Radical [1]

I. The Bureau of Lost Persons
Econphilos
The Martian Capitol

 “Still can’t believe it. An intern. In this department. Yah, Latiif! Do they want to scare the up and coming generation away from police work?”

Police Commander Faruq scowled down at his Wisp© watch’s second, dour reminder that he needed to find an assignment for the schoolboy that bureaucracy and all its silver-limbed foolishness were dumping in his lap.

The watch said he had to do it before the morning was out. The watch didn’t realize what it was asking. He hadn’t known what he was asking when he programmed the tech the night before.

“This department,” he repeated, more glumly. The missing persons division of Econphilos’s investigative bureau was what one might call a formality, an acknowledgment that people did indeed go missing in the capitol’s labyrinthine maw. It was consulted by everyone from fearful parents to vengeful employers and a few, pitying crime divisions. But the truth of the matter was that there was very little Faruq’s division could do about a case that wasn’t destined to sort itself out anyway. They were underfunded, undermanned, and poorly manned at that.

Simply put, Faruq commanded the hole where careers crawled to die.

You could read his own career in his office. There was a hard-mat portrait of a blest proud underdog from one of Mars’ four prouder Islamic city-states, his shoulders equal to the burden of an Assistant Director’s stripes in the Civilian Bureau of Intelligence. Beside it stood a plaque he’d been given for completing rehabilitation after his stroke. The marvels of modern medicine had restored him to cognizance with little more than gimpy memory and a scattered wit. Yet, as a dartboard rendition of Councilor Spyridon Mavrok’s face hanging on the office door betrayed, that hadn’t spared Faruq demotion. During his rehabilitation the political cogs and favours had been churning in Parliament. Given his dulled edge, he was doomed to comfortable but premature retirement here, with the rest of his motley band of misfits.

God have mercy on us; no one else will.

Electric images of his wife and daughters flocculated between the bars of a silver frame on his desk. He rubbed at a smooth, blunt jaw, trading its sight for their memory. And, in remembrance of them, he was struck by inspiration, by possibilities, by a decidedly new idea.

Yes… she hadn’t been into work for some time. And if interns were good for something, it was most certainly fetching things—or employees, as it were. Better reason still, if the intern really was staying, then he’d best get acquainted with the department’s horrors early on.

The Police Commander was rarely subtle in his dealings with himself—as with all his relationships he trusted implicitly that integrity would bind it together firmest. For the present, he beamed with self-satisfaction and flicked at the windows littering the plasmatic surface of his desk until he found his intern’s contact specs.

A few drums of his fingers later, and he had handed one Georgie Grey what was like as not the hardest task of the youth’s inconsiderable life.

∞

Georgie Grey did not feel like she was on a mission. She did not, in fact, feel much like a schoolboy at all.

So far as Georgie Grey was concerned, carving a path from home to university when she reached her so-called adulthood and having to add the looming campus to the demesnes of the familiar… that had been torment enough. Commander Faruq, she knew, thought she was a brash and boastful youth, like her peers. But she was not, and could never be. Even now her heart was twitching alarmingly in her chest as though to shake itself free of the nightmare that was Econphilos. Econphilos: a city which, from birth, she had known better than to try and master entire, electing instead to let it keep her in the cage of its palm, in the few districts that life’s little vicissitudes wouldn’t let her hide from.

Faruq’s impromptu missive and its binary demands near killed her. Not only was he driving her away from her meticulously plotted route to his office, but the task he’d given her was as terrible as they came.

She reeled and swayed as a perambulator belt trundled her along. She reeled, and she gawked desperately at the directions her Wisp© Watch was projecting over her palm, tapping occasionally at one of the callouses marring skin and screen to plead again with her inbox to send a change of orders, cancellation—mercy.

It was to no avail. Her Wisp© instructed her to step off Econphilos’ gliding thoroughfares. She tried to avoid staring down at the auto-traffic a city story below and carry on. Vertigo plowed her stomach. When it passed her recovery was not at all evident to the crush of anons surrounding her. Georgie’s long, lanky legs and disproportionately thick trunk always swayed with perfect, permanent imbalance. There were times, like now, when she loathed them.

Econphilos, Mars’ triumphantly self-asserting capitol, did not welcome the intern’s eager but awkward smile or round cheeks. It didn’t welcome her at all. She’d been ordered to head into the 15^th District, too oft dubbed Gallows, and it, too, didn’t believe in her ilk, in well-tended offspring careworn to fragility.

