Valys wore an iron grey suit with gold cufflinks, his head was a fluctuating pattern of nebular incandescence. Lo-seccers who looked at him for too long thought they were looking at the face of God. Owl, as his name might suggest, had a prosthetic head in blackened chrome that resembled an eagle owl with ivory eyes. His suit was golden brown with silver cufflinks.
The d-tects were here because transfigurators were key contributors to peace in the Crawl. Their streams satisfied many latent desires for violence and sexual abuse in the populace. Direct interfaces they offered in the Flood were in a perpetual state of over-subscription. For one of the most popular transfigurators to be murdered, and for there to be no record of it on any system, was cause for concern. A disruption that created ripples strong enough to draw CI attention.
“What data we got?” whistled Owl.
“None, as you know,” Valys hummed. “It was scrubbed by whoever did this.”
“So we’re in again for the usual reasons.”
“Yeah, funny really,” Valys droned, “I don’t have a heart anymore and your lungs are lead-lined tanks yet we’re still human enough for the CIs.”
“They need us for the intuition thing.”
“Flesh and blood feeling, true.”
“Understanding of the primal need to kill,” Owl finished.
They took turns to scan the scene. Valys hummed in differing choral registers. Owl whistled, hooted and cooed. The regular pol-tects stayed well away from them. A few transfigurators looked on, fascinated.
“Done?” Owl asked.
“Done.” Valys confirmed.
“Plan or passion?” Owl asked.
“Definitely passion,” Valys answered.
Owl cocked his head, his feathers shimmering from opaque to glass-transparent to obsidian, as he zoomed in on Lai’leen Medea’s body, “Nasty.”
“What do you think?” Valys asked.
“Interview her apprentices. How many?”
“Six.”
“One out of six can’t be bad-bad odds.” Owl glitched.
“Best odds, my friend. Call ‘em in. And get that stutter fixed. You don’t want another breakdown.”
Jaiq remembered the first time he saw Lai’leen on the transfigurator streams.
He’d decided that, as soon as his adolescent lockdown was complete, he would travel to the Illuminarium and submit himself for design by her alone. No-one else. It would be difficult to get there as he was lo-sec born and it would mean having to traverse the lo-sec and mid-sec stacks to get there, but he would do it. To be a transfigurator was better than a redundant grey life stuck in module hell with his wired-in parents.
Jaiq made the climb as men once ascended mountains in the hope of finding the gates to Heaven, Olympus, or Asgard waiting for them so they might be admitted to dine with the Gods. He lost count of the hours, the days, and the nights he laboured to reach his hi-sec goal. He gnawed on the mutant vermin infesting the Crawl’s infrastructure, drinking their blood as sour refreshment. Some might say the change in him began here – his body wracked by the unstable exterior conditions of the Crawl. Starved and dehydrated, sick from exposure, he’d collapsed on the front porch of the Illuminarium, aching to die.
Lai’leen emerged to see who this vagrant was dirtying the doorstep of her sanctum – and he found the strength to offer himself to her for as long as he lived, thinking he was about to die there and then.
“I would look upon your face a thousand times and never tire of it.” Those were his words, spoken to her with rare honesty – and they paid his admission into the Illuminarium.
There was little honesty left in the Crawl.
Lai’leen gave him water so that he might tell his full story. She kept him in a cage for forty days and forty nights as he recited every last minute of his life up to this point. He was subjected to fierce temperature shifts, injected with hallucino-genes, poked and prodded by curious transfigurators – until the day came when she accepted him for design. His time on her table was watched by billions. They all saw the cat lick his heart.
And I should have continued from there – and to ascend, he thought, to have my talent revealed, but it didn’t work out like that. Everything I’ve made is sub-creation. Something inside me is in the way. Blocking. Stopping. Halting. Holding me back.
Or, I’m lo-sec scum after all. I’ll never be able to complete a transfiguration the way she does. I’m waste product. I should be flushed back down the pipes. Dropped into the oblivion depths beneath the Crawl to roast in the Earth’s plasma storms.
He’d finished sodomising the young man’s corpse half an hour ago. The body had gone cold. The blood congealed. He kicked at it again.
I need someone else. Someone perfect.
“Thanks for your time,” Owl whistled as the fifth red-eyed, silk-robed apprentice bowed and left the chamber.
“Five interviews. Five blanks.” Valys said.
“Which leaves us with number six. Name?”
“Jaiq Banquo. A lo-sec climber who managed to get himself accepted into the Illuminarium. Lai’leen’s most prized apprentice according to recs. Four billion plus watched his transfiguration.”
“I remember that one. Cat lick your heart. Think they streamed it in while we were on ice.”
“He’s not covered his tracks very well. Letting himself be suspect number one.”
“Act of passion. Guilt pathways must be burning fierce inside his head. He did her in, but doesn’t mind getting caught.”
“Or,” Valys sang, “he’s got something special planned for us.”
“Could be. Could be.” Owl twit-twooed, “we’d best go and have a word then, hadn’t we?”
“Something special,” Valys murmured, “like the old days in mid-sec thirteen.”
“I miss beer,” Owl whistled. “Ice-cold beer.”
Jaiq was waiting for them. He’d left the door to his pod open.
“Jaiq Banquo, are you prepped to come quiet?” Valys asked.
The apprentice turned his eyes on the d-tects, “Sure, why not?”
Tone casual, Valys analysed, body language null and lax.
“Looks junked to me,” Owl whistled, “let me do a psi-scan before we touch.”
“All yours, my friend.”
Valys watched as Owl did his job. Jaiq made no move whilst the bird-headed d-tect twittered and chirruped.
“And what’ve got?” Valys asked.
“Clean. No threat of violence to us, or himself.”
“He junked?”
“No, also clean.”
“Allah, what makes his eyes so big then?”
“Sorrow and loss,” Owl answered.
The suspect whispered something hoarsely.
“You say something?” Valys asked Jaiq.
The apprentice looked at him and smiled unkindly, “Cat lick your heart.”
Lai’leen woke up.
Jaiq watched her try to scream, but screaming was impossible because he’d taken her mouth away. “One of the first tricks you taught me,” he whispered into her ear. “You did this to me. You made me happen this way. This is all your doing.”
She was on his table now – and she was perfect. The wires and straps held her in place. He’d disabled the streaming service because he wanted this to be different from what was done to him. Special. Intimate. Private. Audience of one. He’d killed her cat before she woke up.
I might make her lick its broken heart.
“What’s the one rule we have here?” he asked, “we fuck the dead, guzzle hallucino-genes until we go blind, drink poison like it’s bitterclear, but what’s the one thing we never ever do?”