*So the idea is I’m posting this here, and then trying to finish it tonight/tomorrow, so I don’t eat my last nerve or chew my nails to the elbows. I’m posting it free and open for everyone. I’ll just remove it before editing for publication. I can’t post everything I have in a single post because it’s too long for email, so I’ll do this in probably two posts (Maybe three. I’m not sure how long they let me post) - SAH*
Rhodes To Hell
Sarah A. Hoyt
The Airlock Chimes
The man wore the clothes of a by gone era. Top hat, long tailed coat, vest and dark-cloth pants that disappeared into knee-length riding boots polished to shine. It was the attire ancient historians told us belonged to the era of Queen Victoria, first world-monarch in Old Earth.
Which would be interesting and curious had he been in an historical mersi, or perhaps a recreation festival, but he wasn’t.
He was standing in the airlock of the West 35th Street, our recently upgraded interstellar.
We were docked in a busy spaceport outside the city of Neverhold, in the Earth-like world of Dremurus in the Flaming Icarus system, when the airlock chimed.
After a look at my boss, Nick Rhodes, who sat with his feet on the desk, his specialty-built chair tilted back, his blue-glowing eyes scanning the holographic page of a book projecting from his desk, I sighed and pressed the button that allowed a 3-D projection of our visitor to form in front of my desk.
The projection was one way only. He’d neither see us nor hear us until I decided to allow it. And even then, he’d see only me.
His appearance was so incongruous it took me a moment to get out the standard patter. Pressing the button on my desk, that would allow the client – if he was one – to hear me, I said “Nick Rhodes, investigations. Stella D’Or speaking. How may we help you?”
The man removed his hat, showing mid-long blond curls, and blinked faded-blue eyes at the 3-d pickup. “I… I am here to—” His face seemed to crumple just a bit, like wax left in the sun. He swallowed, visibly. “There has been a series of murders. We… my employer and I, need help.”
I frowned, and leaned forward, about to ask for details, but realized, by the corner of my eye, that Nick had sat up. His metal carapace – molded in an ideal male form that would give Ancient Greece a run for its money – shone soft silver. The light from his blue eyes gleamed hard and unblinking.
It shouldn’t be possible to read a borg’s expressions, even if the strange material the body was formed of could and did move seamlessly, like skin over human muscle and bone. Yes, his unopenable lips did harden into a straight line, but it should still be impossible to tell what he was thinking.
Only I knew him so well, that I could read alert interest as he stared at the 3-d projection of a man. He looked at me and nodded, then pressed the panel on his desk that made the invisibility shield form.
How to explain the invisibility shield? It was a fog, like the privacy shields used in many restaurants and public areas built to hide one customer from the other. Only this one was deep blue, and near impenetrable. Through it, you had an impression of a big square something – Nick’s desk – and a human shape. That was not Nick’s shape, being smaller and less rigid, but yet another projection.
The only other difference between it and the privacy shield you might find anywhere else, is that it had a built in-anti-failure mechanism normally only found in nursing homes, or life sustaining equipment. Anything short of the interstellar falling apart into its component parts would keep the shield in place.
Of course it also had a no-touch barrier that would withstand anything but a full size elephant charging it. But that wasn’t visible.
I sighed, because Nick activating the barrier made it obvious what I should do. And I wasn’t even sure why he’d decided that way, since we’d just finished a lucrative case, and we were not in need of money. Also, when it came to working half of my job was to convince Nick that it must be done, while, normally, he was far more interested in spending his days in the specially built mersi unit, or perhaps reading. So it was weird for him to be enthusiastic about a case without my doing anything for it.
But he was the boss, and he wanted this potential client admitted.
I turned the sound on, and said, “Mr. Rhodes will see you now.”
I got up, pulled my own vintage clothes into proper shape. Not the same vintage as the visitors, but a little more recent. A very little: a body-molding dress in the style of the 1920s New York City, as portrayed in the Nick Rhodes Mersi show – with which we weren’t associated – and adjusted my short platinum blond coiffure.
Walking in high stiletto heels had become second nature in the last year, and I tap-tapped effortlessly to the airlock door.
When the door retracted, the man stepped in, and handed me his tall hat, but not his coat. I waited a moment for the coat, but when it became obvious he wasn’t going to take it off, I put the hat in the faux-marble topped table at the entrance and led him to the office.
