Ghostmakers

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This week I am tapped out and I have maggots in my brain, so here’s one from the vaults. A short fiction I wrote for an anthology called HAUNTED FUTURES from Ghostwood Books about a dozen years ago now. I hope it amuses.

FICTION

GHOSTMAKERS

Kelso was having that lovely daydream about killing himself, again. It usually came to him in the afternoons, when the shadows started to stretch on the streets. A few Vicodin, for that warm and floating comfort. Maybe a small glass of wine with them, a really good one, a Merlot that was fat with fruit. And then the Painless Exit Drink.

The Painless Exit Drink was something that pretty much only existed in Kelso’s head. He’d whisper it like a mantra sometimes. He had decided that somewhere in Europe, in their mysterious Alpine medical laboratories and dignified suicide clinics, there must be a Painless Exit Drink that they give to elective euthanasia subjects. Europeans were sophisticated, after all, and had been far ahead of American death science since probably Joseph Mengele. So he felt quite certain that there was a Painless Exit Drink out there somewhere, and that it probably tasted lovely, and that you’d be quietly and comfortably dead as hell a couple of minutes after sinking it.

“Painless Exit Drink,” he muttered to himself, with a little smile. It was a small pleasure to him, knowing it was bound to be available and that he could go and get it one day.

The squad tended to sit apart, at this time of day. They’d been told not to do it by the shrinks, but, somehow, the pressure seemed to build up in the afternoons. The minutes started to drag. Bad enough they were in LA, which always seemed to them now to be so far behind the rest of the world. Europe had already done its day’s work by the time Los Angeles was up and moving. What wonders and horrors had they designed before Kelso had taken his first antidepressant of the day?

Including Kelso, there were five people in the squad. Same headcount as a LAPD SWAT fire team. If they’d been on SWAT, the lot of them would have been on medical suspension for PTSD months ago, even the ones who still had families. Kelso had engineered his own separation from his family. They might be colder and even sadder in Montana, but they’d be safer from what was coming. Cities were going to be no place for children in the future. And seeing the future was his job.

The desk phone rang, shocking him halfway to a welcome heart attack. He punched the receiver button, trying to control his breathing. “RACR ECS.”

It was always a phone call, or video. Nobody came to visit them, here in this grim old building LAPD had forgotten it owned until they realized nobody wanted to be near ECS.

“You have a Code Six X-Ray. Details to your board now. The estimated scene clock is at two hours and counting.”

Kelso hung up without responding. He stood up and yelled, “We’ve got a dead one.”

Across the office space, people snapped alert.

The big board mounted on the office wall cleared itself and then brought up the Code Six details. Location, four brief lines of description, a looping twenty seconds of camera take, and the scene clock as estimated by the Real-time Analysis and Critical Response division of the Los Angeles Police Department. RACR was the pervasive police surveillance system for LA. ECS was Exotic Crimes Squad, and Kelso ran it. And, with the clock at two hours and running, ECS has less than four hours to raise a ghost.

On paper, Los Angeles was a terrible place to put a rapid-response team of any kind. Five hundred square miles connected by a thousand miles of roads. It was nigh impossible to get anywhere rapidly.

But Los Angeles was the new hot zone. Traffic from the Pacific Rim, skunkworks operations in California, homebrew labs in Arizona and Nevada – Los Angeles was the transportation point for it all. Not even counting all the hidden little operations in LA itself. All the new technology on this side of the world came through LA. And there was so much of it. Science had passed some kind of tipping point, in the last few years. New, strange technologies were appearing faster than society’s ability to cope with and assimilate them – and those were just the ones society knew about. That was the tip of a very dark iceberg. Any technology constitutes a new ability, and, sooner or later – usually sooner – any new ability will be used to steal or kill.

The Exotic Crimes Squad’s beat was the crimes of tomorrow, today. Violent outbreaks of the future in the present.

It was hell to keep up with.

Kelso and his crew checked that the car was loaded. They only had one tool against the future. Two, if you counted the car itself, a one-off vehicle donated by a tech-friendly billionaire trying to curry favour with the city of Los Angeles in the hope that one day they’d approve his high-speed monorail link to the Bay Area. It was a proof of concept. He always told the press that he could build a flying car.

Take-off was routinely terrifying. Cars weren’t really supposed to fly, after all, and nobody enjoyed sitting that close to big quad-rotors or lifter jets. But it could get the squad to crime scenes very fast, and time was always of the essence. That one tool was very time-sensitive.

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RACR had been in operation in its present form since 2009, and had gotten very good at its job. It processed take from thousands of cameras across Los Angeles, and processed the imagery with speed and intelligence, but it still took time to flag up anomalies in its vision, for an algorithm to decide if it was an ECS situation, and to push a report to a human.

In this instance, cameras had spotted something very like gun flash, and RACR had sent a local patrol car in. The uniforms had taken one look and called a body at RACR directly. That still happened. No surveillance system was perfect. Yet.

The car put down in a lot off Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica. Regular uniforms had already cordoned the location off. Kelso knew the uniforms would take off as soon as they could, unless there was a gawker. It was easier to be hated. The gawkers had to be chased off. Nobody was allowed to watch his team work.

The building was an old factory, being converted into open-plan offices for some production company or app foundry. Kelso could hear – and he knew his grumbling team, could, too, as they lugged the gear in – uniforms muttering about them. “Ghostmakers” was audible more than once. They had a reputation.

