Fic for Meredydd: Mrs. Jones
Title: Mrs. Jones
Recipient: Meredydd
Author: oboetheres
Characters/Pairings: Molly Hooper, Mycroft Holmes
Rating: Teen
Words: 5090
Warnings/Contents: Disscussion of Slavery, AU, Magical Realism
Summary: Ever since her cousin was labeled a 'Simulacra' Molly hasn't been able to believe that they are less than human, no matter how radical that position is considered to be.
Read on Archive of Our Own:
Mrs. Jones
Read on LJ:
Molly rubbed her forehead miserably. She couldn’t get the news story she’d heard on her way home out of her head. A government Simulacra had been put down for being as the story had put it, glitchy. She was one of those who believed that Sims were as real as anybody else, crazy though most people thought the idea was. She couldn’t ever dismiss Sarah that way, and the unfortunate consequence of that was that she could never dismiss any of them that way.
Thinking about Sims as though they were humans like everyone else had so many unsettling implications. She daren’t do much about it, despite how horrifying it was that human beings were still being considered property and could be killed as easily as an old laptop might be thrown out. Slavery had officially been ended so long ago, but this just kept on and on.
Restless, she stood and started pacing around her little main room. She knew that her conscience wouldn’t let her rest until she’d done something, but she didn’t know what. She was too pragmatic about the situation to think that she could really do anything to make it change. It was culturally and legally entrenched. Governments couldn’t make a change like that - to recognize the humanity of Sims would be to admit that they’d been enslaving and working to death their own citizens for centuries. What could she do right now that might actually make some sort of difference?
It would have to be a letter, she decided. But a letter to who? And what should she say? Maybe something about it being a waste of resources. Or maybe that if the government had run out of uses for a sim it should be sent back to its family.
It was long hours with her heart in her throat and many drafts of her letter before she felt like she had finally gotten it right. She didn’t get much sleep that night.
Molly was hard at work in her lab on the most recent case that she’d been assigned. It was a very curious one. On the surface it was a simple hit and run, but she kept finding little tiny clues that just didn’t quite add up. As she was puzzling over a strange mark on the deceased’s neck that she still couldn’t identify, a very well dressed man strode authoritatively into the room. He was tall and had an immediately noticeable air of officiousness.
“Dr. Hooper?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
“Yes,” Molly replied, “That’s me, what can I do for you?”
“I’m here on official business from the department,” he replied giving her a brief insincere smile. “We will be taking control of this autopsy.” Molly’s eyes widened in shock as he continued. “There will be no need for you to concern yourself with it any further. Our own people will be here momentarily to handle the transfer.” He finished, sounding for all the world as if his plan was a foregone conclusion, and Molly bristled. Normally anyone here on official business would present the paperwork up front. The way he talked, she almost thought he expected to just up and leave simply because he’d said so.
“I don’t think that’s normal procedure Mr. …” She let it hang.
“Holmes,” he responded with a thin smile that was even more insincere than his first, if that were possible.
“Mr. Holmes,” she continued, deciding to take that as a small victory in this bizarre battle of words she found herself in. “You do have all the proper paperwork?” It was a leading statement.
Only then did it occur to her to be worried what getting in this man’s way might mean. If he didn’t have that paperwork he might be some sort of criminal, and if he was, she had no idea if this was important enough to him to do her harm to get what he wanted. Thinking back on how vague he had been, criminal didn’t seem like that unlikely a possibility.
“Of course,” he replied, tone making it clear that he thought her slow. After a moment’s maneuvering he pulled a sheath of papers out of his briefcase and handed them over to her.
She pursed her lips and huffed before stripping her gloves off and moved to take the papers from him. As she looked through them, everything seemed to be in order, but she was an expert eye - at least in this particular matter. She couldn’t even have said how many of these forms she had seen come through - none in a manner remotely like this though. It was a simple official request for transferal of custody of the body. They usually came into her inbox, placed there by one of the many receptionists and assistants at Bart’s who had likely taken it off of the department fax machine. Every once in a great while one might arrive by courier, but Mr. Holmes was certainly no courier or errand boy. She could see that he was far too high up the totem pole to be delivering papers.
In any case, she knew what this paperwork was supposed to look like, and everything seemed to be in place. But somehow, to her, it looked like it was merely an excellent emulation of the real thing. It even had all the appropriate signatures, including the ones from Bart. The only thing concretely missing was her own signature, which would signify that she had transferred custody.
Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it. She’d only noticed it because when one of Bart’s labs had been undergoing repairs she’d been searching around for a lab that could perform the particular testing put forth as reason for the transfer on the form. She knew that the facility listed as the destination did not perform that test. It sent shivers down her spine. Was it a simple mistake? She could only hope it was. The alternatives weren’t nice to think about.
“Well,” she frowned, trying to act puzzled rather than frightened, “all the signatures seem to be in order but I think you’ll be disappointed to find that the testing you want isn’t something ‘Integrated’ can do. In fact, it is a test that I’m pleased to say that Bart’s has the capability to do. That’s very odd,” she continued haltingly, “Are you quite sure that there hasn’t been some mix-up somewhere Mr. Holmes?”
He blustered for a split second, clearly caught off guard. After a moment he seemed to regain his dignity.
“I am not the specialist in this case Dr. Hooper, but perhaps they have recently added this testing. We certainly want all tests done in as state of the art a facility as is possible, after all.”
Oh, smooth. He was very smooth.
“Really.” she said, her tone making it clear that she didn’t buy that in the slightest, and something like wry amusement appeared in his eyes for just a split second. “Look Mr. Holmes, why don’t you get this straightened out on your end, and come back to me with the proper set of paperwork. Just verify that everything is correct for me. If you can do that, I will of course release the body to you. Unfortunately, I just can’t right now, not with all the inconsistencies here. All right?” She held the papers back out to him.
