During her lifetime thus far Lydia has been very successful at avoiding contact with the police. She’s had some automated spot fines, the kind of thing where you get a message telling you a drone saw you breaking the law and you can either pay the fine or contest it. Contesting it rarely works and costs more in the long run, so you take the fine and the points on your record. The fine gets taken directly out of your support wages, so if you don’t appeal, you have no contact with anyone in authority. There’s rarely any human intervention in the process, and no one even knows you did anything unless they check your record.
From her driving escapades with Gil, Lydia had learned how to keep off the radar, spot trouble brewing and duck out before the police arrived. This proved useful in other situations: for instance, one time when Lydia was at her block’s book group, someone told Melia Grace her interpretation of Gravity’s Rainbow was “overly literal” and Melia kicked off. Lydia saw which way the wind was blowing, quietly slipped out and went up to her flat. The fight escalated and eight people were arrested. Mum told Lydia she should’ve stuck around and streamed it: She could’ve got a few thousand views and earned a bit of pocket money off the affiliates. People love watching that stuff. But Lydia never thought it was worth the risk.
Now as Lydia stands in front of Fitz’s corpse slumped on the luxurious sofa, her glasses take in the scene, read her emotional state and a window pops up with 911? in it. Lydia answers yes while still trying to get her head around the situation. She tells the operator “Someone’s dead” and her glasses attach images of the scene. The operator tells her to wait there and cuts the call, and Lydia realizes she’s just called the police for the first time ever. It was barely even a decision.
She has instinctively read this as a murder, because everything about it looks like a murder, but she can’t take in the enormity of it. Stupidly she looks around as if the murderer might still be in the room and she’s just failed to notice—but no, she’s alone. There’s a particular type of alone you feel when in a room with someone who’s no longer alive, she’s discovering now, and it is the worst kind.
But what happened? If she could access the house data she could find out, but she doesn’t have those permissions. She’ll just have to work out what she can from what she can see.
Lydia forces herself to look at Fitz. She learned the basics about Logi biology and some first aid at LSTL, so she knows stuff like what their blood looks like and roughly where their vital organs are. It looks like he died of a gunshot to the chest and either died instantly or bled out: surely the former, otherwise he’d have tried to get help, or at least moved from the sofa. Her eyes travel upwards and for the first time she notices the canvas above his sofa is blank: a crack spreads out across its glassy surface from a hole slightly off-center. At least two shots were fired, hitting Fitz and the canvas, all while Lydia was asleep upstairs. How did they get in? Where was security? What were Arthur and Martha doing?
Lydia leaves the study, opens the front door and looks out. The morning air is already hot and sticky. Arthur is stationed to the left of the doorway, where he always is. Martha is presumably in the backyard.
The street looks so normal. How can it look normal when Fitz is dead in there? Even though they walked around every day accompanied by drones specifically tasked with protecting Fitz from harm, even though she was aware of the hostility many people felt towards the Logi, Lydia never felt like she lived in a world where harm might actually come to him.
“Can I help you with anything this morning?” says a voice behind Lydia, making her jump. She turns and sees the domestic has silently trundled up behind her.
“Did you see what happened?” Lydia replies.
“Can you be more specific?”
“Who killed him? What happened? How did they get in?”
“Sorry, I can’t answer that. Would you like some breakfast?”
Lydia blinks.
The first thing Lydia needs to do, she realizes in a panic, is dispose of any & she still has in her possession. There’s a small amount in a vial in her bag, which she briefly considers taking in one go before deciding, correctly, that this is the worst idea ever. She then washes out the vial and pushes it down to the bottom of the waste bin in the kitchen. Is it well hidden enough? The cops won’t be thinking about that sort of thing, surely?
At this point she’s hit by the reality that she’s going to have to talk to the police.
Lydia calms herself down. Everything is fucked and she cannot control that, but she can address her hangover, and if she does that she will be more able to deal with everything being fucked. The domestic has made some coffee so she drinks it and asks it to make toast. “And put some extra coffee on. The police are coming.”
“I know,” says the domestic: it’s patched into all that stuff.
“I mean they might want some coffee.”
“Yes. I understood this.”
Lydia waits for her toast while she rues the fact there are no baked beans in the house: her ideal hangover breakfast would be beans on toast with a glug of maple syrup on top, a meal that covers all bases. Fitz would probably order some in for her if she asked but she can’t do that because he’s dead. She wishes she could stop thinking about this in terms of what it means for her. This is not about her. But she has no idea what she’s going to do now. LSTL didn’t prepare her for this. If he was killed there were supposed to be people around to deal with it.
She’s spreading marshmallow fluff over her first slice of toast when the police arrive and let themselves in: an emergency call registered from this address gives them automatic permission to enter. She remains at the kitchen table as a cop drone hovers in to ascertain whether she is armed and dangerous.
“Put down the knife,” the drone tells her.
“It’s not sharp,” she says, holding up a knife slathered in marshmallow fluff, a drip of which runs down the side of the knife and over her fingers.
“Put down the knife,” the drone repeats.
