YOULOVEME.VBS: A Cyberpunk Short

by TheManFromAnotherTime

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Death, Alternate Universe, Original Character, Mystery, Science Fiction
Length: 5949

It's Nightmare Night and a fresh body arrives at the morgue. Was it murder, or just another victim of the mean streets?

In Hippodrome City, life is cheap and chrome is prized. The rich fill their bodies with implants and graft on appendages their species isn't born with, or chop off perfectly good limbs to replace them with upgraded hardware, all in the name of fashion and performance. After all, why bother to save for the future when everything can come crashing down in a hail of gangbanger gunfire or deadly corporate-warfare systems hacks?

Better live life while you can, and on Nightmare Night there's no better way to do that than to go partying in costume.

In the criminal justice system of Hippodrome City, the Chief Cyber Medical Examiner is responsible for forensic autopsies of the deceased found in unusual or suspicious circumstances. This is the story of one such exam.

Written for the 2023 Cyberpunk Nightmare Night Story Contest, where it won second place

Published 2023-11-30 16:30:00 UTC
Last updated 2023-11-30 16:30:00 UTC

Chapter 1

Artesuna Quinine looked down at the sheet-covered body on the mortuary slab before her, ignoring the display screens that sprang to life at her approach. She always made it a point to view the subject with her own eyes first and try to connect with who the pony was before starting her mechanical investigation; born from a desire to establish an organic relationship before a computational one.

It was a young mare this morning; a late teenager, or maybe early 20s. Quinine found it got harder to tell every year as she got older and more removed from youth culture, not that she herself had been particularly fashionable as a filly. But ever since the minimum age for nonessential cybernetic replacement was lowered to twelve years of age not long ago, she’d felt the distance accelerate more quickly as the physical differences compounded the cultural ones. The body before her, with sparkling black eyes and the dull sheen of metallic shoulders peeking out from underneath the sheet, would be considered only modestly augmented by today’s standards, potentially one of any number of literal foals trotting around with titanium bodies, chromed hooves, and telescoping optics.

With her left hoof, Quinine drew back the thin white cover to expose the body’s forelegs and torso. The subject’s left forelimb and hoof were completely cybernetic, in the latest swirling “engraved bronze” style favoured by Earth ponies or anyone else who wanted to look big and tough in a luxurious manner. The body’s right forelimb appeared natural, but she expected it would have received some internal strengthening to counterbalance the fully mechanical other side. X-rays already taken by the automated examiner’s table would probably show reinforcing rods for bones as well as low-friction coatings for the joints. That was just standard practice dating back to when cybernetic limbs were merely replacements for genuine injuries, rather than fashion upgrades, and Quinine thought that the work looked like it had been done by a proper cyberneticist, not some back-alley ‘ripper’.

There was a soft click behind her and the stepping of hooves. “Morning, Quinine!” said a cheerful young stallion.

She nodded, still looking at the body. “Morning, Sam.” When her assistant rounded the table to the other side, a flapping motion caught her eyes and she glanced up, frowning slightly when she noticed his unusual outfit. “Did I miss a special offer at the scrubs dispenser this morning?”

Samurai ‘Sam’ Trotts grinned, rearing back on his hind hooves and spreading his forelegs wide to reveal his outfit – some sort of padded grey full-body armour, festooned with pouches and pads, and cloaked underneath a crimson-red longcoat with cut-off sleeves. More concerning to her, however, was the bandolier of throwing daggers across her assistant’s breast and pair of swords slung over his back.

“Check it out, Quinine, I’m Morning Starr! You know Morning Starr, don’t you?”

Quinine had to shake her head. “Can’t say that I do. Is it his birthday today?”

Snorting, Sam got back down on all fours. “Come on, chief, it’s Nightmare Night! Costumes and candy, ghouls and ghosts, The Mare in The Moon and all that, ya know?”

