By Chantal Holmes
There was something different about the rain. After the sun had descended fully below the skyline, the weather, too, had decided it wanted to put on different makeup for the evening. What had once been a thin sheet of grey had been steadily growing darker, transforming itself into a thick, off-black veil hiding clumped mascara as the first drops had begun to fall. Had they been warm, maybe, they could’ve more properly passed for tears, but these were far from it: icy and hard-landing enough to sting, cold enough against the warmer ground for a thin layer of mist to linger. Another phone notification pulled her attention down from peering out through the clear plastic of her umbrella, dispelling the daydream. She let her vision tunnel down to the glowing text on her screen, only barely noting the slight gemstone changes in hue as she turned her way down one of the entertainment districts. A mute sigh of relief left her chest: not another warning or news alert, just a friend making sure she was on her way home and safe despite the weather. Stepping a little closer to the buildings along the sidewalk, she sent back a quick confirmation and returned her phone to her pocket. The next chance she had to upgrade to an arm-mounted system instead, she was going to take it.
She had only managed to walk a little more than halfway up the street, when her foot came down on something softer than the rest of the sidewalk; it was just firm enough to shift her gait, pliable enough to squish ever so slightly beneath her sole. A stiff crinkling noise quietly followed her slowly lifting her boot back up. Trash? An amalgam of urban tumbleweeds? Tilting her head, she peered down at the object as she moved her foot aside. Black text on yellow, partial striping on the edges: barrier tape. Her eyes slowly drifted from the crumpled ball along the tattered, but intact, ribbon still connected to it. The two-tone line continued away from the main sidewalk and into a connecting alley, nearly fading from view entirely as it crossed the reach of the streetside lights. She slowly straightened her posture, taking in the barely visible shadows of tape that spanned across the alley’s width. A few of the criss-crossing lines had been broken, their ragged edges rippling ever so slightly in the rain. Had she an actual mouth in place of the faintly glowing shape decorating the lower half of her screen, she was fairly certain it would’ve started to go dry.
Beyond the tape, something flickered. She tilted her head ever so slightly, re-checking the sidewalk and rapidly cycling her visual filters to make sure nothing else was lurking nearby. All readings came back negative.
It flickered a second time, the small screen managing to stay on, casting the edges of the rest of the object in its glow; it looked like a phone, either discarded or forgotten, half resting against a small garbage bag. Cautiously, she made her way to the line of tape and ducked her way under it. There were no evidence markers, but a working phone being left behind barrier tape felt more than a little out of place. Crouching, she lifted the phone from the plastic, the glow of its screen fading back out in the process. She told herself that she could leave it with someone in the morning, in the off chance that it really had been left behind by mistake. Turning it over in her hand as she stood, the initial pang of unease began to rapidly dissipate as she checked for any damage. Its case was a little scuffed, but otherwise intact, while the screen protector had suffered only one fairly deep scratch. The screen flickered back to life as she ran her thumb along the scratch, earning a dulled haptic response that nearly made her drop it.
A short bootup video started to play: a pixel art fish swimming until it bit onto a fisherman’s lure, turning into a little heart logo as it was reeled upward. It rotated clockwise as it breached the surface, landing on its point in what looked like it should have been a text reveal animation. Instead, the little heart tilted slightly, shaking as the animation locked. The screen flashed in rapid cycle of red, purple, fuchsia, and cyan as a few pixels began to fall out of the immobilized shape: slowly forming a jagged line down the center of the heart trapped on the screen. Confusion gave way to panic as a dull, static sensation begin to creep over her hand; the moment she’d lost all sensation in it, she watched her fingers curled tighter around the device to ensure it wouldn’t fall. Her vocal functions froze, legs rooting themselves in place as the static spread its way outward from her shoulder, eyes locked on the screen and the jagged line that had begun to break the little pixel heart in two. She could only barely feel the phone in her pocket vibrate with another notification as the static began to bleed its way into her vision, her other arm unwilling to reach for it no matter how much she silently begged. Blocks of swimming, bright color filled her eyes completely as she felt herself pulled backward into one of her own internal storage devices, reduced to a passive program.