“Very well,” he said as he snatched the papers back, “I’m sure I won’t be long.”
True to his word he was back within a few hours, this time with paperwork that actually made sense.
“I do apologize Dr. Hooper. It would seem that some members of my department have been producing sub-par work.” The sentence ended with such delicately precise diction that she almost winced, thinking of the roasting those members of his department must have gotten.
When he finally left after overseeing his people loading up the deceased, Molly breathed a sigh of relief. With any luck she’d never have to deal with him again.
It was strange how she could go days, even weeks or months without really thinking about Sarah at all, and then the littlest thing would bring it back to the front of her mind, and Sarah and how she must have died would be all that she could think about for days (work excepted, of course).
On this particular day it had probably been about a month and a half. It was, as usual, the simplest most innocuous thing that brought it all up to the surface. There was a little old thrift shop that she passed sometimes on her way to the library. They had a little display window in the front where they would arrange little mannequins with some of the clothes from the store. She would sometimes stop to look more closely, since whoever was in charge of the display seemed to have a sense of humor, posing the mannequins and putting sets of clothes on them that were almost puns, if you were familiar with the fashion when they had been made. Most of the time she didn’t see anything like that, but for the clothes that came out during her mid-teens to mid-twenties, when she’d been paying the most attention, she often caught little odd juxtapositions.
On this particular day, she didn’t recognize any of the clothes as being from that time frame, but a girl’s dress caught her eye and forcibly held it. For a second she almost couldn’t breathe. She was absolutely certain that Sarah had had a dress precisely like this one. Same brand, same style, same color. In fact, for a second she was irrationally certain that this dress and Sarah’s were one and the same.
After what seemed an eternity she was finally able to free her eyes. She closed them, and took several deep breaths before forcing herself to slowly keep walking towards the library. She grimaced. There went her plans for the afternoon. She had been intending to take advantage of having a week day off to go to the library and the shops when they were less crowded, maybe get scans or a couple of patterns from a craft book she’d discovered there the other day. It would have been a nice relaxed afternoon, getting some necessary things out of the way in as leisurely a manner as possible.
She couldn’t help resenting the clothing shop for that, even though she knew exactly how irrational that was. And there it started again, the cycle of resenting Sarah for taking over her mind like this, and then feeling horrible for thinking such a thing, and then berating herself over it, and then starting it off all over again by resenting Sarah for making her berate herself.
Finally, about a block away from the library, she stopped and leaned back against the cool wall of a building and tilted her head up. She always hated when she got like this. She knew exactly how irrational it all was, as she watched herself go through this absurd cycle over and over. At least maybe she could get past this part, and get to the part where she was resenting the government.
“C’mon Molly,” she whispered to herself as she forcibly refocused her train of thought. She stood like that for a while longer before shaking her head at herself and heading towards the library.
Molly looked around the room, the meeting was still several minutes away from starting and not all the participants were there yet. It was a strange situation for her. She’d been in many meetings at Bart’s, and even a few at the yard when she had done an autopsy in an unusual case.
This was entirely different.
Amanda Ranson was someone that she’d known for several years, and she’d been involved in several cases undertaken by Amanda’s previous department. She hadn’t worked with the outgoing administrator since her transfer. Her new department had its own pathologist, and she hadn’t really needed to call Molly in, despite how much they had enjoyed working together in the past. When this case came along, and the department felt that it needed a second expert to corroborate the opinions of their own expert, Amanda had jumped at the chance to bring Molly in. Molly had expected to come in, do her own autopsy and produce her own report, possibly even present it briefly in a small meeting. She hadn’t expected to end up being asked to attend the entire length of a large interdepartmental meeting just so that she could summarize her report.
She can’t help but feel self-conscious in the face of the obvious importance of some of the people in the room. The level of stiff and stuffy finesse displayed by their outfits made their general positions quite clear to her, even if she didn’t know (and probably didn’t want to know) the particulars. The next person to enter the room didn’t make her feel any better. She recognized him immediately, and her first reaction was one of mixed exasperation and relief. Exasperation because she couldn’t help but think of him as some sort of nefarious controlling… something.
Mr. Holmes had made quite the impression on her, none of it good. The relief was from the knowledge that if he was here, he must be legitimate; she hadn’t cooperated with some sort of criminal organization when she’d turned that corpse over to him. She’d always thought the idea a bit paranoid, but she had never been able to discount it entirely. Her reaction quickly shifted to one of surprise. She’d always assumed that if he did legitimately work for the government that he must be some sort of spook. What was he doing here?
She watched as he moved towards one of the other men of obvious importance in the room and shook hands. As he turned to take his seat, their eyes met for the briefest of moments, the surprise in his clearly visible to her. Molly quickly looked down. What had he thought of her staring? He did not seem like the sort of person that she wanted to be caught staring at.
Just a few moments later the meeting was officially started, though Molly was too preoccupied to really pay close attention. Half worried and half curious, her mind wandered down various avenues and into numerous scenarios. What kind of work could bring someone here and to Bart’s to pick up a body? Did it mean anything bad for her that she’d run into him again?
She wasn’t so far gone though that she didn’t recognize when it was time for her to give her conclusions, nor so distracted that she wasn’t able to do a professional job of it. There were no questions for her, her report corroborated the in house pathologist’s perfectly, and they’d already had a chance to ask him all of the questions that they wanted.
