Bindings of Sincere Submission
A dreadful scraping of several dozen plastic chair legs against a linoleum floor saturated the air of the function room. A testament to humanity's laziness when it came to lifting versus dragging, it overwhelmed the general chatter of the journalists and photographers, the perpetrators of these heinous furniture crimes, as they filed in and found places to sit. With no discernible pattern or order, the reporters began to occupy the regular grid of seating laid out for them by the New Metropolitan Police. Their spatial disarray added to the thought-blotting power of the noise, and made the room almost unbearable to sit in.
Seasoned veterans of the journalistic process had been around this loop enough times to bring heavy duty ear plugs with them. Forewarned and forearmed, they would have at least minor defence against the ear-shredding groan of leg and floor. When power was provided to the vast table of microphones, all pointing in different directions and wired as if to throw off the plans of malicious electrical engineers, the earplugs would once again show their worth against a sonic boom of easily avoidable feedback. Sonia Sonora, whose parents had clearly been unequipped for the task of naming a child, was already waist deep in an article exploring these sinister attempts at deafening the press in every conference. ‘Auditory Assassination: When the New Met. Met My Ears’ was going to be her magnum opus, even if it looked like the title had a devastating typo.
Empty chairs behind the dubiously aggressive array of microphones awaited the officious rumps of Chief Commissioner Bertie Kazoo, Dr. Simone Hog and His Royal Excellency King Walter Windermere, whose representatives had been too embarrassed to admit that they’d made a mistake in their arrangements when booking him in for the panel. With so much of the press in attendance to hear the announcement of the modern world’s greatest advance in policing, a sudden cancellation from the king would invite far too many probing questions. What was he hiding? What had happened in the shadows? Who had ensconced what where on whom? It just wasn’t worth all the fallout; the best course of action was to let him sit in as if he had a vested interest in the judicial system and try to stop him talking too much. Situation normal, really.
Most of the press in the room, despite the precarious circumstances in which their ears found themselves, were entirely focused on the news story for which the conference had been called. Game-changing new technology was being brought into the fold, according to the official leak, and according to the unofficial leak it would allow dangerous criminals to be brought into custody with virtually zero resistance. 'Gone are the days of police shootouts with notorious gang leaders' claimed a source close to the unofficial leak, and a whistle-blower close to the source close to the unofficial leak had expressed minor concerns about the ethics of the whole thing. A further leak, seeking to limit the damage of the whistle-blower, claimed that there would be such stringent control over access to the technology that abuse would be functionally impossible, and a further anonymous insider added that only one model had been manufactured to date, so that there were very few items of which to keep track. By the estimations of most newspaper editors, over fifty percent of associated staff within the police force had leaked some information or other relating to the story, which somewhat undermined the police chief's campaign to increase data security within their department. That in itself was yet another juicy story in the making.
In any case, a sea of trilby hats with pieces of paper stuck in the headband were waiting in polite anticipation of receiving the information they'd already been given, and came prepared with as many unfairly undermining questions as they could think of in the preceding days. Hanging behind the microphone-laden desk was a silvery projection screen, ready for the audio-visual portion of the presentation. This much, at least, was a mystery to the assembled reporters. Many dreaded a tedious slideshow, and others held quiet optimism that they'd be watching a nature documentary, but thankfully they were all mistaken.
Promptly arriving ten minutes after the advertised start time of the conference, the presenters of the moment emerged from the dowdy pine door to a back room of some kind and walked their way to the desk. Sonia and her cadre in the know hastily shoved their earplugs into place, while those too junior or apathetic to have made appropriate preparations were subjected to the deafeningly over-amplified sounds of chairs creaking, people sitting, and feedback being actively encouraged by the sound engineers. Vitally, this did not stop them from partaking in the state mandated applause of the king.
The three figures, none as equal as any other, made for a visually discordant company. Dr. Hog was, of course, wearing a lab coat and a pair of spectacles, with over-glasses hanging at the ready from the top pocket. It was a certainty that she'd not come into the room directly from the laboratory, because her laboratory was over five miles away, but for reasons of catering to the lowest common denominator of the speculated viewers it was necessary to cement the claim that she was, indeed, a scientist.
Next to Dr. Hog sat Chief Commissioner Kazoo, wearing the decadent and confusing uniform of his rank. As always it was pressed to perfection, with creases on which one could make a credible attempt to plane down their door frame. The scratch and gouge marks in his office doorway were suspiciously close to shoulder height, and the shoulders often seemed to be dusted with sawdust, but none in the department were brave enough to make the accusation directly.
