SANITY LINE
Episode 03 - Cognitohazard
“Ah. Good evening, Special Director Därk.”
The agent currently passing the threshold of the reception desk all but did a double take. He stopped, the customary response going unvoiced, and calmly turned and walked back to the receptionist, adjusting his shoulder-bag and peering at her through his glasses. The Augmented Reality interface scrolled information on her identity readily, updated wirelessly by his phone which had, also wirelessly, confirmed her identity through contactless RFID.
He covered the check for a name by adjusting the glasses to sit further down his nose. “… First day, Miss Bell?”
“No, sir. I’ve been at this post for two years.”
He tugged on the holographic RIFD badge clipped to his lapel. “Black Header Bar is field operative. Two pips for Special Agent.”
“Yes, sir. Your security credentials are outdated, but not expired. The reception system pulled up the correct information.” Bell cleared her throat. “It should be a silver header bar, now.”
She gestured to her display, which Vidcund could see out-of-focus against the stainless wainscoting behind her. The Level 4 Atrium of the Kraterburg Facility was all steel and glass. Very modern, twenty years ago. Sure enough, there was now a slate-grey header bar over the digital representation of his badge. “Fair enough,” he said, as if this had all been a test, and carried on his way. “Let Deputy Facility Director Dowd know I’m on my way.”
“A push notification was sent out automatically when you signed in.”
Vidcund stepped onto one of the four numbered travellators that spread out deeper into this level of the facility. They were below most of the original tunnel-work of the ancient capital, now, at least so far as the sections that could be accessed from the College of Judges’ campus. These much more modern tunnels had all the amenities, including sunlight-simulating florescent lighting, by the light of which the Agent was currently reading the latest updates on his investigation on an autofile.
The document, a piece of paper with registration marks along the top and right edge, was part of an ingeniously simple AR system, allowing him to superimpose any document he wanted onto the page, manipulating it exactly as though it were hard copy. He could even flip the paper over one way or the other to change the page, or scroll with gestures, so long as he was actually looking at it while he did so.
As it turned out, the unusual triskelion that had been spray-painted onto the rear door of the morgue had been referenced before. He used his stylus to redact several lines of griping on the part of the Archival Research agent who had prepared the report, complaining about the difficulty of narrowing down such marks. Three-armed figures were common symbols, existing in the glyphic lexicon of most cultures the world over: Norse, Hindi, African, Celts, and so on. He got as deep into the report as understanding the origins seemed to be southern-coastal France before he came to his stop and had to close the file, stepping off of the motorized pedway onto a stationary side-corridor. Level Four was a maze, a veritable warren of tunnels. Even in the administrative core region of the level, where the original planners had succeeded in a level of organizational design only vaguely imitated in the outer reaches, it could be a task and a half to find things.
Someone as important as a Deputy Facility Director, however, usually had a corner office, at the intersection of two such corridors, and the door was in the base’s positioning network, so that it could be highlighted on Vidcund’s visual, just like the objective in the hand-holding First Person Shooter videogames of the 2010s.
“Ah, Agent Därk. Glad you could make it.”
He reached across to shake her hand, easing into a seat. “Stamatia. It’s not often people request to meet with me in person, anymore.”
“I thought, given the circumstances, it was appropriate.”
“I think I know why.”
Stamatia Dowd gave a soft frown. “I hate having my surprises spoiled, but I suppose in the Information Age, it can’t be helped. You’ve been promoted to Special Director of Task Force Creena.”
Vidcund heaved a sigh. For three weeks now, Gloria Creena had been off his radar screen. He still had contact with Niles Clayton, but with the detective also actively taking on other cases until there had been developments, Vidcund too found himself turning to other matters – Professor Johannson and his forbidden lore. “Surely the situation hasn’t become so far out of the ordinary that it requires its own task-force.”
“You think depth-first, Vidcund. While your report from Thursday was correct in stating that we have no evidence for Gloria Creena being anything but quite deceased, there’s a disturbing pattern that is highly suggestive that the cult is reviving its practices, perhaps even increasing in size. Nothing supernatural, as yet, but there have been a spate in violent deaths that fit the profile.”
