The Astronaut Always Rings Twice

By Shannon Allen, JR Campbell, Chris Barnham and 12 more

Crime Is Not Bound by Gravity

 

Turns out, greed and passion are universal truths, and leaving Earth does not mean leaving behind humanity. Spaceships, other planets, even Virtual Reality: all carry the taint of human desires.

 

Androids and robots fight for equal rights. The poor struggle to survive while the rich build private paradises high above the mess of Earth. Big Brother is watching and death remains the only equalizer, but some poor sod may try to unravel the mystery behind these murders, shine a light on corruption, and see justice done. If the price is right.

 

Fifteen stories explore the darkness of space and the human heart, featuring works by: Michael Teasdale; Al Onia; Douglas DiCicco; Kenzie Lappin; Kirk Bueckert; Wendy N. Wagner; J.W. Schnarr; J. Gordon; Chris Barnham; Ewan A. Dougall; JR Campbell; David F. Shultz; Shannon Allen; Calvin D. Jim; and Hayden Trenholm.

 

But remember: The Astronaut Always Rings Twice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tyche Books
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201338817

Book preview

The Astronaut Always

Rings Twice

Edited by

Shannon Allen and JR Campbell

Logo Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Dedicated, with appreciation, to the long-suffering spouses of writers and anthologists everywhere.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

The Flowers of Spring - Michael Teasdale

Jurisdiction - Al Onia

BronzeShield Plus - Douglas DiCicco

The Case of the Beautiful Woman - Kenzie Lappin

Darkly Through the Glass Place - Kirk Bueckert

The Inseparable Fun Boys - Wendy N. Wagner

Mary Kaye Will Always Break Your Heart - J.W. Schnarr

Where the Devil Can’t Go - J. Gordon

Twelve Days of Christmas - Chris Barnham

The Diary of a Dead Diplomat - Ewan A. Dougall

Partners - JR Campbell

Starship Seraphim - David F. Shultz

Death by Index - Shannon Allen

A Night on Jishu Shan - Calvin D. Jim

Big Trouble in Droidtown - Hayden Trenholm

The Suspects

Copyright

Foreword

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two. — Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

THE HEART OF crime never dies. It evolves and adapts to every new hurdle put in its way. It extends tendrils that grip souls on the edge. It fascinates, it beguiles, and is the guilty reading pleasure for many, me included. The Maltese Falcon got me early. I was hooked on the fedora wearing detective, a woman who knew how to handle herself while a world of backroom deals and double-crosses happened around two broken people. It started a wave of reading everything I could get my hands on, and I read it all, the good, the bad, and the campy. That is, until I found science fiction. As I read, the lone detective operating on the fringe crossed my path more than once. Bit by bit, just like the plucky detective, the two genres started backroom deals to bring the edge of noir onto the pages of science fiction and science fiction into the realm of the detective. A point driven home by novels like Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and into a future where novels push the boundaries of culture and voices.

That is one of the great things about stories, they are ever-growing conversations striking out in new and fascinating directions, offering insight into the world, real or imagined, around us. Science fiction gives us the possibilities. Noir exposes our darkest corners. As we delve deeper into the blend of these two great genres, we leave the confines of Earth to a place that takes us out into the absence of light. No matter the place, darkness will consume the void. However, light will always be at the edge, waiting for the chance to dissipate whatever climbs from that void. These stories jump into that void. Each wonderful author contained in these pages has taken hold of the possibilities that lurk in the dark and made them their own. So, tip back your fedora, pour yourself a drink, put your feet up on the desk, and enjoy.

Shannon Allen

The Flowers of Spring

Michael Teasdale

HERE SHE IS, Drake. This is how we found her.

The girl lies cold and unmoving, a dark shape sprawled out across the scuffed linoleum floor. My nostrils twitch at the heady mixture of perfume and stale Chinese takeaway that permeates the humidity of the dressing room. And, of course, there is the other smell.

