First five hundred: ‘Find My Murderer’

Shona Williams went off the radar at precisely 3.36am that Saturday morning.

It wasn’t unheard of, what happened to the young woman, but it was rare. And in this case, it stirred up a high level of panic — for reasons that seemed miniscule, but were quite the opposite. It’s the future: you can imagine things are much more sensitive now. Nothing’s supposed to break, but it still does.

Going off the radar — a blip, as it more commonly known, happened for a second. The longest case before that Saturday night had been five seconds. If you tend to believe panic and anxiety cannot invade the body in a pathetic five seconds, think again. It did.

Think of it like this:

(read slowly)

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Longer than the blink of an eye. And to think, we’ve lived all these years believing that the days have flown by.

And it was worse this time: Shona Williams disappeared for well over a minute. GHOST times it, they made sure they did. After six seconds, a response team was dispatched to the location before she miraculously jumped off the face of the earth. All in all, it had been eighty-two seconds.

Gus Ford was an avid GHOST representative. This had been his first classified case. It had been the first classified case in some time. The police, the underworked force of state that stared glumly at computer screens these days were alerted second to Gus. A detective (though she had done no such detecting for some time) was called to what GHOST believed was some sort of crime scene, even though those things didn’t exist anymore.

The last time she had received a graveyard call like this she couldn’t quite recall: must have been in the old days, when her opinion still mattered. Resentful but slightly smug that GHOST had even attempted to reach her, she was up and dressed in five minutes. But in that time, too much had already happened for her — or even GHOST — to comprehend:

A body was discovered at 3.38am. The first use of the term crime scene had been used once again. And Shona Williams had come back online, despite one very disturbing factor:

‘Dead.’

Gus remarked the state of the woman so plainly, so inhuman, it made detective Marion Lesser brand a look of disgust his way.

No matter how he put it, he was right. Biologically, Shona Williams was dead.

Technologically, however, was a different story all together.

Eighty-two seconds after leaving the radar she returned. In those eighty-two seconds she had been brutally strangled and thrown from a balcony onto the ground below. The soft patch of soil she lay so awkwardly on couldn’t save her now.

Shona Williams was dead, and yet she, by GHOST standards — which for the record, are universal standards now — was alive and well.

The company gathered around the crime scene shrugged. They hardly seemed to care. Surely her existence could be forcibly wiped, as long as this was contained and kept undercover, no one need worry.

But this isn’t that kind of story. Mind you… when is it?

Seconds later, a deep breath of shock came from below. Gus was bewildered. Marion threw up. And Shona Williams looked around in confusion, wondering what she had done to cause such an unfavourable reaction.