Working Mourning Til Nite

Rest in Peace

"Detective Constable Two-Zero-Six, report to street level immediately. Your presence is required for an investigation."

I'd only just started charging when I got the Ping from Conglomerate HQ summoning me to the street level. I felt annoyed at the Ping–or at least, I think I felt annoyed. When the flesh-jockeys at the Conglomerate's Department of Reanimation had fused what was left of my body with a SynthSuit, they'd been more concerned about fine tuning motor function to keep me from ripping my shoulder out of its socket than about whether or not I could navigate the eddies of human emotion.

I decided to ignore the Ping–a small, pointless act of defiance by a reanimated human looking for a victory where it can get them–though I knew I couldn't hold out indefinitely. Pings from the Department are infused with PainCode–programming that burrows deep between your synthetic and organic parts, the ones and zeroes buzzing like a baby cockroach that's crawled into an ear canal and decided to chew its way through the eardrum and out the other side than leave the way it came in. It's vicious, and horrible, but it makes a sadistic kind of sense. Because how else do you keep your legions of resurrected workers in line?

My purposeful ignoring lasted a total of 32.1 seconds before the pain felt like molten steel against bare skin, and I acknowledged the Ping. Not my best record, but considering that my battery level was low enough to make me lightheaded, I thought it was a decent showing.

I sent a command to the building's Artificial Intelligence to disengage my charging cycle early, and the computer consciousness shot back a passive-aggressive response about cyborg analogues wasting its processing power on beginning charging cycles that they didn't intend to finish. An emotion similar to what I'd felt when the Ping hit me flooded my brain, and I considered shooting the stupid sentient program a screenshot of the Ping just to show that quitting the charge wasn't my idea. Except I knew the effort would be pointless. The AI had taken my presence in its building as a personal insult since I'd first been assigned to live in it. And since AIs, along with every other sentient creature on the Colony, loathed the prospect of prolonged contact with the resurrected dead, nothing short of slicing new code into the AI's programming was likely to make the machine drop the attitude.

Remnants tend to bring up the worst kind of revulsion in humans, so as a rule I interact with them as little as possible. So when I found the hallway outside my charging coffin empty (no, the irony of my being a reanimated corpse living in a coffin is not lost on me) I felt a sense of relief bathe my synthetic neurons. The hall itself was littered with spent stimulant injectables and old food containers–the typical detritus of underclass humans assigned to the same housing block as a Remnant–but their presence was otherwise blissfully absent. I shut off my olfactory receptors as I strode down the hall, my synthetic feet clunking against the stained ceramic floor before stopping at the building's only functioning lift. I sent a summons to the lift, and waited patiently for 1.32 minutes until the lift let out a garbled sound that might have been cheerful at some point in the building's past. The doors opened, and I felt something that can only be described as panic blast into my organic parts as I laid eyes on the lift's sole occupant.

Another Remnant stood in the lift. Another actual Remnant. My foot clunked as I took a jolting step back, just as the CPU embedded in my brain auto-initiated a self-diagnostic to ensure my optical nerves were functioning. They were, which meant that the Remnant in front of me was not the hallucinatory effects of decomposing brain matter. Usually I'd consider that a good thing, except for that the alternative to my brain going to rot was that there really was another Remnant standing within arm's length of me.

I should pause here to explain a few things. You see, over the past two decades, the Colony has been slowly dying (pun intended), an effect of policies instituted by Conglomerate executives who were too busy lusting over profit to consider the biological consequences of selecting the lowest bidder to terraform the planet. As the saying goes, "You get what you pay for", and the Conglomerate paid for both a cheaply terraformed world packed with land shares to sell to humans desperate for a fresh start, and a slew of novel viruses created during said terraforming–the kind of viruses that caused babies to be born with feet where their lungs should be. The result has been an abysmal birth rate, skyrocketing emigration, and no fresh blood to fill the jobs that ought to be done by actual living people. Rather than fix their mistake, the Conglomerate decided that fusing cybernetic bodies to the reanimated tissue of skilled, albeit dead, former colonists was the perfect way to bolster the labor force (see: me, a criminal investigator) until a fresh wave of idiots could be duped into moving on-world.

I know. Even to me it sounds gross, and I'm one of them.

Remnants aren't exactly uncommon, but the Conglomerate explicitly discourages us from interacting. Formerly dead people socializing with other formerly dead people has the sometimes nasty side effect of destabilizing the fragile psyche of a Remnant, posing all kinds of fun problems like psychosis and homicidal mania. Which is why, as mentioned above, I thought it was more likely that the preservatives intended to keep my brain tissue from rotting into mush had stopped working, rather than acknowledging the possibility that another Remnant was in the lift.

The Remnant stood facing me from the center of the lift, patches of ashen white skin stark against the matte black of synthetic augments crisscrossing its flesh. Ugh, was that what I looked like? My coffin doesn't exactly have room for a vanity, and since I've spent exactly 0.00 minutes on personal grooming since awakening to my second life in the Department's reanimation lab, I couldn't say for sure. I stared at the Remnant for 22.1 seconds, and I might have stared longer, except for that the Remnant chose that moment to speak.

"Are you getting into the lift, or are you just going to stand there like an idiot?"

I blinked. I might have also swallowed nervously, but my digestive tract hadn't made the proverbial cut when they'd reanimated me.

Instead, I managed to say, "Sorry, but who are you?"

It narrowed pale blue eyes at me. "Detective Constable Two-Five-Three."

"Detective Constable..." I trailed off awkwardly. "Right, well, Detective Constable, it's nice to meet you." My voice raised at the end, like I was asking a question. "But, I'm not sure why you're here."

"Why I'm here," the Remnant repeated slowly. It let out a very human sounding sigh. It must have still had some portion of lung intact. "Because, Detective Constable Two-Zero-Six. There's been a murder, and you're going to help me catch the killer."