Thursday 11 November 2010

Entry 24 - Trash Collector

Louis was a trash collector. Everyday he'd dress his work suit, drink his cup of morning coffee, and drag himself into the street. There he's hop into the first car with a empty seat and sleep for a while until they reached the work city. His tower was the third on so he would normally walk there if it wasn't raining. When it rained he'd take the automatic sidewalk, squished by the thousands of workers trying to be on their desks on time. On this particular day, it wasn't raining so Louis walked outside to the door. He climbed into the elevator after being validated by the security devices, and stepped into the cubicle maze. After five years there he could find the way with closed eyes, straight ahead for ten cubicles, turn left and walk past five more, turn right and it's the fourth on the right. He takes the coat off, putting it in the hanger, sits down at his desk, turning his terminal on.
The screen has only 5 icons, one in each corner and one in the middle. On the top left a email client, bottom left the information browser, bottom right the music player and on the center the control program. He put on the glove and taped the top right corner of the screen, entered the time and day, closed the application, tapped the email, dragged all the union communications to the deleted folder and read the only important email : the route for the day. He dragged the bullet list with the name of streets into the second screen that had been black until now, found the little box with his wireless ear pods, put them on and tapped music, tapped random, tapped play and dragged the player to the second screen too.
When all was ready he tapped the central icon, checked what the starting point was, selected the nearest available Tele-guided Garbage Collector Vehicle and started driving it to the first pickup point. Driving was done with the gloved right hand by leaning it in the correct direction, so anyone looking would see a grown up man waving his hand in front of a screen, looking bored to the moving dot on the map, checking for collisions on the four cameras, making sure none of the 41 status indicators turned yellow, or god forbid! red. Once the TeGaCoV reached the first pick up point Louis closed and opened his hand in a swift movement, the vehicle stopped and the screen changed. Instead of the map, the central part showed the view from the crane's camera, that the glove now controlled. He could do it in less than a minute now, bu the first time he had to pick up a trash can and empty it to the truck it took him almost thirty minutes. Now his hand would mimic the crane, grabbing the trash can, calculating exactly when he needed to tip it off, and doing so.
After emptying all of the trash cans in the crane's range, he once again closed and opened his hand, cycling to movement mode, and drove the truck to the next pick up point. He was operating in a link he had never been worked on before, so when he saw a men wearing nothing but a loincloth and a huge axe, he dismissed it as 'some local costume'. Until the barbarian ran into the vehicle and started hitting it with the axe. Little yellow and red lights started to blink, and the TeGaCoV entered automatic mode, backing up and running away. Once the truck was safe inside the hangar, Louis tapped the 'report incident' button hidden inside one of the menus.
"Vehicle attacked by barbarian retreated to hangar. Request orders." he typed into the "describe your problem" box after finding the keyboard under the stack of newspapers, and tapped submit. The 'estimated resolution time' was above twenty minutes so he got off of his chair and went to bar. There he met three other coworkers, one of them trying to convince the others that a crazy man dressed as a barbarian had trashed his trash collector truck. Louis chipped in with "It happened to me too. Which link were you working on?". His coworker replied with the link code, and Louis nodded a "me too". The others were looking at them with a 'I don't believe a word of that' face, that only got away when another guy entered, and before anyone asking him he goes "I was working on RD-13-01F, when a crazy guy attacks my damned tegacov with a bloody axe". Louis and the other one both turned and went "SEE?" to which they finally agreed something strange was happening. Later, a internal memo was sent to every employee, saying that the link with the code RD-13-01F would no longer be cleaned by their company due to a 'change in regime'.

