Brome thought furiously, astonished he was considering doing this crazy thing. Murdering the boy. He met her gaze.
“How do I kill him?”
* * * *
The first sims are easy: variations on weather, or random obstacles like locked doors or chambermaids with insomnia. Brome breezes through them.
He’s given a blueprint. He memorizes every room, every closet, staircase, table, bed, and chair inside Pommer Inn, along with the dimensions of the private apartment where Klara, Alois, their children, and the target reside. Will reside. Did reside.
The boy is always referred to as “the target.”
Hannah tells him: “Braunau am Inn is a border village on the River Inn, between Bavaria and Austria. You will be injected at 0300 local time. Everyone should be asleep.”
The first sims are easy, yes. Then they get harder.
Hannah sets him down in a pasture. Clouds scudding across a starry sky are reflected in a weed-choked river. A weathered farmhouse stands in the distance. Brome forces himself to remember he is only inside a sensorium tank. He activates the protein-sheathed wetchip implanted in his brain’s sulci and accesses a map. He’s thirty kilometers from Braunau. He taps the pin mike curving from his ear, tells Hannah sitting like God in her polyglas observation booth over the sim tank: “I can’t make the village in time; it’s too far. I’m going to hit the recall switch.” A switch on his visor will transmit a signal, reach across the domain wall, and yank him back to his own reality.
Hannah barks abruptly: “Are you telling me you’re giving up?”
Brome begins to run. At the end of twenty minutes the sim shuts down and he’s in the black lab, in the sensorium, face steaming with sweat, chest heaving, cursing anyone foolish enough to approach him.
He rips off the headset and stalks from the sim tank, angry for getting caught short that way. The sim was a test of character and he has failed. Hannah glowers from behind the polyglas windows, surrounded by her geeky programmers. Brome’s performance is logged as “unacceptable” and she loads a new sim.
Pommer Inn on fire. Brome rushes inside. A woman, one of the housemaids, screams when she sees him; his shycloth armor has failed due to the intense heat. He takes the stairs two at a time, completes the mission, hits the recall and Hannah compliments him on getting the job done because he didn’t waste time saving the other screaming children trapped in the raging fire. Hannah’s like that, the bitch; the job comes first with her. Failure is never an option beneath the Negev.
Other scenarios. He meets a second traveler, from a third domain-echo, intent on saving the target. Brome kills him first, then the boy. Blood on his hands. Hannah logs the run a glowing success. Brome is sickened.
So many simulations in the intervening weeks he can’t remember them all. Klara wakes. “Paul, why are you hurting my baby?” The sorrow in her voice cuts through him but he injects the target with toxin and Hannah logs the run. Or, he finds the right address, Vorstadt No. 219, but the inn has inexplicably been transformed into a blacksmith’s shop. He searches frantically for the boy, fails, is recalled unceremoniously.
In another sim he approaches the inn from the countryside. Braunau in 1889 has medieval fortifications and broken Gothic arches limned with moonlight. Trees whisper; wind gusts off black water. A dog barks and he hears the somber clank of a cow bell from a nearby meadow. The Inn River meanders through the countryside like an unbroken silver thread. Idyllic, but he has come, a demon encased in shycloth armor, to murder a mother’s child in her arms.
Hannah dismisses his qualms with a flip of her hand. “Children often died of measles or diphtheria in the late 1800s. Klara Pölzl is young and healthy. She can always have another little Schicklgruber.”
New scenario: Brome is hopelessly lost inside the Planck foam forming the boundary between domains. He spins in white nothingness, in what he later learns is called “spatial decoherence” by the theoretical physicists assigned to the Project. He’s incorporeal, tumbling helplessly, forever trapped. He screams but hears nothing, feels nothing, is nothing. He spends twenty long minutes in this hell before the sim mercifully ends.
Back in the sensorium, the attendant technicians peel adhesive sensors from his chest, temples, groin. He grabs one man, voice ringing like steel. “Goddammit, I’ll walk out of here if you run that one again.”
The tech, whey-faced, stares at his captured arm. One more pound of torque will snap the radius. His partner nervously radios Hannah’s booth for instructions.
