empty, but busy. Something filled her headspace, consuming everything she could see or hear like a vacuum. She tried to call out, to talk, or yell or move, but her body wouldn’t respond. The void built around her expanded out for what felt like an eternity. She struggled again to think, to form any pictures in her mind. Slowly they emerged from the blackness grey and washed out.
A meeting. No, a date. Kyle. A sweet guy. She remembered the tiny cuts on his face from his morning shave. He brought her up here in his father’s old beat-up car. They talked, discussed her family, his plans for after high school. The memories flashed like a broken neon sign—bright for only a half second, but missing a letter or three, and then gone.
She fought against the nothingness, struggled to move, to think, to talk. Whatever monster inside her head wouldn’t let go. The very act of thinking felt impossible. Something dark sat in her mind, occupied it, controlled it.
Maybe her neural implant malfunctioned, trapping her forever inside the prison of her own mind. She heard of that happening before, or maybe not.
Sarah stood lifeless, trapped in her own body for an eternity until a voice called to her, from somewhere deep in the blackness of her mind. Both far away and so close it itched in her throat.
“Thank you for your sacrifice. I will always remember you as my first. You’ve given me more than you will ever know.”
It was a calm voice, welcoming, that sounded much like her own.
The world popped.
Sarah’s vision returned, flickering in disjointed bands of color and shapes like a broken news broadcast. She stood on the overlook, a blanket with disheveled food and spilled drinks below her. Shaking her head, her view came into a sharper focus as her neural implant flickered her vision on and off and she just as quickly the world became normal again.
Sarah looked down at her wet hands, soaked in crimson blood that glimmered in the light of floating neon colored billboards around her. Kyle lay at her feet, the blade of a kitchen knife buried deep in his chest, a look of absolute horror frozen on his face.
Kain yanked the headset off and took a deep breath, trying to orient himself back into his own body and memories. Kain crossed paths with a lot of victim feeds over the years, and hated them all. Something about this one unsettled him, though. The emptiness of it. Normally a person’s feed teemed with thoughts and feelings—a mass of pictures and sounds. But this…this chilled him to his core.
“What about the other kid. Anything wrong with his feed?” Kain asked, gesturing back to the covered body behind them. Mike looked down at the screen floating off his hand again.
“They had dinner and talked. Pretty innocent. He made a move and she stabbed him in the gut. He tried to get away, but she chased after him and finished him off. She said some creepy shit before she did it too, ‘bout him being the first, but she doesn’t remember doing that neither,”
“Yeah I noticed that. So there may be more?” Kain said.
“No way to tell, but it certainly sounds like it.”
“Send the report to me,” Kain said, his mind ablaze.
He’d never heard of a neural link feed cutting out like that, much less during a traumatic event like this. Besides himself and a few others, the D-3742 Neural transmitters and receivers rested inside the neck of everyone remaining on earth and even a fair amount on the new colonies as well, linked directly into a person’s brain through the nerves in their spine. Specialized augmentations, the transmitters allowed for storage and conveyance of thoughts, sights, sounds, and basic communication. Touted as a pure marvel of technology and engineering, they had re-written the way humanity communicated with each other.
Only the company who made them and special police units such as his had direct access to the information. A layer of heavy encryption protected any prying eyes from getting to the data. Most people used the feeds to make home videos, calls and things like that, but Kain never heard of a complete feed blackout before.
“Any sign of physical tampering with her transmitter?” Kain asked as they walked over to the group of men gathered around the girl. They checked her vitals and asked questions. She shook in the frigid morning air, her skin pale and her eyes fixed on the body mere yards away.
“None. There’d be no way to, either. She’s young enough to have had it since birth. You couldn’t physically get to it without severing her spine.” Mike said, still looking at the data on his screen.
A lot of controversy erupted when the implants first came to the market. People made a huge uproar about privacy, claiming the augmentations went too far, that their lives weren’t private anymore. Fears of “Big Brother” being in their heads and such. But the company, The Theseus Collective, made a huge campaign to push them, offering many deep discounts and incentives on their other augmentations if people adopted the devices. The city saw a mass surge of acceptance after that. Money talks, as they say.
Once enough people came on board, the demand skyrocketed. The allure of a complete and perfect visual retelling of any and every moment of your life to recall back later became a huge marke. companies charged big money to make highlight videos for you, collections of birthday parties, best of videos, even the adult film industry used it to their own benefit.
The implants also gave way to the net, a super powerful and immersive simulation experience plugged directly into the user’s neural transmitter. The net let you go anywhere, do anything, and never realize you weren’t still sitting at home on your couch. Expensive as it was, people flocked to it in droves. They worked there, dated there, hell some of them even lived there. Kain himself never saw the appeal, not that he could even if he wanted to.
Eventually the implants became mandatory, but by then so many people had them that whoever still protested them got outnumbered. The move revolutionized law enforcement as well.
Afterwards, neural data and feeds reduced a great deal of violent crimes. Eyewitnesses made perfect evidence of any crime. He didn’t know anyone who didn’t have one besides the tunnel dwellers that lived beneath the city or out beyond the dead lands, well, except for himself. Kain had been off-world for most of the neural nets’ first years, never having the chance to voice his opinion on the matter, but it didn’t matter now anyway with his condition. He diverted his mind away from those thoughts and back to the girl.
“Ok, so physical tampering is out, but she’s connected to the grid, right? Can they be tampered with from the outside? Hacked?” Kain asked, noting the face the young cop made at his question.
“I mean, it’s some of the best encryption available. Is it impossible? Nothin’ is truly impossible, I guess. But it’s pretty fucking unlikely, I’d say. They keep these things updated with a new encryption key every twelve hours.” he said, and Kain shook his head.
