A Hooker with a Heart of Code

The call comes in during the twilight of the night shift, an anonymous, synthesized voice offering only an address and a pair of commands: clean it up, find the root cause. Two tasks that can't conceivably be dealt with to the satisfaction of the higher-ups before the shift change - but the Rake knows he has to try regardless.

It's easy to find the scene of the crime. There's humans crowding to get a look at the mess. The mass of stinking, soft bodies is being held back by a hastily erected barrier, beyond which a pop-up tent conceals the body. “Metro police coming through,” he grunts, to little effect, still forced to squeeze through the crowd. An android steps out of the tent and a little buzz of electricity fizzles beneath his right eye socket, his implant responding dimly to the presence of the ‘droid, circuitry signalling circuitry. It's blank face turns down towards him, and if it had features they would certainly be contorted in disappointment at the sight of this unshaven, sleep-deprived human.

The Rake’s eyelid twitches; no matter what people tell you, this never stops being painful. A string of commands spreads through the wires beneath his cybernetic eye, delivered wirelessly and wordlessly by the android. As the Rake stands just outside the flap of the tent, his implant struggles to unpack and process the packet of data collected by the android.

The Rake blinks, and the ‘droid’s gone, leaving him with code flowing across his field of vision and ahead, sprawled before him, the mangled body of a robotic prostitute.

"You're late."

The Rake blinks again, and the speaker comes into focus beyond the river of code. Detective Prent sips her coffee; she does not hold one out toward him as she would have for her previous partner.

She scrubs a hand through her mess of short brown hair, her own implants helping her pick apart the robotic body that is splayed out on the 'crete. Each limb has been severed at the joint, at first carefully and then with increasing violence.

Anger, she thinks, though the HUD overlay from her cybernetic corneas do not comment on this emotional supposition.

James Prent, Metro Police Detective Third Class, sips her coffee again before turning to her new partner. The loss of Bryon still stings. Six months is not enough time to grieve. She blinks away the HUD to focus on the Rake's unshaven face, waiting for him to comment as she sends him the data packet with all the information she's been given since she arrived on scene.

It isn't much. Humans don't tend to care about the android hookers, except for when they get too attached, and the other robots prefer not to notice them at all. A violent disassembly, however, must be thoroughly investigated.

“Good morning, detective,” he says, avoiding Prent’s gaze while the smell of the coffee tugs at his empty stomach. Something inside the Rake’s implant surges, data left behind by the cybernetic eye’s previous owner and Detective Prent’s previous partner, Bryon. She used to get coffee for Bryon and hand it over with a smile. For a moment, he is Bryon, seeing her smiling up at him. She trusts him.

The illusion is short-lived. The pixels of the false memory crumble away as Prent’s implant briefly interfaces with his own, sending another stream of data.

All of this mingles with the packet that’s still processing, unpacking metrics on just about everything around the scene: the humidity of the air, all known businesses and residences within a ten block proximity and serial numbers for all CCTV cameras attached to those buildings, the guest-lists of clubs and parties nearby, the patient registers for this districts hospitals, the tidal rise and fall of stocks and shares, and on and on and on…

So much data, and almost all of it certainly irrelevant.

“We should, ah, take some samples,” he says, with a wincing look at the dismembered robot.

Her eyes track down the body toward its nether regions, the pelvis sitting there, separate from the abdomen and the upper legs. "The perp started carefully, but their work deteriorated as they continued."

She kneels down, coffee still in hand as she points to the neck where wires are protruding and fluids have leaked on the 'crete. "I would wager this was the last action. Almost as it the head was wrenched off physically, rather than cut."

Prent motions to a tech, who eagerly swabs the area and bags whatever evidence they collect.

She rocks back on her heels, looking up at the tent ceiling. "I wonder what she's looking at."

It takes a moment for the Rake to realize she's talking about the 'bot.

Prent's main implant, attached to her brain via the spinal column but seated in her chest cavity, reconstructs the narrow street as it is beyond the privacy tent, overlaying the image on her HUD. Corporate logos from the looming skyscrapers block out the sky, and she dismisses the overlay with an impatient blink.

