The Infinity Code

(t8n-time:0.6s)[[The Infinity Code->1]] A Story By Detective Sexfuck

I. A butchered body in a field. The heart has been laid out beside the still clothed farmer. Their shirt and skin and ribs folded back. Dead initially to a head wound, the heart was quickly excised, then laid in the grass. Surgical. Less butchery, more surgery. Autopsy. A surgerised body in a field. On the coroner's table the flesh around the heart reveals it was drained, three punctures in the coronary arteries, pooling blood into the chest cavity before it can reach the pumping chamber. Starved of oxygen, already unconscious, the body dies. This was the first time I saw it in person. I've seen about ten like that. [[NEXT|2]]

II. In the apartment of the new lover, the fresh smell of pine, petal and carrot. Some kind of air freshener. Vegetables. (link-reveal:"Food. ")[ The lover is cooking offal. It has a richness to it in the frying, a tinny, bloody one, sour. Mixes with the smells of the four room space. They have designated tonight a special night but the detective doesn't know why. Not so smart after all. But happy to be surprised. They have started playing a record, some kind of minimalist jazz. When the two 30 minute sides run down, they flip back to the start and begin it again. At the start, a short cough. It's a stew, slow but easy, the pig's insides as they steep with the vegetables, they make for a more coppery taste. Kidney, liver and heart. This was when I told my lover about that first time. [[NEXT|3]]]

III. Pinned to the board in the student dorm, a piece of paper. A series of seventeen red scratches on an octave. On the bed, the same deal as previous. This one fresh from a shower, towel, sheets, mattress, soaked red. The organ lying there, nothing more than a kind of trophy. The note could have been new or old. Pen or blood. It was a string of random notes, there was no melody or rhythm. The building was old, a hospital, had a smell to it, of musty furniture, and things that don't leave stone. People were still dying here, young people either killing themselves or being surgerised. It was a Sunday. I stood looking out at the students as they left the buidling. Distress rippling through us all. [[NEXT|4]]

IV. The Dead Heaven Principle was the idea that God himself had been killed and now resided in Hell being (link-reveal:"tortured by the Devil.")[ I learned this at the lecture given by Doctor Lesbiana. She looked at the paper, found in the room of her dead student. It was a music class, and the arrangements randomly scattered around the room spoke of a kind of reckless curiosity, pieces of paper labelled Cock Hardening Quartet and Fast Fashion Orchestra. Compositions played with dildos and cheap dresses. Stuff that went under the nose of the authority I was there in place of. She smoked a cigarette, poisoning my lungs, looking intently at the paper. Ultimately she said something about there being no intent behind it seemingly, seemingly random arrangement. I said I'd worked that much out myself. A voice spoke up, a student, and I was caught off guard. "What looks random may always be intentional, just following steps that you haven't considered." They said, at the door. "Sorry, I just, wanted to drop off my late submission Doctor." I caught up with them in the corridor. Showed them the piece of paper and they looked at it for an extended moment, said they had no idea, walked off. [[NEXT|5]]]

V. "If you count all of the rings on a dead tree, you work out how long its been alive right. If you do the same to a person, well, you don't." I laughed, I was drunk. Or getting there. Me and my lover sat at the kitchen table after dinner. It was their birthday soon enough. They'd be what, nineteen. It wasn't weird, they said, wasn't weird. They straddled me. "If I cut you open, I'm sure I could work out something, old man." I put the beer on the table to grab their backside close, push them close to me. "I'm not that old." Their tongue silenced me, right down my throat, I could bite it off. When it slid back out they said, "Yes, you are." [[NEXT|6]]

