Monsters of the Week

Together With Qubi - [2] -

When I got back from Ibra's the next morning, the apartment stunk to high heaven. The air was moving, so Ralph had the good sense to open the back window before he started burning shit, but it was still against the lease, and it was still utterly without consideration for the idea that I had to live here too. I stomped into the kitchen. "Ralph!"

He looked up from a rack full of test tubes, a Bunsen burner on a slide under them, next to his cube's box. The cube was wired up to his phone, and the top of the gelatin was sprinkled with clumps of what looked like ash. "Yes?"

"What the FUCK are you burning in here? What the fuck are you doing, more generally? You know that this apartment is on a no-smoking lease, right?"

"Well, I'm not smoking; I'm reducing these samples for ash."

"Right, but why?"

He looked down and started poking his fingertips together. "If we had our own analysis unit, one that could crawl over everything, we could find the traces of the one those guys last night used to pick up the blood, and then –" Even Ralph couldn't keep wittering on against the stare I was giving him.

"If you think you can use your gross slime block pet at work, as well as around the house, which is what you promised me it would be limited to, you can go ahead and try to do that; as long as I don't step on it, and it doesn't eat my shit, I don't care. But I do care about not losing my lease and getting a black mark on my landlord history because my stupid fucking roommate was setting tobacco on fire in a no-smoking apartment! Also, where the fuck have you been, like, your whole life? By now, you ought to know only hipsters actually light tobacco on fire to smoke these days! How many hipsters have we arrested in the last three years? Zero, right? Do you think you're gonna get some goddamn Jane-Austen case of a graphic designer and a party-planner stabbing their uncle for the inheritance and blaming it on the robot butler? The fuck kind of value did you think you were adding?"

Ralph slumped his shoulders down. "I'm just trying to keep up with the times. I'm eighty, ninety percent sure those guys from the warehouse were killed by a biogel organism. That was what was in the box, and it's what they used to clean up the platform. I could smell it out on the tiles, but the problem with biogel is it's not chemically differentiable from, like, anything that we eat these days. If the criminals are using bio-AI organisms as weapons, shouldn't we try to keep up with that? Especially since I've already got one right here – and I bet that I can get Qubi smarter, faster than whatever they've got."

I sat down on the other chair. If that was what he was getting at, it made a little more sense, but just like always, he had reliably picked the most random, ass-backwards, unproductive way to start in on it. "Well, it's better than trying to train it up because familiars are the thing on this season of Magic Fairy Dojikko-chan, which is what you were programming it towards the other day, right?" Ralph gave a weak smile and busied himself shutting off the gas to the burner. "It's fine if you want to do this Sherlock Holmes shit, but think a little about priorities, huh? Tobacco ash should be the goddamn last thing you should be worried about; think about, like slices of soles to track perps by their shoe composition. Think a little, Ralph. What kind of evidence can we get? What kind of evidence do we not get that we could if we had a smarter sniffer that could walk around on its own?" Ralph perked up a little. "I gotta take a shower before we head out; clean this stuff up while I'm in, and we can put it to work after. We can stop at Dico's on the way over, my treat."

The slime block was happily grouting the soap crap out of the shower tiles when we left, and if anything could reliably get Ralph into a good mood, it was real if predictably-bad Dico's coffee and a couple chicken sandwiches, especially if someone else was paying. The later start meant that pretty much just as soon as we got in and my tablet finished waking up, we got the notification from the examiner's office. This was the one good thing about having Huy on our stiffs: he hated doing the work, but he hated having corpses above ground even more, so he always blasted out his blue sheets immediately and leaned on the coroners until they got the autopsy slotted and promised him a deadline where he could get the body into the ground. The autopsies on our victims were done, and the comprehensive reports were coming as soon as whatever junior coroner had gotten stuck with the job finished transcribing and sorting them and found the actual examiner to sign off. That was going to take till the end of the day; Huy's job was over as soon as he got his corpses back, and Ralph and I had better things to do than spend all day calling the coroner's office for a progress check. As long as we didn't have to pick up another street case, we could just wait for them to send it out; no shortage of paperwork on the back burner, and we had the video from the station to pick through and try to get some wanted profiles together for the patrol folks to watch out for.