Turning back to the business before her, Quinine nodded. “Sure. Sorry, I guess I don’t really notice the holidays come and go like I used to; at least not until the bodies come in wearing Hearthswarming Eve ‘ugly sweaters’ or festooned with red hearts for those & Hooves’ Day. So who’s Morning Starr?”

Sam turned in place to show off the rest of the costume, then quickly shook off the coat and removed the weapons, pulling out his actual green scrubs from one of the numerous pouches and scrambling to slip them over his armour. “Who’s Morning Starr? Why, only the most popular action-horror hero to come out of the media mills of our fair Hippodrome City!”

Finally dressed properly for work – mostly, for the bulky bodysuit bulged awkwardly underneath his medical uniform – Sam returned to the examination table, sitting on his haunches and seizing one of the monitor arms to bring it up to his muzzle. “Morning Starr, hero of the *Mace* franchise, is a cybernetically augmented vampony-hunter.”

“Sounds like a tough job.” Quinine’s eyes were still on the body. There were signs of contusions under the hair, at the chest. The scanner’s report would reveal most of the details, but if no family came forward to claim the remains within the allowed twenty-four hours, and if tomorrow’s schedule permitted, then she would come back and shave it to get a good look at the wounds herself. She didn’t like relying solely on penetrating scans. At least these injuries weren’t on the face – even late-calling family could get very upset at a shaved muzzle; it complicated funerary arrangements.

She remembered back to an incident years ago: a teary-eyed widow screaming at the then-chief medical examiner that the coroner’s office had committed a final humiliation on her husband’s body by shaving his head – which Quinine had done in order to investigate the details of the entry wounds from the hail of 5mm gunfire which had killed him.

In the eyes of the widow and the previous chief, however, that had been an unnecessary over-investigation. What did it matter if it was twelve rounds impacting or only eleven? If two or three had ricocheted off his forehead plate while the rest penetrated up via his cheeks and nose? Did it change anything for prosecuting the killers who’d committed the brazen daylight murder?

Across the table, Sam was still gushing, scrolling quickly through the records on-screen. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it, chief. Morning Starr’s not just a vampony-hunter, he’s a vampony *himself*! And that causes all sorts of problems. Vampony bodies reject cybernetics, you see? But he needs his augs, since he refuses to drink blood, and without blood or augs he’s as weak as an ordinary pony. So he works closely with a cyberdoc pal and has to go under the knife again and again. Real ‘dark, suffering hero’ stuff.”

Sam followed that explanation with a low whistle. “Speaking of going under the knife, wow, today’s special sure had the works.”

Quinine took a deep breath, returning her gaze to the blank-eyed face of the chilled body. “I only got here a few moments before you did, Sam. Haven’t had the chance to look over the chart. Give me the rundown.”

“Sure thing.” With a flick of his hoof, he scrolled back to the top of the output. “Subject is one Cassandra Stonefield, earth pony, age nineteen, natural mare, parents Igneous and Scoria Stonefield, both deceased. No siblings. Equestrian citizen by birth, registered resident of Hippodrome City with no fixed address.”

As much as the Chief Cybernetic Medical Examiner of Hippodrome City dealt with death every day, that last fact still stung her. “Homeless at nineteen with this much chrome. Paying for cyberware instead of putting a roof over her head.”

Sam shrugged, his padded shoulders pulling tightly at his scrub shirt. “That’s the style today, chief: high tech, low life.” He glanced down at the dead mare’s face, noticing the glittering particularly party-mare eye makeup. “She was probably couch-surfing; maybe running with a gang or a herd of groupies for some celeb. Possibly mixed with the occasional hotel stabling; looks too clean to have been slumming on the streets or in the shantytowns, I’d say.”

Bending over, Quinine stared into the mechanical eyes that would surely be harvested and resold by the state if nopony with inheritance rights came forward to claim them. With a forehoof, she pulled up on one of the eyelids, revealing the manufacturer’s inscription around the outer edge of the optical implant: “OLO”, written in stylized ancient Dalecarlian runic letters. “Odin Laser-Optical,” she announced. “Luxury oculars, if they aren’t knock-offs.”

