L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 31

Chapter 2-3

“Mr. Rodriguez, I’m sorry, but we need to ask these questions.”

He nods rapidly. “It’s just that—” He clears his throat. “I mean, there are all these calls I have to make. I have to arrange the—you know—the funeral and—” His voice catches. He rubs the stitched initials on his handkerchief with his thumb, and then notices me looking at it. “Kurt gave this to me a week ago for Father’s Day. He had it personalized. See?” He turns it over, and the stitching reads, “To the best father in the world. Love, Kurt.” The anger returns in his voice. “You think he would have done that if he was messed up on that stuff?”

We sit for a moment. I give Mr. Rodriguez the space to collect himself. Mullins is impatient, tapping his foot annoyingly. I shoot him a quit-it look and he stops. I resume my questioning.

“Mr. Rodriguez, do you know what Switch does to the central nervous system? It rewires it. It affects judgment, restraint, motor skills, focus and attention. If you’re doing bad in math, it fixes it. If you think you’re weak, it changes that. If you’re feeling aggressive, it amplifies the sensation. It does a lot with just a little. And when the high is off, the craving hits you, because feeling normal just isn’t good enough anymore.” I hit a high note with the last part, my sermon fueled by confession. Mullins looks at me strangely, but I ignore him, and continue.

“Mr. Rodriguez, it’s not that we don’t hear what you’re saying. No one wants to think their child uses. But do you think nothing was wrong when he shot those police officers?” I’m surprised at my own flare of anger.

Mr. Rodriguez brandishes the handkerchief. “He wasn’t on it when he gave me this! I know my son. He must have taken it for the first time yesterday. Or someone drugged him. Why aren’t you looking into that?”

Kurt Rodriguez was an addict, pure and simple. His father can’t recognize the signs. “We found quite a bit in his bloodstream. There were indications he was dosing regularly. No one drugged him.”

Mr. Rodriguez perks up. We’re not allowed to share lab specifics during an investigation, especially before the official report comes out, so I leave it at that.

I try to get back to obtaining a meaningful answer. “What about new associates? Did your son meet any new people, either outside of school or over the Mindnet?”

“None that I was aware of.”

“What about his feelings toward authority? Any changes in his views on religion or politics or the government?”

Mr. Rodriguez throws his hands up. “Look, I already told you I don’t know anything. I hardly saw him as it was, and now …” He swallows. He’s on the verge of crying. His voice comes out chaffed. “And now, I won’t get to see him again.”

I sigh inwardly. We’re spinning our wheels.

I thank Mr. Rodriguez for his time. He barely acknowledges me. We leave him in his armchair, handkerchief clenched in his hand, tears of defeat streaking down his face.

Back at the precinct, we go through the items seized from Kurt Rodriguez’s bedroom. The little s**t had to have been OCD, because everything was arranged and aligned perfectly on his desk and drawers—his socks, underwear and T-shirts folded and pressed, his other clothes hanging in the closet, hangers spaced evenly apart.

I recognize the pattern. Switch makes you do things like that. You get all this energy, all this creativity, and you have to use it or you get antsy. Suzie would always ask me how much coffee I drank whenever I’d redo our cupboards, making sure every label on every can or box faced forward, all stacked and sorted neatly, and dust-free; or when I’d work on the lawn for hours, snipping the edges with a scissor, on my hands and knees.

Rodriguez’s room was a total disaster by the time our team was done tearing it apart. The only computerized device they found was his digipad, loaded up with meaningless, hand-drawn sketches and the notes he took during his junior-year classes. The problem these days is that anything of merit is on the Net, and since people use their TLIs instead of old-tech computers for just about everything, you have to go to the cloud if you want anything.

Mullins and I review the panoramic photos taken of the kid’s room, looking for additional clues. The one facet of interest is on the north wall where Rodriguez had meticulously pasted a few hundred blank sticky notes in straight rows and columns, each sticky equally spaced apart.

Mullins shakes his head. “You mean to tell me his father didn’t notice this?”

Thinking about the pattern gives me an idea. I rub my hands together. “You know what we need to do, right?”

“What, get something to eat?”

“No, we need to tap into his last memories.”

Mullins tents his eyebrows, forehead creasing in puzzlement. It takes him a few seconds to get what I’m suggesting. Then he smiles big. “I’ll get us the warrant.”

It’s called a cerebral trace, and it requires an okay from a judge. I’m not a big fan of digging into a person’s private memories, even when they’re dead, but it’s helped us in the past, like when we scanned the last memories of a murdered r**e victim a few months back to find a serial killer before he struck again. I honestly think we saved lives, because we weren’t anywhere near catching the bastard. Privacy advocates argue the technique violates Fourth Amendment rights, and in a way, I see their point. With a pending case at the Supreme Court, we’ll see what happens. Until then, we keep doing our job.