On the phone’s screen, the heart had fully broken; the words ‘DOWNLOAD COMPELTE’ flickered and danced across the screen before it both visibly and audibly sparked, and went dark. Just as casually as she’d picked the device up, she watched herself slip it into the dumpster and retrieve her own phone from her pocket. A message from her friends, asking if she was still on her way to their game night. Her thumb slid across the keyboard quickly, promising she would, but that she’d likely be a bit late. The hand casually set her phone to silent mode and returned it to her pocket, giving her shoulders a light rotation to clear the lingering static. She could hear her drives clicking and responding, different pieces of her being rearranged and almost gently set aside as whatever this thing was settled itself in. She wanted to scream, to halt its processes and force it into a digital quarantine until she could properly purge it, but it had already overwritten key permissions and blocked access. A new personality profile was added, name encrypted, and was promptly set as currently active and in use, solidifying her state as a prisoner in her own system. The invading program slowly reconfigured her facial display, ultimately leaving only her model type and serial number as her own by the time it was finished. It carefully closed her umbrella and leaned it against the wall.
Pieces of fragmented memory flashed before her eyes as she stepped deeper into the alley, nudging something soft and phantom out of the way with her foot. A pair of shadows, glinting metal, and a shower of sparks flickered in and out of her vision. Crouching low, she rummaged around for a loose piece between the ground and wall that’d been used as a hiding place. Her visual display flickered, still struggling to differentiate between memory and present, as she carefully worked a piece of the lower wall open and reached inside. A smile, jagged and much too wide, stretched across her face; everything was in the precise place she’d left it, curved knife and little velvet giftbox untouched. Another flicker, a better lit and drier version of the alley trying to overtake the view of the one she was currently standing in: a splatter art broken heart painted in blood on the wall, a pair of bodies carefully pinned in place beneath it. The metallic tang that would’ve been hanging in the air was uncomfortably vivid, as was the series of images of spending well over an hour making sure everything would catch the light from beyond the alley just right.
The sound of feet rushing along the sidewalk was enough to make her turn, forcing the overlapping memory back out of her sight. She slowly tucked the knife into her other jacket pocket as a pair of shadows hurried by, internal drive clicking quietly with something between contemplation and vague recognition. Almost compulsively, she ducked under the tape line and hurried to the open mouth of the alley, peering around the corner. Her vision flickered, still adjusting, still fighting itself, distorted the shrinking silhouettes as they hurried beneath an awning to catch their breath. Stepping back from the corner, she blinked and shook her head, trying to jar the pixelated blocks from her sight. She was already trying to do too much at once by rushing to pick up where she’d left off. She needed to slow down, give herself time to properly acclimate: the process of jumping from a space as cramped as a phone back into a full body didn’t guarantee immediate functionality. Even the sound of her own sigh was distorted as she stepped away from the wall and began to make her way up the street behind the pair. They hadn’t gotten too far up ahead; there was still plenty of time to confirm whether or not that flicker of familiarity had just been another piece of bleed over.
As she waited for the hiss and whine to fade from her audio inputs, she half occupied herself with the rain. Passing what she assumed to be a pawn shop, the mix of green and yellow neon painted the droplets in a sickly, acidic green: the dreamy jewel tones temporarily morphed into the likeness of dripping hydra venom and corrosive mist. The hiss in her ears gradually gave way to the sound of pouring rain and the partially muffled echo of the two talking under the slowly approaching awning. Straining her hardware a little, she tried to internally boost what they were saying to the point of audibility.
“That’s… the last time… I trust a park that says they have ‘rain-proof’ areas.” One of the two managed between attempts to finish catching their breath. She didn’t recognize the voice.
“No kidding. Redefining ‘raincheck’ wasn’t on my list of things to do tonight, but here we are.” The other sighed, “We’re about halfway back to my place. I know it’s not exactly ideal, but we can at least be a little more dry there while we’re waiting for your ride. They’re a few hours out, right?” The second voice, male, was unmistakable. His companion’s response didn’t register as she glanced in their direction, watching as they turned the corner and began to hurry their way from cover to cover up the next street. Momentarily pressing the box tucked under her arm a little closer to her side, she quickened her pace to follow, half playing with the thought of whether or not he’d be able to recognize her in her current state.