Tapping at the screen, Sam nodded approvingly. “Diagnostics say they’re legit. Manufacturer serial number registration checks out, too. Service records show the opticals were installed by a licensed OLO doc two years ago.” A few more taps took him to another page of records. “Previous registered address at the time was in Vienna Heights. Parents were still alive, then; must’ve had some money if they were in that neighbourhood. A ‘sweet sixteen’ present, maybe? And as for living conditions, I’d assume she’s surviving on a combo of inheritance and life-insurance payouts.”

Quinine nodded. “Maybe.” Finally, she pulled herself away from the corpse and turned to the beckoning screens around her. It was time to go to work in earnest. “All right, let’s start from the top. Why don’t you carry on leading us through the procedure list, Sam?” She leaned over and glanced at the sheathed blades on the work table behind him. “Or I guess we should use your full first name today, ‘Samurai’?”

Sam licked his lips and flicked away at the screens once more. “Hah. Well, of course Morning Starr has been trained in the ancient Kirinese martial arts, you know. I’ll still stick with ‘Sam’ at work, if it’s all the same to you, but my parents definitely got a kick out of the selfie I sent them on my way here, that pair of old Kirinaboos.”

With that last bit of humour, they set about the slow, methodical procedure of postmortem examination. Most of the details had already been collected, processed, and collated together by the automated facilities at the mortuary. They just needed to go through it.

The body was discovered at 2 AM this morning in a toilet stall at GALLOP, an expensive and fashionable downtown Hippodrome City music venue with pretensions to being grittier than it actually was. Friends of the subject had noticed her absence after some time and gone looking; when they found her they tried to rouse her to no avail. An expired platinum-tier VeTrauma membership resulted in a greatly delayed visit by VT pegamedics who registered no vitals at the scene and informed the office of the coroner. Formally pronounced dead in the wagon-ride over. Detective Leandro Birchwood from homicide assigned to investigate. No report from him filed yet, but crime scene investigation agents were on-schedule to do their work earlier this morning, so it probably wouldn’t be too long in coming.

Quinine had dealt with Birchwood before; he was good ponice. He’d have something for them this morning, she was sure. And they’d hopefully have something for him in turn. There was no shortage of bodies dropped overnight to get through today.

The automated examination table with its eight double-jointed robotic arms and array of sensors had already taken care of gathering all the basic surface evidence, photographing, x-raying, infrascoping, and ultrasounding the body from all angles, even removing and gathering the subject’s clothing. The deceased was wearing an iridescent green bodycon dress with noodle straps, Carousel Boutique label, earth pony size 10. Hooves in black Louis Valise sandals, earth pony size 9. Black panties, Celestia’s Secret, earth pony size 11. The system’s body-clothing shape analyzer had noted that the dress was slightly overlong for her but snug in the hips, and the built-in expert-intelligence assistant noted that this was a popular look among earth pony mares at present.

Sam couldn’t help but note the eye-watering total estimated sum retail cost for both the outfit and the cybernetic enhancements. “Expensive clothes, luxury eyes and foreleg, reinforced skeleton and organic hooves, last year’s top-shelf cranial comms suite, and a high-grade biocomp capable of driving almost a full-body conversion. It looks like attachment points have been laid down for prosthetic wings as well. This mare spent enough on herself to outright buy a one-bedroom condo midtown. I can understand thinking you’re invincible as a kid and letting a VeTrauma contract expire, but you’re right, Quinine: why didn’t she have an apartment? I mean, I’ll cut expenses and skip on dining out or the latest games & virt-sims for a few months, sure, but I know the pace of upgrades I can afford.” Flicking his ears ruefully, he continued. “I can’t deny that I slobber over the latest chrome release and watch far too many trashy vids from even trashier celebs showing off their shiny new hardware, but I’m no junkie. I like chrome, but I’ve got self-control. And a budget.”

“Hmm. I imagine mister ‘Morning Starr’ has no such restrictions.”

