Date: June 24, 2089
Location: San Francisco Memorial, State of California, United States of America
Transcript: Elliot Hayes
It was a grisly sight to behold. Mass graves are one thing, but extracting the damn brain with it? That’s something else entirely. Putting those two together makes it so much worse. There must’ve been dozens of corpses, and a dozen more security guys locking down in this alley. Warm reds and cool blues from the squad cars bathed it with an eerie, flickering glow. Good thing we isolated the crime scene. No person going on a peaceful evening walk should see this.
A shiver crept down my spine as I glanced at the alley over again. It was a bloody mess of gore that seemed like the artwork of a hot-tempered teenager. The bodies’ skulls were clean and almost completely hollowed out. The rain was washing out the blood and pooling it around our boots.
Working for the Vanguard Consortium sucks ass.
“Jesus,” Tristan Serrano said as he stood next to me, “you think it was the Triads?”
“No, even for all their brutality Triads wouldn’t even do this,” I explained briefly before offering up another potential candidate. “Volchya?”
“They sex traffic, not brain traffic.”
I sighed. “Those assholes at the Iron Frontier wouldn’t do this either… Nor would the mafia. Or any typical group. Any witnesses?”
Tristan answered like he had his heart lodged in his mouth. “Yeah, one.”
He took a little white handwritten note out of his pocket and read it over. “Sama Takejiro. Twelve-year-old Japanese kid. He’s a refugee who came here when Japan fell. And, apparently, now an orphan. His mom’s in that pile.”
Poor kid.
“I’m assuming we detained him?”
“We have him back at the station house in Fremont. He’s not talking though.”
“Alright, until then,” I groaned in frustration, “how about cameras?”
“Not anymore,” Tristan pointed to a devastated camera hanging off the wall. It had a giant bullet hole in it.
“Shit,” I muttered, turning back to walk towards my car. “Get that back to the guys in the nearest tech department, see if they can salvage anything.”
“You got it,” he yanked the security camera off its handle. “Where are you going?”
“Gonna see if our Sama Takejiro’s gonna talk.”
I stepped into my car, turned off the emergency lights, and pressed the “Ignition” button on the dashboard. It sprang to life silently. The projection of the route to Fremont appeared on the corner of the windshield, revealing a brisk, hour's drive that took me on a journey across the southern end of the Bay and avoided the big wreckage sites from the civil war. Quick and easy. I brought the exterior tint on the windows up to avoid any opportunistic folk. There tended to be a lot of those. With a slow and rough roll, I took the car off the curb and onto the cracked asphalt of the street.
The road out of San Francisco hugged the inner coastline tightly. Small waves pushed by the storm from the churning waters of the Bay crashed down onto the parts where the road made a dip. The rain came down in heavy steady sheets, drumming on the roof of the car and bringing my visibility down as I drove further towards the outskirts of the city. My vision was reduced to a haze of grays and muted neon colors. A few pedestrians made themselves known as they quickly darted through the road in front of me. Drones were flying back and forth overhead. I checked the speedometer on the windshield: A smooth eighty miles per hour. I let my foot off the accelerator pad, bringing it down to a relaxed forty. I didn’t want to slide off the road because of a stupid mistake.
Ugh.
Boredom crept into my mind as the drive became a monotonous routine; an endless weaving through the jagged highway and the occasional dodge of an abandoned tank. I turned on the radio to ease my head a little more. A voice came through the static and filled the cab with tiresome cadence.
“...so far, the reaction to the President’s address last week has been mixed as tapes of the event make their way west,” the news anchor said. “Cities like Denver and Austin are reporting a surge in civic engagement, while those in the Rust Belt remain unconvinced, where skeptical residents are citing a lack of-”
Flick.
“-Guerrero’s Juneteenth address is yet another example of the shit we left behind fifty years ago-”
Flick.
“-hat was Netdo by Astrarayne, a track making waves nationwide aft-”
Flick.
“The wildfires from El Dorado County are rapidly making their way west towards Stockton Memorial City. Travelers are advised to avoid-”
Flick.
“-French government derided the US as a threat to European stability-”
Flick.
“-clean water no longer available in Santa Rosa, causing the largest water crisis since the 2062 Los Angeles-”
Flick.