Carefully balancing keeping them within sight and appearing innocuous, she kept her pace just brisk enough to appear as though she were making up for her missing umbrella; whenever she felt she’d closed too much distance, she’d pause by a display window or vending machine to give them a little more space. During one of her pauses, she could hear someone’s radio broadcast drifting down from a cracked window somewhere above. She tilted her head slightly, listening as the host discussed how much time it would take to pose a corpse for a crime scene, posing the question to his listeners as to how someone hadn’t been caught in the process after nearly a dozen victims. She listened quietly to his theorizing about why each scene contained at least one broken heart painted in blood, and had been littered with snapped heart candies branded with scathing text, resisting the urge to respond to each under her breath. As he closed the segment with surprise that a curfew hadn’t been instated, and his own theory that someone had simply been playing with the themes of the month’s holiday, she shook her head. He certainly earned his media points for the effort, regardless of inaccuracy and caffeine-fueled, late-night theory crafting.
“Bear with me; I know your situation is anything but what you probably wanted to do tonight. Just a little longer, and you’ll have your body back. I don’t plan to keep it from you.” The words passed to the other personality as she resumed her hunt, knowing full well they weren’t likely to be believed. The response back was quick, sharp.
“After you’ve added another tally to your body count, right?”
“You catch on quick~” She silently chuckled.
“This will make how many, according to that radio guy? Twelve? Thirteen? Have you stopped to consider that what you’re doing might be going too far?”
She slowed her walking pace a little, gaze trained on the pair walking ahead. Had he stopped to consider that he was going ‘too far’ when he’d strapped her to a table to test his theory? Was ‘too far’ flipping the switch that tore her out of her body and sent her spiraling into a digital limbo? Or, perhaps, was ‘too far’ had been dismembering and disposing of her original body so she couldn’t try to find her way back? Her hand tightened around the handle of the knife in her pocket.
“I have. It isn’t.” The words were chillingly calm as she stepped back out into the rain again, turning to cross the street as soon as she saw one of their heads move a little too far to the side. She didn’t turn her head until her foot touched the opposite sidewalk, just barely catching sight of him turning his attention back to the street ahead of him. She gave them a count of fifteen before she resumed her quiet trailing, watching them continue to dart from cover to cover. His posture shifted from wary back to confident within about three steps, either satisfied that his paranoia found no shadows to cling to, or attempting to mask his alertness to the one that he felt still lingered, unconvinced it had moved on to other vultures to haunt. He didn’t let his companion out of his sight for more than a few moments, keeping them moving and wrapped in carefully feigned interest and apologies in order to keep them from noticing much else. She kept her head tilted downward, a thin façade of trying to keep her display dry in the chance that either of them glanced at the opposite sidewalk for a little too long.
They sprinted up a dead-end street and through a security gate as the first dull rumbles of thunder began. She waited until they were almost halfway through the courtyard before she let her foot fall back onto the street to cross, watching as they paused to catch their breath on the building’s porch. They’d already retreated inside by the time she reached the gate. Lifting her head, her eyes flitted upward from one lit window to the next, pausing on a particular patch of dark glass. Had he moved to a different floor, or was he still running his little operation out of the same apartment? She counted the minutes it would’ve taken to climb from the ground floor to the room she was staring at. Only a few seconds later than expected, the apartment’s lights blinked on one by one; she couldn’t determine whether it was a decision of arrogance, or if he simply hadn’t had the time to relocate, but the thought was enough to draw a dry, glitch-laden chuckle from her audio output. The vocal distortion gave her momentary pause, her grip loosening on the knife handle in her pocket as she tried, and failed, to find her own voice in whatever she’d just heard. She’d have to give her thanks for that lost piece of herself, too.
