Mardock Scramble полностью

The Doctor seemed to be thinking hard. He put his food down. “It’s probably no bad thing that you understand what sort of a man Boiled is. So I’ll tell you.”

Such was the Doctor’s preface to what was to come.

“It was about a year ago, on a certain case. A young man—a university student—had been beaten up so badly that he was in a comatose state. The client was the father, and the young man was his eldest son. There were five of them in the family: the father, the mother, the student, and a younger brother and sister. The father ran a factory, but it was up to the hilt in debt. The family’s only hope was the eldest son, the student. He was a so-called ‘golden boy’—not only did he have a full scholarship to the university, but he worked on the side, bringing in money for the family. He was their main source of income.”

–So who attacked him?

“At first we all supposed drug dealers. The student’s girlfriend had become hooked on drugs, and the student challenged her dealers, leading to the fight that put him in a coma. Oeufcoque, Boiled, and I took on the case because we thought that by doing so we might be able to find a drug link back to OctoberCorp and crush their illegal trade that way.”

–And then?

“First we honed in on the people who allegedly put the student in the coma. It wasn’t too difficult to track them down. It was the group of drug-dealing students, and the university was their turf. But then, something strange happened.”

–Something strange?

“The ringleader of the group—another student—suddenly committed suicide. He was drugged up himself. People put it down to something stupid he did while he was out of his head, but it all seemed a little too neat for us, and we figured that something suspicious was going on behind the scenes. Then, about the same time, the comatose student’s addict girlfriend went missing. And we discovered that behind the original university drug ring was another, more complex, organization—all part of a scheme to sell OctoberCorp’s illegal wares. The police were involved too. It was all one big tangle. And it was pretty difficult to work out who was controlling whom.”

–The organization was trying to hide something?

“That’s what everyone thought. We tightened the screws on some of the people we managed to track down—they all thought the same thing. But our enemy was all people connected to the drug trade, one way or another. And at the core of all this was the original comatose student.”

–What do you mean?

“We’d misread the situation. The student wasn’t just the victim. He was also the perpetrator.”

Balot was visibly stunned.

The Doctor furrowed his brow and continued with difficulty. “I told you that the comatose son was the main source of income for his family, right? Well, drugs were the main source of income for him. To all outward appearances, the ringleader of the student drug ring was the youth who’d committed suicide. But behind the scenes it was the comatose son who had been running the show. And that wasn’t all. It was the son who had gotten his girlfriend addicted in the first place. It’s called fishing—they tried to collect as many girlfriends as they could, using drugs as bait.”

–So who put him in the coma?

“The student who ended up committing suicide had punched him. Because of an argument over money, or maybe just because he was on a bad trip. The blow caused him to stumble and fall down a flight of stairs, and he hit his head against the wall at the bottom. The student who hit him was so shocked that he retreated further and further into his drugs until one day he got so high that he decided to dive head-first from a pedestrian bridge onto a busy roadway. The incident was pretty gruesome, and there were cut marks on his arms and legs, so we assumed that somebody had decided to make an example of him. But no, it turned out that it was just a straightforward suicide by an addict who happened to have a history of self-harm.”

–That’s hard to take in. Who would have suspected that the victim was also the perpetrator?

“Yup, it was hard to take in for us too, and we were working on the case. The police were investigating it as well, and at the same time they were indicting a number of their own for corruption and involvement in the drug ring—it was a great scandal at the time. Some of the police had been keeping the drugs that they had confiscated on raids and selling them off on the sly to the student drug ring, you see. And the student who killed himself was involved in that part of the operation. Not particularly heavily, though. Everyone just saw him as someone who was there.”

–So it was one wrong guess after another?