Finally, there was the king himself, bedecked in all the regalia and royal splendour that one might expect from a monarch on a visit to their vassal states. A military-adjacent uniform in fluorescent green and pink practically lit the room, throwing off the colour balance and exposure time of the television cameras, and his velvet cape stretched away behind him, reaching clear through the doorway. Even when he took his seat the hem was well out of sight, and could have been harbouring any kind of national secrets. His characteristic red face stared demurely at the crowd of reporters, and he gave a gentle wave to permit them to cease their applause and start their sitting. Veins on the royal neck bugled from tensed muscles at the strain of holding up a solid gold crown, which shone tantalisingly under the spotlights focused on the speakers' table. It was the very same gold crown that had broken the spine of his father, and his father before him, and her mother before him. Despite the desperate pleas of the royal physiotherapist, the medical community at large and the queen consort, the king's unwavering deference to tradition left no room for the crown to be anywhere but upon his regal bonce. A healthy gambling industry had been propped up by speculation on the snapping-date of his own neck, and it showed no sign of abating.
The police commissioner had brought a few sheets of paper with him. Immediately, representatives of the more sensationalist publications started to construct headlines such as 'Papergate: What was so important that the commissioner couldn't even grab a GREAT BRITISH notebook?" Other, more reasonable, journalists assumed he had some notes to read and access to a printer, and instead decided to accuse him of expenses fraud. With the confidence of someone who has worked on one and only one project for the last decade, Dr. Hog forewent any kind of memory aid, and the king, of course, would be able to draw on his limitless supply of polite, interest-feigning phrases which said nothing and meant even less. He looked interestedly at some of the microphone cabling as if it was a great novelty, and then smiled at his people. This was his only job of the day, and soon he would be able to go home and have a very nice soup, so his mood was about as buoyed as it could be.
The final few straggling reporters shuffled their way into the remaining chairs, all behind pillars or with threadbare seats or covered in glitter and gravy, while the production crews signalled to one another that they were ready to start recording. One of them gave a thumbs-up to the police commissioner, and received a cordial wave from the king by way of response. A wave of shushing swept over the room.
"Shushgate: What were they REALLY trying to silence during that audience?" scribbled Jansen Hardcrest of The Nightly Piper, alongside a selection of his favourite libellous accusations.
One last preparatory squeal of the microphones, taking by surprise those who had prematurely removed their ear defences, was the final herald of the conference's impending start. Sonia Sonora finally swapped her earplugs for a set of comfortable and fashionable light-duty defenders, suitable for listening to officials whilst remaining protected from sudden balloon pops or especially egregious sneezes.
"Thank you for being here, everybody." said the commissioner, his voice gruff and gravelly. He didn’t normally speak that way, having a natural soprano voice with easy airiness and an almost choral quality to every word. When it came to official announcements, however, there was something about a gruff tone that gave him a legitimacy with which his true voice would never contend. "I would like to especially thank his royal majesty the king for showing such a sudden and personal interest in our revolutionary new techniques of policing. Truly, we will be able to uphold your rule of law more easily and more safely with this development on our side."
The king, a veteran of being thanked for doing very little, gave a short, grateful nod. It put a strain on his neck that would have been unacceptable for any normal human, and even a good cross section of cranes, but he expertly kept each vertebra in place and experienced minimal cracking. It was a marvellous display of ceremonial professionalism.
"Now, I'm aware that there have been several leaks to various outlets in the past few days, so I hope that what we are about to show you will put to rest these rumours of unethical approaches to keeping the peace." Commissioner Kazoo told the room. Notepads were scratching, Dictaphones were recording, and bottoms were already shuffling uncomfortably, particularly those in gravy. "For as long as there have been police forces there have been those who resist arrest. With the advent of more freely available weaponry, more sophisticated networks of communication, and a surge in architects plying their trade for evil, making arrests of the most dangerous criminals operating on our shores has been a perilous task. The risk of loss of life, injury, collateral damage, improper conduct and loss of shoes has gone up by over fifty percent in the last six years."
As the commissioner spoke his statistics, a large '50%' appeared on the projector, wearing a sombrero embroidered with '6 years' as a hat. As was the tradition with pictures, its value became equal to a thousand words despite communicating very little. Mobile phone and large, telescopic-lensed camera flashes told of how valuable the press community found this graphic, and Theresa Coalveins jotted down "Riskgate: Police Commissioner celebrates fifty percent rise, aims to hit one hundred within the week".