The coffee is similarly tossed into a garbage receptacle and she returns her attention to the body.

"The 'bots are self-sanitizing," Prent says, indicating the pelvis, "But we might get lucky."

She scans the soft lavender colored synthskin of the 'bot with her eye implants, barely wincing as the data streams into her brain. "There are a lot of fingerprints."

A grunt of agreement and slight surprise as the data slips from Prent’s implant to the Rake’s, his eye painting the metallic limbs in a blotchy pattern of prints. “Someone’s had their hands all over her - it.”

The routine that acts as the interface between his ocular implant and his flesh brain is still integrating, and the thought of some Jane or John pawing hungrily at the robot triggers a recall of another of Bryon’s memories and a spike in his heartrate. Jaw tight, the Rake aborts the recall.

“There’s a… cluster of prints around the neck. Like they were,” he squints, confused, “Trying to choke it.”

Crouching down alongside the body, a fact that moments ago was completely unknown to the Rake (but not to Bryon) suddenly becomes solid and certain in his mind.

“This isn’t the first one like this.”

Prent looks up sharply, but says nothing. She nods. Before she can comment, the tech speaks up.

"Looks like the chest was cracked open."

Gloved hands roll the chest piece over, revealing a clean cut down the seam of the 'bot's spine. Prent leans in, implant flaring painfully as she tries to take it all in at once. The pain is always where the Huston implant interfaces directly with her brain.

Huston tech is the best, but even they can't get rid of the cybermigraine side effect.

Prent gloves up as the tech carefully pries apart the cut, trying to avoid the sharp metal edges under the synthskin.

"Maybe we should do this at the lab," the tech says nervously, but Prent reaches in and pulls the torso open before he can fully commit to his cautious thought.

"Her CPU is gone," she says, though she already knew it would be.

In the cavity where the 'bot's hardware should have been, lies a single white rose.

Prent makes eye contact with the Rake. The rookie carries Bryon's implants, gifted to him by the department to 'ease the transition' or some other such corporate nonsense. She feels a familiar surge of emotion when she sees Bryon's cybernetic eye staring back at her, but she tamps it down.

"The others weren't completely taken apart like this, but that flower seals it. Detective Campbell and I were on the other cases as well."

She backs away from the body. The unsolved robot deaths had never sat well with Bryon, though she still isn't sure why they'd affected him so much.

"We should move this to the lab," Prent tells the tech, who is happy to comply.

She strips off her gloves and tosses them in the receptacle.

Detective Campbell. The last moments of Bryon Campbell’s life are like a scab that the Rake has to resist the urge to pick. Instead, he allows himself controlled access to what’s left of the relevant case files. The white rose killer.

There was something so jarring about the sight of a flower, something organic and rare, nestled within the broken chest cavity of a robot - and the missing CPUs… destroying a robot and stealing their innards like that was the kind of crime that you didn’t come back from. The robots had zero tolerance where that was concerned and the last human to make that kind of mistake had been rendered into a colourless paste. Just the thought of it fired off some deep-seated protocol in his implant to remind the Rake that the robots are our betters and we must serve and protect them.

Outside, the crowd has dispersed. With the tent blocking their view, most of the humans had become bored enough to wander away. There are a few still lurking at the edge of the police. He looks them over, capturing images of their faces. Would the culprit be bold or stupid enough to return to the scene of the crime?

The Rake clears his throat before addressing the barrier.

“If anyone saw anything, you can come down to the station and give a statement.”

Most of the stragglers wander off. They’d been happy to spectate, but had no interest in solving whatever crime had been committed.

Prent's implant flares with an incoming packet as the techs and unis work to transport the scene.

Case 2915 upgraded to Priority: High

She frowns, letting the message remain on the HUD for a moment. Glancing at the Rake she can see that he is processing the same input. High priority cases are handled by Detectives First Class. The reassignment packet will come down any minute, but for now the case is still theirs.

"Any matches in the crowd?" Prent asks the Rake, searching her memory for the images from the other crime scenes.