This area of the – admittedly expensive – ship had been done up to look high class and refined and imitate the classical styles of Earth. It was supposed to impress clients.
The office itself contained two large desks made of wood. The client couldn’t see Rhodes’ desk, or the immediate area around it, but he could see at least some of the built in shelves behind, which held some very expensive artifacts, including a dozen real-paper books, reproductions of age-old titles found and meticulously recreated by archeologists.
My desk, to the right of Rhodes’, about ten feet away, and set perpendicular to it was also large, impressive, and made of real, expensive wood. The controls for the holo display and keyboard were hidden seamlessly on the polished surface. My chair too was wooden, and swiveled.
I led the client to the red chair facing the desk and invited him to sit, then tap-tapped away to my desk, and sat down, swiveling to face the client.
He was still half standing, apparently having been struck by the privacy shield on his way to sitting. He stared at it about half a minute, with his mouth half-open, then snapped to standing completely and pivoted towards me, “I thought I’d get to see Nick Rhodes,” he said, his voice vaguely offended.
I opened my mouth to give the normal explanation: that so many people in so many worlds wanted Mr. Rhodes killed that he had to hide his appearance beneath this artifice, in order to stay alive.
But before any sound came out, Nick’s voice emerged from behind the privacy shield, “No, sir,” he said. “She said I’d see you.”
The man opened and closed his mouth like a landed fish. “How…” He cleared his throat. “How do I know you are the real Nick Rhodes if I can’t see you?”
“Don’t be an infant,” Nick said, displaying some of his patented customer charm-offensive. Or really, just offensive. “How would you know I was the right Nick Rhodes, anyway? Do you plan to genprint me? Or do you mean the Nick Rhodes from the mersis? Because I am not him.”
“No,” the client said. “No, I know that. The… the person who referred you said you weren’t, but—” He swallowed again. It was like he was trying to deal with some things he couldn’t quite digest. “But surely, this doesn’t build confidence.”
“You either have confidence in me and whoever referred me, or you don’t. That must be your decision. What will it be? Don’t waste our time. It is valuable.”
Did I mention Nick Rhodes has his own patented way of reeling in customers? It was akin to chasing them out under a barrage of automatic fire, and normally it drove me nuts. In this case it didn’t upset me, since I wasn’t a hundred percent sure we wanted this one. He looked weird, and we weren’t in dire need of a case just now. But all the same it was disturbing to listen to Nick being rude to someone who’d come in to hire us.
For a moment I thought the man would leave. For a moment he thought so too. He turned away from the desk, and his faded blue eyes cast a longing look towards the door to the entrance hall. He adjusted his long coat around him, as though a cold breeze had come from somewhere. Then, suddenly, he pivoted around again, and plopped down on the red chair facing the desk, and glared at the privacy shield.
I cut my eyes at Nick, then adjusted my skirt as I sat down and pressed a button to activate the holographic screen, which would display my typing to my own eyes, but only a grey swirl to anyone else, at any other angle.
Right on cue, the would-be-client said, “Does she need to stay?”
“Ms. D’Or is an integral part of this investigative team,” Nick said. He was getting better at speaking like a human, though if you knew what you were listening to, you could still catch a sort-of-hollowness behind his voice, due to the lack of breath. I wondered if there was some way to create that. Not that it mattered much. You had to know what you were hearing before you figured it out. You had to suspect that Nick Rhodes was a borg. It took a kind of special mind to think that. Normal people were likely to think the odd lack of other noises was due to the extra strong privacy shield. “Do you wish to see her license?”
