Detective Harvey Bishop was a detective in Third York City's police force, specifically the 391st district, in the borough of Siegfried.
More specifically, he was part of the homicide division and occasionally cooperated with the Major Crimes Unit and the Hypercognitive Crimes Unit.
He had been part of the police force since he was nineteen, and a detective since he'd been twenty-four.
He'd gotten that promotion by looking over a detective's shoulder, undoing a month of work by immediately pointing out where he'd gone wrong and proceeding to figure out the case just with the information the detective had had at hand.
He was now fifty-two years old. People were starting to comment on the topic of retirement. Some were also starting to comment on the lack of ascension in the ranks.
Those were the people that failed to understand who Harvey was.
He was someone that believed in maximizing comfort as the ultimate goal of life. He was someone that knew that to maximize comfort, you had to know what you had and how to use it.
He was good at figuring out cases, shifting red names to black on the board. He was good at politicking, enough to be liked by his bosses. He was good at getting people to talk, and good at playing people against themselves.
And more than anything else, he was smart enough to not let the rush of policing keep him from the game of maximizing comfort.
When the bosses wanted detectives looking the other way, he looked. When money shifted hands, he paid just enough attention that some of it fell into his grip.
He was not blind to the fact that he was police through and through, like anyone else that spent this long on this level of the job, but he tried not to let it rule his life.
It was about to end his life unless he suddenly figured out a lot of stuff very, very fast.
Either from Kingston Hill taking out the city, or from the captain personally strangling him to death for not figuring things out for Kingston Hill.
“This is a fuck-up of monumental dimensions,” Captain Wayne Gordon said, pacing around the room agitatedly, papers held in hand.
He was a short, old white man with a large bald spot in the middle of his short white hair. At the moment, he was sweating bullets, giving his wide forehead a light sheen.
He continued, “I don’t know who fucked up, but someone did and it’s going to roll downhill soon.”
“Yes, sir,” said Harvey.
“Fuck you, don’t ‘yes, sir’ me,” Captain Gordon snapped, before going back to his pacing. “You… you don’t know anything yet?”
“That family’s got too many possible enemies to narrow down suspects,” said Harvey. He would have added ‘unless you want me to arrest random people off the street’, but he didn’t want to risk giving the captain any ideas.
“You don’t have any suspects?” Gordon asked. “The fuck are you doing here with your dick in your hand, then?! Go do some fucking police work, for Christ’s sake!”
“Well… it happened in Santo Ataúd,” Harvey started. “And Polk’s asking around for what Jake Hill was doing before his death as we speak. We caught a lead about some kind of argument early yesterday, we’re seeing if that gets us anywhere.”
“You’re telling me your partner’s going around alone right now?”
“No sir, she’s making calls from her cubicle.”
“Good, good,” the Captain sighed. “I don’t want anyone walking alone. As soon as I get people to sign off on it, I’m making the beat cops go around with coppers.”
“Tensions will rise,” Harvey noted. “And the officer’s are gonna be pissed.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Gordon replied. He looked out the window for a moment, before turning back to Harvey. “I’m going to bring this up with… well, everyone but the press, I guess. I want you on this like shit on paper, do you understand me? I want overtime, and I don’t care if you get paid or not. This goes to black before the month is done, no matter what.”
Harvey’s poker face had gotten a lot of practice over the years. He hid a frown, nodded, and let himself out of the Captain’s office.
He ignored the looks from fellow police as the door closed behind him, just in time to muffle a shouted curse word.
The word would get out by the end of the day. Hell, by twelve it’d probably be known in fucking Europe. And then more people would be dragged into it, the same demands would be made, and morale would surely plummet.
And Harvey knew he was going to be at the bottom of the hill when it rolled down.
He walked over to his cubicle, dragged the chair around and sat next to Kate, who was talking into a phone.
“... and you’re sure of this?” she said. “... yes... yes, I understand… Yes, thank you. I’ll… yeah, I’ll call you later. Thanks.”