After her report she returned to her seat. The door was on the opposite side of the table from her, almost directly behind Holmes in her line of sight, and she had to remind herself not to keep glancing over at it. For whatever reason she was expected to remain in the meeting until it ended. She normally wouldn’t mind, but she knew that talk would inevitably turn to the now suspected killer - one of the government’s golems. Once it did, she shut it out for the most part, and was almost surprised when the meeting was over. By some bizarre coincidence, she and Holmes were all of the sudden the only two people still seated in the conference room. That was the last thing she wanted, so she hurriedly tidied her things up to leave. Just as she was pushing her chair back to stand up, a voice filtered back through the door.
“I don’t see why we can’t just terminate the fakie. It’d be a better use of resources than going to all this trouble to investigate.”
Molly suppressed a shudder of rage, and because she was seated on the opposite side of the table from Holmes, she was able to see Holmes’s face. It was a coincidence that she was looking almost straight at him in that moment, and she was surprised to see his face distort for just a second. She’d never put much thought into her fairly shallow opinions of him - they were straight stereotype really, and they made him into someone who agreed with every official stance of the government and probably every unofficial one too. She was stunned to see that the expression that had peeked through hadn’t been pretty, and she guessed that he was no more pleased with that statement than she had been.
This young woman’s life story was particularly tragic in Molly’s opinion. She had been identified as a Simulacra at the remarkably young age of three. The government was always thrilled by finding one that was so young, the younger the ‘powers’ became noticeable, the more powerful that individual was likely to ultimately be. Her name, once upon a time, had been Jessica Solomon. When she was taken away from her parents and family at three years old, she’d lost that name. Been trained in a government facility, had it drilled into her that she was nothing more than a tool. A golem. By all accounts, the brainwashing had worked remarkably well. Probably because they had gotten to her so young. Her ‘maintenance record’ was spotless, right up until she had died a sudden death at the age of twenty eight.
Molly always found it hard with female Sims, particularly any who looked like her cousin had. As a white female brunette, Ms. Solomon was close enough for her emotions. Her mind was stuck in some stupid cycle again, feeling sorry for herself and then feeling horribly guilty about putting her own emotions before the horrible things that the dead woman in front of her must have suffered. After wallowing for a moment, she cleared her throat and brushed that tangled morass of emotions aside. It was time to get to work.
Hours of cutting and weighing and cataloguing and taking and sending off samples later, Molly was finally done with the messy part of the job. Hopefully.
After sighing and rolling her head to work out the kinks, she stepped back and stripped off her gloves, flinging them into a nearby receptacle almost like she was shooting a rubber band. It wasn’t exactly professional, but somehow she found it satisfying. Now for the less literally messy, but far more figuratively messy part of the job. All the first line of in house tests had come back, and it was time for her to sort through them all and try to make sense of this whole thing.
She’d sent in samples for the full range of testing they might do on a corpse, excepting tests that were very expensive, for things that were either very unlikely, or both. She sipped her coffee as she flipped through the report on the first panel. It was all very mundane, nothing to indicate cause of death. The second panel was much the same, as was the preliminary toxicology screen that she’d gotten back. It wasn’t until she got to the blood type analysis of all things that she realized it. While golems had the same ABO blood types as normal humans, their Rh factor when looked at in detail rather than in the simplified positive or negative system, always fell within a certain range. The reasons for this were unknown. Solomon’s Rh factor was literally one point away from the boundary of that range on the smallest scale used for Rh typing.
Molly stopped, taking a second to absorb that information. She seen blood type reports on more people than she could count, and she’d seen reports where the bona fide human’s measurement was scarcely any different, just barely different enough to put them on the ‘human’ side of that line. Now, blood type in and of itself was not considered to be definitive proof. If it were, surely all babies would be typed at birth, and golems taken from their families to be indoctrinated by the state when they were still infants.
Molly looked back at the other reports, zeroing in on other measurements that could indicate a Simulacra. They were all so close to that line. She stopped, hand involuntarily coming up to cover her mouth. If just a tiny shift had happened, this woman’s life would have been entirely different.
Molly flipped through the reports until she came to the key one: the preliminary report on residual energetic magic and stable magic in the subject’s neurons. Taking a deep breath, she dived in, taking special care to pay attention to every single measure. Most were close to that line that divided the humans from the ‘golems’. One was even on the human side of that line. It wasn’t until she got to the section where the tests of various ‘fissile magics’ were listed that she began to understand. Fissile Alpha was quite literally off the charts. This helped explain how she had such strong magic animation despite all her other readings being so low. Her breath caught as she got to the Fissile Sigma series and the gross imbalances that it showed. Here was the smoking gun. All that remained was to go through the rest of the reports to see if there were any other factors in her death, and organize all her notes into the final report.
It had been an entirely unremarkable day, and her latest subject seemed, so far, to be a perfectly normal dead woman. Molly finished sealing the last liver sample in its receptacle and turned back to the body to begin putting everything in order.
She almost jumped at the sight of a man just standing silently on the other side of the table. He hadn’t been there a minute ago, and she hadn’t heard anything. She blinked, recovering her composure. Him again. What were the odds that she’d keep encountering the same man despite the fact that she had nothing to do with him?
Holmes was tense this time though, she realized. He’d been perfectly at ease the other two times, posture rigorously correct but not tense.
After a few moments of him simply standing there, studying her, and Molly trying to figure out what was going on, he shifted slightly, pasting a polite smile onto his face.
“Dr. Hooper, what a pleasant surprise to see you again.” All she could think was what a blatant lie that was. He was the one who had walked into her morgue after all.
“Oh?” Her expression made her disbelief plain.
“Quite,” he responded lightly, offering her another supercilious smile. This definitely wasn’t normal.
