“Mr. Abington!” one of the reporters barked. “Are you here to see the body?”
“Body?” Tyson echoed. “I’m here to see to my body, if that’s what you mean.”
“You know it isn’t,” Ji-eun said. “Are you here to identify the body MPD brought in less than an hour ago?”
“I don’t know anything about a body, Ms. Park, no matter who brought it in. I’m here for my tri-annual colonoscopy.”
The rest of the press pool recoiled a bit at that, but Ji-eun remained undeterred. “You mean to tell me that you’re here to have a camera stuck up your … nether-regions?” she said, catching herself before committing a faux pas that would have earned INN a significant broadcasting fine.
“Yes. And as much as I’m sure you’d love the honor, I’m afraid I must leave my prostate health in the hands of trained medical professionals. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Tyson politely, but firmly, pushed past the knot of journalists trying to block his way, most of them wearing faces of discomfort or outright disgust. Indeed the only one not looking at him like he was covered in shit was Ji-eun, who wore a small smirk on her gently shaking head. Tyson gave her a breezy, two-fingered salute with his right hand as he passed through the automatic ER doors.
Once inside, he was met by a middle-aged sergeant of the MPD whom he didn’t recognize, not that it meant anything. Tyson had experienced very little contact with the MPD since he’d graduated from primary school. Its independence as a police force was a polite fiction maintained by their labor union and the city’s public council. In reality, the police, like all civil servants on Lazarus, had their checks cut by Ageless Corp.
“Mr. Abington.” The sergeant stuck out a hand. Tyson took it. “I’m Officer Berg. Sorry to have to call you out for this. Messy business. But your, ah, assistant messaged the precinct to say you might be able to help us ID the, um, deceased.”
“It’s all right, Officer. But if we can move somewhere more private before we continue this conversation?”
“Doesn’t get much more private than a morgue, sir.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“This way.” The sergeant led him toward a set of elevators. Once inside, he keyed for a subbasement that required code verification. “Can’t be too careful who comes and goes down here,” Berg said. “The dead have a way of bringing out the worst in folks, you know?”
“No,” Tyson said. “But I can imagine.”
“Better you don’t have to. Believe you me.”
“How long have you been on the force, Sergeant?” Tyson very consciously didn’t say “my” force.
“Seven years next month. Best decision I ever made.”
“Oh yes?”
“No doubt. I wasn’t exactly a model citizen as a youth. If the Academy hadn’t straightened me out, mum would’ve been visiting me down here by now.”
“Well, Lazarus is the place for second chances. We’re proud to have you, Officer Berg.” The lift came to a stop as Tyson said it. The doors opened, and the most disturbing smell Tyson had ever experienced washed into his nose. It wasn’t a disgusting smell, exactly. It was too sterile for that. Instead, the lingering undertones of rot and death had been chopped up and overpowered by cleaning solvents and preservative agents. It smelled like a butcher shop run out of the back of a dentist’s office.
And it was cold. Unseasonably cold.
Tyson braced himself against the chill, unwilling to let it harm the air of calm competence he maintained at all times and all costs. He wasn’t entirely unprepared. Lazarus had been a largely desert world when the first terraforming rigs were set up. Unlike Earth, the problem here had been too much heat and not enough atmospheric humidity. Even after a century of solar-radiation-reflecting sulfates being injected into the upper atmosphere, the days on Lazarus still hit the high fifties C during summer. But like any desert, the lack of cloud cover at night meant temperatures plunged into single digits or worse. Everyone had gone on “nature” excursions in primary school, if only to drive the dangers of the open desert into the children at an early age.
Still, Tyson was a few decades removed from those miserable, windblown nights in a paper-thin Mylar tent out on the Aldrin Plateau. It took concentration not to shiver.
“The morgue’s just up here.” Berg held a hand out down the corridor toward a set of stainless-steel double doors, scratched and dented from a thousand gurneys, with copper handles polished to a bright shine in the middle. Round windows offered a very narrow view of whatever lay beyond. The whole thing looked like it had been stolen straight from an old movie set.
“You should know, sir. The coroner here is a little…” He wiggled his palm.
Oh, great, Tyson thought quietly, without letting it reach his features. The last week had already been strange and stressful enough. The last thing he wanted to be doing right now was to be led around in a subbasement labyrinth by a juvenile delinquent turned cop on a pilgrimage to some sort of antisocial crypt-keeper with the only prize being a dead body.
But some things one just had to endure.
“Be kind, Officer Berg,” Tyson said instead. “I’m sure we would all be a little…” Tyson wiggled his own hand. “… in their position.”
“Too true.”
The doors swung open with a clack that made Tyson wonder what exactly was holding them fast to their hinges. Half a dozen exam tables arranged in rows of three lay under harsh, unnaturally white light streaming down from the ceiling. Probably all the better for inspection and photography, but it cast the entire room in an unsettling hue. Four of the tables already had customers lying in repose beneath thin green sheets stained brown in places by blood, or worse.
“Who’s this?” a gruff female voice called out from around a corner of the room over the sound of a running sink.
“This is Mr. Abington,” Berg said. “He’s here to identify the halfsie, remember?”
“Halfsie?” Tyson asked, suddenly