That got a knicker from the momentarily morose pony across the table. “Hah, no he does not. The franchise is sponsored by a consortium of the biggest names in chrome. Mister Starr has OLO optics, KiTi reinforcements, BRUT limbs, Locksteed-Martingale composite wings, Tulpar microjets, even an experimental Uranus prosthetic horn – and two of ‘em at the same time in one of the arcs when he was up against a vampony god – the whole works. He’s a living – unliving, strictly speaking – fictional chrome sales catalogue. A cyberalicorn de luxe.” Sam raised a forehoof with a grin, tapping his chin. “Of course, the gimmick is he’s always needing to replace them on account of the vampirism rejecting & glitching the things, but he’s also always broke – nopony’s paying him to fight the vamponies. So he rips ‘em out of the vamps’ own living pony minions, and the stuff he doesn’t need, he sells, which funds his bullets and vehicles and the rest of his operation. It’s kinda like recycling, hah. Savin’ the world one bad guy corpse at a time.”

The clothing report from the table continued with details of items that had been collected with the subject. Purse, ‘Carriage’ brand, black. Contents: MAG self-applying lipstick and digital compact mirror, unbranded small brush, registered secure bitstick (apparently legitimate, bank trace ongoing, significant sums already accounted for), supplementary pocket power-bank, mint-flavoured ‘Lance’ chewing gum, unbranded gold-plated vape inhaler with two cartridges of nicotine-free juice, fruit flavoured.

These items were all gathered on a side tray, and Quinine took a moment to have one of the robotic arms pick up each in turn to present it to her. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for who this pony already appeared to be.

Miss Stonefield had also been found clutching the straps of a party mask, which had accompanied her to the morgue. It was of white chromoplastic with the design of a green beetle face printed on the front. The table AI had identified it as the face of ‘The Green Beetle’, a fictional superheroine who fought evil in a suit with the shape of an iridescent green beetle.

“Hey, Green Beetle, she teams up with Morning Starr in the latest flick, Mace 8: Dark Designs! Going to see it again tonight with some friends before we trot the bars. Damn, that’s a cool way to have done the costume. Shame about how it ended up.”

Quinine squinted. “You said tonight’s Nightmare Night? Why was she dressed up yesterday, then?”

Sam made a few quick taps on a side monitor, searching online. “GALLOP’s holiday celebrations started two days early, apparently. Prizes and a different act every night, with the big show and grand prize tonight. Tagline on the datalinks is ‘Why buy a costume you’ll only use once?’ Offering a discount for multi-night tickets. I guess it makes sense, some ponies want to party all weekend, others might not be able to make it on the day of.”

Spreading her forelegs wide across the examination table as she leaned back, Hippodrome City’s most senior cyber medical examiner took in a final long view of the body before her in its natural state. In its cold black eyes she saw the spark that had once been there, pictured the mare dancing in her dress and mask, carefree and energetic, vibrant and alive.

All that magic was gone now.

“Cause of death.”

At that verbal command, the examination table’s holoprojectors sprung to life, bathing the corpse in the shimmering glow of superimposed analysis diagrams and text.

Sam glanced at the animation a moment before reading out the machine’s conclusion. “Pulmonary embolism by thrombosis. Biocomp logs show very high heart rate for several hours before death; tachycardia would be a major aggravating factor for blood clot formation.”

Quinine looked down at the bruise marks in the fur, each now highlighted by a ring. She reached out and tapped a virtual button, then the projector animated the deceased’s own cybernetic foreleg flailing about, pounding at the sternum. A desperate attempt to deal with the horrible sensation in the chest that would’ve been the last memory before it all ended.

“Toxicology negligible. Surface bruising was self-inflicted in the throes of death,” Quinine pronounced. “If she was dancing all-out, her heart rate should be high, but not that high, and without drugs, she’d have to take breaks so it wouldn’t be constant. Why didn’t her heart rate ever drop, and why didn’t the biocomp correct the condition?”

