The Mortal Coil - Chapter 1

Another murder scene was visible to Detective Bob Ludwick as he exited his vehicle. He stretched as he got out, feeling a bit stiff after the lengthy slumber from which he’d just awakened. He knew that these were new experiences, but everything seemed the same, except for the new watch, the new shoes, and the fact that his hair was wet from a shower he didn’t remember taking.

The scene was a dark alley in a bad part of town. Graffiti decorated the crumbling brick walls, and ponds of dumpster scum pooled around the base of a large pile of garbage. Another pool, this one of congealing blood, had also formed on the dirty pavement. A dead man lay motionless in its midst.

“Over here, sir,” directed a patrol officer with one hand as he munched a cake donut with the other. Pink and yellow sprinkles fell from his mouth onto his uniform, which protruded with an inconvenient and unpleasant-looking gut-shelf over the top of which his plain black tie, complete with sliver policeman’s tie bar, crookedly hung.

In the direction of the officer’s pointing hand was the murder scene, cordoned off with yellow tape bearing the familiar “POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS”. Ludwick ducked under the tape, careful not to put his shoe print into the blood, and observed the scene. Photographers snapped away, and crime scene technicians scoured the area for evidence.

“Shell casings here,” one announced excitedly as he sifted through a pile of garbage.

One of the other homicide detectives looked at the body, at Bob, then back to the body, and grimaced. “No matter how many times I see this,” he said, “I still can’t get used to it.”

“Tell me about it,” Bob replied. Try being the victim for once, he didn’t say.

Bob looked down at the body. This one was a good dresser, he thought. Just like the last one. Maybe there’s a pattern to these killings. He allowed himself a brief, smug grin and then crouched down to examine the body. It was adorned with a dark blue suit, the color of which effectively concealed the significant volume of blood its fabric had absorbed.

“Looks like a medium caliber, probably a .45,” he observed. The other cops nodded in agreement. Ludwick reached into the decedent’s jacket and removed a pistol. “And they left this again, too.” The weapon was a .45 caliber H&K USP, the special operations version with the ambidextrous safety, tritium night sites, threaded barrel, and extended twelve round magazine. Bob opened his own jacket and placed the pistol into the empty holster he wore there. Perfect fit – again.

The corpse, for a man who’d died an awful death, stared peacefully into the distance, his eyes having somehow remained open despite the violent nature of his demise. He was a handsome fellow, thought Ludwick, despite the bags under his eyes that told a tale of a stressful existence. Bob knew of this existence well, as he peered into a similar face each morning in preparation for the day’s challenges. Each day he saw the same stressed bags under the eyes, the same graying hair, the same tired look. It was depressing.

Bob’s examination of the body brought his attention to the singed stump where the victim’s right hand had once been. The hand was several feet away, peacefully resting on the pavement with a photographer snapping pictures of it from every conceivable angle.

“Can someone give me a hand over here?” asked the coroner before he erupted into laughter at his own cleverness. “I think the detective is stumped!”

The officers all allowed themselves a laugh as if to ease the tension at the scene. “I think we’re gonna have to solve this crime in parts,” one officer suggested. “Yeah,” said another, “and in the end maybe we’ll a-wrist someone if a witness points the finger at him!” The officer stood in awkward silence for a moment, as dirty looks from the others ended the pun contest.

Ludwick hadn’t noticed. He looked around and, when no one was looking, he removed a wallet from the body’s back pocket. He examined it, noting that it contained thirty-seven dollars, which was somewhat short of what he’d expected. He looked at the badge inside the wallet, shook his head in disappointment, and slipped it into his own pocket. “When did we hear from him last?” he inquired of the Captain, who stood nearby smoking and still shaking his head in response to the poor taste demonstrated by his officers.

“Uh,” began the Captain as he reviewed his notes, “about two this morning he uploaded some data to the server. We figure he was killed about four hours later.”
Ludwick knew that whatever intelligence had been gathered by the victim after the upload had been destroyed when his PDA watch had detonated. It was designed to do that when it detected the termination of its wearer’s vital signs. Bob wore an identical model.

