La dernière bouchée

A glistening stream of blood gently wept from the body's jagged holes.

The crimson gore sparkled under rapid flash photography as it loosely clung to the wounds. So many wounds. Far too many for this to have been an accident. Under the forensic lights it appeared ethereal. The skin a dull shade of nothing and the hair a pale motif of sadness. The lights washed out any shadows, making the scene look like it had been drawn by an unskilled comic-book artist desperate to get to their next panel. The dripping sound of blood mixed with the high-pitched whine of a dozen flashbulbs repeatedly charging and discharging sounded like the worst kind of musique concrète. An avant-garde composition of despair.

The forensics officer was clad in synthetic white. A portrait of purity amidst a scene of unimaginable depravity. The suit hung loosely on their slumped frame, its fringes sullied with flecks of red. A splatter of colour to outline their form and bring definition to their washed out edges. After a dozen years of mopping up the tattered remains of an uncountable number of humans, there was no life left in his eyes. Two hollow orbs, brimming with unexpected tears, peering out from behind a transparent perspex mask. This didn't get any easier.

"What have we got?" Said the detective.

"Bite marks," said the forensics officer. "A lot of bite marks."

Truchet was a cliché of a modern detective. Long trench coat, poor posture, and a face covered with an impenetrable visor bristling with a dozen sensors, each sniffing out the environment. Inside, the visor beamed augmented information directly into his eyeballs, ultra-violet overlays, infrared patterns, chemical compositions. It whispered constantly in his ears, muttering updates from the æther, letting him listen in on the incessant chatter around him. The mask blanked his face, leaving him completely anonymous to any lurking scumbag. From a respectable distance, he focussed the visor's sensors on the crime scene, letting the LIDAR paint the room with invisible rays. There, in the centre, was the ragged corpse. The visor's AI struggled to form a comprehensive overview of the data it was picking up. The remains were barely recognisable as human; just a series of holes where flesh ought to be. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the incisions.

Detective Truchet was green. No one around him knew that he'd only been on the squad for a couple of months. Detectives like him were interchangeable resources, sent where they were needed to gather, assess, and investigate. Now that the visor was fused to his skull, he was just another "Det" to the rest of the police. An augmented NPC like so many others. There for a day and then gone. No time to build up a human relationship with his colleagues - that was antithetical to impartial police work, apparently. The visor detected his nervousness, felt the bile rising in its host, and flooded his brain with calming hormones.

Even with the synthetic relaxation, Truchet's voice was a quivering wreck he could barely keep from cracking. But all the forensics officer heard was the impassive tone emanating from the visor. "Please tell me a wild animal did this."

If only it had been that simple. Some nuclear-mutant from the scrubland finding its way into a restricted zone was rare, but not impossible. Pheromone-seeking drones could be deployed to sniff out such creatures - pursue and subdue was the polite euphemism. Even the neo-Vegans didn't put much effort into their protests when a wild ultra-boar was rampaging through a school, impaling and irradiating every child in its wake. Once, a reanimated Woolly Mammoth had made its way down from the frozen tundra and started to stomp around one of the clusters of refugee tents. Long-dormant viruses had blasted out of its trunk every time it sneezed, spraying infection across the camp. The entire zone had been "sterilised" and the incident covered-up.

The forensics officer reluctantly looked back at the victim. He bade the Det to kneel down and pulled out a laser scanner. He waved the tool over a series of incisions across what was left of a shoulder. The scanner happily chuntered away, pulsing a series of coloured lights onto the tattered skin, briefly turning it into a disco. The scanner started feeding directly into the visor, and Truchet's eyes were infused with a confusing series of diagrams. Mandibles, jaws, compression rates, shearing force, incision ratios. The laser projector was so strong that even when he screwed his eyes shut against the horrors, those puncture-wounds were still etched onto his retinas.

The scanner beeped and finished its transmission. The lights died and Truchet's vision returned to normal, but his heart couldn't stop pounding.

The forensics officer's voice was a rattle of sadness and incomprehension. "That's a human bite. No doubt about it."

Truchet's visor started working overtime as it reacted to the sudden and drastic changes in its host's endocrine system. It quickly locked down the Det's bladder and bowels, placing a tight constriction on the whole area. The stomach was sent an unhealthy dose of muscle relaxant to prevent the eruption of vomit which was forming. Simultaneously, caffeine was flooded into the brain to allow Truchet to cope with the influx of information pouring in from multiple online sources, and a mild dose of dopamine left him feeling happy that he was helping solve a problem. A spasm of electricity was zapped down his spine, causing him to stand up straight. To the outside world, it looked like military precision and professional indifference.

The forensics officer stood slowly. "What kind of sick freak bites chunks out of someone?"

An unbidden thought flashed across Truchet's brain; what if these really were the end times? The world had gone to hell and it didn't look like it would be redeemed any time soon. The oceans were boiling while plagues of locusts swarmed across the few remaining crop fields. A foul pestilence had been stalking the land since before he was born; but for how much longer? Was it really so unlikely that man would turn on man? Everyone was hungry these days. Synthetic meat gave you nutrients, but it couldn't satisfy the primal hunger people had for slaughtered flesh. Perhaps an omni who was sick of the forced rationing had taken matters into their own hands? Their own jaws.

The visor sent an encrypted signal back to HQ that it was running dangerously low on mood-altering chemicals along with a suggestion that its host might need a few sessions of aggressive re-education. Somewhere, unknown to Truchet, a counter incremented - taking him one step closer to retirement. Detectives were expensive to breed, expensive to train, and even more expensive when they went wrong. It was nothing personal, of course, merely economics. An annoying waste on a spreadsheet, sure, but he was one of a thousand Dets in the city-state. The algorithms could always promote someone else. Someone with a less heightened sense of fear.

