“What is it?” Marcus asked, getting up from the bar and walking over to the patrolman with Beth.
“We found it in a postbox just down the street. It’s a broken lamp, sir, like you were describing. There’s even blood on it.”
“Excellent!” Marcus yelled, clasping his hand down on the cop’s shoulder. “Good work, lad, thanks. Let us have a look at it.”
He relieved the officer and took the bundle back towards the bar.
“So it would seem the murderer was here in person, like I said,” Beth pointed out.
“It would seem that way, yeah,” Marcus replied, his eyes downcast in mock shame. “That means we have a lead. We can check cameras in nearby buildings for anyone who’s out of place. Anyone who can’t be placed after the night of the murder. We need to know if Simon is out there using some poor soul as a meat puppet. Suggestions?”
“I think we go over the witnesses once more,” Beth replied. “We need more specific accounts, especially now that we know what we’re looking for. Hammer down anyone who might have seen someone carrying a bundle or anything like that out the door. You want to get your guys to start rounding folk up?”
“In the morning,” her partner said. “We can let everyone have a good night’s sleep before we prod them anymore. Besides, we need to still go over the facts we already have. Scrutinize anything we might have missed. Peter might even find something while we work. What do you say? Wanna lift back to the office?”
Beth took a moment before downing the last bit of her drink and nodding. She didn’t mind saving money on hyperloop fare.
They had already gone through an entire pot of coffee when a knock came at Beth’s office door. Marcus had been in the middle of reenacting what he thought could have been a plausible remote attack on Ms. Fontane, stopping dead in his tracks at the sound.
“Come in,” Beth urged, knowing who it was without hesitation.
Peter So came into the office, carrying with him an electronic pad, on which, Beth hoped, were the autopsy results. The coroner had a pale, washed out look in his face. Like he had seen a spirit or something and it shook his core belief in science.
“What have you got for us?” Beth asked.
Peter swallowed. “We’ve finished the autopsy,” he said, his voice faint and drifting like he was talking over a dream.
“And?”
“And Vicky Fontane isn’t human,” Peter explained. “She looks human, but she’s a machine. The device we found in her skull and thought was a possible neural implant is actually a housing unit.”
Beth’s eyebrows started to lift up towards the ceiling. “Housing unit?” she asked. “For what?”
“A computer program. Or — more likely — an I.I.,” Peter replied. “Vicky Fontane was an elaborate bodyshell. Perhaps the most realistic I’ve ever seen.”
Greetings
Beth always found water to be the hardest thing to paint. She could produce the fluffiness of ferns and leaves, even recreate the knotted bark of a tree trunk, but when she had to paint the currents of a river around it, she found herself struggling. No matter how many bodies of water she stared at while she worked, the waves and currents just never came out right. The foam always looked too solid, like snow floating on the river’s surface.
The water trickled around her as she floated in her long canoe. The sun was caught by the shimmering surface and reflected back up at her like millions of diamonds. She lifted her nose in the air and breathed in deep. Even though it was all an elaborate simulation, her senses were still fooled. Her cerebral computer made her smell the breeze rolling through the aspen trees. It made her feel the wind on her face and the warmth of the sun’s rays on her forearms. She could feel the canvas as she painted over it. She could sense the pull of the river as she and her art supplies floated on the river.
There was something about being in the pit of nature like this, even if it wasn’t real. There were plenty of parks she could go to to get a similar sense of zen, but nowhere that she could be alone like this. That, and nowhere in the world had a view like this. She looked up at the castle that loomed over her. It didn’t block out the sun, but the shadow it cast covered most of the land beside the river.
No such castle actually existed. It was just a simulation built off of an artist’s rendering of a summer evening in a fantasy world. The castle resembled the white city of Minas Tirith, where Aragorn had been crowned in the Lord of the Rings. However, there were no distinct features. No white tree, no throne room. In fact, Beth wasn’t even sure if the castle was part of the simulation or just an image in the backdrop. She had never tried to go up there, instead content to spend her time in C.C.-immersion floating down the river with her easel.
She decided to give up on the river and instead work on the mossy embankments that lined it. Perhaps, if she created just the right outline for the water to snake along, then she could create the illusion of a river in the absence of land. She figured it was worth a try, so she washed her brush and switched to one with a finer tip. She was about to dip it in some earthy green acrylic she had mixed up for the tree moss when an alert came onto her display.
It was her mother, calling in for what seemed like the dozenth time that weekend. Beth had been ignoring most of her calls, but started to feel guilty around the second day of constant ringing. She sighed, put her brush back down on her palette, and opened up the
