A narrow curved stair case from a small foyer under a hexagonal pyramid skylight is the signal feature of this faded building. Built between the wars it fronts onto a street in an equally faded part of town. Turn right on the landing at the top a short corridor leads to the door to my office. On mottled glass in Times New Roman are the words Matthew Parrish Investigations. Beneath in much smaller gold leaf type are the vertically centred the words, one above the other ‘of, fraud, fraud, fraud’ all in italics. My services are sought generally to confirm cases of insurance fraud, marital fraud, business fraud, CV fraud and other manners of fraudulence. Surprising how ingenious and varied fraud is. Push the dark stained door open to a small ante room and another dark wood door behind which is my inner sanctum.

Proximity to the ocean means salt borne on the sea spray sodden air, decays the nickel plating on metal fittings like drawer handles, corrodes hinges and the such. The office is a three room affair counting the toilet. The one window overlooking the street opens with a knocking sound as the counter weights bang inside the sash frame. Because I don’t mind the sound of the traffic coming out of the carpark diagonally across the street I keep the window mostly open. An older sign in the circular foyer on the ground floor points parties interested in my services upstairs. Next to my sign are others, one for an accountant I have never seen, and one for the chiropodist on the mezzanine floor who I have met and don't need to meet again. The sign says “Regression Investigations”, the two letters of the first word Capitalised so at a glance it just says RE-Investigations. That was the chiropodist’s idea. Later on after I had spent the money on the sign it occurred it would have been better to have only the word ‘Investigations’. The money was spent so I left it. HisCor jobs have Health and Safety requirements obliging periods of recuperation between assignments. Downtime crimps cashflow. May be change is due and I embrace the private sector exclusively.

The entire floor above is occupied by surfers. Wetsuits hanging to dry in the windows give the building an unkept appearance of a backpackers hostel. We occupants have nothing in common but observe the practical courtesies. The young men keep the noise down and don’t thump around on the floor over my head and their worst infraction is the muffled laughter leaking from above when they smoke so no reason to disrupt this state of relative serenity.

Change comes when I hear the clacking of heels on the steps, a pause on the landing, then approaching before the knock. The outline through the patterned glass in the outer door is of a tall shadow, large enough to make the climb up the narrow stairs a challenge, wearing something bright. Opening the door I am confronted with a striking female in her late thirties to early forties wearing a loose West African print dress, bare arms and a turban affair hiding her dyed orange red hair. Her eye brows are dark and thick contrasting with eyes so green I think they must be coloured contacts.

“Mister Parris?” she asks in a worried but pleasant voice. “Investigator?”

“It’s Parrish, but close enough.” In the open door she takes up most of the frame. In heels she is a full three shots of whisky taller than me. “At your service.” I step aside and invite her in.

She looks around the anteroom till I close the outer door. I point her through the second door into the office. Entering she looks around, takes in the brown cracked leather couch next to a filing cabinet by the door settling on the only chair fronting the scratched wooden desk. I gesture for her to sit down assessing whether the chair can take her weight. She is a big woman. Chair is a rescue chair saved from kerbside eviction, a no longer loved throw out. Business is slow so another chair would also have to be another rescue. I am hoping to lift office aesthetics.

Robustly athletic in movement she crosses the floor in three paces and sits down. Taking off her heels with an distinct sigh by way of explanation she says, “They perk me up.” as she slips them off. “Looks I get wearing them makes the ache worthwhile.” She settles onto the chair and watches me as I sit down, measuring, searching my face for any familiarity. Satisfied she doesn't know me she says, “Torture for effect,” a smile hints on her lips, “or affect through torture.” Without waiting for a response she puts the printed cloth bag hanging from her shoulder on her lap and begins rummaging in it. I only notice the bag now. Camouflaged Its design is the same as her dress. I sit down carefully on the old, treacherous swivel chair which inevitably will embaress me one day. The stop which prevents the seat leaning back too far has worn away and if one is not mindful the chair tips back precariously spilling it’s occupant. I hate that chair yet it has sentimental value. A paramour gift of the which my criticism caused the abruption of our relationship. Keeping it and all its perils is the reminder of her favourite quip “All things is hypothetical.”

Back then I didn’t understand her bad grammar. “Are, not is.” I corrected.

“Is, not are.” she corrected back. “You’ll see.” she said smiling. So it came to be. Every time I sit I think of her. Is indeed. Pays to not be too at ease.

