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Case Day 1
Saturday, 2/13/2096
Residence of Gwenda Lynn Pypher
The Inside World
Gwenda Lynn Pypher stood in her kitchen, her right hand reaching into the frozen wastes of Antarctica, the rest of her body comfortably situated in the warmth of Inside. For long moments, she was too stunned to move. Nothing had prepared her for the bloody horrors in her freezer.
Up to now, her workday had gone well, with a dozen recipes from the new microbeef craze posted to her culinary STREAM, Bytes of Bites. The response had been excellent: 3,429 comments from those who believed in the healthiness of the heart-friendly microbial beef substitute and 1,562 replies from furious “on-the-hoof” purists. That kind of attention would keep her first among food critics on the net.
Her glow of self-satisfaction had grown when her bedroom health panel displayed 12,545 steps for the day. All had been accumulated as she strode from room to room shouting out sentences to the house comp for her STREAM. Editorial changes occurred instantly based on feedback from Chatterbox, her top of-the-line linguistic AI. She had invested three months of income in the artificial-intelligence editor. Now she trusted it more than her own language cortex.
At 5:00 p.m. Standard Universal Time, she had called for the comp to save all files and headed for the shower. Toweling off afterward, her stomach growled. Dinnertime. She handed her towel to the convenience bot, which would launder, dry, and re-shelve the cloth, and then instructed the house comp to randomly select which meal she’d make tonight from the list of recipes awaiting her professional evaluation.
As she listened to its selection — LoCarb pasta with linger-not garlic-tomato sauce — she made a face.
Oh, well. Win some, lose some.
While pulling on her wooly-caterpillar coveralls, she decided to pep up the recipe with a few hi-omega beefballs from her kitchen freezer.
She pressed the KITCHEN button on her house portal. As she waited for the double-doors to open, she tried to recall what other ingredients she had on hand.
Some amateur chefs enjoyed working in a restaurant-sized kitchen, surrounded by gleaming, stainless steel, but Gwenda believed in minimalism. Her new kitchen unit, one of the 100,000 units in the Kitchens4U stack in the Nation of Texas, enclosed a tidy 10-foot by 10-foot space. The center held a cooktop, triple sink, and loads of counter space. All storage, including Fridge’n’Freeze, was portalized.
Walking to her single cupboard, she scrolled through the categories on the door screen and selected SPICES. Opening the door, she pressed the NEXT button repeatedly, scanning the shelves as they rolled past from right to left. Every now and then she idly wondered where the spice cabinet was actually located — possibly the subarctic tundra? The Siberian steppes? Patagonia? All had excellent weather for storing herbs. “Stop,” she told the cupboard, and took a few leaves of genetically enhanced oregano from a bin.
Ten minutes later, she had all the ingredients for her sauce assembled. Time to get the meatballs from the freezer. She’d rented the sub-zero shelf of her Fridge’n’Freeze from PolarAir, a green-friendly, no-power storage stack located on the Lambert Glacier on the eastern side of the Antarctic continent.
Gwenda opened her freezer door, spotted the meat, reached through the portal to grab the package, and stopped.
The back of the 3-foot by 3-foot box was bent back, letting snow drift in.
Oh, oh. This isn’t right.
Those lumps back there, under the snow. They don’t look like my meatballs.
She brushed away the snow covering the lumps and let out a scream.
Yanking her hand back, she stared in disbelief at what she’d uncovered: severed hands and feet in pools of icy blood.