Sam shook his head. “Not sure. It was firing warnings and alarms, and it was trying to reach VeTrauma but of course getting code 401 Unauthorized rejections due to contract expiry. System malfunction? Firmware is up-to-date. Diagnostic scans show as green. Hack seems unlikely unless it was an as-yet-undocumented zero-day, but then why use it on a random unemployed mare in a club, even a wealthy one? Nothing’s missing or stolen. Zero-day exploits are worth too much to waste like this.”

The dead cybernetic eyes glistened as they reflected the holoprojected text which announced that three hours of video recording was available prior to time of death.

Grabbing a pair of vid-glasses from a tool cart, Quinine pulled up thumbnails of the unedited video. “Let’s scroll her visual feed. See if anything suspicious comes up.”

Across the table, Sam’s glass-and-composite eyes went black and he shut his lids. While his optics weren’t as high-end as Miss Stonefield’s, they were more than capable of playing back the recording at full fidelity.

Dragging a forehoof along a lower control panel, Quinine scrubbed quickly from the start, seeing the deceased arriving at the nightclub by airlimo, in the company of three colts and two other mares, all dressed in fancy-looking costumes, all laughing, all clearly expecting to have a good time.

Then it was almost three hours straight of crowded nightclub scenes. They had gotten a booth and bottle service, but Miss Stonefield had spent most of the time dancing, only returning to the table twice during the evening. There was one recurring visual artifact, however: one of the colts, a masked pegasus who she was almost always with, and who was constantly looking at her — and she looking at him in turn. Her partner? Or just her escort for the night? It was hard to tell. They didn’t appear to kiss or make out at all, and the vid-analysis AI confirmed no hits on the recording showing any such kind of close physical interaction. It was still struggling to process the horde of faces at the dance club, cross-referencing social media with employee and criminal databases to put a name to every one of them.

Quinine paused her high-speed scrub every now and then, allowing events to play out in real time and watching the way the two dancers interacted for a few moments. He looked young; she was young, too, but he still had the scruffiness of adolescence. And he looked nervous; shy, maybe. Had Miss Stonefield also been shy? No way to tell without her partner’s account.

Across the table, Sam seemed just as confused. “I don’t get it, chief. All that dancing together and he never gets his hooves or wings around her for a single moment? They don’t even rub or bump flanks. It’s like they’re dancing *at* each other instead of *with* each other.”

He turned his head, taking advantage of the wider view angle that her optics were able to capture, mentally zooming in on other parts of the scene. “It’s not like there was some no-touching rule in place at the club. Plenty of other couples were getting more than a little hoofsy on the dance floor.”

The ping of a notification interrupted their analysis, and Quinine lifted up her glasses onto her brow to read one of the main screens. “Crime scene investigator’s report is in, along with a prelim from Detective Birchwood.”

His eyes still shut, Sam nodded and started to rattle off the contents. “Forensics came up zero on the washroom stall, other than that she was in it, which confirms the embolism as cause.”

“Supports, Sam. Not confirms,” she corrected him.

“Oh, right, yeah. Sorry.”

Another pinging from the systems, this time repeating. It was Birchwood himself. Quinine flicked the vidcall answer button, and the table lights automatically shifted to better illuminate her face, rather than the body.

A close-up of the detective’s own muzzle came into view on the datascreen, his eyes shielded by goggles and the hair of his face being buffeted by winds. “Quinine,” he said impassively, his voice muffled by the best efforts of the noise-cancellation systems clearly trying to compensate for the fact that he was presently in jet-assisted flight.

“Birchwood. Got your report.”

“Good. Let me give you the summary. Victim was out clubbing with five friends from a little social group. So far I’ve interviewed two of them: the mares, who share an apartment. Our vic’s parents were mid-level corpos, a business analyst and a product owner, working for First Clopital Financial before getting zero’d in a hit on a departmental party at a restaurant a year and change ago. Suspected to have been ordered by a rival bank. Corp life insurance paid out and the parents had investments; she’s been living carefree since graduating high school. Called it her ‘gap year’ before attending college.”