"Who could forget the dramatic shootout prior to the arrest of Gerald 'The Pockets' Tambor? Eight hours of exchanged gunfire between gang members hunkered down in a busy bus station, with services still running thanks to improper emergency response protocols. We lost six officers and three important routes that day, impacts which continue to be felt in our community."
Various minds drifted to their local bus stops, none of which were on the routes to which the commissioner referred and all of which had been unused for years. Front page articles formed with photos of these monuments to public services, with taglines such as 'Another GREAT BRITISH Loss to Crime', 'From Transportation to Devastation: Gun Crime Wreaks Toll on Bus Services' and 'Police Commissioner Mocks Lost Bus Service, Labels Users "Improper"'. None of them questioned why the routes could not be reinstated following the gunfight, inadvertently securing next year's generous donation from the public transportation think-tanks to the umbrella media corporations.
"But, despite our heroic work, that gang still operates. In other guises, with resources hidden from us, with members about whom we did not know, they are able to rebuild and carry on." continued the commissioner, blissfully unaware of tomorrow's headlines and their trajectory to becoming next week's small-print apology. "Some of you may wonder what the point of the whole thing is, in that case. We ourselves were included in that number until recently. But let me ask you all a question: what if we could deliver the same result of getting villains off the street, but without causing irreparable damage to public services and innocent people? What if we could apprehend the heads of these organisations and force them to tell us how to dismantle their operations fully? Would that not be a better world in which to live?"
There was quiet apprehension among the crowd and much of the television audience. It wasn't just a leading question, but the kind that has you strapped into a moving carriage running along a set of well-defined rails. All arms and legs, real or figurative, were to be kept inside the bounds of the question's intended answer at all times. Dutifully unwilling to suggest that it would be better if gang leaders walked free and more buses were destroyed, the journalists mostly submitted to a half-hearted nod. The king, recognising perfunctory agreement when he saw it, smiled approvingly.
"Exactly. We're all after the same thing here: a safer country for our people and a more reliable bus service for those who require it. Until recently it felt impossible to deliver those things at the same time, but now, thanks to the tireless innovation of Dr. Hog and others, we are proud to announce the creation of two game-changing tools in our crusade against organised and disorganised crime alike. Dr. Hog? Would you care to explain?"
Commissioner Kazoo sat down, shuffling his papers a little for the look of it, as Dr. Hog stood. Her eyes narrowed and scanned across the trilbies as if reading a rapidly scrolling stream of data from some nerd machine or other. Nadine Gutter of The Three-weekly Dirge began to mentally write an article entitled 'Police Commissioner Commendably Stands Aside for First WOMAN SCIENTIST to Speak at This Press Conference in Display of Feminism After Misogynistically Giving her Instructions', a tonal rollercoaster of praise and condemnation that missed all the points it thought it was trying to make at the outset.
"There were two primary problems that the commissioner tasked my team with solving. The first was one of safety and minimised collateral damage; officers under the commissioner's control were suffering an unacceptable level of wear and tear on the kinds of high profile arrest he has described, variously coming back with faulty articulations, fluid leaks, foreign objects lodged in inappropriate spaces, and dead. This kind of low longevity and inadequate resilience was much to his personal shame, as well as the shame of those officers who engaged in such poor displays of suitability for these operations." said the doctor, calmly and clinically, maintaining eye contact with individual journalists and police officers in attendance as she spoke. Gossip columnists watched hungrily as the commissioner's eyes widened in shock and outrage at the doctor's framing of his private remarks to her. Not only had she aired them in front of the press, and some of the injured officers to whom he had been directly referring, but she had quoted him verbatim without an ounce of spin. Hundreds of articles, entitled things like 'Schism in the Ranks", "Speculated Romance Between Dr. and Commissioner Breaks Down Under Shocking Revelations" and "Commissioner Bravely Remains Silent While Dr. Reveals Dark Secrets" began to spawn unbidden in the notebooks and laptops of the crowd. Many eagerly anticipated some kind of dramatic rebuke from the commissioner.
"We considered many options to rectify the egregious shortcomings of these frankly lazy and worthless officers. The first suggestion was to hire better people, ones who were less feeble and prone to bullet wounds, but this was discounted as too difficult. Next we looked into training the officers in question to simply take more pride in their work and actually try to avoid the gunfire, but this idea too gained very little traction. With the obvious courses of action discounted immediately, we had to ask technology to swoop in where natured had failed us."
