Chapter Six

Clues

The three hours that Mai had to be online ended up turning into five, and it was already noon when she was finally able to disconnect from the virtual court. To her surprise, as soon as she opened the door to leave the room, she found a transparent PVC curtain blocking her way. Shin, who was in the kitchen, had removed his trench coat and was now wearing a PVC lab apron.

"Is everything all right there?" Mai asked worriedly.

"Yeah, you can take that off," Shin replied.

Mai pulled back the curtain and stepped out. She didn't get two steps out of the room, when her nose hit some sort of invisible wall, which produced a series of almost imperceptible ripples when she touched it.

"Ow!" she said, holding a hand to her nose.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry," Shin said and hurriedly walked over to the table to press some controls on the portable lab case. "I forgot that I activated an extra security barrier, just in case."

Shin had transformed part of the kitchen, and the dining room table into some sort of bizarre culinary laboratory. Apparently, he had found the cooking utensils to prepare some food.

When they were too busy to eat properly in a case they even had the fast food bars. But well, Mai wasn't going to complain if they ate anything out of the ordinary. Shin seemed to entertain himself quite a bit cooking sometimes.

"What are you doing?" Mai asked as she now felt her senses become invaded by the aroma of the food after the hard slap. I told him not to leave too many footprints.

"It's called food, you eat it. You need to eat like normal people, you know?" Shin replied, as he moved a wok on the electric stove. "How was the meeting?"

"Good... I hope. The final details is up to the lawyers," she said and walked over.

In the wok, he was stirring what looked like chicken and some sautéed vegetables with sauce. On the adjoining counter was the open supply case. There, neatly arranged with several trays lying spread out, were tiny metal cubes with different food labels, vegetables, cereal, water, soda.

"What is it?"

"It's just something quick, just some chicken and vegetables. It's ready now, if you took any longer I was going to have to reheat it and it's not the same. Go wash your hands."

"Yes, daddy." she said, giving him a gentle kick as she walked away.

"Wait, don't use the tap water." he said and tossed her a cube labeled [Water for emergencies. Select temperature required].

Mai looked at him with concern as she tackled the cube. "What's with the water?" Mai asked as she walked over to the bathroom.

"I think we were right to come after all and not give the case to the local branch to investigate. I did an analysis of the water and I found concentrations of sulfur and hydrogen sulfide. That's the fart smell from this morning. I think there is some hydrothermal source around the lake but I can't find the exact location."

"There are no volcanoes or hot springs nearby."

"The earthquake from a two weeks ago could have caused some movement in the surrounding plates. This lake was formed by seismic activity, after all."

"Did you use the drones to see if there are any hot springs?"

"Yes, but they didn't detect anything in particular in the surrounding area. But the temperature of the lake is a few degrees above what it should be for ambient temperature at this time of the year. Maybe it's some underwater hydrothermal source, but the smell is concentrated over the middle part of the lake."

"Isn't it dangerous for us to breathe it in?"

"Yes. If we are exposed for a long time. But after two hours the wind blew the concentration in a northerly direction. We'll be fine unless the wind direction changes again."

"Why did you say we were right to come? That could have been investigated by the local branch."

"Yes, I know. But I meant we took the case instead of leaving it to the local branch. The case of the lights has been ignored before, right."

"Yes. That's true..."

Mai returned after a few minutes at the bathroom. She replaced the cube with another that was blue in color. Some engraved words appeared, as if it were some sort of menu. She selected [mineral water] and placed it on the counter where it changed its size, until it became the size of a basketball but transparent.

A strange fractal pattern, composed of hundreds of thousands of tiny cubes, appeared on its surface, constantly changing shape and moving at the same time in a clockwise direction. A few seconds later a bottle of water had formed inside the cube. Mai took the cube, and, while the bottle remained on the counter, the cube simply passed through the plastic and the liquid, until it regained its original size. When it finished, she placed it back on the tray from which she had taken it.

She sat down in one of the nearby chairs and sipped from the bottle and looked at the other huge mobile lab case that was spread out on the table.

In there were several instruments that Shin had taken out and used over the course of the morning. A portable electronic Bunsen lighter, now extinguished, along with the microscope and a portable mass spectrometer, told her that he had been more than busy while she attended to her working routine. A much larger cube was open in the table, and unfolded and had several cells with different Petri dishes of different sizes with some samples inside.

"What else did you discover?" Mai asked.

