John Moralee - Future Imperfect - A Collection of Science Fiction Stories

“We had a security breach this morning,” she said. “Our computers were not working right. No cams recorded the incident on platform eighty.”

I swore. “Was it a hacker attack?”

“No—it was Bane.”

Bane was a virus—a sentient virus that lived on any distributed network it could infect. Bane was self-aware, but it had no agenda except to reproduce itself and cause chaos in any infected system. No computer network was entirely safe from it unless it was completely disconnected from external access. Bane was the reason why the New Commonwealth limited the use of advanced computers to non-vital systems.

“Great,” Vito muttered. “Please tell us you’ve got some witnesses.”

“Yes, I did my own detective work,” Radford said, rather smugly. “I used to be a cop on Ikiain—but they wouldn’t let me join the police here because I failed the physical. I’m too slow for a low gee world, they said.” She sighed. “Guess you don’t want to hear my problems.”

“It’s tough,” Vito said. “Maybe I could put in a good a word for you. What can you tell us about the incident this morning?”

“It happened at 7.20. There were 257 people on the platform waiting for the 7.30 to Marthar’s Port. Seventeen of them all saw the victim leap onto the track just as the non-stop express was coming along the tunnel. I detained them for you to question, on platform eighty.” She paused to flick some hair out of her eyes. “Did I do the right thing, Detective?”

“You did,” Vito said with a charming grin.

We boarded a glass elevator to take us down to the main concourse. The view gave me vertigo until I glanded some beta. “So, Chief, why didn’t the driver stop?”

“The train’s got collision detection protocols—but it couldn’t slow down fast enough without injuring the passengers. It braked and stopped about a klick down the tunnel. My security team didn’t see any organic material on the front—so I think the suicide got crushed under the carriages. We’ve closed down the line so you can go onto the track safely. This accident has caused a serious delay. I hope you won’t take long.”

We followed Radford through the station’s huge concourse of verdant parkland filled with food vendors and coffee shops. Reunion Station was the central hub of public and private transport, from the spaceport to everywhere on Arcadia. It had over a hundred train platforms, as well as cab and shuttle terminals. At one end of the main concourse was a terminal to the spaceport, where thousands of new visitors arrived every day. Each new arrival passed through a rigorous security check where each visitor was screened for identity, diseases and bio-weapons. That morning the station was especially busy due to the influx of 15,000 off-world travellers. Radford led us down a walkway to platform eighty.

The witnesses were gathered in a group, guarded by six station security guards in blue uniforms.

Vito donned a bio-suit and climbed down onto the track to look for human remains using his forensic kit, while I stayed on the platform and started talking to the witnesses. All of the witnesses told the same story. A blonde-haired teenage girl, wearing jeans and a faux leather jacket, ran along the crowded platform as though she was hurrying for a train. At the platform’s edge, she had leapt onto the track, just moments before the express hurtled past at 400 kilometres per hour.

I needed a better description of the woman. Luckily, an off-worlder from Takol’s Ring had been video-recording his arrival on Arcadia for friends and family back home. I linked my personal tablet physically to his video cam and downloaded the file, which had not been affected by Bane. The victim’s face was visible on a few frames before she plunged to her death. She had short, blonde hair, darker eyebrows and brown eyes. Her physical description didn’t really matter to me, though. I could see she looked scared. Suicide victims didn’t normally look scared. They looked calm, resigned to their fate. I frowned. Why had she been running? What had she been running from ?

“Did any of you see which way the girl entered the platform?”

Three witnesses pointed at the walkway leading up to the main concourse. I turned to the security chief. “Did Bane infect all of your cams or just the ones on this platform?”

“Um. I’m not sure. You’re welcome to check at my office.”

My partner had gone out of sight into the tunnel. I spoke into my shoulder mic. “Vito, you find anything?”

“Not yet,” he said.

“Keep looking. I’m going to check the security cam recordings from earlier—if Bane didn’t wipe them. Something isn’t right about this. I don’t think it was a suicide. The girl was running away from someone, or something. I’m going to check it out from the security office.”

It turned out that all of the cams in the station had been affected—so that line of inquiry was useless. But Bane could not infect the eyes and ears of the people in the station. Since almost an hour had passed, many potential witnesses had already left for their destinations. I prayed some of the station staff and vendors had observed something. I questioned dozens of vendors before finding one who did remember seeing the girl.

“Yeah, I noticed her,” the owner of a bagel kiosk said. “She bought a coffee with a pay card. I remember her because about ten seconds later four security guards approached her. They looked like they were going to arrest her for something—but she surprised them by tossing her coffee into one guard’s face. She dropped her bag and ran into the crowd with the other three guys chasing her.”

I frowned at Radford. “You didn’t tell me about this.”

“Hey! This is news to me.” Radford spoke on her com, talking to her security staff, then shook her head. “My guys all deny following her and I believe them.” She glared at the kiosk owner. “Harry, if you want to keep your licence to work here, you’d better describe the guards.”

“Uh—they were all light-skinned, tough-looking. They had guns like her.” He looked at my Omni.

“My people don’t carry lethal weapons,” Radford said, showing me her stunner, which could not be mistaken for a lethal weapon. “Those guards were not working for me. What’s going on here, some kind of covert security operation by Homeworld Defence?”

I didn’t have any answers. My com had been on during the conversation—so I knew Vito was listening. “Vito, did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Fake security team. Weird. Want to hear something just as weird?”

“What?”

“I found some blood leading to a maintenance tunnel. Looks like the girl isn’t dead. She made it across the tracks alive.”

“Collect a blood sample.”

“Already done. I’m going into the tunnel to see if I can catch up.”

“Be careful,” I said. “We don’t know if the girl is a victim or a suspect.”

Too much time had passed since the incident to make it worth locking down the station – but I still had something I could do there. First, I asked the kiosk owner one more question. “What happened to her bag?”

“The guard she hurt picked it up. He went through it, but he didn’t look happy. Was she smuggling something?”

“I don’t know. Thanks for cooperating.”

Next, I approached the spaceport terminal, hoping the girl had been aboard the Starcruiser. I showed her picture to the inspectors. They remembered her. I asked them to get the name on her passport chip. Quickly, I got an ID. The girl was called Charlotte Dodgson.

Something about the name tingled my mind.

“Did you scan her bag?”

“Of course,” an inspector said. “Nothing in it except clothes and the usual teenage girl stuff. She said she was a student. We did a full scan for illegal tech. She was clean.”