Free Less Than Human by Maxine McArthur

followed
     a beige-walled, brown-tiled corridor.
    In the apartment blocks Ishihara had lived in when he first married, the corridors were balconies open to the outside air,
     cluttered with children’s toys, bicycles, and pot plants. In summer, doors were always propped open to let the breeze through.
     The air was heavy with cooking smells, and noisy with voices and television jingles.
    Here, nobody spoke in the cool, aseptic tunnel of the corridor, and only one door stood open. A black-and-yellow crime-scene
     barrier blocked it off.
    Ishihara sighed and pulled gloves and surgical mask out of his pocket. The only good thing about suicides was that he wouldn’t
     be spending the next however many shifts chasing the culprit.
    The entrance hall was full of solid, sensible, police shoes. The dead people’s shoes would have been packed away as exhibits.
     The door and lock didn’t seem to have been damaged. They must have broken in to use the apartment, but why didn’t the alarms
     sound?
    The smell, as the constable had said, wasn’t too bad through the gauze mask, merely a sourness at the back of his throat.
    “Assistant Inspector.” One of the station’s forensic pathologists, Dr. Matobe, beckoned him from the inner room.
    The apartment was set out very much like his own. A short hall led on from the entry, with a study on one side and a tiny
     bedroom and bathroom on the other. Then the kitchen/dining room on the left, a living room beyond, and the main tatami room
     to the right of kitchen and living room. A small verandah completed the whole, which must have been about sixty meters square.
    As Ishihara walked through the kitchen he noticed that the dining table was cluttered with cups and unwashed bowls. Just like
     at his own place. The familiarity made the scene in the room even more grotesque.
    The living area was full of bodies. One lay stretched at his feet, as though fallen on the way to the door. Two curled in
     fetal crouches in front of the vidscreen and one sprawled half-in, half-out of the tatami mat room beyond. No sign of a weapon,
     no obvious wounds.
    They were all naked and all silver.
    Ishihara stepped carefully around the body near the door and squatted by the two in front of the screen. One male, one female.
     Beside them lay two hand computers. Wires were taped to their hands and shaven heads, leading to the handcoms and the computer
     drive panel on the living room wall. Both had metal tips on their fingers where the wires were attached.
    Can’t be electrocution, thought Ishihara. We’d smell the singeing.
    “Shock?” he said, raising his voice to be heard clearly through the mask.
    “Always a safe guess, Detective.” Slim little Dr. Matobe rubbed his hands together. His Playtex gloves squeaked. “From an
     initial examination that’s all I can tell.”
    He squeezed easily past Ishihara and squatted beside the female body that faced them. “They’ve had some kind of anaphylactic
     reaction. You can’t see the cyanosis because of the paint. It’s a spray-on body paint.” He pointed at the bathroom. “The tin’s
     in there.”
    “You can see their airways have swollen and basically choked them.” He raised the chin of one of the girls slightly to show
     Ishihara her blackened, protruding tongue. Ishihara put up with the sight, but looked away as soon as he could.
    “Of course,” Matobe hastened to add, “this is off the record. I can give no opinion until we’ve done an autopsy.”
    “Right, sure,” Ishihara confirmed mechanically. He turned to the other bodies. The one near the living room door was male,
     the other female. He shivered involuntarily. The silver paint flattened the children’s features, made them seem inhuman. Even
     the pert little breasts and flaccid penises seemed mechanical.
    They’d have to interview the other residents—somebody might have noticed something unusual. They’d have to check the movements
     of the dead kids before they came here.
    As