March 23, 2045 - 9:45 AM
Carl sat in the police van alone. A holographic screen glowed on the wall on his opposite side playing the news. He had no interest in what the TV had to say, but given the fact he was in a self-driving van, he had no driver to talk to. So he spent the next few minutes studying his Fatemaker, the futuristic handgun every Psychwatch officer had the responsibility of owning.
A streak of light flashed across the gun's jet-black barrel, alternating between green and orange depending on its mode. Just one press of the button could activate its Incapacitate mode or Execute mode. All that was required to unleash the true potential of this weapon was his thumbprint on the ID scanner and a single thought: What mode is most appropriate for this situation?
"You have arrived at your destination," the van's robotic voice said as the vehicle slowed to a stop. "Your fellow officers await."
"Thanks, generic lady voice," Carl replied. He held his Fatemaker against his MagniSheath until the magnetic claw clasped around his gun like cuffs. He rose from his seat and pushed through the van doors.
He was greeted by the gray afternoon sky. Rows of dilapidated brick buildings lined the road from one end to the other, not a single SanityScan in sight. Out in the distance he could see the downtown Philadelphia skyline rising above the rest of the world like mountains. Even though he had been to the Psycho Slums hundreds of times, he still couldn't get over how different it was from the rest of the city. Two different worlds: one that couldn't live without Psychwatch and another that couldn't care less about bonding with its life-changing developments.
"Maslow!" Carl heard his colleague Royce call. "Over here!"
Focus on your job, payaso, Catalina said from the depths of Carl's mind.
"Hey, what did I say about dissociating?" Carl told her. He didn't wait for a response and instead joined his colleagues at the crime scene.
A block away, his old buddy Brian Royce waited at the corner of another shabby-looking building. There he stood wearing his Psychwatch officer vest, not even bothering to conceal his Fatemaker. He did his usual routine of slightly nudging his glasses over his nose to keep them from slipping as he waited for Carl to join him and the others. His hands were covered by dark gloves as he twirled around his fingers out of boredom.
"That's a first," Carl said once he reached Royce's position at the corner of the alley. "You haven't puked yet. Guess the crime scene isn't too bad."
"Maslow, we've been over this," Royce replied. "It's the smell, not the sight, that nauseates me."
"What the hell happened here?"
Carl glanced around the alley. Several of his colleagues were studying the area around them along with the little Crawl Patrol bots they had deployed to scan for more evidence. Blood was splattered against the walls of the alleyway. Four bodies remained from last night's carnage, yet the Crawl Patrol bots creeped across the corpses like flies around roadkill. The constant beeping of the officers' SanityScans as they studied the bodies without a care in the world only added to their unintentional apathy.
Then Carl saw Inspector Andrade standing at the opposite corner of him. She brushed her lovely black hair to the side as she studied the holographic screen hovering in front of her. Hundreds of faces flashed across the screen, yet none of them resembled the dead. Carl could tell she was stressed. He could hear her mutter Spanish profanities under her breath.
"There you are, Maslow," she said as she glanced up from the screen. "Make yourself useful and connect to the Crawl Patrol's feed."
"Nice to see you, too, Andrade," Carl replied. He activated his ThoughtControl piece, flashing a small, square holographic lens in front of his left eye. Now with his Scan ready, he connected to one of the Crawl Patrol's wireless feeds and waited patiently as the data the bot had gathered transferred over. The flow of information never ceased to satisfy him, drifting into his Scan like a serene little creek.
Four individuals. Ages ranging from 21 to 39. No known diagnoses. Cause of deaths: Class IV Hemorrhage, blunt force trauma. Possible narcotics usage: traces of phenethylamine found in...
"More Wonderland users?" Carl asked, still studying the information in his Scan.
"Yeah," Andrade replied. "Found a dozen inhalers full of that shit over there. Might've been a deal gone wrong."
"This seems too violent to be done by simple dealers," Royce interjected. "Most of the failed deals I've investigated resulted in shootouts. Granted, it still got pretty messy, but not to the point you'd have enough spilled guts to map out the entire digestive system."
"The only firearm we got here is this boring little shotgun," Carl said as he glared at an empty shotgun lying on the pavement.
Royce chuckled. "You sound like Holloway. Only a felon like him would call a weapon boring."
