‘You’re welcome…’
Blood. Everywhere. On the floor, up the walls, spattered across the ceiling. Will fumbled with the sizing band on the dusty VR headset one of the technicians had dug out of the stores for him. The old-fashioned gloves weren’t helping, the wires kept getting tangled in the straps…
Flat 47-122 looked nothing like Will remembered it. There were holes in the recording: fuzzy blobs of no data caused by interference, but nearly everything else was stained red. An avatar stood next to him: a muscular, computer-generated man with hair hanging down to the middle of his back-which was either wishful thinking, or a serious case of self-delusion. A dark-blue label floated above its head with ‘AGENT ALEXANDER’ written on it.
Will walked forwards and touched the scarlet-stained wall, the glove giving a small tingle of feedback as he ran his fingertips across the pixel-perfect wallpaper. ‘Are you sure this is the right apartment?’
The avatar that didn’t look anything like Brian nodded. ‘Trust me, it’s no’ the sort of thing you forget. Bits of body all over the shop, blood everywhere. Aye, this is it alright.’
The carpet beneath their computer-generated feet was almost black with blood, the SOC team’s footprints still clearly visible in the matted fabric. Over by the door, something that had once been a father of two was sprawled against the wall.
‘So where’s the rest of him?’
Brian’s avatar pointed downwards. ‘You’re standing in it.’
And that’s when Will realized what the fist-sized lump lying beside his left foot was. ‘Wonderful…’
Kevin McEwen’s lower half coated the middle of the room, what was left of his torso acting as a doorstop. Mrs McEwen was smeared across the tiny kitchen, the two children all over the second bedroom. Will worked his way from room to room, just as he’d done when he’d visited the real apartment yesterday.
How on earth could this be the same place? The flat he’d seen was spotless; this was straight out of a cheap horror film.
The murder weapon was lying behind the sofa, power lights flickering in the reconstruction. Will gave it a cursory once over and then went looking for the VR unit. It was lying on the floor, the casing battered and cracked, as if someone had smashed the thing repeatedly against the wall until it was little more than a large, electronic maraca. Will bent down and picked the computer-generated replica off the carpet, his gloves tingling in a half-hearted attempt to simulate weight and texture. One of the headsets was bent into a perfect figure of eight, the lenses cracked, the cables ripped from their sockets, leaving small tufts of multicoloured spaghetti behind.
They still didn’t know what caused VR syndrome, but they knew the symptoms well enough. Something goes very wrong with Kevin McEwen’s brain chemistry. Then, one day, the only escape he has from his shitty life-the public virtual reality channels-goes on the blink. Maybe his VR unit blows a fuse, or maybe one of his kids tries to stick a slice of buttered toast in the drive, whatever, it doesn’t matter: the results are the same. Kevin McEwen goes out, gets himself an old MZ90 and kills every last member of his family.
Will took another look at the room. The bloodstains. The chunks of meat. The big holes of nothing in the corners of the room, where the walls joined the ceiling, jagged with interference. ‘It’s a bloody awful recording.’
‘What do you expect? Every SOC team kicks seven shades of shite out the machinery. I’m no’ surprised it’s buggered.’
Will closed his eyes and pictured the place he’d visited: a cramped, scrupulously clean rabbit hutch without so much as a stain on the carpet.
‘It didn’t look anything like this yesterday.’
‘We really need some new SOC kit. Any chance you could have a word with the Demon Dwarf? Buy somethin’ that actually bloody works?’
‘The place was spotless.’
‘Aye, well, this is how it looked Sunday when we picked up the stiffs: freshly decorated in “internal organ red”. James threw a hairy when he saw the state of ma suit.’ Brian’s Avatar shrugged. ‘Maybe Services redecorated? You know, givin’ it the once over for the next lot of poor bastards.’
‘If they did, they used recycled wallpaper. There were shadows on the walls where pictures used to hang.’
‘Nah, look at it: there’s no way you’d ever get that crap off the walls. Them stains is there to stay. Must’ve been a different flat.’
Will took his headset off and the crime scene disappeared, replaced by a bland beige room. ‘Not unless there’s two flat one-twenty-twos on the forty-seventh floor.’
Brian was sitting in the corner, both eyes a milky shade of grey. ‘Even if it was the same place-and I’m no sayin’ it was mind…’ He reached up and unplugged the jack from the socket in the base of his skull. ‘But if it was, why the hell would anyone bother to make it look like it’d been lived in for years?’
‘That’s what I intend to find out.’
The décor in Director Smith-Hamilton’s office was probably meant to be ‘restrained executive chic’, but to Will it just looked like a Martian theme pub. The walls were clad in burnished bronze, hand-crafted rivets picked out in delicate verdigris. Genetically engineered pot plants sat on the deep ochre carpet, their manmade fronds an oasis of green and red in the shining dessert. The director sat in leather splendour behind a sandstone desk big enough to sleep six, toying with a two-foot holo of Mars.
‘I’m sorry, William, but it’s out of the question,’ she said, flipping the planet on its axis. ‘We’ve had too many incursions into Sherman House already. Look what happened yesterday!’
He shifted in his chair, and tried to explain the situation for the third time. ‘But-’
‘Give it a couple of weeks to cool down. Let them get back to their little routines. Then we can look at a small expedition, one that doesn’t involve anyone getting shot.’
‘There’s definitely something going on at Sherman House. We’ve got two confirmed cases of VR syndrome and a disappearing crime scene. Flat forty-seven one-twenty-two was a bloodbath when Agent Alexander’s team collected the first set of bodies, but three days later-’
‘It was clean. I know, you said.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment. ‘Look, William, whether you go back to Sherman House today or next week, the room will still be there. There’s no point risking lives for the sake of a couple of days.’
‘But-’
‘I understand your need to get to the bottom of this, and I admire your determination, but my decision is final.’ She pushed the holo away and stood, frowning down at him. ‘Until the situation at Sherman House has stabilized, there will be no more Network intrusions. Is that understood?’
Will sighed. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Good.’ The frown vanished, replaced by a beaming smile. ‘I’m glad we had this talk, William, it’s so seldom we get to discuss ongoing cases. Tell me…’ She teetered around the desk, took his elbow, and escorted him to the door. ‘How is Detective Inspector Cameroon getting on?’
‘Detective Sergeant Cameron is doing fine.’
‘Excellent. Well, don’t let me keep you.’ And with that she closed the door.
Will counted all the way to ten before he started swearing.
‘Bastarding shite-bags!’ The pig-faced man glowers up at the sky, as if it’s God himself who’s just crapped down the back of his overalls. A one-sided Rorschach inkblot in stinky grey and white.
His partner grins. ‘Don’t know what yer whingin’ about. On you it looks good.’
‘Fuckin’ birds…’ Pig-Face shoves another halfhead into its bay in the back of the Roadhugger. The halfhead stumbles-falls like a bag of potatoes onto the dirty metal floor.
‘Get up you stupid fuck!’ Pig-Face kicks the prone figure. Putting the boot in. Venting his anger on something that can’t even cry out in pain. Just because a seagull did what seagulls do…