He wondered how to answer. Could he say he was from another village? Was there another village? He knew so little it was impossible to make even a bumbling attempt at a lie, and he felt deceiving a police officer wasn’t the best way to start a new life, no matter how short-lived it might be. “I came from the city of Detroit.” He paused for effect, then added in a soft tone, “From the year 2014.”
Ellis had no idea what to expect. They should pack him off to a psychiatric ward, but times had changed. Anything might be possible now. Ellis guessed the plausible reactions ranged from him being worshiped like a god to a dismissive nod, as everyone was likely time traveling nowadays. It would explain the disparity in clothes, and that portal could have been Time Machine 2.0. If computers could go from room-sized vacuum-tubed monsters to tablets in eighty years, time travel had to be a whole lot slicker than a bunch of plastic milk crates and a car seat.
Pax just stared at him a moment, looking puzzled. Slowly he watched as Pax’s eyes widened. “You’re from the past…way in the past.”
Cha made a dismissive huffing sound.
“Where is this time machine?” Pax asked.
“I left it up in the woods. Five—maybe six miles north along the river, not sure. I hiked a long way. Isn’t much to see, really.”
“Oh sure,” Cha said. “Bet it’s even invisible.”
“Cha, please.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Cha replied.
Pax scowled.
“Time travel isn’t common then?”
“No,” Pax replied.
“It’s impossible,” Cha said.
Can I really be the only one? Why haven’t there been others? “So I’m guessing you don’t believe me.”
Pax looked at him with intense eyes. “I believe you.” The statement was flat, no underlying tone, no sarcasm, and spoken so quickly and loudly that it left no room for argument. Pax continued to stare deeply into his eyes, no glances away or awkward shifts in stance.
If that’s a lie, it’s a damn good one, Ellis thought.
“The PICA has been cut out.” Cha looked up from the body, first to Pax and then accusingly at Ellis.
“Ellis Rogers didn’t do it,” Pax said firmly. “Ellis Rogers is telling the truth. Look—do you see any blood? Whoever committed the murder would be drenched.”
Ellis wasn’t certain of a lot of things. He didn’t know if the people around him were really human or the result of some android manufacturing plant. He didn’t know what year he was in or if technology was ahead of or behind his time. He had no idea what had happened to the city or the world. And the envelope had yet to be opened on whether he’d made a mistake or not, but he was certain of one thing. He was starting to like Pax.
So far everyone he’d seen had the same features, perfect copies of one another, but they weren’t the same. Ellis didn’t care much for the way Cha shared the same suspicious expression as the others in the crowd, but Pax was different—more gentleness around the eyes, more concern in the line of the jaw and the angle of the mouth, which appeared on the verge of a smile. Hair would have helped. Ellis had never known too many bald people, and the lack of eyebrows was disturbing. Their absence made Ellis uneasy, like he was in a cancer ward, but Pax impressed him as a person he might trust.
“Is there a Port-a-Call?” Pax asked Cha. “There would be an ID stamp on that, and we could trace the jumps.”
“I don’t see anything. Not even a tattoo—completely clean. Not much of an individualist. There’s nothing personal here at all.”
Pax turned back to Ellis. “Do you know who the victim was?”
Ellis shook his head, and he wished he hadn’t. The world swam. “I just told you I’m from—”
“Yes, I know—I just thought you might have heard a name or something.”
“Oh—no.” Ellis tried to remember, but he was feeling terrible. “I’m pretty sure neither said a name.”
“What were they talking about?”
“I really didn’t hear much. Something about a Hive Project and the future. That’s about all I remember.”
“See,” Cha said with a superior tone that irritated Ellis. He had no idea what Cha meant by the single word. It sounded like a continuation of a previous argument, but all he knew was that he didn’t like it. He also decided he didn’t like Cha’s tattoo. Ellis never cared for tattoos, they always made people look cheap—human graffiti—but he made exceptions for statements of honor like military insignias, the name of a loved one, or a quote from the Bible. But Cha’s was just strange swirls, like some Aztec art.
“I’m going to sit down, is that okay?” He was going to sit down even if it wasn’t. Ellis was feeling nauseous in addition to dizzy, and he let himself slide down the wall to the grass.
Pax nodded. “Nothing at all, Cha?”
“Sorry.”
“Concrete! I can’t report another anonymous. It’ll just make things worse.”
“There’s nothing here.”
Pax looked angry, but Cha only shrugged.
“Can’t you run tests?” Ellis asked. “You still have forensic sciences, right?”
They both looked at him, confused.
“You know, fingerprints and DNA samples.” He was about to say hair samples but caught himself.
“Those won’t help, Ellis Rogers,” Pax told him. “We all have the same.”
“Same what? DNA? Fingerprints? You can’t all—oh.” Not androids then—genetic engineering. Ellis finally understood the Darwin reference. So maybe he was a Darwin, at least in the strictest sense. Is everyone here born in a test tube?
“Without the chip we can’t identify the victim,” Cha said.
“Really?” Ellis asked. “So you all have chips in your shoulders to tell each other apart? C’mon, there has to be another way. I mean, what happens when those things stop working? Don’t they ever fail?”
“Not really.”
“In a case like that we could verify identity just by asking questions,” Pax explained. “Or run a neural scan. But being dead, those won’t work.”
“But you must have had this problem before.”
The two shook their heads. “Until recently, it’s never happened.”
“Seriously?” Ellis was amazed.
“What do we do now?” Cha asked.
“Like I have all the experience with dead bodies,” Pax replied, staring at the corpse with an expression that mirrored how Ellis was feeling.
“You’ve at least seen one before,” Cha said.
“Contact the ISP. They’ll want to look it over.”
“You two are homicide cops, and this is only the second dead body either of you has seen?” Ellis asked.
“First I’ve seen,” Cha corrected.
“What’s a homicide cop?” Pax asked.
“Police that deal with murders.”
With widening eyes, Pax pointed a finger at Ellis. “That’s right! You’re from the past! Way in the past. You know all about this—this sort of thing…about murders, right?”
“Not really. I wasn’t a cop. I used to design cars—parts of them anyway—worked on energy and alternate fuel. This village was a museum that was built by the Henry Ford Motor Company, and I—”
“Still is a museum,” Pax corrected.
“Okay, well—see, I used to work for another car company, trying to improve the capacity of batteries. I wasn’t a detective or anything.”
“But they had murders then, yes?”
“I lived in Detroit—they had plenty.”
“And you know that they used DNA and fingerprints to find the killers.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“Maybe everyone in 2014 knows about such things—not so much these days.” Pax took another step closer, until they were only an arm’s length apart.
Nice eyes, Ellis thought, something innocent and childlike about them.
“We don’t have this sort of thing anymore,” Pax said.
“Murders?”
“Death,” Pax replied.