Maria Crahan arrived at her workplace, a DanariTek cybernetic implant factory, to the sight of a police hovercar parked up front and the sounds of an approaching ambulance, its sirens piercing the air and turning the otherwise serene morning atmosphere into something else entirely. It was rare to see the police and medical crew here at the same time, so she couldn’t help but wonder what had happened here to warrant their simultaneous presence. Had someone been attacked? Killed? Was there a riot breaking out? Were people injured? She ran every possible scenario in her mind before covering her ears – the blaring of the ambulance sirens was starting to hurt them – and running inside.

And when she made it indoors, the image given to her by the brewing chaos was none the clearer. People – her coworkers – ran around and screamed in panic. The noise in the lounge was deafening. Maria kept her ears covered as she proceeded further inward, eventually deciding to stop one of her coworkers to ask what was going on.

The person she stopped was Deren Falk, cybersurgeon, son of Steve Falk – also a DanariTek cybersurgeon – and her mentor back when she’d just been hired. “What the hell happened here?!” she yelled to Deren, barely able to hear herself from the commotion.

“Enez was stabbed,” Deren yelled a panicked response. “Police came to interrogate her about something, she walked out to Steve stabbing her, and now Steve has a bullet in his head.”

“Steve?!” Maria hollered in disbelief. Steve had always seemed a decent guy to her, not mentally unstable in any way. Certainly not enough to just stab a coworker unprompted. She thought she had known him long enough to form a thorough image of him, but as it now turned out… “Why did he attack Enez?”

“Fuck if I know. I never thought I’d see him doing that to anyone, let alone here.” And Maria had every reason to believe Deren’s assessment – after all, he was Steve’s son. He if anyone knew his father better than anyone else at the factory.

Maria pulled Deren in for a hug as a way to offer her condolences. Steve might have committed a horrendous breaking of character in her mind, but that didn’t change her feeling the need to comfort a coworker – a friend – after losing his only living parent. “I’ll be okay,” Deren assured Maria in a half-whisper.

“I know. You’re strong,” Maria replied. “What about Enez? She okay?”

“She’s alive.”

“I heard the ambulance arriving just now. Was it you who alerted it?”

“No, I think the police officers did.”

Maria merely nodded in response. Enez would be fine in the medics’ care. In a way, Maria felt bad for her – Enez wasn’t one for making friends in the workplace, so nobody dared to approach her, but her coworkers still cared about her. Well, some of them cared. And Maria was one of them, that much she could admit.

She wanted to run to Enez and look over her while they waited for the medics to come in, but she trusted the police would do so in her stead. Besides, she had another objective in mind, and for that, she needed to get to her office. In that mo-ment, a commanding baritone voice echoed through the chaotic lounge: “Calm down and make way, people! We have medics coming in.”

Maria threw her gaze to the direction the voice had come from for a moment, then quickly turned back to Deren. “I gotta get to my office. Talk to you later, yeah?”

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

“Sorry about Steve. Again.”

“Thanks. I’ll manage, though.”

Maria gave Deren a parting pat on the shoulder and started making a dash for her office, but not before stopping at the open doorway where Steve Falk lay with a bullet in his head. Looking at his lifeless body, slowly bleeding out onto the plastic flooring, made her want to puke, but she managed to hold it back somehow. “Rest in peace, Steve,” she whispered to the body, almost forgetting herself there until one of the police officers gave her a commanding pat on the shoulder and said to her: “Move along. Let the medics in.” A command that some people were still taking their time obeying.

Maria, on the other hand, was nothing if not obedient. “Right. Sorry,” she muttered carefully in response and con-tinued strolling towards her office with a casualness that be-trayed her true feelings about what she’d seen and heard happen here today. Her only hope was that this wouldn’t become a common occurrence.

She made it to the door of her office, digging up her employee badge and tapping it against the scanner. The scanner beeped, the door slid open, and the office welcomed her with a calming odor courtesy of the lilacs she’d bought on her vacation in Central Europe. The flower shop she had stumbled upon was one of the few that still had real flowers – most sold synthetic flowers because real ones were rare to find these days, and the price definitely reflected that. The lilacs sat in a very plain but functional vase on Maria’s desk, right next to her holocomp. She closed her eyes as she entered the office and took a deep whiff of the floral aroma, then let out a relaxed exhale and sat down at her desk.

First order of business: see if there’s any mention of Yoshiro Busujima’s murder on the Net. Maria had been on a call with a police officer earlier in the morning where she’d been informed that her father had been killed. On prison ground the day he was supposed to walk out, no less. How had that been possible? The prisons of Neo-Tokyo were supposed to be some of the most secure in the world. She danced her fingers across the holographic keyboard of the computer as she typed in her Net search query: “Yoshiro Busujima murder”. No results. Evidently the news hadn’t reached the press yet, or if it had, they’d deemed it wasn’t worth reporting on. After all, Yoshiro was a nobody compared to another figure that had died recently – Yosuke Harashima, coincidentally the CEO of the company Maria worked for, among many others. She’d heard the news on her way to work. Officially, his cause of death was undisclosed, but police involvement suggested a murder. Maybe that was why they had come here to interrogate Enez.

But why Enez specifically? What did she have to do with Harashima’s death? Maria didn’t pretend to know the first thing about it, but she was worried about Enez either way. She hoped she wouldn’t get into trouble.

“Now you show up,” came an irritated voice from Maria’s doorway. She looked up from her holocomp and was greeted by the sight of her boss, Martin Stokes. An unpleasant man in every way possible, but Maria didn’t dare say that to his face, lest she get fired.

“Sorry I missed the party,” Maria replied sarcastically. “Anything you want me for?”

“Not right now. Just wanted to say hi. Keep your comm line open, though.”

“Will do,” Maria replied with a raised thumb.

Upon hearing Maria’s affirmative, Martin walked off without another word, leaving her to her own devices. When she was sure no one else was coming in to interrupt her, she punched in another Net search query: “Yosuke Harashima death”. The news was all over the Net. A million news articles, posts of varying length thanking him for what he gave to the world, an equal number of posts effectively saying “good riddance”… and somehow only a single mention of an in-vestigation looking into his death. If the information reached one news network, one would think it’d reach all the rest. But that wasn’t the case here. It was as if the police didn’t want the larger public to know about the investigation. Maria couldn’t help but wonder why.

Either way, Harashima wasn’t her primary concern. It was her father, Yoshiro Busujima. She wanted to know who had killed him, why, how. And if no one else was going to look into it, she’d have to do it herself.