"It's bigger on the inside," Tia explained automatically once we entered the library proper. Since that was true for most spaces in Demiland, I didn't comment on it.
"Just follow the line," the Chief of Security said, right before the drone slotted itself into an info reclaimer halfway up the wall. It disappeared in a cloud of pixels.
Inside the library was a style I understood as 24th-century modern.
History rhymed though, and so to me, it all looked like pre-millennium Art Deco. All radials and circle-arcs and lines...
The lines actually did things, and a helpful little guideline on the floor led me by the most direct route to the pig pen of the Library's illustrious sheriff.
The top half of the Ziggurat was for quartering the librarians, historians, historiographers, and... I don't know, cartographers? Hard to map anything when there's nothing to explore.
People ducked out of my way in the halls, and I saw the usual mix of fear, jealousy, and hatred on their faces.
Then I arrived.
Like most people who had centuries of doing the same shit, this pig seemed to have absorbed his work into his identity. So of course his office was set up in his quarters.
He actually had a wooden swing door with opaque glass and his name stylized like this was some detective movie from pre-millennium cinema.
Obliging his tastes, I kicked the door open.
"What the fuck?" I said to myself as I smelled cigarette smoke. Walking into the office, I found that everything was in black and white. An environmental filter that came with actual film grain on everything.
The whole place looked like one huge studio apartment. There was a circle of couches for guests, surrounding a coffee table that had plenty of coffee rings on it.
A massive desk dominated the back half of the room, replete with knickknacks strait out of film noir. A cigarette in an ashtray that let a stream of smoke rise into the air. A fan turning at medium speed right above the desk.
The walls all had windows that looked out on what I assumed was a permanently dark and stormy night.
Looking down, I saw that the colored bits of me had gone monochrome.
The door had read Denton Briggs, PI, right above Ph.D. Criminal Psychology, MA Forensic History, MA Archaeological Forensics.
Our erstwhile Private Investigator was laying on his back, on the couch, a trilby covering half his face.
"Yo, Mister Briggs, I gots a monster to catch and time's a wastin'." I cringed internally as the words came out of my mouth. The pig even had a freaking speech filter active in the room.
"I say, what an extraordinary accommodation you have for your clientele," Tia added, sounding the fake kind of sophisticated people used at parties. As she floated and peeked about a box of vinyl records. One of them was playing, a swingy, ragtime tune in a minor chord that seemed a bit at odds with the whole setup. "Classical jives there, Mr. B."
Seemed Tia was subject to the speech filters too. Then I noticed she was still pink. Maybe she was just weird.
"Really settin' the mood," I said, the filter converting my speech into something close to US east-coast slang from the 1900s.
"You wanted the best, so you came to me," our host said, sliding off his couch and side-posing at me as he put his trilby on.
"Enough of this," I growled, mentally going into my menu and disabling all environmental access to my speech and appearance subroutines.
I was still mostly black and white, but the reassuring blue glow of my inner clothes told me I was back to being myself before I opened my mouth again.
"I'm not here to play detective. Just show me the security cameras and stay out of my way," I said.
Dr. Briggs deflated. "Would it kill you to play along, bucko? This is the first real case I've had since I took this job."
"No," I admitted, "But it might kill you if you keep trying to flex on me." To make my point, I showed him the handle of the Excisor.
"Fine..." he cast his hands up to about his shoulders. "Of course Demiurge would hire the craziest dame..."
So I came off as a woman to him? Maybe that was just the filter working. Or maybe it was the stench of self-inflicted chauvinistic longing for a time when the only thing that mattered to people that looked like him was black and white. Emphasis on white.
I slipped next to him and planted my hip against the massively overcompensating desk.
Muttering to himself the whole time, he helped himself to the cigarette, which I noticed had grown no shorter. Even when he took a drag, the tip just glowed, the burn line wavering about but not actually declining toward the slightly darker cylinder of the filter.
"Here," he finally said, as a lot of little screens appeared. They resembled ancient vacuum-chamber televisions but stripped down to just a screen and the vacuum chambers, with tons of purely aesthetic wires connecting them all and nixie tubes with little numbers for each. I had to admit to myself that I liked the nixie tubes.
I counted eight on a side both up and across. So sixty-four screens.
"What got you stuck with this job?" I asked as I scanned the initial batch of screens. No action. Just a lot of people walking around like nothing was happening. After a few moments, they all swapped to different points of view. Same halls though.
"Try being the only Criminal Psychologist in a world where no one can commit any real crimes," he sighed. "Used to just be going out and nabbing overdue books... but once we got all of those it just became sitting around and mediating after the odd reboot."
There's another term for temporarily killing each other. Rebooting. I noticed his speech filter had come off. Perhaps he figured clear communication would get me out of his hair so he could return to his psycho-temporal masturbation, pretending to be a cop. The more I saw him actually talking, the more I realized he was just some bored asshole who'd taken a job because he wanted some excitement.
I can sympathize with the man, but the cop part still served someone whose vested interest was exploitation. Dr. Briggs was a property-rights enforcer for that Atticus fellow who had the paywalls put up so he could have a comfortable little afterlife at the Apex.
"Probably fell to the lower floors," Briggs muttered.
It made sense, a lot more surface area there.
But then...
"What's this office?" I asked, pointing at a cathedral-like square flanked by books, the entire back wall dominated by a stained glass window that would have been obvious on the Ziggurat if it had an expression on the walls.
"That's the Library Director's office... no one's supposed to be there," Briggs said as he saw what I saw. "Only Atticus has the authority."
"Get the upper floors evacuated," I charged him, turning away and leaving his film noir apartment.
If what Briggs said was true, Atticus was home...
And the zombie was already eating him.