Dale Washington of the Old London Shrieker began to draft an opinion piece on the shocking revelation of officers simply not trying not to get hurt, and why it could probably be blamed on the younger generation having different taste in music to their parents.
"Although the full list is too great to read out here, the biggest flaw with the police officers in question is their fragility. And how better to remove that fragility than to encase their pathetic biological frames in a pristine, impenetrable shell of wondrous technology?" announced the scientist grandly, clicking the button on her presentation remote control and switching the slide, to a wave of gasps which quickly became sniggers. Displayed before them, in stunningly stretched resolution to fit the page, was a metal shell straight from the pages of a comic book. This wasn't a turn of phrase; it was very obviously an image torn from a comic. "You see here the blueprint of our solution. The Wondrous Shelled Cretin, as he is known in nerd circles, provided us with all the necessary design information we needed to create something very similar for our own officers." the next slide star-wiped into place, showing a staggeringly faithful recreation of the Wondrous Shelled Cretin suit. It was all gleaming chrome, illuminated visors, scaled articulations and heavy, chunky boots. If there had been a lightshow of flashes for the statistics slide, then the response to the image of a metal super suit could only be described as a catastrophic spike in solar activity. Every outlet, from The Mid-Afternoon Sensationaliser to Garden Screaming Enthusiast Monthly, sought to record and report on the extravagant claims laid before them. "Our own shell suit, dubbed 'Officer's Shame' after the motivation behind its conception, aims to replicate every superpower that the Wondrous Shelled Cretin boasted in his popular story arc 'WSC Versus the Poor', giving our officers a complete set of tools to make up for their frankly insulting inadequacies in the pursuit of removing gang influences from our society."
Behind her, the knuckles of the police commissioner turned as white as his face was red. The doctor's assessment of his officers was not painting the picture of reliability for which he wished.
"The other issue was one of the apprehension and cooperation of the arrested party. You see, not only are our enforcement agencies incapable of reaching the perpetrators in question without suffering critical harm, when they eventually do get to their targets they often fail to arrest them, or fail to extract confessions and other relevant information when the subject is returned to the cells. This was a more difficult challenge to resolve, because it required us to make the officers less pathetically incompetent, and it took us many months of development cycles, iterations of failed ideas, and tussles with HR over acceptable working hours. Finally, however, we were able to devise a solution which, in combination with Officer's Shame, would resolve both of those problems in one swoop. I present to you now, the Bindings of Sincere Submission." Another click of the remote flipped the slide to what looked, for all intents and purposes, like a pair of iron manacles which had been disguised for the set of a space opera. Much like Officer's Shame their surface had been brightly chromed, and they were laden with glowing lights of various colours and dubious purpose. A series of short antennae pointed outwards like delicate spines from the circumference of the shackles, and appeared worryingly breakable if the item were to be packed underneath a heavy bag of shopping. Grocer's Digest journalist Barry Yrrab made particular note of this shortcoming for a cutting article on the waste of public money on nonsense developments. "As their name might suggest to you, assuming you are not all as morally and intellectually destitute as you appear, the Bindings of Sincere Submission make use of powerful neurotransmitters, amplifying latent psychic powers to enforce the wearer of the ‘victim’ end to abide by the wishes of the ‘victimiser’ end."
"We really do take issue with that naming convention." blurted the commissioner. It was mildly surprising to the press junket that this was the particular statement to which the police took most offense, and many made a note of it for blackmail purposes later.
"And I still do not care about your pathetic emotions.” Dr. Hog replied, matter-of-factly. “No longer will the officer be defied by their quarry. If we wish for a confession of all crimes, then the victim will be forced to speak it. If they are commanded to come quietly and tell their subordinates to lay down their arms, then there will be a peaceful arrest. In short, we have delivered a complete resolution to all problems plaguing the arrest process of armed criminals in their strongholds and hideouts. Are there any questions?"
For the briefest of moments the room was silent, as the assembled crowd tried to take in what they were being expected to believe, but then the flood of queries and demands for attention burst through the dam of incredulity.
"Dr. Hog! Dr. Hog! Angela Gunn here from the Bi-fortnightly Brick Summary. When you say that Officer's Shame has all the powers from 'WSC Versus the Poor' what does that mean? What are the powers exactly?"
