The Day Knox Died: Part 1

When A Lawman Sees Beyond The Veil...

Art by Kevin John Jacob

Officer Adam Knox had just slid into his police-issue black boots, had popped the cuffs of his police-issue slacks over their shafts, and went about grazing on his police-issue breakfast of bacon, eggs and coffee. The sun beamed through the clean glass windows of the apartment as the many news items concerning increased productivity and happy wolven interest stories boomed over the module wall’s silver speakers.

The dark gray wolf stood a lean and tall 25 years old, with chiseled muzzle and well-groomed coat making him one of the sharper looking of Haven’s finest. He ate with a gentleman’s demeanor, though found himself with the nasty schoolboy habit of taking in his jet-black brew in liter-sized gulps, with half the mug gone between his second fried egg and fifth strip of bacon.

It seemed a “doubleplusgood” day (or so the Old World saying went), and the officer’s mind soon turned to the usual events. The briefing with the Commissioner and Captain, the public enemies he had to take care of, and idle hours in-between spent in the company of friend and partner Lamont Harris.

The black-furred Officer Harris, one hand higher than his six-foot copilot, was something of a joker. When Knox once made the idle remark of “how the hell can every thug on the list be Public Enemy Number One,” Harris was always quick on the comeback. “Just think of it as a mile-wide awards stand.” he chuckled behind the wheel of their hovercraft cruiser. “And we’re the ones handing out the medals.” It was as good a line as any to make it all make sense.

Harris was also something of a crack shot. Today was range-day after wrapping up their patrol, and the re-calibration of their flat, GLOCK-styled laser pistols was sure to make the competition fierce. Harris once nailed a perp blind, which while unorthodox, had gone according to plan, and made him the talk of the department for a good week. “Betcha won’t outgun me this time Lamont.” he chuckled to himself, downing the very last of his coffee.

It was upon sliding into his police-issue jacket when the message boomed over the morning newscast: DISTRICT 222 MOURNS OFFICER HARRIS: DEAD AT 31 IN FREAK HOVER ACCIDENT.

While the brisk newscasts left little time to linger on such upsetting items, Officer Knox found himself standing at the threshold, silent and still. The horrible chill, felt only at the bristling moment before death, played along his spine. He was a brave hound, a tough one even at his age, but it truly was the death of a friend that brought him to pause before setting out into the world he was now to patrol alone.

He received all the usual condolences from his colleagues, and the light-gray, oddly stocky Captain Fielding was certainly sympathetic. “You know Lamont.” she smiled, as warmly as a police captain could credibly be. “He’d want us carrying on, and he’d definitely want to see his rake of lowlifes hauled in.”

It was the oldest line in the book, and yet it also stood the truest. Perhaps it was boredom brought on by the efficiency of the great computer network A.C.E.S., but it seemed the leisure afforded by this post-scarcity utopia was breeding more wanton thugs by the day, even with the crackdowns brought on by all departments in all districts of the expansive metropolis.

And so he did just that.

For one day only, Knox allowed himself the luxury afforded most police officers in Haven, that unique airing of grievances as only a cop can air them, with a gun in one hand, and a jackboot flat on the throttle of his hovercraft.

He was always a rather composed operator when in the field. Lamont had taught him that. They’d joke about how foolhardy and overzealous some cops got with their perps when all you needed to do was land one good shot and that was that. And while it wasn’t a good way to honor his comrade’s memory, it was the only legal way that a chiseled 20-something could relieve himself of this pent-up rage. A pent-up, grief-stricken rage that saw every Public Enemy Number One rubbed out in a ruthless campaign of street-sweeping. He was convinced the freak accident was some thug’s doing, some half-baked revenge against the state for the crime of robbing them of the strife that had historically slaughtered thousands without mercy. And since every thug on the docket was Public Enemy Number One, he’d make them feel it. He’d make them bleed and bruise as he felt churning within him.

As the streets ran red with his skill and precision, he was promoted twice-over by lunchtime, and had gone from a two-star junior officer to a four-star standard in a matter of 12 hours. There was not a crook left on the streets by the time he had finished his shift, for word had spread that “someone’s gone apeshit down on Triple-2.” And yet, by nightfall, he hated himself for it.