"Yeah, but he focuses on the weapon's power. I focus on its design. This isn't one of those sleek-looking smart firearms people only dream of getting. Just a lame, unmodifiable shotgun—"
"That was used to murder someone," Andrade chimed in bluntly. "Maybe instead of focusing on how it looks, why don't you focus on who used it and why they did?"
"That's what we've been doing for the last three hours," Royce groaned. He turned back to Carl. "Speaking of which, Mason ordered Holloway to be brought in as part of his redemption therapy. Y'know, using a freak to catch other freaks."
"That's kinda rude, don't you think?" Carl chuckled nervously. "I mean, not all the people we find are too far gone. If we're lucky, a few therapy sessions should bring the perp back to reality."
"I'm talking about Holloway. I know it's his therapy, but it's also technically his jail sentence. And the guy hardly looks like he's made any progress at all! Remember that last incident at the high school?"
Carl winced. "Well...in Holloway's defense," he replied carefully, "that teen was guilty of sexual harassment and influencing the suicide of one of his classmates."
Andrade flashed him a dirty look. However, he could sense she wasn't as angry at him as she normally would've been. She, too, knew what happened was essentially the consequences taking place, as illegal as they were.
"I definitely agree that the kid was a degenerate little shit," Royce whispered, his hand on Carl's shoulder, "but Holloway didn't beat the shit out of him because he deserved it. He did it because he saw it as the perfect opportunity to vent. Remember? It took ten minutes for anyone to intervene!"
Carl nodded his head. He couldn't look at Royce in the eye, ashamed of the fact it took so long for the officers to stop their violent colleague that day. What he regretted most, however, was the fact he didn't want it to stop. The teen admitted to sexually harassing multiple female classmates, motivated one of them to take their own lives, and showed zero remorse for it. Seeing him getting beaten into the dirt felt like a long-awaited punishment.
But it was still illegal. "Well hopefully," Carl continued slowly, "he'll have a change of heart some day."
"In the meantime," Royce replied as the two of them wandered around the alley, "he'll be...attempting to assist us around here. His holo-projection should be appearing any second."
A loud beeping noise startled the officers around the scene. Two triangular pieces of metal emerged from the Psychwatch van and floated over to the edge of the alleyway, swirling around each other like vultures swarming around their prey before freezing in midair. Blue lights flickered out of the lens in the devices as they aimed toward the street, a holographic projection of their infamous colleague generating any second now.
"Here he comes," Andrade said.
* * *
Officer Jack Holloway stood in his cell in the psych ward. The tiny panels in the floor beneath him shifted back and forth, like tiny crabs traversing through the sand on a beach. Two triangular projectors hung from the wall in front of him, a single beep indicating a countdown.
"Don't screw this up," Commissioner Mason ordered into his ThoughtControl piece. "Evaluate the crime scene and nothing else."
Fuck off, he wanted to tell her, but instead he replied with false enthusiasm, "Empathize, euthanize, stabilize. Right?"
"It's neutralize, Holloway."
"Just a euphemism, Commissioner. Just a damn euphemism."
Suddenly, Jack was engulfed in blue light, blinded by the devices in front of him. When he opened his eyes, he found himself standing in an alleyway with his fellow officers at the crime scene, all eyes now on him. His skin twitched with brief distortion as he glanced down at his hands, and he looked up to see the projectors floating around him.
Jack flashed a grin as he approached his colleagues, the floor panels shifting beneath him with every step he took to simulate the surface of the street. "How's it going, Andrade?" he greeted. "You look lovely today."
"Cabrón," Andrade muttered, returning her view to her ThoughtControl's lens.
"Maslow, Royce, how are you gentlemen doing?" Jack asked as he stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets, the lens on his own piece activating.
"I'm guessing you haven't noticed the mutilated corpses stranded around this alleyway?" Royce retorted as he nudged his glasses further up his nose.
"Of course I have, buckaroo. Just not too interested in them."
"Well, you kinda have to be. It's part of your job."
"Actually, Brian—hope you don't mind me calling you that—it's often best that you don't get so attached to people. It's harder to study a dead body when you remember that the person that body belonged to had done so much for you. I mean, you've seen autopsies before, haven't you? Don't you think it'd be heartbreakingly difficult to just glance up and down the body of someone who meant so much to you as if they were nothing more than a lab specimen?"
"That...would be a conflict of interest," Royce uttered quietly and frightfully before going silent. To avoid further contact, he activated his earpiece and studied multiple holographic screens hovering in front of him.