The man shook his head. He sat for a moment in absolute silence, then started, “My name is Colrin Graeme. I’m part of…” He paused and swallowed again. “I am an employee of Lived Lives, and I manage a world sized park in Olrucalco, an Earth-class in the Wintercross system, in the Diamond Cloud. We… That is the company that runs the world is devoted to recreating legendary murders.” He paused for a moment. “We use human-like constructs, of course, not humans as victims. And… Well, my portion Olrucalco, the Northern hemisphere continent, with a temperate climate, is devoted to the murders in the era of World-Queen Victoria.” He gave an embarrassed smile, and gestured at his attire. “As you probably can tell.” A deep breath. “We set up old London and have all the historical murders of the era. London is most accurate, of course, except much larger, because it’s divided into sections according to the murder featured. What I mean is we replicate some portions of London more than once, to allow people to book a particular murder, without having the other murders impinge. I mean the sections are historical too, only these are much larger, to accommodate our… well, the guests. So, say you want to live at close quarters in the time of Jack the Ripper, while the murders were actually happening, there are several hotels and accommodations designed to look like homes and lodging houses of the era from outside, but of course thoroughly modern and commodious inside.” This time the smile had just a hint of self-deprecating pride. “Guests get issued period clothing, and get to pick their role, which for the White Chapel area can be those of a doxy, or a peddler, of a devout socialist missionary or of a policeman, even. Your role won’t be decisive. You don’t have, so to put it, a playing part in the great game. We can’t risk the events being affected by random guests, and thus injuring other guests’ appreciation and experience. But you get to be around and be a side character in the … in the events. In the Boston Heights section of London, where the Lizzy Borden murders take place, your role will be that of a local resident or a farmer, or-- Well, you know. Like in the Leeds section of London, down by the port’s harbor, you’ll get to be a navy or a captain, or a bar patron or owner or a doxy or server or cleaning lady, or even respectable matron at close quarters with the murders of Crippled Bartram.”
“Yes,” Rhodes said in measured tones. “I know the style of thing. And? I take it there’s a problem.”
Colrin nodded. “It’s in the Jack the Ripper section, you see. Starting a year ago, there have been…. Murders.”
Something like a cackle emerged from behind the privacy screen. Technically cyborgs don’t laugh. The bio-mechanical whatever that served them as a nervous system simply didn’t have a trigger for humor. But like everything else, it all depended on the brain that had been put into the borg. And Nick’s had a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous, and apparently irrepressible humor. How and where he had learned to make the sounds of laughter, I didn’t know. I remembered when they sounded like a grinding of mechanical gears, but now they were even more believable than his voice. They reminded me of my long-lost husband’s laughter, irrepressible and infectious. “Murders in a planet devoted to murder?” he asked. “Who would have thought it?”
Colrin didn’t laugh. His eyebrows went up in the middle and he looked pained, as someone who gets the joke all too well, but the joke is on him. “They’re not the right murders.”
I was afraid that Rhodes would laugh again, but what escaped from behind the shield was more akin to a sneeze than a guffaw. And I bit my lip in time not to giggle. The situation was admittedly funny if macabre.
But Colrin didn’t seem to notice. He was facing Rhodes straight on. “I think… You have to understand, we are supposed to recreate the murders, so for Jack the Ripper we have the canonical eight. The murders are exactly as depicted, including the mutilations. The constructs are almost impossible to distinguish from human, since they are bio-mechanical. And we have several sets of them so one can be employed while the other is being repaired. But the thing is, the guests are not supposed to be harmed, under any circumstances, no matter if they’re dressed, or acting like street walkers. You know, the population that was killed by Jack the Ripper.”
“But they’ve been?” Rhodes asked.
“Yes,” the man said. “Yes. Take the murder of Emma Smith, which is supposed… Well, she is raped with a blunt object that causes damage, and dies in the nursing hub the next day. Everything went according to plan, except instead of the bio-mechanical known as Emma Smith, a visitor to the park, a Miss Aibell Sross was killed. We thought it was a random murder. You can’t exclude it in a grouping of murder devotees. We examined the construct – one of ten in varied forms and appearances – who is Jack the Ripper, and there was no forensic evidence it had been involved in the murder of Miss Sross. Since Miss Sross was a person of some prominence, the daughter—”
“Yes, yes, I imagine that everyone that comes to this kind of park is a person of wealth and that some number of them are well known to the news aggregators. We’ll get all the details later.”
Colrin mopped at his brow with a large red handkerchief, which made me wonder if it was possible to be too in character. He was wearing a large, heavy coat in a carefully climate controlled environment, and then mopping sweat from his brow with a piece of cloth, something I’d read about or seen in the Nick Rhodes sensies, but never in reality. “Well, yes. Anyway, the park police, as well as sector investigators got involved, but no one could find either a reason someone would want Miss Sross dead, or who might have killed her. We couldn’t very well detain and process every person in the park at the time.”
