Midway: Chapter 5

  Ten minutes after seeing Dhika, Johannes was sitting on a bench in a relatively isolated area of the arboretum.  The simulated sun was up, and it appeared to be a clear blue sky, with just a smattering of clouds.  He’d noticed the state of the sky when he walked in, but for the moment he had seated himself in a small grove down one of the wandering trails off of the main path in an effort to find some privacy, something in scarcity on the ship.  Here where he had seated himself, the canopy of the trees totally obscured the artificial sky.

  “Now, let’s see what we have here…” he said to himself.  He opened the scroll only a third of the way and it went rigid in his hands.  He pulled out a stylus which besides his finger, was the only way to control the device in the absence of a transceiver which facilitated Brainchip control.  One was not hard to find though, since they were still used sometimes in conjunction with the Brainchips, or by the young before they’d had a chip implanted.  He set the screen to only display on the side facing him, and after only a cursory glance at the file listings, it didn’t take him very long to find what he was looking for.  Apparently the lack of transceiver and password were themselves the final line of defence; the incriminating files were not hidden at all within the scroll itself.

   

  There’s something wrong with me… I’m not like the others, I have… urges that nobody else seems to.  I seem to… to want things that I know are wrong to want, things I can never have, or… or take.  Why is this happening to me?  What have I done to deserve this?  I find the girls my age attractive enough in an… aesthetic sense, but the boys… the young boys… oh god help me the too young boys…

  I know I’m not supposed to feel this way, I know that they’re too young for anyone to look at them… in that way, and yet I do.  Why?   It’s just not fair, it’s-

   

  Johannes pushed the posts together and closed the scroll.  It appeared as though all that was on it was a journal kept by his murder victim.  By the date written at the top of that first entry, it appeared to be written when he’d been only twenty one years old, some forty-nine years ago.

  He threw the retracted scroll down into the soil and gravel in front of him, and it landed with a hollow thud and some sounds of scraping.  He did it involuntarily, despite himself.  He paused for several moments, stunned.  He looked straight forward in shock with his skin turned even whiter than usual.  He sat up straight and looked forward off into the distance as it mortifyingly dawned on him.  Now he had his motive.

  Something in him could see it all laid out in front of him now, the whole story unfolding before his mind’s eye.  He knew he had to read the rest of the journal but on some level he didn’t need to.   In a flash he knew how it all played out.  He’d studied pedophilia academically while studying abnormal psychology and the sociology of deviance more broadly.  It was only suspicion at this point but he could already see where all of this was now likely heading.  If that… if that man’s feelings as a young man only intensified, then over the years…   Well, if he abused somebody, if he ever finally succumbed to his urges, then it would be a pretty cut and dry motive for somebody killing him in response.  The obvious connection was especially salient when he recalled the violent sexual orchestration of the murder itself; it sickeningly made all too much sense.

  ‘How could this have happened?’ he asked himself.  From what he’d learned during his tertiary education, pedophiles didn’t just come out of nowhere, they were usually damaged themselves in some way in their own childhood.  Sure he’d have to read the entire journal to look for indications, but Johannes knew the man’s parents and they were good people.  Being original crew from Earth they were long dead now, but from what he could remember of them he couldn’t imagine them being anything other than loving, caring, nurturing, and supporting parents.

  Could his condition really have just come out of nowhere?  Was that even possible?  As improbable as it might seem he found it infinitely more improbable, that their beloved mission founders could have made such a terrible mistake in allowing aboard in the first place, people who could do something awful enough to their son to lead him down such a terribly destructive path.   He was also stymied by his faith in the genetic screening procedure which he thought would rule out this sort of thing regardless!  

  Johannes alternatingly found himself in terrible confusion and horror as he was putting all of the pieces together.  He’d never known darkness in any personal capacity.  He’d studied it most of his life, but on an academic level, and from a distance.  He happily studied it with the same distance with which his son Tycho bemoaned his Earth Science studies, as phenomena that occurred back on Earth, not here in their perfect little community.  He’d had faith that the mission founders had taken all the appropriate steps to prevent just this kind of thing from happening; he’d always figured they’d thought of everything.  He’d believed in that premise his whole life; could it really have just been all so much propaganda?  Could he really have been that gullible?  Or was human nature just something humans could never be clever enough to leave behind?   Now all of a sudden he felt steeped in a darkness he thought they’d carefully left behind on Earth and in its past; murder, pedophilia… and suicide.

