Brooks & Smith, page 23
The 3D Printer of Doom
Rochester, New York. Home of Kodak, Xerox, and a handful of universities, the greater Rochester area fancied itself a sort of discount Silicon Valley. It had all the amenities, from algorithm-obsessed dweebs to gross privacy violations to libertarians who insisted they were against age of consent laws for non-pedophilic reasons.
It also had a serial killer.
That’s why Agents Brooks and Smith found themselves at a Medical Examiner’s office, picking through corpses. Three bodies had turned up in less than twenty-four hours, each missing an organ. The first—a twenty-something young man—arrived without kidneys. Expecting changelings, The Reticent had assigned the detectives to the case. In the time it took them to travel from Manhattan to Rochester, two more young adults had been murdered: one woman missing her liver and one man missing his lungs.
“Not changelings,” Brooks said, his latex-gloved hands wrist deep in the lungless corpse.
Pretending to be an FBI medical examiner wasn’t all that fun. As usual, he and Smith didn’t know what they were looking for. They were just looking for something weird, whether it be organs turned to stone (gorgon), organs liquified (wendigo), or a parasitic worm burrowing through an abdominal cavity (parasitic worm burrowing through an abdominal cavity). Unfortunately for them, everything but the missing organs was normal.
“The coroner said that each of these people died from missing whatever organ was missing,” Brooks said. “They weren’t stabbed or shot or choked to death. Toxicology reports aren’t back yet, but I’m guessing they were sedated and someone did some amateur surgery.”
Smith’s hands were wrist deep in paperwork. “They all went to the same school.”
“Which one?” Brooks asked, as he removed and discarded his gloves.
“Rochester Institute of Technology,” Smith said.
Brooks joined him behind a desk. “Same major? Same classes? Same dorm?”
“Nope. Mechanical Engineering, Sonography, and... Museum Studies?” Smith shook his head. “Two different dorms and one local living at home with his parents.”
“They don’t have a med school, do they?”
Smith shook his head. “Negative. That was my thought. A rogue doctor.”
“Run of the mill cannibal?” Brooks wondered.
As they speculated, the swinging doors to the examination area opened with a WHOOOF. A rolling cart entered first, with a sheet-covered corpse on top. Then came the person pushing the cart: a sweaty, overworked medical examiner.
“Another one?” Brooks asked.
He and Smith stood to check it out.
“No.” The medical examiner brought the cart to a halt, and wiped the sweat from her brow. “Well, yes and no. I’m pretty sure this one is a heart attack.” She pulled the sheet back, revealing a fifty-something man, and continued. “He freaked out when he found another corpse with its eyeballs missing. The guy was on the phone with 911 reporting it when he just... died.”
“Just the eyeballs?” Brooks asked.
That made no sense. It wouldn’t kill anyone, just blind them.
“As far as I know. I haven’t examined it yet,” she said.
“Where’s the other body?” Smith asked.
“Cops are still taking pics,” she said. “You can probably catch them if you want.”
“Where?” Brooks asked.
“RIT campus. Right in front of the Liberal Arts building.”
❦
Right in front of the Liberal Arts building, Rochester Police were finishing up and loading the eyeless body into an ambulance for transport. Brooks and Smith—fake badges in hand—made their way over and accosted the officers for information.
“What happened to this one?” Smith asked.
An annoyed officer who’d been ready to leave the scene answered. “Eyes ripped out.”
“Any signs of the cause of death?” Brooks asked.
“You mean other than having her eyes ripped out?” asked the officer.
“Yes, other than—”
“No,” said the officer. “I’m thinking whoever’s doing this is poisoning the victims, and that’s what they’re dying of. If those lazy fucks in toxicology would hurry up— ”
“Where exactly was the body when you found it?” Brooks asked.
The officer pointed to a spot on the sidewalk. “Just lying there on her back.”
Brooks and Smith knelt down to get a closer look.
“What’s that?” Smith asked, pointing to a tiny orange piece of something. Plastic, maybe.
