Messages

 

The grass grew quickly under her feet. If she stood too long in one spot it almost hurt – tiny blades pressing upward insistently. “They shouldn’t have messed with it.” she thought, reflecting on the choice to engineer the grass for quick spread and coverage.

The overall effect wasn’t unpleasant though and they were trying to find means of taking advantage of the quick growth. That was why she was here at the Starry Sea.

There was something about the waters that often took boats to similar waters on distant planets. She wondered if it worked for smaller things as well. She carefully tossed a bottle in the water – inside of it a note. Coordinates for the planet – in case they didn’t want to chance the random teleports - and a message about the grass problem.

Reports suggested that at this time of the year most of the water’s spacewarping destinations would be planets with intelligent herbivores. Which ones and how far they were a mystery. Then again, the key might be the clouds. She used her remote and shaped the nearby ones to resemble cows.

It seemed like the bottle must have been duplicated somehow, as the next morning six bottles appeared on the shore – identical to the one she sent out.

The first complained about the coordinate system, showing several attempts to make sense of it. It seemed her planets organization of that differed too greatly from others. At the bottom was single line in large font – language was universal at least – it read “I give up.”

The second promised a ship within the hour. She was excited. But when the hour passed and nothing happened she realized it was an empty promise. Despite the short turn around, she felt let down.

The third bottle again promised an answer, but they would have to visit a number of different locations first. From the wording it seemed unlikely to bear fruit.

The forth message was sad, explaining that they would love to take advantage of the invitation, but their family had died. Despite not knowing the person beyond the note – she cried.

The fifth message was puzzling. It simply read “Goodbye”. Which seemed odd as they had never met.

The sixth said they were from the same planet and it gave a name and address. She looked it up quickly and found it was false. Again, even though it was a random message, it hurt.

Knowing that bottles sent back in the water often returned to their origin, she made a point of answering each one.

The next morning something strange happened. Unlike the day before there was only one bottle returned. It seemed to have received all six other messages, and had it’s own reply in a new hand. It read:

“Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you, never gonna make you cry, never gonna say goodbye, never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.”

Electric Black Murder

The police combed over the scene, tags labelled 5, 6 and 9 were lined up in the woods of the downtown park. They were highlighting a large pool of blood, a shell casing and a patch of fabric. Drag marks from the area toward a river likely meant the body would be slightly more difficult to find and washed clean of trace clues.

Fortunately though, the fabric was a bigger hint than they imagined. A tech had noticed some wires protruding from the edges and realized it was Electric Black. It was a new kind of material that used micro LEDs to give a kind of rippling iridescence to clothing. There were only a few people that had access to the stuff and only one that was in the area.

Aurora Vandersteen sat in the interrogation room watching the video of her entering the park where the murder took place. Her husband was still missing and it seemed like his body would be the one found. Her lawyer argued that the video only placed her near the murder and the fabric might have been torn, found and planted. The interviewer sighed. The Vandersteen’s could afford high priced lawyers and were known for weaseling out of just about anything due to doubt on circumstantial evidence.

“Besides,” she said “There’s no way I could haul my husband’s body all the way to the river.” The interviewer twitched at the admission. A voice in his ear told him the news story had already leaked. ‘So much for that’ he thought ‘It would have been nice if they kept a lid on it.’

“You also don’t have a weapon.” said Aurora, a little too certainly to just be going off the reports from the scene. Her lawyer looked both annoyed and smug as if they wanted to save that line for a potential court case. Sam was wary about interrogating suspects who flaunted their knowledge of the crime without also implicating themselves. He wanted to wrap up without seeming suspicious himself.

Utopia Murder

 William Shatner looked at the paper again. Apartment 11- Floor 2 – Suite 9. He thought that year he would scale back on his residence credit in favour of more travel credit. It wasn’t the lifestyle he was used to, but he had his health back and the major problems of the world were solved.

He walked the rest of the way to the apartment building. The mass transit had dropped him off fairly close to it, and it was a bright spring day. There was a slight drizzle of rain, but nothing unpleasant. Still, when he stepped into the lobby a fellow minding the desk tossed him a towel before asking him why he was there. It wasn’t as though Shatner wasn’t still famous, but people had a more balanced view of things. He wasn’t even sure the desk manager recognized him, he hardly knew the man in the mirror himself some days.

It wasn’t as though he didn’t look the same as his younger years, but there was a kind of weight lifted off that made him carry himself differently. His own attitude toward fame was a bit more reasonable too. He was a little quieter, and a little less presumptuous. He could fade into the background a lot easier now, partially based on how he acted, and a bit of how he did his hair. The Clark Kent affect was quite real, especially when everyone viewed you as a person first and a star as an incidental occupation.

The twinkle in the eyes of the desk manager was inviting further conversation. William noted his nametag and asked Derek if he had any questions or requests. Derek shrugged and said there would be time to chat later. Obviously he knew of Shatner’s new address and that kept things pleasantly casual. Derek offered Shatner a sandwich, which he almost refused, until he found out that it was included as part of the resident credit. Derek explained that communal areas had bulk food that cut down on unique effort for delivering and preparing when compared to the individual dwellings.

Seaside Mystery

 

The house seemed clean enough. A rough jacket by the door, men’s and women’s boots, still wet from the early rain stood by the entrance. A cat cried for attention and a bird in a small cage chirped mindlessly in the alcove in the living room, blissfully unaware of the fate of its owner. The first on the scene, the detective tried to drink in all the details of the room before the townsfolk brought the body in from the elements. In a few short minutes she made a mental picture of the rooms before the door burst open with yelling and jostling. The body was hauled roughly to the middle of the entryway and placed on the ground. A few of the people left again almost as quickly having other work to do, while others lingered around inadvertently touching things. Someone suggested tea to help comfort the mourners and the scene was thoroughly compromised.

The detective looked at the body again. She still couldn’t find any signs of a struggle, injuries, marks or anything that suggested a cause of death. It would be a few days until a proper coroner’s report could be done, being so far off the beaten trail. The medical history of the deceased didn’t suggest anything potentially lethal either.

Still the circumstances the body was found under were very suspicious. It was wrapped carefully in a few layers of blankets, weighted down with stones and dragged most of the way to the pier. The blankets belonged to the victim and the rocks were ones missing from their lawn. Very few in the village woke up early, and those that did were already deep into their work and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

The body was that of a young widow, well liked in the community despite not being very social since the death of her husband. Everyone who was present was questioned thoroughly, but they had either rock solid alibis, no motivation to kill, or no means – and frequently more than one of those disqualifiers together.

Troubled Mansion

 

The mansion was dark and oppressive, with only candlelight to fight off the shadows. Everyone had been assembled in the study with the detective lighting the fireplace almost immediately. The maid, the cook, the gardener and the deceased’s brother and sister were all present.

The body had been found by the maid, who had been seen only moments before by at least two other people. The cook had been downstairs, blocked in the kitchen by the brother and sister. The gardener had been locked outside accidentally – only now just let in. That left the brother and sister were alibied by the maid and the gardener who was at the window.

The detective had been called only hours before by the deceased, who was worried that someone was trying to kill him. He arrived just as the maid screamed.

There were certain things to eliminate – such as everyone wanting the person dead – and all covering for each other. There was enough dissent in the house that it seemed implausible. Everyone liked the dead man, but each other not so much.

The body was examined, but nothing stood out as being suspicious.