Harvey raised an eyebrow, watching her hang up before resting her forehead on her hand.
“So?”
“Last people he pissed off were Blackfish,” she replied. “Everyone that knew and would talk said so.”
“Fuck,” he said, with feeling. “I didn’t think they were this fucking stupid.”
“They’re not,” said Kate, raising her head. “It must’ve been one of the baby gangs.”
“Trying to impress the older kids?” Harvey suggested. Kate shrugged and nodded, so he said, “Okay, that’s… maybe we can work with that. It narrows things down somewhat.”
“So how do we track down the perp?”
“We go for the younger ones, put a little pressure on them, see what they’ve heard,” said Harvey. “People say all sorts of shit around kids, thinking it doesn’t matter.”
“Sounds about right,” Kate snorted. “My dad used to catch me doing all sorts of shit just ‘cause he asked my little brother.”
Harvey snorted. “The fuck you get up to, Junior?”
“Nothing you could prove,” Kate replied. “What did the Captain say?”
“Basically what I said he would, only somehow meaner.”
“Unpaid overtime?”
“Yup.”
“Mm,” Kate muttered.
Kate was a trust-fund kid. She could afford to say ‘Mm’ to unpaid overtime.
“So, where are we starting?” she asked.
“This is gonna go to HCU sooner or later, and we’re gonna get dragged with it,” Harvey predicted, driving the chair back to his side of the shared cubicle before getting back and pulling his jacket over the back. “We better have the foundation of a case ready.”
“So?”
“So we’re going to go around and grab little kids off the street.”
“... I’m so glad I became a cop,” Kate sighed. “Truly, I am.”
=]O[=
After I failed to show up for breakfast, mom came into my room and frowned upon seeing me curled up in my bed sheets, staring straight ahead.
“Pichón?” she said. My eyes moved to look at her, and she got closer. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
“... I don’t wanna talk,” I mumbled.
“Did something happen?”
My mouth stayed stubbornly shut.
She kneeled by my bed and ran her fingers through my hair for a moment, looking at me with worried eyes. I refused to meet them.
“... breakfast is getting cold,” she said. “You don’t want to get up and get some?”
… I shook my head.
“... okay, I’ll bring it here just this once,” she promised. “We don’t have to talk right now, but… tonight?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
She patted my arm and walked off, coming back with the well-used-and-abused cheap wood tray that we used for eating in bed and generally carrying stuff. Countless stains and faded paint marked the years it had experienced.
She set it down on my lap as I sat up, chocolate milk and Amarettis that we usually saved for merienda. She kissed my forehead and left, leaving me to sit still and look at my breakfast.
I recognized, distantly, that I should eat. It was like there was a buzzing in my head, every thought was pushed aside by a wall of white noise that made focus impossible.
I was still for minutes before I took the glass of chocolate milk and took a sip. The taste was sour and bitter. I drank some more.
Every sensation was overwhelming and bothersome. I wanted to take off my own skin, blind all my senses and just lay down to sleep until the next ice age.
I filled my mouth with tiny Italian cookies and chewed miserably.
Eventually breakfast was done, and I set the tray by the bed, next to my shoes. I laid back down and stared at the ceiling.
I had killed a man. In fact, I’d killed a man and his two friends, once to save my skin and remain in the game and the other two to keep my identity a secret.
I shivered a bit.
Distantly, I heard knocking, and the door opening. A whispered conversation, footsteps, then my door opened.
I turned my head and found John standing there, looking at me with a frown.
“... the hell’s wrong with you?” he asked.
I didn’t answer, instead turning to look at the ceiling.
John stood there in silence for a bit, then walked closer.
Before I could ask what he thought he was doing, he threw the covers off of me and grabbed me by one leg, starting to drag me out of the bed.
“Ey! Ey, wait, hold—” was as far as I got before he pulled me fully out of bed, making my head bang on the floor before he started dragging, ignoring my kicking at him. “Wait! Wait, asshole! At least let me put on some pants!”