Pulling her hand from her pocket, she flexed her fingers a little and rested her palm on the user panel. She’d had enough time to settle in and get comfortable, meaning it was about time to see what her borrowed hardware would allow. Rerouting a little bit of power, she sent a small burst of discharge shot through her hand and into the panel; her mental companion immediately recoiled, clutching her phantom wrist. The clatter of the lock disengaging was just enough to mask the electric snap of the panel’s short, leaving only the smell of slightly burnt rain and a faint scorch mark to indicate her tampering. She drew a little flat-edged heart in the soot before sliding the gate open, stepping into the courtyard with the same confident, practiced monotony as a courier. Sparing one more glance up to the dimly lit apartment on the eighth floor, she crossed the courtyard and applied another jolt of electrical coercion to the building’s keypad lock. Knowing that two security malfunctions in such a short span of time were bound to set off a silent alarm, she slipped her way through the door and made her stay on the ground floor as brief as possible, pausing only to confirm a name and a number: Dolios, eighth floor, apartment six.
Strolling past the elevators, she turned her way up the stairwell both to avoid potentially being trapped inside a different small metal box, and to secure a potential escape route. Her pace was unhurried, the overhead lights slowly starting to dim to the point of flickering out completely as she passed, testing how much she could affect without direct contact. If the courier excuse didn’t work, she supposed she could always turn off her facial display and pretend to be one of those haunted, empty machines that supposedly roamed after dark. It would’ve at least been a partial truth. The faint whirring sound of an unmaintained camera motor interrupted her train of thought. Her previous thought carried over; impulsively switching off her facial display, she slowly tilted her head up to “look” back at the camera mounted at corner overlooking the landing. As the light directly overhead dimmed, she let the display flicker back piece by piece: one eye a broken pink heart, the other a bright white knife, her mouth a jagged and cracked smile stretching from one edge of the screen to the other. She could hear it adjusting focus, attempting to zoom in; someone sitting in a security booth somewhere was trying to make sense of what they were looking at. Stepping closer, causing the light nearest the camera to start to dim, she reached up to grip its mounting arm and leave the onlooker a tiny present in the form of flickering pixel vomit and static. Someone was going to have a story to tell, and not a soul would likely believe them.
The next camera along her climb received much less ceremony: no sooner than the light had fully dimmed, she rushed forward to render its point of view just as unusable as the last. If her counting had been correct, the next camera was positioned on the ninth-floor landing, not the eighth, allowing her to enter the apartment hall unhindered. The change in atmosphere was almost immediate as the stairwell’s constant hum fell almost completely mute, muffled by carpet and the distant sound of someone watching a particularly loud movie. She counted the door numbers as she passed, odds on the right, evens on the left, until she was, for the second time, standing outside his apartment. Carefully, she pressed the side of her head to the door, listening. The muffled conversation on the other side was all the confirmation she needed. Taking a full step away from the door, she finally removed her little black box from its spot under her arm and gingerly placed it on the floor. Opening its lid, she pulled out an oil and thermal paste stained “bouquet” of wires and processors. Beside a small bundle of filled and meticulously labeled blood vials, she retrieved a small card with a small note scratched into its surface: “143 // 831: never true, not once”. Closing the lid, she carefully placed the messy bouquet and card on top, standing only to lightly knock on the door.
“Yeah?” The voice was slightly less muffled than before, from somewhere in the kitchen. She reallocated some of her resources, trying her best to replace her glitching voice with what she remembered sounding like.
“Hey… it’s Erin. Was just stopping by to deliver on that promise.” She quietly hurried to the vacant apartment next door, giving it a tiny jolt to snap the lock open and let herself inside. The door to his apartment opened only a few moments after she’d quietly shut hers. Adjusting her hearing sensitivity, she listened closely for his reaction as she quietly made her way through the barren apartment. It was quiet for a few moments, the tension momentarily broken by the scuff of a boot on carpet and the rustle of the bouquet’s paper wrapping being moved. Silence returned while she imagined him scanning the hall for anything amiss, followed by the door abruptly slamming and the clicking of several locks. The alarm from his guest was immediate, asking who it was that’d knocked and why his reaction had been so visceral. She could hear the box being roughly tossed onto something, followed by verbal recoil. He knew she was in the building now; the clock was ticking.