“The problem with the profile is that it’s aggressively vague. Any death that involves any level of mutilation in which muscle tissue is separated from bone and can’t be accounted for trips the algorithms. I’d know, I helped design them. Also, three in a month is hardly a spate, in national terms.”
“All three cases were in the Terrwald Precinct, and two are being investigated by the relevant police groups as having cannibalistic elements.”
Vidcund sat up a little straighter. That was a pretty tight match to the profile. “Nobody’s ever made a task force because of a pattern.”
“You’re right. It gets more complicated. What do you know about Gloria Creena’s original arrest?”
“Not much more than anyone in the Agency knows, I’m afraid. Date of Birth unknown, birthplace unknown, parentage unknown. It’s like the woman congealed in a gutter somewhere. She was captured in Azuldorf or Anfangsburg, depending on who you listen to, and was caught red-handed.”
“More than red handed, Agent. The knife she had on her person at the time had all the hallmarks of the weapon used in every crime she was eventually convicted of. It was passed off to one of ours for analysis after the material – animal bone – triggered a red flag with one of our National Police Force plants. We still have it in our custody.”
“It had supernatural properties?”
“Every test, every indication, suggested that the knife was living, human tissue. However, there was a complication. The weapon had also been noted as consistent with ancient Terreran Geoglyphs. The precinct government of the Terrwald was sued by the White Keepers, who wanted the weapon turned over to a museum they ran, as they considered it an exemplar of their cultural heritage.”
“And a double was provided.”
“A very, very close facsimile. It was stolen this morning. We have security footage.”
Vidcund was already manipulating his phone. “I’ll look at it when I’m given the chance. Is there more to the situation?”
“Yes. Consider your contact with the NPF compromised. We have reason to believe that he may have been the one who corrupted the drives at the morgue where Creena’s body went missing.”
“How’s that, now?”
“We finally managed to unscramble the drives completely. The video footage was already deleted. As in, properly deleted, with the sectors back-written so that it couldn’t be recovered. Someone good with computers erased those files. Someone who was in the building after the crime was discovered. Only three sorts of people are so careful with digital media. One is our kind of people. The other is teenagers with nothing better to do.”
The agent kept his face expressionless behind the black, square lenses. “… I’ll take care of him. One other thing.”
Dowd sat up more fully, her brow slightly furrowed. “Yes?”
Vidcund gestured with his new phone. “We’re going to want disbursements to have a look at their mobile security suites and bump them up a little. Someone fried my old phone remotely, and I already had that day’s security update.”
“Who?”
“I’m looking into it.” Vidcund said, more earnestly than any other commitment he had made so far. “I thought our smartphone antimalware suites were unbreakable.”
“So did I, but logic would suggest that there’s not a lock in the world that can’t be picked.”
---
The Pig and Pickle was one of maybe a dozen bars that got away with being open into the wee hours of the morning in Tererra, but it was the only one that offered regular patrons access to their wireless network, as long as you kept the booze flowing. Niles had kept himself in the green on a steady stream of Spanish coffee after an earlier evening of beer. He was tanked, but he’d considered the problem from nearly every other angle his sober mind could consider.
The strangeness of this security footage had been eating at him for three weeks now. Three weeks in which he had attended only minimal grooming, now sporting the beginnings of a scruffy beard. Even his boots, usually polished to a shine in spite of the rumpled nature of the rest of his daily clothing, were getting scuffed and rough around the edges. He slept little, and what sleep he had had was infected with the strong, hallucinogenic nightmares of a person a third of his age.
Still, the relative weakness of beer and the brandy in the coffee was balanced more or less by the caffeine, and he could keep enough brain power together in his corner booth to replay the footage once more.
It was a sweet mercy that the lights in the morgue’s cold storage room came on before the door of the drawer-cubicle in which Creena’s remains had been interred swung open. Damningly, there seemed to be no cause for either. There was no clutter to be disturbed, and indeed, nothing at all, be it body or shadow, to suggest a figure had entered the room, but the fact remained that the lights had turned on, and that the lever on the door affected its motions before the door itself swung open. In similar autonomy, the sliding drawer on which the suspect-victim was presently resting slide to its fullest outward extent.
