A few days ago, I encountered my mysterious neighbor. She was a stark reminder of this messed up, bitter, cynical world that we unfortunately live in, what I fight against, and what I am fighting for.
I am Maximilian Ultimata, male, thirty years old, single, bio-augment, former member of the NBCPD [New Bright City Police Department], now a private detective.
When I was a child, I believed in a strong code of justice, that the police were the immutable enforcers of the law, that they had a responsibility to uphold the safety and stability of society and its people of all species. Call it naivety or the fantastical delusions of a young boy who watched too many action movies, but even now, I still firmly believe that to be the ideal… however far the current stock has fallen short of that lofty goal.
Many people, including some friends of mine, see the police as inept, corrupt, prejudiced and violent, based on what they see in the news or out on the streets with their own eyes. They see the corruption and believe that to be inherent to the system, rather than an unresolved blight let run amok.
I had entered the police academy in my early twenties, and then entered the service a year after that. I intended to set an example for others, to become a new role model to the service and to society. I intended to set about cleaning up our broken system.
Plans never work out the way you intend them to.
As our “beloved” PM’s anti-augment sentiment kicked off, I was caught in the crossfire for being an augment myself. A bio-augment, to be precise. Unlike most people with their flashy metal limbs, my augmentation has modified my being at the genetic level; it is invisible to the naked eye. Aside from the most obvious thing, the exact types of augmentations are a mystery, but it still caused me to run into trouble with the anti-augment movement, and even though the NBCPD has augs willing to play ball in its midst, I was proven to be too much of a troublemaker to be worth keeping around.
My bio-augments were not by choice. I was modified when I was very young, possibly beginning shortly after I was born. That probably makes me a first generation aug. Most of my earliest memories are from a time when I was in a facility of some kind, with doctors and scientists monitoring me and injecting me with various chemicals and serums. I was being treated for some kind of genetic defect that went undetected when I was born. At least that was the story I was told, but I don’t think my mother would lie to me or have subjected me to that experiment so casually, otherwise.
Shortly before my release, I began to experience a… change, that slowly turned my body into that of a girl’s. I was afraid of the transformation at first, clinging onto the illusion that I was wholly a boy, before I learned to embrace what I had become.
When I lost my job at the NBCPD, I drifted for a few months, doing odd jobs to make rent, keep the lights on and food in the fridge. It was a lucky encounter on the subway that started all this, my investigation into my own past.
As I waited for my stop, I noticed a woman, maybe a few years older than me, angrily typing out a message on her PDA. I asked her what the problem was. She told me she had a feeling her husband was cheating on her, with his late nights and not returning her calls. Maybe it’s none of the business of the actual police, but I believed that it was still my duty to help her. I exchanged contact information with her and promised that I would get to the bottom of it. It wasn’t hard; a few days later and with some snooping around, I managed to find concrete evidence, including video evidence, of his infidelity, and brought it to her. Over the next two months, she would destroy him in court and divorce him.
This was the start of my newfound career as a private detective. Turns out I was really good at it. I knew the only way you would dig up anything substantial about a person or company is by looking where they don’t want you to look, reading what they don’t want you to read, and going behind doors locked in their myriad ways. Once you know where to look, most of the time, everything falls into place.
During my investigation, I decided to look deeper into the client’s soon-to-be-ex-husband. I had no reason or cause to do it; I was simply curious. Turns out he was an office clerk for a major pharmaceutical company: Helix Pharmaceuticals, one of those generic brand companies that make up the backdrop of the pharmacy section of your local drug store.
I did what anybody would do at that point: I began looking into what Helix did, who worked for them. Most of it was pretty typical, boring stuff, but one thing stuck out to me. A listed “private contractor”, unlike everyone else whose profiles were extensively detailed by the company and I could easily crosscheck on social media, was simply listed as “Doctor G”. Nothing else was listed about them, not even a photo. The name itself may have even been a pseudonym.
I checked some more into Helix’s activities. One of their listed projects involved “genetic restructuring”, which was odd, considering the anti-augment movement would have pitched a fit if they knew about this. Unlike hormone replacement therapy or steroid treatments, genetic restructuring alters the subject at a fundamental level, altering their physicality or giving them abilities beyond what could be considered natural. It is the reason I developed a girl’s body, though the exact reason why that was the case is unclear, if that was a direct intention or a side effect of the treatment I underwent.