"Several things," he said, as he walked over and placed the steaming plate of food and some chopsticks in front of her.

"It smells good."

"I just hope it tastes as good as it smells."

Mai tasted a bit and nodded. "It's great," she said smiling.

"I'm going to pour myself some then."

"What did you find out?" Mai asked.

"Do you know what a tubifex worm is?"

Mai looked at him as she stopped the chopsticks a few inches from his mouth and took a closer look at the plate.

"Tell me you didn't use worms or any kind of insect as ingredients for this."

"No," he replied smiling and added. "But those kinds of worms are used for farming, fish food and some people even keep them as pets," he said and sat down in front of Mai with his plate of food.

“Charming...”

"Remember that plant we saw outside and that thing in the bathroom? Well, as I suspected something was wrong. It is an autochthonous plant, but it has something abnormal, it is like a fungal infection. The infected part I saw under the microscope it has reminded me of something I saw a long time ago about those kinds of worms, they form collective cores of hundreds of thousands when they don't have enough nutrients."

Mai grimaced, almost glad she hadn't touched that earlier.

"Were you able to catalog it?"

"Yes and no. There are no records of this type, and the closest thing biologically is a type of mushroom called anemonae stinkhorn, but stinkhorn mushrooms don't grow that way and they are not from here neither. These have a shape almost as if they form some kind of ameboid net but only as if they were mycelia filaments, which is abnormal, because the growth shape is different."

"Is it some new species?"

"I am not sure, but it is not in the records.," he said, reaching for his book lying on the table.

Shin opened it to the first few pages and this time took a pen that was hidden in one of the sides. He wrote a few words on the blank page and put the book on the table. Almost instantly, Mai saw huge moving holographic microphotographs projected in the air, a few centimeters above the book forming a ring. Several of them showed a series of networks of fibrous organisms. The other magnified images, with a flesh-red color, showed an organic network of globular chambers interconnecting, and forming a kind of shell around what looked like black metal. Fine hair or nail shaped structures sprouted from it, with crystalline bulbs scattered in a disorderly manner near the tips. These reminded her of dewdrops on grass in the morning.

Shin pointed to one of the photos. "See those fleshy bulbs? Those are the ones that reminded me of worms, although it has nothing to do with mushrooms, it's just a curiosity. Organically, they are like stinkhorn mushrooms, but they have differences from the ones you can normally find," he then touched the photo showing the black metal. "These have some kind of microscopic organometallic structure almost like spores on the hyphae."

"Artificial?"

"Natural. But the traces of the metal suggest iron of meteoric origin. Curiously I did a search with the academic archives and it is known that there is presence of meteoric iron in several parts although no studies have been done about it for years. Which is strange that the universities have not shown interest in studying.” Shin paused for a bite and continued to explain. “Anyway… But I've found them everywhere. They're also in the soil, in the grass and where I found the most was in lake mud. These fungi have a type of parasitic organism with a calcareous micro-skeleton that serves to protect the structure of the metal in the core. Remember the red sparks from the fire back there? Well what burned first were iron and calcium particles, the blue fire was sulfur."

"It's not cataloged as something from the area? Many areas of the planet changed after the Great War and a lot organisms have appeared that never existed before, since the portal opened."

"Well, I've been going over it with Hazmat, and she's waiting for me to bring samples, because this one is new. It has a completely different kind of structure."

"Something that makes it special?"

"A lot of things, taking into account the new branches of study of microbiology I would say that it is some kind of fungal chimera. Calcium is involved in fungal cellular processes as catalytic and signal regulators, but not at this level. And you haven't seen the weirdest thing yet." Shin pointed to one of the industrial suitcases that was open. There was a huge cube with several smaller cubes inside, these in turn contained samples in petri dishes. "Look at the first one on the right," he said.

Mai gulped down the last mouthful and walked over to look where Shin indicated. At first, she thought it must be a very small sample, since nothing was visible there. It was when she got closer and looked more sideways that she saw that the light produced a strange effect as it passed through the small cube, as if it was deforming.

There was something there. But she couldn't see it.

"What is it?"

"That's a sample I pulled from the fungus."

"Is it invisible? They're not like the ones outside."

"They are the same. Now look at the cubes below."

At the bottom other plates with samples inside exhibited stranger features. A stone that in the middle took on a textured green hue as if it were a plant. Some samples of grass where some parts acquired characteristics that reminded Mai of the legs of a spider. In the next cube, there was a leaf litter that Mai had never seen before in her life.