In the absence of tears came a violent retching over the toilet in his apartment bathroom as the city’s cobalt blue moonlight poured over him. For Adam, there wasn’t the capacity to ease these emotions. He felt them, he hated them, and yet acknowledgement alone wasn’t enough to end the ramming of them through both body and mind.

Every night, he cruised the streets in his civilian ride; a rare Old-World Hemi Cuda, painted a rich deep green. Another police-issue luxury, seeing as motor laws prohibited civilians from ownership of such barbarous gas-guzzlers, and he had taken down quite a few that day in one ruthless display of justice. He hoped that the zen of the drive would ease the pain of it all, and sure enough, the Cuda’s gentle rumblings did just that. And with the clearing of the mind came a sobering thought: he didn’t even know how Lamont had died.

FREAK HOVER ACCIDENT read the headlines, and that exact phrase was used by everyone who consoled him that day, including Captain Fielding in her briefing to the District. Three simple words, and yet he didn’t know what they entailed. Had he been run down, crushed by a machine on autopilot, asphyxiated at altitude by a failure in the air systems? Of course, no matter how he died, it was his absence that had brought on the tumult, but young Adam Knox couldn’t get that not-knowing out of his mind.

The not-knowing soon flowered into an investigation when he was denied access to the autopsy and accident report.

“Is it an objection of Ace’s?” he asked Captain Fielding.

“Only in as much as all files on the matter are sealed.” she replied. “Accidents like this are the concern of WCC. Mechanical faults effect all units manufactured, and you know what the boys in the labs are like about recalls.”

And so, that was that. In as much as going through the official channels went.

A few more night drives of clearing the dark gray’s mind gave him the constitution to get his answers however the hell he could. One night, he’d offer to take up an evening patrol, during which he could tap one of the station terminals to gain access to Lamont’s network profile. He could cross reference his various ID numbers to any reports recovered through another old trick: wireless syphons.

Not even Haven’s finest were allowed access to the White Coat Crew and their facilities, but Knox had run across server grounds deep in the city’s heart, and with the ID numbers for Harris in tow, he let the little portable laptop work its magic and grab every file containing those numbers. He had the whole life story of his partner in a slab of cyberspace, riding shotgun in his heap of Old-World muscle.

He parked in an alley to survey his drop, only to be met with the stomach-churning sight; the black wolf’s hand frozen in agony, peering out from beneath the shadow of the still-hovering machine. The pigment had drained from it, rendering the black fur several shades lighter than Knox’s own coat. The file report was also a disconcerting read.

FILE REPORT #732489 - HARRIS
- ORDERED TO TEST DRIVE NEW HOVERCRAFT
- CRAFT ENGINE FAILS, HARRIS INSPECTS
- AUTOPILOT OVERRIDE PROTOCOL ENGAGED
- HARRIS DEAD FROM DIRECT EXPOSURE TO HOVER BEAM

It read neither like an autopsy or an accident log; it read like a death warrant fulfilled. Someone had put a fix on him, and now the next question was why. A question answered by the spider web of files unveiled via the syphon.

Turned out Harris had said a few not-too-nice things about the city’s systems. This in turn tied him not to outward revolutionary groups, but a list of officers caught saying similar things within earshot of a module. Nothing uniquely offensive either, just the usual “why can’t things be better?” or “she can run an entire city and not keep a synthesizer running at a hundred?” Little idle remarks that now carried with them the weight of a speeding guillotine.

Knox slid the computer into the lead-lined bag, and found himself restless for the entire night, and the night after that, and the endless nights he faced thereafter. He was able to stay and steady his hand during the day after his bender of untrammeled aggression, but still did his best to overperform, to keep any suspicions concerning his own behavior at bay.

He kept mulling over the bizarreness of it all, and it was only after his umpteenth drive around the block in the Cuda, and another restless night in bed, that he finally broke past the two dimensions of his life in Haven, and into the third to wrestle with everything he had learned.

On one hand, he felt a strange pang of betrayal. Why did he have to say such things, why’d he have to go against that particular grain of all the things to rebel against? And yet on the other, that was his friend who had been rubbed out. Rubbed out for speaking his mind in a system that shouldn’t have to kill the law-abiding to keep the peace. In a system that shouldn’t have to kill, period, which naturally called his own profession into question. He knew confronting the Department was a death sentence, and he knew leaks would be hand-waved away by the news anchors and screened by the network’s Comm/Ent division.

