Retiree 2.0 Read online

  Alana did not reply. For her to do so would have been absurd. She dealt with dead people on a weekly, sometimes daily basis.

  Rhys began to speak again when Alana suddenly held up her palm, “Wait—”

  Her Vira whispered in her ears, “Chief Inspector, you have a priority call from Dispatch.”

  Alana said, “It’s the station,” but she waited for Rhys’ approval before answering the call.

  Rhys said, “Take it.”

  “Vira, accept the call.”

  The perfectly modulated synthetic voice of the dispatch computer spoke, “Inspector Graves, our GPS tracker shows that you are the nearest unassigned detective to Zumpco East Los Angeles Stadium. Are you in a position to answer a priority on-site call?”

  Alana was supposed to be on involuntary vacation, but things like that had never stopped her from being on-call. She took the concept that police officers are always on duty literally. “Yes, I’m inside now. Give me the details.”

  “See the main security desk for additional information. I am sending you navigational information now. Uniformed officers are also en route to assist.”

  “I’m on it. Over and out.” Alana refocused her attention on Rhys, “Ben, I’ve been summoned down to security. I think it’s because of Robertson. Is that okay?”

  Rhys looked straight ahead, staring at the baseball diamond, “When duty calls, it calls. I’ll probably see you on Monday.”

  Alana stood and squeezed past Rhys on her way toward the main aisles. She stopped when she had passed him. Reaching into her suit pocket, she produced an electronic key. She offered it, “Ben, if you need somewhere to stay until your house gets fixed, or if you need to do laundry or—”

  “I’ll be all right,” Rhys smiled, but it was the expression of someone who had just had his feelings injured. Even his being a cyborg did not shield that emotion from Alana. She merely nodded, returned the key fob to her pocket, and walked away.

  Alana reached the landing above their upper deck seats before she thought to tell her Vira to activate her navigational overlay. A directional arrow guided her through the maze that was the crowded stadium, down three flights of stairs and around a number of arched accessways until she finally reached the main security station. There were several other people crowded around, holding up press passes and miniature recording devices. Alana pulled out her badge and held it higher than those gathered before her. One of the security officers spotted her and waved her around to the side. On the way, a female reporter asked what was going on, and Alana ignored her, pushing her aside when she partially blocked Alana’s path. The officer opened the door for Alana, and she squeezed through, pulling it closed behind her.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Graves, Southwest Region. I gather you have a problem?”

  The security guard was a couple of centimeters shorter than Alana was, with sandy blond hair and hazel eyes highlighting a round face. He was the first to extend his hand, “I’m Atkins. And yes, ma’am, we’ve had a death—”

  Alana shook the man’s hand only briefly, “Yes, Robertson. I saw—”

  “Uh, no, ma’am. This is a different one.”

  Alana stopped abruptly, “Explain?”

  Atkins motioned for Alana to follow, and she did. The officer spoke as they walked down the brightly lit interior corridors, “We found Greg Veedock dead in the Cyber League locker room—”

  “Veedock? The batter who hit Robertson?”

  Atkins nodded, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “I’m not qualified to say for sure, ma’am, but it looks somebody bashed his brains in with a baseball bat.”

  Alana gently shook her head as the officer’s alliteration aggravated her language processing centers, “Show me the scene.”

  Officer Atkins led Alana even deeper through the basement, passing only employees and other guards, until they reached a locker room, “It—he’s in here, ma’am.”

  The guard’s slip registered with Alana, but she was so accustomed to being thought of as a thing that it bothered her less than the lack of a lockdown following the deaths of two minor celebrity baseball players. She asked, “Are there any other exits to this room?”

  “Yes, ma’am, there is an exit to the visiting team’s clubhouse and dugout on the other side.”

  “Is there anyone guarding the other door?”