VI. The dark station, a thirty minute train ride from the centre, the last stop on the underground. Buses would be packed for a day or two at least. Isolated and shut down so we could clamber along the electrified line. There on the tracks. (link-reveal:"The offending article.")[ What is a heart crime? Usually romantic, or ones of passion, claiming. Sexual assault, domestic abuse, stalking. It was fuzzy though, and at first my boss had refused to take the case, this was murder. But as soon as there were two. Two ritualised brutalities involving a heart. It was a heart crime. I read the notes about the subway murder, never got to the scene as it lived. Breathed. But stood on the platform, saw the blood stain under the bench that hadn't been properly washed away. A business student in the University of Money. Dragged from platform around 3am, an hour before the first train. No business being out here either, no-one knew why she would be. When we combed the dead's phone for information we got to a text message chat with a deactivated number that had only ever been used through the internet from credits on an international phone card. Hacked credits. The messages were sweet. Funny. At the bar they'd met up at I asked the bartender if they had CCTV. If they recognised the person the student was with. They said they didn't remember. I asked them to try and they said I should ask somewhere where police hadn't raided and raped the bar staff. I said it was about a murder. "Who cares?" [[NEXT|7]]]

VII. There's this theory, that the start of human conciousness, sapience, that this wasn't caused by the random branching of cells, but that it was a deliberate intervention. That it came from an extraterrestrial insemination of the ability for higher function, directly into the blood stream of a bunch of apes deemed capable enough to handle such revelation. There's many variants on this idea, but, one that I was introduced to by the student who looked over that pattern, the notes on the octave, was that it was done in such a way that a trace of it was still inside the human body, one that sent out a message every time a person died. And that, in dying, the message transmitted was part of a sequence, being played out over and over again. That the spasms of the heart in death were in fact able to be read by the aliens as a code. And this code, was part of their fundament, their tapestry of life. Necessary to keep them going too. It was what permitted them the ability to transcend time and space to feed, a kind of engine built from a signal, being played out by millions of sapient species across the universe. A parasitic power source hidden in the DNA. Higher brain power was really only provided as a kind of insurance attached to it, a feature that couldn't be bred out or mutated, one that attached special meaning to survival. This is called The Infinity Code. I was so enamoured with their young, supple beauty, their cheeks and undamaged undereyes, and smell, that I listened without expressing how much bullshit I thought it was. "Of course." They said. "That's completely crazy." It was just an example of what they'd said, where a series of seemingly random notes might emerge in this situation, that of the murder, and actually have total intent behind it. [[NEXT|8]]

VIII. (link-reveal:"After 8 killings they took the case away from us.")[ Gave it over to the Murder Squad. Like they should have at the start. We had the lowest closure rate in the city and that was saying something. We were requested at the last two of course, to give analysis, but really the eighth was the last one that was mine. A kid, in a playground. Woodchip, sand, and that kind of, springy rubber tarmac, the one so that children don't get concussions when they do something stupid. This was the one that made me think that maybe it was something like that, some outlandish belief, because, well, it was a child. They're like, animals, they're not even, they're too... I don't know, I couldn't. But, of course, there were people who could, easily. My colleagues. The army. The border patrol. And they either believed in something or... ah... who knows. But I looked at it. The heart, smaller than the rest, and I heard the sound. My brain at least, pretended to. Pretended to hear the aliens. Powering up their ship. It was probably the fact it was a kid that got it taken off of us. Everyone starts acting all important. Like, we never meant this to happen. As if our life becomes unimportant past the age of maybe 15. They'll call 16 year olds children in order to make it seem more tragic when they die and yet when they aren't in work or school they're unproductive, fallen, lost. A lost generation. I don't know. I looked at the skull of the kid, about 10, smashed with a rock and thought that I was lost. There was a cloud across my eyes, I was falling from a fifty storey building, thrown out of the window by an explosion. A drone strike on a city block tower ten thousand miles away and here, the open chest of a kid who had been killed to learn what, the next in a series of digits that counted up to nothing? [[NEXT|9]]]