“Is there something you need?”
“Need? That’s a rather strong word Dr. Hooper. I’m merely here to see that Mrs. Jones is being… treated properly. She was a colleague.”
Molly was floored. That was absolutely the last thing she would have expected. Was he essentially here on personal business? What a bizarre sort of personal business.
“Um, OK? Well, she’s, uh, she’s being autopsied.” The look she received might as well have been a whole paragraph, asking what was wrong with her in detail. She rolled her eyes and started to explain herself. “Well, I don’t know what you mean by treating her properly, but I have been cutting her open… I just thought it worth mentioning that it’s, there’s an autopsy going on, that’s why there’s all the incisions?”
“Ah, I see,” he said. His expression said ‘Ah, I see how much of an idiot you are.’
“Well, is there anything specific I can help you with Mr. Holmes? Do you have transfer orders or something?” At this point she almost didn’t care. She just didn’t the patience for whatever this was. When he didn’t answer she went on.
“It’s very touching that you’re here out of concern for your colleague, but we don’t normally do autopsies with members of the public just wandering in to watch.”
“Ah.”
Was that really all he was going to say? Seriously?
He cleared his throat.
“I was wondering if it would be possible for you to fill me in on how things have been going. Not necessarily your findings or even any preliminary findings. Just how things have been going.” His face seemed open, but she didn’t trust that for a second.
After considering for a moment she decided that what he was asking wasn’t strictly, literally, out of the question.
“Well, I guess I can say that they have been going smoothly, but I really can’t be any more specific than that. I can’t exactly release all that information to just anyone who walks in the door. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I did.” There was a short awkward silence.
He pursed his lips, “Of course. I would not expect anything else. You do seem competent, I suppose.”
She knew she was glaring at him. She didn’t really care. Come into her workplace and imply that she might not be even competent at her job?
He stood in place for another moment, as if to prove that she wasn’t kicking him out, that he was leaving of his own accord.
“Very well. I do suppose that I have learned what I came here to learn. I hope you have a good evening, Dr. Hooper,” he finished before turning and heading out the door.
Molly stayed in the same spot for several moments, and then just shook her head. She had no idea what to make of all that.
By the time she was done getting everything in order, she had managed to push Holmes’s bizarre appearance to the back of her mind. She was finally able to get fully back on track and concentrate on the matter at hand. She’d go drop off the remaining samples, and then down to the little ‘mailroom’ to pick up the reports that had already come back in. She had an inkling of what some of them would probably show just from her own examination, and she began going over what various possibilities would mean. On the way back from the mailroom, she stopped at a machine in the hallway to pick up a cup of coffee. As she was filling it up, the man sitting in the little waiting alcove across from the machine, who she’d only really seen in her peripheral vision, finally registered.
Holmes again. This was getting creepy.
She turned around to see him relaxing, almost deliberately nonchalant in one of the chairs. All the tension she’d seen earlier (if she hadn’t just been imagining it) had gone. She was sure he looked upset, maybe even angry.
He simply smiled a pleasant, almost personable smile, and it seemed like he was surrounded by a faint aura of menace. She couldn’t shake the thought that he had been waiting here, just for her.
She hesitated.
“Mr. Holmes,” she said, just to be polite. She had turned around and started staring at him, after all.
“Dr. Hooper,” he responded, too smoothly to be natural, and it just about sent shivers down her spine.
She grimaced and turned back to the machine, hoping that he wasn’t going to try to continue the conversation. It was in vain, of course.
“Do you know much about Mrs. Jones’s life, Dr. Hooper? She was married of course,” he continued, never giving her time to respond. “And she and her husband had two children. Young adults now. I do believe that the elder is in engaged to be married. Charming children.” His tone was deliberately light.
Molly wondered what he was really trying to say. She could almost feel his eyes boring into her back.
“Oh,” she responded simply, almost tonelessly.
“Yes,” he continued. “And her husband is quite the upstanding citizen, as far as I understand it.”
The hairs on the back of Molly’s neck stood on end. She swallowed and spoke quietly.
“What is it that you’re trying to say, exactly?” For a moment there was just silence.
She turned around, and caught his face in a very troubled expression. It cleared away almost as soon as she saw it, but it had been real. She suddenly felt as though she could see the mask that he wore. She’d always known there was a mask there, but for a split second she felt that she could properly see it, all of it, before the sensation faded. Some of her hostility had drained away with that odd moment of realization, and it didn’t come back, despite the fact that he was back in ‘menacingly polite’ mode.
“Nothing at all, Dr. Hooper.” Like nothing had ever happened.
She sighed. Much help he was being.
The realization didn’t come until the next day, after she’d gotten more of the results back. She had no idea how Holmes could have possibly known, but Mrs. Jones’ results showed, when taken together, that she was almost certainly a Simulacra. At least by the government’s standards.
It would be bad enough, what would be done to her memory if she was discovered to be a sim post-mortem. What her family could go through would be even worse. Her husband would be a laughingstock, and her children would be considered sub-human at best. They might even end up as property of the state. Now she knew what he had meant, what he had wanted to tell her. ‘Don’t let people find out what she was. If it does get out it could ruin innocent lives.’
Molly looked through the test results that she had, thankful that she’d only ever sent in a brain stem sample for residual magic testing. It couldn’t give a definitive result the way a sample of the amygdala could. If the amygdala was never tested, if she was cremated for instance, without it happening, there would always be room for reasonable doubt that she was truly a sim. What Molly had to do was really quite simple. She had to focus on the actual cause of death in her report, and bury the tests that were closest to being smoking guns. Then, she had to get her released to the appropriate funeral service without her amygdala ever being tested. Do her job, in other words.
