“Oh—no.” Ellis tried to remember, but he was feeling terrible. “I’m pretty sure neither said a name.”
“What were they talking about?”
“I really didn’t hear much. Something about a Hive Project and the future. That’s about all I remember.”
“See,” Cha said with a superior tone that irritated Ellis. He had no idea what Cha meant by the single word. It sounded like a continuation of a previous argument, but all he knew was that he didn’t like it. He also decided he didn’t like Cha’s tattoo. Ellis never cared for tattoos, they always made people look cheap—human graffiti—but he made exceptions for statements of honor like military insignias, the name of a loved one, or a quote from the Bible. But Cha’s was just strange swirls, like some Aztec art.
“I’m going to sit down, is that okay?” He was going to sit down even if it wasn’t. Ellis was feeling nauseous in addition to dizzy, and he let himself slide down the wall to the grass.
Pax nodded. “Nothing at all, Cha?”
“Sorry.”
“Concrete! I can’t report another anonymous. It’ll just make things worse.”
“There’s nothing here.”
Pax looked angry, but Cha only shrugged.
“Can’t you run tests?” Ellis asked. “You still have forensic sciences, right?”
They both looked at him, confused.
“You know, fingerprints and DNA samples.” He was about to say hair samples but caught himself.
“Those won’t help, Ellis Rogers,” Pax told him. “We all have the same.”
“Same what? DNA? Fingerprints? You can’t all—oh.” Not androids then—genetic engineering. Ellis finally understood the Darwin reference. So maybe he wasa Darwin, at least in the strictest sense. Is everyone here born in a test tube?
“Without the chip we can’t identify the victim,” Cha said.
“Really?” Ellis asked. “So you all have chips in your shoulders to tell each other apart? C’mon, there has to be another way. I mean, what happens when those things stop working? Don’t they ever fail?”
“Not really.”
“In a case like that we could verify identity just by asking questions,” Pax explained. “Or run a neural scan. But being dead, those won’t work.”
“But you must have had this problem before.”
The two shook their heads. “Until recently, it’s never happened.”
“Seriously?” Ellis was amazed.
“What do we do now?” Cha asked.
“Like Ihave all the experience with dead bodies,” Pax replied, staring at the corpse with an expression that mirrored how Ellis was feeling.
“You’ve at least seen one before,” Cha said.
“Contact the ISP. They’ll want to look it over.”
“You two are homicide cops, and this is only the second dead body either of you has seen?” Ellis asked.
“First I’veseen,” Cha corrected.
“What’s a homicide cop?” Pax asked.
“Police that deal with murders.”
With widening eyes, Pax pointed a finger at Ellis. “That’s right! You’re from the past! Wayin the past. You know all about this—this sort of thing…about murders, right?”
“Not really. I wasn’t a cop. I used to design cars—parts of them anyway—worked on energy and alternate fuel. This village was a museum that was built by the Henry Ford Motor Company, and I—”
“Still is a museum,” Pax corrected.
“Okay, well—see, I used to work for another car company, trying to improve the capacity of batteries. I wasn’t a detective or anything.”
“But they had murders then, yes?”
“I lived in Detroit—they had plenty.”
“And you know that they used DNA and fingerprints to find the killers.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“Maybe everyone in 2014 knows about such things—not so much these days.” Pax took another step closer, until they were only an arm’s length apart.
Nice eyes, Ellis thought, something innocent and childlike about them.
“We don’t have this sort of thing anymore,” Pax said.
“Murders?”
“Death,” Pax replied.
Ellis just stared, certain he wasn’t getting everything. He was still trying to understand what Pax meant by him being from wayin the past. How long ago was way? Then it sounded like Pax had said there was no more death. “What did you say?”
“Listen,” Pax began in a softened tone. “I’m sorry about all this. You’ve just been through a traumatic experience. You’re tired and not feeling well. You’re clearly a pioneer, a great scientist of some sort who’s accomplished something astounding. You’re a new Charles Lindbergh or Network Azo, and trust me, I’ll see you’re taken care of. Your very existence is amazing—”
“Impossible actually,” Cha added with disdain.
Pax went on without pause. “You should be welcomed with a parade, and a party, and I’m certain a great many people will wish to speak with you. I know you have all sorts of questions, but you need to believe me when I tell you I’m not a cop. I’m an arbitrator. I deal with general disputes between people—help them settle their differences with the least amount of bad feelings. And I help people who have experienced painful events in their lives. I was called here to see if I could help these students deal with the trauma of witnessing a dead and brutalized body. But this…is there anything else you could tell us?”
“Are you serious?”
“Right now you’re the foremost living expert.”
Ellis had never been the foremost anything. And whether he really was or not, he liked that Pax thought he might be. “I don’t know what I can offer. I don’t know anything about how things work here. All I know comes from reading crime thrillers and watching TV.” He said this even as he moved toward the body, crawling now, as standing was too much effort to consider. Cha quickly stepped back, but not as frantically as before.
The corpse looked like the bystanders, who were still shifting around to get a better look at him, except the dead person was covered in blood, cuts, and puncture wounds. Looking down, Ellis felt his dizziness rise a couple of notches. He also had a headache. He’d never seen a brutalized body before. All the dead people he’d been near were thick with makeup and tucked neatly in boxes surrounded by flower arrangements. Luckily, with the exception of the blood, which had already mostly dried, it wasn’t a very gruesome scene. No guts hanging out, no bones showing—just the mutilated shoulder, which wasn’t as bad as he had expected. The killer had dug in like a doctor to retrieve a bit of shrapnel. He knew he wasn’t going to puke, which surprised him, because his stomach had been churning for some time. He tried to focus and apply what he knew from the novels of Patricia Cornwell, Jonathan Kellerman, and the occasional episode of Law & Orderor CSI.“Looks like he was stabbed to death and the killer didn’t seem to know what he was doing.”
“Why’s that?” Cha asked this time.
“Well, unless you’ve moved things around since my time, the best places to kill a person, according to most of the crime novels, would be a slice across the throat to cut the carotid artery, an upward stab under the ribs to the heart, or a stab to the base of the skull. This person was just jabbing anywhere, straight in and out. See all the puncture marks on the stomach? All of them have small openings, like he was just going for the soft spots. There was no twisting of a blade or attempt to open the wounds wide. And the victim didn’t fight back…just defended. See the cut on the arm there? Probably from trying to ward off the knife. And see the blood pool? That wound caught a larger artery there, and I bet that caused the bleed out. These others might have damaged intestines, and maybe eventually done the trick, but not nearly as fast. Might have been saved if not for that arm cut.”