IX. I hung around one of Doctor Lesbiana's lectures the next time a body had been found, waiting for the one who'd told me about the Infinity Code. She said that they'd quit the course, taken a job tending bar at this place called Infinity. It was funny. When I went there that night, I told them, in the mostly empty place that was situated above a noodle bar on city centre streets, I told them it was funny. They laughed with me, yeah, it was funny right. Fucking funny. Kid goes to work at a place called Infinity. We'd not hit this place I think, for drugs and sex trafficking, which just meant for being a bar for queers right. I wanted to see them split open, their body wrapped in plastic. No, that was too much. In their school outfit, on their knees, in prayer before my cunt right. In their church clothes. Spit polished cheeks. My head hurt, that whole night. I had thrown up at the sight of the new body in the car park outside of the job centre. I hadn't even drunk that much. I had the student, bartender, whatever, their body sliding over mine. God, I hadn't needed anyone that much in forever. I just, let it wash over me, until I woke up and rushed to the bathroom to throw up. The stuff that came up was blue, I think. Headache dissolving though. In the morning I left my number on their bedside table, and stumbled out of the room, into a series of corridors above the bar. Made my way down the fire escape. [[NEXT|10]]

X. (link-reveal:"\"Remember when I called you.\" The voice of my lover. \"And I said, that I needed to see you again.\"")[ They are putting the record from the living room on the player in the bedroom now, setting it up perfectly. I can't reply. My mouth feels like it is made of lead, moving the jaw is agony, muscles have turned to custard. The taste of copper. "And you said, that you wanted to see me again." They throw their hips across mine, straddling again, but, I can't respond. "And I said, that would be perfect." I remembered. The song, it's too loud. An electric churn. It's making the walls vibrate I'm sure. "And we met up again, and again, and again, and each time I called you, you know I'd just killed again right?" The knees squeeze my hips, digging in, and yet, without pain. I feel numb to any sensation but the sounds. I'm wet, my clit engorged on testosterone and the feeling of my lover's body. They'd point it out, but I can't sense it. It's so far away. I couldn't reply. "You know that, when you had me, and you had me, and you had me, dressed up for you, tits in your hands, your fingers inside me, that I'd been thinking about putting a knife right here." And they held the scalpel over my chest. The blood began seeping out of my skin, a thing I can't really feel, or move against, except with deep terror in my brain. And then a hammer and chisel to crack the sternum. My body is shivering, I sense, the movement but nothing except hearing dissonance and voice. "I was waiting, for you, for this." A bounce as the thuds come down. The bone is removed with some gore and crunching, but nothing I haven't seen. Really it's the noise from the record player, that sequence, that's disturbing me. I look to them with a kind of pleading. And they can read it. They are waiting. One. Two. Three. One cut, I begin to bleed out and, my eyes are going, my, knowing, of... I... can hear them, still talking. "I mean I told you, it's completely crazy, but, if this music wasn't something, then why can't you move detective? If there's not the DNA of your ancestral aliens in this sound, the combined final spasms of the dead, don't they sound like an engine, don't they? They power your ability to be awake and yet completely sedate. Thinking and yet dead. And I just need one more collection of notes. Until the code is complete." A second cut. "you can talk to the stone door, and see it as a passageway precisely because you are part of the attuned dimension detective the attunement principle Squandered over eons by a species unable to see what had been done to them, the opening of knowledge to me was produced by spectacular events. on the third night of the evil sun, as it coincided with the full moon, there I bathed in the waters outside the Palace of the Equinox. I cut myself on a razor clam as I swam, and the pulsation of blood under moonlight was honed in on, by the reflection of a freeing green light, through a laser crystal on the satellite Archimedes, directly pointed in the direction of the pool. The bloody water was lit up for but a second with the image contained in the light. A father kills one of his twin sons, he rips out the heart and with his remaining child they listen to the spasming muscle. Thirty beings stand on the hill behind them. You see now. How it filled my head with the beauty of it." A horrible cracking sound. [[A final cut.|A]]]