A soft synth tune with distant and echo-y notes with low distorted bass tunes.
Finally, I thought as I turned the volume knob up, something good.
The claustrophobic, half-abandoned urban sprawl eventually gave way to a patchwork of muddy hills, clustered suburbs, and scattered, abandoned buildings as I neared Fremont. Through the fog, I could see the occasional flash of a distant vehicle that promised me I wasn’t alone out here. Far away, there were blurry silhouettes of crashed aircraft carriers and half-collapsed buildings leaning into each other like drunken combatants of some long-past bar fight. As I crested a hill, my destination came into sight.
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Vanguard’s local station house towered over Fremont as a testament to privatized law and order. It’s an angular, steel-and-concrete monolith fitted with spotlights that carve their way through the stereotypical Bay haze-like lasers. Another set of spotlights on the ground shone towards the building itself. Its surface was a messy mix-and-match of scorched metal plates and reinforced glass. At the center of it all, the emblem of the Vanguard Consortium–a sharp, triangular shield encircled by a ring of stars–was etched into its walls.
San Francisco’s status as a Memorial City, you can thank the pompous dicks at the Department of Cultural Preservation for that one, doesn’t make it crimeless. In fact, I’m pretty sure it just made it lawless. The remnants of the San Francisco Police Department got dismantled and all their guys were spread out across the West Coast’s last few law enforcement agencies ten years back. They said the forty-thousand people left in the peninsula would follow, but nothing really came of that. Regardless, San Francisco is full of crime and has no police department. That’s where the Vanguard Consortium comes in.
I came to a halt outside the main entrance at the checkpoint. The guard, dressed in the typical Vanguard black body armor fashion, walked up to the driver’s window. I rolled it down and found myself staring into my reflection in her rain-battered helmet. A faint blue glow came from the display inside it.
“Evening, Elliot,” the guard said coldly.
“Hey, Natalia,” I responded in kind. “Do I really still need the eye scan? I’ve been an operative at this location for years now.”
No response. Natalia just stared at me through the visor, patiently waiting.
“Okay then,” I leaned my head out the window. She brought a small tablet up to my eye and gave a quick scan of my left eye. After a few seconds, Natalia’s helmet was lit up with a bright green and she gave me a thumbs-up. The barrier in front of me let itself up.
I gave her a nod and a small smile as I drove into a sparsely populated parking lot. As I put the car into the assigned space, the built-in Vanguard radio crackled to life.
“Hayes,” Captain Lain’s voice came from the speakers.
“For fuck’s sake,” I whispered to myself under my breath.
“Hayes, are you there?” His voice was sharp.
I pressed the microphone button on the dashboard. “Right here. What do you need?”
“My office. Now. Don’t bring Serrano with you if you have him.”
“I don’t but… Alright. I’m on my way,” I said.
With that, I threw my raincoat back on and opened the driver’s door in one swift motion. A trio of security drones flew low, routinely circled me for a brief second, then disappeared back into the rainfall. Their cameras swiveled around like watchful hawks. I ignored them as I walked up to the front entrance.
The station house’s front entrance was a single, imposing metal door. Two guards stood outside under a glass awning, dressed in the same urban combat outfit that Natalia had. One of them inserted a small card into a little gap in the doorway. The buzz of the machine went off for a moment, then emitted a green flash as it confirmed clearance, allowing the door to open with a sudden, mechanical hiss.
A sanitized hum inside our base of operations greeted me, accompanied by the faint clicks and whirrs of the automated security systems. The walls were lined with reinforced steel panels with glowing displays that scrolled through San Francisco’s real-time data: You have maps, patrol reports, resource allocations–all the typical stuff you’d expect that a private urban security company tends to have.
The front lobby was designed to be completely functional, save for the giant Vanguard emblem behind the receptionist's desk. The receptionist herself, a young girl who I hadn’t cared to learn the name of, seemed bored out of her mind. She barely seemed to even glance at me when I put my raincoat up on the rack, instead seeming to busy herself with the augmented retinal display in her eyes.
