Crime ... Things

 Hellu, today I wanted to share with you a bit of something I did for a seminar called “Historical crime novels”.

** So careful, there will be blood and corpses and scary things **

It is just a rough idea and a few snippets, but I liked it at the time and since I'm not planning on continuing it in the near future I thought you might enjoy it.
So, it is a crime novel, obviously and it is set in 2104 in Moscow, a bit cyberpunk here and there but nothing too spectacular. So the protagonists of this little story are:
Tara Iljin, a young and impulsive rookie in the Moscow polieceworld, she likes catching bad guys and is more a woman for the rough parts of this job. Her father is actually pretty high up in the food chain, but also very corrupt. For the most parts she behaves more like a delinquent teenager, but she has a knack for connecting details and putting things together.

So our “hero’s” meet because they both had/made problems at their workstation and now have to serve half a year in the archives as “cold warriors” (not because of the cold war, but because they have to go through the cold cases). Since we are in the year 2104 this works a bit differently. Basically the whole crime scenes are being replicated in VR, including corpses and everything. So big parts of the story actually take place in virtual reality, so let’s start with the first scene:

“Entry number one hundred seventy four. First day of march two thousand one hundred and four, ten past nine a.m. in the morning, mild rain with a high probability of a storm in the next few days. Darja, with a delay of ten minutes I have made my way toward the main building of the archives from the moscow police department. Like mentioned in entry number one hundred sixty nein is today my first day as a cold warrior. To remind you, that's what our colleagues on the streets call the people who go through all the cold cases. In spite of my degradation I am determined to see towards my day with verve and vigor. Entry number one hundred seventy four over.” Ex-investigator Petrow let his tape recorder disappear into the pocket of his long and dusty coat and turned towards the pink haired, young man that had been waiting rather impatiently in front of the big buildings entry. “Kostja Petrow, a pleasure to meet you, Mr. …?” His outstretched hand went numb as his new partner shook it quite violently. “Tara Ilkinowa.” “Oh.” With a distant smile Petrow freed his hand, turned away and pulled out his tape recorder again. “Entry number one hundred seventy five. First day of march two thousand one hundred and four, thirteen past nine a.m. I’ve just met my new partner Tara Ilkin. She seems to be an interesting, young lady. Due to her very short hair I mistakenly thought of her as a young man and...” “I’m right here!” Tara crossed her arms in front of her chest, which made her many silver earrings softly jingle. When the man didn’t react, she just turned on her heels and marched forward into the foye, where a broad shouldered man with shorn hair and dark skin waited. “Serg. Gromow.” Halfheartedly she saluted. “Miss. Ilkin, I can see you still didn't banish this pink monstrosity from your head.” Behind her the door opened again and Petrow stumbled to her side. He just looked so… weird, not like any police officer she ever met. “Mr. Petrow, lovely that you decided to join us as well.” The big man flicked a speck of dust from the sleeve of his neatly ironed, dark blue uniform. “Both of you are present here because of your embarrassing behaviour while working hours.” His dark eyes drilled into Petrow, who seemed to be fumbling for his recorder. “Because of those,” This time his death laser eyes hit Tara. “behavioural problems, you are going to work for the next six months here in the main archive through all the cold cases that I present you with!” Sergeant Gromow motioned towards two towering stacks of files, some as thick as watruschki. “The cassettes for the GS are stored in the cellar.” And just like that he left the two new cold warriors and disappeared with wide steps towards the exit. “Entry number one hundred seventy six. First day of march two hundred and four, eighteen past nine a.m. Darja, at the sight of the files that are piled up before my verve and vigor are vanishing.”

The two of them go for a while without any interesting occurrences, but after a few weeks they tremble onto something… bigger than expected:

“Miss. Iljin...” “I told you to just call me Tara, didn’t I?” “Tara.” Kostja cleared his throat. “It has been a little over a month since we started working together in the archives. In this time it didn’t escape me, that you seem to have a special gift for detecting clues and putting them together. That’s why I am so surprised that you seem to overlook the rather obvious.” Without letting show if she was listening Tara turned around to scan the room a second time. “Well, let's check: Obvious scene of murder, check. Murder weapon, check. A buttload of blood, double check.” she counted down on her fingers with a sour undertone to her voice. “Nope, I got everything on my list.” With lipse that were pressed to a thin line she stared at Kostja as if he questioned her usefulness as a detective. “Well, a corpse would be a nice start...”

A little later.