He stopped dragging and looked at me, “You’re gonna put on pants?”
“I— yeah, sure!” I said, and despite myself a chuckle escaped me.
John smiled a bit and asked, “So you’re gonna come hang out?”
Like a bucket of cold water thrown at my face, I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be feeling remorse for a literal homicide.
I instinctively tried to get over it, but a part of me was still amused at John trying to pull me by the leg, in my boxers, out the door.
What disgust blossomed in me when I recognized my feelings. That was all it took for me to get over committing a sin? A little joke? Some amusement?
I wanted to vomit.
It must’ve shown in my face, because John resumed dragging me out the door.
“Stop!” I cried, kicking at him.
“Come hang out!” he demanded, starting to drag me through the carpeted hallway and towards the door, giving my scalp carpet burn through the hair.
“Fine!” I growled as intimidatingly as an eight-year-old child could manage. “I’ll put on my stupid pants and hang out with you. Dick.”
“Good,” he said, letting go of my leg. “I’m gonna have breakfast with your mom.”
Grumbling, I stood up and walked back into my room, taking extra time to put on my clothes and shoes as a petty sort of revenge against him.
=]O[=
“Hey, Moss,” said John.
“Hola, Mohsen,” I muttered, nodding at him.
“Guys!” he said, “Hi!”
Mohsen “Moss” Torabi was a kid younger than us by two years and smarter by a grade. He was brown skinned and curly-haired; chubby-cheeked, short and squeaky, he wore big round glasses with wire frames and got dimples when he smiled. He unironically wore sweater vests.
While most of the people my own age that I associated had the general energy of starved, rabid and hyperactive possums, Moss looked to have been ripped out from some educational children’s cartoon, the classical bookworm.
Despite all the tests showing that he was not a cog, Mohsen had made a hell of a showing at his parents’ behest, skipping a number of grades until he was a year ahead of us.
Naturally, this alienated a number of classmates, but John and I liked Moss alright.
When we found him that day, he’d been reading a book thicker than my wrist on his building’s stoop. He quickly dropped it after marking his spot and rushed over, smiling at us.
“What’s up?” he asked, looking from John to me. “Did something happen?”
“Lil’ bitch isn’t feeling too hot,” said John, tilting his head in my direction.
I grumbled something impolite.
“Oh no!” Moss said, painfully earnest. “How can I help?”
“We’re just here to hang out,” said John, before pulling out a couple of bills that I was pretty sure came from my stash, “But could you go buy some magazines from Kevin? Luke, what do you want?”
I grumbled again while Moss took the money.
“Alright, get him an issue of Steaming Romances,” said John, and barely dodged the shove I immediately gave him. “Okay, so you do want something.”
I glared, then looked at Moss and said, “Anything but Steaming Romances.”
I fucking hated that magazine back then. Even if I listened to my mom and ignored the cultural bias against men liking romance, it truly was horrid. And torrid. Also, I was pretty sure that some of the stories were straight up smut and I didn’t want my mom catching me reading that.
“Got it,” said Moss, already rushing away.
John put a hand on my shoulder and guided me to the stoop, where we sat down.
Once Mohsen was out of sight, having turned a corner, John asked, “What happened?”
“... doesn’t matter,” I muttered.
“You tell me everything,” said John. “I try to get you to shut up and you tell me more. What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, John,” I snapped. “Okay? Can you just… f-fucking drop it?”
John blinked. I tried not to make a habit out of swearing, since my mom said I was forbidden from it until I was eleven.
John looked at me, then faced back forward, not saying a word.
Moss eventually came running back, change clutched in one hand and a magazine held in the other. He handed me the latter and gave John the former before sitting between us, looking at us eagerly as he asked, “Did you guys do anything cool lately?”
I moodily opened my magazine and ignored him. John rolled his eyes at me and smiled at Mohsen, saying, “Luke went uptown to do a delivery, so they let me do sales on my own for a while. They even loaned me a gun!”
Moss’ eyes got really wide as he smiled and said, “Cool!”
