From Louise: Are you sure about this?
Her breathing tells me that she’s working through a panic attack.
To Louise: I don’t think we have much choice. The room with the bodies is at the center of the building, so unless you have some good way to extend the range of your medical bots so that we can do it from outside, we’ll need to get closer. Or we could wait until tonight and break in. I’m sure that would be fun.
From Louise: No. They’re strictly short range. Alright, I guess this is better than playing burglars.
“Come on, then,” I tell her. “It’s time for the tour.”
She grumbles as we approach the doors of the Medical Examiner’s office. I think I was expecting something like a hospital, but this place looks more like a strip mall from the outside. A strip mall in an industrial neighborhood. I pull open the metal and glass door and we step inside.
The morgue looks a little more like a hospital once we get inside. It has the same kind of clinical smell too. The disinfectant, I think. A smiling middle-aged woman is posted at the reception desk up front.
“Good morning,” she says cheerfully as we approach. “What can I help you with today?”
“Good morning,” I answer, putting a smile on my face. “We’re here for a tour with Doctor Jeppson. We called earlier this morning. We’re the students.”
“Oh, yes, the ones thinking about becoming coroners? Well, that’s so nice. Let me see if the doctor is ready yet.”
“Thanks.”
She picks up the phone and I feel the vibrations of the ringing phone in an office down the hall.
“He’s coming. You two just have a seat there and he’ll be with you in a jiffy.”
We sit down on the hard plastic chairs near the front door that she indicates. While we wait, I feel out the whole place with my bots again. The cold room where the bodies are stored is down a hallway and to the left. Smith was a huge man, broader at the shoulders than the standard drawers here. There’s one big body out on the tables. At first I don’t recognize him. His muscular frame has added a lot of fat in the year since I last saw him, but it’s definitely him.
To Louise: Should be easy once we get in there, he’s just out in the open in their refrigerated room.
From Louise: Good, at least one thing is going right then.
A small, bespectacled man in a white coat emerges from the big metal double doors that lead deeper into the morgue.
“John Anderson?” he says, looking at me. “And Alice Kurasawa?”
“Yeah, that’s us,” I lie.
“Welcome to the Denver Medical Examiner’s office. I understand you’re both thinking about careers in forensic science.”
“That’s right,” Louise says. “We got through our freshman biology and chemistry classes and the field seemed fascinating. I just wanted to get a chance to see what it’s like before I committed to the pathology major.”
“And I wanted to make sure I could handle working in a morgue,” I add. “All I have to go on now is the way they’re shown on TV crime dramas.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Well, how wonderful that you’re considering the field,” he says. “There are just too few of us that are interested. Come along, let me show you where we work and what we do.”
He leads us down the hallway, through the big metal doors, and starts extolling the virtues of life as a coroner. He’s a pretty funny guy, I like him. It probably helps to have a healthy sense of humor in his line of work. We stroll past rows of tall cabinets that hold a weird mix of medical and janitorial supplies which he explains as we go. The cold room is at the very end of the tour, its door looking a lot like a restaurant walk-in freezer. Dr. Jeppson walks us in and my console overlay shows Louise’s medical bots rushing towards the huge corpse under the cloth. The coroner gives us a quick description of the body drawers and turns to walk us out.
From Louise: I need a few more minutes. Stall him.
“Doctor Jeppson,” I venture, gently grabbing his elbow to stop him from walking out. “What do you think about coming in with a criminology undergrad degree before med school? Is that going to be as valuable as doing pathology or biology? I know it’ll be a lot of extra work to get the pre-med requirements in, but it seems like it would pay off once I’m working.”
That starts a very long explanation on the virtues of either path, which I pretend to listen to attentively. Louise is nodding occasionally, trying to look like she’s interested too. I can tell it’s hard for her to mask the look of concentration that keeps creeping onto her face.
From Louise: Done, get us out of here.
The timing is good, as his explanation sounds like it’s wrapping up.
“Thank you, Doctor Jeppson,” I tell him with my most genuine looking smile. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“I’m always happy to help young people make good career choices,” he says with a smile. “And if you’re looking for an internship while you’re in school, we might be able to find you something helping out around here.”
“We’ll definitely think about that,” Louise says. “And thanks again.”
He walks us back down the hallway to the entrance, where we wave goodbye to the friendly receptionist on the way out.
“Yes on the bots, no on the immediate danger,” Louise declares once we’re clear. “It was ugly in there. If I had to guess, I’d say he had the implant put in using a modification of my auto-installer. It was probably installed for two or three days before death based on how much the neurons had started to grow around the bots. The optical nerve connection didn’t look right. Jeff probably didn’t get a console overlay working for him. I’m guessing Smith was blind or mostly blind from it.”
“Did it look like the implant was usable otherwise?”
“Probably. I mean, obviously it worked at least for that Cyclone of Death program. He couldn’t have done much targeting, but he wouldn’t have needed to if Jeff set it up to home in on other nanobot signals. Assuming Jeff was the one that tweaked it for him. I guess it could have been some illuminati coder or something, but this seems kind of like something Jeff would insist on doing. Point is, Smith definitely didn’t do it himself. This was pretty sophisticated and he didn’t have the background for that.”
“No, Smith wasn’t technical at all. I mean, he understood it enough to work with the patent team, but he couldn’t have coded anything.”
“Yeah. It wouldn’t have been nice for him though. The placement on a lot of the sensors and feedback nodes were off. I think a lot of that is my fault. My installer made assumptions that relied on genetic similarities between all of us implantees. Anyway, a bunch of the nodes ended up clustered badly and got stuck in the capillaries in his brain, which I think is what ended up killing him. It looked like he had several aneurysms, and at least three of them had ruptured. He probably died in tremendous pain.”
I nod. I know I shouldn’t feel satisfaction at that, but I do. Sorry, Mom. I need to put some safeguards into my digital conscience to help me resist the desire for vengeance and just look for justice instead. Vengeance has cost us all enough already.
“Did you get things cleaned up?” I ask her.
“Yeah. The bots had self-lobotomized like they’re supposed to. Whatever bad code that Jeff put in there to let the bots run wild must have been an option that Smith had to turn on for the attacking bots. Or maybe it was baked into the code for the death tornado. Anyway, I disassembled all the bots in there and pulled out as much of the material as I could. There might still be some residue, but nothing they’ll see without putting his brain into a mass spectrometer.”
“They don’t do that, right?”
“No, they don’t do that as part of a normal autopsy. They’ll conclude natural causes. Death by massive stroke. Nothing unusual for a man of his age and weight.”
“Good,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”