  Officer Atkins removed a phone from his belt and asked someone, presumably his supervisor, if anyone was guarding the clubhouse entrance to the locker room. The answer was no. Alana tried to open the door, but it was locked. Atkins held his identification card up to a reader at the side, and it unlocked with an audible click. As she opened the door, Alana told Atkins to stand guard on the clubhouse door and not to let anyone in. Atkins continued onward, crossing the room as Alana stopped at what was apparently the scene of the death.

  Two Los Angeles City police officers were standing near a body that was dressed in a baseball uniform, the same striped outfit that Veedock was wearing when he accidentally killed Phil Robertson.

  Alana took note of the officer’s nametags, Pike and Gomez. Neither officer could have been over thirty. From the way they slouched as they stood on the hard floor, she presumed they were both living humans, and not retirees. She had already looked away, focusing her attention on the body splayed out on the tile before her, when she greeted them matter-of-factly, “Detective Chief Inspector Graves. Dispatch sent me. Am I the ranking officer here?”

  Officer Pike replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then I’m assuming responsibility for the crime scene.”

  Alana quickly surveyed the locker room. Veedock was lying on his back. Both of his hands still grasped the handles of a black baseball bat tightly. It could have been the same one he carried with him as he walked off the field, but Alana could not know with certainty, or even if it mattered. The face was flattened, and in some places, dented from what appeared to be multiple, self-inflicted strikes from the bat. The eyes were wide open, and the left eyeball case was cracked. The bat had multiple scratches on the side that faced Veedock’s face. There was one round smudge on the opposite side, and Alana presumed that might have been from where it struck the baseball that struck Robertson. The force of the blows against his face was enough to crack Veedock’s brain case, and a pool of bright red liquid had formed beneath his head. Alana stooped and touched the wet spot, her finger creating a ripple. She placed her finger to her tongue, which elicited a grimace from Officer Pike. The fluid had a salty taste, which Alana’s chemical analyzer immediately identified as cybernetic nutrient fluid, the synthetic blood plasma that kept cybernetic brains hydrated and oxygenated.

  Humans tended to buckle at the knees and otherwise crumple when they fell to blows, at least in most circumstances, but Veedock fell over backwards. That was consistent with his cybernetic knees locking when his brain died. It was likely that the final blow from the bat also toppled him over.

  Alana asked, “Who discovered the body?”

  Gomez answered, “It was a reporter. Jenkins, was it?”

  Pike affirmed, “Yeah, Jenkins. Sports Central.”

  “Where is Jenkins now?”

  Pike and Gomez looked at each other, concerned. Pike eventually answered, “We don’t know, ma’am. He might have left.”

  Alana said, “You let the primary witness to a possible homicide walk away?”

  Pike said, “Uh, yes, ma’am. It would look that way.”

  “I guess that means it’ll be all over the news. Officer Gomez, step outside and guard the back entrance to this room. Don’t let anyone without police ID inside unless I tell you otherwise. And if you see that Jenkins character, detain him for questioning.”

  Gomez nodded and strode off, trying to make up for his procedural mistake with post-flub alacrity.

  As Alana started looking over the rest of the locker room, Pike said, “It’s all right, ma’am. It was a suicide, not a homicide.”

&nbs
p; “What makes you say that, Officer Pike?”

  “He left a note.”

  Alana finally looked at Pike when she spoke to him, “Where?”

  “On an electronic notepad.”

  Alana wanted to sigh badly, but her cybernetic body wasn’t programmed to do so, “Where is the notepad?”

  Pike reached down and lifted a notepad from a nearby bench. It had been hidden from Alana’s view by a stack of towels at the end of the bench.

  Alana asked, “Has anything else been touched?”

  “Not to my knowledge, ma’am.”

  Alana extended her hand toward Pike, who gave Alana the electronic display. She touched the screen, and it lit up. She read the contents of the screen aloud, “I cannot live with the memory of what I just did to Robertson. I am killing myself to force a roll-back so I do not have to relive it.”