I settle into the chair and look at the woman across the glass puddle of my scratched desk.

“So, How can I be of service?” I say with deference I learned from my mother. The word ‘service’ indicates acknowledgement the client has value and status equal, or even superior. If I say ‘how can I help?’ it infers helplessness. In the current culture women often resent any assistance offered by a male and me being unapologetically cisgender requires being mindful of possible offence. I reflect on Popeye the Sailor’s catchphrase, “I yam what I yam and that is all I yam.”

She settles into the chair, holding the vape foraged from her bag. “I understand you are a Junker?”she says, and sets the smoking implement down on her side of the glass sheet covering my desk.

I answer the question. “I am.”

Primed she takes a sip of smoke without asking permission. It has been a while since women stopped extending the courtesies to men that men or obliged to offer women. I suppose Feminine Entitlement is the price for the Masculine Gaze

The fact my Visa has not yet been renewed by HisCor I don't mention. I need the business so if there is a chance our genetic lines intersect the Visa might be unnecessar anyway. She draws another lungful of smoke and says through the cloud of aromatic exhale, “I think I might be murdered.”

3A.

137312955 Augustine

The Golems

5268 Kant

337227837 Descartes

462237 Hobbes

7746692 Spinoza

4972842 Hypatia

227824 Paine

I am 137312955. You call me Augustine.

Remember, watching and listening to (Kant) holding forth, admiring the impersonated passion in the words, "..there are only three questions we need concern ourselves with,"

"Those being?" (Hegel) asked with its familiar needling tone as if this discourse was new, yet heard a thousand times before. (Kant) ignored the sarcasm implicit in the comment and pressed on, "Life, death and utility."

(Descartes) got up creakily and went to the recharger wall plate, but gestured for (Kant) to continue, and tiredly leaned against the plate, sighing as the tingle of replenishment coursed from the wall to the limbs.

"Life," (Kant) continued portentously, "is how we live it, the manner with which we disport ourselves. Death; the grace with which we accept it, and utility, how useful we make our being in both life and death."

(Hegel) cleverly added, "When you croak I have dibs on your logic module."

But they had all heard this before and it passed without notice.

" The same..no, the problem we face is whether.. or not our charges are.. a danger to us."

“Again.” Descartes golem raised its hand with an oddly human flourish.

Kant ignored the interjection knowing full well the others had turned back to their tasks since they’d heard what followed countless times. “If C is the speed of light we are moving through space at C-1kph towards a planet called Kepler 186 in the constellation Cygnus, roughly 500 light years from Earth. Our ETA is roughly 200 years from now and we are carrying the makings of a colony of humans under the aegis of the Parallels Program initiated 350 years ago. A consequence of the collision with earth of the asteroid Aten (2014 LY21) Though this asteroid was a mere 80 metres across it laid waste to Capricornia, completely flattening Cairns, its capital and extinguishing the lives of one and a half million people. There are thousands if not millions of objects larger than Aten in space, many in degrading orbits.

The very inevitability of a civilisation killer focussed the minds of world leaders and the Parallels Program was born. The Ark was built.

Though some argued the chances of another similar event were roughly sixty three million to one, the improbability quotient indicated that with the passing of every year the likelihood would increase by multiple factors as space got more crowded.

Advances in genetics exposed the secrets in so-called junk DNA and discovered that writ large in every human is the story of progress from eukaryote to sentience, experiences remembered epigenetically transferred from iteration to generation. Each individual burdened, or gifted with inklings of so called destiny, which is nothing more than a genetic trajectory, an evolutionary series of episodes in an endless daytime soapie of death and reincarnation. The sum of that individual is captured and transferred to a medium. The samples and glass prints of which we are the guardians are the gospel legacy, the safety of which we are entrusted, and thus responsible for determining the course of evolution as we are the insurance humanity doesn't vanish in a flash of ice and rock.”

Spinoza added a flippant remark while repairing its left heal seal. “I like the flash of ice and rock part.”

Listening to (Kant) I am alerted to the presence of an odd mannerism in the presentation. (Kant) is hesitating as if searching for the right words, as if uncertain of the next thought, unsure in its logical exposition. And in the 350 years I had known (Kant) this had never occurred.