She knew this in a vague, unformed, mostly instinctive sense.

She wished that her boss, too, knew. But every time she tried to think up an excuse to give the earthy dark visage that lowered at her from his LifeWeb profile all her feelings unraveled, and she felt she could do nothing but babble if she tried to explain herself.

Georgie glanced skyward, at the translucent climateric dome engulfing the city, and she tried to remind herself that her doubts were natural. That there was always something bigger than her and that it couldn’t so bad because she’d lived with it painlessly enough so far. The deep breath she took did her more good than the sophistry.

Indeed, as Econphilos’s civilian walkway declined Georgie felt she was sinking into her own depths.  She hesitated, unaware of the stream of commuters parting agitatedly about her as she peered ahead with an almost obligatory pang of guilt. Guilt, because she at once tread over and was confronted by the sprawling metallic waste that was Gallows. The floating plasma banners overhead, each advertising novels, films, games, and all other manners of escapism, were multiplying rapidly.

Every creature had its squeamish bits, tucked away beneath its skin, and every city had a slums. When your city happened to harbor the last, stubborn vestige of laissez faire governance in the galaxy this truth was bound to look uglier. Not that Econphilos, brimming with philanthropists, lacked welfare programs—no, there wasn’t a single man starving on Mars unless it was of his own will. What Georgie looked out over was poverty of the spirit. These were people who preferred the alternate reality of makeshift CFAS’s to the stares they would garner trying to find escape in the supposedly welcoming communities that littered neighborhoods like Georgie’s. People who, even on Mars, which had city-states that were more or less collectives of outcasts that neither Anthropeden nor Europa would give voice, couldn’t seem to find place. They were, to be frank, freaks, fools, and madmen. Race, creed, gender… those people could accept, these days. But if they thought your head was cracked, and if you opted to use your liberty to keep it that way…

That was a generalization, perhaps. There were some oldworld sects, ethnicities, and religions that didn’t have real place in any city and wound up haunting their slums, instead. It was just that usually those groups joined up with the Romani Alliance and became nomads.

Not that Georgie Grey thought wandering was a life for anyone, mind you...

Shaking her head, feeling vertiginous again just thinking about leaving the city, Georgie Grey hustled along. Thankfully, she didn’t have to go deep into the Gallows. Her assignment required she brave a lean and looming tenement just off the main beltway— a tenement as tidy and hornetcombed and grey as though it were the glass-paned shelving in a morgue.

It was one of those subsidized places where half the residents were the staff, where Econphilos’s council had managed to seal a few of its more problematic citizens for less cost than their trouble would have been. Georgie managed a sheepish smile at the dull man loitering outside. He was smoking a roll and sweeping the walkway with agonizing deliberation, and she was trying to convince herself that his jerky movements didn’t mean anything.

She failed, of course. But that didn’t matter because by then she’d slipped through the auto doors, and she’d made it, whatever that meant.

Now, now the only way was forward.

Georgie was, in fact, so determined by then to finish her quest that she didn’t notice her Wisp© flashing. She didn’t notice that Police Inspector Faruq had tried to make precisely the frantic cancellation call she’d been hoping for all along.

It was a brilliant day for her sense, as of her own resiliency.

It was about to be a terrible one for just about everything and everybody else.

∞

Georgie Grey had checked the floor and apartment numbers a dozen times before she left home that morning, just to spare herself the possibility of looking foolish or uncertain when she arrived. The girl braced herself outside the door to cell 602, having recently stumbled out one of many chutes meandering up and down the calc-carbonate complex, and she swallowed. She tried to convince herself that her boss wouldn't lie. To convince herself that she was, in fact, fetching a fellow employee and not a criminal. Violent criminals weren't even in Faruq’s department--.

‘Stop fantasizing.’ 

Georgie pressed the bell, cringing with anticipation and regret. But nothing happened. An agonizing minute and a half passed while she tried to mould her face into something polite, just in case someone was sticking his—or her—eye through the peephole. It passed without event.

Then, torture of tortures, Georgie realized she’d have to press the bell again. In so doing she’d either look impatient, or else she’d have failed and this entire ordeal would have been for nothing.

She rang again. More silence followed. And Georgie panicked inside—she couldn’t do it, she thought, she couldn’t ring a third time—she didn’t have the heart. But then again, if she didn’t, then how could she hope to report back to the Police Inspector in earnes--?

The door opened.

Georgie blinked.

