It fascinated her that he could attend to so many things at once. What was he even doing in each of the windows? She had no idea.
He stood up suddenly, and she leaped back into the shadows. He walked to his wall slot as a delivery drone clattered in the vent and came through. The display followed in front of the man, while his fingers kept typing away. The drone hovered briefly, laid down the man’s new food tray with the food cubes, then took away his empty tray from earlier that day. It buzzed and vanished back into the vents. Rapidly the man reached out, grabbed the squares, and shoved them into his mouth. Then he returned to his seat, his attention on the display not once faltering.
Her face burning, H124 realized she’d been standing there far too long. If her employers found out, she’d be ticketed. Or worse. They could assign her even more extra duties. She was lucky the man hadn’t noticed her. She stepped forward quietly and reached the hole in the wall. Without a sound, she stepped through it into the dead man’s apartment.
She could smell the corpse before she saw it. She wondered why they’d waited so long to call her onsite. She followed the sickly sweet smell down a dark corridor to the bathroom. He lay sprawled on the bathroom floor, legs twisted at an odd angle. His bloody head lay in a pool of crusted red on the white tile. She crept closer, staring down at him. She’d never seen a death like this before. She’d seen heart attacks, disease, a broken neck once. But this was different. Violent. She didn’t see how he could have done this to himself, even if he’d slipped and fallen on the tile, cracking his head open. She bent closer, looking at his skull. It wasn’t a fracture he’d bled from. It was an evenly cut hole in his skull.
She’d heard that if jacked-in citizens unplugged from the network, they risked death. Is this what happened? Had the man’s cranial implant malfunctioned?
She slung her tool bag off her shoulder, placing it on the floor. The coppery scent of blood hung strongly in the bathroom, lingering above the fetid smell of decay. She tried to breathe through her mouth and pulled out a thick plastic body bag from her supplies. Kneeling over the body, she rolled him onto his back. She tugged on his shirt, and his face came free from the dried pool of blood. He was heavy, tall and flabby, probably around thirty-five or so. She unzipped the bag and moved it along the floor until it lay flush to him. She sat back on her heels, preparing to roll him into it.
Grabbing his arm, she stopped. A sound echoed up from beneath her. A beeping sound. She paused, listening. It was muffled, like it wasn’t coming from this unit. Cautiously, she stood up and walked back into the hall. Craning her neck, she tried to pinpoint the sound. She moved back toward the hole in the wall, thinking it might be coming from the next living pod, but it wasn’t. She walked back toward the bathroom. The beeping grew louder. She walked past the bathroom toward the man’s bedroom. She stopped at the end of the hallway, just before its doorway. The sound was loudest here, an incessant, unfamiliar beeping. She knelt down, and it stopped.
She waited, but after minutes of silence, she stood up and returned to the bathroom. Stooping down, she rolled the body into the bag. She began zipping it up and looked back at the man’s head. The wound was circular and clean, right where his implant should have been. Curious, she leaned closer, staring at the hole. The man’s implant hadn’t malfunctioned; it was completely gone, and something had seared his brain tissue. She stared down at the blackened flesh, wrinkling her nose at the acrid smell that wafted up.
She looked around the bathroom, seeing a shattered vase, a group of towels spilling out of the hutch above the toilet. Her gut roiled around inside her. Something wasn’t right. This wasn’t a natural death or an accident.
His brain had been destroyed, violently. He had struggled, fought against someone.
Who had removed his implant? And where was it now? Who would have had access to his pod? Only her employers or a worker like herself. Maybe someone had tried to save him when his implant shorted out. She didn’t like it, and she grew nervous, wanting to finish the job.
She finished zipping him up inside the thick plastic, then tugged him out into the hallway. Straightening up, she looked back into the bathroom. Blood had pooled under him, crusted and dried. She pulled out the bleach and scrub brush and went to work. When a new person was installed in this living pod, it had to look spotless.
She scrubbed and wiped until the white tile floor gleamed. Then she went through the whole pod, righting an upended lamp in the hallway. Housekeeping would take care of the rest, resupplying the bathroom with new linens and other necessities.
She returned to the body bag. He was heavy. She’d have to drag him out with the harness. She pulled it out of her bag and stepped into it. Tightening it around her chest, she was glad he lived near the corner of the building. Even so, it would take a lot of effort to get him down the exterior hallway to the incinerator.
She pulled out tow ropes and attached them to the body bag with carabiners. She was about to attach him to her harness when the beeping started again. She stood silently in the darkened hallway, listening. She waited for it to stop, but it didn’t this time. Dropping the ropes, she walked to the end of the hallway where it was loudest. A red-and-black carpet covered the floor there. The sound was coming from underneath. She was sure of it. She knew the utility tunnels well, having been navigating them since she was four. They didn’t run under this part of the building. It should be just dirt under there.
She peeled the carpet back and stared at the floorboards. Faint scratches marred their plastic edges. While all the planks still lay flush together, she noticed their nails had been removed. As she bent lower, she found a broken fingernail. She leaned back on her heels. Stood up. On a thought, she returned to the body bag and unzipped it. Pulling out the man’s cold arm, she found all of his fingernails bloody and torn. He’d been scratching at the floor.
The beeping continued, insistent, demanding. What was it?
Then, just as suddenly as it started, it came to an end. She waited, but it didn’t resume.
Taking a knee, she traced her fingers along one of the boards. At the end she tugged upward, and it came free, revealing a support beam beneath. Under it lay darkness. She lifted up a few more boards, laying them quietly to one side. Glancing back toward the hole in the wall, she made out the faint glow from the man’s display in the next pod. He had taken no notice of her. She felt exposed, crouching there, exploring, not doing her job. Her heart hammered, and her mouth went dry at the thought of him peeking through the hole, or, worse, her employers showing up for an inspection. But no one came through the ragged hole in the wall.
She grabbed her headlamp and her tool bag and returned to the opening in the floor. Donning the light, she switched it on and pointed it down into the darkness. The beam traveled over rubble from an ancient ceiling, more support beams, and strange shapes clustered in shadow. It was a whole other room, she realized, a room beneath this one. Her nose wrinkled as a moldy odor stirred upward.
She swung her legs over into the darkness. Sitting on the edge, she hovered between two worlds. What lay beneath this living pod? She always thought it had been built on the ground floor.
Before she even knew she’d made the decision, she gripped the edge of the floor with her hands and lowered her legs down into the unknown.
Chapter 3
H124’s feet thrashed inside the hole until they found a stable spot on the rubble. Slowly she lowered her full weight onto it. With only her head above the floor of the deceased man’s living pod, she glanced one more time toward the hole at the end of the hallway. Nothing had changed.
She turned away, aiming her light down into the black. The rubble angled downward, so she slid and stumbled her way to the base of the pile, reaching a sloping floor. Dust motes hung in the air, and a thick blanket of gray covered strange rectangular shapes around the room. Stopping to listen for any sounds above, she stared up through the hole. Then she turned, playing her light over the shapes. A large desk stood against one wall with a chair in front of it. Two items sat on top of the desk. She brushed the