Chapter 4: Tommy's Den

In a matter of seconds, the elevator came down to my floor, the fifth floor, where I work in surveillance. Guys like me are the scouts; we go out and look for anything suspicious, and we’re extremely possessive on what case we want to be in. We monitor and check-up on anything strange or weird, like a giant man-rat running through the sewers. I start walking through the hallways in a calm manner, trying not to keep my mind occupied.

It’s still gnawing at me, though; all these questions, these theories, these ideas. They’re still digging into my head, like a jackhammer is pounding away on the top of my brain, and I can’t seem to get what the hell is going on. I could try to see if I can hack into Paul’s office and break the security, but that will just make it worse. I could try to talk to the chief again, tell him I need the code for his office, but he’s trying to pick himself up, and he’d snap at me if I did. So I decided to try and ask around, see if someone knew Paul. This place is called “surveillance” for a reason; most things don’t get past us. No one told me anything except for one guy telling me he works in AT; Augmentation Trafficking, eighth floor.

I went back to the elevator and took it up to the eighth floor. I was afraid I might have to run into more people like Paul when I got up here, but I was pleasantly surprised to see I wasn’t. When the doors opened up, my ears caught the myriad of voices and sounds in the floor, everyone discussing what was going on in their cases, talking to others about how someone’s moving augments illegally, or just general chatter in their everyday lives. It was basically the same as all of the other floors I’ve been through, except this floor seemed to be mostly dominated by Nanos more than Gears; I’ve probably counted fifteen barcodes as I walked among them.

Putting on my detective skills, I go around and ask if they know who Paul is. None of the guys know who he is, but they only know about his famous crimes concerning the different gangs and dealers that parade around unlicensed augments for hapless folk wanting a good way to get through life. I felt a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. Why was Paul a closet case among his peers? Why didn’t he talk to them about his life or family…if he even has both of those things?

Almost giving up, I decide to head back to my desk and think some more until something caught my eye. A golden-haired woman was sitting by a desk, looking nervous and lost. Her eyes shifted from one direction to another, seeing all the Nanos and Gears walk by, looking with a hint of disdain. But what really caught my eye was the insignia sewn into the right sleeve of her overcoat; a five-sided shield with talons clutching an egg.

What’s a Human Preservationist doing here? I wondered. These guys are anti-augmentation, screaming foul at the idea of humankind becoming augmented. The Hyperions even had a few riots involving these guys, seeing how we mostly use Nanos and Gears in our police force. The HPs kept complaining that there’s not enough Naturals working in most jobs, and they’re right. They keep ignoring the fact that Nanos and Gears are “more efficient” than Naturals, and that the Hyperions don’t enforce augmentation"if they did, I wouldn’t be here"but it certainly does help with catching the technologically superior criminals. It’s part of nature; one side adapts, so does another to beat it. Whatever to keep the equilibrium steady.

I walk up to the Preservationist, moving through a couple of guys, when she directed her dark brown eyes to me. It looked like she jumped a little out of fear, but she kept her calm and waited for me. “Excuse me, miss?” were the first words that came out of my mouth.

She flinched a bit away from me, thinking I must’ve been a Gear or Nano. Then she regained her composure and gave me a look of scrutiny. “Yes?” She responded cautiously.

“Are you up here waiting for someone?”

“Yes, I’m here about the suspect I’ve apprehended.”

Apprehended? She sounds like she belongs here in the law force. Like she’s a secret agent for them. Never heard of a Preservationist capturing someone. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yes, I caught her smuggling nanomachines to her clients. I’ve been tailing her for quite some time, and finally, my work has borne fruit.”

The way she talks and acts…it’s like she’s trained to be like that. Act professional, like she’s one of us. She sounded proud of that, too. And she’s been tailing this woman, too? What kind of practices do these guys have? Are the Preservationists training them to track and capture now? Sure, these guys have made protests before, but nothing like surveillance. It gets me a little uneasy toward her, but she said a woman smuggled the nanos. “So who did you take her to?”