The outbreak of strangeness abruptly ended as Creena sat up. To Niles, this was the very least surreal part of the footage from the various cameras in the building – at least, those which showed any activity whatever. She sat up, as one sits up in bed when preparing to exit it, with all the same grogginess. She rubbed her throat as though it was sore, and it probably was, being as it had been one of the sites of lethal wounds.
When she retracted her hand again, Niles paused the replay. He was certainly no expert in video manipulation, and most of what you saw on television for video enhancement was bollocks. He could only zoom in on the area of her neck, and apply some automated filtering to reduce some of the sensor noise.
The sight of her perfectly intact neck was more perplexing than the question of however the doors had come to be open, or the activation of the lights. This was not a thing that jived with his understanding of the possible. He had seen a death faked so well that it passed medical examination once before, but open wounds? Lethal wounds, rubbed off like cheap stage prosthetics? It was like the block of ice that had been sitting in his stomach all evening slumped into his bowels.
Nothing he could do to the footage could convince him of his lying eyes anymore. Something had gone seriously wrong with the way physics manipulated biology. As a consequence, a small part of the security blanket Niles clung to, the fabric of reality, had been torn away.
He flagged a server over for a refresh on his coffee, and closed out this particular line of footage.
---
“Thank you very much for coming, Detective Fougasse.”
Vidcund was pleased to finally find an academic with a handshake, in the form of the Consultant Curator of the Museum of Tererran Spirituality. “Professor Coultier, it was my pleasure. I must thank you for your continuing help with this investigation.”
The Professor was a young man. Almost impossibly young for the titles and accolades at his disposal, being merely in his mid-20s. He had a shock of prematurely-white hair owing to a deficiency in his body’s pigmentation, and sported a rich tan unusual to the profession, but growing less so in the age of bottled sunlight and vanity. Vidcund’s practiced eye could detect no artificial quality in the glow – Malvolio Coultier did more than his share of work out-of-doors. “You of course know Professor Donnovan Kline.”
“Charmed, I’m sure, Detective.”
Even without his suspicions, and the long-running history of interactions between Agency Division and Professor Kline, everything about Kline rubbed Vidcund the wrong way. He was an anachronism, twenty years late in his fashion and about a century in mannerism, with an effete handshake and annoying, ambiguous accent that seemed to have elements of every major European dialect. Vidcund forced a smile to the best of his considerable acting ability. “I’m simply here to review the security footage from that evening.”
“Of course. This way, please.”
---
The footage only continued to become weirder and weirder as time elapsed. He still couldn’t find the frame where the second figure entered the building – and had looked several hours backward in the record. A man, about 6’3” from his build, was about to round a corner in the corridor that lead to the exit, as Gloria headed in the direction of the door – and there was no good reason why he should be in the building at all. He was masked, from what the detective could tell, but he always seemed to occupy a field of poor focus in the frame, as though something had gone wrong with the auto-focus circuitry on the security cameras.
As he had a dozen times previously, Niles watched him round the corner to cut off her escape. There was no sound on the recording, but he liked to think that Gloria and the masked man had exchanged words. There certainly seemed to be a pause, before she had began to flee him – a charged pause, full of tension.
---
Thousands of people had visited the exhibit where the Living Knife had been kept on the day that it disappeared. Before Vidcund could even start to process them all through the various identification databases he had at his disposal, he had to at least narrow the field.
The best hope he had was to catch a particular person in the act – but of course, if things were that simple, there would be no need for direct Agency intervention, task forces, or Special Directorships.
Not that he minded the promotion and the associated pay rate. Still, Special Director was a temporary position at best. Nailing down Creena, though... that could earn him something more permanent.
Around the time that the Knife had gone missing, the exhibit it was a part of was relatively empty. The knife itself was not the centrepiece, and indeed, it was only near the very edge of CCTV coverage – these civilian rigs tended to have huge blind spots in them.
Just there, at the edge of the fame, as if a frame had skipped, Vidcund watched the knife vanish.