“3D printer filament,” said the officer. “It’s everywhere around here.”
“You don’t think it’s evidence?” Brooks asked.
“No. You can get that shit stuck in your hair just walking through campus.”
“Okay...” Brooks said, doubting that.
Smith also doubted it. “Out of curiosity, where’s the 3D printing lab?”
“They call it The Construct,” the officer said in a mocking tone. “It’s a makerspace.” He pointed across campus. “Institute Hall on Reynolds Drive. We already checked it out, though. One of our officers had the same idea. Nothing there.”
“We’ll check it out anyway,” Brooks said.
The officer shrugged and was on his way.
❦
At The Construct, which was as needlessly capitalized as The Reticent, Brooks and Smith found little but 3D printers, laser-cutters, and CNC mills. Rows of sterile-looking tables were laid out in factory-like fashion. The whole area reeked of solder and future mesothelioma lawsuits. Introverted students buried their heads in their work and avoided making eye contact with the old dudes who clearly didn’t belong on their campus.
One 3D printer was still running, making BREEEP and CHUGCHUGCHUG sounds as the printing base moved frantically beneath the nozzle. Brooks and Smith went over to inspect the printer, and found that it was printing a human heart. Not a 3D-printed piece of plastic that looked like a human heart. An actual human heart muscle—unmistakable, especially to someone who’d been doing amateur autopsies all morning. Since it contained no blood, the heart was transparent, and it was about three-quarters of the way finished, missing only one chamber and a little piece of the aorta.
“Umm...” Brooks didn’t have words for the unsettling organ.
“Come on.” Smith grabbed Brooks by the arm and pulled him underneath a shop table. “I’d say someone will be back for that, wouldn’t you?”
In agreement, Brooks grabbed a nearby file cabinet and scooted it closer, further obscuring them from view. He and his partner remained quiet, and kept their eyes focused on the printer.
After an hour, no one had come for the heart. Of course they hadn’t. The printer was still BREEEPing and CHUGCHUGCHUGing. The detectives were still scrunched.
“We should be shorter,” Smith complained, rubbing at a sore shoulder.
“And younger,” Brooks added.
Another hour passed, and the sounds finally stopped. The organ was ready.
Within minutes, a young man entered to retrieve his heart. He wore an RIT hoodie, with the hood up to obscure his face, and carried a lunchbox. His demeanor could be described as ‘forced casual.’ That is, he was in a hurry but didn’t want it to seem like he was in a hurry. He grabbed the heart and stuffed it into his lunchbox. A few pieces of ice fell to the floor and skidded toward the detectives.
Brooks and Smith slid out from under the table, guns drawn.
“In a hurry?” Smith asked.
The young man jumped in fright, sending his hood sliding off his head. That revealed a pale, chubby face and a buzzcut. “Oh man... I’m in trouble.”
“Yeah, you think?” Brooks said.
“It’s not, um... it’s not what it looks like,” said the young man.
“It looks like you’re yanking out people’s body parts and using them to learn how to 3D print new ones,” Smith said.
“No, no. I already know how to 3D print any organ you can think of,” said the young man.
“What’s your name?” Smith asked.
“Um... Chet.”
“Where are you taking the heart, Chet?” Brooks asked.
“Um... b-b-back to my room?”
Brooks pointed his gun at the doorway. “Take us there.”
Motivated by the gun, Chet took his lunchbox and showed the detectives to his dorm room. The three stood in a dimly lit hallway that smelled like gym socks, as all men’s dorms do.
Chet cracked the door open. “Oh man. Can you just... wait ’til I clean up?”
“No,” Smith said, pushing it wide open and releasing musty sex stank into the hallway.
“Ugh,” Brooks groaned.
It was a dorm room. Two unmade twin beds, their blankets piled upon them. Two desks, each covered in an array of books and bits of machinery. Trashy swimsuit posters on the walls.
Smith pushed Chet into the room first. As he followed him in, he chastised the student for the stench. “You gotta take out your cum rags every once in a while.”
