Corner Pieces - Elly

[Posterboy]

The rain had followed Elly back to headquarters. It streaked the windows of the spinner in silver threads and gathered in the gutters outside LAPD in oily, trembling pools. By the time she stepped beneath the overhang, the warmth of the restaurant had already begun to feel distant: spice on her tongue, salt at the corner of her mouth, the pleasant looseness of tequila still lingering behind her eyes.

For a little while, there had only been food. The three of them had sat around a table at two in the morning and eaten something that probably shouldn't have worked but somehow did, while Los Angeles carried on dying noisily outside.

It'd been almost ordinary... Elly wasn't sure what to do with ordinary...


The doors opened for her. Cool, recycled air washed over her face. She pulled the scarf down from her mouth and walked inside. Crowe and Wylde should be somewhere east of the city by now. She pictured the spinner slipping through rain and smog as they headed for the GENTEK facility, Crowe stubbornly pretending his ribs weren't cracked badly enough to matter and Wylde— Elly stopped the thought there. They could take care of themselves... Probably.

She pressed the elevator control. The doors opened. Crime Lab.

There were reasons she'd chosen this part of the investigation. Evidence didn't become defensive when you asked the wrong question, didn't decide it disliked you halfway through an interview, and didn't lie because it was afraid or loyal or ashamed.

Sure, it could be misunderstood, contaminated, destroyed... sometimes deliberately. But whatever remained was what remained.

Elly trusted that. More than she trusted people.

The elevator descended. Her reflection hovered faintly in the brushed metal opposite her. For an instant, she saw herself as someone else might: coat damp around the shoulders, hair touched by rain, face still carrying the faint signs of exhaustion that even a hospital and several hours away from the case hadn't entirely erased.

Alive. She reminded herself, letting her eyes and mind linger there a moment.
Then the doors parted and she walked out.


The Crime Lab at this hour had the same sleeplessness of the rest of Los Angeles: Machines hummed beneath fluorescent lights, half-empty cups sat beside terminals, and someone had abandoned a meal that looked as though it had been printed sometime during the Wallace administration.

Elly moved through it all toward Coco's section. She was already assembling the case again in her mind: Bolt-On, Bellefontaine, Turfan. The stolen truck. The damaged canimoids. GENTEK... And somewhere behind all of that, the older robberies Varela had been chasing. Separate things, perhaps... except separate things had an irritating habit of becoming one thing after you looked at them long enough.

That's what bothered her – not that they lacked leads, they had too many. A trail in every direction could mean they were close... or it could mean someone had scattered breadcrumbs deliberately.

Elly reached Coco's workspace and stopped just short of intruding into it. She rested one hand against the edge of the partition. "Coco." Her voice was quiet but carried easily through the lab. She waited until she had his attention. "What did you find?"

[Eclecticon]

Coco looks up from his screen, rubbing his eyes and blinking like a kid woken from a nap.  "Elly, yes" he says, soft-voiced.  Shifting mental gears from whatever else he's been working on.  "They told me you were injured.  I'm glad you're... okay." 

He pulls a sheaf of papers out of a drawer.  Takes off a rusting bulldog clip and gulps down some coffee.  Regrets his mistake there but presses on after a revolted shudder.  "The little stuff first: there were two types of explosives used at your crime scene.  The warehouse door was blown open with yīng máo, or something very like it."  Seeing Elly's expression, he explains: "It's a plastic explosive made by the Chinese for the war.  Basic enough that someone who knows what they're doing can manufacture it at home, which is what's happened here judging by the impurities.  The charges in the steam tunnel were different.  Sonic clearance charges, probably specially chosen not to do any structural damage." 

He sighs and rubs the back of his head.  "There wasn't much to say about the dogs, poor things.  All just old consumer models, pets and companions.  I don't know if they could've actually hurt you."  A thump on a nearby workbench announces the arrival of Biscuits, the calico felinoid that someone let out of an evidence locker years ago and who's never been caught since.  Coco strokes her head without looking around, his tension and fatigue visibly ebbing. 

"Now, the bigger things.  Almost all the blood at the scene was definitely human - A-negative and B-positive.  But we did find some O-negative splatter and the DNA matches a surviving pre-Blackout incept record." 

Words to make the ears of any Blade Runner on the force prick up, 'pre-Blackout'.  Means Nexus-8, the Sixes all having died off long ago.  Tough, but not built like a Nexus-9.  More to the point, still outlaws on Earth.  Persona non grata.  Retire on confirmation with a nice bonus in your paycheck.  Coco turns on an old monitor and Elly gets to look at the guy who just became her prey.  Voto Jergic.  Nexus-8 combat model, incept date 23 August 2021. 

Woe unto Voto Jergic, who slipped up and came to RDU's attention.

Coco's still talking.  "... there were components for twenty-five individuals, but the perps left the musculo-skeletal systems, skin and brains.  Everything they took was fully internal.  Or eyes.  They took all the eyes, too.  Now, here's the really big thing.  None of it was Tyrell stock.  Records from back then are incomplete, obviously, but the telomere signatures don't match what's recorded on the packaging, which is all the same.  There's no sign of the degradation you'd see over at least fifteen years of even proper storage, either.  These were brand new." 

Brand new.  You heard of people out on DNA row bootlegging replicant models for sale offworld and marketing them as old Tyrell stock.  The name still carries a reputation for product reliability despite everything that happened to the actual company.  First time anyone's seen proof of it for a good while, though.