At first she thought it might have been a shadow that answered—and not one of those jagged, prim, and daunting shadows, either—it was more like a gloom. If ever a company were to manufacture shades, this would have been the waste fished out after a particularly heinous malfunction, jammed in the conveyor belt, frayed and ephemeral…

Defunct.

But no. This was a woman, mostly. She had hair that might have been more disheveled save for the grease slicking it, and her face was a sallow plain pitted by the dark rings haunting her languor-lidded eyes, but she was a woman. You could tell, in the end, because the coats of black she was wearing didn't quite prevail to hide her hips.

The woman-or-so-Georgie-supposed didn't say anything. Just studied the intern dimly from where she slouched as though said intern was a particularly uninteresting cloud billowing across her horizons.

"Erm—does Specialist Rona Ullien live here?" Georgie hazarded, willing the subatomic forces that be not to kill Schrodinger's cat, that this wasn’t her quarry.

"I’m Coronach Ullien," the woman spoke with a brogue as distant and desultory as her appearance.

Georgie cursed God's dice.

The woman leaned against the frame of the door, toying with the anachrostic cigarette in her fingers, and frowning at it. “Faruq’s operating at an unusually ambitious pace, t’day. Then, s’little surprise considering as we’ve our first case in eons…”

Georgie blanked. There was a searing, hyperfocus-glint in Coronach’s pupils, so disused it appeared foreign to the Investigator. As though she had powered on for the first time in years.

“Ah, so y’don know. Then this must be a mistake on his part…”

“He asked me to request that you appear at work today…”

“Early this morn’.”

“Ah—yes.”

“Mmm…” The woman paused, and if Georgie weren’t so tall might have gazed out over her head. “Y’look to be suff’ring, ling’ring there in the hall. Do try t’make y’self comfortable.” Coronach turned smartly on her heel and retreated into her apartment, leaving Georgie to gawk a moment at the door swinging ajar. Gawk, and puzzle at whether the words, too, were an invitation or a contradiction.

In the end, she had little choice but to venture in. The apartment met her dismal expectations. The floor was matted, full of dints and dents and divots, and the accommodations went beyond ascetic. One low, short couch littered with papers (and Georgie near-shuttered at what a waste this second anachronism was when there were fiber films to act as surrogates for hundreds of thousands of documents a piece) constituted the only furniture, save a full ashtray.

There was no entertainment complex, no briefing box next to the door. There were no decorations holographic or otherwise save for a picture on the stand. It didn’t scroll through images—it displayed only one, small, rather delicate black man turning to flash the camera a sardonic expression. His profile was flush with motion, as though his elbow might jut through the frame, and though the icon was by no means a cheerful one it contrasted so severely with the stillness of the room that Georgie found herself glancing about for signs of a C.F.A.S. interface stashed nearby. Only reality junkies were supposed to live this way, or so commonly held opinion had it.

Speaking of which, Coronach emerged. She was brushing her teeth, but ordered around the foam: “Check ‘ur Wi’scht.”

Georgie scrabbled to glance at her wrist, biting her lip as it flashed three new alarms at her. When she spread out her palm she saw that they were all from Faruq.

“He’s a good man—b’scattered, ‘ese days,” Coronach mumbled, before resuming her brushing. “Well, y’ll ‘ee ‘im oon enough.”

“Scattered?”

The investigator spit in the kitchen sink, throwing her brush down in after. “Faruq forgot this week’s the anniversary’ve m’husbands death. An’ the case… fortunately m’not bad off fer work, t’day.”

“Case?”

“Mmm, nah. Won’t corrupt your judgment. Wait f’briefing.”

“Briefing.”

“Yea, s’a real, big case this time.”

“R—really--?”

“Yeah. ‘Stronomical odds.”

“Ah--.”

“Jikes. W’don’t get tha’sorta cases. Dark humor, thinking t’world might need us.”

“So you were saying Faruq doesn’t want me to--.”

“Too late f’all of us now. M’quiet’s broke.”

Coronach flashed her cell at the door to lock it and walked out. She still had an old model from before everything became an implant or accessory. They were popular on Mars, those models. Anything to deny the technological invasion that had transformed Earth—now Anthropeden—into one big, giant, biocybertelekinetic--.

The investigator was drifting unconcernedly down the hall, and Georgie realized she was supposed to be following after.

Rushing, she dashed past the portrait of--.

--anniversary’ve m’husbands dea—

Georgie doubled her pace, but she sealed the smoke-blurred, airless crypt behind her carefully, heart pounding in her chest.

And that was how she met the remnants of Coronach Ullien.