Bob was the product of a series of secret government programs designed to counter organized crime and terrorism. It had all started in the mid-2030s when scientists finally discovered a technology called “brain backup”. The technology was difficult to use, as it required an enormous amount of memory storage and the devotion of one channel of sensory input to upload the memory to a subject’s brain.

Bob’s sense of choice was his sense of taste, as he deemed it the least necessary of the senses for his job. By diverting the nerves used for transmission of taste signals to the brain, technicians were able to transmit data from a computer into a subject’s biological memory, but at the cost of the use of that sense. Bob had learned several useful skills this way, though the education was exhausting and could be time consuming. This very morning his mind had been loaded with the information uploaded from this victim’s watch, which gave him somewhat of a head start on picking up the investigation where his predecessor had left off. He was only missing the last four hours of the recently terminated life.

Okay, pal, he thought, as if to telepathically commune with the dead, what did you learn in those last four hours?

The scene had been examined and very little had been gleaned from it. The victim had been carrying a coffee cup from Grunge Brew, a local franchise of a famous Seattle coffee company with at least four branches in town. The cup contained plain black coffee, this deceased officer’s beverage of choice, but scrawled in red marker on the side were the words “HALF-CAF PEPPERMINT”. Bob removed the lid and smelled the coffee, which smelled like regular cold coffee, only with a hint of mint.

“He never would have had a peppermint latte,” Ludwick told the other officers. “I know that for a fact. This is a second-hand cup.” How could he do that? Just think of the germs! Bob knew that the decedent was as germ phobic as he was, and that, as had Bob, the decedent had traded his sense of taste for the ability to load data from the brain backup server. What use would he have for peppermint?

Another detective approached. This was Alvin Hanson, Bob’s least favorite colleague. Alvin reported: “I checked with the guys at the Grunge Brew around the corner, and they say he never came in there. They’ve sold about ten peppermint lattes today, but only two were half caf. We’re trying to run down the buyers now, but one used cash so that’s a dead end.”

“The whole thing’s a dead end,” Bob replied. “This coffee is the instant kind. This guy was working all night, and needed coffee to keep watch on something. Something was going down, and he wanted to see it. He checked in at two in the morning, and we know what he knew up to that point. He thought The Club had an exchange set up, and he was looking to bust it. In his last four hours, he got tired and in desperation to stay alert he used a cup from the dumpster and mixed some instant coffee.”

Captain Roland and Detective Hanson nodded in agreement with the theory. No one knew what the dead cop was thinking better than Bob. “What next?” Roland asked.

“Someone got the drop on me,” he concluded, looking down at the bullet holes in his own head. No matter how many times he saw his own corpse, he would never get used to it. Perhaps it was the realization that he was a mortal, and that it only seemed like he’d survived a killing because he’d had his exemplar’s memories transplanted into his relatively young cloned brain. Perhaps it was the realization that he, as the two hundred prior copies of the original detective Bob Ludwick, would likely die in action, and that the lights would go out for good for him and his memories would be transmitted, at least whatever had been recorded up until his last upload, to another clone blank.

The government had extracted Ludwick’s DNA and had cultivated a series of physical clone “blanks” into which, if something were to happen to Bob, they could download his memory from the database and restore him to action. It cost a fortune, but was far less expensive than recruiting and training an agent from scratch. A new “Bob” could be sent into action fast enough to solve his own murder.

“This Looks like the work of Nugent,” he concluded, alluding to his arch-nemesis and most frequently encountered hit man, Michael Nugent. Nugent was The Club’s best shooter, and he’d moved up the ranks of the organization much more slowly than most, not for lack of merit but because he was too good at his work to get promoted.

“Nugent?” Alvin responded with some degree of incredulity. “I thought he was in Mexico.”

“We all did,” Bob said, “but nobody is as smooth as he, and this job has his signature written all over it. They must have sent one of his apprentices to Mexico, and that’s why the patterns made us think it was him. He is very good at this, and he always seems to sneak up on me, no matter what I do.” Bob could recall being killed at least a dozen times by this hit man, and wanted very badly to catch him. “Someday I’ll be the one shooting him,” he thought aloud.

“All in good time,” the captain assured him.