MINERVA: Episodic, Single-Player Half-Life 2

7 - Collision - posted by Cargo Cult on Tuesday August 22 2006

Work in progress. Stealing characters (but not abilities or situations) from Eidetic, this tragic tale about MD5 checksums will actually have an ending. And be of novella length. Oh my.

Surprisingly, some other project keeps getting in the way. I forget what it's called. Athena, or something?

Collision

The tuneless bleep from the computer woke her with a start.

Red roundel on the email icon: one new message.

Katya sat up, picked up her long-cold mug of coffee, took one final swig then, composing herself, clicked on the icon.

Detective Peter Highbury, Leadchester police. Forwarded, a case number she didn't recognise in the subject line. New work, most likely. She'd better get paid for it this time, she thought. Bleary-eyed, she read on.

hi kat,

got a right interesting one for your weird deductive powers here! dead body, blood spatters, and a proper little mystery! one of ours is involved (but he's not the dead one), suggest you come down to station immediately. have attached some paperwork if you want a read, tried calling you but yr mobile was switched off or summat. silly girl.

see ya,

pete

Twit.

Frowning, she scrolled down further. Photographs: a male slumped against a wall, dark arterial spray arcing behind him. The dead body, presumably. That was one for the forensics; her work was much more fruitful when the subject was both alive and fully conscious.

More photographs. Stacks upon stacks of papers, folders and filing cabinets, almost filling a small, seemingly windowless room. Shelves with binders, files and boxes, all carefully ordered, aligned, sorted and collated. Unreadable on her computer screen, tiny, feverish black writing covered almost every available surface, like some scaly, reptilian skin.

Ah. This was presumably where she came in.

She closed the computer, ignoring the rest of the attached documents, stood up, put her coat on then started walking towards her office door. She'd better get paid for it this time, she thought again.

---

"So you're telling me you're not sure if it's a murder, a suicide or an accident?"

"Yeah. Pc Plod breaks into some apparently abandoned building, after being told of some kind of disturbance, and finds our corpse surrounded by boxes of papers, albeit very much alive and waving a gun around. Depending on who you believe, either our friendly stiff shoots himself despite our valiant Plod trying to wrestle the gun off him, viciously attempts to shoot Plod but gets shot himself in Plod's attempts to defend himself against such flagrant antisocial behaviour, or has his gun cruelly nicked by Plod and thus got shot in a topically messy bit of police brutality."

"Er... Right," Katya paused for a moment, thinking. "You basically don't have a clue who shot whom and why, yes?"

"No. I mean yes, we don't know. Whatever, you know what I mean."

Detective Highbury leant back in his chair, put his hands behind his prematurely balding head and began to smile.

Katya went on. "What about fingerprints? Witnesses? Anything like that? I mean, what's Constable Smith's account of it, given that he's a major potential suspect?"

"Fingerprints are all messed up, and could match any of the possible stories. Witnesses are our corpse and Pc Smith, and Smith claims it was all self-defence. But he's a bit, well, suspect anyway, in part because he nearly lost his job in a happy little incident a few months ago where his boot oh-so-accidentally came into contact with some lout's head. Claimed that was self-defence too, would you believe?"

"Two men, one gun, both had hands on gun, one man dies. Nobody except the survivor to say what happened, right?"

"Yup. Got it in one, girl."

Katya had to ask. "So, what do I have to do here? Magically delve into Smith's head, and retrieve the truth? I'm not a miracle lie-detector, you know. I'm a psychologist. I have methods too."

"Nah. Not Smith. Head's practically empty anyway. Need much better than that."

"So, what is it you want?"

Detective Highbury sat up, pulled a desk drawer open, heaved out a large plastic envelope filled with handwritten sheets of paper and dropped it on to the desk in front of her, grinning. Katya was expecting this.

"I want you to magically delve into the mind of a corpse. Think you can do that, my dear?"

---

Katya Sorokova. Newly qualified psychologist. Average height, average build, average looks. Mouse-brown, shoulder-length hair framing a thin face, high cheekbones, brown eyes and a long, slightly crooked nose. Still waiting for that proper, steady job which might fully utilise her years of expensive training, and now sat in her bedroom office on some as-yet unpaid side-work, poring over some tens of pages of miniscule handwriting with a magnifying glass.

Edward Traynor. Unemployed, homeless drifter until five years ago, at which point records documenting his existence began to peter out. Had excelled at school, before failing every single one of his A-levels; a death in his close family was thought to have triggered the first of his many mental breakdowns. Tall, desperately thin, almost emaciated. Sparse hair, a near skull-like head. A single gunshot wound to the lower jaw, the bullet travelling upwards and backwards until shearing through the brain-stem, killing him instantly.

Murder, suicide, or accident?

The handwritten pieces of paper she had been given so far were merely those which were found scattered on the floor in the immediate vicinity of the deceased. She had been reassured that there were many, many more where they came from - despite apparent attempts at the incineration of certain batches.

The handwriting was small, neat and usually surprisingly legible. Print, not joined-up, it generally formed proper, grammatically correct sentences, although any actual separation into paragraphs was missing. Written in thin, black pen on both sides of plain A4 paper, only the density of text and the content gave it away as the barely coherent ramblings of someone of perhaps less than sound mind.

So it continued:

"... today I have been made aware of some of the lesser known aspects of this condition, in that I am profoundly knowledgeable about the possibility of progressive changes which shall befall this non-local viewpoint. It is not entirely without due care and attention that I document these important facts and figures, for due to this means of communication I am limited to recording only that which can be understood by an uninformed bystander, since it is implicit that my message be read and dispersed by whomever may discover it. Furthermore, ..."

The predictable concern that the world was about to end?

How ... stereotypical. Cinematic, even.

Katya read on, determined to extract a theme more promising than crude paranoia. Flick through the folders, find something new.

... A diagram.

And that brings this ludicrous Creative Writing Week to a close. I hope you've enjoyed it!