He copied the half hour before and after to cloud storage, made a note of the time to the second of the disappearance, and sent the whole thing off in an email to the technical department. He also took careful note of the features of the room’s sole occupant – a young girl about the age of 14, who had been nowhere near the case at the time.
He had the strangest feeling he had seen the young woman before. A truly damning feeling, since he usually prided himself on remembering people.
He’d let his driver worry on the truly pressing details, as he returned to his apartment. He still had a report to conclude. The triskelion did not belong to the symbolic lexicon of the Cult of The Eye, which made identifying it all the more relevant.
Learning that piece of evidence made him accept that much more strongly the need for a task force.
---
Gloria could not remember the last time her heart had pounded so hard. The doctors at her asylum had kept her so deeply immersed in psychoactives that she was practically living in a dissociative state. To finally have emotions and pulse again... it was a greater release than many of her experiences so far.
Still, fear had a funny way of keeping you from enjoying yourself too much. She had run back into her room, as she had come to think of that space they stored corpses like hers until they tired of them. With nothing sharp close to hand, or even particularly heavy, there was little she could do but bite into her thumb to get the blood going.
She pulled out another body, smearing her blood across its neck, before fleeing again.
---
Niles could not understand why the masked man ignored Gloria the second time they encountered each other in the corridor. He had simply strode past her, into the cold storage. He watched Creena flee through the back door. Just as he had never entered the building, the Masked Man never exited it, either.
He was going to need something stronger than brandy, Niles began to worry. He watched an external camera show Creena’s flight route, not that it told him much, the trail being so cold already.
As he had done every night now for three weeks, he packed his laptop back into his bag, settled his tab, and slumped into his car for a smoke.
---
References by Kline (1957) and Coultier (2010) mention this particular symbol in their own compendiums. Such documents are not widely distributed outside of their respective schools (The Iron Institute of the National Library and the Saffron Academy, respectively). The monographs refer to the symbol as the Yellow Sign, in reference to their use on the cover of the original editions of a French play titled “Le Roi en Juane”.
The play is currently proscribed by most major nations at the insistence of Agency Division, and several precursor organizations. Both the symbol and the work are known Cognitohazards. Agency conditioning Class A and higher is sufficient for exposure to the sign without the need for amnesiacs.
Well, thought Vidcund, that much was a relief. He set the report aside for the time being, tapping the panel that would raise the hatch on his immersion tank. He autofile and the AR glasses were the last items he needed to remove from his person before settling in. As he inserted his earplugs, he reached for his phone and tapped out a short to-do for after his bath. He was pleased to note that an icon was flashing, indicating a security update being downloaded.
+>Terminate Niles Clayton
He pushed the matter out of mind, as he was so well trained to do, and sank greedily into those familiar, warm waters, seeking that enigmatic embrace of a thousand other parts of his body he didn’t even remember having had.
---
Being a police officer, especially once you had a few years worn into the soles of your shoes, you tended to catch your fair share of paranoia. For the most part, Niles had learned to deal with it well. You simply had to rule, in your mind, on what risks were really worth worrying about. It was the law of large numbers played with lives. Yes, it was possible he’d be assassinated in a drive-by shooting by some mob boss whose nephew he’d put away, but it was extremely unlikely.
More to the point, it wasn’t worth worrying about because there was nothing he could do about it.
Someone following him, on the other hand, he could do very much about, most days. He identified more than his fair share of stalkers, and in fairness, most of them were probably not actually following him. Having said that, he could usually shake the less persistent of the real ones, as well.
He had been able to do nothing, thus far, absolutely nothing, about the nagging feeling of being followed, of the curious commonality of auburn-haired women with yellow dresses in November. It was one such occurrence, the sight of a taudry thing on a street corner that fit that rather wide prescription, that had distracted him.
None of the adrenaline in the world could have counteracted the sedative in his throat. No fear, it seemed, drove a sensible scream through the leather hand that covered his mouth. His head lolled back, and his eyes rolled to the back of his skull, and he thought he saw, against the streetlights, a dark sea of stars.