Mullins and I race over to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan, warrant already forwarded. We meet with Dr. Sanjay Parekh, a neuropathologist certified in cerebral traces. Time is of the essence, considering the decomposition of the brain after death, so I’m happy to see Parekh already at work in the autopsy room. Rodriguez’s blanched form is lying upright on a metal table, the body covered with a sheet below the collarbone, a probe jutting from his skull where I imagine Parekh drilled into it only moments ago. It’s a good thing too because I get a little queasy seeing drills and bone saws in action. Plus, I hate the odor. Mullins always jokes that it smells like corn chips.

Parekh plugs the other end of the electrode into a beige cylinder with a monitor affixed to a mobile cart. “Almost there,” he says, as he continues to set things up.

Mullins chomps noisily on his gum. “Hey, I got a question about the autopsy report.” He attempts a bubble, but the gum flops over his lower lip. He shoves it back into his mouth. “You mentioned something about his right shoulder tattoo being animated. I thought those things stopped postmortem.”

I’d noticed the oddity too, but hadn’t thought much about it. Rodriguez had a black-and-white tattoo of a Bengal tiger with bared teeth that transformed into Chinese characters when animated—nothing fancy or useful in my opinion.

Dr. Parekh checks the monitor while adjusting the cranial probe. The screen is grainy, a dark sea of shimmering speckles. “It’s rare, but not unheard of. Skin cells can survive for days. Animorphs—animated tattoos—function as long as the cells sustain them.”

“So, it’ll work now?” Mullins asks.

Parekh moves over to Rodriguez’s left side. “Take a look.” He presses a gloved finger firmly into the stiff muscle of the shoulder. The Bengal tiger dissolves, changing into a pair of Chinese characters, and then back to the original tiger. “See? Animorphic transformation. Pretty cool, actually.”

Mullins lifts his eyebrows. “Huh. What d’ya know?”

“Stand back, please.” Parekh motions for us to not make contact with the cadaver. I maintain a safe distance.

The doctor taps an icon on the side of the monitor and Rodriguez’s body convulses for a split second. The speckled screen dissolves into a blob of gray and black gradients, expanding and contracting like heated wax in a lava lamp. Parekh rotates his finger over a shaded dial in the sidebar menu, and the screen’s contrast brightens. He adjusts several more controls, and the blur sharpens into an image that looks exactly like the canopy lights at the gas station. “It’s the last thing he saw,” Parekh explains. “We call it residual retinal burn. Let’s see if we can get anything else.”

He taps the screen. The body shudders again. We see fractured images, glimpses of a school locker, a crowd of students in a hallway, a few flashes of different parts of the Rodriguez household—boring scenes, although I’m quite impressed that we’re actually seeing what Rodriguez saw when he was alive. I’ve been through this process before, but it amazes me every time.

The on-screen image changes. We’re looking at what I imagine to be a Mindnet page showing an online store, followed by a chat session with a succession of static images representing a conversation. I’m thinking we’re going nowhere until I spot the familiar packet of strips. I assume our suspect is holding the dispenser when it turns out to be someone else. The dispenser gets handed off to Rodriguez, but I glimpse a y-shaped scar on the knuckle of the tanned individual before it disappears from view.

“Wait, go back!” I jab my finger at the monitor.

Parekh freezes the frame. He tries to retrieve the last scene, but now we’re looking at a bowl of cereal and Rodriguez’s brown fingers moving a spoon around in circles, not bothering to eat. “Sorry, I can’t go back. Don’t worry, it’ll be on the recording.”

The scene continues with Rodriguez still not eating. Something must be bothering him. “Any idea how far back this is?”

“Probably the morning of the incident, or the day before,” Parekh says.

“Not earlier?”

“I’ve never seen any memories older than seventy-two hours. This is pure visual cortex feedback. It’s always short-term.”

Rodriguez slams the spoon down on the table, splashing milk everywhere. There’s no sound with these memories, just raw imagery. Someday, I hope the technology improves so we can get audio. Rodriguez removes his dispenser from his pocket and empties out all the strips. He stuffs the entire wad into his mouth. There had to be at least ten strips in the bundle! Mullins and Parekh seem unfazed. Am I the only one who noticed?

The better part of a minute goes by with Rodriguez sitting at the table. He takes the spoon and bowl and neatly moves them to the side, wiping up the spill with his napkin. Whatever agitation was coursing through him seems to be gone. We watch as he calmly leaves the table and goes up to his room and locks the door. It’s bizarre as he walks in a circle, round and round. He finally stops, and lifts up his mattress. He grabs a handgun resting on the box spring.

Mullins snorts a laugh. “Hah, there’s our murder weapon!”

I ignore Mullins’ outburst and continue to watch as Rodriguez takes his firearm over to his desk. He removes the magazine and makes sure the chamber is empty. He then disassembles the rest of the g*n—slide, recoil spring assembly, barrel, pistol base. Each piece is carefully placed on the desk. It’s as if Rodriguez is creating an exploded diagram from an engineering schematic. He retrieves a cleaning kit from a drawer, and proceeds to clean the components with obsessive detail. I recognize the precision in his movements, the need to clean. He’s amped, a fully-charged human turned into a purpose-driven machine.