A/N: Another bit, practically right on top of the prologue. (But if I've got 'em, I should post 'em, right?) And so the mystery begins...
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The prime cause of death in the former United States: suicide.
The prime triggering factor for suicide? In a word: tedium.
The geneticists who had figured out how to shut down the aging gene hadn't thought things through. They were, after all, only scientists. Amoral in the truest, most decent, best intended of ways, they had conducted their bloodhound pursuit of immortality. And when they found immortality, the politicians took it away from them and proceeded to twist it to their ends.
Not that they, in turn, could be blamed, either. They were, after all, only politicians. Greed, the will to power, and shortsightedness defined them. Ironic, though, that the promise of eternal life, gift or curse that it was, should become the tool, the weapon, the attack-dog of those who were too busy strip-mining today to look, even, to tomorrow.
So, in the beginning, no one of influence gave generalized immortality much thought. Thought about it in the long term, anyway. Those who should have had a say— the psychologists, the philosophers— found themselves shouting into the wind. The odd yet touchingly strident article here and there about the risks to the mind and, more quaintly yet, the soul, all mowed down or ignored by those hypnotized by a dream become reality, the best of all possible news: death was dead, or at least wounded, crippled.
Or now, for the first time ever, humankind stood facing death eye to eye, as an equal.
Understandable, therefore, that the greedy, the naive, and the population at large should become intoxicated by the idea: I can live forever.
Which was not to say that immortality guaranteed perfection. Immortality didn't eradicate disease, physical defects, or mental illness. By the time people realized how long they would be trapped in their own bodies, even the supposed-best bodies in which they found themselves time-locked at the age of twenty-five, it was too late. And so they found themselves having to cope, for ever and always.
Or not.
Self-termination rates were highest, ironically, in the zone areas once considered most desirable for habitation. In the former United States, these areas included the southern and west coasts, the southwest. People needed definite seasons; they needed climatic change, even the set cycles of said change. The days of hot glare in, for example, the areas once known as Arizona, Florida, and California messed with people's heads. Like those dwelling above the Arctic Circle in months of semi-light, they began to lose their sense of time. Was it yesterday— or centuries— before?: Leon recalled the line from a poem he'd read, in public school, over seventy years ago. But it was apt. The sense of time passing went first— a variation, in a way, on the idea that travelers sense motion only through anomalies: if there were no bumps in the road, in other words, we would never know we were moving— followed by sense of purpose. If I have no reason to be, why am I still here? Depression set in, and then, finally, mired in a perpetual present, trapped in a forever-now, the would-be suicide found Death patiently waiting.
As Death had been waiting all along.
Somewhat ironically, change stood as a counterpoint to stagnation when it came time for suicide to cull the herd. Those whom immortality burdened might pray for something different in their lives— something as prosaic as a different job, a different house, a move to a different zone; then, if and when change came, they couldn't cope with it. That, of course, was a malady reserved largely (or hardly at all, given the lot of its potential sufferers) to the lower classes. The rich, ironically, insulated themselves from change by indulging in it as much as possible: in having everything— all the vacation homes in every possible zone, all the cars, all the hobbies, all the toys, mechanical, human, and other— they effectively immobilized themselves. In having everything, they sank into a stagnation of their own making; in having everything, they had, in a way, nothing.
The two prime triggers for suicide, thought Raymond Leon, from behind the wheel of his vintage Chrysler cruiser, a car matte-black and threateningly muscular, as the tires burred along the worn concrete and macadam of the old 105. Things staying the same. Things changing. Which was it for you, Mr. Doe?
Normally, suicides didn't require the services of Timekeepers. Real suicides, that is. The plain fact was that when the regular police found themselves with a body that hadn't been shot, stabbed, beaten to death, or time-jacked, they called Temporal Control. Forwarded a report of a "self-term, not otherwise specified." Which, Leon suspected, was what had happened forty-eight minutes ago, when he'd been paged, at four forty-six in the morning, from a sound and ostensibly dreamless sleep.
Odd, though, that Control had called him, specifically, off-duty as he had been. No doubt something to do with staffing shortages: a number of Timekeepers from Leon's precinct were presently on training sabbaticals in other zones. Fortunately, Jaeger, Leon's usual partner, was not among them. And, as he had been working the graveyard shift, Friday night into Saturday morning, when Leon flagged him as his ride-along, Jaeger was only too willing to escape his desk, the pile of reports he was completing, and the sterile harsh lighting of the ward room for a jaunt in the 'Cuda.
Someone had found the body in the the old switchyard for the Los Angeles Rapid Transit System, and that was where Leon and Jaeger were heading now.
"Friday," Jaeger mused, his symmetrically handsome African-North American face turned to look out at the darkness, the flash-by of streetlamps. Boredom made him both contemplative and bold. "Did they tear you away from Rawlins?"
Leon was unoffended. He knew Jaeger's habits as completely as Jaeger knew his: his Friday assignations with Timekeeper Rawlins, while not the subject of gossip or boasting on Leon's part, were hardly a secret to his duty partners. "She left just before twenty-three hundred hours."