Lydia puts down the knife and licks her fingers. The drone emits a loud chime that indicates it’s safe to enter the kitchen, and two uniformed officers do so. They take in the scene—Lydia in her pajamas, sitting at the table and licking marshmallow fluff from her fingers—and she feels the marshmallow fluff was an error. It seems a frivolous thing to eat after discovering a murder victim, the kind of thing a sociopath would eat in such a situation. She wants to explain to them that high-sugar foods are the most effective thing for a translation hangover because of the insulin imbalance. But at the same time she doesn’t want to draw more attention to the marshmallow fluff. So she says nothing.
“Your name is Lydia Southwell?” one of the cops asks, reading the information from his glasses. The standard-issue police glasses are aviator-style reaction shades and make all the cops look like utter dicks, without exception.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“You worked for the victim?”
Victim. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
Lydia tells them she found the body and immediately called the police, and that’s all she knows. Did she touch anything, they ask? No, she says, she touched nothing. She checks her glasses for stats on which rooms she’s spent time in so far today, and it says she was in the study for one minute and forty-one seconds. She tells them this, and at their request bounces her full footage of her time in that room over to them.
The cops mutter something to each other, tell her to stay in the kitchen, then leave. Lydia realizes she forgot to offer them coffee and calls down the hallway to them, but they don’t seem to hear. She sits back and eats her marshmallow fluff on toast, under the watchful eye of the cop drone.
Lydia listens to the police come and go while she refreshes her feeds over and over and over, watching the news start to break via her neighbors.
@McLean&Evans67 / Police arriving in our street … very odd for a Sunday … gone into the Logi embassy house? Live now / TR97
@Swingleton1604 / Picked up cop chatter—homicide detectives have arrived, treating it as murder, no word on victim yet / TR96
These, and several others, have set up streams and Lydia finds herself watching the outside of the building she’s currently inside. More police arrive all the time, pouring in resources commensurate with the importance of the victim: a huge CSI truck pulls up and a dozen drones stream from the back. A pop tunnel is erected between the front door and the road, frustrating the growing crowd who stand behind the barriers erected across the street, peering in the hope of seeing Fitz’s body being carried out. Whoever puts the first shot of it online will be able to megamonetize it.
In the absence of any official statement from the police, distortions of the story begin to spread. Many people leap to the most obvious and straightforward conclusion—that Fitz has died and there are suspicious circumstances—but that’s not the juiciest version:
@SKINNYDIP / Logi cultural attaché COMMITS SUICIDE in shocking development—take short survey or medical scan to view pictures / TR23
@FACTS4FRIENDS / Assassination of high-ranking Logi LATEST—who’s next? We rank ten most likely targets, number four will surprise you! / TR15
@EVERYTHING_FOCUS / Embassy covers up death of cultural attaché in SEX GAME GONE WRONG—FULL REALDEF recon for premium subscribers AVAILABLE NOW / TR19
@NOWPUNCHER / Logi Ambassador “Fitzwilliam” MURDERS translator in fit of rage—tributes paid by colleagues and friends / TR12
There’s a picture of Lydia on the last one, with her old blue hair. It’s nice to know some of the spinners and contengines who generate this stuff are aware of who she is—although when she clicks through to the “tributes” she finds none of it is accurate and none of her “colleagues and friends” are real people, just stock images with generic quotes attached. Until some actual facts push these stories down they’ll float around the feeds regardless of their junk TRs, and people will be looking at them, just as she is. The temptation to dip into this stuff is annoyingly strong, and she tries to resist it.
Lydia knows she could send out the truth herself—the truthometers would recognize her connection to Fitz and her stream’s solid record and score it highly—but she suspects that would antagonize the cops, and anyway she doesn’t want to make this story about her. She takes off her glasses to force herself to look away, and notices a bunch of pap drones at the kitchen window, grabbing footage of her. She goes to dim the panes—but then Martha deals with it by unleashing a crackle like a discharge of static and fritzing the paps. It’s almost comical how they drop out of the air, making a series of clonks as they hit the patio.
Lydia dims the panes anyway.
Messages are arriving from the agency and the embassy, and she wonders if she was expected to contact them herself. She replies to tell them she’s fine and is cooperating with the police and she doesn’t know what happened. Her connections have seen the news and are messaging her, but she can’t bring herself to reply to those. Maybe she should set up a triple-O: Hi! Thanks for the reachout! My boss has been murdered and I may be slow to respond.
Another cop comes in. Lydia remembers to offer him coffee this time, but he declines.
“Where were you at the time of the murder?” he asks.
“When was the time of the murder?” Lydia replies.
“Two fourteen a.m.”
“I was asleep upstairs.”
“You didn’t hear anything, or come down at any point?”
“No. But you’ll be able to see all that in the house data, there’s cameras in all the hallways.”
The cop runs his tongue over his top teeth and nods. “We’ll need you to come to the station to give a statement.”
“Can we not just do it here?”
“Protocol is to do it at the station, miss,” he says impatiently, and escorts her to the front door. (Lydia takes an involuntary glance through the study door and notices Fitz’s body has been removed.) She emerges into the pop tunnel, which leads down to a secure car. Lydia gets in the back; no one gets in the front. The windows are blacked out. She can hear a commotion as the car pulls away—the crowds speculating on who’s inside—and over this an ayaie formally warns her that all her actions and speech will be recorded until further notice.