"Did you collect this from out there?"

"Yes, it's all over the place. It's as if something has been changing the structure of all the elements out there that are touched by the fungus. In all of them, I find crypsis patterns, but in poorly achieved stages. As if the change had wanted to be achieved but was never perfected, with the exception of the fungus, which can camouflage itself perfectly as if they did it at will. Those turned that color in less than thirty seconds after I put them in the petri dish."

"...What about the black trees we saw earlier?"

"Those are covered by the fungus too."

"So technically we have a case to investigate then."

"Maybe now for the local branch of the FRT it will be interesting, it's a biological anomaly that no one saw before. Still, we came here looking for someone missing. What I've found warrants an investigation, but it's not enough to declare this an official SID case till we found more evidence. Also, I find it odd that no one has been interested in this before."

Shin picked up the two empty plates and took them to the sink, while Mai continued inspecting the samples, and it was a sharp beeping sound that brought her out of her self-absorption. On the pages of the book where Shin had written earlier, there was now a red dot with the label of an incoming video call. Mai accepted the call, and the ring of photographs grew smaller as a much larger holographic screen opened.

There appeared the face of a slender black woman with black hair in a bun, dressed in a white blouse and blazer. Behind her moved several people dressed in lab robes, as they appeared to move objects placed in glass boxes.

"Hello Naomi," Mai greeted with a smile as she sat again.

[Hey! How's it going? Is your boyfriend around? I got the information he asked for.]

Shin came back from the sink drying his hands and took off his PVC apron. Naomi who was also receiving live images, was now looking apprehensively at Shin.

"What's up?"

[I have good news and bad news. I've been looking at the images you sent me and I got quite a bit of information.

[Those pieces of sculpture you sent me have no historical background whatsoever. They are original, and they are not based on any kind of ancient deity. The closest we found are some ancient sculptures molded in clay from the Dogon culture of Mali. Which is curious in one detail.]

Both could see how Naomi was manipulating something underneath that the holographic image did not show. Half a second later, two images appeared from Shin's book and floated to a position below Naomi.

[Meet Elif Bicini, and one of his works: AmmLaag. Which curiously was donated to the museum of fine arts in Mali before his death.]

The images showed a lanky, deep-eyed man, with a bushy beard, sitting in a studio surrounded by anthropoid and animal-like sculptures. The other image was of a figure about six feet tall standing on a pedestal. It was the same strange carved figure that Amir had shown them in the past days, with the sort of horn-like appendages on the crown and jaw, the same arms embracing the wiry belly and ending at the base in a more rounded and bulbous surface. It was more grotesque to see it that size than the small ones they had seen before.

"You found it," Shin said.

[Yes, it wasn't hard. What struck me is that he made this motif in miniature fifty times over. At least that's what's listed in the appendices of his collection, in addition to everything else he made during his lifetime.]

"In what year?"

[You guys, ready? It was '64 of the first century.]

“That's a year before what Amir told us happened.” Mai said.

"Is it known why he made this sculpture?"

[There's not much data about that from consulting his biography. Every time he was asked about, he said and I quote: everything is one in the amalgam.]

Shin thought about it for a few seconds.

"AmmLaag... is an anagram in English for amalgam?"

[Exactly. That's the same thing I thought, unless it's something we don't know.]

"You said he made fifty of those… is there anything about the identities of the buyers?" Mai asked.

[There was never any, all the miniatures were gifts for anonymous friends, and all of them disappeared in the '64. There is no record of any of the identities in the records. But, thanks to Fermi and Dirac, I was able to find something else. In the '66, two appeared for sale by families in the States and two others a few years later, one in Australia and one in China. I'm going to send you the data, but interestingly, the four original owners of those all died in '65.]

"So, those four, there's a good chance they would have been among the 30 that died in the lake."

Naomi nodded and added. [Do you guys, want to know more?. Elif Bicini died at the age of 90, 36 years ago, and the last visit he received was from a family friend, including a 20-year-old girl named Rayana Ivraeva.]

Shin simply tried to smile. "You are amazing. Thank you."

[Don't thank me yet, big boy. I haven't given you the bad news yet,] Naomi said and turned to look at Shin. [When you guys come to Egypt, you Shin, have an interrogation order waiting, something about an object you borrowed in 1979 from the Ancient Era and never returned to the Ministry for the Preservation of Relics in Cairo.]

