A Fraudulent Death, Draft 02, CH 38 (Patreon)

Marlot looked at the few parts of the computer he’d been able to salvage. Those thieves hadn’t bothered disconnecting the drive when they pulled it out, so the control board was ruined. The video card was functional, but old enough he should donate it to someone. The computer at home, if no one broke in there and destroyed it, had better everything.

His pad buzzed with a message from Ukely. Work’s boring, so I’m calling it done. Heading to hang with friends. It’ll take me longer to pick you up when you need to head home.

He didn’t reply; it was her telling him where she was going in a way no one spying on his pad would understand. He stepped out and walked to the electronic store down the plaza. Just in case his home system wasn’t there by the end of the day. Or that’s what he told himself as he looked through the components. He could afford most of them and start building himself an office system right now.

Harik would lose his mind if Marlot bought off-the-shelf parts. Just for that, he pulled a control board off the rack. The mouse could use some excitement in his life.

When his pad buzzed, he found himself juggling parts to answer it. “RI Blackclaw speaking,” he said, then hurried to place components on the counter before they fell to the floor.

“Sounds like I’m bothering you,” Joren said, chuckling. “Did that secretary of yours finally see reason and leave? You do know hiring someone for the purpose of eating them down the line is against employment laws, right?”

“Funny,” Marlot reply. “I’m just out shopping and you caught me with my hands full. Her mate wouldn’t let me eat her if that was my intention.”

“So she comes with dessert? Lucky you.”

“More like indigestion. He took enough of a beating defending her this morning I would love to see the state of the thieves. He took her home once the enforcer took their statements. I’m thinking of building a new office computer to replace the one the thieves destroyed.”

“Is that something you need to do now?” the hare asked.

“What’s wrong?” Marlot demanded, his mind jumping to one of them being attacked.

“My computer’s shitting garbage on me.”

“What?” He tried to reconcile that with the fear that was still spiking.

Joren sighed. “I think a malicious program managed to sneak into my system. Before you complain,” he continued as Marlot tried to process the information, “about me going on sited that aren’t vetted, I was careful.”

“You don’t—” everything finally fell into place. Starting with Ukely’s message and now how one of the best malware killers he knew was calling him to fight off an infection. “You don’t call getting infected being careful, Joren.” He looked at the parts on the counter. Maybe this was for the best. He didn’t need an entirely new computer.

“When can you come over to fix it?”

“I don’t know, I’m without my car, so I have to take transit.” He covered the microphone and whispered to the young wolf behind the counter. “Can you put these aside? I’ll come back later or tomorrow to buy them.”

“Can you be here sooner?”

Marlot sighed, then remembered the covered microphone. “I’ll see if I can convince Ukely to pick me up. She volunteered to drive me home, not do errands, so if she doesn’t want to, you’ll have to deal with me taking longer.”

The cashier placed the items in a basket and under the counter as Marlot headed for the door.

“Okay, I’ll be waiting.”

* * * * *

As he expected, Ukely had no problem picking him up, and his surprise was only mild when she took him to Harik’s house instead of Joren. Hopefully, no one watching him had had the time to work out who everyone in his circle of friends was.

The door opened, but the mouse wasn’t visible as he said, “get in.” Harik pointed to the isolation cages on the small table, and Marlot and Ukely placed their pads in them. They were better built than Marlot expected from something assembled at the last moment, and he wondered if the mouse had expected a situation like this to arise one day. His paranoia had finally been right.

Motioning for them to be silent, Harik led them through the house, to one of the multiple bedrooms that had been converted into workrooms. Afirna and Joren were seated behind two of the five systems set up in a circle in the center of the room.

The mouse closed the door. “As far as I can tell, no one’s watching my house, but we’re not taking any chances. I put these computers together with parts I had lying around.”

“Except for his,” Afirna said, drooling at the Interon.

“When we set up in your house,” Harik said, sitting at the Interon. “You get to use your top of the line, built with unreleased parts, that the rest of us can drool over.” He tapped the table, and the keyboard was projected on it. “Pick whichever one you want. They all have my latest operating system.”

The computer Marlot sat at was a monstrosity without a case, and wires connecting the components to a control board he didn’t recognize and with signs of fresh welding. It looked like it shouldn’t work, but knowing Harik, this would outperform anything Marlot could assemble. The privilege of being a tester for the largest manufacturers, and of being an engineer. He got the best stuff and knew how to make it better.

“Everything’s already digitized,” Joren said, “but without the context, we couldn’t do much.”

“Context.” Marlot entered commands, familiarizing himself with the operating system the mouse created. “I’m investigating a body, and it turns out his tax was paid five years ago. Only he was also walking around a few days before he was found. So this isn’t someone playing a prank by keeping a body in a freeze for all that time. I’ve linked him to organized crime with a high level of certainty. This is based on my car being sabotaged while I conducted surveillance on someone else involved and the body’s mate being eaten hours after leaving me a message saying she’d received a package from her dead mate. The RB knows about this happening, at least enough one person there is trying to stop it, or at least find a way to properly taxing those bodies, and has drafted me into it. This set of data is from a second package the body sent before his death, which means he suspected the people behind all of this would have no problem ending the first person to receive it. So take me seriously when I say this is dangerous.”

Harik smiled. “I was already taking this seriously. My safety is always top priority.”

