Transmat World: Chapter 4
Atlanta; October, 2145 A.D.
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Squirrels described furry arcs over bright green tufts of winter rye, appearing and disappearing like mullet fleeing trout as they chased each other through the park. Despite the fact they were going to commit yet another act of adultery, Terence enjoyed the scene without a twinge of conscience. The thing that bothered Lori was the possibility of getting caught.
“It’s risky to be meeting here like this,” Lori said, twirling a lock of hair arching past her ear.
“Oh, come on. He doesn’t suspect a thing. What’s he gonna do? Kill me? Hand me one of those brownies.”
They both sat on the bench chewing in the morning sun, savoring the sexual tension and anticipating its release at a nearby sextel.
“Mmm, a bit of shell in the pecans but these are good,” said Terence. You make ‘em?”
“No, I found them on the table. Roy must have made them.”
“Really, I didn’t know he cooked anything but books.”
Lori felt irritated as she thought, Yes, Roy is a dickhead but he is my dickhead.
Terence was a good sex partner, but his constant Roy-bashing was getting to her.
“Sometimes when he’s upset, it helps to calm him down,” Lori said. “Let’s go! I don’t want to talk about him,” mainly because he’s a vengeful psycho and if you knew that you might not be having sex with me.
She spotted a Cab-Electro and pointed her omni. The sleek two-seater robot was a tear-drop on wheels, its faux-fish-scale photovoltaic skin shed wind instead of water as it obediently pulled to the curb, gull-wing doors opening with a swoosh and glint of sunlight. They got into the car. The cab had already grabbed the address from her omni and sped off with a muted whine, debiting her account every hundredth of a mile.
They lay on the bed, sweaty and drained. The room was small, a bed with walkway space around it and a bathroom with a small shower — a typical sextel room that rented by the minute. The air kicked on in response to the steaminess. New Transmat air conditioning, it was a pair of S0.1 Class III Transmats. One transmitted air from an undisclosed site in the Antarctic and the other sucked air from another location in the Sahara. A thermostat controlled the air mixture, dumped it into a common plenum and expelled it into the room. The Buy Your Leave Sextel was riding the wave of the future with their Trasmat air conditioning. They made it a point to mention that in their brochure.
“Get rid of Roy! Divorce him and marry me,” Terence announced.
“No, Terence. We talked about this before we started. This is just sex, and it’s good sex.”
“You know it, baby.”
“You don’t think of him as a threat, but I do, and he would be extremely upset if he found out about us, and I don’t really know what he would do. He can be vindictive so don’t get any screwball ideas about letting him know … what’s that look? Tell me you have not done anything … “
“No, no, of course not, but Dave knows Roy. Me and Dave were having a drink and he was telling me how Roy thinks someone might be … I don’t know … like he suspects something, but Dave certainly doesn’t know anything because I haven’t told him anything.”
“Okay, this has to be the last time. He can’t find out. You are totally underestimating Roy and …” she looked at his face and saw big eyes, drawn mouth, and exaggerated neck tendons. “Oh, poor baby, we had a good time, but all good things–.”
“The brownies!” he gasped, sweat forming on his brow and upper lip. His fingers on her arm began to quiver. “There was something in them!”
She felt it now, a growing sense of bloat in her gut quickly turning to cramps. Everything seemed brighter as fear and pain cast a nightmarish glare on everything. Terence ran back and forth holding his abdomen, face contorting in screams between gurgling belches. Sweat glistened on pasty, pale skin. He began to swell.
The last thing Lori saw was Terence with his arms and legs sticking straight out from his ballooning body, eyes staring, sightless. A circular cloud of gray contracted toward the center of her vision, framing the scene. The odd last thought in her brain was some old cartoon character poking his head out of the center and saying, “That’s all, folks!”
“They really blew up at each other,” said Detective Fulbright laconically as he surveyed the room. The worse it was, the more he joked. It was a coping mechanism. Morris did not mind. He did the same thing. Fulbright was still a good cop. Almost as good as me, thought Morris.
“That’s not going to get any belly laughs from this audience,” said Detective Morris.
“The smell is so bad in here even the robots are making faces,” said Fulbright, though he cannot smell a thing, and it was a stretch to anthropomorphize the robotic camera lenses and speaker grills.
The transparent inspection suits filtered out all odors. Gobbets of flesh and damaged body parts decorated the sextel room in Early Psychopathic Visigoth. The bodies lay on the floor and bed, holes where the lower part of their abdomen used to be. Their faces were slack and their eyes open. The woman had an odd half grin or, more likely, a grimace. The victims’ identifications were carefully placed at the foot of the bed by machines. Detective Fulbright picked them up and put them in a plastic bag.
An iScanAll® sat on its tripod in the middle of the room; sensor-tipped, flexible, extensible arm bobbing and weaving and whirring about the room like an apple on a long and frenetic cat’s tail. It scanned visible and invisible frequencies of light and radiation, all the while sucking air through an odor-recording chip. The detectives ignored the machine as it darted about the room, clearing their heads by inches.
“What do you think?” Fulbright offered.
“I think it takes a really big dog to eat a ten-pound biscuit.”
“No, seriously,” said Fulbright.
“It looks like they each swallowed a blasting cap and set it off, but I don’t see wires and I don’t see a remote. Maybe a double suicide or a murder-suicide. No visible weapons. No signs of a third party. That doesn’t rule out a double murder. We’ll know more after the body bots get in here and sort this stuff out by DNA. Hopefully, we’ll wind up with only two piles of mush to sort through. That and the autopsy should be enough to tell us what happened. Hello, what’s this?”
Morris noticed a wisp of vapor rising from somewhere in the gore of the woman’s abdomen and instructed the iScanAll® to find its source.
“It’s a little ball of ice!” said Morris.
“So they were shot with exploding ice bullets?” asked Fulbright.
“I doubt it. My grandfather used to talk about his dad working in a refinery in Pre-Hit days. Great granddad said he knew when one of the plant air regulators was screwing up. It would turn into a ball of ice.”
“Why?” asked Fulbright.
“Adiabatic cooling,” said Morris.
“You do and you’ll clean it up.”
“You know what it means,” replied Morris.
“Yeah. Just kidding. That’s how the old-timey air conditioners worked. Did I ever tell you my great-grandfather was a BNI survivor?”
“Yes, you did; many times. And I read the book. And you showed me the 1000 rupiah note. Look for one of these in the other body.” The last part Morris directed at the machine.
Twenty-three seconds of poking and probing and the machine came up with another pea-sized ball of ice. “Bag these up and rush ’em to the lab,” ordered Morris. Through his mike in a slightly raised voice, “Get those body bots in here.” He turned to Fulbright, “Coffee?”
“Sure, you’re buying — Shipley, not iCoffee® or Starbru.”
“We might as well get a raspberry-filled doughnut while we’re there, and then we’ll follow up on these I.D.’s,” said Morris.
“Okay,” Fulbright responded brightly.
Nothing affects this guy’s appetite, thought Morris. He stifled a grin as the detectives turned and moved outside to the islands of grass surrounding that wing of the sextel. They stepped out of their suits which sloughed on command for the clean up crew and settled into the iCar®, punching the faded speed-entry keys for Shipley Donuts on the destination keypad.