Shin made a strange gesture and scratched a cheek. "Interesting if it were not for one detail. In 1979 I was still underwater, regenerating. In fact I didn't visit Egypt until 1989."

[They probably got the year wrong.]

"I don't remember taking anything from them anyway. Let them ask Leon." Shin said, as Mai looked at him with narrowed eyes.

"We appreciate it Naomi, let us know if they find anything else."

[I'll put one of my archivists on it to see if there's anything else to dig up but, we can only help you with artistic issues. Secret cult crimes is not my area. I'll be seeing you guys. Take care,] Naomi said, with a smile of circumstance.

The image disappeared and only the image of Elif Bicini and his strange creation remained floating.

They both continued to stare for a few moments at the images rotating around, making the pieces fit together in their heads. It was a moment that Mai certainly hated because it seemed they had done enough for the moment, but the last pieces of the puzzle were slipping away.

"We have evidence, but we still don't know what led all those people here."

"We need all three. We've been moving solely on leads so far," pondered Shin.

"That's why I've wanted to keep this quiet. We have no physical evidence, no murder weapon, only crime scene," Mai sighed and added. "I'm going to call the local branch agents to see if they have any information."

Mai walked around the room for a few moments and then looked at Shin, remembering that he had no Neurowire, only his book. She traced some symbols with her right hand, and then making, a sort of spiral she pointed to Shin's book. From it a new circle sprouted and transformed into a rectangle.

After a few seconds the face of a man on a black background appeared on the screen. Like them, he also had pointed ears, but the expression -almost on the verge of tedium- seemed to indicate that he lacked several doses of adrenaline. He had electric blue disheveled hair and almost half-closed eyes of a black color that did not reflect any light.

[Izumi,] the man said with a slight bow, as he slurred his words.

He then looked at Shin standing behind Mai and bowed his head again.

"Hey, Arsen," Mai greeted. "I was calling to see if you had any news."

[Unfortunately, not much. Dr. Komarov's figure is still in police custody. We've been trying to find out more, but if we were too interested we might raise suspicions. Without access to some of the figures, or solid evidence, we can't stick our nose in, because technically it's not our jurisdiction.]

"It was a long shot, anyway," Mai nodded snorting.

[But we have something else. We've gathered quite a bit of data on the so-called Kolsay lights. In fact there's enough data going back to the year 10 of the first century.]

"Year 10? Of the Singularity Age or CE, AE?" Shin asked.

[From the last century,] nodded Arsen.

"But no alarms have ever been raised. No attempt was ever made to at least investigate about those?"

[My apologies boss, but do you know how many reports of strange lights we get per day from open source only? Over fifty. Satellite sightings, teenage pranks, glitches in the Neurowire synaptic systems, they can even produce hallucinations of seeing things that aren't there because of that. The Kolsay lights are sporadic, it is not as if it is a phenomenon that occurs every year. The last ones reported were last year and this year's were reported by a soldier stationed at the entrance of the park but, before that, the last ones recorded were in 117.

[There is also the fact that they do not obey a fixed time pattern, when they appear most often is in March, but the dates change, and there are even cases where they have been reported in January and April, for periods ranging from 3 to 8 days.]

"From what our source told us, Dr. Komarov disappeared last Thursday."

"We're already a week out, so there's a chance that, whatever happened at this location, we've already missed the opportunity to investigate it," Shin added.

[But we have something else. We were able to find Professor Ivraeva's figure that disappeared from the police evidence locker.]

"What? How did you find it?" Mai asked.

[It was in Dr. Komarov's office, at the university. I sent two of my undercover agents to check it out.]

"Komarov stole the evidence Ivraeva left behind?"

"We have physical evidence," Mai said, looking at Shin.

[This guy is not only a geologist, he has also a background in mineralogy with a specialization in meteorite mining. And something else.] This time Arsen turned to Shin. [I asked Hazmat to send me the data from the analyses you did of the lake early. It turns out that the park's conservation studies are spread out over several departments, but they all answer to the same area director. The director is the Dr. Komarov, and the data from your analyses do not agree with his. In fact, it seems that every year he modified certain parts concerning the lake.]

"Which parts?"

[The changes are minimal but they are related to the reservoir water purity studies and soil studies.]

"There were no complaints from those who wrote the other reports?"