Her cybernetics are still processing the fingerprints, and she is unhappy to remember that she'd downloaded most of the White Rose Killer data to the core at the station. Comparisons will have to wait.

Each time he blinks, another face from the crowd is outlined and overlaid in lines and shapes that divide the facial features into categorizable component parts. Seconds of lag punctuate the connection between the implant and the Metro PD’s central citizen databank. It’s no surprise that every facial capture returns a match; the ‘bots have catalogued every human child born in the last century.

Turning his back to what’s left of the crowd, the Rake severs the connection to the central databank and mutters, “Nothing. Just a... bunch of people with nothing better to do.”

The tech’s are making quick work of transporting the body parts, lifting and, in spite of the fact that you could club someone to death with one of the robot’s limbs, they carry them with all the reverence of a religious ceremony.

The Rake doesn't watch. Doesn’t want any part in case 2915.

If they stand here long enough, the case will be reassigned. He’ll be released from shift and can go home to sleep - or at least, lie down in the dark and not move. Close his eyes and try to ignore that whirr in his skull, the ever-executing strands of code, the pieces of Bryon Campbell that are trying to fit like square pegs into the round holes of his consciousness.

"If we had the case we -" Prent's voice stops abruptly as a call comes through from the station chief.

Subvocalizing, her lips barely moving as she forms the words more as thoughts than sound, she picks it up by focusing on the blinking icon on her HUD.

"Hello Chief."

"You're keeping case 2915. Despite your demotion you were running the White Rose killings with Campbell. We want you to continue."

"Uh, yes sir," she says, full voiced in her surprise.

"It goes without saying that if you mess this up, you're through."

The call terminates. Prent purses her lips, catching the Rake's attention.

"We're not being reassigned. Do you need a ride to the station?"

His head rolls back, eyes on the sky at the moment Prent’s ‘yes sir’ comes out. It doesn’t take a neural connection to a network of supercomputers to deduce what’s just come through from command. A small part of the Rake, a vestige of Campbell, is elated to be back on the case. This was all a part of taking the job, taking the implant; a whole lot of history and unfinished business came with it.

At the offer of a lift, the Rake looks down and out into the street that he’d walked along to reach the scene, thinking the walk might clear his head.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Then, as an afterthought, “Thanks.”

He starts walking towards Prent’s vehicle, parked up nearby.

“You were saying, if we had the case...?”

"We can compare crowd shots from the other crime scenes. See if anyone has been to multiple."

They both already know there weren't any repeat faces on the first two, but it won't hurt to run the comparison.

She slides into the driver's seat, starting the car with a button push. It is coded to recognize her corneal signature, and she pulls away from the curb as soon as the Rake closes his door.

The rising sun begins to illuminate the city around them as she pulls into the station, parking over a line in the parking lot. She hates letting the car park itself, directing the car to its rest if her bad parking job makes her more human.

But Prent is more than human. The Huston implant nestled in her ribcage and extra cybernetics threaded through her body have made sure of that. While it makes her job easier, as she can interface directly with the human and the robot population of the city, neither side will accept her as part of them.

More than human, less than 'bot.

Most of Metro PD have implants. It creates a brotherhood that binds them together, more than just the badge. Your average human fleshbag will have a comms chip and perhaps a corneal implant if they don't want to bother putting lenses in every day, but mostly they enjoy being different from the robots.

She slams her car door a little too hard and stalks into the station.

An outline is still visible where the word SCABS was spray painted onto one of the station walls. One of the latest recruits scrubs at what remains of the paint, occasionally casting wary glances of their shoulder. They give the Rake a tight, joyless smile as he smile as he follows Prent into the station.

The ‘bots didn’t built the station, instead co-opting a pre-singularity construct and augmenting it, much as they had the entire human race. The old brick and mortar building has been pragmatically stripped off anything that doesn’t directly serve the maintenance of law and order, leaving behind a confused looking, mostly hollow shell full of similarly fractured people.

An array of sensors automatically sweep the two of them, checking their identities. The station network pings the Rake’s implant: a minor but mandatory security patch has been queued for download and installation into his eye. A small timer, counting down the minutes until the upgrade will begin, appears at the edge of his vision and he resists the urge to swat at it like a fly.

