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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."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.