---
The acknowledgement of impending death was a truly liberating sensation. What fear could you have, if you knew nothing could change that fate? You are going to die. There’s nothing you can do about it. But damned, thought Maria Frost, if you did nothing about it. Damned if the bastards weren’t going to take you kicking and screaming first.
She had come back from the Labarynth a changed person. Gone were the days of her childhood, before her abduction and near-demise at the hands of the Cult of the Sleeping Eye. Gone was innocence, and youth – at least, the mental aspects of it.
She had returned a broken mind, riddled with anxieties, paranoia, obsessions, compulsions, and delusions. The years that had passed had been consumed by three activities – avoiding medication, eating huge amounts of well-spiced food that never quite satisfied her peculiar hunger, and arcane studies – what her over-worked mother called her drawings – from which she had filled reams upon reams of information, written in a dead hand, stacked neatly in twine-bound bundles all throughout her room.
With a final heave, she forced herself through the gap in her bedroom window, and collapsed less-than-gracefully on the floor. She recovered quickly, hurrying to hide under her covers.
When her mother did not come to check on her after several minutes, she emerged again, and shrugged off her backpack. It hung open – she quickly closed it back up, to conceal the mask, spray paint, and other incriminating paraphernalia inside. She peeled out of her yellow sweater, crawled back into bed, and for the first time in years, rested easily.
Why concern herself with Gloria, when her Ambassador had done his job?
---
The Labyrinth was a world apart from the sterile, brightly-lit halls of the various subterranean installations of Agency Division, but, like their erstwhile antagonists, the Cult of the Sleeping Eye had long understood that power was found in depths.
This was a realm of hedonistic decadence, a quasi-organic hive of all the various things that go bump in the night. There were many beasts, both mundane and arcane, that the Cult put under their yoke, and most, if not all, could be found here.
Still, the chamber of the obsidian throne was hallowed ground, the Labyrinth’s holy of holys. It was reserved only for the use of the highest practitioners of their art, who gathered here in secrecy even from those few cultists that had freely entered the Labyrinth.
It was a truncated dodecahedron, in shape, composed of a sandy-coloured stone that none the less had the smoothness and pallid sheen of a deep-earth metamorphic. The various surfaces were set about with scribings and spirals in the hieroglyphic writing peculiar the Cult, predating even its relatively modern incarnation’s foundation some time in the late-16th century CE. A throne of hewn obsidian sat in the middle, among three irregularly-placed torches, what, when lit (as now) produced a sickly green flame that added neither true illumination nor warmth to the room.
They were, in many ways, a mockery of true light, which even now played upon the face of Gloria Creena, as her skyclad form settled over the sharp edges and surfaces of the throne. She, and she alone, possessed such faith in the cult’s diety that she could sit in this position, and for that reason (as well as others), she was the leader of the cult, the Glorious Speaker, from whom the authority of the Sleeping Prisoner could be felt in reality.
“You have done well, Erwin. You as well, Crowe.”
“I just hope that artist’s death really did put the Phantom off your trail.” Crowe was a mountain of a man, presently involved in working nitrogen bubbles out of his various joints. The sound, like the tearing of poultry joint from joint, was soothing to Gloria.
By contrast, Baha was a far smoother, leaner, and smaller man. He alone had not disrobed for the meeting, wearing instead a dark, burgundy robe, which seemed less a garment than something that had congealed around him as he had slipped out of some wall of the outer reaches of the Labyrinth’s pulsing arteries. “The artist would be a fitting sacrifice to the Phantom’s master, and one indeed far worthier of whatever he intended Gloria’s fate to be.”
The flattery pleased Gloria, growing her smirk as she twisted a lock of her dark hair around a finger. “Who indeed. Who dares to author my fate, but the Glorious One himself?”
There would be, of course, no answer. She shifted in her posture, now sitting in the chair properly, upright, and with a powerful disposition of limbs that owned the station. “You two will focus all your energies, all your followers, on finding me Maria Frost. It’s time to put this grand farce to an end. I need my Key.”
“What of Agency Division?”
“Leave them to me.”