Flipping through her visual filters, she was able to quickly find what she was looking for: a relic from the days when the building had functioned as a hotel, a door connecting the empty apartment to the one next door. Kneeling beside the old locking mechanism, she began to quietly poke and prod at it. She remembered to turn her hearing sensitivity back down just as the first shouts began next door: what had started as simple questions were beginning to turn into demands, the way he’d locked the door and the contents of the box bringing a new wariness to their situation. One by one, she listened to each inquiry sail across the room with the delicacy of a thrown dinner plate. Who was Erin? Was he casting a particularly wide net and accidentally scheduled two of his meet ups in a single night? What kind of sick promise involved blood and hard storage? The lock clicked open, her left hand automatically dipping into her pocket to recover the handle of her weapon. Quietly nudging the door inward, despite certainty that the volume of their back and forth would’ve concealed even a moderate creak, she crept her way into one of the apartment’s rear rooms.
It took a few blinks to be sure she wasn’t suffering another memory bleed. The apartment was almost entirely unchanged from the last time, and the last time, that she’d set foot inside; he’d changed the curtains, perhaps, but everything else remained largely the same. In one of his unused bedrooms, an old, broken monitor had been positioned to face the hall. She could feel her facial display flicker and momentarily distort, recalling the panic of waking up behind that screen, and the smile on his face as he shattered it. He hadn’t even bothered to hide it, knowing that any future experiment would simply write it off as garbage he’d yet to dispose of; maybe he saw it as a trophy of his limited success. She would’ve curled the lip of her display in disgust, seeing the beginnings of another similar device being built in the same room, but the sound of tensions continuing to rise in the living room held her focus. His half passive, half panicked, bromides and dismissals weren’t faring as well as he needed them to. Slowly, she stood and withdrew the knife from her pocket, quietly continuing ever closer to the demands for answers and threats to unlock the door themselves. If she was lucky, one would incapacitate the other and she’d be able to leave with far less mess on her hands.
Peering around the corner, she watched as tempers finally flared, punctuated by a flash and a thunderclap that sent the lights sputtering.
“If they’re so ‘not important’, why can’t you just tell me who they are?” His companion snapped. She slipped around the corner and quietly stepped into the room with them to answer, her voice unable to stay as steady as it had been at the door.
“Go ah-head. Te-ell her how you k-k-killed her two months ag-go.” Eyes widened as heads turned, the ticking of the decorative clock in the room slowing to a crawl. His face grew pale, looks of recognition, incomprehension, and blind terror flashing through his eyes as his body seized. His mouth slowly opened and closed, searching for anything in his mental dictionary that he thought would be enough to pacify whatever currently stood, armed, in his living room. She could see his tongue rapidly go dry as he failed to do so. She felt her shoulders shake, a broken, cracking laughter falling out of her voice module as a red, flickering vignette began to seep into the edges of her vision. As his guest scrambled over the back of the couch, tucking herself between it and the window, she pounced.
The movement seemed to be enough to rouse his legs, propelling him upward in a quarter turn intended to be the start of a sprint to the kitchen. It, instead, resulted in a curved blade burying itself deep between his spine and shoulder blade, sending him plummeting back to the floor. He gasped, what little breath he had catching in his lungs as the knife found itself in the same spot on the other side. Wrenching the blade free, she rolled him onto his back and promptly sat on his stomach to keep him from scrambling. She raised her hand slowly, making several horizontal cuts across his chest to mark where each strap had held her to his experiment table, his voice no longer processing as anything more than heavily muffled sounds. As the vignette fully consumed her vision, her arm began to slash and swing wildly. One by one, letters flashed across the red backdrop, scrolling in rapid succession like a silent command.
CRUSH MODE: ENGAGED
The muffled yelps and pleas began to grow weaker.
CRUSH MODE: ENGAGED
The hands pounding against her chest and shoulders fell limp.
CRUSH MODE: ENGAGED
A soft, wet noise replaced his voice altogether.
