As Above So Below

Part 1

What is a survivor's most powerful weapon?

Fear.

Knowing when to run. A split-second decision to turn around and force the body to move instead of freezing. Winning nature's lottery did not always mean that someone was fortunate.

Despite being an effective tool against dying, fear had the selfish tendency to settle so deep and so comfortably behind the eyes of a survivor that it left no space left for any other emotion. There was no hope. No soul. Just the preternatural calm of someone who had seen too much and would likely carry the scars until the end of their life.

***

It had been a strange night, even by the standards of the 14th NCPD station in Watson's NID sub-district. The first call came in at 3:33AM. The dispatcher didn't think much of it at the time. It was just another minute of violence in a city that never slept.

The recording of the emergency call showed a corpo big-wig screaming through her holo, crouching behind a garbage bin. She kept rambling about blood and limbs raining from the sky. Trauma Team was dispatched after her biomon showed a dangerous spike of cortisol that went way beyond a jump scare at a seedy braindance joint.

The Platinum team got there quicker than NCPD and administered tranquilizers after making sure she wasn't simply as high as a kite on the latest designer drug. It wasn't alcohol either. Booze encouraged tall tales, but not to that degree. Police officers who got to the scene confirmed her story, quickly putting vaporub under their noses to escape the coppery petrichor of around two dozen mismatched arms and legs.

After a bit of head scratching and DNA-to-ID matching, the on-site analysts came to a preliminary conclusion that the body parts were previously attached to young people. Mostly in the 17 to 21 age group, seeing as the majority of genetic markers popped up in the database as student IDs. Some of them had the misfortune of being from Charter Hill. That meant a lot of entitled parents with enough leverage on a board of directors somewhere to reduce the retirement fund of the detective running the case to a few eddies.

Detectives Ramos and Paulson had the misfortune of being assigned to the case.

"...And then what, we're just going to show them a leg and be like... sorry but this is all we've got left of your kid, it fell from the sky, we have no clue?" Paulson groaned. He was a tall, dark skinned man who took pride in his work. The cases with difficult beginnings kept frustrating him. He couldn't wait to find out more and start puzzling things together.

Their office was soundproofed and private. It had enough room for two desks, terminals, and a station for analyzing recordings made by personal cyberware. Gaining evidence from raw braindances and recovering the faces of guilty parties from a victim's scrolling chip was not a technique used by everyone in line of duty, but both Paulson and Ramos were relatively young and eager to use anything they could to find the truth. They had even managed to get some pointers from a Mox BD specialist, after solving a case of a doll's murder at Clouds, back in '75.

A single desk lamp was on, giving off a warm, orange glow, almost like a candle. It had been their temple of justice for five years already, a place to crack the course of criminal minds and find ways to bring families at least a bit of closure.

"I'll have the coroner run more tests, more confirmations. We need to check in with Missing Persons, too before we make any far-reaching conclusions. If we're lucky, it'll be their job to tell the parents, so calm the fuck down Paulson, and do some thinking with me," Ramos was sitting at one of the two desks, cradling a cup of horribly lukewarm coffee. As if that wasn't bad enough, the barista had put three pumps of pumpkin spice syrup in her drink instead of just the one she specifically asked for.