I’d thrown that gun down a storm drain a few hours after I got it back, so that no one could connect the bullet with the gun.
“It was so cool, I got a ton of money. One guy tried to rob me so I pulled out the gun.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
I looked up, not putting down the magazine. As casual as I could manage, I immediately asked, “You’re okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, waving me off. “Anyway, the guy looked like he was about to shit himself when I pulled iron on him. I almost shit myself laughing.”
“Wow,” Moss whispered, before turning to look at me, “A-And what part of uptown did you go to?”
“... suburbs,” I said. I made to stay quiet, then realized Moss wouldn’t let that happen, and added, “It was… there was a lot of space. Everyone had gardens with like… orange trees and shit. Fancy cars. Houses were big, but… they were all away from each other.”
“I saw some pictures on Grandpa Walt’s TV,” Moss said. “Are the houses that big?”
“Huge. Bigger than some of the rises,” I said.
They weren’t, but to me they had been.
“Cool!” Moss smiled. “I’d love to live there someday.”
I blinked, a moment of silence occurring in my head. I remembered what the taxi driver had said, and I imagined living there with mom, John, Moss and Chris. For a moment, I could almost push back the thought of the body hitting the floor.
“... yeah,” I said. “That’d be cool.”
I went back to reading my magazine, pretending I drew understanding from the letters.
John and Mohsen kept talking. I chimed in from time to time.
The morning was mostly spent that way, and eventually I actually got enough reading done to be halfway through the magazine.
(It was the latest issue of Chrome-atic, another cogtech magazine that I read, more focused on medicinal uses of the latest forms of Hypercognitive technologies.
(It occurred to me that it might be of interest for Annabeth. I decided to put it with my other issues of the magazine so that I could share them with her some day.))
“What time is it?” Mohsen asked at some point. “I gotta tutor Chris at five.”
“You’re tutoring Chris?” I asked, smiling with disbelief.
“The fuck are you laughing at?” John asked. “Moss helps you with your homework, that’s basically tutoring.”
“Fuck off,” I replied, before turning back to Moss. “What are you tutoring Chris on?”
“Geometry stuff,” Moss shrugged. “Can’t remember the names of anything. The time?”
“Right,” I said, pulling up my wrist to look at the shitty plastic green-screened digital watch that Crane had given me for my birthday. “It’s two twenty-six, you’ve got–”
“Two hours thirty-four minutes,” Mohsen interrupted. “I know.”
“... must be nice,” John grumbled.
I considered mocking him, but to avoid an argument I said, “We could go hang out. We ain’t really doin’ much.”
I received shrugs and agreements, so I stuffed the pulp magazine in my back pocket and we started heading around.
Santo Ataúd was relatively simple to navigate, as part of one of the boroughs built mostly on a gridiron system. The twelve square blocks that comprised my neighborhood were fairly walkable, if you ignored the speeding cars and drive-bys.
Chris’ place was only a small distance from Moss’ place, putting it a medium distance from John and I’s place. On the way there we were called out to by a few of the other neighborhood kids, all of whom we’d played with at least once.
Not for any popularity, just because when you spent every summer of your life walking around in the street, you ended up talking to whoever’s there.
(I’d like to clarify that we were not let out into the street because of some form of willing child neglect. But the simple truth was that everyone in the neighborhood had multiple jobs and obligations. Couples tended to work the same shift so they could be tired together, unless they had a kid and then someone had to stay with it, only occasionally hiring a babysitter so that they could either relax together or work more alone.
(Single parents like my mom tended to bring us to work. It was a struggle to get bosses to agree to that outside of El Santo, but she managed thanks to me being naturally inclined to not moving or making noise. She attributed my skills with math to my having sat in on her classes for kids up to eight years older than me since I was three.
Then I proved to be responsible enough to be left alone at seven, so I just hung around and made myself snacks.))
We got to Chris’ building. The apartment buzzer was too high for any of us, so Moss sat on my shoulders and pressed the right bell.