Recipient: Meredydd
Author: oboetheres
Characters/Pairings: Molly Hooper, Mycroft Holmes
Rating: Teen
Words: 5090
Warnings/Contents: Disscussion of Slavery, AU, Magical Realism
Summary: Ever since her cousin was labeled a 'Simulacra' Molly hasn't been able to believe that they are less than human, no matter how radical that position is considered to be.
Read on Archive of Our Own:
Mrs. Jones
Read on LJ:
Molly rubbed her forehead miserably. She couldn’t get the news story she’d heard on her way home out of her head. A government Simulacra had been put down for being as the story had put it, glitchy. She was one of those who believed that Sims were as real as anybody else, crazy though most people thought the idea was. She couldn’t ever dismiss Sarah that way, and the unfortunate consequence of that was that she could never dismiss any of them that way.
Thinking about Sims as though they were humans like everyone else had so many unsettling implications. She daren’t do much about it, despite how horrifying it was that human beings were still being considered property and could be killed as easily as an old laptop might be thrown out. Slavery had officially been ended so long ago, but this just kept on and on.
Restless, she stood and started pacing around her little main room. She knew that her conscience wouldn’t let her rest until she’d done something, but she didn’t know what. She was too pragmatic about the situation to think that she could really do anything to make it change. It was culturally and legally entrenched. Governments couldn’t make a change like that - to recognize the humanity of Sims would be to admit that they’d been enslaving and working to death their own citizens for centuries. What could she do right now that might actually make some sort of difference?
It would have to be a letter, she decided. But a letter to who? And what should she say? Maybe something about it being a waste of resources. Or maybe that if the government had run out of uses for a sim it should be sent back to its family.
It was long hours with her heart in her throat and many drafts of her letter before she felt like she had finally gotten it right. She didn’t get much sleep that night.
Molly was hard at work in her lab on the most recent case that she’d been assigned. It was a very curious one. On the surface it was a simple hit and run, but she kept finding little tiny clues that just didn’t quite add up. As she was puzzling over a strange mark on the deceased’s neck that she still couldn’t identify, a very well dressed man strode authoritatively into the room. He was tall and had an immediately noticeable air of officiousness.
“Dr. Hooper?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
“Yes,” Molly replied, “That’s me, what can I do for you?”
“I’m here on official business from the department,” he replied giving her a brief insincere smile. “We will be taking control of this autopsy.” Molly’s eyes widened in shock as he continued. “There will be no need for you to concern yourself with it any further. Our own people will be here momentarily to handle the transfer.” He finished, sounding for all the world as if his plan was a foregone conclusion, and Molly bristled. Normally anyone here on official business would present the paperwork up front. The way he talked, she almost thought he expected to just up and leave simply because he’d said so.
“I don’t think that’s normal procedure Mr. …” She let it hang.
“Holmes,” he responded with a thin smile that was even more insincere than his first, if that were possible.
“Mr. Holmes,” she continued, deciding to take that as a small victory in this bizarre battle of words she found herself in. “You do have all the proper paperwork?” It was a leading statement.
Only then did it occur to her to be worried what getting in this man’s way might mean. If he didn’t have that paperwork he might be some sort of criminal, and if he was, she had no idea if this was important enough to him to do her harm to get what he wanted. Thinking back on how vague he had been, criminal didn’t seem like that unlikely a possibility.
“Of course,” he replied, tone making it clear that he thought her slow. After a moment’s maneuvering he pulled a sheath of papers out of his briefcase and handed them over to her.
She pursed her lips and huffed before stripping her gloves off and moved to take the papers from him. As she looked through them, everything seemed to be in order, but she was an expert eye - at least in this particular matter. She couldn’t even have said how many of these forms she had seen come through - none in a manner remotely like this though. It was a simple official request for transferal of custody of the body. They usually came into her inbox, placed there by one of the many receptionists and assistants at Bart’s who had likely taken it off of the department fax machine. Every once in a great while one might arrive by courier, but Mr. Holmes was certainly no courier or errand boy. She could see that he was far too high up the totem pole to be delivering papers.
In any case, she knew what this paperwork was supposed to look like, and everything seemed to be in place. But somehow, to her, it looked like it was merely an excellent emulation of the real thing. It even had all the appropriate signatures, including the ones from Bart. The only thing concretely missing was her own signature, which would signify that she had transferred custody.
Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it. She’d only noticed it because when one of Bart’s labs had been undergoing repairs she’d been searching around for a lab that could perform the particular testing put forth as reason for the transfer on the form. She knew that the facility listed as the destination did not perform that test. It sent shivers down her spine. Was it a simple mistake? She could only hope it was. The alternatives weren’t nice to think about.
“Well,” she frowned, trying to act puzzled rather than frightened, “all the signatures seem to be in order but I think you’ll be disappointed to find that the testing you want isn’t something ‘Integrated’ can do. In fact, it is a test that I’m pleased to say that Bart’s has the capability to do. That’s very odd,” she continued haltingly, “Are you quite sure that there hasn’t been some mix-up somewhere Mr. Holmes?”
He blustered for a split second, clearly caught off guard. After a moment he seemed to regain his dignity.
“I am not the specialist in this case Dr. Hooper, but perhaps they have recently added this testing. We certainly want all tests done in as state of the art a facility as is possible, after all.”
Oh, smooth. He was very smooth.
“Really.” she said, her tone making it clear that she didn’t buy that in the slightest, and something like wry amusement appeared in his eyes for just a split second. “Look Mr. Holmes, why don’t you get this straightened out on your end, and come back to me with the proper set of paperwork. Just verify that everything is correct for me. If you can do that, I will of course release the body to you. Unfortunately, I just can’t right now, not with all the inconsistencies here. All right?” She held the papers back out to him.