I gathered what information I could about the case at hand and ended my extracurricular research into the rest of the staff. I had nothing to go by and it was probably just some happy coincidence.
I began to take more jobs after that, eventually setting myself up as a private detective officially. I soon had a steady supply of jobs. Most jobs were investigations too small or involved for the police to bother dealing with. Lost family members, petty thefts, issuing subpoenas, settling inheritance disputes, that sort of thing. It was mostly boring stuff, and sometimes really emphasized the petty part, but it was a living and that was what mattered. At some point, the NBCPD began offloading some of their cases onto me; turns out despite my status as a persona non grata in the service, I still had a few friends in the department who were still willing to work with me. It also earned me more than a few favors on the side; the higher ups didn't need to know they were outsourcing to a bio-augment, so long as they got results on their backlog of cases running cold.
I eventually got contracted by an accountant for a major bank to look into some suspicious deposits and transfers being made. She was worried about looking into it in fear of being targeted by someone powerful or dangerous. It sounded like some very serious and heavy stuff; I wondered for a minute if this was going to be my big break.
Chest puffed up, confidence soaring and head filled with fantasies about busting an international trafficking ring, I began my investigation into the matter. I got deposit timelines and cross referenced them with the CCTV footage. All of these deposits, at least in person, were made by the same guy each time. Pretty cut and dry businessman in a three-piece suit. Sometimes the person paid a physical visit. Sometimes it was an electronic deposit.
I looked into what this account was for. That, in and of itself, was quite easy. When you transfer money through a bank, everything you do is logged and recorded. A lot of effort goes into laundering money, to bypass the bank and feds' ever watchful eyes and make it look like it was coming from a legit source.
That being said, I quickly struck the possibility of a laundering scheme from my mind. I won't get into the details as to how I came to that conclusion in case anybody reading this gets some funny ideas, but the gist of it is there were multiple big name companies, some of which I actually recognized, mainly from the medical field, funneling money into this one account. I confirmed that these were indeed the legit accounts belonging to their respective companies, and not codenames by some secret organization masking their activity. One of those companies was my old friend from the first case I took up: Helix Pharmaceuticals.
I almost wished it was money laundering. That would have been far simpler to understand. Why were these different companies pouring these assets into a single account? Was it some weird tax evasion scheme? Were the radio conspiracies about a secret organization true? What could they possibly need with 200 billion accumulated credits?
There was only one way to find out. I would have to dig deeply and forcefully into the archives of at least ONE of these listed organizations until I find something that could explain everything.
So I got to it. I returned to Helix Pharmaceuticals and, under the guise of the IT department creating a routine backup of their servers, made a copy of their email server onto a portable hard drive. Using a nifty program a friend created for me to search for certain keywords, I scanned every email ever sent and received by everyone in the company going back five years.
It took a while. It gave me enough time to consider the legality of my actions, what I was doing pursuing this secret bank account and the means I took to get as far as I did. If I did find something illegal, it would get dismissed in court without question. I was breaking the law in so many ways, and our justice system expected us to play by certain rules…
Rules that were structured to not touch a certain elite caste. Once again I thought of the anti-augment movement, and the girls at the Technosexual who had an inherent distrust of the system. They have done nothing wrong, and yet they, and my formerly-enigmatic neighbor included, were treated by the government as inherent criminals and left to fend for themselves.
My concerns about the morality of my actions were quickly dashed.
Once the entire archive had been scanned, I checked the results. Most of it was false positives, as you could imagine, but one of the results brought up an interesting email.
From: FG_Amb_S4bb//SpireNet
To: J_Dawson//HelixCorp
Subject: re: Project Delays
I understand your frustrations about the delays. This current climate of ours isn't helping things, either. Losing track of Subject 404 during their most developmental period was a costly mistake that set back progress by fifteen years. That being said, I am no amateur scientist. The subsequent test subjects proved to be considerably more successful based on the notes I had taken and the corrections I made from Subject 404's successful treatment.
Project Ambrosia, I can assure you, is proceeding on schedule, and should be completed within two years. Then even the mightiest of kings would envy you.
- G
"Project Ambrosia". At last, I had a key phrase I could work with. I modified the search parameters and returned after a nice dinner to see what the program came up with.
* * *
I had to step away after what I read. Now I REALLY wished it was tax evasion.
What in the actual fuck did I stumble into?