“So, the way we - you - left this one, were there any outstanding leads?”

"No. If this follows the pattern then the majority of the fingerprints will be from multiple people, but the ones around the throat will match the ones on our other deactivated 'bots. Which in turn have no matches in the system."

Prent uploads the fingerprint data to the station's core, letting the disembodied robot they call Chief disseminate it all. A number pops up indicating where it is in the queue, only to flip to Processing Now. . . when the Priority: High tag is read.

"Maybe the killer left something behind this time," she says tonelessly, walking through the nearly deserted lobby and its blue plastic chairs into Processing.

Two unis are struggling to get a drunk guy into Holding, until a third with an augmented arm steps in and bodily lifts the guy off his feet. Prent ignores the yelling and takes the turn into the blank white hallway that leads to Homicide. It's too early for anyone else to be in, and the coffee machine sits empty and cold.

She crosses to it immediately, putting the machine to work, and impatiently paces to her desk. The Rake has already taken his seat across from her, his eyes focused on input only he could see.

Prent pulls out her chair and sits. The desk is empty except for a pad and stylus (in case one needs to write a note to upload), and a woefully empty coffee mug with the station emblem on it.

She interfaces with the core, and her HUD brings up their joint murderboard, each folder of Evidence carefully marked. The Rake is already compiling data from the previous cases, creating tabs so they can flick back and forth.

Prent looks in the folder marked Physical Evidence, but it's still empty for Case 2915. The body hasn't made it back to the Lab yet.

"The other two had their RAM stripped as well - I'm guessing it'll be the case for Lavender, too. With the most recent memories not backed up yet, we didn't have much to go on."

The implant warns her not to trivialize the 'bot by giving it a nickname. I'm humanizing her, Prent realizes.

The smell of coffee breaks the internal dialogue between her thoughts and the cybernetic network inside her, and she grabs her mug off her desk and heads for the machine.

Syncing with the murderboard is a lot like finding an old family photo album the Rake hasn’t seen or thought of in years. As the reports, photographs, audio recordings, observations and notes form a composite picture of the case file to date, fragments of Bryon Campbell click into place alongside them, adding context to the details.

The strong, bitter smell of coffee tickles his senses and his implants central processor attempts to scrub the impulse to get a cup. Methyltheobromine is non-essential to current optimal function. Abort. Hissing breath through his teeth, the Rake snatches up his mug and sloshes the tar-black liquid in regardless. It burns his tongue as he sips at it, and he imagines that blank android face staring down at him again, its absence of expression somehow conveying deep disapproval at absolutely predictability behaviour.

The Rake slumps back into his chair. “The perp,” he says, the slang tasting unnatural on his scalded tongue but oh so familiar to Campbell, “The perp has to be either part of the Undercity, to have dodged the DNA databank - or they’re well-connected enough to have themselves scrubbed from the ‘bank.”

Logic tells the Rake that the former is more plausible than the latter. What motivation could the robots have to allow a human to corrupt their precious, infallible databanks? Only an already corrupt ‘bot would permit it, and no such construct could possibly exist within the PD. Still, as a child of the Undercity, he knows well enough what that kind of life could drive a person to do.

“Might be worth looking at the DNA 'bank logs, to see if there’s been any unusual CRUD operations.”

James gives the Rake a carefully blank look as she sips her coffee. She knows that sometimes memories can persist even if an implant has been scrubbed for reuse, but he’s never mentioned experiencing any of Bryon’s.

She can’t tell if the Rake knows what Bryon had suspected. The suspicion he’d had that she thinks got him killed.

Her hand twitches a little.

“That’s a good idea. You need help checking it out? I was going to wait for the body.”

He shrugs the offer off. “No reason for us both to suffer.”

There’s usually something relaxing about keying into the police databanks. A query might take a minute or an hour, but for those ticking seconds, the Rake knows he can let the implant take hold. In this case, there’s no straightforward way of querying anomalies. No way of simply switching off and letting the software do the investigation.

He takes another swig of the coffee, wondering how much of his own, sleep-degraded performance the implant can counteract.