I squint at the corpse. My eyes still raw from the brain burn I took this morning. Somewhere, amid the flickering fairy lights, hints of colour begin to emerge. Deep red ribbons that draw diagonal slashes across her cream lace corset. A leg, bent at an unusual angle, pokes out like a pale arrow from the long tulle peacock-feather bustle skirt. I nod in understanding. It was showtime when the killer struck.

Gloria blows into a tissue. An unglamourous action for a dame so proud of her appearance. It wasn’t like her to ever miss a cue, she tells me. When I came back here to check . . . Gloria begins to sob again. Jet black mascara running in uneven rivulets from beneath puffy red eyes that have seen too much. I wonder if she’s crying for the girl or the loss of income. Even in a club built around discretion, situated at the heart of a hundred-degree swampland, word gets out, and Jo-Jo was the one they all came for.

Gloria seems to peep my thoughts.

Yes, Drake, it’s Jo-Jo . . . she’s a . . . synthetic. I mean, obviously I had no idea but . . . I thought of you right away . . . the cops aren’t . . . I mean . . . they won’t . . . they’d see it as a service, not a crime, and of course, there’s all the trouble it’ll bring . . . Gloria’s words trail away, suffocated in the cloying stillness of the room.

I shuffle over to the corpse and crouch down, knees popping like distant gunshots. These days my whole body feels like a perp resisting arrest. I figure it’s payback for everything I put it through in my active years. Every chase through some neon-lit back alley. Every precariously scaled stairwell. Every bullet that grazed me. Every shard of broken glass that I picked out of my hands at two in the morning over the bloodstained bathroom sink.

Still, as I look at Jo-Jo, I consider myself fortunate.

Sweet Jo-Jo. The burlesque superstar and main draw of the Velvet Pussycat, now just another pile of parts for the android scrapheap. Hell, people need some motivation to drag their ass out here in this heat, and Gloria’s gumbo, great as it might be, ain’t that big a draw.

The scent of the synth overpowers the rapidly spoiling carton of wonton that sits uneaten by the dresser. Jo-Jo’s perfume is exotic and wild, but mixed in with it is that other scent. A dangerous smell. Something more illicit. I’ve sniffed it before, of course. You don’t need to have been a cop to know this particular odour. Everyone who lived through the Android Spring has it hardwired into their olfactory senses. There was a time, not so long ago, when every corner of every neighbourhood reeked of it; leaking out of every dead eyed runner who never made it out in time.

My eyes linger on the dead girl’s mouth. The perfect cherry-red lips that charmed the cred out of so many johns, now stained with a thin white dribble of what passes for an android’s blood. It runs in a neat line down her chin and drips into a small puddle, hardening like resin on the liquor-stained floor.

The johns will weep for her when word gets out about her murder. Some will swear revenge. Crime will spike, but it’ll calm down once they find out what she was. Nobody mourns a synthetic anymore.

Broken neck. That must have been tough given . . . I mean, I take it you already knew she was a . . .

Gloria cuts me off with a glare. I didn’t know shit before I seen her neck, Drake. Don’t be getting any ideas about reporting me to the Luddites because—

Whoa! I raise a hand I’m retired, remember? Five years gone. I didn’t like what the Luddites did to the department anymore than—

Gloria cuts out my tongue with a switchblade scowl. Jeez! For the dame that called me in, she sure doesn’t seem to trust me. I guess I can peep why. She probably trusted Jo-Jo too. I scan Gloria’s face, interminably weary of the look I’ve seen in so many victims over the years; that crushed resignation that finally settles in when all faith is gone forever. The android’s neck wasn’t the only thing that was broken here tonight.

I glance back to the body, not wanting to further rattle Gloria’s cage. The movement is a little quick. I forget about the lasting after-effects of the brain burn. My vision swoons in and out of focus, and still crouching, I wobble and fall flat on my ass.

Jesus Christ! I hear Gloria cuss from behind me. Are you drunk, Drake? You private dicks are all the same, ain’t ya? Living out your low-rent Philip Marlowe fantasies on other people’s cred? Well not on mine! I ain’t some femme fatale here to coo at ya and stroke ya ego over a dirty glass. I got enough deadbeats in my bar lookin’ for that already, but, right now, I got a dead droid on my dressing room floor who . . .

