Future Blue 2189 (A Short Sci Fi Story)

Chapter 1

Let me tell you about rain.

Not the kind that cleans things. New Detroit doesn't get that kind anymore. What we get is acid runoff from three hundred years of bad decisions drifting off Lake Erie in a mist that smells like copper and old regret. It doesn't wash the city. It just reminds it of what it is. Reliable as a loan shark.

23:40. Forty minutes past the end of a shift that never really ended, because nothing ends when you're a Blue. Conduct Authority policy — uniform on, you're on the clock. They took our personal hours after the Seattle Incident of '71 and that was that. Rights leave through one door, they don't come back through another. That's just how this city works.

The Halcyon Tower was bleeding neon forty stories down onto the wet street — pharmaceutical ads cycling through colors God never intended, the AI voiceover bright and hollow against the bass thrum of a hover-freight dragging its belly across the skyline: NeuroCalm. SerenityDrop. Bliss-7. Ask your licensed distributor about dosage guidelines.

One can't help but glance up in distraction, the adverts do their job well. My eyes squint from the brightness of their colors. But it's awash from all the rain. It's always raining.

CB-9 stood behind me in the mist without complaint. Two years this machine had been my shadow — Blue Partner Training Bot, designation CB-9. Face like a black mirror, smooth as a fresh lie, reflecting everything back slightly wrong. Voice like a man who'd been asked to imitate patience but never personally experienced it.

"Officer Garner. You have been stationary for four minutes and seventeen seconds. The incident is at grid nine-north, section B."

"I know where it is."

"You appear to be observing the pharmaceutical advertisement on Halcyon Tower."

"I appear to be doing a lot of things."

A pause. The kind a machine makes when it's deciding if your answer is worth logging. "Is there a cognitive delay I should flag for your morning screening?"

I looked at that black mirror face. My own reflection looked back — tired, wet, wearing a uniform the color of a bruise. "No," I said. "There isn't."

I turned up my collar and started walking. You always start walking. That's the whole job right there, distilled down to its truest form. Walk toward whatever's wrong, deal with it, walk toward the next thing. No arc, no resolution. Just the next thing, always the next thing, the city feeding you an endless supply until one of them finally puts you down.

The Plex is six blocks of reclaimed industrial towers they converted into residential stacks forty years back when the housing market finally finished the job it'd been quietly working on for a century. The city ran pipes in, bolted transit pods to the exterior, licensed three drug kiosks per block, and handed out a press release about urban renewal. Politicians smiled for photographs. Nobody who actually lived there was in the photographs.

Sixty thousand people. Stacked. The kiosks keeping the waiting manageable.

Tower Plex-7, stairwell between three and four. I took the stairs because the elevator had been broken since Tuesday and the repair order was somewhere in a queue that moved slower than justice in this town, which is to say it wasn't moving at all.

She was seated against the wall with her hand loose around an empty Bliss-7 autoinjector, like she'd held onto it because it was the last thing that had been kind to her. Triple dose. Licensed product. Every box checked, every form pre-filled, nothing left for me to do but crouch down and look at what the law had permitted.

I always crouch. CB-9 doesn't understand why — it's already scanned the room, pulled the data, knows everything a civic chip can tell you, which is most things and none of the things that matter. But I crouch anyway. Somebody should be at her level when they look at her. Somebody should make that small effort.