  Suddenly, there was a commotion at the clubhouse entrance. A deep voice bellowed, “What do you mean I can’t come in. We need access to the room! Who’s in charge here?”

  Alana returned the notepad to the place it was reportedly discovered and turned to find an older man dressed in a brown-and-white striped baseball uniform with the number ‘1’ emblazoned on the front leaning forward, his feet planted firmly on the floor and his fists planted firmly against his hips. He was trying to intimidate the shorter security guard, without success.

  Alana said, “I’m in charge. Detective Chief Inspector Graves. What can I do for you?”

  “My players need access to this room. This is where we keep our spare gear.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t let any non-police personnel inside here until our forensics team has finished—”

  The man interrupted, “And how long will that take?”

  “That will depend on how long it takes me to call them.”

  Almost as much spittle issued from the man’s mouth as did intelligible words as he screamed, “They’re not even on the way yet?”

  Alana held firm, “I’ve only just discovered that I need to call them in. The longer and more frequent the interruptions, the longer it will take.”

  “What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “Improvise. Good day, sir. Officer Atkins, please close the door and only allow policemen through until I tell you otherwise.”

  Atkins smirked as the baseballer stomped back toward the field. The security guard said, “Do you know you just told off Skippy McCabe, the winningest manager in the history of the game?”

  Alana shrugged, “I’ll bank that as payback for them boring me to death with the pregame show. By the way, do you know if this McCabe is a retiree?”

  Atkins said as he pulled the door closed, “He’s definitely still alive, ma’am.”

  As she walked away, she said, “Vira, how many Cyber League baseball teams are managed by cyborgs?”

  The voice of the virtual assistant answered in her ears, “No Cyber League teams are managed by retirees.”

  Alana was not surprised that the leadership of even the cybernetic team was left in the hands of a non-cyborg. The discrimination she and her fellow ex-humans endured extended across many disciplines and industries. It had become widely known as the ‘Silicon Ceiling,’ and few retirees had broken through it into higher management who weren’t already in those roles when they died.

  When Alana returned to Veedock’s body, she told Officer Pike, “Call your boss and tell him you’ve got a long night ahead. I’m treating this is a homicide.”

  Pike looked supremely disappointed, but he answered, “Yes, ma’am,” before removing his phone from his utility belt and stepping away.

  Alana did not see anything that struck her as being out of order beyond the corpse. There was no obvious sign of a struggle, and no neon arrows pointing to a beady-eyed butler. She was already suspecting that this murder would be solved by keystrokes rather than shoe leather. She called the police station and requested a biological forensics team for the locker room, to include a cyberforensics technician. The dispatcher informed her that the estimated time of arrival would be approximately one hour, which gave Alana far too much wait time given the paltry amount of evidence she was staring at.

  With the continued absence of the reporter who had discovered the body, Alana began interviewing the stadium security staff who weren’t engaged in holding back a throng of other reporters or cyborg baseball players who wanted to retrieve personal belongings from the locker room. She eventually settled into the main security station, along with their security chief, an older human named Jacobson. It did not escape her attention that she was calling them humans even in her mind, as if they were a different species from her and other cyborgs. It was probably a step up from ‘biologicals’ or ‘bios,’ but the line was there, and she could not think of a more apropos term to delineate them.

  Alana grilled the stadium security staff about the incident, going so far as to sit with them and walk frame-by-frame through their video surveillance records.

  From the clubhouse side of the locker room, Veedock walked inside and closed the door behind him. Two minutes later, a man dressed in a snappy, light gray sports jacket, white shirt, and blue tie snuck into the dugout from the press box above. He crept past the visiting All-Star Team members as they were paying their respects to the late Phil Robertson, opened the gray metal locker room door, and ducked inside.

  Alana asked Security Chief Jacobson, “Is that Jenkins, the reporter?”

  The man nodded, “Yes, ma’am. I recognize him. Slippery one, isn’t he?”

  “It’s a shame he wasn’t working on the Zumpco Robotics story back in May. That’s a lot of effort to waste on a sports story.”