It ain’t that! my voice comes out with unexpected ferocity and stops Gloria cold. I pull myself to my feet, readjusting my hat. I’m sixty-three years old, Gloria. I haven’t been feeling well and your floor is covered in liquor and Lord knows what. Gimme a break, would ya? I came here to help, not be chewed out for being an old man who can’t keep a clean footing.

I close my eyes. Hoping this isn’t the precursor to another blackout. After a moment, I feel her hand on my shoulder. I open my eyes and look up from under the rim of my Fedora into the smeared black mess of Gloria’s big scared eyes.

I’m sorry . . . I just . . . You okay, Sam?

First name, huh? That’s rare. I’ve always been just Drake to her, as a cop and, later, as a civilian. Sometimes, I wish it were different.

I’m okay, I mutter. Like you said. I’m not the one with the dead droid in my bar. The old look snaps back into place like the rusted iron shutter coming down at closing time; the kind of look she’d throw at a barfly who’d had a few too many shots and started chewing out the waitress on what was takin’ so long to rustle up a po’boy.

That’s why I pinged you on the Chatta, Drake. Her tone is even now, barely concealing the anger bristling beneath. You gonna help or do I get the boys to row her out and feed her to the gators?

She’s joking. At least I hope so. I offer a crooked smile in acknowledgement. Cut the shit, Gloria. Why am I here? This ain’t a murder ’cause androids ain’t people. Least not anymore. In the old days this would have been an insurance claim at best. It’s a sick business all right, but you know as well as I do how some johns get their kicks. The old pleasure-bots used to get wrecked like this all the time, it’s just some nut who went too far . . .

Gloria’s nose wrinkles. I get it. I can smell the bullshit in my words even as they leave my lips, but what else am I supposed to say? I’m a cop . . . no, that ain’t right. I was a cop and, even then, it never felt right. I picture the kind of face we’d haul in for a case like this in the old days. Smug. Secure. Zanzingers, we’d call ’em. Like in the old-time song from a century past about the guy who killed his maid to get his rocks off. The most we could get ’em on was destruction of personal property. It weren’t right then . . . it ain’t right now. When you couldn’t tell ’em apart anymore, when they could pass for human to any of us. Why? Why was it different from murder?

"I . . . I’m sorry . . . it’s the ex-cop in me. I get it, it’s . . . distressing . . . expensive even, but come on, Gloria: For what you’re paying me, presuming you still want to pay me, I mean you must have some techy contacts on the Chatta you can ping . . . you had an illegal droid dancing for you after all and—"

Gloria leans in real close. Now the hand that had expressed such tender care just moments ago closes around the collar of my raincoat in a fist. "Listen to me, Drake. I’ll say it real clear, just so you get it for good. I didn’t know she was a fucking android. I ain’t lyin’ about that and . . . yeah . . . I could call in some contacts, if anyone is still even out there. I mean, didn’t all the runners go into hiding after the Luddites got in power? What the hell was she doing here? Literally making an exhibition of herself . . . the brass tacks! For two years! I had her on flyers, Drake! All over the Chatta! Her lower lip trembles as she finishes. Just check her neck a little closer. Then you’ll see why I pinged you."

She lets go of my jacket, and I hear her stilettos click back to the dress mirror at the back of the room. I shoot her a glance, but she’s already parking herself on a stool, vape in hand, lost in a hazy pink cloud of her own regrets.

I get on with the job. Crouching. Bending low again. Taking care this time to move real slow. The brain burn is no joke. More frequent of late. Blackouts. Short-term memory loss. The last thing I want is to wake up to some medic, lying next to a dead android go-go dancer, and have to explain myself.

After a few seconds I see what Gloria is getting at. Or rather, I see what’s missing.

The personality chip. Removed, huh?

