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WHO: Hank Anderson | Harry Du Bois
WHAT: The Wonderful World of Ultrasound
WHERE: The Park
WHEN: Mid-Month
WARNINGS: Dun dun DUUUUUUNNN

The Zoo.

The Park.

The Dorms.

Those are the three places in the city that never move. Which means something about them is important not to move. A power supply? A cloning facility? The servers? There has to be something under each one.

Harry 'the Zooman' Du Bois has access to one of the places. Is also a former cop. One the Dualis Police Department never had a chance to look deeply into, not like him and Connor. Hank is hoping that means a grizzled veteran detective's skills can help pick apart this mess.

Putting a lot of faith in a relative stranger, he knows. But he's honestly desperate for that old sense of camaraderie, and he's hoping that he's not wrong. He uses the connections he made after the bombing, while he was searching for the source of the detonators, to 'acquire' a couple of spare city groundskeeping uniforms. And he uses it to also acquire a piece of ultrasound equipment.

Using that and some landscaping equipment enough to do some early spring pruning, Hank's found a nice hidden place in the shrubbed area of the park. It's early evening. A time when it'd make sense for them to be out, and everyone's gone back to work from their lunch breaks but haven't swarmed the traffic grid. The window is tight. They can't be here forever.

"Keep an eye out," he warns Harry as he's setting the thing up. "This has gotta work or I'm gonna lose my fucking mind."

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"Peeled and ready, chief," Harry mumbles in return, head twitching up as he sets about actually surveying the scene around him.

He wasn't drifting, so much as he was busy staring down at the equipment Hank's now fiddling away with. Sure, he's not the biggest torque dork in the RCM, but having been blasted by the waves of Ruby's pale-emitter, there's a natural kind of wariness in place. And, unsurprisingly, he's also very keen for it to actually work, too.

"You know how to use that thing?"

He's glancing down again, somehow resisting the urge to tug at the collar of his disguise for the fifteenth time. A disguise that absolutely does nothing to hide his identity, frankly. Not up close, anyway.

"Yeah, I mean... sorta."

He places the console on top of the rig, holding either side of the screen. When he opens it up, the menu appears without touch, without prompting. The selections chosen with Hank holding the sides of it alone.

"I got this mod. Originally I got it 'cause I wanted to be better in tune with Connor. But then we figured out we needed to talk silently. Just between the two of us."

He swallows.

"Then I got worried for these clones. I didn't want 'em just... fuckin' dead, you know? I didn't see 'em as expendable. So I started beefing the thing up, hoping I could get good enough with it I could break the Head's control over 'em.

"If you asked me how to program my phone, I couldn't tell you. But now sometimes when I touch something? It's like I'm- I guess it's like moving a limb. I still fuck up sometimes, but I automatically get how to make it go." Like a child learning to walk, though, sometimes he still trips over his own feet. Right now, though, the ultrasound machine is setting up.

He finishes setting it up, pressing it off to the side and handing off an electric trimmer to cover the sound. "Hey, when I tell you to? Turn that on. And just uh.... try not to hack too much off the bush."

It's hard to put a word to the emotion that bubbles up, hearing about Hank's mod. It's a complex, slightly ugly thing - one that probably falls somewhere under the banner of envy if he's completely honest with himself.

Which he isn't, unfortunately.

He simply frowns, distracted by it for all of a moment or two, before following along again. Nodding, as he's apt to do.

It strikes him that the feeling Hank's struggling to describe - it's not so different than his own slow moments of self-discovery, back in Revachol. Moments like picking up his old hand-cannon again, or brushing his fingers along the sleek metal of Kim's Kineema. He might not remember driving, but he knows he could. He knows how.

And he supposes he knows how to operate a hedge-trimmer, too, even if he stares at it stupidly as Hank pushes it into his hands.

"Roger that: hack away all the bush."

He leans forward just enough to rap a set of knuckles against Hank's shoulder. "Don't worry, you got this."

The 'And I got you' is implicit.

Hank snorts at the 'hack away all the bush' comment, turning his attention to the ultrasound. "And start running it... now."

He starts up the ultrasound, letting it thump lightly against the ground. Once, twice, again. Soft thuds to betray what's between the rock and soil in the ground.

He expect that, after six or eight feet, there'd be metal. Concrete. Something solid. No, it's not. What he sees first looks like wing bones. Then a skull, neckbones, ribs.

This cross-section of ground, in a triangle shape of spreading electronic realization, reveals a spread of bones. Piles and piles of them. All of them including the wing bones of the old race, if you can tell that much.