“Detective Tommy Powell.”

That name sent a shock up my spine. I try not to let my emotions take over and I nod calmly. “Powell, huh?”

“Yes. Him and I have been working on finding her.”

“You were working with us? I thought you guys hated us.”

“Yes, but we work together on a few cases rarely. This one would’ve endangered the Naturals from the girl’s faulty nanomachines.”

I resisted the urge to raise an eyebrow and kept being professional. “The girl? How old is she?”

She looks away, down at the floor, thinking of a good estimate. She looks back at me with an answer in her eyes, and says, “I’d say about twenty years. Her early-twenties, yeah.”

I gave a quick smile, hiding my panic. She didn’t seem to catch my fears. “Oh, is that right?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling back.

“Does she know the nanos are defunct?”

She shrugged nonchalantly. “That’s what Powell is going to find out.”

I thought of a quick excuse and said, “Um, sorry for bothering you. I need to get back to work.”

She smiles again with red lips and says, “Oh, no, you’re fine. I’m just waiting for the answers so we can follow up.”

“All right. Thank you for the talk, uh…”

“Melanie.” She holds out a hand. “Melanie Locker.”

I shake it once, and gave her my full name. I let go and head back to the elevator, both saying our good-byes. I press the down button, acting patient around the elevator while trying not to fidget, and a car comes down, letting a few guys out. I hit a button to the first floor, and it takes me straight there.

The Hyperions have been recognized for their talent of pursuing both the crooks involved in different crimes, and pursuing the answers they got that would lead us to a closed case. We’ve been given awards, accolades, and praise for our “honest, clean, and satisfactory methods” of catching the lawbreakers and sending them straight to justice. We’re the most reliable police force in all of Solyssia and in most of the U.S. What they said about us was only half true. We catch bad guys on a daily basis, yeah. We throw them in interrogation rooms and serve to bust out answers in a proficient way without beating them out of it. But when we get someone who just refuses to answer, who refuses to cooperate with us after three pain-staking months…then those “honest, clean, and satisfactory methods” are thrown out the window for more cruel, inhumane, and unethical methods.

I make it to the first floor and take the stairs to the basement. I walk through the network of hallways to a supposed dead end, and I put a hand on its smooth surface. A warm, green glow scans my handprint, and then an eye-scanner stretches out from an opening the handprint scanner opened up. I let it scan my eye, record my vitals, and the wall parts way a bit, revealing a hidden lift going down to the lower floors. I step inside and head to Floor B7.

The floors beneath the Hyperion Precinct are called the Dens. The rise of new augmentations provides different types of technology, such as enabling you to control your emotions with near-perfection. You can learn how to say the right things in an interview, become the main focus of attention among a group, or even outsmart anyone interrogating you for answers. This tech was open to the populace, but was later outlawed from everyone, seeing how it can be used for detrimental means against everyone and anyone. The Shrouded Voices, the group responsible for the Blind Man Tragedy and other terrorist acts, showed how diabolic these social enhancers are. We got rid of them over time, scrapping as many of those enhancers as we can…at least we think we did. We haven’t heard a peep out of them for a while. That doesn’t mean, however, that the social tech couldn’t be available to everyone else…at least, not legally. Some of the suspects we catch have this social tech, and it makes interrogation that much harder and draining on the interrogators, and sometimes, eventually fail. In order to provide answers quicker, a network of subterranean rooms were made in secret underneath the Hyperion building. These rooms were built only for all kinds of tortures ranging back to the ancient times, like flogging, and waterboarding, to the years of today, like nano-nailing, which was making a Nano’s bugs send pain signals of various intensities, depending on how much they wanted them to hurt. They don’t use these rooms for everyone, though; only guys responsible for committing a severe crime like murder, rape, augmentation trafficking, and other high-level crimes. People like runners or proxies get an interrogation, and then once they find another lead, they leave them alone. Also, they only have a time limit for the Dens; they have about two hours before they come down and relieve the suspect from their room. They don’t want them to get too into it.

