Abaddonian Dream Read online

  Abaddonian Dream

  by M. K. Woollard

  Text copyright 2016 M. K. Woollard

  All Rights Reserved

  For Henry and James

  Table of Contents

  Part I: The I.A.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II: The Red King

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part III: I.T.F.

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part IV: Runner

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part V: The Red Hands

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Terminology

  Part I: The I.A.

  Chapter 1

  The best thing about the traffic system being largely automated was that it wasn’t easy to hit anyone, no matter how fast or badly he was driving. Public nats would sense his car coming and would hop right over. He only really needed to concern himself with stationary objects like trees and lamp-posts. And people. There weren’t so many of those around these days, but a few still managed to get in his way. He hadn’t killed anyone yet, though he had helped a cyclist into a hedge and worried a jogger.

  Even with the megaAI running the network, it wasn’t entirely straightforward driving through the city. For one thing, street lighting would only come on as a vehicle passed, in order to save power. Above the speed limit, the lights didn’t always keep up – and even when they did, the road ahead was obscured by the mist; the near-constant mist. It was a good thing he knew these streets. More or less.

  “Three minutes,” Toskan’s image on the windscreen said. “Still red.”

  Hammell knew it without being told. He had the alert up on the windscreen, along with his partner’s smug, chubby face and the directions to the crime scene. Green arrows were displayed directly over the road, showing him exactly where to go, but he still nearly missed a turn because of Toskan’s attempts at distraction. He braked hard and swerved around the corner, blindly hoping there wasn’t another manually driven vehicle coming the other way.

  “Bit risky there,” Toskan said. “Two thirty. Think you’ll make it?”

  Hammell didn’t answer. He couldn’t afford any mistakes.

  He’d conducted a minor study to make sure of his timings. Theft related crimes from retailers were solved on average in a little over twelve minutes. If the perpetrator wasn’t captured at the scene, they were almost never caught in less than eight. They would always run and quite often they would hide. Stupid, sure, but if they were dumb enough to steal in the first place… The point was that he’d been waiting for one like this. The crime had occurred a six minute drive from the station. Statistically that meant he had a greater than 97% chance of reaching the scene before Providence turned the alert from red to green.

  And the best part was that Toskan was oblivious; he had no idea the level of planning involved. As far as he was concerned, Hammell had plucked this alert out of thin air. He grinned to himself at his deviousness - and nearly missed another turn. Yanking the wheel around sharply, he found himself on the road where it had happened. Under a minute now - less at this pace, he thought. He was going to -

  The alert turned green and vanished. Toskan began to chuckle.

  “Motherfucker,” Hammell said to himself as he brought the car to a halt. He could practically see the crime scene from here.

  “I’m feeling like champagne,” his partner said. “Are you feeling like champagne?”

  “No.”

  “I won’t choose the most expensive bottle,” Toskan said. “I’ll choose… the second most.”

  Hammell only grunted. He didn’t actually care about the money – as an I.A. he had more than he knew what to do with anyway - but now the drinks tonight would be ruined by Toskan giggling every time he ordered something.

  Opening the historical alerts, he checked to see what had happened. His man had stolen a four pound slab of insect-based protein and had run, obviously. Then he’d hidden in a bush. Criminal fucking mastermind, Hammell thought, wondering how he’d managed to pick the dumbest of an already dumb breed. On the bright side, it did mean Toskan would definitely come out now. There was no chance he’d pass up a free night of drinking - not unless Meera had come back.

  Turning the car around, Hammell set off towards the office at a more sedate, sane pace, just as a speeding ticket popped up on his implant. Three more points on his licence – another ticket would mean a ban – and a hefty fine.

  “Perfect,” he muttered to himself. “What a perfect fucking start to a perfect fucking day.”

  Six or seven alerts had popped up so far this morning, but they were all petty and all had gone green quickly. There were none which stayed red long enough for them to get interested. Even if a real crime did occur, the I.A.s would normally give it a day or so before getting anything more than superficially involved. Providence solved 92.7% of all crimes within the first two hours and 98.8% within twenty four. It was a waste of time even trying to investigate, especially too quickly.

  Hammell realised he was jiggling his leg, making his foot tap on the floor annoyingly. “Stop it,” he said aloud and Toskan looked over at him.

  “Are you ok?” his partner asked.

  Hammell nodded, but he was becoming dangerously bored and he knew it was because of yesterday. The problem with having a dry night was that the next morning he wasn’t content just cruising the networks and sleeping. Without a hangover to nurse, he actually needed to occupy his brain.

  Toskan glanced at the clock on the wall. “Fancy a coffee?”

  “Yeah,” Hammell replied.

  “I’ll go, then,” Toskan huffed as he stood up.

  Hammell furrowed his brow. “It was your idea.”