My fingers fumble over the open hatch at the back of the girl’s neck. Without it, Jo-Jo, or what had once been Jo-Jo, really was just an empty shell. The closest an android could get to being human was in death. The difference was that an android always backed itself up and, with a fresh enough re-shelling, could be restored. When a human hit lights-out the soul was gone, lost to the unknown. The androids were too expensive an investment for that mercy. They were revived countless times through their backup chip. The trauma of whatever had finished them off was left to linger as a memory, a trivial unpleasantness, as clear as last Tuesday’s dental appointment. The campaign for the dignity of a natural android death had been one of the key backdrops to the Android Spring; an unpredictable uprising with no traceable flash-point. Its aim had been to liberate synthetic life from the figurative shackles that our society had placed them in. The riots that followed had burned for months and led to the rise of the Luddites.

Only two people could have opened that. Jo-Jo or her owner.

Gloria groans. Come on, Drake. You want to play naive? You know as well as I do what kind of services are out there on the Dark-Chatta. Besides, she ain’t a person. We’ve established that already! She sure as hell didn’t have an owner.

My eyes drift down to the droid’s hand and the tight fist that Jo-Jo seems to have formed in death. They all had owners ’fore the Spring, I reason. Perhaps Jo-Jo’s old boss wandered in here one night and recognised her. Decided to take back his property, illegal or not. You said yourself you had promos of her on the Chatta. It’s easy to imagine that someone might have peeped her there.

Gloria dismisses my theory with a silent plume of sweet-scented smoke as my hands begin working on Jo-Jo’s fingers. I do it without thought. Old muscle memory. I don’t have time to prepare myself for what I see when that hand opens up and reveals the secrets Jo-Jo has been concealing.

Images of the old case trigger instantly, flashing through my mind like the bolts of pain that all but incapacitated me just a few hours ago. Mental pictures I’ve stored and filed for posterity, long after the case was buried. Every detail committed to a memory that no amount of liquor could erase. Exhibits in an ongoing investigation that never reached its end. A missing fingertip. An extracted human nail. An irregular lock of hair clipped away. The place where an ear or a toe ought to have been. And there, linking them all, the same motif. Always the same thing clutched in the John or Jane Doe’s hand. An echo of an evil I thought had slunk quietly away into the neon-infused night.

Sam, are you okay?

The blackness begins to cloak me as I struggle to stay conscious. I can feel the brain burn tighten, hear the beating of my own heart as I look down into Jo-Jo’s hand and see it clearly. His symbol. His calling card.

The crushed white petals of a carnation.

C—. . . Collector, I stutter. I see Gloria’s lips move but can no longer hear the words as I surrender to the blackout.

I DON’T KNOW why you’d want to go dredging this up again, Drake. The Collector moved on, got sick maybe. We figure he was already an old man when he started. Old men die now, especially since the tech crackdowns shut down all talk of cloud consciousness transfer. And the world . . . it’s moved on too, and not in a good way.

Li Jing shoots me a stare that begs me to challenge her and knows that I can’t possibly do so and win. She sees the defeat in my face and half smiles, digging her chopsticks down into the soba noodle packet like she’s performing an autopsy.

The alleyway stinks of sour piss and overboiled rice, the crackle of the neon signs above are a music only residents of this scum-filled city could learn to love.

We wouldn’t be able to work a case the way we did back then, Li Jing protests. You haven’t seen the office since you retired. Since the Spring, the Luddites have . . . they’ve stripped out and downgraded everything they deem a potential AI threat. It’s a struggle to convince GHQ to even keep the computers running. There’s talk of filing physical reports again! Can you imagine? Actual paperwork . . . on paper . . . not just an archaic phrase anymore? Jeez, like any of these lunks could learn to type! We’d have a city-wide backlog by the end of the month.

I glance around. It’s three days since my blackout at the Velvet Pussycat. Gloria helped me home that night, pinged me several times since. They stashed Jo-Jo’s body at the local chop-shop to give me time to investigate. The crime scene is ruined, of course, but it’s better than the droid becoming gator-bait. Reptiles washing up with bellyfuls of metal and synthetic fluid filling their intestinal tract might just cause a fuss with the patrols.

