suck down a boot without getting clogged. This went way beyond rich. Aunt Zelda was easily the wealthiest person I’d ever encountered during my years on the peace force.
Who was this woman?
I went into the kitchen. Neil had abandoned the breakfast bar and opened a utensil drawer. He had a pair of scissors against his neck and was getting ready to cut the supplication collar.
“Neil, that won’t work. And if you try it-”
He squeezed the scissors. They didn’t cut through the nanotubes. But they did activate the tamper sensors, sucking electricity from the Tesla field and giving him a harsh jolt.
“-you’ll get shocked again.”
Neil dropped onto his butt. The jolt continued.
“Neil, you need to let go of the scissors for it to stop.”
He probably heard me. But the muscles in his hand remained locked on the blades, and the collar kept shocking him in self-defense. I saw a small cloud rise up and hover above his head. It wasn’t smoke. It was the tears on his face turning into steam.
I gave his hand a kick-away from his neck so he didn’t stab himself-and broke the connection.
“I want to go home,” Neil cried.
“I know, buddy. Tell me how your aunt got so rich.”
He touched his face, then his forehead. “Do I still have eyebrows?”
“Most of them.”
I lost Neil to another sobbing binge, and took the opportunity to search through the kitchen. Still no DT. But I did find a can of blackstrap molasses that was worth more credits than I earned in a month. I’d never tasted the real thing before, and was tempted to try it.
Government subsidies, and competition with biofuel companies, caused food farmers to sow what could be grown and harvested the quickest. Things that took longer to grow were proportionally more expensive. The universal availability of synthetic food drove the price up even higher.
Indulgent as the molasses was, it was downright decadent when I figured out what she was doing with it. In one of the cabinets, Aunt Zelda had a Mr. Distiller.
Alcohol was never actually outlawed. In fact, the biggest manufacturer of alcohol in the world was the US government, which sold it as fuel. But it became illegal to drink it. Stupid, too. Alcohol pills were safer, and cheaper, than the real thing. And from what I understood, the pills didn’t damage your liver, or give you bad breath and hangovers.
I stared at the antique silver device, retrofitted to function off of the Tesla grid, and noticed behind it on the shelf were several full bottles with Rum written on the sides.
Next I searched the bathroom to see what sorts of pills she took. I found the standards. Morphine. LSD. Ibuprofen. Penicillin. Antacids. Methamphetamine. Antihistamine. Pretty much the same contents as every other person’s medicine cabinet, mine included. Except for two exceptions. Antiandrogen and Estrolux. Both in high doses.
Time to power up the intranet and see what I could see.
I took out my DT and accessed uffsee. While having every bit of human knowledge accessible on a digital tablet was an overwhelming experience-so overwhelming that many folks had to go into therapy because of their DT addiction-information was essentially useless unless you were able to find it. When I was a child, pre-intranet, the Internet was the place to go to learn things. But search engines were limited back then, and you spent most of your time trying to sort out the good information from the ads, inaccuracies, and plain old bullshit.
Then a man named Franklin Debont created UFSE. An acronym of Use the Fucking Search Engine, the uffsee search algorithm was intuitive and user-specific. In layman’s terms, it learned what the user was seeking, and pinpointed data to match individual search requests.
No more wasted hours searching. WYSIWYW technology had made the overwhelming wealth of accumulated human knowledge as easy to navigate as a walk around the block.
I hit the voice button on my touch screen and told uffsee, “Detailed biography of Zelda Peterson, thirteen twenty-two Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois.”
Three-thousandths of a second later the screen filled with data.
Or perhaps filled was too optimistic a word.
It listed all the standard stats. Height, weight, age, eye color, chip number, previous addresses, and assorted public information like the charities she supported, moped license, estimated biofuel consumption, etcetera. No criminal record. And strangely, no mention of education or work history.
“Peace officer eyes only,” I told my DT.
That brought up the private info. No known associates. The excessive amount she paid in taxes, which was more than Vicki made in a year. Credit history. But it came up blank in regard to family, college, and previous employment. No mention of how she got so rich, or how she managed to avoid penalties for the contraband she made no effort to conceal. It also didn’t list her medical history, or the obvious reason she took Antiandrogen and Estrolux.
The average ten-year-old kid had more information available about them than Aunt Zelda did. Which meant it was time to have another chat with Neil. I set the voice-stress analyzer on my DT to record a neutral baseline.
“Oh, no.” Neil’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates when I walked up to him. “You’re going to kill me now.”
“Soon, Neil. But first I have some questions. Your aunt Zelda was a billionaire. I’m assuming you knew that and just neglected to mention it.”
“I… uh… didn’t know that.”
My DT said it was the truth.
“Did you know Aunt Zelda was once Uncle Zelda?”
“Excuse me?”
“She was TG, Neil. Transgender. She took hormones because she used to be a man. Did you know that?”
“Uh… no.”
I checked the touch screen. Truth.
“You apparently weren’t very close. Did you know the intranet didn’t actually mention you as a next of kin?” I moved closer to him, making him cringe. “Are you really her nephew, Neil?”
“Yes.”
Inconclusive.
“Say it. Say she was your aunt.”
“She was my aunt.”
Inconclusive.
“Do you know how she got so rich?”
“No.”
Truth.
“Do you know who murdered her?”
“Yes.”
Truth.
“Who murdered her, Neil?”
“You did.”
Truth.
Shit. Neil wasn’t helping the investigation much. I decided to take it in another, unprofessional direction.
“Okay, Neil. One last question. Are you ready?”
He gave me a small, frightened nod.
“Do you love my wife, Neil?”
Neil swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbling. “Uh… no.”
Untruth.
I made a fist, and he cowered away, covering his face. While hitting him would have felt pretty good, it wouldn’t have accomplished anything. Of course he loved Vicki. All men who met Vicki fell in love with her. Guys like