  He waited in his chair, appearing casual, until the rotund older man had left the cupboard - his semi-affectionate name for the office he and Toskan shared. Then he walked to the door and peered through the blinds to make sure Toskan was going for the lift. When the fat, balding head was out of sight, Hammell grabbed a handful of rubber bands from Toskan’s stash and set off up the stairs. Bounding up two flights, he jogged to the coffee machine in the empty, silent corridor. He crammed himself inside the adjacent cabinet, just managing to squeeze the doors closed, and began pulling elastic bands over his hands and head.

  He heard Toskan meander down the corridor and stop at the machine. Remaining still and silent, he waited for the right moment to achieve maximum effect: Toskan had to be holding both cups. He could hear the beans being ground and the water pouring out. His nostrils caught the scent of fresh coffee. Almost there.

  This too had been a long-term project; one which he had been saving up for a while. It had taken weeks to slide the cabinet down the corridor a couple of centimetres at a time, getting it as close as possible to the machine without creating suspicion. After Toskan’s victory this morning, he’d decided to speed things along.

  Hearing the familia
r clunk as the machine finished, he waited for Toskan to press the button again to order the second cup. Only he didn’t. Possibly he was planning on doing something else before delivering to Hammell. Panic set in and he decided that one would have to do. He burst out of the cupboard with a roar, causing Commissioner Yun to hurl scalding hot coffee into his own face.

  Hammell stood there, elastic bands distorting his features, aghast. He looked up and down the corridor but Dave Toskan was nowhere to be seen. The Commissioner seemed to inflate as he wiped at the liquid on his face, and Hammell wondered how much of his skin’s reddening was related to burning and how much to sheer fury.

  “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU PLAYING AT?!” Yun bellowed.

  “Pig boy,” Hammell mumbled.

  The chewing out that followed was one of the worst he’d ever endured. Midway through, as Hammell began discretely rolling off the bands - the odd one pinging off riskily - he caught a sly looking Toskan peering around the corner at the end of the corridor. The bastard was grinning.

  Coffee was his idea, Hammell realised.

  He had to give it to the guy - it was a well-worked reversal. He made a tiny bow in appreciation of the artistry, but Yun caught the gesture. The big man spun around and began to berate a bewildered looking Toskan too, telling him that the people upstairs were right, that I.A.s had had their day and were now worthless, that they were experienced officers who were worse than the greenest wardens, that they were grown men acting like children, and so on. Eventually he blew himself out and left to find a clean shirt, and Hammell and Toskan trudged back to the cupboard like a couple of schoolboys coming out of the headmaster’s office.

  Sitting at his desk, Toskan began digging out cold cases, as Yun had ordered, throwing a bunch of them onto a skywall display. “Your pick,” he said.

  Going through the unsolved cases, mainly from the time before Providence, was all Interpol Agents were good for now, but the task was a pointless one. The original investigators had worked the cases and failed to get a conviction. The megaAI too had scoured them, and would do so again periodically, and had also failed. Memories had faded, witnesses had passed away. If they hadn’t been solved by now...

  What the fuck are we doing here? Hammell asked himself, not for the first time. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

  A case caught his eye and he pointed to it to open it up.

  Toskan quickly span around in his chair to make sure the door was closed. “That one?” he said. “You don’t think we should choose something a little less… provocative?”

  “It’s a legitimate case,” Hammell said, feeling sullen. Provocation was kind of the point. How else to get through the day? “Possible insurance scam from the days before Providence,” he continued. “Andromorph factory burned down. Suspected arson, never proven.”

  “But if Yun walked in now...”

  “So don’t look at it,” Hammell said as he tossed a catalogue over to Toskan’s display and then set about checking through the rest of the files.

  “Holy hell, would you look at that,” Toskan said as the catalogue opened on a display and a full-sized nearly naked 3D woman appeared in front of him. Unable to help himself, he swiped left and right, changing some of her more obvious features. “Every body part made to order… And you could have her talk football or astrophysics or not understand the difference between a fork and a spoon. This company would even do orifice fittings. Imagine that.”

  “Well, now I’m trying not to.”

  “You could build your perfect partner,” Toskan said wistfully.

  “She’d be fake,” Hammell said as he glanced up, seeing the older man had assembled a model that was the polar opposite of his wife. “And she might try to take over the world again.”

  “You’re right,” Toskan said, closing the catalogue. “There’s no such thing as perfect.”

  The model blew a kiss and disappeared.

  From what Hammell could ascertain, there was no physical evidence linking the owner to the fire. The man had claimed it was electrical, and the evidence had indeed suggested faulty wiring. The question had been whether or not the wiring had been deliberately sabotaged, but it had been burned too badly to be certain. That was where the investigation had faltered.

  What else can I add to that? Hammell thought and he swiped away the file angrily. “This is a dead end.”