"A tedious question from a tedious person." declared the scientist, with the king's approving smile at her side. "You can find the list of superpowers online if you care to even try to do your job properly. Officer's Shame replicates these powers completely."
"I have looked already, Dr. Hog, and I find the results surprising. You're telling us that Officer's Shame has rocket boots, capable of granting flight to the arresting officer?"
"Obviously, yes."
"And a wrist-mounted tear-gas launcher for 'encouraging peaceful protesters to move along'?
"Everything on the list is on the suit."
"But why would an officer ever need a set of disembowelling knives to sprout from their knees? Or a flame to jet from their eyes? Or a ballistic weapon crafted with the express purpose of shooting out lampposts?" pressed Angela, her imagination clearly lacking.
"Ask the commissioner any questions about what the officers need their equipment for. Especially the cruel and sadistic stuff. They seem to really like it.” The commissioner’s pen snapped in half. “Next question, please."
"Janet Nugent, Tyres and Teeth Daily. Does this super suit have the formal endorsement of the crown?"
With reluctant deference to his legal authority in not only the room but the whole country, earned by bravely being born into money, Dr. Hog turned to the king for his response.
"Oh, one would imagine so, yes. Anything which keeps the country great and stops us from suffering on rainy days is something of which this monarchy approves." was the official regal line. There followed the mandatory three-minute standing ovation for such a brave, insightful and clear statement from the king, which he lapped up with quiet dignity and a biscuit wrapped in single-use plastic. Although Janet was, of course, fully committed to the rapturous applause prompted by her question, her mind was busy drafting a scathing report on the king wanting to personally disembowel the poor with knife-laden knees.
"Siddarth Khan, The New Wristwatch Times. I'm more interested in these Bindings of Sincere Submission. They appear to be more like truth serum, handcuffs and mind control combined into a single tool. How is that possible, and would that interfere with wearing a metal-strapped wristwatch? Would a leather strap be more appropriate if combining the two accessories?"
"Finally, a question that doesn't make me want to flip this table and burn down the police commissioner." sighed Dr. Hog. The commissioner was practically glowing with flush-cheeked rage, but with the king present he couldn't afford to let his decorum slip. "It's quite simple; handcuff technology already existed, so all we had to do was augment it with the capability to enforce the victimiser's will on the victim. This, it turned out, was most easily achieved with the use of gravel. You see, gravel has a latent level of psychic activity, which is why it persists as a driveway surface for so many people despite being evidently unsuitable for the job." summarised Dr. Hog, while a sea of copy editors searched for stock footage of gravel and pebbles scattered across the pavement and residential streets. It would be front page material for many weeks. "We have taken the essence of gravel and implanted it into receptors and transmitters in the cuffs, thereby allowing full control over another human."
"Does that not sound a little bit... you know...unethical?" asked an airy voice which made no attempt to introduce either itself or its associated publication. This lack of credentials was plausible justification for ignoring the question, and Dr. Hog was all too happy to jump on that opportunity.
"Any other questions?"
"I believe," said the king, in his ineffable wisdom, "that you already had one about ethics to answer."
Anyone else would have received one of Dr. Hog's grant-revoking, career-ending and lunch-losing looks, one of the really powerful ones that could melt the paint off a jet engine. With so many royal bodyguards in the room, however, it wasn't worth trying ocular regicide.
"I must have missed it." she lied flatly, putting her back onto solid and familiar ground. "I am not concerned that this is unethical. Next question."
Despite having answered the query fully and thoroughly, the questioner spoke up again immediately, revealing himself as a gaunt-looking young man in a worn-out pinstripe suit. His paper-stuffed trilby hat was about ready to split in two, but the obligation of reporting the stories that matter was keeping its more destructive intentions in check.
"How so? Surely arming an officer to be utterly physically unstoppable, as WSC was shown to be in issue 563: "WSC Survives the Judicial System", and then giving them the means to force a false confession, is too much power to be placed in the hands of any human?"
"You'd have thought so, but it turns out that it's fine. I now consider the matter closed and so should you unless you wish to be declared a formal dunce."
To a low level chorus of goading 'ooh's all eyes turned on the scruffy young man, waiting eagerly to see whether he'd bow out to the scientist's taunts or self-declare as a dunce. It was a masterpiece of a trap that Dr. Hog had laid, and it would be the stuff of many features in the Sunday supplements.
For his part, the young man held Dr. Hog's gaze for a few seconds, silently, and then raised a flat-palmed hand in supplication. Ethics be damned, he would not cause his colleagues to think him a dunce.