[Posterboy]

For a moment, Elly said nothing. The monitor threw Voto Jergic's face into the dim space between them, the grainy image and flat institutional lighting revealing a man who, until a few minutes ago, had apparently succeeded in staying invisible.

Nexus-8. The designation settled into place with terrible efficiency. Elly knew what happened next... Everybody in RDU did. A surviving Eight wasn't a suspect in the ordinary sense. There would be no warrant application, no argument over probable cause, no careful distinction between what the blood proved and what it merely suggested. His name had surfaced, his DNA had matched, and, somewhere, in the machinery of the department, Voto Jergic had already begun the transformation from person into assignment. Find. Confirm. Retire.

Elly looked at his face another second before looking away. "Where was the blood?"

Coco blinked. "What?"

"Jergic's. Where did you find it?" She stepped closer to the workbench, resting her fingertips lightly against its edge. Biscuits watched her from beside Coco's elbow with suspicion, as if it knew when people were behaving badly.

"Not just which room," Elly continued. "Where in relation to the entrance, the inventory, the tunnel. How much of it was there? Spray, drops, transfer?"

Coco shuffled through the papers. Elly's eyes returned to the screen despite herself. Blood... That was all it had taken. A few millilitres left behind on concrete and now the LAPD knew Voto Jergic was alive.

Whatever remained was what remained. She had believed that when she came downstairs... She still did. The problem was that evidence didn't tell you what to feel about it.

"Because we know he bled there," she said quietly. "We just don't know why." Her eyes flicked back toward Coco. "At least, not yet."

That mattered... maybe only for the next few minutes, maybe only until Coco showed her a blood trail leading from a breached door with Jergic's fingerprints all over the detonator. But it still mattered.

Elly drew the papers toward herself enough to see them without taking them from Coco. "And the other blood? A-negative and B-positive. Anything in the system?" Bolt-On. Bellefontaine. Turfan. Three names orbiting a robbery that had just become something else entirely.

It was Coco's last words that kept pulling Elly's attention away from Jergic's photograph. Brand new. She glanced toward the evidence laid out beyond the partition. "And you're sure those components were brand new?" It wasn't disbelief. Coco would know that. "Not recently thawed. Not unusually well preserved." Her brow tightened slightly. "New."

The word felt wrong in her mouth. Replicant organs did not simply become new. Someone made them. She looked back at Coco. "Can you tell how new?" The hum of the lab seemed louder while she waited.

"And can you tell whether they all came from the same place?"

Twenty-five bodies. No... Twenty-five sets of components. Elly straightened as she asked her next question, "You said components for twenty-five individuals. Does that mean twenty-five complete replicants except for what was stolen? Or twenty-five lots of compatible parts?"

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she reconstructed the inventory. "Skin. Brains. Musculoskeletal systems left behind. Internal organs taken. Eyes taken." Every eye. She turned back to Coco. "Why the eyes?" It came out more sharply than the rest. Not because eyes were strange things to steal in Los Angeles... almost nothing was strange anymore... but because taking all of them sounded like intent. "Are they more valuable? Easier to trace? Is there identifying information in them that isn't present in the other tissue?"

She paused. "Or something else?" Elly watched Coco's face carefully.

Twenty-five sets of biological components, supposedly Tyrell, actually fresh... a warehouse full of counterfeit history. Someone had gone to considerable effort to make new things look old. She hated that kind of lie, not because it was dishonest (well, to be honest, she did hate that too), but because it meant someone expected people to ask questions... and had prepared answers in advance.

Her gaze drifted to Jergic's image again. August 23, 2021. Combat model. Elly studied the photograph. There was something disturbingly ordinary about him. No warning stamped across his forehead, no visible boundary between man and replicant, between someone the LAPD would question and someone the LAPD would kill. Just a face. And a drop of blood had been enough to tell them which kind of face it was.

Elly became conscious of her own pulse, the small pressure beneath the skin of her wrist, blood moving through vessels grown for her and belonging entirely to her. She tucked the thought away before it could become anything larger.

"One more thing." Her attention returned fully to Coco. "The explosive." She tapped the report with one finger. "The yīng máo. Homemade, you said. Impurities." A thought was already taking shape. "Can you fingerprint the recipe?"

Coco's expression shifted slightly, enough to tell her the question wasn't entirely stupid.
"Not literally," she clarified. "But if someone keeps making the same compound with the same process, same contaminants, same ratios..." She tilted her head. "Would it leave enough of a signature to compare against another scene?"

Elly had Varela's robberies in mind. She could feel the separate leads begin inching toward one another again. "Detective Varela investigated similar thefts. If evidence was retained, I want to know whether this explosive—or those sonic charges—appear anywhere in his cases. Can you look into that for me?"

She exhaled slowly through her nose. GENTEK. Turfan. Animoid Row. Jergic. Bootleg replicant tissue. Five roads leading away from the same crime scene. Maybe... Or... five roads someone wanted them to follow.

Elly finally reached for the stack of papers and lifted it from Coco's desk. "Send me everything you've got on Jergic. Incept records, known identifiers, old photographs, whatever survived the Blackout. And flag the DNA match to Crowe and Wylde."

A slight pause. "With the words blood at scene rather than suspect, please." She looked again at the man on the monitor. Woe unto Voto Jergic... Maybe. But evidence first. Always evidence.

Elly turned back toward Coco before leaving. "And Coco?" She waited until he looked at her. "If those organs were grown recently..." Her eyes moved briefly toward the evidence lockers and then back. "...I need to know what kind of facility could make them." Because someone had... and somewhere in Los Angeles, perhaps not very far away, twenty-five bodies had begun their existence in pieces.