Something was missing, something about all this felt…off. He scrubbed back through the footage on the feeds again, trying to see if there was anything that gave some indication that it’d been tampered with, a marker or a sign of any sort but it all looked normal. As normal as abnormal could be at least.
The boy’s were much worse. The death was recorded in pristine detail, the heart and brain activity spiking hard during the attack and then plummeting till his death. Death footage never bothered him before, having seen thousands of hours of it, but this one twisted his gut. The words the girl said to him before she killed him. They sounded off. As if it came through her, not from her.
“She got any family?” he asked, still scrolling through all the data they had pulled off both of their feeds.
“Uh yeah, she’s got a dad somewhere. Left years ago. Mom’s dead. She lives with her sister.”
“Can I speak with her?” Kain said, nodding towards the girl.
“Yeah, shouldn’t be an issue. But fair warning, she ain’t been giving us much.” They waited for the rest of the team to finish their questioning and analysis before walking over.
“Give us a minute here, boys,” Kain said, and the techs nodded and stepped away. He sat in the chair in front of the girl, giving an appropriate amount of space, trying not to appear hostile or intimidating. “I’m detective Kain Forsyth. I’d like to ask you a few questions if that’s all right,” he said, trying his best to scrub off the gruffness that normally coated his voice. She sat quietly, her eyes still fixed past him to the bloodstained body, her face flat and expressionless.
“Can you tell me your name?” he said, trying to start simple.
After a moment she gave a very soft and barely audible, “Sarah.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Sarah,”
“Yeah…I guess,” she muttered. “I…I didn’t kill him.” She said and for the first time her eyes met his and they shifted from blank shock to utter desperation. Her lip trembled. “You have to believe me…I know…I know what it looks like but…I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me…” She said, her voice shaking slightly before it trailed off, as if she’d lost faith in the effort as quickly as she made it.
“It’s ok, I’m here to help,” he said. He tried to find something in her eyes, but he wasn’t having much luck. “Was there anything strange, anything that felt different? Any sensation you remember from when you blacked out?”
She paused for a moment, her eyes glazed over at the memory.
“We were just…sitting here, having dinner and talking. My head started hurting kinda. But then I…blacked out. It was strange. I was there, I can feel…myself there, but I wasn’t there either. I know that doesn’t make any sense. I could feel the air, and dampness, but it somehow felt close and far away, like my body was sending me the sensations from somewhere else after the fact. Next thing I remember, I was standing over him. I was standing there, and he was…” her eyes welled up at the memory. “I didn’t do it…please. Tell them I didn’t do it,” she sobbed, trying to look at him through the stream of tears rolling down her face.
“Hey…It’s ok. Whatever happened here, whatever happened to you, we will get to the bottom of it, okay? I promise.” He wanted to say more, to try to be more reassuring, but he wasn’t sure how. She continued to sob quietly as he stood and walked back over to where Mike was standing and watching their conversation. “Go back and check the past few months of her feed. Look for something that might give her a motive or anything that would hint this was preplanned. I’m not expecting you to find anything, but we have to rule it out anyway,” he said, and the younger cop nodded.
Time was running short. With the boy’s feed of the murder, the DA had a clear-cut conviction and would sentence her in the next few days. One of the few downsides the neural links provided was that everything moved a lot faster than it used to with the abundance of concrete visual evidence.
Something about it didn’t add up, though. He’d seen plenty of murders. People acted irrationally despite knowing they had a camera in their head recording them, but he’d never seen a blackout in someone’s feed before. It left a strange feeling in his gut.
Walking back to the car, he called up the station’s number and Captain Moore’s extension and filled him in on what he’d found.
“I need a few days. This whole thing doesn’t feel right, and I want to pick at some leads,” he said, finally pulling the cigarette out of his jacket and lighting it, a calmness washing over him as the smoke filled his lungs.
“This is gonna go fast Kain. There’s no evidence the girl’s implant was tampered with, and without that there’s no reason to stall a conviction. I might be able to squeeze a day or two with the gap in her timeline, but the DA is gonna push for technical failure tolerance. The boy’s parents are obviously very upset and want this dealt with immediately.”
Kain hated hearing that. Parents being upset he could understand, but there was less and less compassion these days. Everyone lived in a detached and isolated world, and it made people cold and unempathetic. He didn’t think they were wrong for thinking the way they did. Who could blame them? He only wished they cared about the truth rather than blind justice. It was a constant battle he had to deal with. The truth versus justice for the sake of justice.
“Well, get me as much time as you can,” Kain said, a large cloud of smoke rolling out as he spoke.
“You really think someone hacked her implants and made her kill that boy? Is that the story you’re trying to prove Kain? This whole thing sounds weird, but that’s one hell of a stretch. The data just doesn’t support it.” he said. The skepticism in his voice was more than apparent.
“Fuck the data.” Kain said, letting the built-up bitterness from their earlier conversation return.
The captain sighed.
Numbers first, people second.
The truth was, Kain didn’t know what he believed, but he knew killers and he knew that the girl didn’t feel like a killer and somewhere in the sea of ones and zeros floating in and out of hers and everyone else’s heads, there was a possibility of some foul play, as unlikely as it might seem. He took a deep breath and tried to calm down.
“Sorry Cap, but something about this doesn’t add up. Either something is going on with her implant or that girl is the best actress I’ve ever seen. I need to look into some things. I’ll be in touch,” and he ended the call. He tossed the finished smoke out the window and looked down at his watch. It was late afternoon now, but he needed somewhere to start. Someone had to have a lead on who might do this. He just needed to know where to dig.
“Claire, take us to the Rat Hole,” he said leaning back in the seat as she turned on the car and guided it towards the bar.
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