After a few moments, there was a click and a gravelly male voice called out, short and clearly nervous, “Yeah?”
“Is Chris home?” Moss asked, shiting on my shoulders and fucking with my balance.
“Oh. Oh, yeah… yeah, one moment,” the voice said, almost dazed, then there was another click.
We waited, and after a few seconds Moss complained, “Stop leaning!”
“Stop fuckin’ moving, then!”
“I’m not moving!”
“Yuh-huh! Now my whole neck– back of ne– my whole nuca is gonna smell like asshole!”
“Shut up, I’m not moving!”
The buzzer clicked and Chris’ voice came out as filtered through a shitty microphone, “Hello?”
“Get your ass down here so I can stop holding up this asshole!” I called out, now purposefully leaning around to make Mohsen dizzy.
“... yeah, alright,” Chris said, audibly shrugging and not giving a fuck before the buzzer clicked again.
I promptly pretended like I was going to toss Mohsen backwards.
“Don’t!” he whined, grabbing onto my face.
John and I laughed. I stopped leaning back so he’d be relieved, then licked his hand.
“Gross!” he called out. I was too busy laughing to hear him put his finger in his mouth, but realized what happened when he stuck it to my ear.
“Augh!”
John was laughing his ass off, so I grabbed onto Moss’ legs and shoved him over my head, towards him. John spooked and made to catch Mohsen, who immediately headbutted him, making them both fall backwards.
Then I started laughing while they both started to hit each other on the ground.
When Chris got down and came out, she found me kicking at both of them indiscriminately while they had moved from pinching and punching to doing that and also biting each other.
Being an opportunist at heart and well-accustomed to the way little boys play, she did not miss a single beat. As soon as she was out the door, she proceeded to tackle me to the floor, slamming me into the concrete wheelchair ramp, then started tickling me and occasionally kneeing me in the crotch while I alternated between laughing and groaning in pain.
Such was the way of friendship.
=]O[=
Let’s take a break from talking about my life to talk about cogs in general.
The term itself comes from “hypercognitive”, which itself comes from the research carried out by Adam Ferris and Michael Waters on what they narcissistically dubbed the Ferris-Waters neurological mutation.
Hypercognitive individuals develop intellectually at an accelerated, heightened rate.
Notably, their emotional maturity does not match pace.
In fact, the academic description of the Ferris-Waters neurological mutation is that it grants the individual in question ‘heightened emotions, neurosis, recollection and intelligence’.
It is well known nowadays that intelligence measurements are by and large bullshit, but it’s hard to argue when you have teenagers creating laser death rays and adults creating sapient life from whatever they forgot to eat and started rotting in the fridge.
Nowadays, the treatment of cogs depends on where you are.
Some places have institutions dedicated to harnessing the intellect of cogs, like Third York’s Academy of Heightened Learning.
Other places conscript cogs as soon as they are found, like the Crown States do.
Other places simply banish or execute cogs under pretense of religion and/or public safety, like the Antarctic Society.
This is, grim as it might seem, an improvement of how they used to be treated.
Being that they started popping up shortly after the second world war — in the midst of international paranoia, spy games and counterculture flower children — the general unspoken agreement regarding these young children, who were already designing better atomic bombs in their sleep, was that they were to be used in pursuit of the ultimate arsenal.
The third world war lasted four years. Less than half of a decade.
It was enough time to change everything.
=]O[=
Now let’s talk about the world in general.
In those four years of global warfare, most of the world was turned into a wasteland filled with escaped or released experiments, highly altered environments full of incomprehensible flora and fauna, and nomadic tribes that found their niche in surviving the untamed world.
But if wandering the world on whatever vehicle you can put together is not your style, one can always enter one of the city-states littering the world. Granted, it’s easier to just be born in one.
I’m told the paperwork to prove that you are not a secret lab rat full of every plague known and unknown to man is killer.
