Toys

water around me, waving at me to come join them in their play…

The exquisite concerto ended with its last, very memorable drawn-out chord.

“We’re here, Dr. Baker,” Elle said in the quietest whisper. “Toyz store, Baronville.”

Damn. I could have used a little more Bach.

Chapter 12

Owen McGill certainly hadn’t exaggerated-the crime scene was ugly all right. Eleven dead! The first thing I saw was a butchered male body in what looked to be a very expensive navy blue pin-striped suit. The poor fellow’s torso was twisted horribly and partly submerged in a veritable lake of his own blood.

I’d seen plenty of gore before, but this was possibly the worst yet. The most nightmarish aspect of the scene was that the victim’s blood had splattered all over some miniature toy horses that had been let out of a stable- themed play set.

The cat-sized horses were covered head to hoof in blood and were walking around, leaving tiny, crescent- shaped red prints on the synthetic marble floor, apparently looking for some miniature oats or hay.

Creepy didn’t begin to describe it.

But the full measure of the massacre, the carnage, was much worse than that initial impression.

A second corpse, this one female and partially dressed in an expensive gold lame pantsuit, was lying nearby. Close to that were two more female victims. Their trademark pink and blue Toyz shopping bags were scattered everywhere around the courtyard.

They had been cut in a way that sickened me-torsos savagely ripped open, organs removed, the heads completely gone. Missing, in fact.

As I stared at the gore, and shooed away one of the little horses from the male’s body, McGill came striding over. As always, I was glad to see him. My friend is rock solid, dependable, and a good ally when things get rough. He’s built like a gorilla, six foot six, and close to three hundred pounds.

“Where are the killers?” I said, assuming the humans responsible had been arrested by now. The city police would have been on the case immediately.

“So far, no sign of them, Hays. You believe it? They got away with this.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I hear you. Gets even stranger though. Listen to this. Every single one of the security cameras in the place just happened to malfunction at the same time.”

“What?”

“It gets even better. There must have been close to a hundred customers in the store-nobody remembers a goddamn thing. Not even the security guards.”

That was impossible. Elites have crystal clear memories and would never lie to authorities. They aren’t capable of it.

“Go ahead, ask ’em,” Owen McGill challenged me. He gestured at the civilians gathered beyond the cordon. “Maybe it will start coming back to them-once you turn on the old Hays Baker charm.”

As with most of the company’s consumer outlets, especially ones in respectable Elite communities, this Toyz superstore was open twenty-four hours, and it was crowded with customers.

“Who can tell me what happened?” I stepped forward and called to the blank-faced, clearly confused crowd. “Somebody must have seen these terrible murders. I need witnesses. Please. Anybody? Speak up now.”

A pretty, young Elite woman, wearing skintight jeans and a bodice that barely covered her nipples, shrugged helplessly. “I was standing right there, looking at the iSpielberg imagers,” she said, pointing at a display of equipment that allowed you to star in your own movie.

Her shaking finger moved toward the homicide scene.

“Those two-I don’t think they were a couple… they acted more like they worked together… Anyhow, they were walking past me, talking to each other. It was all perfectly… ordinary. Then-they were lying on the floor. Just like they are now. Cut open! It’s the weirdest thing, but it was like there was nothing in between.”

Others in the crowd nodded their heads in complete agreement.

“Hey, why don’t you tell us what’s going on?” a man in front called out to me. “The police are supposed to protect us, aren’t you? How could you let something like this happen? In a Toyz store of all places?”

It was a fair question, but I didn’t have a clue what to say. How could I? Basically, these murders just couldn’t have happened.

Chapter 13

“Come on, there are more bodies up front,” McGill said in a quiet voice, respectful of the occasion or, perhaps, the deeply disturbing mystery of it. It was rare for Elites to be crime victims-now here were eleven of them dead, and Lizbeth and I were still recovering from an armed attack. What the hell was going on?

I followed Owen through the distraction-crammed store, trying to keep my focus on the grisly task at hand and my head clear of the Toyz siren song.

But what a collection of playthings. Sex and adventure simulators, domestic servants that could do everything but think your thoughts, genetically tamed wild animals that never needed feeding, personal submarines, personal airpods, role-playing worlds, antigravity chambers, celebrity “clone” androids you could bring home and interact with as you pleased… Toys, toys, toys for all good little girls and boys. That line-from the Toyz store’s famous jingle-you couldn’t get it out of your head without using a ThoughtCleanser, another Toyz store favorite.

“One thing’s for sure-it had to be skunks,” McGill said grimly, hatred for the despicable human killers burning like hot coals in his eyes.

I nodded. No Elite would commit a vicious crime like this. Almost by definition, it’s what separates us from those murdering animals. Genetically speaking, of course, Elites are more than 99 percent human. It’s not something we tend to dwell on, but we’re rational-and it is what it is.

Quite simply, our kind was geneered from human stock. In our case, it was deliberate science rather than blind natural selection-but it’s essentially similar to how “modern” humans themselves are said to have evolved from Homo erectus or Australopithecus or other primitive forms.

But even more significant than our DNA blueprint-genes, after all, are simply sets of biological instructions-is the final product. Unlike humans-or any organism that’s ever walked under the sun for that matter-we aren’t just flesh and blood. We contain circuitry and nanomachinery. Although it isn’t visible from the outside, we are, in fact, part machine.

One other difference between us and them is that rather than being born from a woman’s uterus, we grow in artificial wombs. This means Elite women don’t have to endure the old-world pain, inconvenience, and health risks of pregnancy.

Artificial wombs also permit us to gestate for longer-we spend a full two years developing before birth, as opposed to the typical nine months of human pregnancy. Among other things, this makes it possible for doctors to integrate the biocircuitry and other augmentations that enable us to rise above humankind’s dangerous shortcomings: greed, immorality, self-destructiveness, rage. I could go on and on, of course. Even the best human artists understood humanity’s frailties and failings. Just read Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Swift, Rand, Solzhenitsyn- even pop culture writers like Stephen King and Philip K. Dick got it right.

The brutally dismembered bodies at the Toyz store reminded me once again these human flaws should never be underestimated. Too often the outcome was tragic.