"Hey, Harry, take a look at this and tell me if this looks like a shitload of bodies to you." He offers to take a turn with that hedge trimmer.

It takes a hell of a lot of Harry's willpower to keep himself from craning his neck to try and sneak a peek of the ultrasound's screen from over Hank's shoulder. Instead, all that antsy focus is set on proving those latent landscaping skills. A respectable effort to look at least somewhat like an actual groundskeeper. The moment Hank moves to take the hedge-trimmer, however, he gives up all pretense and reaches across for the machine.

His chin jerks a little as he registers what Hank actually said, but his eyes stay rooted to the image, brows reaching in vain to meet one another.

VISUAL CALCULUS — What are you trying to do? The longer you stare, the more you're filled with a sense of vague disappointment. The lines criss-crossing the screen could be bodies, sure, but giving anything more than a "maybe" would be lying.

"Hold on."

Clinging onto the machine with one hand, Harry works at loosening his uniform shirt with the other. It's awkward and fumbling, but he pries the collar open and brings the machine back to rest against his stomach. Casts a quick, self-conscious glance Hank's way as he mumbles something close to an apology.

SHIVERS — Your arms grow heavy as the cold finds its way into your skin, the hairs on your body standing at attention like soldiers preparing for review. Beneath your feet, the earth is hard from cold, undisturbed.

And further down?

SHIVERS — Like a graveyard. Fingerbones and clavicles, some fractured like broken teeth. Sticks and straws forming wings. Skulls as eggshell. Dead flesh in rivers of polychrome, with a pervasive smell that comes with an ache and an ooze. Stillness.

The feeling recedes, and Harry sucks in a breath, throat bobbing with a dry, tacky swallow. He lifts the machine again, looking over to Hank.

"That's, uh... Yeah."

Hank pays attention to loosely trimming leaves and a few extraneous twigs, waiting for Harry's judgment. He's pretty sure he's right, but the confirmation is what he needed.

"Those look like wing bones in there too, don't they? The original people that lived here? They had wings. The scientists that made MINDSEYE- that was the AI that the Head came from, they had wings. And MINDSEYE killed 'em all, fuck if I know why yet... Might have just wanted to see what would happen."

But from what he can see, at least from that cross-section of ground, he is betting all of these are old bodies. Not new bodies.

"So what the fuck is holding the zoo and the dorms still?"

He realizes, dimly, that he's disappointed. He wanted... he doesn't know. Hope maybe? Some useful information? A weak spot? Something? And he knows that it's not horror, not unrest, not that sense of dread hitting him. It's fucking disappointment. Because he already knew these fuckers had died. So what!? They're fucking dead. Great. He has a skeletal layout to go off of. Now what?! NOW WHAT?!

Disappointment turns to anger, long enough for the screen to spackle with static on the ultrasound, and behind him someone's car skids and nearly runs into another as their GPS falters. It's enough to distract Hank from his straying emotions and get his brain back on the right course.

"So this is what Arkady felt in the park. Now we just need to learn what's under the other two."

That was the kind of casual summing up that takes more processing power to parse than what Harry has access to, honestly. He's struck dumb for a moment, stuck listening to what seems to amount to a kind of impenetrable, frustrated litany.

ENCYCLOPEDIA — MINDSEYE? Oh, of course! The winged MINDSEYE scientists! Those guys!.

"You saw all of that?" He's looking back at the screen - at the shifting image creeping back, now the interference seems to have faded again. It's still a confusing mush of lines and shapes to him. His mouth sets into a grim little line.

Either Calculus is right, and this is yet another window into his own inadequacies as a cop, or...

INLAND EMPIRE — Or?

"Sorry, uh..." He sniffs and looks up at Hank again. "Just catching up. You think the bodies are keeping this place rooted?" It's not a sentence that feels right, coming out of his mouth. He tries again: "Like, what, a mass-burial anchor?"

"No idea." Hank says honestly before resigning himself to sitting between two of the bushes.

"No, I mean. There was this recording. Apparently some scientist, maybe the one from that stray memory, he called it MINDSEYE. And it was made by some organization called HeAD. And he made the disease that fucking killed them all. I left a copy of it at Ricks but you can take a look at mine."

Hank stops and puts his elbows on his knees and his hands on the cap that he got to go with the uniform and muffle that mess he calls hair. He just stays like that for a minute. Considering that he'd used a disease for one of the executions and the shady everything about the Head? None of it had come as a surprise.

