Free The 88th Floor by Benjamin Sperduto

 
    “ What a fucking
mess.”
    Rees nodded and took a drag from his
cigarette.
    “ Where the hell is
forensics?” he asked.
    “ They’re on the way, sir.
Still running behind after that bombing on Highland this afternoon,
I guess. You heard anything else about that?”
    Rees hadn’t.
    “ Everybody’s saying it’s
another terrorist attack,” the patrolman said. “I hear the SICA
guys aren’t letting anyone near the blast site.”
    “ Figures.” The city’s
intelligence agency had a well-deserved reputation for not playing
well with others.
    Rees checked his phone.
    3:26 AM.
    “ You ever see one this
bad, sir?”
    Rees looked at the mangled, bloody corpse
sprawled across the floor just a few feet away. He drew deeply from
his cigarette again.
    “ Why don’t you go see
what’s keeping the lab boys?”
    “ They already
said–”
    “ I know what they said.
Just humor me, okay?”
    The patrolman nodded and walked over to
where a few other officers were busy blocking off the area. It
wasn’t a difficult crime scene to secure, considering they were
eighty-eight stories above the streets inside the unfinished
Sircotin Technologies building. The night work crew had already
been sent home.
    Rees knelt beside the victim. All that
remained of the face was a twisted clump of flesh and bone that was
fused together as if the head were partially melted. The hands and
feet weren’t much better, little more than misshapen stumps. Then
there was the blood that had poured out from at least half a dozen
bullet wounds.
    “ Poor bastard. What the
hell happened to you?”
    “ Detective Rees,” a cool,
monotone voice said, “please step away from the victim.”
    Rees stood up and raised his hands.
    “ Relax, Morgan,” he said.
“I didn’t touch anything.”
    He turned to face Doctor Morgan, one of the
department’s more experienced forensics experts. The digital pupil
of his left eye narrowed, focusing intently on one of Rees’s
hands.
    “ You are contaminating my
crime scene, Detective Rees.”
    Rees glanced at the cigarette and quickly
extinguished it.
    “ Sorry,” he said. “Old
habits, you know?”
    “ I am quite afraid that I
do not. Now, if you would kindly step away from the victim I can
begin my examination.”
    “ Yeah, sure,” Rees said.
There was no use trying to say much of anything to Morgan these
days. Rees had known him for years, but even he had a hard time
telling where the man ended and the machine began.
    The doctor’s face betrayed no reaction to
the disfigured corpse.
    “ Interesting… ” he
said.
    Rees could do little but wait patiently as
Morgan activated his sensors and data recorders to examine and
catalogue every minute detail of the scene. His gaze strayed away
from the corpse and took in the details of the unfinished room.
    “ When was the victim
discovered?”
    “ About an hour ago,” Rees
said, still examining the room. For such an expensive project, the
workmanship was awfully shoddy. He wondered if the crew had
something against straight lines. “We got an anonymous call and a
patrolman dropped by to check it out.”
    Morgan didn’t indicate whether or not he
heard the answer, but Rees knew he had. The bastard could listen in
on every conversation within five blocks if he wanted to. Rees knew
better than to take being ignored personal and was surprised Morgan
had even bothered to spare the miniscule processing power required
for simple conversation. It really didn’t bother him since most of
his attention was still on the layout of the unfinished
eighty-eighth floor. The more he looked at it, the more he thought
he discerned a pattern to its odd angles and edges. Something kept
tugging at his peripheral vision, an image that almost took a
definite form before flickering away when he looked at it
directly.
    Morgan analyzed the corpse for some time,
running thousands of calculations inside his cybernetic brain. He
then injected a small vial of nano-bots into the body that