Hindsight

Neven Sievers felt his body growing colder as his life’s blood poured onto the deck plating and pooled around him.

The pain still registered, but it was more of an afterthought, faint and in the background. He gazed upward as an indistinct shadow fell across his vision and reached towards him. Fear gripped him and held him immobile as surely as if the gravity had been increased tenfold.

His sight, which had been growing dim and blurry, suddenly came into sharp focus. He felt the telltale tickle of data flowing through his simjack and realized his killer had linked them together with a neurolink cable. He gazed at the face of Death and saw only featureless darkness, then his own face within it as Death gazed back. Though he could not see it, he felt Death’s cruel smile. The black hatred. The rush of elation and excitement.

A blade projected from Death’s left wrist. Neven watched in resigned horror as the blade approached his neck, then through Death’s eyes as the blade slowly slid across his throat. His eyes widened in renewed pain as the blade bit deep and opened his trachea in a gaping smile.

Neven’s eyes closed, but continued watching himself die as Death stood watch over him and savored the moment of transit from this life to whatever follows. The world descended into darkness.

The neural feed stopped and Neven opened his eyes. He felt hot and was breathing heavily. Neven had experienced his share of Presense and recognized that he was on the edge of an induced orgasm. In frustration and disgust, Neven disconnected the neurolink cable from the simjack at the base of his skull.

“Nothing. Same as the others. Never see the face. Just a shadow and the wrist blade.”

Neven remained reclined in the S.I.M. chair as he waited for his own senses to reassert themselves. His vision came back almost instantly, but his other senses often took slightly longer. Experience had taught him it was better to wait than to fall on his face. He looked at the corpse of the woman still hooked up to the lab’s second S.I.M. chair beside him.

The pleasure of killing her felt barely stronger than his hate for her. That was his only real clue to the identity of the killer, and it was next to nothing. This made victim number six and he was no closer than he was after the first.

“I need a chip copy of the Presense data. Filter out the emotion information. Maybe I’ll notice something when I compare it against the others.”

And if I don’t, maybe I’ll start killing people until the other killings stop.

Neven shook his head to clear the aberrant thoughts from his mind. He got out of the chair and took the chip from the arm receptacle before making his way towards the door and back out into the station.

The holographic technician smiled as it faded to an indistinct shadow, then the face itself obscured to black and winked out.