“Very well,” he said as he snatched the papers back, “I’m sure I won’t be long.”
True to his word he was back within a few hours, this time with paperwork that actually made sense.
“I do apologize Dr. Hooper. It would seem that some members of my department have been producing sub-par work.” The sentence ended with such delicately precise diction that she almost winced, thinking of the roasting those members of his department must have gotten.
When he finally left after overseeing his people loading up the deceased, Molly breathed a sigh of relief. With any luck she’d never have to deal with him again.
It was strange how she could go days, even weeks or months without really thinking about Sarah at all, and then the littlest thing would bring it back to the front of her mind, and Sarah and how she must have died would be all that she could think about for days (work excepted, of course).
On this particular day it had probably been about a month and a half. It was, as usual, the simplest most innocuous thing that brought it all up to the surface. There was a little old thrift shop that she passed sometimes on her way to the library. They had a little display window in the front where they would arrange little mannequins with some of the clothes from the store. She would sometimes stop to look more closely, since whoever was in charge of the display seemed to have a sense of humor, posing the mannequins and putting sets of clothes on them that were almost puns, if you were familiar with the fashion when they had been made. Most of the time she didn’t see anything like that, but for the clothes that came out during her mid-teens to mid-twenties, when she’d been paying the most attention, she often caught little odd juxtapositions.
On this particular day, she didn’t recognize any of the clothes as being from that time frame, but a girl’s dress caught her eye and forcibly held it. For a second she almost couldn’t breathe. She was absolutely certain that Sarah had had a dress precisely like this one. Same brand, same style, same color. In fact, for a second she was irrationally certain that this dress and Sarah’s were one and the same.
After what seemed an eternity she was finally able to free her eyes. She closed them, and took several deep breaths before forcing herself to slowly keep walking towards the library. She grimaced. There went her plans for the afternoon. She had been intending to take advantage of having a week day off to go to the library and the shops when they were less crowded, maybe get scans or a couple of patterns from a craft book she’d discovered there the other day. It would have been a nice relaxed afternoon, getting some necessary things out of the way in as leisurely a manner as possible.
She couldn’t help resenting the clothing shop for that, even though she knew exactly how irrational that was. And there it started again, the cycle of resenting Sarah for taking over her mind like this, and then feeling horrible for thinking such a thing, and then berating herself over it, and then starting it off all over again by resenting Sarah for making her berate herself.
Finally, about a block away from the library, she stopped and leaned back against the cool wall of a building and tilted her head up. She always hated when she got like this. She knew exactly how irrational it all was, as she watched herself go through this absurd cycle over and over. At least maybe she could get past this part, and get to the part where she was resenting the government.
“C’mon Molly,” she whispered to herself as she forcibly refocused her train of thought. She stood like that for a while longer before shaking her head at herself and heading towards the library.
Molly looked around the room, the meeting was still several minutes away from starting and not all the participants were there yet. It was a strange situation for her. She’d been in many meetings at Bart’s, and even a few at the yard when she had done an autopsy in an unusual case.
This was entirely different.
Amanda Ranson was someone that she’d known for several years, and she’d been involved in several cases undertaken by Amanda’s previous department. She hadn’t worked with the outgoing administrator since her transfer. Her new department had its own pathologist, and she hadn’t really needed to call Molly in, despite how much they had enjoyed working together in the past. When this case came along, and the department felt that it needed a second expert to corroborate the opinions of their own expert, Amanda had jumped at the chance to bring Molly in. Molly had expected to come in, do her own autopsy and produce her own report, possibly even present it briefly in a small meeting. She hadn’t expected to end up being asked to attend the entire length of a large interdepartmental meeting just so that she could summarize her report.
She can’t help but feel self-conscious in the face of the obvious importance of some of the people in the room. The level of stiff and stuffy finesse displayed by their outfits made their general positions quite clear to her, even if she didn’t know (and probably didn’t want to know) the particulars. The next person to enter the room didn’t make her feel any better. She recognized him immediately, and her first reaction was one of mixed exasperation and relief. Exasperation because she couldn’t help but think of him as some sort of nefarious controlling… something.
Mr. Holmes had made quite the impression on her, none of it good. The relief was from the knowledge that if he was here, he must be legitimate; she hadn’t cooperated with some sort of criminal organization when she’d turned that corpse over to him. She’d always thought the idea a bit paranoid, but she had never been able to discount it entirely. Her reaction quickly shifted to one of surprise. She’d always assumed that if he did legitimately work for the government that he must be some sort of spook. What was he doing here?
She watched as he moved towards one of the other men of obvious importance in the room and shook hands. As he turned to take his seat, their eyes met for the briefest of moments, the surprise in his clearly visible to her. Molly quickly looked down. What had he thought of her staring? He did not seem like the sort of person that she wanted to be caught staring at.
Just a few moments later the meeting was officially started, though Molly was too preoccupied to really pay close attention. Half worried and half curious, her mind wandered down various avenues and into numerous scenarios. What kind of work could bring someone here and to Bart’s to pick up a body? Did it mean anything bad for her that she’d run into him again?
She wasn’t so far gone though that she didn’t recognize when it was time for her to give her conclusions, nor so distracted that she wasn’t able to do a professional job of it. There were no questions for her, her report corroborated the in house pathologist’s perfectly, and they’d already had a chance to ask him all of the questions that they wanted.