“Whyever not?” Rhodes asked. I’d say it was a failure of the cyborg to understand human psychology, but the man he’d been before being borged had had the same blind spots. He seemed to have very little tolerance, or consideration for class distinctions or for the sort of considerations that some people though were due to them because of their birth and wealth.
The would be client looked confused. He stared at the privacy shield, his lips working, as though he were desperately trying to find words. The red handkerchief emerged again, and the kerchief mopped the overflowing brow. “Oh, the public relations nightmare.”
“Oh.” Nick said. “But isn’t the murder one? Which do you think would be worse?”
“Yes, well. Every guest to the park signs a release, because you know it’s not unusual for there to be a violent criminal among those with an obsessive interest in violent crime.”
“Of course.”
“And we paid a … healthy settlement to Mr. Boremon, Miss Sross’s parent, and we thought the unpleasant accident was over and done with.”
“But it wasn’t,” Rhodes anticipated.
“No. It was just the beginning. To date four clients have … eh… been killed instead of the constructs. Not all in the same groupings, of course, and not all in the same programmed murder. But—You see… We’ve paid many millions of Lyr in secret compensation, and if this goes on, we’ll go under. So, I’ve come here, at the behest of the trustees, to beg you to take the case and stop this spree of crimes.”
“It will cost you,” Rhodes said. And named the price. For a normal individual or even company a million Lyr was really big money. For us… well, it meant we’d have money to keep running this ship, and get Rhodes his very special and essential supplies to keep him alive for a few years. It was security and safety for a little while longer, a relief from the constant fear we’d be discovered and killed.
I realized, for the first time, why Rhodes had been so interested in this case. A world-murder-park attracted the attention of everyone interested in murders. Murders in those, would, if they hadn’t already, soon attract the attention of news aggregators. Even if one managed to keep it secret for a long time, the people concerned with crime and law enforcement in various places would come to know about it, because of course they would. It was specialty information. And the park catered to the richest people in all the colonies. Which meant—
Which meant that a million shouldn’t mean anything to them. And that this case would attract other recommendations.
“Of course,” the man murmured, as if he expected it all along.
“But payable whether we get a result or not,” Rhodes said. “You need not fear we won’t do our best to investigate it. We will. We don’t want our reputation damaged. But it’s possible we won’t achieve resolution, in a case as occluded as this.”
The man cackled, a laugh in the back of his throat. “We’ve wasted more money than that,” he said.
He reached into his pocket and brought out a credgem. He stood, then stopped seemingly at a loss for what to do with it, until I cleared my throat. I wondered if he had thought of just going through the secrecy veil and putting it on Rhodes’ desk. It didn’t matter, he wouldn’t manage it. There was a force field to stop that.
When I cleared my throat, he handed me the credgem. Put on the right place on my desk, it told me exactly how much was in it, plus verified the funds were in the account to be transferred.
There was exactly a million and a half Lyr. “For expenses,” the man said, and I thought Rhodes had missed a point and a trick. Because he’d not pushed for all the traffic could bear. And he normally did. He normally made it clear that his fee was exclusive of expenses.
On the other hand that “No take backs if we fail” took some of the pressure off and perhaps Nick had thought he didn’t need to push it more.
But there was a tone of legalistic picking in his voice as he said, “And you have permission to hire me? Not on your own decision, I assume.”
“On my decision, but I’m a deputy for the board. I am authorized to hire you on behalf of the Lived Lives corporation.”
I pushed the button to transfer the money to our account.
And then Rhodes interviewed our brand new client.
All together we got very little, more than what’s above. Oh, we did get the names of the victims and the next of kin who were paid.
Miss Aibell Sross. Next of kin paid: Mr. Zyre Boremon. Parent. Planet of residence: Taceanus.
Miss Talira Tyse. Next of kin paid: Arrymo Coley. Father. Planet of residence: New Quebec
Lady Patry Rigalan. Next of kin paid: Tine Meson, husband. Planet of residence: Huldin
Free Citizen Arbian Midere. Next of kin paid: Ylivea Midere, wife. Planet of residence: New Daispar.
Colrin Graeme also gave me a gem, which contained details of the investigation done on the murders. I put it into my reader but analysis would take far longer.