"Good. Anyone else?"
"Buster Looms! The Herald Bugle Boomer!" roared the eponymous Buster, his barrel chest and sonic waves vibrating the whole room. Those watching at home saw their picture quality crackle with white noise, thanks to the raw electromagnetic power of his bellowing. "I have a question! When will we, the tax paying public, see the benefit of these technological marvels? Can we expect a protracted development and prototyping cycle, or will we see the first models in the field within this quarter?!"
Around Buster there was now a void of chairs and other journalists. The concussive waves of his voice had pushed them clean away, and also managed to further validate Sonia's earplug decisions.
"You can take this one, commissioner. It's down at your level and I grow tired of dealing with questions about your snivelling real world problems." said Dr. Hog, taking her seat and folding her arms in self-satisfied disappointment.
Incandescent with indignation, but not willing to show discord in the presence of the king, Commissioner Kazoo stood and spoke tersely into the microphone array.
"There will be no waiting. The first prototypes are in the field as we speak." He drew a breath and forced a little more calmness to override his demeanour. "If the live video feed could please be initiated..."
"Then we'll all be able to get on with our day of very important work." sniped Dr. Hog from her seat, ever eager to engage in outreach and PR activities. The king, not one for noticing sarcasm, nodded sagely. Behind them all the slideshow abruptly shifted to washed-out live video, showing a group of police officers gathered around a parked fleet of vehicles. Their chosen parking place, as observed by many of the motoring journalists in attendance, was in the cul-de-sac of a high-rise estate in one of the dingier districts of the city; soulless grey blocks and stained, off-white rendering loomed over them as if threatening to infect the world with its own decay.
"We are now seeing the body-cam footage of Officer Isabella Grunt, outside the confirmed residence of the East End's most notorious cartel boss, one Jimmy 'The Gate' Taylor. The Gate rose to notoriety as an enforcer within an organised crime syndicate, owing mostly to his distinctive style of beating victims with a small iron gate, such as one might normally have on the access way to their front garden. For many years we've been building a case against him, but to make an arrest would involve a direct frontal assault on one of his safe houses and, thanks to the limitations of biology that Dr. Hog has so heartlessly laid at the feet of my people, this was not possible to conduct safely. The..." he sighed "…Officer's Shame, a working title that will definitely be changed..."
Dr. Hog shook her head at the suggestion.
"... And the Bindings of Sincerity will not only allow us to deliver justice for Jimmy's victims, but also enable us to dismantle the whole criminal web of which The Gate is at the centre. Would Sergeant Hearnes please activate his camera and step into view."
After a short delay, possibly as a result of Sergeant Hearnes eating a chocolate biscuit on the job, a terrifyingly convincing replica of WSC's chrome-heavy super suit stepped into view. Reflecting every light source in the Greater London area, it was like a man made of mirrors had taken personal offence at the idea of other people being able to see, and had subsequently made it his mission to right that wrong. Even the visor, which was a blackened glass of some sort, was lined with powerful LEDs to add to the photonic assault; they also helped to obscure a couple of small exhaust ports, which presumably served to direct the jets of flame alluded to previously.
With a brief flickering and some protracted buffering, the video feed showing Sergeant Hearnes was pushed to one side of the screen. Greedily taking up the liberated space was a second video feed, rather like the first, but provided by the cameras mounted in Officer's Shame. All eyes were on the screen, fascinated despite the fact it was footage of two police officers standing still and looking at one another. Geraldine Yule of Diving Denier Monthly, the only magazine brave enough to be dedicated to actively proving that diving does not exist, scoped out an article entitled '7 Oscar-worthy scenes from the notably diving-free police press conference video feed'.
"Is everything working with the suit, Sergeant?" asked the commissioner theatrically. The metal-clad man on the screen gave a thumbs up, accidentally firing a tranquilliser dart into a nearby officer in the process. No-one paid it any mind. "Excellent. Then you are authorised to proceed with the operation."
"Surely you aren't going to show us live footage of this?" complained the scruffy young man from before. "We might see someone die or be terribly injured. Anything could be happening in there!"
"No questions during the video." barked the commissioner, just after the instruction would have been most useful.
"And what if The Gate is watching? You'll have tipped him off!" continued the man, rudely ignoring the 'no questions' rule.