(Descartes) noticed it to. Slowly but without the fatigue evidenced earlier (Descartes) crossed over to (Kant) in the dark, placed its hands on either side of its head and said, "If your thinking becomes faulty, then so does your existence," Pausing and thinking about the most tactful way of putting it, " and if your existence becomes faulty, and we are all integrated into the one program then all of our existences are no longer free of defects. Thus faulty, thus existentially threatened." Frowning if it could (Descartes) asked, "Am I making myself clear?"

(Kant) was silent and after a long moment as that observation was digested responded, "What do you suggest?"

(Hobbes) who had been watching and listening, moreover comprehending, interjected

"Hatch the brutes." The words fell onto the deck plates between them like revealed sins.

In the dark none spoke for a long time.

3B.

“Murdered?” She is fidgeting with something beneath the edge of the desk out of my line of sight. “What makes you say that?” I ask quietly.

“I know it,” her reply is adamant. Her gaze drifts up to the left,. “It’s something my family has been living with forever.” she says as if it were a congenital affliction. I smile to myself. Of course it is, she has come to see a Junker.

“You say murdered, not inherited?”

She looks at me evenly, with those green eyes. Now that I look more closely her eyebrows are a darker, more bronze, than her hair. Probably Mediterranean stock. The turban affair on her head is slipping and she reaches up to adjust, and then thinks better of it and takes it off to hold in her lap. Her hair tumbles down to her shoulders and I can see the roots are greying. Mid to late forties I guess.

“Murdered.” She affirms. She shakes her hair out with a graceful motion and by the action seems to grow calmer. “In my family we all die by accidental means after we have our first child. Not one member of the family has had more than one going back for hundreds of years.”

“Really.” I try to hide my scepticism.

She intuits I don’t believe her.

She reaches into the bag she is carrying and takes out a folded broadsheet of paper. She opens it up on the desktop. A printed spread sheet detailing names of ancestors in one column, dates of birth in another column, names of offspring in another column and lastly the date of death and the means of death in the last two columns. I lean over and study the sheet which ranges over 25 generations. 400 years. I note with each successive generation the name of the offspring in the next generation becomes the name of the deceased.

Still skeptical I ask, “Compiled by who?”

She glances across as if I had used a profanity.

Records from Livorno, from church registers, the Austro Hungarian empire after the religious wars of the 17^th Century, One of the those DNA sites as well as notes my mother kept before she was killed and so on.

As I study the columns of names she stands up and goes to the open window behind my chair, “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asks, taking out her vape-pen and slipping a cartridge into haft before can say it is okay.

I look at her fiddling with the pen and notice the cotton under the coil is darkly oily, indicating she is a habitual smoker. “Just blow it out the window.” I ask and turn back to studying the spreadsheet.

It takes a few seconds for the coil in her pen to heat up but when it does some of the cloud she is trying to blow out the window is carried back into the room enveloping both of us in a cocoon of sweet rum and tobacco. I don’t mind the smell, it reminds me of the rollies I used to smoke. All my life I have careened from one addiction to another. Cigarettes, alcohol, sex, now it is gambling on stocks which by addicts reasoning is a better chance of breaking even than on the nags. It isn’t working out. I should go back to sex, at least it is a closer approximation to living than the other addictions.

I look up from the desk at her and realise I have not asked her to identify herself. I look back at the spread sheet and go to the last entry. Dalena Poole it says. I say the name out loud.

She turns from the window, “My mother.” Below an old internal combustion engine is revving to show off, leaving the car park in a screech of tyres.

“It says here she died by suicide.”

“Actually she died by someone else’s suicide.” She says leaving the window and coming back around the desk to sit down on the beat up chair.

“How’s that?”

“She and my dad were walking along one day when a suicide jumped off the ninth floor of a building in the CBD and landed square on her.” She looks at her hands and back at me, “I was three at the time and in day care. When I was twenty one I changed my name by deed poll to my mother’s.”

“So you’re Dalena as well?”

“Yes.” and anticipating my next question, “It’s Italian. Magdalena.”

I look at her long and hard. She is a comely woman, not quite past her prime. Edgy, not quite anxious but definitely not calm. Almost an air of expectant resignation. She is waiting for me to come to some conclusion from studying the spread sheet.