Brooks noticed that one desk was much dustier than the other. “Where’s your roommate?”
“Out,” Chet said.
“Chet?” A soft, feminine voice called out from under one of the blanket piles. “Do you have my heart?”
Smith gripped his gun harder. “What the fuck is that?”
“Who’s with you?” the voice asked, frightened.
While Smith kept his gun pressed to Chet’s back, Brooks walked over to the bed and uncovered its occupant.
Brooks gagged. “Oh my God. What is that?”
The room’s awful smell hadn’t been from cum rags. It was a naked woman, sort of. She was blonde, busty, and had a seam down the middle of her abdomen—jagged bits of flesh fastened together, running from the top of her ribcage to her belly button. Clear liquid with pink tinges leaked from the seam, which appeared to be held together by Velcro. She didn’t move. It didn’t seem she could.
“That’s Printana,” Chet said, like he was introducing a date to his parents.
“Printana?” Smith wondered.
Chet brandished his lunchbox. “I gotta put this heart in her or she’s gonna die.”
“She’s alive?” Brooks cringed.
“Kinda. Yeah,” Chet said. “I think.”
“You think?”
“Please. I gotta put this heart in... then I can explain.”
Brooks waved his gun toward Printana. “Fine.”
Chet pulled the Velcro apart with a CRRRRSSSH, exposing more foul-smelling goop.
Brooks and Smith pinched their noses shut to keep out the mix of decaying flesh and hot metal.
Printana’s insides looked human. They also looked like they were rotting.
Chet reached in and pulled out a heart that had shriveled to the size of a plum, its surface looking like it had been scorched by acid. He opened his cooler, pulled out the pristine 3D printed heart, and clicked it into place like it was a Lego. Viscous black fluid began pumping through it.
“What happened to the old heart?” Smith asked.
“It dissolved. I, uh... haven’t perfected everything,” Chet said.
He sealed her up, and Printana was as good as new. She shot up into a seated position and turned to her maker. “Would you like to have sex with me now?”
“No, Printana...”
“Okay then,” Printana said. She shut her eyes and seemingly went to sleep.
“So, you made a fuckbot,” Smith said.
“She’s not a robot,” Chet said.
“She’s definitely not a person,” Brooks said.
“But she is! Those are all human organs. The blood pumping through them isn’t exactly real, but there’s no microchip in her head or anything. It’s all flesh and bone,” Chet said.
“Then why does she want to have sex with you?” Smith asked.
Brooks scienced up that question. “Who’d you model the brain after?”
“I dunno, I found the blueprint online,” Chet said.
“Let me get this straight,” Brooks said. “You found blueprints for a human brain on the internet, and didn’t put even a second of thought into printing it out. Didn’t worry about the ramifications of human consciousness or anything.”
“Um... yeah,” Chet said. “Who doesn’t want a warm girlfriend to cozy up with?”
Brooks raised his hand, like a smartass.
Smith tried reasoning with the student. “Chet, you made a fuckbot. I get it. I see the appeal—”
“Do you?” Brooks asked.
“I do. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a bunch of corpses have turned up with organs missing while you’re 3D printing new ones,” Smith said.
“I didn’t do anything, I definitely didn’t kill anyone,” Chet said.
“Someone did,” Brooks said.
“Maybe Printana?” Smith wondered.
Chet defended his girlfriend’s honor. “Printana would never.”
Smith, not believing Chet to be a threat, tucked his gun away and speculated. “Maybe she knows her organs keep failing, and she’s not waiting for you to print new ones. She’s going out and extracting them for herself.”
“Let’s look under the hood,” Brooks said.
“What?” Chet asked.
“Open her up again. I want to compare parts,” Brooks said.
“Okay...” Chet opened Printana’s chest.
Brooks and Smith leaned in to get a closer look. Each organ—from the brand-new heart to the older kidneys and intestines—had filament lines.
“I don’t think he’s lying,” Smith said.
“Yeah. Everything here looks printed—”
Brooks shut up, as he was knocked out.