The Dens are the Hyperions’ most well-kept secret, and the most hypocritical aspect of these “guardians of Solyssia.” We could’ve easily spent the time and money to legalize the social enhancers for a select few; specialists trained to use them for the greater good. But it was obviously against their code. The Hyperions always uphold a law, and never break it. They follow their own rules, and no one else’s, whether they may be ethical or not. And it’s part of the reason why I hate these guys. The reason I stay here is because I know their secret. If I get out there and tell the world, I’d be a number one elimination priority the moment I step out of the building. Found them out on my fifth year here, when I was following rumors on their “Dens." I’m pretty sure there are others in the same boat with me, but with this place being under constant surveillance, like every other street in Solyssia, a mere peep out of them, or an implied statement would be enough to take them down to the Dens for a little private time.

I made it to B7, and the doors opened the way to a dim hallway, with doors on each side. Each door led to a poorly-lit room that had only a table, two chairs, and whatever tools of the trade they ordered down there for their own rooms. The only way in and out was a door with a steel handle, and would only open every time a Hyperion officer touched the handle. Pliers, scalpels, forceps, restraints, a cornucopia of drugs and chemicals they can mix for their own uses, fire-heads"helmets that increase their internal temperature"needles, spiked mandibles, and other draconian instruments that would haunt a man’s dreams. No one outside the rooms would ever know what’s happening on the other side of the walls, because there were no windows to see with, all the rooms were soundproof, and there was no way to communicate outside of the rooms, whether by nanomachines, mechanical augmentation, or tracking bugs, because the rooms here soak up the signals. The only ones that know what’s going on inside are the people inside participating. It’s another form of psychological torture, making the interrogated feel like this is the only universe they belong in, and the only one who they can plead to is the interrogator.

I’ve been in one of these before after I got caught stalking one of the guys taking a suspect here. They showed me a sample of what they do to them. I saw a poor guy strapped to a chair while someone was looming over him, as if he’s ready to follow an oncoming order. I heard the victim pleading: begging for him to let him go, to spare him. Then the torturer grabbed him by the jaw and forced him to look up. The suspect swore up and down to tell everything and anything, but the detective didn’t even twitch or crack a smile as he put acid into his right eye. Then the detective let go, and the next thing that came after were howls and squeals of pain as his eye was burning out and turning into liquid right before me. He fell to the side, still stuck to the chair, crying out of his other eye, with tears from his dying eye also being eaten up. He moaned and cried for the torment to stop, the acid slowly creeping to his brain. The detective stood above him, still as a rock, watching him die. He showed no emotion in his face, no movement, nothing. I couldn’t tell if he enjoyed it, despised it, or worse, just didn’t care, like he’s been doing this his whole life.

Finally, as the victim’s face twists and shakes his head, the acid creeping up on his brain, he let out one more frightening, heart-stopping scream…then his scream was cut off and he lied there, motionless. I never said a word. I was frozen, out of fear and grief. I forgot to have taken a breath after those excruciating 40 seconds of watching him die, so I took the deepest breath of my life, hoping it would calm me down. It didn’t. My back became incredibly cold, chilling sweat coming down my head, my whole body feeling stiff. I was mortified. Speechless. I wanted to scream out of horror. The next thing that happened was a hand leaning on my shoulder, and a voice that said, “Now…if you squeal to everyone about this...we won’t kill you that fast. We want to make sure you get the message before we decide how much you’re worth.” Then after a pause, he said, “Welcome to the Hyperions, golden boy.”

I’ll never forget that moment. I dreamed for weeks of what they could do to me, and what they’ve done to him. It was…it was horrible. What other way could I describe it? I can only find one word that I know that can accurately describe everything that happened in that one moment. And it was horrible. But most of all, I’ll never forget that voice. And over time, I began to know who it belonged to.