My vision is improving and I’m beginning to feel hungry again, not just for the lousy ramen we ordered from Alex’s back alley soba stall, but hungry to work a case again. Not spend my time winding down towards an early grave, chasing after teenage runaways for dead-eyed yuppies or spying on philandering spouses at seedy love-hotels but really working an important case. The case. The one that got away. The one we called The Collector.

My old partner, Li Jing Zhou, seems less keen. Her hair is greying since I last saw her, and even for a cop, she looks tired. As tired as I feel. She stayed on for the pension, despite her feelings towards the Luddites whose anti-tech movement drained us all of our love for the job. For a genius detective like Li Jing, working without mods or AI has been a tough downgrade. I try to think when we last met. Ten years ago? When the leads hit dead-ends, when the murders stopped. When the snow-white petals we’d been following dried up.

Don’t you see the connection? I ask, knowing that it’s beyond obvious to her but failing to understand why her eyes didn’t catch fire the way I’d expected at the mention of his name. The stolen part. It’s not an ear or a toe this time. It’s something more personal. Her chip. Her memories. Everything she was. Her whole personality.

Li Jing holds up her chopsticks, inspecting a greyish lump of meat, then shrugs. It’s less a case of why you’d take it as why you wouldn’t. The cred value on those things is still high on the Dark-Chatta. Word is there are even real collectors, stockpiling them, speculating that the ban on synthetics will be lifted again if the Luddites lose power once the fallout from the Spring dies down.

I sigh. Same old clinical Li Jing. The petals, then! I protest, hammering my fist down on the table hard enough for the soba vendor to shoot us a concerned look.

A copycat maybe?

She’s speculating. I can tell she doesn’t want it to be true. The Collector was a bogeyman to the whole city. Ten women and ten men. Twenty perfect murders across a seven-year span. The trophies he took were his calling card. An ear. A toe. Always leaving the white carnation petals in the victim’s hand. But a lot has happened in a decade. The Collector has become a myth; an urban legend. His story lost among all the other noise our society has been through.

Some loner probably read about him, fetishized him. It’s sad to say, but this was probably someone’s sick cosplay fantasy. You know how people were with the pleasure-bots, Drake?

I can’t hold back any longer. This wasn’t some trick at a skin-joint, Zhou! Nobody had a clue that Jo-Jo was a synth. Even Gloria thought she was human.

There’s that shrug again. Somebody knew. She sighs, dumping her chopsticks into the empty packet. They knew exactly what to take so that no memory of what they did to her could ever be preserved. The petals are a misdirection, a distraction for sentimental old sleuths like you who might get called in to investigate. I’m sorry, Drake. I know what you want this to be. I understand why you want it to be, but the cold, hard reality is that we lost. The Collector beat us a long time ago. This is just another dead droid.

From above us I feel the first few splashes of the approaching storm. The soba vendor hustles over and pulls out the shawl as the hail begins to come down. I’m glad for the interruption.

You’re right about one thing, I say. There has been a lot of noise this past decade. So much so that maybe you’ve lost sight of the signal. The carnation petals. We—

Jeez, Drake, I already—

We never made that detail public, Zhou!

My old partner’s mouth remains open, the words drying up on her tongue like the taste of Alex’s day-old ramen. It closes and reopens like a coy carp bubbling to the surface. I see the look form in her eyes and try not to smile, recognising it for what it is; a spark that will soon kindle into an unquenchable flame.

We . . . we didn’t? Are you sure?

Dead sure. My reply is firm. We didn’t want the vultures getting hold of it. Remember the Lace Ribbon Killer. We had copycats from every aggrieved spouse who bumped off his old lady, trying to divert attention. We didn’t want that again. Plus, Peterson was firm in his profile, remember? He didn’t want to give the guy what he wanted. He said it was important to the killer. That the carnations represented something. A political statement he wanted to make. Something about . . .

