Thrill Switch

2

2

I ALMOST DID a fist pump when my first murder case came in. Then I remembered it was because someone had died. Rather than look like a total douche-canoe, I smoothed my suit out, grabbed a notepad, and took a self-drive to the crime scene.

Las Vegas streets whipped by. I headed to the Old Strip, its former glitz now a faint glimmer in the center of the city. Over the decades, all the casinos had turned into mass jack-in centers—cheap accommodation for those who spent most of their lives in the virtual world, the Holos. Vegas was no longer the gambling capital of America. Now, we were the virtual hub of the planet. Our secure electrical grid powered servers instead of neon lights. Our towering high-rises were the perfect place to fit the city’s skyrocketing population. Thanks to relaxed laws protecting virtual r**e, murder fantasies, and worse as ‘freedom of speech’, people from all over the world flocked here to live out their darkest desires with impunity. It was still Sin City, just in a different way. Give me your poor and your huddled masses, Lady Liberty once said. What she’d really meant was give me your paying customers to plug into our system. That might all change with the new legal proposals coming but, for now, it was full steam ahead into damnation. Not that I took part. The Holos was a sewer. You wouldn’t catch me dead inside. Not since that first trip so many years ago.

I self-consciously fiddled with my tie. I needed to look pristine. Together. A reflection of how I should feel inside. I checked my hair in the derm screen of my wrist-comm. Red bangs snipped as straight as a cutthroat’s razor. Good. At least that part of me looked sharp.

The whole way to the Strip I thought why me? Why this case now? I’d been banging my head in the missing persons unit for a year and hadn’t been granted a transfer to homicide, even with a Ph.D. on serial killers. The serial killer. Maybe my lack of progress was because I was a woman, or because they thought I was too young. More likely it was my unfortunate habit of making off-color jokes at inappropriate times.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Not Billy, he’s missing.

Not funny, apparently.

The car stopped at the building address I’d been given. This place used to be called Treasure Island. Now it was called the Bolodair Apartments. The elevator ride up to the crime scene was nauseating. Old casino lifts had a habit of jerking upward before smoothing out. The worn carpet along the hallway wasn’t much better. It reminded me of vomit swirls and blood. Or pineapple on top of pizza. Just as disgusting. Since most of the residents of this place spent all their time in digital, the common areas were never upgraded. As long as the connections were fast and equipment state-of-the-art, no one cared about the rest.

A streak of yellow tape at the end of the hall indicated where to go. Standing outside the unit was Gibson, homicide department lead. A bollard of a man. His thick neck and bald head made him look like a giant thumb with a face. Gibson turned to see me. I gave him a thumbs up, figuring it might look like a tiny mirror and keep him happy. It didn’t.

‘Byron?’ he grunted as I approached.

I was a full head taller than him but there were no illusions about who held the most power.

‘Ada is fine, Deputy Chief Gibson,’ I said. ‘Have the scan team been through?’

‘Yes. That’s why I called you.’

Without another word, he dipped under the tape blocking the door. I followed but stopped when confronted with the scene. A VR immersion rig sat in the corner with a limp body strapped into it. The corpse’s back was to us, so I couldn’t see the helmet or head. Its fingers were covered in blood. The plasma dripped into a puddle that spread along the floor. A Holos unit was stacked onto the back wall along with feeding tubes and a*****e of liquid nutrients. On the far side of the room, black writing was scrawled on the wall. The script was too small to read from this distance.

‘Trauma includes abrasions on the fingertips and a burst eyeball,’ Gibson said. ‘No DNA or fingerprints, other than the victim’s.’

‘Right. So no eye-popping evidence?’ I asked.

Gibson just stared at me.

‘Any security footage of someone leaving or entering the room recently?’ I hoped vainly.

‘Plenty of footage of empty halls,’ Gibson said. ‘The only person that came near this room was a cleaner who found the body this morning.’

My mouth went dry.

‘Cause of death is from a massive loss of blood?’

Gibson nodded.

‘Through the eyes?’ I managed to ask.

‘Through the eyes. Time of death was around midnight last night,’ Gibson confirmed.

This couldn’t be right. My gut clenched. I saw now why I was called here. The serial killer. But that wasn’t possible.

‘You think this might be linked to the Specter s*******r?’ I asked, point-blank.

‘You did your thesis on it,’ Gibson said. ‘You tell me.’

‘Did the scan team note anything else?’ I asked, grasping for evidence to the contrary.

‘The victim’s blood contains mildly elevated traces of potassium.’

‘Maybe he had a banana addiction?’ I offered, trying to lighten the darkness I was feeling.

Gibson leveled a cold gaze at me.

‘Bananas?’

‘You know, high in potassium?’

‘Is that a professional opinion?’

‘Perhaps an unprofessional one,’ I said.

‘Then give me some actual insight, if you have any.’

I swallowed my creeping dread, looking at the scene again. I didn’t want to say it yet, lest it became real. I straightened my tie again. It was dark crimson, like my hair. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about bloodstains.

‘May I?’ I indicated the body.

Gibson stepped aside to let me through. I tentatively walked up, took the corpse’s wrist, and checked the hands. The fingertips were lacerated like Gibson had said, fingernails all broken backward. I considered the helmet. Scratch marks studded the edges where the victim had clawed his own immersion rig trying to get out. There was something strange about the marks that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. They weren’t exactly what I expected. Pushing that information to the back of my mind, I twisted the body in its rig. The Holos resolution screen had already been pulled up. The corpse’s blood-caked face stared at me, his black eyes bugged out. One of them had ruptured into a gory mess.

