THE CORPSE THAT had once housed the consciousness of Olon Daniel lay upon a slab at the Jakarta International Airport. The metal slab was in a large, disused room. The airport's staff had forgotten the room's original purpose with its empty metal drawers, so it had come to be used as a storage room. Pallets of blank paper nestled against the back wall. Various boxes, some already open, lied piled up all around the room. A long broom with a green handle rested in a corner.
When Inspector Sangal Yun was faced with the choice of what to do with the body around which a crowd had gathered, he remembered the storage room with the empty drawers and metal slabs that, when he had first had seen them, hadn't appeared to be designed for anything in particular.
No one had found a dead body in the airport, much less in the region, for some time. As a result, no one had used the room once designed to store dead bodies.
Sangal hadn't believed his own conclusion even after he set the cleanup process in motion. Even in the days before lethal weapons had been outlawed completely, no one could have any use for a morgue in an airport.
Could they?
Sangal made a note of that in the notepad he carried around in his breast pocket.
The room must have had a purpose at some time or another, even if everyone had forgotten about it. At one time in history, dead bodies might have been so common in the airport that someone had gone to the trouble of installing a place where they might be stored.
That fact alone warranted an investigation, as far as Sangal was concerned.
Standing nine and a half feet tall with short black hair on his head and wide, thick bristles of hair on the back of his hands, Sangal did his best to appear as ordinary as possible. He purposefully wore nondescript brown suits so that the untrained eye would slide right off him. He wanted to be invisible so he could observe matters without interruption. Doing so meant getting people to ignore him. People would always be surprised when he began asking pointed questions.
He was not, however, thinking about remaining uninteresting as he rushed forward to investigate a woman's cry. He had been daydreaming on a day off, walking through the airport as was his custom. He observed people during his walks. Good people, bad people, indifferent people, most of whom looked the same.
He even spotted on that day, and to his surprise, small people.
They were two small people walking beside a taller yet still short person. He let them go on their way, imagining any number of scenarios which might explain their remarkable presence in the airport. He has never seen anyone like them anywhere else.
Some time after that, he heard the scream.
The scream had come from a woman who first saw the body of Olon Daniel, so identified from his thumbprints. Sangal had gained an advantage on the all other investigators just by being able to press a thumb from Olon's detached arm onto a machine. Had it been a professional killing, the man's fingers would have been taken by his killer. Sangal had read of cases where whole hands had been cut off from a victim to prevent quick identification.
In this case, Sangal could only assume the murderer wanted the victim to be found. It was not clear how the man had died. There was blood in his mouth, but there seemed to be nowhere else. Near his corpse was found a hand-held Rostam K-201, a weapon banned in every region due to its lethal ability.
Sangal had seen the results of the weapon when fired to a man. That other corpse had a separated head from its dismantled body. He found he could not disagree with the decision to criminalize its use.
Yet, it had been used. The weapon had worked so well that it destroyed the tiles where it was fired several times, breaking them to small pieces. Why the tiles and not the man? Why did he die? Why choose to leave the weapon beside the body?
Sangal could only think of one explanation for that particular decision: whoever killed Olon Daniel had power to spare without the gun. In all probability, Sangal had on his hands a crime committed by one of the world's elite citizens.
Prosecuting such a case would be impossible. As soon as he found out the identity of the murderer, he would be told to drop the case. Olon Daniel, whoever he was before he became a corpse, would be disposed of in an incinerator somewhere close by. If Sangal was right-and he thought that he could not be wrong in this regard-he had a limited amount of time to discover all the facts that he could.
He had delayed informing his superiors for that reason. The responsibility to report the case to headquarters. fell to him as the ranking officer on the scene. He placed the call an hour after he combed over the body in the disorganized morgue. He found that even without the assistance of a central computer, rumors had spread so fast that the people at headquarters had already heard about the case before he told them about it.
They had reached the same conclusions he had. He was told to keep investigating until he was told otherwise.
He conducted his investigation for three hours straight. Though the day was his one day off out of fourteen work days, he felt compelled to work. He examined every detail, went over every eyewitness account as it came in. No one had seen anything, nor had anyone heard anything.