The descent into walled-off city-states (or nation-states in some cases) was not a sudden one. Things were very visibly heading that way the more cities had to be quarantined to protect everyone else from biological warfare, until cities were getting quarantined to keep them safe from everywhere else.
Communication between cities is tough, considering that after all the killer satellites that happened in the third year of the war, anything even remotely shaped like a kill-sat launched up by someone gets shot down by everyone else. The remaining city-states of the United States are together under one banner in name only.
But a few agreements from just before the walls came up and the sats came down were still held. Specifically, the UN’s agreements of what subjects were Dark Science, not to be explored lightly.
Creating sapient life from scratch, defying the flow of time, and most forms of advanced social sciences were among the fields of study forbidden. Most of the societies Third York was still in contact with upheld these restrictions, and all the ones that did had an underworld of madcogs, dark scientists determined to consume the forbidden fruits.
But more on that in a second.
Third York itself was built around the irradiated debris of what used to be New York, at a distance but close enough that the ruins could be scavenged for parts that would later be decontaminated and used.
By the time I’d arrived at the city, Third York covered about half of the old state, and most of Second York had been recovered and decontaminated through careful use of Academy-approved bioengineered plant life. Its new boroughs had been named by one of the city’s founders, Iskander Valiant, after heroes of fable that he’d adored as a young man.
Unfortunately, most cogs have a tendency to give themselves ridiculously cool names, as evidenced by Houses Valiant, Sanguine, Goldflower, Guerra and Asclepius, the great Noble Houses and half of the city’s United Council.
But more of that later.
=]O[=
Finally, let’s talk about cogs as individuals.
With the experience that I now have relating to cogs, I can say that they are simultaneously some of the most direct and circuitous motherfuckers in existence.
Consider the case of Charlene “Charlie” Abernant, a cog from my native borough of Siegfried.
Charlie liked pigeons. Quite a bit, with the passion that cogs usually hold for their special interests.
Charlie decided she would raise a small flock of them to be mightier than the rest, and that the Abernant Flock would rule the rest of their species.
Being six at the time, she decided to do this by feeding spicy food to the flock she was raising on her apartment building’s roof. She later realized that pigeons can’t taste capsaicin.
She decided that to remedy this, she would build a device that would wipe out every pigeon in Third York and in a couple miles around it.
After her Doom Tower was done pulverizing every poor flying rat in the city-state, she scooped up some of the loose pigeon guts that now decorated the city, took it back to her lab (her mom’s study) and started working.
Within a week, she’d recreated pigeons, except now they could taste spice. She cloned enough so that the population would get back to its previous numbers within the year, and started raising another small flock, now getting them used to spices.
To this day, Third York is still populated by pigeons that scream when they shit, and which obey a flock that is housed in the Abernant family's apartment building.
So what can be learned from that amusing little anecdote?
It means, as I understand it, that hypercognitive individuals have one true sin: stubbornness.
Charlie could have investigated another way to raise her flock above the rest of its idiot species. She could have just designed from scratch a superior species of pigeon, as she was clearly capable of doing. She could have done anything, literally anything less horrifying than what she actually did.
And she did not choose the path she did because of callousness, or evil. Cogs have the same morals any of us do, even if the development is stunted from the treatment they usually get.
But it was the first idea she had, and when you’re so smart that you can do your first idea no matter what it is, that’s what you usually go with.
Hypercognitives, with this, become conditioned into developing intense stubbornness.
They will despise any challenge given to their ideas, and will argue in a way only someone as smart or smarter than that particular cog can keep up with.
(Or an idiot just as stubborn as they are, as it turns out.)
So, what do you get when you have enough smarts to figure out anything you ever need to, the attitude to never stray, stop or swerve around morals in your path, and live in a world where only about one in a thousand are like you?
You get bored.
And that leads to you messing around, making experiments.
Society allows it, but there are rules. Third York, for example, has an academy, you go there and suddenly you’re surrounded by kids as smart as you, and all it costs is not peeking into those little forbidden branches of the tree.
But then something else happens. Maybe you get bored again. Maybe you hate following the rules of those idiots that built your society when you clearly know better.
