![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
...while I was cleaning out a folder on my desktop. It's the first scene and a half of a story I was working on at some point*. Should I take it up again, assuming I can either remember, figure out, or invent a plot for for it?
ETA: *January of '05, according to the file creation date.
Expuned
“We’re not Arson, what are we doing here? Hell, not even Arson would care about this. It looks like a trash fire.” Detective Toman looked around the cavernous area formed by the intersections of buildings, overhead road, and river. The area was isolated and hard to get to; no doubt it was Dropout territory – at least when cops and fire control weren't around, investigating a blaze someone had set on the bare steelcrete.
“We’ve got a witness,” his partner, Detective Sanger, answered.
“So? Witness to what?” Toman asked patiently. Sander was half-distracted by the tests she was running on the area of the fire, at the edge of the chemical residue left by the firefighters. She was frowning at the readout of the chemsense.
“We’re positive for some heavy-duty accelerants, bone fragments, and ash, consistent with animal remains after exposure to extreme heat. And we’ve got fragments of neural wire and idchip.” Sander looked up at him from where she crouched.
Toman hissed through his teeth and looked at the dark patch on the ground; a thin smear of damp, crumbled ash and carbon fragments, surrounded by an area of rapidly melting firefoam and the moist powder it dissolved into. “What did the id say?”
“I repeat, fragments of idchip.” The identification chips were not indestructible, but they were designed to survive traumas that would leave their owners in pieces. That included fires, but apparently not ones this hot. There would be no easy retrieval of name, medical conditions, and possibly even cause of death.
“Shit.” He stared at the ashes. “Someone wanted him completely erased.” A destoyed idchip would not help them determine the cause of death, but the witness might.
“Her, according to our witness.” Sander hitched her thumb at a teen flanked by two street cops. The kid was somewhere between clean and dirty, and thinner than looked healthy. His clothes were third- or fourth-hand. “Local Dropout. He’s probably salvageable – he’s the one who called it in.”
“Wonderful,” Toman said under his breath as he headed to talk to the kid. He didn’t like Dropouts. They offended his sense of order at the best of times, and too many of them were dangerous. They were sometimes idealized as ‘the last of the free’, and from everything he knew, they were as free as people could be. Free of the burdens of a home, a reliable source of food, medical care, and protection from anyone who wanted to hurt them; all the things that the people who romanticized them took for granted. Dropping Out was the last refuge of wanted criminals and the mentally disturbed. He wondered which one the kid was.
******
The teen had some useful information. He was almost positive the victim had been a woman, and dead before she was ignited. “Her face was all cut up. I mean, you couldn’t even tell what she looked like. But she had breasts.” His idchip had given his name as Rajesh Brown. He told Toman he was called Raj. His face was pale under a slight mixed-race tint, horror having overtaken excitement.
The boy had agreed to let Citizen Services take him in for mental and physical evaluation, which raised one of Toman’s eyebrows, and refused to permit CS to contact his family, which raised the other. He made a quick field note for follow-up there. It was possible the kid had Dropped because of his family. If so, they would require treatment. Mental disorders and nonstandard mnemonic patterns were only permitted if they did not cause damage in others, and only the damaged Dropped. The note attached itself to Raj’s idchip. It would flag the boy's CS rep as soon as one was assigned.
ETA: *January of '05, according to the file creation date.
Expuned
“We’re not Arson, what are we doing here? Hell, not even Arson would care about this. It looks like a trash fire.” Detective Toman looked around the cavernous area formed by the intersections of buildings, overhead road, and river. The area was isolated and hard to get to; no doubt it was Dropout territory – at least when cops and fire control weren't around, investigating a blaze someone had set on the bare steelcrete.
“We’ve got a witness,” his partner, Detective Sanger, answered.
“So? Witness to what?” Toman asked patiently. Sander was half-distracted by the tests she was running on the area of the fire, at the edge of the chemical residue left by the firefighters. She was frowning at the readout of the chemsense.
“We’re positive for some heavy-duty accelerants, bone fragments, and ash, consistent with animal remains after exposure to extreme heat. And we’ve got fragments of neural wire and idchip.” Sander looked up at him from where she crouched.
Toman hissed through his teeth and looked at the dark patch on the ground; a thin smear of damp, crumbled ash and carbon fragments, surrounded by an area of rapidly melting firefoam and the moist powder it dissolved into. “What did the id say?”
“I repeat, fragments of idchip.” The identification chips were not indestructible, but they were designed to survive traumas that would leave their owners in pieces. That included fires, but apparently not ones this hot. There would be no easy retrieval of name, medical conditions, and possibly even cause of death.
“Shit.” He stared at the ashes. “Someone wanted him completely erased.” A destoyed idchip would not help them determine the cause of death, but the witness might.
“Her, according to our witness.” Sander hitched her thumb at a teen flanked by two street cops. The kid was somewhere between clean and dirty, and thinner than looked healthy. His clothes were third- or fourth-hand. “Local Dropout. He’s probably salvageable – he’s the one who called it in.”
“Wonderful,” Toman said under his breath as he headed to talk to the kid. He didn’t like Dropouts. They offended his sense of order at the best of times, and too many of them were dangerous. They were sometimes idealized as ‘the last of the free’, and from everything he knew, they were as free as people could be. Free of the burdens of a home, a reliable source of food, medical care, and protection from anyone who wanted to hurt them; all the things that the people who romanticized them took for granted. Dropping Out was the last refuge of wanted criminals and the mentally disturbed. He wondered which one the kid was.
******
The teen had some useful information. He was almost positive the victim had been a woman, and dead before she was ignited. “Her face was all cut up. I mean, you couldn’t even tell what she looked like. But she had breasts.” His idchip had given his name as Rajesh Brown. He told Toman he was called Raj. His face was pale under a slight mixed-race tint, horror having overtaken excitement.
The boy had agreed to let Citizen Services take him in for mental and physical evaluation, which raised one of Toman’s eyebrows, and refused to permit CS to contact his family, which raised the other. He made a quick field note for follow-up there. It was possible the kid had Dropped because of his family. If so, they would require treatment. Mental disorders and nonstandard mnemonic patterns were only permitted if they did not cause damage in others, and only the damaged Dropped. The note attached itself to Raj’s idchip. It would flag the boy's CS rep as soon as one was assigned.
Tags: