"The First Crime Scene"

The suspect toes the ground resentfully, tight-lipped, shrugging in response to the Magistrate’s queries. Evincing probity and incomprehension, but also giving the impression of barely concealed insolence.

The man is a pitiful liar.

Again the Magistrate demands that the creature divulge the circumstances of his crime and reveal the location of the body. Corpus delicti. Yet despite Supreme Jurist’s obvious frustration and rising anger, the guilty party continues to fend off his remonstrations with hostile silence.

Obstinate brute!

And then, miracle of miracles, the accused mutters something, a curt, sly rejoinder, sotto voce, practically inaudible.

“REPEAT THAT!”

The wretched beast actually raises his eyes, no longer cowed and obeisant, meeting the Magistrate’s gaze directly. “I said, ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’”

The Magistrate is stunned. Everything abruptly freezes, a complete cessation of sound, movement extending across twelve dimensions and countless timelines; the equivalent of a collective, celestial gasp.

Oblivious to the dismay he’d wrought, Cain is washing his hands in a nearby stream, immersing them in the pure, clear water.

Frowning at the stubbornness of the stain.

II. The Last Crime Scene

ARU-2466/TLS-13 spots a glint of white at the base of the escarpment, near a recent slide or rock fall, descends to fifty feet, hovering.

It looks like…could it be…

Remains.

There are mandatory protocols to follow, the ARU unit knows this. Any evidence of the Ancestors must be recorded and transmitted, the site left undisturbed. After all, this is sacred ground.

But the drone lingers, awed by the scale of its discovery, observing at once that the skeleton, though well-preserved, shows indications of massive trauma. The legs shattered, spine and skull split and sundered. An accidental fall from the precipice above?

A series of rapid, almost instantaneous calculations. Answer: unlikely.

Like many of its counterparts, ARU-2466/TLS-13 is aware of the legends surrounding the End Days. The Ancestors, once a great species, reduced by war, famine, disease and deprivation. Squabbling over increasingly scarce resources, raiding and killing until they were all but extinct.

Could this be one of the last survivors? Isolated, forsaken, appalled by the poisonous wasteland its kind had made of the planet?

Remorseful, perhaps, capable of one final act of contrition, a form of ritual self-slaughter.

The evidence is persuasive but hardly definitive.

ARU-2466/TLS-13 drops a beacon, dipping its wings respectfully as it makes one final pass.

Others will investigate the site, draw their own conclusions.

The drone returns to its regular search pattern, a virtual grid superimposed over a bleak, exhausted terrain.

Continuing an eternal, seemingly fruitless search for signs of life.

Cliff Burns (Canada)