Whatever it is, you peek into the schools of Dark Science. Maybe you just dabble a bit, or maybe you take the full plunge.
If it’s the latter, you quickly realize that research is expensive, that you have no references to study from, and that you’re basically making sweet science from scratch.
The difficulties from that become obvious. How long can you do this without anyone else, any of the other cogs, noticing? How can you possibly keep gathering the materials for experimentation without a paper trail? Wouldn’t it be easier to just not break the law?
Oh, but you’re already so interested in the topic, you can’t turn back now! And since you’re already breaking the ultimate taboo… what’s it matter if you break a few lesser laws?
If you understand all that, you understand who Kingston Hill was when he started making experimental drugs for cash.
And that still doesn’t tell you shit about the depths of depravity that filled the man’s soul by the time I shot his son.
=]O[=
“Kingston Hill’s son?” John asked. “I didn’t even know he had one. Who killed him?”
“Some fuck-up, I guess?” Chris said, shrugging. “I heard Dad complainin’ about it to a buncha people, but nobody seemed to have any answers.”
Crystal “Chris” Jones was the daughter of a real-ass, bonafide Blackfish soldier. A high-ranking one. A trusted one, with a family history entrenched in the gang since it started. Were we the cosa nostra, Chris’ father would’ve been a made man.
The princess herself kept her hair in a series of braids that flowed down her back, usually held back by a cloth either red or black. She almost constantly wore oversized basketball jerseys and shorts, and she was the only other person my age that I knew regularly carried a gun.
Her dad had done everything he could to keep her from actually joining the gang. But he still wanted her safe.
After the spontaneous violence had concluded, we’d all taken our bruised selves over to the court, which had all the items and markings required for either basketball or good ol’ fashioned football (not the American type). On the way there we’d spent time at a small playground that had concrete tunnels that we occasionally trapped each other inside of.
When we’d gotten there some Ataúd kids had already been playing, and they’d almost wordlessly integrated us into their game. It was difficult to play while replaying three deaths over and over in my head, and my own competitive spirit made me focus more and more on the game, making me have fun except when I occasionally snapped out of it.
We’d played a couple rounds until some older kids got there, and since they were actually in the José de San Martín Football Club — playfully nicknamed Los Cadaveres by themselves and others, on account of the neighborhood’s thematics — we got kicked to the side.
We were currently sitting to the side. Moss and the other three kids were watching the teens train and run drills while John and Chris talked and I read.
“What do you think is going to happen?” John asked. “I mean, he died here, so…”
I saw Chris shrug again out of the corner of my eye. “Whoever it is, they’re going to hand him over as soon as they find him. They gotta.”
John and I made agreeing hums.
“Dad thinks it’s a frame-up,” Chris said. “Like, someone trying to get us all wiped out so they can take over.”
“Maybe it was Hill,” I suggested.
John and Chris blinked and looked at me askance.
“What?” asked Chris.
“I mean, Hill’s a madcog, his son ain’t even a regular cog,” I explained. “Maybe he was like all disappointed with his kid and went ‘you’ve outlived your usefulness’ and iced him.”
They both stared at me for a little longer.
“... boy, you gotta stop reading those fuckin’ magazines,” Chris chastised me. “This is reality, motherfucker. Ain’t no parents killing they own fuckin’ kids.”
John didn’t nod at her words or anything, but he still looked at me weird.
I shrugged and went back to reading.
“What’s up with him, anyways?” asked Chris, looking at John.
“Something happened after I left, I dunno what,” John shrugged.
“I’m right here,” I grumbled. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not.”
“Shut up, you’re not part of this conversation,” said Chris, making John smirk, before she turned to him and said, “So what’s the plan?”
“He’s gonna talk eventually,” John affirmed. “Right now, I’m just trying to get the bitch to quit moping.”
“I’m not moping!” I whined.
“Bitch please,” Chris said, rolling her eyes.
“No, no, it’s true,” said John. “Sometimes he whines too.”