Ukely nodded. “Okay, all this helps with what I was going through before picking you up.” She typed and names appeared on Marlot’s screens, and the ones on each side of him he confirmed at a glance. “I was going through that first page of names. I limited my search to this city because I don’t have the kind of time needed to search everywhere. That number wasn’t useful since it’s not an ID. Because of the message you left me, my first thought they were people that organization didn’t want found. So I cross-referenced the names with the Missing Person Bureau. No luck. But then some of the names started triggering responses, but as dead whose tax had been paid.”

“What’s the time frame?” Marlot asked as names highlighted on his screen.

“Between six months to ten years ago,” Ukely replied, “with one outlier at thirteen years.”

“How many of the names?” Joren asked, already typing.

“Twenty-eight out of the fifty-three on the page.”

“There were more pages of names not connected to any IDs,” Marlot said, typing a search through the scanned information.

“I have page two,” Afirna said.

“Starting on page three,” Harik added.

“The program I wrote is in the core directory,” Ukely said, “it’s going to help you.”

Marlot brought it up and his screen divided into four and information populated each section.

“You call that a program?” Harik asked. “It’s a mess.”

“Not everyone is the genius you are,” the zebra replied. “That’s what I can do in fifteen minutes.”

“But you have redundant command calls and—”

“Focus,” Joren said. “It works, so we use it. Once we’re done, we can talk about how to clean it up. I’m sure there’s someone out there who’ll be happy to pay for a program that can tabulate who pays whose tax from outside the Revenue Bureau procedures.”

“Insurers, for one,” Marlot mumbled. Using his RI ID, he compiled more detailed information on the people’s death. He wrote a quick program that created a list of the people who had paid those taxes.

“I’m pulling the names of those who paid the taxes,” Afirna said.

“Ignore Ukely’s page,” Marlot replied. “Already doing that.” He didn’t ask how she was getting the information. Unlike him, she didn’t have authorized access.

“Then I’m going to send you what I have and switch to looking into the dead themselves. Try to get some background on them.”

Names appeared on his screen and he changed his program to include anything sent from one of the other computers. With her information, and the names Harik was sending his way, Marlot was noticing patterns. The main was that there wasn’t as much variety in who paid the taxes as there should be.

He’d have to reorder the information to get the exact ratio, but looking at it, for each ten to fifteen dead, only one person was paying the tax. What were the odds of that happening over a decade? Yes, one predator could kill up to a dozen prey in a year, but if he looked at it from the prey side, there should be more randomness. And he noticed another pattern as one name who’d paid the taxes showed up on the dead side of the list. And another, and a third.

“Harik, how comfortable are you getting into the banking system?” Marlot asked.

“I’ll take that,” Joren answered. “I love the banking systems. They’re so accommodating to an outsider.” He shrugged as everyone stared at him. Then they were back at work.

“I’m sending you the people who paid the taxes. Work out their income scheme. I’d liked to know how they could afford it.” He altered the program so it sent the names automatically to Joren’s computer.

“I have something that might explain how they could afford them,” Afirna said. “Something of a common denominator, maybe. There’s a lot of financial troubles in the weeks before they died.”

“If you’re already in the banking system,” Joren said, “I’m sending you the information and I’ll—”

“I’m not,” she replied. “I’m looking through their creditor’s system. Interesting details. All the financial problems stop with their deaths.”

“Makes sense,” Harik said. “The dead can’t pay.”

“Which is why debt gets shifted to their families,” the raccoon replied. “Only they were able to pay off whoever that was.”

“Survivor’s benefit,” Marlot said, “it’s what it’s there for.”

“Sorry predator,” Afirna said with a chuckle. “That’s not how the system works. It helps, but there’s never enough to just wipe everything away.”

Marlot frowned at the raccoon. “The body’s mate said it had been higher than she’d expected. Enough to get them back on their feet.”

Afirna shrugged. “I’ll accept it happened once, but I’m seeing it over and over here.”

“But they were in financial trouble,” Ukely said. “That would cause their productivity to drop and along with that, the survivor’s benefits.”

The raccoon grinned in triumph.

“And yet,” Marlot mused, “somehow they managed it.” He hadn’t made the connection between the trouble Hardir was in and the contradiction of the higher benefits. He remembered something else. “She had a string of good luck. She found a job really quickly, her daughter for a better one. Can you see if that’s true of the others too?”

“Adding that to what I’m looking into,” Afirna said. “I’m trying to find out where the extra money came from. It has to be some sort of incentive to get those people to go along with dying and becoming whatever they become.”

“Undocumented Workers,” Harik said as Marlot said.

“Serfs.”

That silenced them.

“You can’t be serious,” Ukely said. “Serfdom was abolished centuries ago. That’s what the productivity tax was in part about, that everyone has a value and can’t just be forced to work for nothing, or be turned into meat without recompense.”

“And yet here we are,” the mouse said, “with a group of people who have no recourse.”

Marlot looked at the names on his screen. More appeared as the other’s programs processed their information. Now he knew why Hardir had died, why he’d let himself be killed. It was so this injustice would be brought to light.

Marlot would honor him by doing exactly that. He would shine a light on those people so bright it would burn their value away, and then they would be hunted down a feed those they had wronged.

He smiled. It was the kind of justice he believed Trembor would approve of.

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