After her report she returned to her seat. The door was on the opposite side of the table from her, almost directly behind Holmes in her line of sight, and she had to remind herself not to keep glancing over at it. For whatever reason she was expected to remain in the meeting until it ended. She normally wouldn’t mind, but she knew that talk would inevitably turn to the now suspected killer - one of the government’s golems. Once it did, she shut it out for the most part, and was almost surprised when the meeting was over. By some bizarre coincidence, she and Holmes were all of the sudden the only two people still seated in the conference room. That was the last thing she wanted, so she hurriedly tidied her things up to leave. Just as she was pushing her chair back to stand up, a voice filtered back through the door.
“I don’t see why we can’t just terminate the fakie. It’d be a better use of resources than going to all this trouble to investigate.”
Molly suppressed a shudder of rage, and because she was seated on the opposite side of the table from Holmes, she was able to see Holmes’s face. It was a coincidence that she was looking almost straight at him in that moment, and she was surprised to see his face distort for just a second. She’d never put much thought into her fairly shallow opinions of him - they were straight stereotype really, and they made him into someone who agreed with every official stance of the government and probably every unofficial one too. She was stunned to see that the expression that had peeked through hadn’t been pretty, and she guessed that he was no more pleased with that statement than she had been.
This young woman’s life story was particularly tragic in Molly’s opinion. She had been identified as a Simulacra at the remarkably young age of three. The government was always thrilled by finding one that was so young, the younger the ‘powers’ became noticeable, the more powerful that individual was likely to ultimately be. Her name, once upon a time, had been Jessica Solomon. When she was taken away from her parents and family at three years old, she’d lost that name. Been trained in a government facility, had it drilled into her that she was nothing more than a tool. A golem. By all accounts, the brainwashing had worked remarkably well. Probably because they had gotten to her so young. Her ‘maintenance record’ was spotless, right up until she had died a sudden death at the age of twenty eight.
Molly always found it hard with female Sims, particularly any who looked like her cousin had. As a white female brunette, Ms. Solomon was close enough for her emotions. Her mind was stuck in some stupid cycle again, feeling sorry for herself and then feeling horribly guilty about putting her own emotions before the horrible things that the dead woman in front of her must have suffered. After wallowing for a moment, she cleared her throat and brushed that tangled morass of emotions aside. It was time to get to work.
Hours of cutting and weighing and cataloguing and taking and sending off samples later, Molly was finally done with the messy part of the job. Hopefully.
After sighing and rolling her head to work out the kinks, she stepped back and stripped off her gloves, flinging them into a nearby receptacle almost like she was shooting a rubber band. It wasn’t exactly professional, but somehow she found it satisfying. Now for the less literally messy, but far more figuratively messy part of the job. All the first line of in house tests had come back, and it was time for her to sort through them all and try to make sense of this whole thing.
She’d sent in samples for the full range of testing they might do on a corpse, excepting tests that were very expensive, for things that were either very unlikely, or both. She sipped her coffee as she flipped through the report on the first panel. It was all very mundane, nothing to indicate cause of death. The second panel was much the same, as was the preliminary toxicology screen that she’d gotten back. It wasn’t until she got to the blood type analysis of all things that she realized it. While golems had the same ABO blood types as normal humans, their Rh factor when looked at in detail rather than in the simplified positive or negative system, always fell within a certain range. The reasons for this were unknown. Solomon’s Rh factor was literally one point away from the boundary of that range on the smallest scale used for Rh typing.
Molly stopped, taking a second to absorb that information. She seen blood type reports on more people than she could count, and she’d seen reports where the bona fide human’s measurement was scarcely any different, just barely different enough to put them on the ‘human’ side of that line. Now, blood type in and of itself was not considered to be definitive proof. If it were, surely all babies would be typed at birth, and golems taken from their families to be indoctrinated by the state when they were still infants.
Molly looked back at the other reports, zeroing in on other measurements that could indicate a Simulacra. They were all so close to that line. She stopped, hand involuntarily coming up to cover her mouth. If just a tiny shift had happened, this woman’s life would have been entirely different.
Molly flipped through the reports until she came to the key one: the preliminary report on residual energetic magic and stable magic in the subject’s neurons. Taking a deep breath, she dived in, taking special care to pay attention to every single measure. Most were close to that line that divided the humans from the ‘golems’. One was even on the human side of that line. It wasn’t until she got to the section where the tests of various ‘fissile magics’ were listed that she began to understand. Fissile Alpha was quite literally off the charts. This helped explain how she had such strong magic animation despite all her other readings being so low. Her breath caught as she got to the Fissile Sigma series and the gross imbalances that it showed. Here was the smoking gun. All that remained was to go through the rest of the reports to see if there were any other factors in her death, and organize all her notes into the final report.
It had been an entirely unremarkable day, and her latest subject seemed, so far, to be a perfectly normal dead woman. Molly finished sealing the last liver sample in its receptacle and turned back to the body to begin putting everything in order.
She almost jumped at the sight of a man just standing silently on the other side of the table. He hadn’t been there a minute ago, and she hadn’t heard anything. She blinked, recovering her composure. Him again. What were the odds that she’d keep encountering the same man despite the fact that she had nothing to do with him?
Holmes was tense this time though, she realized. He’d been perfectly at ease the other two times, posture rigorously correct but not tense.
After a few moments of him simply standing there, studying her, and Molly trying to figure out what was going on, he shifted slightly, pasting a polite smile onto his face.
“Dr. Hooper, what a pleasant surprise to see you again.” All she could think was what a blatant lie that was. He was the one who had walked into her morgue after all.
“Oh?” Her expression made her disbelief plain.
“Quite,” he responded lightly, offering her another supercilious smile. This definitely wasn’t normal.
“Is there something you need?”