"Only a loser would keep asking questions instead of watching." sneered Dr. Hog with a snug grin. He was once again ensnared in her devious, terrifyingly well-crafted ambush. Although he was many things, the man knew he was not a loser, and therefore could not in good conscience continue raising his concerns. The supplicating hand went up once more.
On screen, events were progressing. On the commissioner's orders, Sergeant Hearnes had begun to approach to tower block. Whether out fear of being labelled a loser, or simple common courtesy, nobody in the press junket spoke. The video feed rolled on, and it looked as if Sergeant Hearnes was a little off target in aiming for the door, instead walking on a direct vector towards a ground floor wall. His path took him through the bins, for which he refused to stop or divert, scattering litter and black bags surprisingly far with his powerfully mechanised legs. A few environmental journalists made displeased notes to libel the commissioner for that later.
Officer Grunt's feed showed the super suit stop in front of the building, while Hearnes' showed a disinteresting and disintegrating patch of wall. It appeared that he was committing a significant amount of time and attention to inspecting the quality of the ageing render, until both videos showed a metallic fist slam into the masonry. The commissioner pinched the bridge of his nose, Dr. Hog shook her head and muttered something, and the king smiled politely, as befitting a panellist of his standing.
Once the unprovoked assault of an innocent structure had been completed, Sergeant Hearnes wiggled his fingers unsurely, while his head flitted around as if watching an unseen fly or distant pelican.
"Your Sergeant has not done a good job of learning the operation of the suit. It seems that Officer's Shame has shamed him once again." observed the doctor. It was unnecessary both in being said at all, and in the way she purposefully leaned into the microphones before speaking, but such were her ways. Article plans were split between praise for her transparency and condemnation for her haircut.
All such planning stopped suddenly. This wasn't due to a spontaneous lack of concern for time management, but as a direct result of Sergeant Hearnes' feet erupting with twin jets of blue flame. His video feed showed a blurred mess of grey and beige, only intelligible as the rushing ascent of a tower block by virtue of Officer Grunt's impressive camerawork at ground level. Rumours of the police force hiring professional film crews were planned for circulation in the next morning's gossip columns, while the science journals worked on praise for Dr. Hog's outstanding achievements despite being utterly unlikeable by every reasonable metric. She sat on her plastic chair with legs crossed, fingers in a steeple, and sense of superiority on full display. That she had also written the commissioner a note detailing how much she despised him, and that she had held that note up for the photographers to see first, were added bonuses.
By this time, the feed from Officer's Shame was showing a much more static scene. The sergeant, having finally got to grips with the boot-based flight controls, was hovering outside a tenth storey window, while the flames from his jets melted the paint below. Officer Grunt’s view showed the full extent of the scorching damage he’d done to the exterior of the building, but nobody seemed terribly worried.
"Proceed with breaching! Go, go, go!" ordered Commissioner Kazoo, as if he were acting in a tiresome police thriller and not behind a plywood desk in a church hall. Dr. Hog threw a ball of paper at the back of his head, and the king gave a royal wave with a cupped hand to signal that he was still paying attention.
A reflective pane of stained and murky glass, which had hitherto given nothing away, burst into a star field of cuboid fragments ahead of Sergeant Hearnes' practiced hammer-blow punch. Unveiled to both the officer and the viewing audience of reporters was a juxtaposed amalgamation of decadence and dinginess, a fusion of styles that could only be the result of organised crime or a misspent lottery fund. Damp-stained walls were adorned with gold-framed artwork. Rotting sofas held boxes of fine jewellery and expensive gadgets. Cigars had been stuffed into gaps in the floorboards, which seemed like a waste and an accident waiting to happen, and the charred, sparking toaster was situated on a solid gold coffee table. Sergeant Hearnes floated inside, setting the drab curtains ablaze, before switching off the jets and slamming down onto the cracked laminate flooring.
Rapt journalists were watching with wide eyes as the suited officer stomped through the flat, their hands typing and writing blindly to embellish what they were seeing for the morning’s stories.
Unfortunately for Hearnes, but perfectly for the demonstration, his breaking and entering into The Gate's flat didn’t leave him lonely for long; emerging from the doorway was a stream of what could only be described as faceless cronies, fodder for any armed and armoured sergeant's demonstration of unnecessary force. Fitting this description nicely, they unleashed a torrent of futile and ill-advised violence at Sergeant Hearnes, coming at him with iron bars, knives and small arms gunfire, according to the notes made by Filipe Smithers of The Violent Crime Tribune. Their actions would receive a respectable seven out of ten on the unacceptability meter, missing out on higher marks only because of the nature of the sergeant's arrival. The sergeant himself, meanwhile, would be at a ten almost immediately.