  Jacobson said, “He has a lot of fans in the sports community.”

  Alana did not press the point. She remained focused on the monitors. A minute after he entered the room, Jenkins exited via the back door, looking rather panicked. He ran down the hall, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor and eventually burst into the same security booth where Alana and Jacobson were now sitting.

  “I suppose that was when security found out about the death?”

  Jacobson nodded, “Yes, ma’am. That’s the moment when my day took a turn for the worse.”

  “Where did Jenkins go from here?”

  The security chief said, “Let’s see...” He then proceeded to use the camera footage to trace Jenkins’ route as he moved quickly to the sidewalk that ran along the perimeter of the stadium. He was soon met by a team of technicians, who set up an impromptu open-air broadcast.

  “And thus the world heard the news before I could find my way down here?”

  Jacobson nodded again, “That’d be about the size of it, ma’am.”

  Alana had managed to expend almost half-an-hour, but all she did was convince herself that Jenkins was probably not the murderer. Was it possible that she was wrong, and that it really was a simple suicide? If Veedock had a standard, or even an elite-level resurrection insurance plan, it would not cover suicide, which would leave him with a high five-figure or low six-figure bill for his next revivification. No one in their right mind would decide impulsively to take that big a financial hit just to have a clear conscience, especially with cybernetics driving down salaries all across the economic spectrum, even in professional sports. As the security room door shut behind her, she mused aloud, “No. This was murder one.”

  She began by researching her first hunch, “Vira, run a query. What is the highest level of education attained by the baseball player Greg Veedock, and what was his grade point average?”

  A scant second later, her Vira said, “Greg Veedock holds a diploma from Lincoln Park Senior High School. His grade point average was two-point-one.”

  Alana continued, believing that she was on the correct path, “Vira, I want you to run another query. Include all public and accessible private records belonging to the baseball player known as Greg Veedock. Include text and audio records. Using my police authority, search for exac
t uses of the word, ‘cannot,’ as one word, spelled c-a-n-n-o-t. Compile all instances, along with source references, into a report and email it to my police account.”

  After Alana had paused for a couple of seconds, her Vira answered, “Query accepted. There is no estimated time for completion of this task.”

  As she retraced her steps back to the locker room, Alana continued, “Good. Vira, look up the phone number for a sports reporter named Jenkins.”

  Alana had taken fewer than three steps before her Vira said, “Match found.”

  “Call the number.”

  On the fifth ring, the call rolled over into a voicemail box with a generic, computer greeting. Alana left the message, “This is Detective Chief Inspector Alana Graves. I would like to interview you regarding the death of Greg Veedock. You should call me at this number, which is my Vira, as soon as is convenient. The police appreciate your cooperation.”

  Nothing had changed in the locker room since Alana had left it, although a small crowd of people had gathered at either entrance. After Officer Gomez let her through the door, Alana sat down on the bench near the hard-killed cyborg, Veedock. She was otherwise alone in the room. She addressed the disabled machine, “So, did you really kill yourself so you could sleep more soundly? You know as well as I do that cyborgs neither toss nor turn. But, let’s assume that you did bash-in your braincase. Why—”

  At that moment, the door to the access corridors flew open and four disgruntled men stepped inside, accompanied by one perky young woman. Alana did not recognize them all, but she did know the forensics team lead, Brian Comerford and the cyberforensics specialist, Wen Jing Lin.

  Comerford was as straight-faced as even the most antisocial cyborg, despite still being fully biological. His straight hair and bangs had likely never been restyled since he was in kindergarten. Despite his usual, lax posture, and e-bookish, Type-B personality, he was the first to speak, “Hello, Inspector. I haven’t seen you since before you got blown up back in April. Not that you’d remember, since you got blown up.”

  Wen Jing suppressed a smile, and her facial contortions made her nose turn upward. It was the only indicator Alana had that Comerford was attempting to make a joke, in his way.