   

  “How could this have happened, Anaru?  I don’t understand!”  Exasperated and emotionally drained, Johannes slumped down into a chair facing the captain across his desk, after resting the incriminating scroll on it.  “What I really don’t understand is how such a thing could have been kept a secret for so long, especially if he’d been active!”  Johannes had superficially looked through the digital journal before coming to Anaru and had confirmed his fearful suspicions.  From what he could tell it documented his murder victim’s descent from the original pleading questions Johannes had first read, all the way through the decades of tortured pleading with himself, as well as the last couple decades of his life when he finally succumbed to his urges.  It appeared that the author was careful to not use the names of any of his victims, preventing Johannes from having an easy list of suspects, if this was indeed a crime of retribution.

  Johannes had, as he sometimes did, walked into the captain’s modest windowless office mid conversation with himself.  As the patriarch and one of the three ultimate authorities on the ship, he certainly had the right to see the captain (or the matriarch for that matter) whenever he wished, but beyond that he and the captain were friends and he was always more than welcome on a personal level as well.  Sometimes Anaru did find it mildly annoying though, when Johannes would only share the last part of his conversation with himself, and expect Anaru to be able to jump right in without the benefit of being privy to the preceding parts. 

  “Johannes.   Stop.  What are you talking about?”

  “Oh,” Johannes said, realizing he’d done it again.  “Sorry.  This pad, it’s a… it’s a journal of sorts; a personal diary.”

  “Of our victim?”

  “Yeah, but it feels just a little unseemly to refer to him as the victim now…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was a pedophile, the scroll is a lengthy and detailed journal chronicling his discovering this about himself, coming to terms with it and trying to restrain himself, but ultimately… failing to.”

  “I see,” Anaru offered thoughtfully.

  “I think we have to assume that one of his victims, it appears there were several, was the one who killed him,” Johannes stated.

  “Why just one?   Why couldn’t several of them have done it together?”

  “This is certainly possible… but for some reason I doubt it.  I don’t see the victims seeking each other out in that way.”

  “Were there any names, or…” the captain inquired.

  “No… no such luck I’m afraid.  But you know, what’ s really been bothering me since I found out… is the idea of people having lived on this ship for years now having to have suffered what happened to them in silence, living with it all alone, all bottled up until… well, until the settling of scores we witnessed the aftermath of earlier today.”

  “You’re sure that the murder has something to do with this?” the captain asked as he gestured towards the scroll.

  “Sure?  No, of course not.  I’m not sure of anything today Ana but I’d bet on it, yes.  The way that body was treated, it had violent sexuality imagery all over it.  The violent sodomy with the metal spike, the genitals cut off and taped into his mouth I mean yeah, I’d say they’re related.”

  “Well you know, if the murderer were an adolescent or younger, they couldn’t’ve been tracked with their Brainchips since they wouldn’t’ve had one yet,” Anaru offered.

  “Yeah I thought of that.  Sure there wouldn’t be any Brainchip entry logs into the suite, but I couldn’t see anyone young enough to not have a Brainchip orchestrating a murder like that, the physical strength required to lift the body for example…  Don’t get me wrong, I could certainly see a young current victim murdering him, but I don’t think they’d have had it in them to go to such lengths to get away with it.  I’d find it more likely that they’d still be there at the scene, unafraid of getting caught and just sitting there traumatized.”

  “Well that does makes sense… so what’s our next move?” Anaru asked.

  Johannes sighed deeply, “interviews I’m afraid, lots and lots of interviews…  I need to talk to any male of the ship’s second generation who has the ability to hack into the Brainchip logs, and who doesn’t have a publicly confirmable alibi.  But I can set that up myself…  I’ll call you once I’m ready to conduct the interviews so you can sit in.”  

  “You know,” Anaru said, “even after we identify the murderer… we’re still going to have to then figure out who the other victims were.  I can’t imagine what they’ve been through, and… and what it must have been like for them to be alone in it, keeping it to themselves all these years.   You’re going to have to find them and help them Joh.”

  “I know Ana, I know… One thing at a time though.”  Johannes turned to leave, but before he did he turned around to face Anaru again and said, “as for the suite though… we need to have somebody go over it for fingerprint and DNA traces.  Something tells me you won’t find anything but we need to look anyways…  I doubt that someone who went to the trouble of setting up a scene like that would be that careless.  After that’s done though we can clean up the suite and repurpose it.”

  It would turn out that he was right.  There were no finger prints at the crime scene at all, not even the victims.  The only genetic material found at the scene was that of the victim’s, and it was spread all over the room in the medium of his blood.