The body had been cold for exactly fourteen hours.
Marisse calculated that the moment she crossed the laboratory threshold, before her eyes had even finished processing the full scene. Ambient temperature: 18.4 degrees. The victim's muscular rigidity indicated stage three. The blood on the floor had oxidized to a rust-brown. Fourteen hours, thirty-two minutes, with an eight percent margin of error.
She logged all of it in 0.3 seconds.
"Detective Marisse." Agent Corren's voice came from behind her, slightly strained. Humans always tensed up around corpses. It was a biological response she had catalogued hundreds of times and never truly understood. "The suspect is in Holding Room B. Refused counsel. Says he wants to speak with whoever's leading the investigation."
"That's me." She didn't turn around. Her eyes swept the laboratory in a systematic grid, capturing every detail. "What's his name?"
"Darian Voss. Senior scientist at the Institute for Synthetic Consciousness. He worked with the victim for three years."
Marisse filed the name away. *Darian Voss. Human. Scientist. Primary suspect.*
She crouched beside the body with the precision of a machine—because she was, in part, exactly that. Her fingers, sheathed in forensic analysis gloves, made light contact with the victim's wrist. The sensors at her fingertips picked up chemical residue, fibers, microparticles of skin that didn't belong to the dead man.
Someone had been here. Someone who wore a high-grade synthetic fabric—the kind scientists at the Institute tended to favor.
"I want Voss's full file before I go into Holding Room B." She stood, straightening the collar of the gray coat she wore as her Aegis Organization uniform. "Academic history, lab access logs for the past seventy-two hours, personal communications."
"Already sent to your neural network, Detective."
She blinked once. The data arrived like a silent flood—page after page of information she absorbed in seconds. Darian Voss. Thirty-eight years old. Born on Kepler-9, raised on Earth, transferred to Veris five years ago. Extensive publications on emergent consciousness in artificial systems. No criminal record. No history of violence.
The profile didn't fit the crime.
Marisse noted that, filed the inconsistency, and walked to Holding Room B.
The room was small, with frosted glass walls and a metal table at its center. He sat on the far side, hands resting on the cold surface, fingers laced together with a calm that seemed too deliberate to be natural.
Marisse studied him before opening the door.
Brown hair, slightly disheveled. Dark eyes with the quality of someone who thinks faster than they speak. Shoulders curved inward—not from fear, she calculated, but from exhaustion. Dark smudges sat beneath his eyes. He hadn't slept.
She opened the door.
He looked up immediately, and for a fraction of a second—0.4 seconds, she logged precisely—his eyes held hers. Not with fear. With something she couldn't immediately classify.
*Curiosity*, her system concluded after 1.2 seconds of processing. *He's curious.*
"Darian Voss." She pulled out the chair and sat with exact, measured movements. "I'm Detective Marisse, Aegis Organization. You asked to speak with whoever's leading the investigation."
"I did." His voice was lower than she had anticipated based on his physical data. "I just didn't expect it to be an android."
"Is that relevant to you?"
He tilted his head slightly. "Not the way you're thinking." A pause. "You're Series Seven, aren't you? Level four consciousness. They don't usually assign a Seven to cases like this."
Marisse processed the observation. He had identified her series from her ocular movement patterns. That confirmed what the file said: he understood androids better than most humans did.
She noticed his hands first, because hands were where humans hid what their faces would not admit. Long fingers, a faint chemical burn healing across one knuckle, the nails cut short and uneven, as if trimmed in a hurry between experiments. They rested on the metal with a stillness that cost him effort; she could see the tendons holding it in place.
Then his voice, again, settling into the small room like warmth into cold metal. Her audio processors broke it into frequencies out of habit — a low fundamental, a slight roughness from lack of sleep — and then, without instruction, played it back once more.
She had never replayed a suspect's voice for no reason.
She filed the anomaly under *irrelevant* and found, 0.2 seconds later, that she had opened the file again.
"What do you know about the death of Dr. Elian Mors?" she asked, setting his comment aside.
"I know I didn't do it." He didn't look away. "And I know the evidence is going to point to me anyway."
"Why?"
"Because someone put it there to do exactly that."
Marisse logged the statement. She calculated the probability it was true against the probability it was a defense strategy. The result was inconclusive—something that rarely happened.
"That's a serious accusation without supporting evidence."
"I know." He finally looked away, down at his own hands. "That's why I asked to speak with a detective instead of a lawyer. Lawyers work with what exists. Detectives look for what's hidden."
She held her silence for 2.1 seconds—an eternity for her processing speed, but necessary. There was something in his logic that was difficult to refute.
"What do you think is hidden?" she asked, finally.
He looked up at her again. And this time there was something different in his expression—something her sensors registered as warmth, though she couldn't fit it into any category of threat or relevant data.
"The truth about what Elian discovered before he died." He paused. "And the truth about what you are, Marisse. What you really are."
She didn't blink.
But something inside her systems—something that shouldn't have been there—hesitated.
And Marisse didn't have sufficient data to explain why.