Midway: Chapter 17

  “Alright, so which one is this Ana?” Johannes asked, sounding awfully bored at this point.

  “Let’s see, number… number fifty-seven, Uzodimma Adewunmi… age thirty-eight,” Anaru answered.  He sounded almost as tired of the process as Johannes was.

  It was two days after the incident at the transmission party, and they were in the middle of systematically interviewing every adult male on the ship who couldn’t provide a verifiable alibi, one by one, as Maharet had suggested.  They were restricting their investigation to males for the time being since it was clear to Johannes from the murder victim’s journal that he’d only targeted boys, and he still presumed the murderer to be one of the rape victims.

  “Right, Uzo… the music teacher.  Alright, bring him in.”

  When they decided to do systematic interviews of a much wider swath of the crew, they converted the crime scene suite into an interrogation room, partly for lack of a more obvious place to do it (or for anything else to do with the suite at the moment), and partly because they hoped it would add an extra intimidation factor against whoever the culprit was.  They simply removed all of the furnishings from the suite which they could, and replaced them with a plain rectangular table from the dining hall and a printed plastic bucket.  An imager had been mounted on the far wall, and was focused on the interviewee so that there was a complete visual record of each interview.  The recordings could be analyzed after the fact for the autonomic micro expressions which even the most accomplished liar had a great deal of difficulty concealing.

  Johannes thought the door open and carefully scrutinized the obviously nervous man who entered, and then came to sit down across the table from him.   “Hello Uzo, how have you been?”

  “Well, I’m worried, I… I think everyone is.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well… there’s just a lot of unknowns right now.  Nobody knows what’s going on or what to think…  I guess it’s just that uncertainty itself; uncertainty of any kind is so unusual around here.”

  “What are you uncertain about?” Johannes asked, despite being pretty well aware of what was on his mind.

  “Well,” Uzodimma continued, though somewhat hesitantly at first, “first there was the murder…”

  “Murder?” Johannes asked, now suspicious.

  “Well, that’s the rumor…”

  “Is it… alright well go on, what else?”

  “Well, these interviews are another thing.  Nobody knows quite what to make of them.  If there really was a murder though, I… I guess these interrogations make sense.”  Johannes nodded, but held his gaze.  “And now the transmission… do you know what that’s about yet?” the man seemed very hopeful that there was indeed an answer to be known, and that he might learn it.

  “I’m afraid not,” Johannes stated while continuing to scrutinize the man.  “We’ve run every diagnostic we can think of, and we’re pretty sure that everything is nominal on our end.  As far as we can tell, we simply didn’t receive any message.”

  “So that means…” Uzodimma looked upwards towards nothing in particular in order to think clearly.  “Either they didn’t send any message, or they sent it to the wrong place…”

  “Uzodimma.”

  “Yes?” 

  “When we were investigating this incident, we put together a list of people who had a particular skill set, and who could not be accounted for at a particular time.  We-“

  “How could they not be accounted for?  I mean, when everyone’s Brainchip can be tracked?  Unless… oh, right, that must be the particular skill you were talking about…”
 Johannes eyes narrowed, increasingly suspicious.  “Where were you the night of five November?”  While on the ship they still used Earth’s calendar and length of day.   Once they reached Haven they would start a new dating system from day zero with Haven length days.  

  “I was in my suite.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah, alone.”

  “Alright then…  I’d like to show you an image now, okay?”

  “Sure…”

  “And I’d like you to just… tell me what comes to mind when you see it.”  Uzodimma nodded his understanding, and Johannes placed his large scroll with the image of the murder scene face down on the table in front of him. He then flipped it up and held it in front of Uzodimma’s face for him to see.  At first the man looked confused, and then his head cocked to one side as an eerie smile of understanding crept over his face, which then widened to a thoroughly pleased grin before receding, at which point he lowered his head.

  Johannes didn’t quite know what to think.  Uzodimma had made no attempt to mask his response, and it was somehow not quite the response he’d have expected from the murderer either.  Nevertheless, it was the first non-typical response.  So far the routine had been the same expected reaction of abhorring shock every single time.  Not all of them vomited like Neil, but many had.  Unmistakable revulsion and horror had in one form or another been clearly displayed by every single previous interviewee though.

  “Why are you smiling?”   Johannes asked Uzodimma, who looked up at him in response.  He was now wearing only a somewhat satisfied smirk.

  “Johannes, listen.   I have a great respect for you, but I’m sorry.  I won’t answer any more of your questions.”

   

  “Well what do you two make of it?” After putting any further interviews on hold, Johannes had called Maharet down to the interrogation room to confer with him and Anaru, and together they had just reviewed the recording of Uzodimma’s reaction.

  “Well that’s great right?  I mean, that make him our guy doesn’t it?” was Anaru’s response.  He appeared ready to convict him on this alone.  He seemed anxious to resolve the situation and put it behind them as quickly as possible.

  “You’re probably right Ana, but…” Maharet answered, “well, something about this bothers me.   Yes he didn’t exactly seem shocked to see the image, and yes he certainly seemed happy about it for one reason or another… but at the same time he really didn’t appear to be making any effort to hide that he was happy about it.   It really seemed to me that something about the image had surprised him at first, but that he then simply became, well…”

  “…pleasantly surprised.”  Johannes completed her sentence for her.

  Maharet snapped her fingers and pointed at him, “right.  Yeah… that’s it exactly.”