I stepped back at the sight. My mind swam. I tried to drag my thoughts to the surface. How could I prove this wasn’t possible without stating the obvious? They’d know the obvious already; wouldn’t have called me if it were that simple. I glanced at the helmet again.

‘Isn’t it standard procedure for a scan team to return anything they moved back to the original position?’ I asked.

‘Yes. So?’ Gibson shifted.

‘So why didn’t they put the victim’s display shield back in place?’

Gibson looked over at the body and frowned. He clicked the comm-screen attached to his wrist and scrolled through some information.

‘Says here it was already open.’

‘That’s odd,’ I clicked my tongue, thinking. ‘If it’s supposed to be a Specter slaying, this guy shouldn’t have been able to turn off his Holos simulation at all.’

Gibson simply stared, waiting for the punch line. He seemed to be growing impatient. Was he going to say it?

‘Could Jazlin Switch have done this?’ he asked.

And there it was, the Devil’s name. Hearing it aloud oddly calmed me because I knew this couldn’t be her work.

‘She’s been in digital confinement for the last seven years. Still is.’

‘But no one has spoken to her in there for five years,’ he countered. ‘Not since her last three interviewers committed suicide.’

‘She’s still there,’ I said. ‘We can see her avatar on the virtual feed.’

I didn’t say that I looked at it every single day, just to reassure myself.

‘And she’s done nothing but sit and meditate in there,’ Gibson said. ‘She won’t respond to audio prompts. For all we know, the footage is on some kind of loop and she’s found a way to jack out of virtual into the real world.’

Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. If that had really happened there’d be more than one body found this morning. Her first s*******r had clocked into the hundreds in a day. I could hear the screams. Feel the shock of people dropping all around me. The terror of dashing to escape my first trip to the virtual world, hoping my dad made it out too. The Holos. The horror. There had been more killings the day after that and again the day after, until they caught her. Almost a thousand people had been murdered in the end.

I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again to steady myself in reality. Actual reality.

‘No one can unsync their mind from digital confinement,’ I said, sounding calmer than I felt. ‘Not even Jazlin Switch. If someone found where she’s plugged in and tried to pull her out manually, she’d die. And good riddance too.’

‘I want you to go in and interview her. Make sure.’

I actually laughed. That wasn’t going to happen. No way, no way, no way. Gibson and I locked gazes—a stare off I had no interest in winning.

I looked over to the body again.

‘It could be a copycat,’ I ventured. ‘Perhaps someone broke in here and killed this guy, making it look like a Specter Slaughter.’

‘Really?’ Gibson raised an eyebrow. ‘No footage. No DNA. No nothing.’

‘But no one has been able to do what she did— kill people inside the virtual world so they die here. Not even close. Filton Fukami confirmed his Holos developers refactored the code that made it possible. How has that changed?’

Gibson stood silent, letting the question hang in the air.

I walked over to look at the writing on the far wall. Neat, block letters read:

IT’S MORE ABOUT MONEY THAN POWER.

Above that was a scrawl in different handwriting.

Free the body and the spirit will soar.

I shuddered. That was something Switch had written in her Hyperrealist’s Manifesto. A blank set of fingerprints signed off the scrawl at the end. It was the mark of a movement Switch had belonged to that prized anonymity as the way to freedom from government and corporate manipulation. It was as if someone was trying hard to connect this to the Specter Slaughters. Really hard. But if this was supposed to have been a Specter killing, the victim must have written it. This was getting more confusing by the minute. I didn’t like it.

It’s more about money than power was new, too. Something different. I used my wrist-comm to take a photo of it.

‘That looks like a motive perhaps,’ I mused. ‘Do we know who the victim is?’

‘No,’ Gibson said. ‘Zero DNA match in the national system. Probably an anonymous jack-in. Indian descent. Male. Twenty-seven.’

‘What about the lease of the unit?’

‘Paid for in SureCoin under the name John Smith. Untraceable.’

I thought for a moment, gathering all the relevant information to recap aloud.

‘So,’ I said, ‘we have something that looks like a Specter slaying, but it’s a one-off. There’s also the potassium in the blood, the open display helmet, and a possible motive beyond mere psychopathy. Those things all point away from Switch. I don’t think we need to interview her.’

‘I do,’ Gibson pressed.

‘Then you do it,’ I snapped.

Gibson’s face turned as red as a Vegas sunset.

‘You’re the expert,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘It’s why I called you in. I thought you’d jump at the chance. You’re more qualified than anyone to do it. I’ve started the clearance process with the military unit who’s holding her. Took a lot of string pulling.’

‘I don’t go into virtual,’ I said, crossing my arms.

‘You what?’ Gibson scoffed. ‘Not even unsynced? You’re not one of those Luddites are you?’

I paused. The screams. My father’s body dead in my arms.

‘No. I just prefer the stability of the real world,’ I said.

‘You must be the only one.’ Gibson shook his head.

‘Look,’ I said, still wanting to make my mark here. ‘Let me work the clues of the scene first. Switch isn’t going anywhere. Hasn’t gone anywhere. I’m sure of it. I’ll find something. I promise.’

Gibson mused, rubbing the top of his thumb-like head.

‘I’ll give you 24 hours,’ he said. ‘It will take that long to finalize digital confinement access with the military anyway. If you find nothing promising, you interview her. It doesn’t have to be long—just enough to confirm she’s safely locked in digital confinement. Right?’

I dipped my head in a reluctant nod.

‘Good. I’ll leave you to it then.’ He turned to leave before pausing. ‘And don’t say anything about the murder to anyone outside the unit. If this gets into the media we’ll have a panic. Right?’

‘Right.’ I nodded, my own mini-panic rising.

I had a day to find a real lead or march into electro-prison to face the woman who killed my dad.