Echo Montegawitz
Rend's Quarters
Echo stood in shock as someone offed themselves right in her presence. Who did that? Not to mention who had a kill-switch built into their head? She sprang to her feet, leaving her glass on the nightstand, in order to turn away and hold her eyes closed by force of her open palms. She attempted alleviate her panic.
No, no, no. This isn’t happening! This is more tinkering with my head. Get a grip! You can beat this! Just calm down and get your composure. It can’t be what it seems.She breathed trying to calm herself. However, her host was just as silent as before. She glanced back, seeing Rend’s corpse, same position. There was no grip on her soul whatsoever. It was like looking at a side of beef. Empathy for Rend was as rare as a New York Yankies ballcap on this planet. Then a shadow darkened the overcast scene.
What if you killed him, but you’ve been engineered to remember it differently?She began pacing. What did one do with a dead body? It wasn’t like there were police or coroners to inform... well, that is to say HUMAN ones anyway, how did one contact alien coroners? Who knows what these creatures might do or accuse. A dead prisoner. What exactly were the implications? She thought of distancing herself from the situation, to round up Benji for emergency brain surgery... yah... that was going to happen. The whole time she paced, and paced. It was almost as if she were biding her time waiting for Rend to somehow recover and say “Well dat-durn-it, that didn’t work!”
The chaos of the situation reigned supreme. The only ideas that rolled around were ones about what people might do, what people might think, what were the funeral arrangements, and so on. However, Echo forced herself to stop, to think. Dead people were, in some regards, a commodity, short supply. It wasn’t like they were something everybody was trying to get rid of at a garage sale. This was uncommon. And most uncommon things could also be useful.
She hurried over to the reclamater chute, and appropriated a multitool from the access panel. Then she stopped. This was about to become a crime scene. She had better be cautious. The access panel was removed, and the opening was now void of its safety precautions. Then came the heavy lifting, as she lugged the body over and stuffed it into its semi-final resting place.
The reclimator kicked into action, it’s perfectly attuned spectrographic lasers began pumping out photons in the patterns of each atom in order to crack their molecular bonds. These were harmonically collected and sorted into microscopic grains for re-use from the printing system. Most of Rend would simply boil away to be captured and reused in the water system, or be transfigured into carbon for structural engineering. The process took a matter of minutes, and it was as though Rend had never even existed.
She swabbed down the screws, and the hatch, and the housing, and everything else that she touched. Returning the tool, swabbing it and the extension, and finally making sure that the panel was thoroughly cleaned as well. She tidied up the bed lastly, and finally he was gone. Actually gone. Now, the Principality would be going crazy searching everywhere for an escaped prisoner, completely clueless as to a willing death.
She was about to leave the room, but her curiosity got the best of her. She proceeded to the closet in order to open it. She was still reluctant. It didn’t feel right rifling through other people’s belongings... even if they were dead. However, she couldn’t help herself. The door opened, and the storm flashes and diffused light fell upon a New York Yankies ball cap... something no respectable Scotsman would own. The clothing inside were all the wrong size for Rend, now Andrew on the other hand...
Echo left the quarters, without even feeling guilty about it. After the door closed, the chamber detected no heat signatures and no motion, and therefore shut off the light-show and other environmental commodities in order to reserve power.