Devin drove into the garage of the Office of Legal and Military Operations and parked the car in the free spot closest to the main elevator. He and Maria climbed out and set foot towards the morgue. As they did, Maria ran through every potential sce-nario in her head, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. If this didn’t produce any leads either – if her father’s neural logs really were so corrupted that she couldn’t identify the murderer – she didn’t know what else she could possibly come up with. She might just need to abandon her investigation altogether. Of course, she hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“We’ll have to drop by the police department floor first,” Devin informed her as they strolled down the corridor towards the main elevator. “Civilians aren’t normally allowed to enter the morgue, so I need to sort out clearance for you.”

Maria shot a death glare at him. “Didn’t occur to you to tell me that detail any sooner? Or did you deliberately leave that part out?”

“I will neither confirm nor deny.”

Maria let out a sharp nose exhale, half frustrated, half amused.

Then they reached the elevator door. The two of them rode it up to the police department floor and walked up to an office door. Maria didn’t take note of the name printed on the plaque next to it.

Devin rang the doorbell, and a voice echoed from the speaker attached to it. “Who is it and what’s your business?” it asked, sounding quite agitated, as if Devin and Maria were in-terrupting something.

“It’s Devin,” said the officer acting as Maria’s escort. “Got a civilian with me, wants to see her father’s body in the morgue.”

“Come on in,” the other officer replied, and the door to the office slid open.

Maria followed Devin into the office, keeping her gaze glued to the officer sitting behind the desk. A native Japanese-looking man, middle-aged, black hair that shone like it’d been polished with turtle wax, combed back into a sleek helmet around his scalp. And equally shiny sunglasses with lenses that acted like mirrors. She didn’t see the point of wearing them indoors.

“So who are you?” the man asked Maria.

“Maria Crahan,” she introduced herself. “I’m the daugh-ter of Yoshiro Busujima. He was killed in prison the day he—”

“Yeah, yeah, I don’t need to know how he died,” the officer interrupted her, waving a dismissive hand. Then he spun his chair to face her directly. Although his eyes were hidden be-hind the mirror sheen of his sunglasses, Maria didn’t like the way his gaze seemed to intensify. After a moment of silence, he said: “Don’t see a neural interface on you.”

“Do I need one for clearance?”

“No, just means setting it up will take a little longer.” Then he tapped on a wrist-mounted device of some sort for a few seconds, producing a holographic projection of a personal information form and saying to Maria: “If you’d be so kind as to fill that out.”

“Absolutely.” Maria took her time filling out the form and hovered a finger over the Submit button when she was done.

The officer grabbed the holographic form like a sheet of paper, pasted it on the screen of his holocomp and pressed a few more buttons. For a moment, the only noises in the office were those that the holocomp emitted.

The officer broke the silence some time later. “Alright, the morgue has your clearance. Just give them your name at the door and they’ll let you in.”

“Thanks, Koji,” Devin said and escorted Maria out of the office. Koji hollered “Anytime” after them. Then they headed back to the elevators and rode one of them a few floors down to where the morgue was. When they came up to what looked like a reception desk, Maria said her name as the other officer had instructed, and a few seconds later, she was in a corridor-like room that was lined with cryo-chambers on both sides.

“Who are you looking for?” asked one of the morgue employees in Jangl. Addressed more so to Devin than Maria, she figured.

“Yoshiro Busujima,” Devin replied. The morgue guard found the chamber in which his body was held in no time flat, as if they had memorized whose body was held in which cham-ber. Devin and Maria thanked them for the assistance, and then they left them to their own devices.

Devin pulled a cable out of his own wrist-worn thinga-majig, with a connector like a three-pronged fork but with nails for the prongs, the kind that would slot into the jack of a neural interface. Then he instructed Maria: “Find the neural jack for me, then plug this in there. I’ll do some setting up in the mean-time.”

Maria obeyed wordlessly, grief and disgust bubbling in her core, but she maintained her composure. She brushed the part of Yoshiro’s hair aside under which the neural interface was concealed, scanned it with her eyes in search of the neural jack and plugged the cord in when she found it. When she did, holo-graphic text popped up in the air from Devin’s wrist apparatus. Maria looked at it curiously and tried to read it, but it was es-sentially a block of random letters and numbers. Devin kept tapping on the device for a few minutes. He looked so entranced in his work that Maria didn’t dare say anything, lest she disturb him.

Eventually, she heard him say: “Okay, I reached the me-mory layer. Now to figure out which one of these blocks is the last one.”

“Wouldn’t it be the one at the top?” Maria inquired.

“You’d think so, but it’s not as logical as that in prac-tice,” Devin replied while he kept tapping away. “The memories are stored on a deeper level than diagnostic info, and the deeper you go, the more scrambled the data gets.”

“Right.” Maria pointed to a random block on the holo-graphic projection as Devin scrolled. “So what’s in that one for instance?”

“Let’s see.” Devin opened the block Maria pointed to, and a video of one of Yoshiro’s memories started playing. One from about 34 years ago, Maria figured – the moment of her conception. She recognized her mother from the video, naked on top of Yoshiro, riding him passionately and moaning with equal fervor. In that moment, Maria wondered how her mother was doing – the woman had divorced Yoshiro and moved out of Japan when Maria was young, and she had no desire to stay in touch with anyone she knew here. Not even her own children.

Devin closed the video with a swift motion, as if he’d been caught watching porn at work. Which, in a way, he had. His face didn’t show any signs of embarrassment, but Maria still chuckled.

He kept scrolling through the memory banks, eyeing the information he could decipher – must be a skill they teach the police here, because Maria couldn’t make sense of any of it – and ignoring most of the entries. Then, a few minutes later, he finally stopped at one.

“Think this is the one,” he said. Maria scrambled over to Devin’s side, leaning against him like they were a couple at a movie theater, and Devin opened the file.

Please be usable, please be usable, please be usable…

The video was an ocean of static. Maria groaned in frus-tration, hunching over and hiding her head between her knees.

She felt Devin’s eyes on the back of her neck. “Won’t lie, I was hoping there’d be something here too,” he muttered.

“It’s just dead end after dead end, isn’t it?” Maria croak-ed in defeat while she lifted her head. “I’m never gonna find out who killed him at this rate.”

Devin was quiet. When Maria turned her gaze to him, his expression was conflicted. He looked like he had an idea that would help Maria on her investigation but also compromise whatever the police were looking into. “What’s on your mind?” Maria asked him at the risk of not getting a straight answer.

Devin shook his head and replied: “Nothing.”

Maria wasn’t convinced but decided not to push the subject.

While Devin unplugged the cable from Yoshiro’s neural interface, Maria got up to her feet and sighed to him: “Thanks for your help. I’m going home.”

“Need a ride?”

“I live close enough that I can walk. Besides, aren’t you on the clock?”

Devin shrugged in response, the motion accompanied by a smirk of admittance. “And what about you? Don’t need to be at work?”

“It’s my day off. Something you don’t get very often, I know.” Maria’s tone turned sarcastic halfway into the statement.

Devin snorted. “Well, enjoy. And sorry you didn’t get to see your dad’s murderer.”

“It’s okay,” Maria sighed in response. “Not your fault.”

With that, she exited the morgue, rode one of the eleva-tors back to the ground floor and made towards her home, coming up with no ideas as to how she was going to continue her quest to find out who had killed her father. But she also didn’t want to drop it just yet.