The air in the interrogation chamber was chilled, recycled to the point of sterility, but it couldn't mask the scent of old violence and new fear. Dr. Deji Fadare sat opposite the man who had emptied the Surulere market square. His name was Abasi, and his body – the young, vibrant one that had mixed the chemicals – was six months dead. The man before her was his Engram, a ghost of neural architecture and cellular memory resurrected.
He was, for all intents and purposes,
a recording being played on new hardware.
And like any stubborn file; he was
refusing to be read.
"Hag, what do you want from me?" Abasi questioned rudely.
Deji leaned back, her voice soft, almost conversational, as she tugged her gloves free and placed them on the table, posture relaxed. "I just want to know what the poison was made of."
Abasi's smile was a bloodless slit in
his face. The engram's fidelity was remarkable; it had perfectly captured his contempt. "What poison, doctor?" He feigned, "It's all about your point of view. In another context, it's a cleansing agent. A purifier."
"A purifier that left two hundred people convulsing in their own fluids, and dead by the next day" Deji replied, not looking up from the file. She tapped a specific line. "Your signature is all over the canisters. But the residual compound is… unstable. Degrading. It's messy. I didn't think a man of your reputation liked mess."
A flicker in his eye. Pride. There.
Engram interviews weren't just about retrieving memories; they were about navigating the core personality, the ego that persisted beyond death, and Abasi was a craftsman.
"My work is elegant. The instability you detected is a feature. It leaves no permanent trace for your kind to pick over like vultures."
"My kind?" Deji leaned back, feigning
casual curiosity. "The living? Or the curious?"
"The paleopsychaitrist!" He fumed. "The
defilers. You dig up bones and think you can understand the spirit that animated them." He gestured at his own chest, thumping a fist against it. "This is defilement."
"Is it?" Deji opened the file, revealing not official documents, but an application dated seven years ago. "When your sister passed, you had requested her Engram be reanimated. By your words, did you want her defiled, or did you want answers?"
Abasi's smugness wavered.
She pulled out another file, a set of
schematics now. Chemical diagrams. "Because the initial analysis missed it, I
ran the spectra again. There's a chiral anomaly in the precursor here. Costly to isolate. Inefficient. Useless. Unless you had a reason."
He was watching her now, truly engaged and wondering where she was going with this.
"It's the same marker we found in your first published paper from university," Deji continued, her tone shifting to one of appreciation. "The one on chiral catalysts in organic synthesis. The one you dedicated to your sister."
Abasi's fingers, which had been drumming a silent rhythm on the table, stilled.
"The one who went missing on her way back
home from the convenience store she was a regular at."
The room went quiet.
"Do not speak of her," he whispered, his
fists clenched, voice laden with the ghost of old pain. His Engram briefly glitching.
Other restorers would have quit by now,
worried about a breakdown that would cost them the Engram, but Deji pressed.
"Why that isomer, Abasi?", her voice
low and relentless. "It served no functional purpose in the weapon. It was a signature. You wanted someone to see it. You wanted someone to know it was your work. It wasn't just a weapon, it was a statement."
He was silent, his jaw clenched. The
engram's emotional matrix was flooding with conflict.
"They promised you something, didn't
they?" Deji leaned forward, now the confidante. "The people who gave you the
materials. They promised they could bring her back. Just like you're back. But they
didn't instead you were killed and was burned to ash. It took me a while to put
you back together from the pieces I was left with."
Abasi raised his bowed head.
"They said… they had her engram. That
they needed a demonstration of faith."
"A demonstration paid for with two
hundred lives." Deji said. "And they never had her, did they? Her body was also cremated. There was nothing left to scan."
The fight went out of him. The sophisticated engram seemed to short-circuit, reduced to its core trauma. He was just a boy who had lost his sister and had been tricked into a monstrous act.
"The solvent," he said, his voice flat. "The left-handed isomer… it was a key. It's bio-reactive. It doesn't just degrade; it bonds with specific synthetic polymers. Check the ventilation systems of the bank subsidiary in the district. The filters should have absorbed it. The compound would have crystallized there. That was the target. The people…were just the delivery mechanism."
Deji didn't smile. She simply nodded, closed the file, and stood then she slid a crystal drive across the table.
"What?" Abasi asked, drained.
"I know its not what you hoped for, but there's a hologram of your sister in there. I thought you might want to see her again."
Abasi's gaze quietly regarded the drive. Then he raised his head, "Thank you, doctor."
"You're welcome," Deji said, her voice
soft. It wasn't forgiveness, and it wasn't absolution. It was a simple acknowledgment passing between two people with a shared understanding and a shared suffering.
She left the room.
Handing the information to the detectives who had observing from behind the one-way glass in the room.
A small group thanked her, one man and woman after the other exchanged a brief handshake. When the fourth figure took hold of her hand, she was met with an unfamiliar face.
The man wore thick blue tinted shades, and
had a culture air about him.
"It was an honor to watch you work, Doctor."
He said. "My name is Inemesit. CEO of OmniSoft, and I have a job for you."
He smiled.