"You know, even if the big fucking AI had been honest with us the whole time? If the disease had been some accident and he was supposed to fix it? This always had to happen." He rubs his hands down his face. "Somewhere the dead of the old inhabitants had to be buried. Burned or buried. And there they are. So I can't fuckin' tell if he doesn't move it 'cause he doesn't want to risk disturbing 'em, or if they ground it, or if... I don't fuckin' know.

"I wonder if that scientist is buried down there somewhere."

Not that he intends to go looking. It's just an idle sentiment, and a wayward thought for that prick Kamski.

Harry finds himself staring down at Hank as the man sort of... concertinas into the bushes. For a moment he even wonders if it's an incredibly shitty attempt to hide, but—

EMPATHY — It's disappointment. Exhaustion. Sometimes you need a win, and this wasn't it.

His knees creak uncomfortably as he squats down next to the other man. He keeps his eyes rooted to him for all but the brief moment he casts a glance to the floor. To where the mountain of dead just... sit, forgotten. Beyond rotting, even. It's grim, but it's not like it fills him with anything more than a slightly disconnected foreboding, really. After all, Revachol sat over a mountain of corpses, too.

"The one from the recording?" He lifts and drops a shoulder in a loose approximation of a shrug. "Maybe." And that's all he can say on that, without understanding more, really. What's one more to the mass, right?

He's busy digging into the uniform, retrieving his cigarettes from his pockets when he adds, "But what's that mean for us?" It's a broad, decidedly naive sounding question, he knows, but it's one he needs answering. He holds the packet out the Hank, gesturing like he's offering him one. "And what's next?"

"Same thing it did before. We knew they were all dead. We just know where the dead are at."

His own shrug follows, shoulders shirking in a dramatic way that's unquestionably a shrug. That's where they're at. Back at square one, in a park of the dead.

"I guess I can tell Arkady now that I know why she had the bad vibes. So we see if the other locations don't move for the same reasons."

He crosses his arms and swivels to look over at Harry.

"Well now that I know how to use the thing, I guess I should show you. Think you can figure out a way to not get caught using it at the zoo?" Because he doesn't want to lose any more people. Not after that search for that drug dealer just ended in ally after ally vanishing.

The first point earns a soft snort. That's about what he figured, yeah.

To the second, his eyebrows ruck up briefly. "Oh yeah." He manages to combine setting a cigarette on his lower lip with a nod. "So unless the rest are more corpse stashes, at least we checked that shitty reveal off the list, right?"

He fishes a green plastic lighter from his shirt. It proves to be about as cheap as it looks, as it then takes four goes for the flame to catch.

"But the zoo, huh?" The thought of something grim buried under that little refuge isn't a welcome one. "I'll be honest, man: interfacing... tech, all that kinda thing? Not my strongest area." The cigarette dances up and down as he speaks, but the words come out clear enough. He's clearly used to speaking around it. "So yeah, assuming I do it, and assuming I can work out a way not to get busted... I'd appreciate the tutorial."

He frowns, silent for a moment. Then, after a brief drag:

"I can't promise I'm some kind of Samaran master though. I ain't about to phase through a wall or... you know, pull off some super-secret spy shit." He gestures to himself - a slow sweep. "What you see is what you get."

"So far I've just been using shit I learned while undercover, to be honest." Hank relents from his somber mulling so he can prepare that ultrasound device then.

"There was a massive red ice trade back in Detroit. I don't know if you got drugs like Krokodadil or Meth, but uh... it's along those lines. Fucking nasty shit. When androids were invented, they started producing a blue chemical to function as their blood. When you take that chemical, mix it with some other shit, then it turns red and crystallizes. Poeple started smoking it, injecting it, whatever.

"Androids were replacing people at their jobs. People were depressed. They'd spend their money on shit made of android blood. It was an escalating cycle. So for a couple of years, like, twelve years ago? I went undercover. Nobody questions the giant 6'4'' guy with the hollow eyes and the deep voice. He was paranoid as fuck though.

"So I got kinda good at just, you know, making distractions. Hiding shit. Doing switches, that kinda thing. I always assumed there were eyes watching and ears listening."

As he talks, he uses his Detroit smart phone to take a few pictures of the screen, showing the stack of bodies, adjusting the height so he has as many views as possible of the scan they took.

He wants as much evidence as he can accumulate.

"I kick myself for being normal all the time here. But we have experience talking and looking, and a lot of the soldier and warrior types focus on the fuckin' fighting before they even figure everything out." And most of them are even kids.

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