Sangal began looking for a person who might have been walking around with a scowl on his face, or someone who might have been overheard making threats of some kind. Witnesses reported the same two small citizens that he himself had seen. They had checked out passengers flown in from Alexandria, courtesy of Rayston Mining International. Sangal had added them to the list of people to question, though he thought it unlikely that they had anything to do with Olon's death.
After getting all the information he could get from the body without dissecting it, Sangal stood in front of it, staring at a pair of closed eyelids. He thought that if he looked long enough, his mind might make a connection he had not yet seen. He processed a great deal of information in a short amount of time, he only needed to piece it all together.
He felt on the verge of a discovery when his supervisor walked through the swinging double doors of the morgue.
With his short hair spiked in the front, sideburns running down his cheeks parallel to his ears, and a suit on his body worth more than a week of Sangal's pay, Gorman Asio appeared to be a man who wanted to be noticed. His expression, like a storm cloud over his face, further confirmed this impression.
Gorman wasted no time in getting to the point. He said, "Drop the investigation, Sangal."
Instead of responding, Sangal stared at the corpse. Gorman waited beside him. He glanced over Olon's body, then rubbed his neck.
Sangal said, "I know who killed this man."
Gorman grunted. "So do we. Though I must say you have astonishing skill to have figured it out without our resources. I'm telling you, this one is a case you want no part of. We are handing the investigation over to the Black Brigade. An officer will be arriving shortly. You can tell him everything you know when he arrives. After that, I want you off the case. Any further investigative action afterwards will be treated as a crime against the city."
Sangal, who had expected such a reaction, did not argue the point. He said, "Who shall I be speaking with?"
"An Officer Unpo, I'm told," Gorman said. "Give him every courtesy. After all, it's his career on the line here."
"The case is that serious?"
Gorman Asio turned away from the corpse. He said, "Yes it is."
"YOU DO?" Savannah asked. She grabbed Kenneth's sleeve. "What is it?"
Kenneth grinned. He said, "It's called an infinite loop. It means-well, I forget. But anyway, you fix the problem by shutting down power to the machine, then starting it up again."
Unquill stared at Kenneth, wide-eyed. "Such a thing has never been attempted. It would mean that all the records on the computer would be erased. Everything we've learned about future history, everything we know about the past, all of it would be gone. We'd have to start over from the beginning."
Kenneth poked Unquill in the arm. "But the universe has no beginning," he said.
Unquill looked away. "Well, that's true, but still..."
"Can we do it?"
A voice called out from the crowd, "Let's give it a try!"
Other people shouted their agreement.
Unquill faced Kenneth, a concerned expression on his face. "To do what you suggest would take the better part of a day. If my understanding is correct, power is fed into the computer by several sources throughout the city. There are also back up systems in place in case of failure. We would have to request the city to shut off all the power. Since we don't have the computer to tell them to do that, we'd have to travel there directly."
A man stepped forward from the crowd. He wore an ill-fitting tweed jacket together with a pair of mismatched shoes. He brushed a strand of gray hair out of his careworn, age-lined face.
"I am the President of Jakarta, Kunan Slaan," he said. "Is it true what you say, small one? Can we get the computer operating again?"
Kenneth considered his response before he answered. "Probably. At the very least, if you try it and it doesn't work, you will have learned something."
"Will it not break anything?" asked Savannah beside him.
"Oh, it won't. It's just restarting our computers at home. Another go at booting up will fix the problem." Kenneth frowned. "That honestly had never occurred to you?" he asked the president.
"Probably not because doing so in a computer like this requires a much complicated process... hugely so than when you're re-booting your old computer," Unquill whispered near him.
Kenneth was about to protest "old" but Kunan closed his eyes as he sighed in relief. "No. Never. Long have we waited for someone with an answer. You have finally come."
"Err, yeah...?" Kenneth agreed hesitantly.
"I know that we shall repair the computer. We shall. I no longer doubt it."
Kunan's words energized the crowd, who at the very least thought something profound had been discussed but did not waste time to ask believing they might not understand it anyway. A cheer erupted, echoing everywhere with the enormous chamber. Kenneth finally felt too proud of himself to notice that the Soonseen he had observed earlier was no longer among them.
He shook Kunan's hand as best he could. Kunan, whose hand was much larger, gripped Kenneth's hand softly so as not to crush it.
"Let us begin at once," Kunan said.
"And so we shall," Unquill agreed, a grin splitting his face for the first time in such a long time that week.