Free TORN by CASEY HILL Page A

of her right hand, she reached across the screen through the network, and grasped the freshly rendered scene from the storage attached to the rendering engine. Turning her palm face up, she clenched a tight fist and then splayed her hand out open. As if by some miracle, the machine responded by unfurling a finely stitched virtual reality mosaic of the Coffey septic tank.
    Whoah… Reilly  felt goosebumps.
    Poking around at the edges of the illusion, she was amazed to find that for a first attempt she had actually followed the instructional protocol fairly well, and all the vital data needed to reconstruct the scene seemed to have been properly captured.
    In fact, it was so close to the real thing it was scary. OK, so there was no way a machine could replicate the sounds … smells … feel of a crime scene for real, but in this situation that was a good thing. This time there was no stink, no toxic stew.
    Nice work, Jet .
    Reilly smiled, ran her hands over the gloves and prepared to walk the Coffey scene for the second time, iSPI-style.
     
     
    As she worked, the GFU building gradually came to life around her – footsteps in the corridor, voices and greetings, phones ringing, the buzz and the pace gradually picking up as people settled into their daily routine. 
    Reilly ignored it all.  She had her door closed this morning, both to shut out sound and also discourage casual visitors.
    ‘Reilly?’ There was a brief knock before the door opened and she looked up to see Lucy leaning inside. Reilly glanced at the clock: it was after 10 a.m. and she had been working on the scene for over two hours. Lucy stared at her headgear. ‘Wow, that looks so … futuristic.’
    ‘I guess that’s exactly what it is.’ Removing the headset, Reilly rocked back in her chair and stretched. Her neck and shoulders were tense from sitting still for so long. She picked up the remains of her coffee, now stone cold.
    ‘Is that the Coffey scene from the other day?’ Lucy moved closer to the computer screen, immediately interested.  Reilly had placed a virtual placemarker inside the rendering of the tank, similar to the ones they used to mark something of potential interest at a real-life crime scene. Lucy screwed up her eyes. ‘What’s this?’
    ‘I’m not sure yet,’ Reilly replied truthfully, ‘but I think it might be some form of blockage, and the real reason the tank backed up.’
    She was slightly reluctant to conjure a theory until the ‘real’ tank had been fully drained, and she was able to examine it physically, but iSP I through its molecular analysis of the tan k had identified an irregularity on one side of the pit about half a meter beneath the surface.
    Had Coffey’s murderer purposely blocked up the offshoot pipe so that the tank would become backed up, and the journalist body would be found? The plumber had mentioned that the system automatically redistributed the effluent out beneath the orchard. If this had happened as it was supposed to, Tony Coffey’s body could have been stewing in the tank for weeks, even months before it was found. As it was, the corpse had been discovered within a couple of days.
    Granted, it might be nothing, but Reilly was impressed at the software’s ability to pick up on potentially interesting evidence that might otherwise have taken considerable time to reveal itself, if at all.
    ‘Crikey, the software showed you that – deep down in the tank? That’s so cool.’  Now it was Lucy’s turned to be awed, making Reilly feel vaguely uncomfortable. If iSPI was that reliable, they could all be out of their jobs soon.
    ‘Like I said, I’m not sure what it is – it could be nothing. And it’s definitely nothing until we find physical evidence to support it. Anway,’ she turned her chair to Lucy, ‘what’s up?’
    ‘Well …’ The younger woman couldn’t keep the enthusiasm out of her voice, ‘… we think we might have something from one of the soil samples from this very