Resistance! Li Jing stiffens in her plastic chair. I can see in her eyes the once razor-sharp memory, dulled with the fog of riots, slowed by the turmoil and government coups that had marked our time apart, now finding its edge again. The white carnation. She continues, In the old wars they were a symbol of rebellion, defiance. They came to epitomise the spirit of the Dutch resistance to the Nazis. It wasn’t just about copycats. Peterson didn’t want us to tell the press because he wanted to deny the killer his symbolic message . . . he thought it might flush him out, make him get sloppy. Go public. Li Jing seems momentarily lost in her own thoughts. Drake, she says suddenly. A thought occurs to me. What if . . . what if the killings never actually stopped? What if he just switched targets? What if he never actually quit collecting and we just gradually decriminalised his victims? Declared open season on the androids?

There it is. Shit! She was always one step ahead of my old ass. I knock back the last of my canned coffee. It’s going to be a long night.

I THROW BACK the meds and swallow hard. A chalky aftertaste followed by an acidic reflux makes me almost fill the bowl with partially digested soba. I place a steadying hand on the bathroom wall, catching myself in the mirror as I do so.

Jeez. What happened? I don’t recognise the jowly grey puddle of flesh that stares back at me. I’ve a bad feeling about my future: That this might be the end. That one of these days the brain burn is going to be permanent. Before then though, there’s the case. That deep unfinished business of the past.

I splash a little water on my face and exit the bathroom walking into the dull orange glow of my office where Li Jing stands waiting for me by the murder-board she’s set up in the corner. Criss-crossing lines of red tape form an elaborate pattern from grainy photographs and hastily photocopied readouts: Everything she’s managed to eke out of every last friend she has in the department over the past few hours.

I was right, she states, then, perhaps out of sympathy, corrects herself. "We were right. He never stopped. He just switched targets. Moved from humans to synthetic, right around the time when the amnesty began." Her thin index finger taps at a picture of a dead-eyed droid. Even my old eyes can see it’s a service model. Probably a nanny or home help. Comely looking. Unlikely to distract the adults in the house from their duties.

This one was reported during the amnesty itself. Insurance paid out big cred for it. Filed as a home invasion. Closed case. The officer pinned it on some local junkie, figured the stolen chip was sold on the Dark-Chatta. He never saw a pattern with the murders, but look! She hands me a copy of the file and my eyes are drawn to a photo of the dead droid’s outstretched hand.

White carnation petals.

Yup. Likely the detective working the case never made the connection. We kept the calling card so hush-hush that even other units didn’t know about it.

But . . . I stammer, my head beginning to hurt again, it’s . . . it’s goddamn murder— I close my eyes in realisation.

It’s an insurance case, Ji Jing points out, damage to personal property. An android, not a person.

I feel like tearing down the whole damn board.

And the others, I yell, my finger jabbing out. This one, I snatch down a photo of what seems to be a pleasure-bot. This one? Another photo. This one resembles a child. Most likely assigned as an afterschool support pal.

Li Jing shrugs. They all carry the same hallmarks. Chip removed. White carnation petals on the scene. It’s amazing anyone working minor cases even recorded this much detail, to be honest.

I toss the photos down on the desk and shuffle over to my chair, feeling like I ought to maybe just stay there and wait for the inevitable.

Sam, I need something bigger than this. These are synthetics. Just property. To the department, it’s like . . . it’s like they didn’t exist. To the Luddites it’s like someone did us a favour.

My voice rattles low. So much that it even scares me. They are evidence, Zhou. Evidence that he’s still at large. Bungled, badly filed, poorly recorded evidence but evidence all the same, evidence that . . .

"Do you want to die, Sam?"

The words are brutal and cut me off in my stride.

I . . .

Your obsession with this case . . . it riled up your blood pressure. Caused your first heart attack. It got you benched. Led to your retirement. It’s been years. The department has moved on. The focus post-Spring is the war on AI, not some old flesh and blood ghoul most people believe dead. These are rogue droids. Enemies of the state. Nobody will work this without . . .

He killed people too, Zhou! Or did you forget?

I shouldn’t have said it and I know it from the moment the words rip their way from my cigarette burned throat.

I didn’t forget, she says, with surprising calm. Then she picks up a dusty old P.O.I folder, hands it me, and strides towards the door of my office.

Call me when you have a smoking gun, she mutters and exits the