"What do we know about the victim?" The visor modulated the panic out of Truchet's voice.

"Depressingly little, sir."

"Biometrics?"

The forensics officer braced himself. He didn't have the benefit of chemical alteration at the scene. That would have to wait until he got home to his illicit still. The official alcohol they served in licenced establishments was watered down and laced with hormones. The more you drank, the more you loved the government. Sometimes, after a day of seeing the worst of humanity, what you really needed was to get black-out drunk on domestic moonshine and damn the hangover.

"No biometrics, sir. As you can see, the finger-prints have been chewed off."

"RFID tag?"

"No sir, shattered due to this incision. The attacker knew which parts to target."

"It isn't your place to speculate!" The visor spat back before Truchet had a chance to digest the implications. Social order must be preserved at all times, and a mere technician making deductions from their limited dataset was inimical to good police-work.

"Sorry sir, of course. We don't have access to dental records though, perhaps you would care to look?" Reluctantly, the Det made his way round to what appeared to be the front of the body. He felt his feet squelch on the little lumps of flesh strewn across the grimy floor. Thankfully, the mouth of the corpse was wide open, twisted in pain, but offering an unobstructed view of the teeth. His fingers prodded the air, instructing the visor where to scan and which databases to correlate against. There was something… his brain was urgently trying to tell him something. A runaway process was going haywire and screaming for attention. Even in his chemically addled state, he could feel his mind writhing in terror at something deep within his subconscious.

The victim's records came back within a few seconds. Young-ish. Male-ish. Famous-ish. A wannabe tuber with a respectable if dwindling follower count. Someone the kids could look up to and the adults could perv on. They were ten-a-penny these days; each scrambling to find a niche to exploit. Each hoping the algorithm would favour them next. This guy had been pumping out videos since he was a kid. His parents had sensibly availed themselves of one of the few remaining economic activities allowable to their class. The visor started playing back some of his biggest hits at double-speed, skipping the now-redundant exaltation to like-and-subscribe. In another world he may have had a successful career as the handsome lead in low-brow talkies. But here he was, shattered and ravaged. Another victim in a sea of horrors. The Det's subconscious finally broke through. Even the visor wasn't quick enough to catch him recoil from the victim or silence his terrified gasp.

"Oh my god! I have a match!"

"From the dental records?" The forensics officer was confused.

"No. Yes. I... Sweet merciful..." The visor muted its host until he regained his composure.

The room went quiet. The flashbulbs were silenced and the forensic cameras flew back a respectful distance. Truchet sent an emergency embargo on his feed. He needed a moment to think about this before it was streamed out to the viewers back home. Perhaps a few of them had already made the connection. They'd probably be censored automatically before they could reveal the awful truth. He breathed in filtered oxygen from his visor. He needed to pause. Just a moment. Either he was crazy, or the world was.

He beckoned the forensics office over and pressed the visor's speaker to the white-clad ear. He set the output volume to the minimum possible. Barely a whisper. Quiet enough that any listening devices in the vicinity would be hard-pressed to distinguish the signal from the background noise.

"The teeth marks on the victim. I have a match. They… they belong to the victim."

The room span around the forensics officer. This was deranged, a sick joke, a freak coincidence. This couldn't be suicide! It just couldn't. No human - not even a psychopath burnt out on designer pharmaceuticals - could inflict those sorts of wounds on themselves. No. Impossible. It didn't make sense. "How sure are you?" he whispered back.

Truchet relaxed and surrendered to the visor, he let it control his motion even as his brain screamed for mercy. He saw his body act autonomously, picking up a discarded lump of human-meat. His hand, no longer under his conscious control, moved the still-warm pound of flesh to the corpse's mouth. The incisions in the skin were clearly visible on both sides. His visor started an augmented reality overlay, confirming what his pattern-matching subconscious had already determined. It started pointing out all the subtle details which proved the match. Each tooth mark in the victim's body matched a tooth in his skull.

This wasn't auto-cannibalism, of that the Det was sure. No one was flexible enough to bite their back like that. A double-jointed mutant with burnt-out pain-receptors wouldn't have been able to inflict that much damage on themselves. It was an impossibility. The data was messed up, surely? His visor was faulty? Something, anything other than the truth.

The visor started to play the victim's latest video. It looked like it had been shot in a doctor's office. The background was sterile and the lighting harsh - a far cry from the sensitively lit and carefully cluttered videos he usually posted. The victim was yammering about how excited he was to be getting a full medical scan courtesy of today's sponsor. Expensive medical equipment swam into view as the camera-drone tracked a wide selfie shot. As he sat down in the face scanner, he started describing how he would soon have a detailed CT scan of his jaw, which would allow him to play around with some open-source plastic surgery tools.

The camera tracked around. "Pause!" shouted Truchet. The visor stopped the video. Truchet instructed the city's mainframe to algorithmically enhance the few frames that contained an oddly coloured square in the corner. An aeon of computer time passed, gigajoules of energy were consumed, until the answer was spat back into his vision. There, stuck to the CT scanner, was a sticky-note. On it, in neater handwriting than befitted a doctor, was the medical system's master password.

The cybernetically enhanced detective felt a surge of relief; he'd cracked the case. The killer had stolen the CT scan and then 3D printed a duplicate jaw to use as a weapon. His visor started pinging him urgently. Somewhere, across town, another victim had been found.

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on this story. Did you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me 😃

Hungry for more? You can read:

• 2024's "Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms"
• 2023's "Tales of the Algorithm"