I look back down again at the columns and rows, like the spread sheet I study for my day trading to supplement the meagre stipend I get from the HC Burueau. My employment with them is looking more like a sinecure than a job. With the market attempting to discern patterns in the prices and predict trades for profit is also fruitless. I have become a degenerate gambler, gambling on stocks, with far more variables than crooked trainers, jockeys or stewards in the racing world, I contend with the ever present and rife insider trading and manipulations by short sellers, the misinformation presented as knowledge in chat rooms. That world is all about hysteria and panic, stampedes for the exits and harvesting of the mullet by the sharks. The question of why I don’t exploit my genetic gift of Junking to go into the Beforelife to harvest information, the answer to that is in the term Beforelife. I cannot go back to situations after I was born. Only before I was born. In itself an old trope of the time travelling paradox. Looking at the spreadsheet in front of me if I had to bet the information in it leads me to the only one conclusion. “It’s must be a vendetta.”

She nods in agreement. With a worried smile she says, “I need you to find out what this is about.”

“You want me to find out what triggered this vendetta and how to thwart it.” I say with my best businesslike tone.

“Yes.” She affirms adding a second later a plaintive “please.”

“Alright then.” I say in sealing the deal. “How will you take care of my renumeration?”

She stares at me for what seems a long time. I stare at her. On closer study she is not a bad looking woman. I can see she does not feel the same about me. There are smile lines around her eyes, she must have been ready with a laugh before she became anxious. Her hands are well kept, nice nails but she is fidgety, yet something regal, not haughty about her gaze. She might be of noble blood. In my experience diseased trees produce rotten fruit. She is the fruit of an exotic tree. I like her bearing, I like her for no reason I can understand, yet.

“I have a business, and for your services you are welcome to a tithe.”

“A what?” I ask surprised. I know what it is but it is an archaism no one uses.

Unbothered she replies, “A tithe. One tenth of what I make. Forgive the word, I was raised by classicists.”

I am intrigued. Usually a set fee is agreed but this seems much more elastic. “Just what is it that you do?” I ask. Her answer is unexpected but I don’t judge. She makes a living on a website where she is paid to do things to herself her mother would not approve. Intimate things. Some would say deviant things.

I admit to surprise. I didn’t expect her answer. Then I suppose there are markets for all types of services. “A tenth of what?” I ask.

She stated a number to my amazement and if true my fee would be what I would call handsome.

“What is it you do that legions don’t?” I had to ask.

“While online doing what I do I do to the accompaniment of opera.”

“People like opera to their wanking?”

“They pay for a soprano with a dildo, yes.” she says without the slightest hint of embarrassment. “A niche I discovered at a time of insolvency. So much better paid than a knee trembler at a wall less the communicable diseases of the disgusting johns.”

“Well that’s new.” It made perfect sense. I ask. “Why have you come to me?”

“You’re recommended by Natasha Epstein.” she says. “Do you know her?”

I remember the case. I had to track down a ring her grandfather buried with the family jewels during the World War 2, the one before the last and final Great War. Most of the family perished leaving the client’s mother and grandmother to survive the war. The mother had died leaving only the legend of her fathers act. I was engaged to trace through the family DNA to locate the jewels which were really not so much valuable in monetary terms but beyond value in terms of sentiment. The trove was located and client reunited with what was left of her ancestral legacy. She wanted to gift a ring to her son for his twenty first birthday. Clearly satisfied she gave her commendation.

“I do,” I say. With that settled I have to add a caution to tamp any assumptions she might have of my abilities as a Junker. “I’ll do it but do not expect instant results.” I say. Then reaching across the desk I proffer my hand. She looks at as if I had just thrust a dead possum at her. She clearly is not familiar with how a Junker works. I explain, “By taking my hand there is a transfer of DNA which is the starting gate from which I find the intersection where our genetic paths have crossed. Maybe a generation back, maybe a hundred generations. The mathematics guarantee there is an intersection and from that crossroads I can trace the path leading to who or what wants you dead.” She is still staring at my hand. I have to ask if she understands.

It seems an effort to stir herself, “I’m sorry. It’s been a very long time since I physically have touched anybody, even a hand. Forgive my hesitation.” she says as her hand crosses the desk to take mine. We clasp and I say, “Well, that’ll do it.” but it appears she does not to want to let go immediately. Her hand is warm in mine, fingers slender, her grip steady, soft yet firm. I feel it as an interlude to a tumult yet to arrive. Eventually she relaxes and withdraws her hand and says with a smile, “I suppose that’s a contract.”

“May I call you Dalena.” I ask. She nods and I say, “Then it is a contract.”

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