With that, he went quiet. Focused on his driving, the reassuring rumble of the V-8. His lingering thoughts regarding the suicide they were apt to find at the switchyard. Jaeger read something else into his boss's silence. "You could ask her to marry you, you know," he said. "Hell, for that matter, she could ask you."
"And then what? We apply for a double-occupancy flat in a cleaner block, submit our reproduction request?"
"You're both shoe-ins to be classified as optimal breeding material: that'd be a given."
Normally, Leon would simply have been annoyed with Jaeger both for the suggestion and the implication; now, with the sensory memory of Rawlins barely hours old, the thought of her potentially agreeing to mate with him brought a tingle to his loins. A moment later, of course, he was annoyed with himself for said moment of fantasy, and with Jaeger for triggering it. But he was grateful for the irritation, too. It helped him to wake up, to focus on the situation at hand.
A black forensics van and two matte-gray cruisers, one marked as an L.A. patrol car, were parked thirty meters inside the razor-wire-topped chain-link fencing that marked the perimeter of the switchyard. The yard's outer gate was open; a duty cop in midnight blue eyed Leon's I.D. and waved them in with a flashlight. The van and cruisers were parked just outside the high overhang of the rusted corrugated steel roof of the warehouse-sized car yard. Leon drove in slowly, letting the 'Cuda pick its way through the debris and worn dusty ruts of the switchyard, and parked to the right of the second car. He shut off the motor; he and Jaeger got out.
"Barnes: Leon," he said to the collar transmitter linked to his belt radio. "Jaeger and I are on-site."
We're in the coupling area, Leon, replied Forensics Specialist Carl Barnes. Forty meters in, take a left.
"Copy that, Barnes."
Leon and Jaeger unclipped flashlights from their duty belts, switched them on, headed in to the car yard. It was a bit like stepping back in time: while the cars on the yard's periphery were of modern make, either recently swapped out or in need of repair, the cars parked further back were older, then older still, their fading paint in colors that Leon hadn't seen on the tracks for years, their side-plates bearing the names of stations and stops that no longer existed. Like a physical manifestation of the stillness of the place, the dust underfoot, powder-soft, grew deeper the farther in they went.
And there was something else. "What's that smell?" Jaeger asked.
"I'm not sure," Leon replied. "Faulty sewer connection. Dead rat, maybe."
It was intensifying as they picked their way among the derelict cars to the turning point Barnes had specified. An odor like rotting meat, sweet, sharp, sickening. A greasiness to it that stuck to the insides of the nostrils.
"Be a hell of a rat," Jaeger muttered.
They reached the coupling zone. A half-dozen spur-tracks that led out to the main lines, powerful yellow-bodied tow carts, heavy hydraulic hoists. And a rough ring of lights marking out something on the dusty, debris-strewn ground. Carl Barnes and Timekeeper Aron Garner came to meet them. Behind them, two field-techs in gray coveralls were carefully surveying the area surrounding the object at the center of the ring of lights, taking pictures, tweezering and bagging samples.
Garner was six-foot-four if he was an inch. He had granite-red hair, a pale face set perpetually in an eagle's scowl. "Leon," he said.
"Timekeeper Garner."
Carl Barnes offered Leon half a smile. A half was all he had. Fifteen years ago, he'd been involved in a horrible auto crash: a year's effort had left him able to walk but unable, fully, to straighten his mangled spine; nerve damage froze the right side of his face. He had straight mouse-brown hair that sometimes fell across his eyes, tired, thoughtful, and pale blue. "Timekeepers," he said, greeting both Leon and Jaeger.
Leon replied: "What do you have for us, Examiner Barnes?"
"I'm not exactly sure."
On-duty, Barnes was rarely facetious. Humor on the job was a waste of time in the best of scenarios.
"Explain," said Leon, as Barnes led them toward the thing at the center of the lights.
"Male. We think. We won't be certain without a detailed autopsy."
A chill could still pass through him, even after all these years. Leon frowned. "You think...?"
"You tell me, Raymond."
Barnes came to a halt at the edge of the ring of lights. Leon and Jaeger did, too. They looked where Barnes was looking. For a second, in Leon's peripherals, Jaeger turned his head away.
Leon felt his jaw muscles clench as he looked at it. It was a human body, obviously. Sprawled on the rough ground.
No: more accurately, it was splattered on the ground. Within the weak confines of jeans, a possibly black t-shirt, a brown jacket. It was as if the body had exploded inside the clothes it wore. And the face: superating on the skull. Melting, literally. Puddles of black-red ichor where the eyes should be, cheeks and jowls sloughing down and away, making rust-colored mud of the dust. The smell, that rotting-sweet smell, was almost palpable.
"We think it was some kind of acid," Barnes said. "No residual spray in the area, as far as we can tell, so we think he— she— it was immersed in whatever it was and then brought here."
"Why was I called to the scene?" Leon asked.
Timekeeper Garner replied: "Because we found your number on its phone, Timekeeper Leon."
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