“Need? That’s a rather strong word Dr. Hooper. I’m merely here to see that Mrs. Jones is being… treated properly. She was a colleague.”
Molly was floored. That was absolutely the last thing she would have expected. Was he essentially here on personal business? What a bizarre sort of personal business.
“Um, OK? Well, she’s, uh, she’s being autopsied.” The look she received might as well have been a whole paragraph, asking what was wrong with her in detail. She rolled her eyes and started to explain herself. “Well, I don’t know what you mean by treating her properly, but I have been cutting her open… I just thought it worth mentioning that it’s, there’s an autopsy going on, that’s why there’s all the incisions?”
“Ah, I see,” he said. His expression said ‘Ah, I see how much of an idiot you are.’
“Well, is there anything specific I can help you with Mr. Holmes? Do you have transfer orders or something?” At this point she almost didn’t care. She just didn’t the patience for whatever this was. When he didn’t answer she went on.
“It’s very touching that you’re here out of concern for your colleague, but we don’t normally do autopsies with members of the public just wandering in to watch.”
“Ah.”
Was that really all he was going to say? Seriously?
He cleared his throat.
“I was wondering if it would be possible for you to fill me in on how things have been going. Not necessarily your findings or even any preliminary findings. Just how things have been going.” His face seemed open, but she didn’t trust that for a second.
After considering for a moment she decided that what he was asking wasn’t strictly, literally, out of the question.
“Well, I guess I can say that they have been going smoothly, but I really can’t be any more specific than that. I can’t exactly release all that information to just anyone who walks in the door. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I did.” There was a short awkward silence.
He pursed his lips, “Of course. I would not expect anything else. You do seem competent, I suppose.”
She knew she was glaring at him. She didn’t really care. Come into her workplace and imply that she might not be even competent at her job?
He stood in place for another moment, as if to prove that she wasn’t kicking him out, that he was leaving of his own accord.
“Very well. I do suppose that I have learned what I came here to learn. I hope you have a good evening, Dr. Hooper,” he finished before turning and heading out the door.
Molly stayed in the same spot for several moments, and then just shook her head. She had no idea what to make of all that.
By the time she was done getting everything in order, she had managed to push Holmes’s bizarre appearance to the back of her mind. She was finally able to get fully back on track and concentrate on the matter at hand. She’d go drop off the remaining samples, and then down to the little ‘mailroom’ to pick up the reports that had already come back in. She had an inkling of what some of them would probably show just from her own examination, and she began going over what various possibilities would mean. On the way back from the mailroom, she stopped at a machine in the hallway to pick up a cup of coffee. As she was filling it up, the man sitting in the little waiting alcove across from the machine, who she’d only really seen in her peripheral vision, finally registered.
Holmes again. This was getting creepy.
She turned around to see him relaxing, almost deliberately nonchalant in one of the chairs. All the tension she’d seen earlier (if she hadn’t just been imagining it) had gone. She was sure he looked upset, maybe even angry.
He simply smiled a pleasant, almost personable smile, and it seemed like he was surrounded by a faint aura of menace. She couldn’t shake the thought that he had been waiting here, just for her.
She hesitated.
“Mr. Holmes,” she said, just to be polite. She had turned around and started staring at him, after all.
“Dr. Hooper,” he responded, too smoothly to be natural, and it just about sent shivers down her spine.
She grimaced and turned back to the machine, hoping that he wasn’t going to try to continue the conversation. It was in vain, of course.
“Do you know much about Mrs. Jones’s life, Dr. Hooper? She was married of course,” he continued, never giving her time to respond. “And she and her husband had two children. Young adults now. I do believe that the elder is in engaged to be married. Charming children.” His tone was deliberately light.
Molly wondered what he was really trying to say. She could almost feel his eyes boring into her back.
“Oh,” she responded simply, almost tonelessly.
“Yes,” he continued. “And her husband is quite the upstanding citizen, as far as I understand it.”
The hairs on the back of Molly’s neck stood on end. She swallowed and spoke quietly.
“What is it that you’re trying to say, exactly?” For a moment there was just silence.
She turned around, and caught his face in a very troubled expression. It cleared away almost as soon as she saw it, but it had been real. She suddenly felt as though she could see the mask that he wore. She’d always known there was a mask there, but for a split second she felt that she could properly see it, all of it, before the sensation faded. Some of her hostility had drained away with that odd moment of realization, and it didn’t come back, despite the fact that he was back in ‘menacingly polite’ mode.
“Nothing at all, Dr. Hooper.” Like nothing had ever happened.
She sighed. Much help he was being.
The realization didn’t come until the next day, after she’d gotten more of the results back. She had no idea how Holmes could have possibly known, but Mrs. Jones’ results showed, when taken together, that she was almost certainly a Simulacra. At least by the government’s standards.
It would be bad enough, what would be done to her memory if she was discovered to be a sim post-mortem. What her family could go through would be even worse. Her husband would be a laughingstock, and her children would be considered sub-human at best. They might even end up as property of the state. Now she knew what he had meant, what he had wanted to tell her. ‘Don’t let people find out what she was. If it does get out it could ruin innocent lives.’
Molly looked through the test results that she had, thankful that she’d only ever sent in a brain stem sample for residual magic testing. It couldn’t give a definitive result the way a sample of the amygdala could. If the amygdala was never tested, if she was cremated for instance, without it happening, there would always be room for reasonable doubt that she was truly a sim. What Molly had to do was really quite simple. She had to focus on the actual cause of death in her report, and bury the tests that were closest to being smoking guns. Then, she had to get her released to the appropriate funeral service without her amygdala ever being tested. Do her job, in other words.