Of Broken Things

Chapter 3 - Scene 5.

Paranoia or not, Aiden went through the footage from the outside cameras for any signs of unwelcome visitors. In his absence, two cats had had a territorial dispute in his backyard, and his next door neighbor had used his trash compactor to dispose of a bag of dog poop. Other than that, nobody had shown any particular interest in the house. None of the security systems had been breached either, so Aiden decided to attribute his feeling of being followed to the fact that he had been pretty shook up by what Ed and him had discovered at the morgue.

He cooked some spaghetti, dumped a whole can of vat-grown tomato sauce on them, and tried to fit all the facts into a cohesive picture.

Five researchers, all of them experts in different, seemingly unconnected fields, had been doing something in a facility called the Nest in Arizona. They had been compensated for their work through an anonymously financed fund. Then, seven months ago something happened. Fortworth's trips to Arizona stopped; the fund was closed; all correspondence between the professors stopped abruptly right at that time as well.

Whatever had happened, somebody was now eliminating everyone involved, and he had a genetically modified killer doing his dirty work, which in itself should have been impossible.

Aiden got up and paced his living room. There was more to this case than Aiden had thought when he initially took it, and he wanted to get to the bottom of it. He was looking forward to going back through the evidence, looking for those little subtle connections, for seemingly unrelated facts that would add more pieces to the puzzle.

He also realized that he hadn't had a drink in days and didn't even crave it. He felt truly alive for the first time since the funeral, as if he had finally awoken after a long nightmare.

"Right then, let's see where Steven was seven months ago."

He finished his spaghetti, dropped the bowl into the sanitizer, and told the computer to display Fortworth's schedule for the month of April.

Steven had made one trip to Arizona, another one to a neuro-science symposium in Australia, which could safely be excluded from the pattern, and gave guest lectures in three universities on the North American continent. He was scheduled to be in the Planetary Capital on April 22, but the trip had been canceled.

Aiden frowned – that trip didn't fit the pattern. As far as he could see from his schedule, Fortworth had never traveled to the Capital before. What business did he have there seven months ago? And why had the trip been canceled at the last moment?

He opened another screen with the list of all scientific conferences or symposiums that had taken place in the Capital in April. A conference about the future of space exploration had been held in the first week of April. Aiden vaguely remembered hearing about it. The main topic had been the first terraforming expedition to Eden. Somehow he doubted that a neuro-scientist would have been interested in that. There had been nothing going on in the Capital in the end of April that was even remotely related to science or research in Fortworth's field.

This was hardly surprising, since the Planetary Government put a heavy emphasis on space exploration, so those were the only research projects welcomed at the Capital. The construction of the Planetary Capital had been the greatest scientific accomplishment of the last century, before the creation of a self-sufficient base on Mars stole that title. The idea behind the Capital had been to show the independence of the newly formed Planetary Government from any notion of race, ethnicity or country. That's why the city had been built on an artificial island the size of Madagascar. And to show that the Capital was the center of the new Earth order, the island traveled the ocean currents circling the globe, never staying at one place for long. Most of the island was occupied by a multitude of governmental agencies, the rest was taken up by housing and all the infrastructure needed to keep the Government running smoothly, namely restaurants, bars, hospitals, holo-theaters, strip clubs, "snow" cooking labs, and a few police precincts. The lack of real estate made it so only scientific research that made profit was allowed to remain on the island. And right now, space was the ultimate money maker.