aaribaud

They were sitting in the small room, under the yellowish light of ageing neon tubes, on three chairs, facing a fourth one. The officer was standing next to a desk on which lay a sheet of paper covered with hastily scribbled pencil.

The officer switched his phone to silent mode, flipped it closed, put it on the desk then addressed the woman.

“Can you make sure we are not disturbed?”

She turned toward the door and made an elaborate handwave.

“There. No one will see this door for the next hour or so.”

“Thanks.”

The officer pinched the bridge of his nose.

“So... People found it on the beach down below. It was systematically dismantling everything it could. They tried to stop it, couldn't, called in the police, who managed to immobilize it, but only just. They brought it here as they though it was a quite sick man who needed medical help. Once doctors here found out it wasn't, they alerted us, and we alerted the national services, and they'll come here eventually, but in the meantime, as I knew you were close... or could travel much faster than a national inspector... I thought you might help me with some insight, any insight, on who made it and why.”

He glanced at the sheet.

“Portable surface mass spectrometer readings, for what they're worth, say it's roughly made of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphor, and traces of other things. It is humanoid in shape, but does not breathe, or drink, or eat, or... produce any waste, or talk, or, at least as far as we've noticed, sleep. It has eyes, but they only move very occasionally. It does not react to sound either. It only gets active if it gets a chance to try and get out and away.”

He sighed.

“And that's where we're at. We looked for fingerprints or DNA traces that we could lift from its envelope to link it to its creator, but we came up with absolutely nothing. Not a single sign of life on it. Now it's all yours.”

On its desk, the mobile phone's light gave a brief, discrete, blink.

The priest started standing up, then stopped midway, his hands on the armrests of his seat.

“Can I?”

“The restraints have held so far, is all I can say.”

“Thank you. I don't intend to harm it.”

“I'm not sure you could.”

The priest went on and started examining the subject.

“I can see why you thought about me. It is eerily human-shaped, and hairless, and, from what you said, tireless and mute. But the figure should be much sturdier, the color of the body should be a hue of brown or gray, not this uneven off-white, and...” — he ran his fingers on the unmoving head, whose faintly glowing iridescent eyes were still set on him “... I cannot find even the tiniest of drops, or ridges, to lift the top of the skull and place a parchment roll in, so...”

He stepped back, gave the subject a last, long look, then turned and went back to his chair beside the other two.

”... Not a golem.”

The officer sighed and wiped his hands on his uniform then took a pen and stroke some words on the paper sheet. Behind him, on the desk, his phone blinked occasionally.

“That's another hypothesis down, I guess.”

He turned to the second guest.

“Any opinion?”

The necromancer lowered his cowl, uncovering a bald head painted with strange signs, stared at the figure for a while, but did not even bother to get up.

“You said so yourself,” he said in a slow and deep voice. “It shows no sign of life, and obviously no signs of the decay which follows death even, alas, in those who are raised back. Also, while the undead's color may be paler than ours, it is never as pale as that, and their eyes remain dull, while this one's, if unmoving, are iridescent. Ergo: this is outside my purview.”

The officer ran the pen again on the sheet, then turned to the woman.

“What about you?”

The witch sighed, slid a hand through the front of her red dress, pulled out a pair of glasses, unfolded them, and put them on.

The necromancer raised a surprised, if hairless, eyebrow.

“You use glasses? Can you not cast a perfect sight hex on yourself?”

She turned to him.

“Would you raise a dead just to make you tea and biscuits?”

“As a matter of fact I do,” he replied haughtily.

Before the witch could answer, the officer cleared his throat.

“If you'll pardon me, I'd like to keep us all focused.”

The witch shot him a slightly too long look, then got up and kneeled by the sitting figure. She took one of its hands in hers and scrutinized it. Then she let go of the hand studied its face; looking straight into the iridescent eyes, she started running her fingers in convoluted gestures around it, leaving in the air sinuous bright purple trails which would then slowly drift and dissolve. After a while, she stopped, waited for the last wisps to wither away, and turned back to the officer, tucking her glasses back behind the neckline of her dress.

“The first half of my conclusions is, this is not the result of a hex either. I'd have found by now if any witchery had been involved. So: no chem in its head makes it move; no master makes it move; and certainly no spell makes it move.”

The officer scratched yet another few words.

“Ok.”

He looked up at her again, oblivious to the the phone behind him which blinked every few seconds.

“Now I'm out of theories.”

“That's when the second half comes in. It wasn't born from any of our magics. Therefore... it was born from some of your magic.”

“Er... We don't do magic.”

“Yes you do, you just don't call it that. How else do you think a lump of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphor, and traces of other things could ever develop signs of life?”

“You mean it's alive?”

“I was speaking about humans. That list of yours, earlier. That's the composition of a human body.”

“You are quite versed in chemistry, for a witch”, commented the necromancer.

“Chemistry's just a fancy name for slightly less haphazard alchemy,” she replied. “Anyway... Human existence itself is a work of magic. And so, come to think of it, is human survival.”

She turned to the three men.

“By the way... Where do you think this lump of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etcetera... comes from? That humans created vaster amounts of than anyone else ever?”

“I remove myself from secular affairs,” stated the priest.

“I prefer not to deal with live humans,” noted the necromancer.

The officer stared at the witch, not so much to try and guess her thoughts as because he was engaged in deep reflection; then he answered.

“Waste?”

“Indeed,” the witch replied. “Mostly plastic, from what I understand, or at least, plastic is the longest-surviving part of it. Much of which ends up in the sea to float and gather, whitened by the sun, hit by the ever harder ultraviolet rays that break and make molecules...”

“There's this chemistry again...” sighed the necromancer.

“So that thing is plastic?” the officer asked, incredulous.

“No. Yes.”

“Er... Which one is it?”

“Yes, it's plastic. But no, it's not a thing. That's where the magic kicks in. A mere lump of impure plastic would not move, much less move to—or from— somewhere. Maybe it also contains traces of your, ah, electronics, and that's what made it alive. Maybe it's something else entirely.”

“Well,” said the officer, at least we're lucky it's one of a kind”.

The witch gave him a quizzical look.

“I suspect there's a sign of life which, surprisingly enough, you have neglected to envision.”

On the desk, the silent mobile phone's light was blinking frantically.