(1/2)
John Chernow marched onto Edgewater Park, the grass beneath his shoes transitioning to dirt then to sand as he made his way closer to the cold water. A particular name was stuck in his head, that name belonging to a girl which he needed to remember. His brain shuddered, and for a moment she was gone. He sunk his feet into the hard sand, freezing in his tracks. He stuffed a hand in his jacket pocket but pulled it out empty handed afterall. Chernow found himself especially forgetful that night.
There it is, he thought as the name came to him again. I didn't have to look this time -- no cheating.
Chernow snickered, finding humor in this memory game he played with himself when his brain momentarily shit the bed. In reality, his memory problems were a very serious, perhaps dangerous. No one knew about the malfunctions besides himself and a few others he once held close, because if his clients knew, the detective wouldn't have a single case. Regardless, pointing fun at your ailments was much easier for John Chernow to do than face a potentially fatal corruption within his augmentation.
Before Chernow began private work (and life as an aug) he started with humble beginnings as a gumshoe of Sandusky, a city less than a half hour trip from Cleveland had you taken the new monorail system erected during his time of service. The young John Chernow was given a robbery case where he met a new partner, Joel Martin, a supposed Spaniard fresh out of Detroit, Michigan, after only a year of work. Sandusky became more of Martin's speed; the usual auto theft and robbery was a walk in the park compared to his previous investigations.
"Would you look at that," Martin said. He fell to his knees, clumsily throwing himself to the ground. "Would you look at that shit," he repeated, holding his head an inch above the pavement.
"What is it, Martin?" called Chernow. Chernow stood, hands in his pockets, teetering near the main street. He was on lookout duty in case anybody came back. He turned to face his partner, who lay planking above the alley floor. "What're you doing, man?"
"Footprints turned around, at this spot here. The fucker went further into the alley, not out."
"That's what the witness said, yeah," stated Chernow.
"Just like to check for myself. That's all." Martin smiled, climbing to his feet.
"Where do you see footprints?"
Martin looked at Chernow, and as if he meant to wink, his right eye flickered. For a moment, the brown of his eye went black before popping with color once again. The man's pupil turned white then back to black, as if it contained within it a tiny camera flash.
"You're an aug?" Chernow questioned in disbelief.
"Took you this long to realize? Your old partner was augmented, too, you know," the Spaniard laughed.
"No way." John Chernow forgot about the task at hand and thought about Patrick Dwyer, his first and previous partner. "No way in hell."
"Yes way in hell," Martin said. "They always pair augs with not-augs, where have you been?"
"Huh," Chernow realized. "Do you like it?"
"The pairing?"
"No, you're eye -- your implant."
"Couldn't live without it," Martin replied, smiling again as he performed another "wink" with his augmented eye.
Their case came to a short close as the two crossed the alley and entered another, following the clues seen by Martin's aug, and came across an aggressive pair of older men who seemed to have had it out for them. Those men were connected to the initial robbery, Joel Martin would later figure out, although they never ended up catching the robber anyway.
"Have you gentleman seen a large man carrying a brown pocketbag run through here, say, an hour ago?" Chernow had straight-out asked them after a brisk conversation. One of the two loiterers stepped away from the brick wall he was leaning against. He approached the detectives and Martin hopped back, placing a hand on Chernow's shoulder. Martin could recognize another aug given enough time, and during Chernow's questioning of the two, he had just enough. Before he could alert his partner, however, the aug fired a punch straight into Chernow's head with a force only attainable through illegal augmentations, shattering Chernow's skull and pushing shards into his brain, rendering part of it no longer functional. Needless to say, his face was hurt too; shoddy augmentations and implants were installed in a hurry to save his life.
John Chernow rubbed his forehead, rethinking the day of his assault all those years ago.
"What a naive detective you were," he said aloud, referring to himself. He laughed again.
Couldn't live without it, his memory of Martin had said about his own augmentation on the night of the hit. He missed Joel Martin. He missed Patrick Dwyer, too. He missed everyone from the department ever since he went private.
Raising his head, Chernow scanned the beach's horizon with augmented eyes of his own. He spied a group of young adults huddled near the water, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Chernow marched up to them, hands in his pockets. The teenagers began to notice him one by one, before nudging the others who hadn't notice at all.
"Hi," John Chernow said to no reply.
His ears heard many things said amongst the group of eight people in that moment. Many names, one of them focused on harder than any of the others:
"Tara," a teenager said before prodding a young girl in the back. "He's looking at you."
"Tara. You're Tara Wilson," the detective said, nodding toward the dark-skinned girl who must've been her. She didn't answer but her body language proved John's suspicion. "Can I speak with you?"
She agreed to speak, hesitantly, but only because she was afraid. She was a vulnerable girl. Her friends watched as Tara walked through them, motioning for Chernow, where she led him to the water's edge about good fifteen feet from the crowd.
"I've been looking for you," Chernow started.
"Who are you?" the girl asked.
"I'm a detective, Tara. Your father sent me to find you."
"Fuck," she simply said, turning her head toward the night sky. "Listen, you gotta leave soon. Before the others show up."
"And why should I leave before more people arrive?"
"Because they'll fuck you up. You, trying to take me away like this... I'm not going back," she said. Her dark eyes held their focus on the stars above. "You aren't from Cleveland, are you?" Tara asked Chernow. "Because if you were, I think you'd know how to act around here."
"Actually, I'm from Sandusky. But I've been working in Cleveland for a few years," replied Chernow.
"Doesn't seem like it," she aimed her head toward the tall detective. "I mean, besides that," Tara said, pointing at the man's face. A metal plate poked through the top of his forehead, cutting off his hairline. It continued down to the brow and ended over his pair of augmented eyes. "A lot of people around here got fucked up shit like that, if they can afford it. Otherwise they just die."