Mardock Scramble

beating against the leaves on the trees.

“There! There! It’s that man’s car!” Oblivious to the cold night wind of early spring hitting his half-jacket, the driver of the convertible nudged his Tech Glasses up with his finger and said,

“Oeufcoque, time to turn.”

He grabbed the Nav with his other hand.

“Got it,” said the Nav. And then a strange thing happened. The Nav lost its shape. A squashy distortion, and in a twinkle it was a pair of binoculars.

“Too dark to see anything, Oeufcoque.”

The man was looking over his glasses into the binoculars, a frown expressing his dissatisfaction. As he did so the binoculars lost their shape in his hands. In less than a moment they had squidged, like quicksilver, into a pair of night vision goggles.

“How’s that, Doc?” said the night vision goggles. The voice was identical to the Nav’s.

“God damn, looks like that AirCar has a real expensive Gravity Device Engine,” said the man that the goggles were speaking to—the Doctor—as the solemn sight of the black car entered his field of vision. “I’d bet the shock absorbers on that thing are so good that a gunfight raging inside wouldn’t even register on the outside. Let’s have a look for the passenger in question…no, Magic Mirrors. Can’t see inside, just as I thought.”

“Save up all your requests for one go, will you, Doc? Wait a sec, I’ll change into a pair with heat detectors.” The goggles distorted again. This time only the lenses. As this took place a kaleidoscope of the reds and blues of human body heat unfolded before the Doctor’s eyes.

“Nice one, Oeufcoque—however tricky the request, you deal with it in a flash, the All-Purpose Tool that you are.” The Doctor peered through the goggles, satisfied.

“They’re violently entangled. Could be engaged in hand-to-hand combat, Doc.” The goggles spoke in a serious tone, but the Doctor just shrugged his shoulders.

“Hmm…you could say they’re engaged in hand-to-hand combat, yeah. Right in the middle of it. Man and…woman. No one else in the car. Let’s start filming.”

“Already recording. But these images aren’t enough to determine whether we have the right man?”

“It’s Shell-Septinos, make no mistake. A modern-day Bluebeard. The color of sin, the death of the six young girls—it’s flowing through his veins. I can see it.”

“Yeah, but your testimony alone isn’t going to count for much down at the Broilerhouse, Doc. With all the fake footage about these days, recorded evidence has stopped counting for much.”

“I know. But you’ve got records of his physical characteristics, right? If we can just identify something specific—any ailments, treatment scars—then a heat scan of his somatic cells will come in handy as evidence.”

“According to an ailment scan we have a 72 percent chance of determining that it’s definitely him, by my calculations.”

“What about his brain? He’s had operations there. If you can identify those.”

“The brain is difficult…48 percent chance.”

“The Broilerhouse won’t even take a second look unless we’re talking over 90 percent. What about the girl?”

“Rune-Balot.” This time the goggles answered immediately. “We can conclude it’s her with a 96 percent certainty. She’s the underage prostitute scouted by Shell-Septinos back when she was a kiddie porn star.”

“Damn it. This’d be useful evidence if she was the one we were trying to stop from killing him.”

“Wait…something’s odd.” A quieter voice from the goggles. The Doctor’s face tensed immediately.

“Odd? What’s odd, Oeufcoque?”

“The odor. I’m getting smells from the car—not just pleasure, but something else mixed in there too.”

“Explain that in a way that I can relate to. You know your nose is special !”

“There’s the marked smell of…fear. They’re both afraid of something.”

“What? In the middle of doing it? Not just the girl, but the man too? Why?”

“No, it’s nerves…stress. Both people are subtly different but…similar.”

“Hone in on Shell, the man, analyze him. We might be able to work out his motives for his crimes to date, Oeufcoque.”

“It’s almost like a death wish.”

The Doctor was visibly stunned by these words.

“What? Shell’s planning a suicide pact with the girl?”

“In a sense…that could indeed be the case.”

“What a perfectly crazy bastard. Right—mission aborted—we need some serious psychoanalysis here. Okay, now that we’ve come this far our next step is to pay someone off, get them to turn this footage in to the Broilerhouse. Any charge we can make stick—breaking the protection of minors law, attempted coercion to commit suicide—whatever! Then we take over her case, offer the girl shelter—”

“Won’t work. He’ll rid himself of all ties to her while the investigation’s under way, and you’ve got yourself an unresolved case, never to be closed. That’s one of the things her fake ID will be there for—so that he can cleanse himself of any ties to her in an instant if he needs to.”

“Well, what do we do then? Carry on playing Peeping Tom?”

“Hang on…something strange is happening.” The voice from the goggles was pointed, abrupt. “The man’s odor has changed. As if it’s oozing out. No suicidal tendencies anymore. It’s definite pleasure.”

Right at that moment another AirCar was silently drawing closer from the other side of the park.

?

“You’ve questioned the status that you were given.” The man murmured while holding the girl. He laughed a sharp, hollow laugh. He stared at the girl, a decision hidden deep in his eyes.

Held by him, the girl just lay there silently. She wondered, through the thin skin that separated her from the outside world, whether it really was such a bad thing to try and work out her own position in life. It must be a very bad thing, surely? Part of the girl became sadder and sadder as she thought about this, but another part—the heart from deep within—looked on, utterly indifferent.

“Good girls don’t break the rules. Nice dolls exist to be obedient little decorations.” The man embraced the girl with both arms as he spoke. He wrapped himself around her tightly. This was different from a gentle embrace. It was like he was clinging, almost as if he were about to be dragged off somewhere but had found something to hold on to in order to stop himself from being pulled away.

“But it’s okay, Balot. It’s okay. It’s tough for me, but it’s tough for you too. It’s tough. I understand. So tough I almost want to die. In fact, I am, practically, going to die. Part of my memory is going to die. But even if it dies away, the shape of it can still remain. Just like a Blue Diamond made from ashes.”

The man thrashed around furiously now, ranting and raving. As if he were delirious with fever. As always at these times the girl remained docile. That was her job, after all, her talent.

Eventually the man stopped moving, slowly peeled himself off the girl, and came out of her. He started dressing himself, and she was about to get up too when the man said in an unexpectedly tender voice, “Stay just the way you are, Balot.”

So the girl lay sprawled in her disheveled state, and all she could do was gaze absentmindedly back at the man as he laughed his thin laugh.

“What a wonderful sight. A beautiful sight. And after this you’re going to turn into something even more beautiful,” the man murmured as he moved farther away from the girl, pressing his back against the car door.

“A Blue Diamond.”

A watery smile, then the man raised his right hand to show off the glittering rings.