The video feed momentarily jerked as Birchwood banked to take a sharp turn around one of the downtown skyscrapers. “She fell in with a little group of similarly unemployed corpo-brats leeching their parents’ cash, though none of them is quite as well-off as she was, and most of them have living guardians. While couch-surfing between them, she’s been bankrolling their cybernetics and acts of teenage rebellion.”

“Cyber punks,” pronounced Quinine.

Birchwood grinned for a moment. “More like cyber-posers. Nothing more serious on their collective rap sheet than uploading graffiti to a digital billboard or hacking a vending machine to swear at customers. But their fancy hardware is real, much of it paid for by Miss Stonefield.”

Quinine nodded, observing once again the luxurious eyes and elegant foreleg. “Interesting.”

The detective continued. “I saw the prelims from the exam AI. You on board with the blot clot embolism call?”

Again she nodded. “Yes, but the cause seems to be a biocomp abnormality that we can’t explain yet. We’re scrolling her opticals right now.”

“All right. You’re probably seeing a lot of a single colt with her at the club, that’s Kel Ocean, alias ‘Zero Override’. They all took on hacker nicknames; Stonefield’s was ‘Rocky Michelangelo’. The two mares in the group said Ocean was sweet on Stonefield, though they weren’t formally an item yet. Apparently he had declared to the others that he would finally summon up the courage last night to try to upgrade from just friend to coltfriend.”

“Fits what we’ve seen so far. They were dancing together, but there seemed to be some emotional distance between them.”

“Okay, good. I’m off to interview the other two guys first, saving Ocean for last. She’d been sleeping at the two-bedroom pad he rents with his college-colt brother for the past few days. Apparently he gave up his bedroom for her and took the sofa. Unless you spot anyone else suspicious in the feed, he’ll be the last one to have interacted with her. I should have all the interviews wrapped up before lunch. Message me if you find anything interesting.”

Hanging up, Birchwood left unstated the obvious implication: that Ocean may be Stonefield’s killer, despite apparently having wanted to become her lover.

As Quinine pondered what that would mean as far as the autopsy, Sam started tapping furiously away at the controls.

“Chief, I just realized something about Ocean; let me show you.”

She slipped the viewglasses back down again, and saw that Sam had brought up a number of shots of the colt and then composited them together to show his full body in three-sixty three-dee. He was wearing a drab metal-plate face mask with breathing, ear, and eye holes, and his left shoulder was similarly protected by strapped-on pads. Around his torso he wore semi-stiff dark blue aramid body armour but was otherwise unadorned.

“That isn’t just some generic wild mustang’s outfit. Ocean’s dressed as Goldmettle, a sometimes-villain, sometimes-reluctant-hero mercenary character who’s also a sometimes love interest for The Green Beetle. Pretty obvious costume pairing for a would-be couple.”

Sure enough, with the composite manually built up the forensic AI almost immediately recognized the costume and provided a matched rotating view of the fictional character for comparison. It was a pretty close likeness.

“Okay, so they synchronized costumes. Fits the evidence so far that they were close. Let’s keep scrolling.”

The video feed continued much as it had before: dancing, brief pauses to drink, and occasional wireless conversations between the friends — actual speaking would have been impossible in the noisy club. And then the feed started to get wobbly; Stonefield may have suffered the embolism at that point.

Quinine and Sam watched from the victim’s own eyes as she stumbled her way to the washroom, pushing desperately through the crowd. The optics neatly filtered and processed the view to show the pathway clearly in spite of the steamy atmosphere and flashing lights, but if the blood clot in her legs had already shot up to her lungs it was likely she would be having issues remaining focused, or even conscious.

Bolting for one of the stalls, the video feed showed her double over the toilet, where she immediately vomited. After a moment, the view shuddered from the augmented pounding on her chest, then tilted sideways as she collapsed to the floor.