Brome’s teeth are clenched. “Don’t run it again. Do you hear me?”
“We won’t, we promise.” Gibli hobbles fast into the sensorium, gripping his eyecane. Brome releases the technician.
“Hannah’s decided that’s the last one,” Gibli says. “You go tomorrow.”
Brome looks up at the observation booth, in hope, in fear. Hannah, surrounded by her stone-faced programmers, nods.
* * * *
Copyright © 2002 K. Mark Hoover
* * * *
K. Mark Hoover is a writer living in Mississippi. He has published over a half dozen fiction and non-fiction articles and is the contest administrator for the Moonlight & Magnolia Fiction Writing Contest. The contest is open to new writers of genre fiction. He is married and has three children.
Other Cities #6 of 12: Zvlotsk
By Benjamin Rosenbaum
2/18/02
Sixth in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.
Around the turn of the last century, as its factories pulled workers from the countryside and its population boomed, Zvlotsk was afflicted with many of the urban ills of its time: slums, houses of prostitution, and unsolved murders of a rough and ready sort. If not for the work of the forensic genius Herr Dr. Oswald Lügenmetzger, Zvlotsk might have continued to endure these plagues in gritty mediocrity.
Though he also broke racketeering rings by reasoning out their webs of suppliers and customers, specified the precise alloy to be used in police badges, and liberated poor girls from the slavery of prostitution through the exercise of Kantian metaphysics, Lügenmetzger’s true metier was the murder case. He could often solve murders before they occurred: it then became merely a matter of stationing an officer where he could observe the foul deed and apprehend the evildoer.
Lügenmetzger’s savaging of the criminal underworld could not long escape notice. Soon an entire industry of tabloid journals, pulp editions of victims’ memoirs, and theatrical reenactments grew up around his accomplishments. Thousands of would-be detectives were sold Starter Kits containing magnifying glasses, fingerprinting equipment, and copies of the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. By 1912, the popularization of detective work accounted for a third of the Zvlotskian economy.
Dr. Lügenmetzger’s answer to this tawdry circus, the Zvlotsk School of the Forensic Sciences, was an immediate sensation. But after the First World War, his cerebral style became increasingly unfashionable. In contrast, the Modern Academy of Detective Work offered a two-fisted, emotionally involved approach that eschewed antiseptic ratiocination.
By the late twenties, the schools had by any measure wildly succeeded. Detection rates were stratospheric, and criminals fled Zvlotsk en masse for less demanding cities. The falling murder rate squeezed the city’s detective industry, imperiling the economy. Editorials lambasted the cowardice of the fleeing criminals, and the Gridnovsky publishing empire threw its weight behind a variety of remedies: Murderer Starter Kits, sponsorship deals for elegant archvillains, and women’s magazine articles with titles like “Ten Ways To Find Out If He’s Cheating On You (And Deserves To Die).”
In the thirties, economic privation and anger restored the murder rate to its proper levels, and Zvlotsk boomed. As murderous and detection-happy immigrants crowded into the city, a snob hierarchy developed. The disaffected mugger and the enraged cuckold were despised as lowbrows; the true craftsmen of murder inaugurated ever more elaborate schemes. Both murderers and detectives sported flamboyant costumes and exotic monikers, attempting to distinguish themselves from the common herd.
The Second World War dealt a major blow to amateur detectivism, and under the Communist regime it was outlawed as a form of bourgeois sentimentality. Both murder and police work became as drab as the endless rows of concrete block housing which grew up around Zvlotsk’s smokestacks. Dissidents lit candles to the spirit of Lügenmetzger and privately circulated illicit copies of true crime stories in the Gridnovskian mode.
After the Revolution of 1989, there were great hopes that Zvlotsk’s unique prewar culture of crime and detection would again flourish. But while the youth of Zvlotsk have embraced American-style serial killing along with MTV and McDonald’s, they find crime-solving prohibitively boring. The intellectuals of the University of Zvlotsk have declared detection an obsolete attempt to impose a totalizing narrative on the pure sign of murder. At present, Zvlotsk is a city with many murderers, but very few detectives.
Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum
* * * *