The room behind the door appeared to be on the first glance a labyrinth of shelves crammed with file folders, neatly stacked cardboard boxes and tapes plugged into every remaining free space. “This is the data storage?” Tara leaned against the frame of the door to get a better look past Kostja’s shoulder. “Back in the days you had to write everything down on paper or at least put it on a very cumbersome cassette. My great grandfather actually used to listen to music on those silvery discs.” The lonely light bulb that tried the impossible task of lighting the whole angled room all by itself started to flicker. “I’m going to file a complaint after this. They can’t expect us to work with this kind of technology!” The old man next to her sighed and pushed his cap back, before he replied seriously: “On the left side should be the door towards the server rooms, maybe we can find there some kind of surveillance recording so we can locate the bodies.” Behind each other they forced their way through the narrow passages. Click. “Shit!” The lightbulb finally quit. Standing in complete darkness Tara feeled how Kostja took her hand, it was sweaty and cold. “Be careful where you step, Miss Iljin.” It clicked again, but this time it was the click of his tape recorder. “Entry number two hundred twelve. Date, time and weather unknown. Darja, me and my colleague Miss. Iljin are literally standing in the dark and are searching for...” Tara didn’t even listen anymore.

This scene should be ending with Tara asking for Kostja to let go of her hand and him saying that he never took her hand…
Yeah, moving on. After a bit of snooping around in the VR (by the way they are at an russian outpost pretty far up north) they finally find their corpses.

The sight of the corpse was horrible. It almost appeared like one half of the face was spooned out with a hand like pudding. The unharmed eye did roll back inside the eye socket and the hair was so wet from all the blood and other sticky substances, that you could hardly make out its original color. There wasn't much left of the uniform the guard had probably worn, only shreds. A deep gap on his left shoulder, that had ripped half his thorax in two pieces, let his arm stick out in a rather disturbing angle. A bit like a peeled banana. “Welp, he is dead.” confirmed Tara and was just able to gulp something rather unpleasant back down. Kostja kneeled down next to the thing that was supposed to be a corpse and began to poke the mince that was once a living person. “What are you doing?!” Not wanting to step too much closer, Tara peared over his shoulder. “I am searching for a nametag or perhaps some keys for the other rooms. this is probably not the place to expect a keycard, I believe.” Whether there was anything left to fing, Tara rather strongly doubted. The strong smell of the blood and burned wires made her feel dizzy. Who had the bright idea to bring smell into VR anyway? “I.. have a look around.” Her partner nodded while rummaging for his ancient tape recorder and started mumbling into it. So weird. She took a few hurried steps away from the corps, meticulously watching where she stepped. In the report it said there were two dead guards. Stepping in another one of those butcher parties was really not something Tara wanted to experience today. But still, there was something bothering her. The strange wounds. Definitely not any sort of gun, that was for sure, and it didn’t look like the work of a knife either. Maybe claws? No, there was no way a wild animal could infiltrate an outpost of the military, even if it was a minor one. There were walls and cameras and it wasn’t like those guys were defenseless. Slowly Tara went through every murderweapon she had ever come across while working, but still no logical solution. A movement in the corner of her eye pulled her back into the - virtuelle - reality. There was a man in the door that she just stepped out. He wore an old white coat and half his face was covered by a doctor's mask. In his hand he held a strange tool, probably for medical purposes. For Tara’s taste it had too many claw-like parts. How was this even possible? The GS was supposed to only picture the crime scene for inspections. Nobody who wasn’t connected to the system could move at all. They were just empty pictures of the person who might have been there. But still the doctor turned around and just left. This had to be a bug! For a split second Tara just stood there frozen in place, like she was the one part of this reality. Then it clicked in her head. She used to be a freaking cop. “Stop!” Two big steps and she was at the door. The corridor behind was empty, but she didn’t let that stop her and kept running. Somewhere. Somewhere he still had to be. It’s not like he could just va… BAM. Taras arms fought the already lost fight to keep her in balance. At least she managed to pull them in front of her face before it could hit the ground. Groaning she rolled on her back, just to flinch. With his torture tool, the doctor bend over her. Through the mask she could hear his muffled voice. “This might hurt a bit!”

So what does it all mean? Well, the idea was that on this outpost they kept an old experiment from the last war, and I mean a human (yes, I know, russian human experimentation, everyone has seen it thousands of times). So the man, which I called Mr. 0, he basically goes on a rampage murder spree and loaded his consciousness on a memory card which was later added to the file and uploaded into the simulation. So now he is basically a virus, but a really creepy one. He would constantly mess with the VR, make things change and even got into the heads of our cold warriors. And it was supposed to end with him escaping on Kostja’s implant and sending one last tape recording to Tara.