All that was left was just a nearly static image until a good half an hour later the door opened to reveal Ocean accompanied by one of the mare friends. They seemed shocked and horrified. AI analysis of facial expressions, however, was impossible given that they were both wearing masks, though eye and ear movements indicated high stress levels. But that was all completely natural for friends finding a companion passed out on the floor.

Quinine scrolled back to just as the door opened. Did Ocean look nervous already? But if he did, was that only from being smitten and therefore concerned? Had Stonefield confided in him some pain or ache which might have been indicative earlier in the day or the night before?

Speculation was pointless. They had to figure out why her heart rate was so high first.

“Pull up the system logs from the biocomp, Sam. Let’s find the root cause of her tachycardia.”

With her goggles on, the virtual space before her filled up with reams of log output from the victim’s internal biological computer implant, responsible for monitoring and regulating all bodily functions, including most particularly all other cyberware.

Quinine typed a query into the AI log analyzer, asking it to compare last night’s logs versus the night prior and display any differences. There was a chance that the neural net algorithms would miss something, but if they didn’t then she would soon have her answer.

In just a second, the operation was complete. “It was the optics which kept requesting elevated oxygen flow,” she stated, as Sam silently followed along. “Why were her cybereyes drawing so much O2?”

Cross-referencing the timestamps in the biocomp log and a few of the correlation IDs from the requests, she had the analyzer open the optical implant logs and filter them down as well.

Sure enough, there was a line confirming the request really had come from the eyes’ image processors. But immediately preceding that was something strange. “‘0x4834434B3352 SubjectSensor.py:91 Engagement subject in view.’ What’s this? Looks like a log from targeting software, but Stonefield didn’t have milspec or even combat opticals. Any of this clicking with you, Sam?”

Through the translucent virtual windows projected in the goggles, she saw Sam shake his head. “No idea, chief. But if her systems were tampered with it surely couldn’t have been over the air in the club.”

“Probably, but we can’t rule it out. Either way, let’s take a look at the system update logs.”

A wave of the hoof sent all the previous data into her virtual notekeeper, and then she brought up the much more standardized records of firmware patches and upgrades.

Sam quickly read out the last few lines. “Firmware update for the OLO ‘Ingram Open’ optics two nights ago delivered via biocomp. Firmware update for the Honeybee ‘Flash Z’ biocomp itself delivered just before by hardwire from foreleg. And another biocomp firmware update earlier in the day over the air.”

Quinine narrowed her eyes. “Two updates in one day? And why would one come by wire while the previous came wirelessly? Something doesn’t add up.” She highlighted the log lines. “Look at the biocomp numbers, Sam. Both deliveries were of the same version. Why would she need to hardwire in an update she’d already received?”

Her mood stiffened when she saw the timestamp of the wired update. Four in the morning, and according to the biocomp monitor the subject was asleep at the time. Another quick scan of the logs showed that the cable was connected not fifteen minutes before that.

Sam gasped. “He jacked into her! Uploaded a hacked firmware with matching file size and hash! I bet the OLO update is fake, too. Damn!”

“Yes. Same as when they hacked the vending machines. Their group, or someone in it, clearly has experience with doing this before.”

Immediately Quinine tapped out a message to Detective Birchwood: ‘Indication of hardwire hack two nights ago while asleep. Effect of hack not yet clear but appears responsible for elevated heart rate which resulted in blood clot.’

Within seconds Birchwood replied with a ponice-badge ponymoji indicating his receipt.

Keeping her goggles on, Quinine extracted the firmware dumps and sent them to her security contacts at OLO and Honeybee for more complete verification, then began to organize and collate the evidence they’d found, typing out statements explaining the significance of the log lines.

Over on the other side of the body, Sam’s eyes flashed to life again. “I don’t get it. Was he lying about being sweet on her? And if they’re just cyber-posers why the sudden upgrade to murder? Nothing makes sense to me, chief.”

Quinine just shook her head. “Motive’s not our concern, Sam. We’re just here for the forensics. Birchwood will get to the ‘why' of things.”