Smith saw his partner collapse onto the fuckbot. He turned just as Chet jabbed him with a needle containing a tranquilizer.
“Shit,” Smith said, before falling onto the pile.
The detectives awoke strapped to the two beds in the dorm room. Brooks was shirtless, for some reason. Printana was nowhere in sight. Between them was a cot with a different body on it—a brunette—and a lab-coated Chet tinkering around in her body cavity.
Neither Brooks nor Smith had a good vantage point. If they had, they’d have seen a grotesque mockery of a human woman. The brunette on the cot was a Frankensteinean monster, just like Printana. But this one was made from real, human organs that pulsed and throbbed and released foul odors.
Smith softly muttered swear words as he tried not to freak out about being bound.
Even if he could have seen his partner’s struggle, Brooks had no ability to comfort him. He tried to work on their predicament.
“Where’s Printana?” he asked.
“In the closet,” Chet said. “She’s exhausting.”
“What?” Brooks asked.
“Do you know how time-consuming 3D printing is? It took twelve hours to finish that heart, and she needs a new organ every other day. It’s killing my social life.”
Smith would have loved to make a crack about that, but he was busy panicking and thrashing against the straps that held him to the bed.
“This is Printana 2.0,” Chet said, looking down at his creation. “Using the same concept as the 3D printed model, I can create a real human woman from a collection of body parts.”
“Congrats, you made a Frankenstein,” Brooks said.
“Frankenstein was the name of the doctor,” Chet said smugly.
“I know,” Brooks snapped. “It’s a figure of speech.”
“I figure I can use your stomach so she can handle spicy food,” Chet said.
“Well, that’s racist,” Brooks said.
Chet glanced at Smith. “And I can use his eyes.”
Smith complained as he squirmed. “You already stole someone’s eyes.”
“I know, but I like yours better,” Chet said.
“Gay,” Smith said.
Chet hit him with another injection, a paralytic to stop the squirming.
He brought a similar needle to Brooks’s arm, and loomed over him. “You first.”
Smith tried to object, but the tongue is a muscle so paralytics also stop speech. He was stuck inside his body, listening as Chet clinked around in a tray of scalpels and revved a sternal saw. He couldn’t even turn his eyes, so he was stuck with peripheral blurs of lab coat and metal.
Brooks was in a similar condition, but with a nerd hovering a scalpel above his bare abdomen. He didn’t love the idea of being hacked apart. His mind filled with visions of his father and sister’s insides spilling all over the ground in Willowbrook Park. He imagined his looked the same.
Brooks’s breathing became rapid, but his body couldn’t move with it. As a result, the inside of his chest burned as he was compelled but unable to thrash about.
Unable to speak. Unable to move. Unable to do anything but watch as some doofus in a lab coat succeeded at what hundreds of monsters had tried and failed. Killing him.
Brooks felt the scalpel hit. It didn’t hurt exactly. Not physically. There was pressure on his skin until the instrument pierced its way through.
The release of pressure was almost relaxing. As his skin parted, it was as though he was melting, like he’d become one with the bed and would soon seep into the Earth.
Then the feeling stopped, and he watched as Chet’s white lab coat developed a spot of red. Dead center. Right at the heart. The spot spread, until it covered his chest. Chet fell forwards, onto the corner of the bed, then toppled onto the floor.
Neither Brooks nor Smith saw him land, but both heard the sound.
❦
An hour later, Brooks was able to move. Once that happened, he looted Chet’s cart and stole bandaging to cover the inch-long incision in his abdomen. Oddly enough, Printana 2.0 was missing from the cart.
Brooks hovered over Smith, and started unstrapping him.
Smith’s eyes shot open. He realized he could speak again. “Brooksy?”
“I’ve got you.” Brooks helped him to a seated position and sat next to him.
Smith was shaking, but he wrapped his arms around Brooks and laid his head against his chest. “I really thought you were dead.”
“Nope. You’re still stuck with me,” Brooks said.
“What happened?” Smith asked.