"You can be diagnosed with a lot of things, Holloway," Carl said, "but being an asshole is a choice. So why don't you just shut up and do your job?"
Jack cracked his knuckles and used his ThoughtControl piece to connect to the Crawl Patrol's feed. In seconds, he received the same information everyone else had. Four dead bodies. All homicides. Wonderland addicts. None of it interested him in the slightest.
"I have a conclusion," Jack declared. "A couple of disposable junkies. Nothing left to lose except for their lives and their stash. And clearly the former didn't matter too much."
"We didn't bring you to judge them," Andrade replied.
Jack paused to kneel down next to one corpse. "Have they been identified yet?"
"The one you are kneeling next to is 27-year-old Wesley Reeds. The eldest is 32-year-old Trent Morales, whom we assume is the leader. However, we haven't identified the last two victims yet, a male and female."
"Is it an actual female or just some bastard in a wig and dress who only thinks he is?"
Carl winced. "I wouldn't say that in front of the Empaths back at headquarters."
"Unfortunately for them," Jack continued, "I ain't an Empath. I'm a sociopath. The Scan said so." He continued investigating the feed from his ThoughtControl piece.
"You could do something about that, Holloway," Andrade muttered. But Jack ignored her like every other time.
After spending an extra minute gathering the rest of the info from the Crawl Patrol into his ThoughtControl piece, Jack reviewed the info to himself one more time. Four victims. Three male, one female. Multiple stab wounds to the first victim, critical concussion to the second, shotgun wound through the brain on the third, and a massive incision into the skull of the fourth. The only weapon left behind was the gun used to kill the third victim. Yet there wasn't a single fingerprint on the gun aside from the poor sap who lost his head to it.
"I'd say there were thirteen people here last night," Jack hypothesized as he glared at the pavement, the holographic lens of his piece hovering in front of his left eye. "Most of them—about nine people—made it out alive. Tire tracks at the edge of the alleyway. Two of them were most likely teenagers."
"What makes you say that, Holloway?" Carl asked.
"According to the Crawl Patrol," Jack continued as he walked over to the parked truck, "there are footprints on the surface of the truck bed matching a size 10 shoe, which means the attacker is either young or of underwhelming size. Plus, the force of poor Mr. Morales's cranium against the window wasn't enough to crack the glass."
"So the attacker wasn't strong enough to break the glass but was strong enough to crack his head open?" Royce chimed in.
"Better be careful not to exaggerate so much," Jack replied with a smug look on his face. "Aside from a rather impressive dent, his skull is completely intact. His brain, however, got scrambled up like a blender. Internal hemorrhage from the concussion."
"So I guess that explains one for now," Carl said. "How do you explain the other attacker being a teenager?"
"Step out of the way for a minute," Jack replied. Once Carl took a step to the side, Jack continued. "More size 10 footprints. From the way their prints are positioned, I'd say they were in a fighting stance. It's a little uneven, so they were either amateur or simply not that confident in their ability. And if you also notice, only a couple of feet away from these prints is none other than Jane Doe over here. Nice clean cut into her skull."
"Your enthusiastic descriptions disturb me," Andrade replied. "You're at a crime scene, not a museum."
"Of course. Only memorable people end up in museums."
"I think you're done here for today, Holloway. We can take the rest from here."
Jack chuckled. "But who else around here is supposed to keep these things interesting? Besides the bastards responsible for this, of course."
Suddenly, bits and pieces of his holographic projection began to crumble off, as if he were disintegrating into dust. The projectors hovering above him were flickering as his program was coming to a conclusion. Soon he'd be back in his dark cell in the psych ward. "I didn't even get to tell you how the shotgun was used," he whined mockingly.
"You have the right to remain silent," Andrade replied coldly. "We'll let you know when you're needed again."
"I guess I'll share my thoughts and notes with you guys later then."
"I think we've had enough of you," Royce grumbled.
"C'mon, Brian. I know you guys need me!"
"Oh please. If anything, you need us. You're alive because of us."
Jack's grin transformed into an intimidating snarl. "But did I ask for that?" he growled before his hologram disappeared. He found himself back in his cell, the floor and wall panels shifting back into their original positions along with the projectors.
Suddenly, all the tension in each officer had disappeared. Even though Holloway was one of them, most of them agreed he was often more intimidating than their own targets. He was a ticking time bomb. He was fully aware that's what they thought of him.
And he couldn't have been more proud.