Inside the small living room of the tiny, rundown apartment crowded five members of the crime scene investigation unit. All of them were wearing white paper coveralls, head to toe. Garret Smalling was standing on the outside of the room, waiting impatiently to be allowed in to start his investigation properly.
'Smalling, won't be a moment now. Sorry, Detective Sergeant,' said the woman leading the white-garbed team. She was holding a plastic wrapped laptop and typing up notes with her gloved hands.
Smalling just stood there and stared, glared, at the whole team. He had looked at his watch too, more than once, huffed a few times and paced to and from the room. The lead of the crime scene investigators, Sarah Dalton, was starting to get a little annoyed with the pressure from Smalling.
'Garret, calm down man. It is not like you have anywhere else to be,' said a member of Dalton's team. 'You've had a glance about anyhow, and we will be done in a couple of minutes.' The man speaking was taking photos of the scene; intermittent camera flashes interspersed his speech.
'Sorry, Danny. I just get freaked out by these,' he took a calming breath, 'things.' Garret gestured towards the virtual reality headset still wrapped around the victim's head.
'Don't tell me you've still not got one!' said Danny James as he let out a small chuckle. He paused from taking photos a moment to try and sell virtual reality living to his friend. 'Come on, this is the future. We'll be living our lives through these one day, being fed by a tube and all the other,' he stopped a moment, searching for the right word to use in the company of others, '"stuff" being taken out by other tubes. You know, just so they don't mix.
'They may even have a way to recycle-' Danny continued.
Smalling raised a hand and scoffed a little, he didn't like to know where Danny's thoughts were taking him. 'Not me, my friend. It will be a cold day in hell before I get one of them on my head.'
'Ok, Detective Sergeant, we're done,' Dalton said. She was only small, possibly five foot at a stretch, more than a foot and a half shorter than Garret Smalling, but the look she gave Smalling was enough to let him know not to rile her.
The crime scene team were packing away all the boxes and bags of evidence, Dalton was closing her laptop and Danny was taking the memory card out of his camera so he could place it into an evidence bag.
'Thanks,' said Smalling. 'Can you send me copies of the photos Danny?'
'Sure, just let me get them on the system and they will be winging their way to you faster than you can say virtual cheese,' Danny flashed his gleaming white teeth at Smalling in a scary grin.
They both chuckled a little.
Danny slapped Smalling on the back as they passed each other, 'Tag, you're it.'
░╠╬╣░
Smalling stood alone now in the small apartment. The body of the deceased resident, one Alistair Frost, had already been taken away by the coroner. The poor man would now be prodded, cut open and dissected to see exactly how he died. Smalling shuddered at the thought.
The fact he was dead was all Smalling needed at this point. How he died would come into play later.
On the side table next to the armchair that Frost was found sitting in was a pamphlet and a memory stick from SaveU. The pamphlet extolled the values of the company; they specialised in saving the consciousness of people at the end of their lives.
Uploading, or "brain dumping", or simply "dumping", as it had become known, was a growing trend in well to do types. It was a costly exercise retaining all the memories, experiences and, in fact, personalities of the so-called residents of "the system".
More than seven million souls from the UK alone now existed as pure data. Dumping had become popular in the last five years, ever since the rise of companies like The Verse and ZoneIT created a shared virtual reality platform that anyone could enter.
The cost of casual entry was simple, and cheap. You just had to accept the terms and conditions, and you were in. As expected, no one read the terms and conditions and therefore no one really knew what they were accepting, and signing up to. The wealthy could even choose to live there permanently after death.
The pamphlet from SaveU gave everything the customer wanted to hear, and glossed over the terms and conditions part with a glib statement.
Smalling picked up the memory stick and wondered if this should have been tagged as evidence. A memory of the dead man with a VR headset sitting on his forehead, not over his eyes, came to him. The man didn't look like he had the time to log on to the system before his demise. In case it was a forgotten item though, he slipped it into his blazer pocket for handing over later.
The dead man's television was still on, showing a screensaver of a digital clock moving about the screen. Every minute the clock moved to another random position. The time read four thirty two in the morning.
Smalling found the remote and turned off the TV.
'Nothing much to see here is there, Mr Frost. What a sad and lonely life you have led'' said Smalling. He was heading for the door when he heard a chime from the TV behind him.
He turned to see the TV had turned on again and there was a blue cursor blinking in the top right corner.
Puzzled, Smalling reached for the remote again and was about to turn off the TV again when he saw characters being typed to the screen.
He paused.
'What the-' he started to say.
Initially he thought it was some standard start up text; the internal computer of the television itself going through a possible update phase. But the text was not what he was expecting. The words that were typed were clear and disturbing:
Help me! I don't know where I am!