Thursday 4 November 2010

Entry 23 - The Case of the Wrong Address

When I woke up she wasn't there in bed so I got up, grabbed a robe and dragged my feet into the bathroom, and she still was nowhere to be seen. After the bath and shaving, she arrived, with bags of groceries.
"Hello my love, I brought us breakfast. Come to the kitchen when you are dressed."
I did as ordered, and met her at the table. Our house is huge compared to the one I had before. Two bedrooms, a small library, a living and a dinning room, kitchen and bathrooms. It even had a small backyard, "for our kids to play" she had said when we chose this one.
After bringing down The Order of Horus we found ourselves very comfortable in finances from the rewards. Jewels, cars, weapons and criminals had gone to their rightful place.
It had been incredibly easy to bring down the cult with her help. She had infiltrated the cult to steal the Eye of Horus, and she knew who it was that I had to arrest to bring the cult down. It crumbled like a card castle that has had one of it's foundations removed.
I still found it hard to believe only five month had passed since that day I found her in my office. I still have the office, but now the rest of the floor is also mine. I don't work alone anymore, I'm the Chief Investigator of the Private Investigators Agency, and five other investigators work with me. Tommy and James are both ex-cops, that decided they wanted to make a bit more money. Frances is a lovely woman, getting close to old age. She was married to a police detective for years, until he was brutally killed three month ago. She alone unraveled the circumstances of his death, and succeeded in solving a case that was baffling the police. So I gave her a job. Marlon was a PI already, but when I opened the Agency he offered to join. And the last of them is Sam. Sam is a kid, early twenties, fresh out of one of the best colleges in the system, and a brilliant mind. I call her She-Lock, but she doesn't understand why, since for some reason, Arthur Conan Doyle's classics were never published in her link. I intend to give her a copy of the Complete Sherlock Holmes as soon as I find one.
Stella helps me out at the office, and it feels wonderful to work with the woman I love, to wake up next to her everyday, and to see her smile whenever I look to the side. I had forgotten what it meant to be in love ever since I came into the Secret System... I was married once, I'm not even sure if I still am married in the "real world". This world is more real than what ever world I was in before I came here. I used to miss them, my old family, but now I'm too happy to think about those things. Stella once asked me where was it that I came from, after reading my notebooks, but I never got around to answer. It still isn't easy to think back to that day, and for now I don't want to. But it is part of my story, part of who I am, and of why I am here, so eventually I shall write it down.
Where was I going? Oh, I know, the case of the wrong address. That one should give you, the silent reader that I still feel looking over my shoulder, a idea of the power of the PIA.
It was one of James informants that tipped us out to that one. A old man got a letter for some other person with the same name as him, but a different address. There had been some mistake at the post office and the letter ended in the sack of one mailman that happen to know the old man. So he saw the name and delivered it, not noticing the address was wrong. So far, nothing that would be of interest for the PIA, except that inside the envelope there was only one photograph. A picture of a dead body and a note on the back "You are next. Love, Mimmy". Now, the old man, Philip, knew no one that went by the name Mimmy, not did he recognize the dead body. His reaction was to go to the police, but they dismissed it as a bad joke. But one of them kept a copy of the picture and showed it to James that showed it to me, and we had a case. The old man wasn't very rich, but even so, when we contacted him he said that he would pay if we helped him out. He was freaked out by the picture and by the idea that someone else might die.
The first thing we did was check up on the real recipient. There was no Philip K. Grill in Allyson Street. Shelock checked the entering records of Dark City and there was only one person with such a name, the old man that received the letter in the first place. I had Tommy, James and Marlon search other links for the second Philip. It took us two weeks but we tracked him down, in a low-tech link, going by a different, although not very imaginative, name. Shelock made contact and after convincing him she knew him not to be John Doe but Philip Grill and explaining the situation, he agreed in helping us track down and arrest Milly.
Milly had been his high school sweetheart and the dead man was their partner in the business they opened after college. They kicked Milly out of it because they suspected her of stealing money. A few months later his partner appears dead in his house and Philip decides it's time to start a new life somewhere else. Knowing her real name and last known address it was easy to find and capture her. She confessed and both Philips now life in peace and without fear.
So if you ever have a nagging interrogation, no matter how irrelevant it might seem, come and question the Private Investigators Agency at the Dark City. We take and solve all cases for a affordable price.