And that voice belonged to Detective Tommy Powell.

As my steps made echoes in the dim hallways of the chambers of Hell hiding underneath the station of these “gilded guardians”"named as such for the golden stripes along a Hyperion officer’s sleeves and pant legs"I made it to Powell’s Den. High class officers and detectives in the Hyperions have their own dens assigned to them, and can be used whenever they wished to use them. I remember this den specifically because this was where they showed me the sample of the tortures here; where I saw the man dying by acid. I didn’t even know if he was a criminal or not. They never said. All they told me before all that was that they would show me an example of what they do here. They never did tell me if he was a suspect or not. And I never bothered to ask if he was, mostly out of fear for these “heroes.”

I took out my standard-issue Matter-Sight sunglasses and put them on, letting me see through the walls and into the room as I changed the magnification on the lens. The Hyperions give various gadgets to guys like me, in order to give them an edge against the Gears and Nanos. These paled in comparison to the technology the Gears and Nanos had, but I’d rather take old, functioning antiquities than risking myself suffering from a glitch in my system I can’t recover from. 

The glasses granted my worst fears. I saw Detective Powell walking around the table, his face contorted with disgust, but his body moving around like a lion toying with its prey, mocking with his superiority toward his prisoner. His black hair was a little frayed, a few strands out of place, his cybernetic fists balled up, ready to strike the victim, a young woman who looked like she was in her late teens. She had her hood up to protect her face, and her arms covered her head. Augment-dealers usually recruit kids or teens so they can play the pity angle. They were easier to recruit, especially the ones down on their luck with only lint occupying their wallets. They were essentially pawns in a greater scheme.

The pity angle, though, didn’t faze Detective Tommy Powell. A lot of detectives here used different instruments and drugs to make a suspect scream a confession out of them. Tommy is a notorious tormentor because he never asks for anything; he says his hands are enough. As a Gear, he uses specialized arm and leg augmentations to increase his blows upon his suspects. I’ve only heard rumors, but they’ve had to clean his den a lot because of how much blood he’d spill, just by using his hands. They say he’s put his hands into suspects in many ways they’re afraid of describing. I didn’t want to hear about what kind of humiliating things he does to his perps, so I tend to shut things like that out.

I wanted to have a good reason why I should barge into Tommy’s den, point my gun at him, and demand that he leave this poor girl alone, but I don’t know exactly what Powell has been doing to her. I shouldn’t even be down here in the Dens, but I did it because there’s no way this young woman did anything that extreme. All she did was deliver bad nanos to others. She probably didn’t know they were, but her deeds wouldn’t warrant a trip to the Dens…would they? She’s just an accessory. Not the real perp.

Regardless, I witness Tommy pick her up from the skin of her neck, showing me her face without him knowing. There were bruises and cuts on her face, though not enough to hide her ivory-colored face. Her green eyes tried to make her look strong, but every part of her mind must’ve commanded her not to cry, because they held misery within them. I see Tommy whisper something into her ear, and she didn’t flinch. She didn’t make a quivering lip or let a tear out of her eye. She looked strong, trying to show that she wasn’t afraid of whatever he’d do to her, but that doesn’t fool Powell. A devious smile stretches across his face, he lets go of her and makes her upper body lay flat on the table…and he reached down to his pants and started taking them off.

That action alone made me pull out my gun, grab the handle, and pushed it open with all the force behind my arm. I pointed my gun straight at Powell, set to kill, and down the barrel of a gun, I saw the girl look up, face full of surprise"maybe a hint of hope"and Powell’s face decorated with an emotion I can’t make out; whether it was rage for me barging in, shock for almost catching him with his pants down, or fear for seeing my fury easily becoming apparent. Either way, he wasn’t happy.

“What the f**k are you doing here, Davy?” He said in his dumb Brooklyn accent that I despise.

“I should ask you the same thing, Tommy,” I say in an eerie calm. “This girl’s a runner. She didn’t kill and loot some poor guy out on the street.”