Reaching the crime scene, on the ground floor at the back of the building, next to the steps to the basement level, Kelso saw why they’d been called.

The dead man had been seared like meat on the grill. On close inspection, the top two centimeters or so of the man’s body had been cooked down and lit on fire. It had happened fast enough that he’d actually split down the middle, the breastbone flamed to ash and brittle black husk. His eyes were soot.

Kelso looked at his team. It was possible for police to develop a certain degree of inurement to dead bodies, but not in ECS. Each dead body was so different. So many new kinds of death were being invented. He walked around, as they put the gear down: a few quiet words here, a touch on the shoulder there. Gently taking as much of their pain and stress and confusion away as he could. He could carry it. He’d given everything else in his life up so that he could take the weight.

Kelso’s squad set up the tall lamps in a wide circular perimeter around the body, placing the squat fog machines at compass points between them.

The human body contains about three kilowatt-hours of electrical power. Half the capacity of your cellphone battery, and transmitting twenty-four hours a day. We put out an electromagnetic field, and it leaves a trail behind us. In almost all cases, that fades in six hours. That was why ECS needed to be at a crime scene within six hours of the crime being committed.

The lamps snapped on, and the scene was bathed in unearthly light.

The ghosts of the dead man and his murderer appeared.

The gear amplified the electromagnetic trails of anyone who’d moved through the lamps’ perimeter, up to six hours back in time. It was very much like seeing ghosts. The developers who gave the gear to LAPD were very gleeful about quoting Arthur C. Clarke: any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. They were very proud of themselves for renting the only such device in the world so far to their home city’s police force. Sometimes Kelso wanted to find them and make them see the things he had to look at.

The dead man’s ghost stood over his own body, arguing with a second male figure who was stooped over. The body language said that the second man was dragging something. “Turn it up,” said Kelso. The lamps intensified a little, and oversplash from the second man’s image revealed the edges of a metallic case, being dragged by the second man. They now had enough definition to capture the second man’s features, and one of Kelso’s team started taking and uploading photos.

The gear was the secret. It’s why ECS was so small, and why the lines of communication between them and LAPD were so narrow. Kelso knew the secret would be broken, one day, and he knew the questions that would be asked. Why didn’t every police force have one? Why didn’t everyone get to see their dead loved ones one more time? Why wasn’t the technology being developed and improved and expanded upon by labs all over the world?

The answer was that Los Angeles was the biggest hot zone in the world for exotic lethal technology and the gear was the only advantage they had, and they didn’t yet know if it would be dangerous if it got loose. It was a logical answer. It may not have been a moral or ethical one.

Kelso operated the imaging scrubber himself, winding the ghost parade back, looking for the crime. “Foggers,” he said, and the small fog machines were kicked into life, pushing mist into the circle and making the visualization inside the lamplight clearer and more defined.

Ghosts and mist. This was their life.

ECS needed to move very, very fast in order to do its work. And, as Kelso looked around, he saw the toll it took on his squad, one more time. Their faces, limned by the ghost light, watching more murders being committed, dealing with more objects and devices that shouldn’t be real. The raw burn of trying to live one step ahead of a world out of control. The deep horror of watching people die, over and over again, just to do their jobs. They were all damaged by being Ghostmakers, and it was only getting worse.

The second man took something out of the case. There it was. He stood, and raised an arm towards the dead man. The thing in his hand became visible. Something inside it became very bright. An electrical motor, powerful enough to leave its own trace in the air.

The dead man flared under the lamps. The lamps captured the sheet of flame he was suddenly enveloped in. Electrical fire. Radio energy. The dead man split open, and collapsed. It was like the ghost was falling back into the corpse.

Kelso didn’t need to ask one of his specialists what had happened here two hours ago. He knew about this one. Active denial systems had been deployed by the US Army since 2010: big trucks with heavy radiator dishes that fired millimeter-wave radio energy. If you were hit by the radio spray, it heated the top few layers of the skin. It was a non-lethal troop disruption weapon – it stung like hell and you had to break and run.

Kelso had read the underground chatter reports about a more powerful, handheld version. This was it. There was no way to know if this was a weaponeer or an arms dealer, but he had a crate of microwave guns and he clearly wasn’t taking any crap from anybody. He’d burned a man down with a gun that wasn’t supposed to exist yet, just for arguing with him.

It took Kelso another beat to realize the ghost light was showing the murderer head towards the back of the building with his crate. The back exits were still boarded up. There was no way out in that direction. Only the steps to the basement level.

Kelso drew his gun. “The bastard’s still in the building.”

The uniforms backed off. They knew the real reason why ECS was called the Ghostmakers. The ECS had more shootings on it than any other squad in the LAPD. High jeopardy. High body count. The most dangerous game in town. The future will kill you.

The Ghostmakers drew their weapons and went to work.

© Warren Ellis 2014

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LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

Morning Computer: a few useful things first thing in my day

Laszlo Krasznahorkai

NINE BELLS chatgpt eats the rabbit

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And that’s me for this week. I have a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about, but time is short and my brain is, yes, full of maggots. Hopefully I’ll get to some of it next week! In the meantime, don’t be like me - slow down, take some time for yourself, get away from all the noise for a bit and give yourself five minutes to relax. You deserve it. See you next week.

W