Mardock Scramble

ran a factory, but it was up to the hilt in debt. The family’s only hope was the eldest son, the student. He was a so-called ‘golden boy’—not only did he have a full scholarship to the university, but he worked on the side, bringing in money for the family. He was their main source of income.”

–So who attacked him?

“At first we all supposed drug dealers. The student’s girlfriend had become hooked on drugs, and the student challenged her dealers, leading to the fight that put him in a coma. Oeufcoque, Boiled, and I took on the case because we thought that by doing so we might be able to find a drug link back to OctoberCorp and crush their illegal trade that way.”

–And then?

“First we honed in on the people who allegedly put the student in the coma. It wasn’t too difficult to track them down. It was the group of drug-dealing students, and the university was their turf. But then, something strange happened.”

–Something strange?

“The ringleader of the group—another student—suddenly committed suicide. He was drugged up himself. People put it down to something stupid he did while he was out of his head, but it all seemed a little too neat for us, and we figured that something suspicious was going on behind the scenes. Then, about the same time, the comatose student’s addict girlfriend went missing. And we discovered that behind the original university drug ring was another, more complex, organization—all part of a scheme to sell OctoberCorp’s illegal wares. The police were involved too. It was all one big tangle. And it was pretty difficult to work out who was controlling whom.”

–The organization was trying to hide something?

“That’s what everyone thought. We tightened the screws on some of the people we managed to track down—they all thought the same thing. But our enemy was all people connected to the drug trade, one way or another. And at the core of all this was the original comatose student.”

–What do you mean?

“We’d misread the situation. The student wasn’t just the victim. He was also the perpetrator.”

Balot was visibly stunned.

The Doctor furrowed his brow and continued with difficulty. “I told you that the comatose son was the main source of income for his family, right? Well, drugs were the main source of income for him. To all outward appearances, the ringleader of the student drug ring was the youth who’d committed suicide. But behind the scenes it was the comatose son who had been running the show. And that wasn’t all. It was the son who had gotten his girlfriend addicted in the first place. It’s called fishing—they tried to collect as many girlfriends as they could, using drugs as bait.”

–So who put him in the coma?

“The student who ended up committing suicide had punched him. Because of an argument over money, or maybe just because he was on a bad trip. The blow caused him to stumble and fall down a flight of stairs, and he hit his head against the wall at the bottom. The student who hit him was so shocked that he retreated further and further into his drugs until one day he got so high that he decided to dive head-first from a pedestrian bridge onto a busy roadway. The incident was pretty gruesome, and there were cut marks on his arms and legs, so we assumed that somebody had decided to make an example of him. But no, it turned out that it was just a straightforward suicide by an addict who happened to have a history of self-harm.”

–That’s hard to take in. Who would have suspected that the victim was also the perpetrator?

“Yup, it was hard to take in for us too, and we were working on the case. The police were investigating it as well, and at the same time they were indicting a number of their own for corruption and involvement in the drug ring—it was a great scandal at the time. Some of the police had been keeping the drugs that they had confiscated on raids and selling them off on the sly to the student drug ring, you see. And the student who killed himself was involved in that part of the operation. Not particularly heavily, though. Everyone just saw him as someone who was there.”

–So it was one wrong guess after another?

“Well, the comatose student’s family had put in a pretty staggering request, you see. In order to pay off the debts of the father’s factory, they had to try and wrangle a huge sum of money out of the Broilerhouse in the shape of child welfare reparations. But in reality, the student was just as guilty as he was a victim, and really he was just reaping what he had sown. And the student’s family didn’t help matters either—his younger brother tracked down one of the other dealers and assaulted him. It was pandemonium. Eventually, though, the missing girlfriend re-emerged. It turned out that she had fallen asleep in a car in a drugged-up state and slept for three days solid. It was only when we discovered the girl that we managed to get to the bottom of the case and were finally ready to go about solving it.”

–So how did you go about solving it?

“In the worst way imaginable.”

The Doctor put his hands to his forehead. It was as if all the horrors of the time were flashing right in front of his eyes.

“If the truth were made public, everybody involved in the whole sordid affair stood to lose. We tried to imagine what would have happened, and it went something like this: the student’s family would suffer the worst— they’d lose their factory, the younger brother would be arrested for violent and disorderly conduct, and not only that, they’d end up having to pay out reparations, never mind receiving them. The whole family would live out the rest of their lives in debt. The police and the Broilerhouse would suffer an embarrassing loss of face, and the university where the whole sordid scene was set would be known forever as ‘the drug school.’ The drug ring would split up into smaller units, and one of these would eventually rat on their police connections, causing additional scandal. So, you see, we were in a real predicament. If we were to let things slide then the Broilerhouse would do more than rap us on the knuckles—they’d repudiate our usefulness, our very reason for existence. So with enemies all around us, or so it seemed, Boiled came up with the worst possible solution to the case. He didn’t even tell us what he had planned.”

–What did he do?

“He annihilated.” The Doctor spat the word out as if he were vomiting up an indescribably bitter object. “First, he shot the comatose student.”

The Doctor saw Balot’s eyes widen but just shrugged his shoulders weakly. “Yes, he killed the very same piece-of-shit student that we were hired by our client to protect in the first place. Then, he found the junkie girlfriend, dragged her back to the car she’d been sleeping in, and shot her. After that, he rounded up the students in the university who were involved in the drug ring and killed them one by one. Then he went after the ringleaders who were involved behind the scenes and killed every single one of them too. Accurately and swiftly. Oh, and in the process of this he also killed a number of corrupt cops along the way.”

–How many people did he kill?

“At that point, eleven.”

–With Oeufcoque as the weapon?

“Oeufcoque trusted Boiled completely. He thought that Boiled was acting according to his own directions.”

–Oeufcoque’s directions?

“When we discovered that the student was at the heart of the drug ring, Oeufcoque said that we should tell his father the truth. Try and get him to drop his claim for reparations. Oeufcoque was just trying to work out what the right thing to do was, until the bitter end. Boiled headed out with Oeufcoque in order to do as Oeufcoque suggested, but along the way Boiled decided that he had a better way to solve the case. For the next forty hours or so, Boiled told Oeufcoque that he was protecting the family from the drug ring, who were now out baying for the family’s blood. They went on a killing spree—nearly twenty people in total. Boiled’s story wasn’t totally unbelievable, as some of the drug ring were actually out to get the family.”

–How come Oeufcoque never worked out what was really going on?