It was this realization that marked his point of no return. Lying there in bed, in the dark of night, a head swimming with grotesque knowledge and no way out for it. Nothing to balance the scales, but why did the scales need balancing? Nowhere to tell this cruel truth, but why tell it at all?

He thought back to childhood, to the city his folks had raised him right in. Haven was a place where you didn’t have to worry, where the worst thing to cry over was an upturned ice cream cone or that ever-so-innocent trip-and-fall at the park. And there Mom and Dad were, armed with that fresh vanilla twist and the band-aid, and everything else that third parent, A.C.E.S., could provide them. Back then it seemed like a pretty good system. It’s what got Knox on the force to begin with; to keep those people safe. The families, the neighbors, those who could be relied upon to do what’s right.

Then the goal post shifted, and it seemed safe involved an ever-tightening noose, wrapping its grinding threads against the neck of anyone who stepped a millimeter out of line. Was he now rebelling just because his friend was iced, or did he now start to see the whole setup of the city as unsavory, if such insignificant thoughts were to be deemed criminal by the network they all served?

“Thoughts” was the word that echoed in his mind when he realized the dumbest move he had made in his little investigation: he never took care of his chip. His internal link chip, installed at the base of his neck as all citizens are required to wear. And if he hadn’t severed his link to the network, that meant these revelations were being processed by the very killer who had burned Lamont Harris alive for the crime of disobeying. He had never thought a second about it before, but that sudden weight of miles of cable, millions of terabytes of data coursing through the city, the very lifeblood of Haven floored Knox like the torrent of a crashing wave.

“Nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine.”

It became a mantra he recited with feverish composure until he had drummed himself into a slumber. By morning, it’d all be forgotten about. By morning, he’d have seen nothing. By morning, he wouldn’t have to worry about joining his dearly departed partner anytime soon. After all, it was just a freak accident. It was in the hands of the White Coat Crew, and that was all he needed to know. That’s why everyone was telling him as such. It was all anyone needed.

And yet, his mind refused to dispense with the information. It was beneath the fear of execution that he had stumbled across another angle. The young gray officer knew that A.C.E.S. possessed the power to drop anyone via the simple detonation of their internal link chip. It was that knowledge that had sent Adam into his panic attack to begin with. And yet, when he recognized this fact, and stepped outside his own anxieties, another terrifying thought visited him upon his bed.

Why execute so publicly, when she can dispense with everyone so quietly?

Suddenly, the apartment module turned on in the other room. Muffled by the door were the sounds of protesters. Stock footage from a Comm/Ent newsreel.

Marches had been taking place across the city. Small, useless demonstrations that had become little more than a nuisance. But then another phrase, one which had been played on the news broadcasts time and time again, one whose monastic chant-like repetitions had made it as much an object of white noise as the protests themselves. “Take the Empire! Take the Empire!” they chanted in unison, followed by the snapping of billy clubs and the banging of police shields.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked, breath chattering. “Oh God, why?”

The sounds of shrieking protests roared ever-louder.

“Please, I’m sorry,” he stuttered on the verge of tears.

Cries for justice went unanswered, his own for mercy unheeded as the sound went rabid and the gain blew out, turning all into a warbling mess as the apartment speakers bent from under the sonic weight, Knox’s heart beating of his chest. Louder and louder, the shouting, the shrieking, the spikes of bit-crushed chaos stabbing at his ears like every death blow he had struck since that fateful morning after his partner’s death. With a final frenzied scream of “WHY!?” at the top of his cracking lungs, the world went silent, and the shattered gray officer was out cold.

It had taken all of one week for a friend’s death and a glimpse behind the veil to turn one of District 222’s most steadfast officers into a fearful ball of confusion. Whether it was a test to see if he could withstand such stress, part of a grander machination, or his simple, stupid mind driving itself mad with paranoia, nothing could stop the speeding train this line of thought was taking him.

And yet, death had not come to young Adam Knox. Not yet. The dark gray officer’s overexertion had ended in but a blackout. His marked day would come upon his waking, deep in the heart of Haven, for an execution that would be anything but private.

SIX STORIES, DOZENS OF HELLION HEROES & ONE WILD WOLVEN FUTURE

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