When I walked into Captain Lain’s office, I was almost immediately shocked by the contented style it had. I had never been there before. Various medals placed on the wooden shelf behind him were paired with the scent of mint from the specialized air filter he had in that room. Lain himself looked rather haggard though; his eyes seemed especially wide, like he’d been thinking for a while, or that he was waist-high in bad stuff. He motioned to the chair in front of his desk, and I sat.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, almost impatiently, clearly excited.
“Honestly, I’m not sure,” I revealed. “This thing is weird. The only security camera there was shot out, but Serrano brought back its remains to the tech department. And the kid who apparently witnessed all of this won’t talk. I was hoping I could talk to-”
Lain raised a hand and cut me off. “He can’t talk, that’s the thing.”
“Huh?”
“His vocal chords are gone,” he sighed. “Burn marks around the throat.”
What a shitshow, I thought to myself before speaking again.
“How about the camera? Has anything been salvaged?”
“We got a single frame off of it, but that frame is giving us a lot,” he took out his holopad and projected it onto the desk between us: A three-dimensional image of the alleyway sixteen hours ago. A red cargo truck blocked most of it, but there was something in the back where the bodies were dumped. Lain rotated the image around to show me a person with a scramble mask and a black hoodie on. Evidently, the scramble mask hadn’t worked since a good portion of his face showed me a middle-aged Caucasian man with blue eyes.
“The system’s AI is sure we’ve got a name,” Lain explained. “Spencer McDowell. Reported missing by his girlfriend last night, and I think it’s evident why he ran off.”
“I heard the name before,” I said. “The guy’s a known affiliate of the techno-freaks at the Unified Church of the Machine. Used to do their dirty work. Isn’t he also a veteran of the goddamn Portland Brigade?”
“Yep,” he took a deep breath before continuing, “he’s also a former affiliate of Tristan Serrano.”
I frowned and almost laughed. “I know that too. But Tristan’s a baptized Catholic now, he quit the Church years ago! He said he stopped speaking to everyone there!”
“I’m not trying to implicate your partner, but it is a very bad look for us. I’m keeping his ties with McDowell under wraps, but you need to find this guy. Don’t bring Tristan with you. I don’t need any emotional attachment killing this case.”
Lain swiped on the holopad, changing the projected image on the desk to a map of the West Coast, pointing to different locations as he went. “From our records on him, we know McDowell used to attend the Unified Church’s masses up in Oakland, so I advise you to start there. Ask around. This guy is deep in their stuff, so they’re bound to know something. Then check around this address in Crescent City. His implant records show that he got a train ride there. I know it’s far, but y’know: It’s just business. Take that same route.”
The Unified Church of the Machine was big. My father used to call them the updated version of Scientology. They had a strange belief that augmentation, synths, implants, artificial intelligence, and basically every piece of advanced technology that was developed in the Second Roaring Twenties would allow them to achieve salvation. You can see where that obsession goes. Regardless, they were the eighth largest “religion” in North America, and their followers were certainly the most dangerous ones to be around.
On a big note, they were one of the largest shareholders in the Vanguard Consortium.
“So what do you need me to do?” I queried.
Lain started bluntly. “Find Spencer McDowell, kill him, then bring his neural implant back to us. His memory card will show us whether or not he’s directly responsible. If he just turns out to be a body dumper, we’ll figure out who asked him. The Church has made it known to us that it wasn't them, but if worse comes to worse we’re keeping quiet. The prize they offered for anyone who gets this guy is wild, I’ll tell you that much.”
I stared down at the desk, looking at the map he had laid out as my suspicion arose. I somewhat felt like I was doing the Church a favor by getting rid of the guy who did the work they didn’t want to do, the guy who brought their reputation down heavily. But the West Coast doesn’t really have law enforcement, it has a Vanguard Consortium. I’ll be the first to admit from that company that I’ve done a couple of things for them and a few others. Sometimes, someone will get thrown off a rooftop. Sometimes, evidence will disappear. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done Vanguard or one of their buddy corporations a favor. Spend this long out here in a half-decimated wasteland where food and water are damn near luxuries, and you start to understand why a certain degree of moral flexibility was necessary.
“Do you have a problem with this?” Lain asked me quizzically. Any softness in his voice was now gone, replaced with a stern tone.
“No,” I said, my throat tightening up. “I’ll take care of it.”