[Apparently not. An interesting fact: those in charge of the studies are fifteen people, twelve years ago they all went on a trip to Kolsay Lake, the photos are on their social networks. After that they have all been treated for psychotic breaks, hallucinations and periods of depression… It would be normal for a human, but I was checking the background of the other victims who died in the alleged accidents, and those who were identified in the incident 60 years ago. All of them, including those in Kyrgyzstan had previous history of psychiatric disorders. And, what is most disturbing about the latter, is that prior to their death they all switched off their Neurowire systems. And in the memory banks there are gaps of information from each time they went to the place, as if they themselves did not want to leave evidence.]

"And what about the fifteen who went on the trip with Komarov? They too have gaps?"

[...] Arsen looked at Shin with a poker expression as he shook his head.

"Yes, I know. We're going to need a warrant if we want to do deep memory browsing."

[Should I call the Fire Department and Virg now?]

Mai shook her head. "No, let's keep this out of the files for a little longer. If we start with too many moves and get caught freelancing on a case that hasn't been assigned and then it turns out it was all a misunderstanding, it's going to go bad for us," she said with a serious expression.

[Honestly reviewing what we have evidence of the case, maybe this is only a case of negligence, in part… at least. The victims’ cases after the year 65 have been very few, and on top of that, in people with psychiatric disorders. Ten deaths in sixty years, in an abandoned place in the middle of nowhere, is not so rare statistically. Those that were not attacks, have been taken simply as cases of suicide. The strangest and most notorious was that of Ivraeva. Then there was another one, three years later, of a woman who was found frozen, and now the case of Dr. Komarov.]

"Yes, that's true, aside than the case where all those people died, the rest were carried out by police and military investigations. But they have been so spaced out in time that probably no one could connect them until our source did," Mai said.

Arsen nodded with a serious face.

[Good luck. Be careful on this one. Carissia is in static orbit over our station, in case you need a quick extraction. The decoy signal from you two is at the station, so in case this gets out of hand you have to let me know first.]

"Thank you Arsen."

Arsen looked over to Shin and seeing that Shin didn't take his eyes off the image sent a mental message that only Mai could hear.

[Is that your boyfriend?]

"Yes. Mine and Lizbeth's." she replied and Arsen looked once again at Shin.

[Give that thing a sandwich,] he said and cut the communication.

Mai twisted her head to the side and tried to stifle a laugh.

"What? What did he say to you?"

"Nothing, nothing." She said, regaining her composure.

She looked at the floating pictures once more and sighed, Arsen's attempt at a final joke didn't take away from the problem they now had on their hands. It would have been so easy to simply retrace their steps, take the car, leave the scene and forget all about it. They had no assignment to investigate the case. But Mai knew herself too well to know that was already impossible. From the moment Amir Zejho walked into the hotel room, and told his story, she knew she would have to go all the way, no matter what the consequences were.

It was the kind of life she had decided to lead for a long time. A duty she had imposed on herself, so long ago, that she had almost forgotten when she had started. Now, together with Shin and Lizbeth, perhaps, it had been worth doing so much to get to that point.

The investigations, the sadness of the victims, the deaths, all weighed heavily on her shoulders at that moment. But continuing to fight to save a world, which although it often treated her cruelly, seemed to make more sense than ever. It was her self-discipline and hard work that had brought her to that position after all.

She had already gone too far.

Mai sighed and folded her arms as she swung her chair.

What if Sergey Komarov had simply turned off his Neurowire and sent the message to Armir Zejho just as a joke? They had certainly considered it as a possibility that night at the hotel. But now that they were there, that possibility was a thing of the past. The adulteration of the data was a serious matter and would have jeopardized not only his position as director and professor at the university, but also his entire career would have been discredited.

Could it have been that he saw no other way out but to escape from it all by committing suicide? If so, then where was his body? What had become of the body of his girlfriend Ivraeva? Was it still somewhere in the depths of the forest? Or had she committed suicide by throwing herself into the icy waters? Or had something dragged them both from the depths of the lake?

"It's a cult after all," Shin's voice snapped her out of her reverie.

"If so, what were all these people worshipping here?"

"And what the hell is going on here, with the environment? Honestly I don't think it's a coincidence." Shin added looking at the collected samples.

"I hate cases of cults and cultists, they have never started or ended well for us," she turned and looked at him with a serious expression. "Let's go to the forest. Let's try to find out what the hell these people were doing here."