  “They’re all dead ends,” Toskan said with a shrug.

  Unlike his partner, Hammell wasn’t able to make peace with that fact. He could feel the blues threatening to descend. They were on the way out and both of them knew it. It was only a matter of time before the two of them would follow all the other I.A.s through the exit. He looked over and saw that Toskan was staring vacantly into space.

  Time for another game.

  They spent the next hour flicking elastic bands from the doorway of the cupboard at the androids in the main office. Hammell concentrated hard – he’d been on the losing side too many times for one morning. He’d even gone to the store cupboard to dig out a box of his preferred size 19 pale crepe golds; the king of flickable rubber bands. By contrast, Toskan was playing with whatever mix he’d gathered into his drawer, the amateur.

  A couple of wardens stopped to watch, amused but without the balls to ask to join in. They were too scared of Commissioner Yun, who could often be found prowling around the building at this time of day. The big man had already threatened to catch them a few minutes back when he’d stepped in a veritable sea of elastic bands near the lift and came close to questioning it.

  The androids, for their part, ignored them, even the one Hammell caught square in the main camera eye - a full fifty point bullseye. He tutted; he’d been aiming to hook the smaller lidar eye for an automatic win. He was still a full eighty points up when the hour mark passed, signifying the end of the game. Toskan offered his hand and Hammell took it, but his thrill in the victory was short-lived. He wondered why it was that he hated to lose passionately but never found much solace in winning. He mused on whether that meant he was driven by negative emotions, and what that in itself might mean.

  He shook himself out of it. Introspection and self-analysis were always a downer. He ordered the android which had been hit last to gather up all of the bands, as per the rule, and it spent the next twenty minutes crawling around on the floor before returning bearing its gifts on a silver tray like it was serving them afternoon tea.

  Toskan looked at him questioningly.

  “Go ahead,” Hammell said.

  The chubby, balding man was absurdly pleased as he snatched up the tray and greedily swept the bands into his already overflowing drawer. Hammell made a point of never reusing pre-fired bands. He would always use a fresh box and usually only of his preferred type. It was part of the reason he rarely lost this game - and why Toskan would never bet on it. Hammell half suspected that his partner only played so he could fill his drawer with more bands. He wondered from where the man derived such joy.

  One of the many issues with living in a condemned building was that the lift didn’t work very often and wasn’t to be trusted when it did. The penthouse had been the obvious option when he’d been selecting an apartment, but sometimes he found himself wishing he’d opted for the ground floor. Like tonight. And every night.

  Staggering up the thirty four flights of stairs, he collapsed panting into his home. Kitty instantly began licking his face, not necessarily out of affection but because he’d eaten several chicken-flavoured balls on the way up, missing his mouth with surprising regularity. He’d saved a few for her, as was their custom; he dragged himself up and dug them out of the brown paper bag. The cat loved Chinese food as much as he did. He stroked her as she wolfed them down and then, when he felt able, struggled back to his feet.

  He ate his noodles leaning over the kitchen counter, shovelling them into his mouth with chopsticks directly from the box, throwing occasional bits of pork substitute down for the greedy little creature begging at his feet. When
he was finished, he stared out over the pre-dawn city. Having to climb up two hundred and four stairs every night was a definite tick in the building’s negative column, but the giant glass windows more than made up for it. From here, he could see everything, all the way out to the Reserves. He could see the spaceport with its thousands of lights and sporadic trails of launches as more and more people got out every day; the huge vertical farms commonly known as ecotowers; the solar power receptor station which received periodic blasts from the orbital mirrors to help power the city. He could see the megahospitals where artificial wombs took embryos to full term in safety, with the added bonus of not ruining all those perfectly toned bodies out there. In the distance, he could even make out the silhouette of the truly enormous offshore spouter in the mouth of the estuary, throwing its jet of water so high up into the atmosphere that it helped cool the planet… while paradoxically having the opposite effect locally, covering the city in a perpetual cloud blanket that somehow trapped in the heat and humidity.

  He could even see the giant burners which were being prepared - he had a sneaking suspicion that the global cooling project was working a little too well. The official line was that the burners were being constructed to ensure that climate was fully controllable in terms of both cooling and heating, but they were being put up awfully quickly. It seemed perfectly possible that global warming would be fixed by ushering in an ice age.

  All of the megastructures he could see were part of a rapidly improving system; a system that Hammell found himself hating a little more each day. Everything was becoming too safe, too sterile. But then he had to ask himself, did he really want to go back to how things were? Was Providence’s ridiculously high conviction rate, and the massive drop in crime because of that deterrent, not better than the dirt and fear and rape and murder that had come before? He had the uncomfortable feeling that it was, and yet he still found himself despising it all. What use is there for a detective in a world without crime?