THE IDEA of the fictional "private eye" goes back a long ways, even before Poe latched onto it and Conan Doyle turned it into a franchise. As we see in today's story, the PI trope is still very much with us in the 21st century:
"Unclaimed."
First appearance: Shimmer No. 18, Summer 2014.
Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).
Found in Pwning Tomorrow (2015; ISFDb HERE).
Short story (18 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).
(Parental warning: Strong profanity and extreme violence.)
"But still the unknowable invaded her."
A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD skiptrace turns into something totally unexpected when a private investigator gets hired to find a missing author. Piece of cake, right? By now you should know better . . .
Prose moments:
"A spinal column of stairs stretched up to the weedy peak in a scoliotic curve. The summit was a shattered jawbone of stone teeth the size of dinosaurs."
"If there was one thing Tom had learned in all her years as a detective, it was that passions didn’t disappear—they metastasized."
"Plants erupted from enormous pots, and vines scaled the walls, clinging to the ceiling with corrosive fingers."
Main characters:
~ Leslie Tom ("A gray wave of sleep overtook Tom, bringing with it a vision she knew wasn’t hers . . ."), Hu ("There was one terrible second of silence before he started screaming"), Nick Gray ("Fine. Two million it is"), Nelly McAuley ("The books will never disappear if I absorb them into my body, because my body will live forever"), J.J. Coal ("She was a weird lady"), Les Cohen ("I hope she’s dead"), and a paramedic ("Lucky you didn’t get sucked into that thing").
References:
- "the proteome" (HERE).
- "ateleological": "Bereft of teleology; not showing evidence of design or purpose" (HERE).
Resources:
- You might not agree, but we think there are character and plot parallels between this story and Les Johnson's "Murder in Space" (HERE).
- Is "Unclaimed" merely fiction or a prediction of the future? It depends on who you ask (HERE). Also see David Berreby's "The Punishment Fits the Crime" (HERE).
Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.
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