She continued to tap away. Sam looked down at the body before them, still bathed in the light of the table’s holoprojectors. After staring a good long while, he muttered, “Good-looking young mare with her whole life ahead of her, loses her parents in a corpo skirmish beyond their control, copes with it by falling in with a bunch of low rate cyberpunks, and winds up dead less than twenty-four hours after her supposed friend jacks into her cyberleg. Unbelievable.”

Ignoring him, Quinine saw the ping of a message back from OLO confirming the upload as improper and indicating it would be promptly added it to a blocklist. Whether or not they’d improve their signature algorithm to make future hacks more difficult or not was another question. Developing new algs wasn’t cheap, and it was a constant race between them and the hackers trying to get around them.

Meanwhile Sam continued to rant. “I mean, buck me, I’m going out tonight with friends and probably gonna crash on one of their downtown-condo couches instead of braving the metro home to my place in the suburbs at some uncelestial hour of the night. What if I wind up here being zeroed by one of them for no reason at all?”

Quinine pulled the goggles off and put her forehooves down, then waved a hoof across a touchscreen to dismiss the holoprojections. The room’s lighting became calm and sterile again. She nodded towards the row of fridge doors along the mortuary wall. Thirty doors had green lights indicating they were presently in use. Ten were bodies not yet claimed from yesterday; the rest were in line for examination. More would arrive as the day wore on, all from Hippodrome City’s central downtown borough, or occasionally forwarded from one of the others when their local coroner ran up against a wall trying to figure things out. “We all wind up here some day, Sam.”

He sighed, looking exhausted even though it was just the start of the day. Suddenly that superhero costume didn’t look so superheroic. “Yeah, but. I mean, I just — there’s gotta be an explanation, right? Ocean must actually be a bad guy. We’ll nail him. That’s the ticket.”

She left him to his dreams of super heroics and continued to work. A few minutes later there was another pinging. Birchwood again. The table lights didn’t have to shift when she answered this time; everything was already bright.

The new vidfeed was from inside a patrol aircar. No noise-cancellation muffling needed now. “Quinine. Got our colt Ocean in the back. He uploaded the hack, confessed to it when I confronted him.”

The chief cyber medical examiner nodded. “Let me guess. He was trying to give himself an edge in asking her out.”

Birchwood sniffed, glancing left and right from the passenger seat as the beat-cop driver next to him worked the controls of the vehicle. “That’s about the sum of it. Made it so that whenever she saw him her heart would beat harder. Turned on some combat algo switches buried in the firmware. He was trying to brute-force her emotions. Screwed up and got her killed instead.”

Sam’s mouth dropped open, his ears flattened, and he slumped forward, putting both forehooves up to his brow.

“You can probably hear him sobbing behind me. Poor bastard. We’ll see what the Crowns’ Attorney wants to do with him. Tampering and cybernetic assault at least, but murder might be tougher to convict. Of course the aug manufacturers will dogpile him in a civil suit to protect their reps. Ocean won’t be jacking into anything or anyone else for a while. Thanks, Quinine.”

“Welcome, Birchwood. Full report soon. See you around.”

A final nod of acknowledgement from him and the callscreen went black. Quinine continued to tap away to complete the remaining paperwork as Sam stared at the body blank-faced.

When she finished filing everything, she dismissed all the digital interfaces, silencing the examination table.

“Sam.”

Her assistant slowly looked up. There was the start of tears in his eyes. He hadn’t worked a lot of cases yet, and all of those had been ones with ‘easy’ explanations: bad guys killing bad guys, bad guys (or bad corps) killing good guys for profit, even bad guys just killing because of drugs or some other insanity. This was his first time with something that could really be construed as completely unintentional.

She nodded towards the body. “This is why I look them over first. I get my personal connection with them out of the way before I investigate. Then it doesn’t hit me later. That’s how I cope.”

He swallowed. “Yeah.”

Taking a step away from the examination table, she looked at the next fridge in line.

“Put her away, Sam. Let’s get to the next.”