CRUSH MODE-
She blinked. Her chest heaved as though she were out of breath, but she was all too aware that she lacked lungs. The eggshell white carpet of his living room had become a completely new shade of red, fresh streaks and splatters of ruby and garnet decorating the walls and furniture. An excised heart rest motionless beside what had once been her killer. Rising back to her feet, she barely glanced at the pair of eyes peeking out from behind the couch, shuffling over to the black velvet box she’d left outside. She rotated the bundle of glass vials until she found an empty one, carefully pulling it free. Without a word, she filled and sealed it, carefully scribbled the name “Morris Dolios” on the label, and returned it to the box with an imitation sigh. Returning to the body on the floor, she dipped the side of her knife into one of the drying pools in order to “paint” a broken heart motif, keeping the edges of this one particularly ragged and messy. Carefully posing the corpse to resemble a man offering his heart out to some unseen entity, she returned to the black box to fetch one of her packages of candy; she gave it a squeeze until she heard some snap, then carefully sprinkled them throughout the living room. Tossing the candy box into the velvet one, she closed the lid tight and returned it to its spot beneath her right arm.
Walking around to the back of the couch, she crouched to look the dead man’s companion in the eye. One of her drives clicked and whirred in that familiar, vague recognition. The woman sat with her back to the couch so she could look out the window, the only indication of her stress being her shaking hands. The wild, tired, look in her eye told her that she’d resigned herself to whatever was about to happen next.
“Killthief,” She half-breathlessly chuckled, “I’d been trying to find that guy for over a month after Erin disappeared. All they’d ever found were bits of hair and half a hand, so… I’d assumed the worst. I know I’m probably going to be just another notch on your knife handle there, but, thank you. At least I got to see him get his.” The memory fragments suddenly fell into place.
“He earned it, you haven’t yet,” She shook her head, “I have a better idea. How’s your pain tol-olerance?”
“Decent enough that I came here ready to fight, why?” Her crooked grin widened.
“Alibi. Self-defense. I leave you with a survivab-ble injury, and put out an emergency call-all on my way out.”
“Why?”
“It’s what E-Erin would’ve wanted.” The vocal glitch was steadily wearing on her last thread. First order of business once this was over was going to be getting that fixed. The woman nodded, grabbing a burner phone out of a nearby messenger bag before sitting up on her knees. Standing, she stepped a little closer, placing a few strategic slashes to imply at least a partial struggle. She offered a small countdown with her hand before stooping to plunge the knife through her calf, leaving the blade in place.
The woman clenched her jaw, but otherwise remained silent. Reaching for the woman’s phone, she quickly dialed the emergency line. She offered her the most sympathetic look her current facial display would allow, lowering her voice to barely above a whisper.
“It was nice seeing you again, too, Tsila.” Rising back to her feet, she gave the stunned woman a wink and quietly made her way to the locked front door.
“Erin?”
She unfastened the first few locks.
“Erin, wait!”
The rest of the locks clicked open, and she stepped back out into the hall without another word, cutting Tsila’s shout short with the click of the closing door. Her hands found themselves back in her pockets as she walked back to the stairwell and began her descent. She let the dull hum fill her thoughts with each step downward, intentionally keeping herself blank, detached, but strangely content. By the time she returned to the ground floor, she was humming a quiet little tune, taking a moment to leave a little, bloody smudge on Morris’ mailbox as she passed. She left out the same doors that she’d entered through, walking into the downpour to cross the courtyard a second time.
By the time she reached the gate, the burning feeling of being observed was too much to ignore. She knew who it was, she knew where they were, but she felt herself hesitating until one hand had wrapped itself around the gate’s bars. Slowly, she turned her head to peer back up to the eighth-floor window. As expected, a small shadow stood out against the light behind it, hand pounding against the glass a few times before remaining pressed to the surface. She didn’t acknowledge it, nor did she offer even the most half-hearted wave farewell, she simply pushed the gate open and walked through. Following the sidewalk, she took a left at the end of the dead-end street to avoid the red and blue glow already approaching from the right. She imagined the rain probably would’ve felt nice right about now, something to wash off all the rust-colored stains and cool her systems back down. Watching the large, heavy drops crash down from the sky as she walked, she let out a long, heavy sigh. Erin had both been avenged and died a second time tonight, and she couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt quite so comfortable with that thought. A small, mischievous smile threatened to reshape her facial display again.
“You know… I think I might hold onto this body for just a little bit longer.”