“And how do you know that, Golden Boy?” His anger starts rising as he puts his pants back on. “I didn’t ask for anyone watching while I’m making this c**t squeal.”

“She’s just a girl, Powell. Only a runner.”

“Only a runner? This broad’s been giving crappy augments to poor saps looking for some sort of uplift. She’s been ruining other people’s lives.”

“And that justifies humiliating and violating her?”

“Hey, come on, Davy,” he cracks an insidious smirk. “It’s my Den. I do what I want in this hole. Besides, the dame upstairs told me I can do whatever I wanted to her. So I showed her to my favorite room in the building.”

I shake my head in pure disgust. “Powell, this is against code.”

“I’m sorry? You didn’t give a s**t about the way we do things. Now you’re strutting in with your f*****g peacock feathers, acting like the big superhero?”

“She’s just a kid! Powell…you don’t get it. If you tried raping her, she wouldn’t say a damn thing. All you’d be doing is traumatizing her.”

“Do you even know what's going on, Davy?"

“You’re just doing this for your own sick pleasure.”

“You know what’s sick? Staring me down at the other end of a gun. Me, a fellow Hyperion.”

“You are in no way my friend. You’re supposed to be looking for a confession, aren’t you?”

“This is one way to get it while having fun.”

“But you have a time limit. Don’t you?”

Powell doesn’t have a wisecrack for me. So I continue to injure his pride and take him down from his pedestal.

“How long have you been in here?” I asked, starting my own interrogation.

“None of your f*****g business, golden boy,” he snarled.

“See, I’m guessing you don’t have a lot of time, and you haven’t made this girl whimper. How’s that gonna look on your record, Tommy? What do you think the guys upstairs will see when Tommy Powell can’t make a twenty-year old girl sing like a bird?”

Powell’s eyes flared with rage, his cybernetic hands flexing. “What are you up to, Davy?”

I calm myself down and relax. “Listen. You’ve been here for a long time, and your minutes are almost up. You haven’t gotten a single answer out of her, didn’t you?”

Powell finally swallowed his pride and confessed. “No.”

“Then how about I take over?”

The very idea of me running this interrogation caused Powell to burst out laughing. “Oh, s**t, Davy! You’re a jokester! You don’t even have the stomach to do what I do! What makes you think you can make her squeal?”

“Just…give me a chance. Give me twenty minutes to talk to her.”

He gave me a condescending sneer. “And what makes you think you can do my job better than me?”

“I won’t. All the credit can go to you. No one or nothing has to know about what’s going on here. I’ll get your answer, and then she can go free. You can decide whatever kind of sentence she gets, but she leaves this room after I’ve gotten an answer out of her. We’ll leave each other alone after this. Sound like a deal?”

I couldn’t believe what I was doing here. What’s making me bargain with Tommy Powell, a demon among men, so that this girl, this girl I know nothing about, can go free without suffering anymore in this dark and dank hole? Is it personal integrity? Trying to stand up for the false ideals the Hyperions boast and gloat over and over to the unsuspecting public? I had no clue as to what I’m doing here, but I couldn’t let this guy walk all over the rules and regulations of a practice I wanted no part of. I never wanted to involve myself in the Dens, and listen to the screams and wails of the people down here in this pseudo-Hell. She’s just a runner. A courier. She’s just an extension of whatever scheme some sick b*****d started. I don’t know what kind of sentence Powell will give her, but it’s better than letting her stay here a bit longer.

Powell walks up to me, directly in front of my gun, the barrel pressing on his chest. I almost expected him to disarm me, break my arm and make me a toy of entertainment, twisting and pulling my limbs in whatever way he could. But much to my shock, Powell walked to my side and stopped. I back up a bit from him, still aiming my gun. “Ten minutes,” he says. “That’s all you got. And if I don’t see you out here with an answer…then there’s gonna be two messes the guys will have to clean up. Got it, golden boy?”