Flying Mermaid Murder

 

The Flying Mermaid was a replica pirate ship that docked at various tourist ports around the Gulf of Mexico. It wasn’t particularly seaworthy at three quarter sized, but it sailed well enough if the conditions were pleasant. It was popular with the college crowds as a kind of destination-party location. A group of students in Tampa, Florida had booked the ship for the first weekend in June.

 

Usually the parties were all night affairs, so the captain was surprised that the kids had asked about sleeping quarters on the ship. Outside of the party season, the ship doubled as a floating hotel, with enough notice, it could be configured back to sleep about two dozen people if a few of them didn’t mind sharing rooms. A number of decorations, cannon balls and blade heavy cutlasses, were put back on the walls, though not as securely as they would be for a full hotel season. The students only expected about fifteen people attending, so most of them would have their own room.

They had their own security for the event and payed a large extra deposit to have the vessel mostly to themselves. Normally the crew doubled as chaperones and bouncers though they were just as happy to have the time off. A few stayed on board to look after any miscellaneous problems that came up.

The captain had stayed on board the first night just to see how things went and despite his initial misgivings, it seemed to be going smoother and quieter than normal. The group in question were a bunch of engineering graduates celebrating their last time together before going off in different directions in the world.

Satisfied that the students were well behaved, the captain spent the next night on shore. He even left his room to the guests when they said they had a few latecomers to the event. Despite being a reasonably authentic pirate ship the doors and locks were decidedly modern and motion detectors guarded the hallways after everyone was locked in their rooms.

During the night, a few rooms were wakened by a loud thud, a clang of metal and a scream from one of the quarters. Unfortunately the door was locked from the inside and it took precious moments for someone to find an extra keycard and get the door open. By then it was too late.

The student staying in the room had bled to death, the cutlass lying next to him in bed, evidently having cut his throat. The initial thought was suicide, but the smart watch they had on registered a deep sleep right up until the sound of the thud. There wasn’t enough time, or presence of mind, to use the sword, get back into bed and tuck himself in.

The motion detectors hadn’t registered anyone outside of the rooms until everyone had come out almost at once, meaning if was murder, they should still have been at the scene of the crime, but it was empty, minus the victim.

The thoughts of the investigators turned to the thud heard shortly before the scream. Nothing else in the room seemed damaged or out of place, even the other half of the pair of cutlasses was still on the wall. In a flash of insight they checked the next room over and noted a large spherical dent on the wall, at the exact height as the sword mount in the adjoining space. There were two people in that room and no quick way to tell who was awake at the time.

The captain arrived on scene, noticed the size of the dent, and mentioned it looked like one of the cannon balls. He said that many of them had been rescued from a room that contained a lot of loose gunpowder. A quick check of the two suspects hands found a telltale residue on one set that had almost been washed off completely.

Emergency Dial

 

Jack had very particular habits. He was paranoid that someone was trying to kill him. As such he tried to take precautions that would keep him safe. He travelled around the United States for a while, not spending too much time in any one place. He thought someone might be tracking his movements, which was a little difficult in the years before cell phones became ubiquitous. He only stayed at hotels that were quiet and out of the way, so mostly frequented by locals. Ones where he could pick the room number himself and order his own food from different restaurants every day, under an assumed name.

He recently felt like the killer was getting too close and had just flown into the UK to find a new place to stay.

This week it was a hotel in the Cardiff area. There had been some work done earlier in the day, a number of things in each of the suites had been replaced – TVs, radios, remotes, coffee machines, microwaves, phones, lamps and such. The hotel had been closed for a number of weeks and that was the final bit of refurbishing before reopening.

In Jack’s mind that seemed perfect.

The rooms in the hotel would be identical. There was no way for the killer to know which room he, the lone American, would be in. Or so he thought.

Unfortunately for Jack, the killer was real and he was a step ahead of him.

He had heard a disturbance in the hallway as the local police were coming to a room near his to check on something. The first time he ignored it. When it happened again, a half hour later, he popped his head out and was told to go back to his room.

He turned on the TV. The picture was black for a few seconds then played an ominous message. “I know you’re in room 245,” which was indeed his room “and I’m coming to get you.”

He was about to dial the police, but remembered they were already there.

He left his room and tracked them down. The local authorities checked a few more rooms and found the all the TVs loaded with the same dark message, but customized to say their own number. They took Jack’s information down and were surprised to find he was American.

“You must be the target of the killer” the detective said plainly. “The phones have been tampered with, and you would have been the only one who would have likely set them off.”

“You were about to dial 911 right? It’s 999 here in the UK.”

Antarctic Base

 

The cold wind howled as it snaked around the modular Antarctic research base. Fortunately the structure was made for the inclement weather and only a slight creaking in the joiner segments hinted at the weather outside. It was a small thing, but it could eat away at your sanity if you were the only one around. Which Jeff was. He turned up the music, blasting it away in all the adjoining rooms to drown out the sounds of the shuddering complex.

He was alone, but only for another month. Various other programs had been cancelled or relocated and he was there to keep the lights on. Not literally of course, the building’s automation could handle most of the basic tasks, but if anything broke it was easier to fix in person. There were a few telepresence robots looking after most of the experiments. They were great at doing exactly what they were built to do, and nothing outside of that.  Their construction was fairly simple - a tablet for a head and a few cameras mounted on a thin body, with two spindly arms meant for light tasks only.  

A week ago one of the north facing labs broke a window and snow had blown in. The bots in the area could hardly manage driving through the indoor drifts, let alone repairing damage as large as the glass. Apart from that though, everything managed to run itself.

That left a lot of time to fill and Jeff was running out of ideas. He had inventoried the supplies at least three times that week and that was only because he didn’t trust the autonomous robots to properly calculate their incidental maintenance item use. The third time through he finally relented that last years programming error had been fixed and he was just being paranoid.

Without anyone present to talk him down from any particular notion he was going off on odd jaunts like that more and more often. Nothing worth a call back to the mainland and nothing harmful, yet, but there was still a month to go.

Or was it longer? He looked at the calendar again. He had skipped ahead, counting from the next shipment of goods rather than the current date. It was difficult to know what day he was really on. He was convinced that the telepresence robots were trying to prank him. Why else would they drive around with the date on screen instead of the face?

Then he remembered that he had asked for that. The blank faces were taunting him. He had been through a dozen variations. Live people looked too flat on the screen. AI faces were too smooth. 3D faces were too impersonal. Animals and cartoons weren’t serious enough. Blank faces would be better. Something that suggested people but more like a mannequin. No. He had tried that.

Or was it a dream? He asked for the blank faces while muttering ‘again?’ under his breath. The main team had been getting used to his half whispered words and didn’t think much of it. They switched remote bots to blank faces.

That was quick, he thought to himself. They must have done it before. No. That’s the default setting. It felt familiar. Then he remembered why he wanted that setting. It was what the robots looked like when the base was being built and everyone was still around. The team was too busy setting up the experiments to bother loading their images onto the display screens. Besides, they were here to converse with, so what would the robots show anyway?

With the robots on the default faces he could pretend the rest of the research team was just in the next module, ready to surprise him around the next corner. He even went so far as to put one of the rooms playback devices at head height behind him and que up a colleague’s lesser known video files. He looked at the setup and tried to improve it by rigging up a spare robot to carry around the speaker and drive around randomly. After a few minutes of the unedited playback, it almost felt like someone was in the room with him and he instinctively turned around so as not to seem rude. As soon as did so, the illusion was shattered.