An Elias Voss novella · free
The Last Page
The last case on Earth
Record 1495Old calendar 2057City Chicago
Here is found only the way the institutions ceased, one by one, to answer, and the few people who still answered in their place.
The Archive of the Consensus, 61st edition
The story
Chicago, late October 2057. The city is not burning. It is going out at the service windows: payments, transit, dispatch, the lab, one after another, while people keep standing in lines for banks that no longer open.
Elias Voss is the last working detective in his district. A terminal prints him a death: Walter Jelen, sixty-one, self-inflicted, consistent with the subject's file. The file says documented delusional decline. Jelen spent thirty years as the man the machines sent their exceptions to, and his whole sin was that he counted everything, on paper, by hand.
The pill bottle holds twenty-seven of thirty. Three were taken as prescribed. The arithmetic is the only instrument Voss has left: no lab, no partner, no prosecutor on the line, and a city where every system that could have confirmed him is dying faster than he can walk between offices.
A complete case, solved by hand in the last three weeks of the old world. What happens after the last page is the series.
What you get
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The author
Arthur K. Mercer writes the Elias Voss books: science fiction built on a detective's method, in the tradition of Asimov's Foundation and the Robot novels. A civilization that abolished crime, a man who remembers how it was investigated, and a machine that is right about the data and wrong about the verdict. Arthur K. Mercer is a pen name, stated openly; the work signs for itself.