I made to reach past Chris to smack him, but she shoved me back then grabbed me by the hood of my hoodie and started pulling me forward towards the teenagers.
“C’mon,” she said, a smile in her voice. “One of them’s been at my house on business, I think I can get us the half court to keep playing.”
I grumbled and pulled at her grip, but followed.
=]O[=
A few hours later, we’d bid farewell to the other kids and were heading back over to my place.
Between playing, talking and walking, we had spent most of the day already, and the sky was starting to tinge purple. Orange street lights were already turning on, their light shining straight down and tinting things in another color.
The court was attached to the only park in El Santo, and already the fireflies were coming out, shining intermittently. The air was still warm and slightly humid, and the sweat from the exercise stuck my clothes to my body. My breathing was still a bit heavy and my body felt pleasantly hot.
Most of the time I had one foot out of reality — usually because I was thinking about pulp fics and that time because I was thinking about crimes — but sometimes I had these moments where my mind fell totally in the moment, where I was fully conscious of where I was and what I was doing, and where my own thoughts went unexamined for once.
I felt my body tense a bit, but I wasn’t anxious or anything. I looked at my friends, thought about how many times they’d managed to distract me from my thoughts, and felt a burst of affection.
I looked up. The standardized street lights throughout Third York were designed to create the smallest amount of light pollution possible, so I could see a number of stars hanging above us.
For the first time all day, I thought about the bodies dropping and dying and failed to feel that crushing emptiness inside my rib cage.
I’m a monster, I thought, and failed to be sad or angry about it. At least being a monster was safe. Monsters never got scared.
My foot fell back out of reality as I got lost in those thoughts and walked staring upwards, until I felt John pulling at the back of my hoodie just as we were about to cross a street.
When I turned to ask him what that was about, I saw what they were all staring at.
A few blocks down a level street, the orange glow of an enormous fire illuminated the street. Now that I was paying attention, I could hear the distant screaming.
We all stood there for a moment. Then I thought of how close we were to my apartment, and that I knew some of the people that lived in that direction.
I started running forward. My friends, wonderful and loyal and stupid, chased after me.
When I got there, there were already firemen tending to the corners of the fire while officers braved the heat to struggle against the creature at the center of the fire.
The creature.
It resembled a person, but it had long stopped being one. All the limbs had been removed and replaced with spindly iron appendages of great length, all covered with nozzles and lighters that spewed fire in all directions. Also removed were patches of skin and musculature below the neck, in their place random bits and pieces of machine and tough fabric.
One of the eyes was gone in favor of a collection of small lenses that covered most of the left side of its face. Its head spun around to aim it at people, mostly ignoring the officers in favor of examining the people. Occasionally someone became enough of a nuisance that it swung out with an artificial limb and immolated the problem as it sent it flying to the other cops and coppers that struggled against it.
The jaw had also been replaced, along with much of the front of the throat. In its place, a black tube and a single speaker that repeated a single message over and over in a scratchy, artificial voice that felt like metal sliding on my teeth:
“JACOB HILL.”
Wiring ran from inside the skull to outside the body, wrapping around the body and coming in and out as they went down, multiplying and stopping at different points. In the eye that hadn’t been removed, unspeakable pain and horror was visible as pus dripped from where the machine parts met meat.
“JACOB HILL. JACOB HILL. JACOB HILL.”
It was easy to realize that it was a product of Dark Science.
“JACOB HILL. JACOB HILL. JACOB HILL. JACOB HILL. JACOB HILL.”
I wanted to run away. I wanted to grab my friends and run and never think about this again. I wanted to hide away and pray that I forgot I lived in a world where Dark Science existed. The existence of the machine seemed to poison the very air around it with the stench of oil and human infestation and wrongness.
But two words stopped me.
“... Jacob?” I whispered. “W–Was Hill’s son’s name… Jake?”
“... yeah,” Chris replied, also whispering.
We stayed there until the cops managed to put the poor abomination out of its misery.