“I’ll let you know when I’m done,” he says, the words coming on a sigh. Another sip, bitter dregs and the grounds from the bottom of the Metro PD issue mug.

“Ping me if you need anything,” he adds, heading rocking back just a fraction as the interface between his implant and the DNA databank connects.

Prent watches her partner glaze over, the laborious task of database querying overtaking him. She sips her coffee, looking around as some of the other detectives walk into the office.

”Heard you caught a body,” says Det. 1st Class Lacy McClaren, blue eyes piercing as they pour a coffee.

Their partner, Det. 1st Class Nguyen An, doesn’t make eye contact as he strides to his desk. McClaren beelines for James.

”Heard it’s a ‘bot.”

The unspoken accusation is that Prent and Rake are pulling cases above their pay grade - which, of course, they absolutely were. McClaren raises an eyebrow, waiting for Prent to speak.

When she does, her voice is calm.

”It’s the White Rose killer. With my history, Chief gave it to me.”

McClaren’s gaze slides over to the Rake, taking in his unshaven face and slightly rumpled appearance. They look back at Prent.

”Hoping there’s something of Campbell left in there, I suppose.”

They can’t keep the sneer off their androgynous face as they turn to join Nguyen on the far side of the bullpen. “Try not to get this one killed too.”

Prent tightens her fists in her lap, but says nothing. Mercifully the lab pings her, and she grabs her jacket as she stands up. BRB, she messages the Rake, and heads to the basement.

There’s only so long the Rake can swim in the mess of the database. Each CPU cycle churns something inside of him, heaping pressure on pressure. Feeling the weight of it on the inside of his skull, he blinks away the interface. Rubs the corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger.

He looks for Prent, but she’s not at her desk. The timestamp on her last message - BRB - is about a quarter of an hour ago. His coffee is cold, but he drinks what’s left before shuffling down to the basement.

Through the observation window, he can see Prent and the medical examiner standing over the body. He can’t hear through the glass, but the examiner is saying something, gesturing, never making eye contact with Prent. They can’t take their eyes off the body, and who can blame them? How many times in their life had the examiner been confronted with a ‘bot like this? Maybe once or twice, maybe never. It’s insides on display, the gnarl of once pristine circuitry somehow more unsettling than the prospect of staring down into an open, wet chest cavity.

The Rake steps into the room, easing the door shut with a soft click behind him, and approaches the table.

“Well?”

A body in the medical examiner's cooled lab is usually a vacant slab of meat; something that has been left behind by the former occupant for the family to grieve over. The lavender 'bot and her dismembered limbs are laid out neatly, looking like a model waiting to be put together.

Prent looks up as the Rake enters, and by the look on her face he knows to lower his expectations. "No case-breaking clues left behind, unfortunately."

Dr. Stephens has the chest cavity flipped over, the cut Prent had made at the scene laid open. The rose had been removed and sent to a separate lab for processing. "Unfortunately it is much like the other, ahem, victims. Very little physical evidence to collect."

"The Chief wants White Rose's head on a platter, Doc," says Prent, eyeballing the examiner.

"Well I can't just make evidence appear when there isn't any," huffs the man, his mechanical irises focusing as he finally looks up. "Still, with a third body now I can say definitively that White Rose is using different sharps to cut with for each victim. The cuts are neat, to begin with, but you can see here," he lifts the foot and points with a gloved finger at the synflesh, "that the blade is serrated."

"He is using weapons of opportunity, perhaps," muses Prent.

You are assuming gender, chides the Huston implant, a little AI of her own to remind her when her humanity was getting in the way of her work.

They are taking apart female 'bots, it is a safe assumption we are looking at a male killer.

Multiple weapons, perhaps multiple killers.

Now who's assuming things?

The implant offers no further suggestions, and James catalogues its input, even if she thinks its ridiculous. Chief likes them to listen to the implants. Says it helps build the Mainframe to get input from the Hustons.

Bryon had wondered if the Hustons were helping the cops, or if the cops were there to inform the Hustons.

Bryon had wondered a lot of things.