True to the claims made by Dr. Hog, Officer's Shame rendered him as impervious to harm as the Wondrous Shelled Cretin himself. Hard blows from heavy objects bounced harmlessly off the thick, metal carapace, and were met with stiff backhands, gouts of pepper spray, or egregious disembowelment from the knee-based weaponry. Gunfire ricocheted away into the surrounding masonry, or what was left of it after roaring blasts of flame that spewed from either side of the visor camera. Officer's Shame had transformed Sergeant Hearnes into an unstoppable wall of arresting power, unbothered by the resistance of The Gate's private army as he stormed his way through the two-bed flat with a single bathroom and barely functional kitchen. Bats, blows and bones broke under his one-man assault, and the press were treated to a first-hand display of the chokeholds, uppercuts and cracked ribs of mechanised justice. Many of them had ceased keeping a tally of the injured, or of the manifold methods that Sergeant Hearnes had employed to suppress resistance. They'd even stopped listing the various personal attacks he'd shrugged off during the assault. All they could do was watch in awe, particularly when he lifted a bothersome brute by the face and slammed him, back first, through a wooden door.
Behind it, when the debris and splinters of broken door had settled, Hearnes came face-to-face with the target at the heart of everything: Jimmy ‘The Gate’ Taylor in a gaudy but tidy bedroom.
To his credit, Jimmy didn't show fear as the metal monster approached him. He showed confusion, certainly, and was taken off guard by the speed of the advance, but he wasn’t scared. With the confidence of a man who failed to understand the nature of Officer’s Shame, he let rip with a furious barrage of blows from a huge wrought-iron gate that barely fit in the room, but Sergeant Hearnes either didn't notice or didn't care. Instead he slapped the weapon from Jimmy's hand, nearly taking the hand off with it, and produced from somewhere off-camera the Bindings of Sincere Submission.
The eyes of the wise, at this stage, should have been on Dr. Hog. She was watching the video with a mixture of maternal pride and condescending smugness, pleased by the performance and consequences of her creations. But when the sergeant began to fit himself and Jimmy with the manacles, all of her sneering joy was transformed into grey-faced, wide-eyed panic.
"No! No, stop him! Stop the fool!" she shrieked, scrabbled forwards and clawing at the commissioner.
"Unhand me, doctor!" the commissioner growled back. "Your derision is noted but my men can capably apply handcuffs!"
"He's doing it wrong! He's..."
She stopped, as the manacles on the feed clicked shut on both wrists.
"The lights on the bands! It's violet for violent victim, and viridian for virtuous victimiser. The system could not possibly be simpler and, apparently, neither could the officer in command of it." she wailed, clutching her head with both hands.
"What are you blathering about?!" the commissioner demanded, irritably watching the lack of affirmative arresting action from the video feed.
"He's put them on backwards!"
It didn’t sound like much of a problem. Commissioner Kazoo was half way through rebuking the doctor for wasting his time when he turned the same shade of grey as she had. Slowly, a heavy blanket of realisation draped itself down over the crowd, the TV crews, and everyone else in the room with the exception of the king. He wore a concerned expression, suitable for a royal hearing the plight of a peasant, but neither understood nor cared enough to do much about it.
"Then The Gate..."
Sergeant Hearnes' video feed went dark. On display on the screen was the same view of a scorched tower block from Officer Grunt, peeling panels of melted paint flaking away in the gentle wind. The other officers shuffled and milled uncomfortably while they waited, unaware of what was happening inside.
“Pull back! All units retreat. Officer’s Shame is compromised and you are all in danger; flee! Kill the feed!” the commissioner barked into his radio, for want of anything else to do. In line with his advice, the video flickered to black. He stood unmoving, staring at the blank screen, before rubbing at his cheeks with both hands. Dr. Hog slumped like a deflated cauliflower on her chair. The king smiled politely. There was silence in the room.
Slowly, a hand was raised in the audience.
"So... was it the police force's intention to arm a dangerous cartel with an impervious super soldier?"
There was no reply. The headlines would soon be made, but no-one was quite sure what they'd be made of.
Seasoned veterans of the journalistic process had been around this loop enough times to bring heavy duty ear plugs with them. Forewarned and forearmed, they would have at least minor defence against the ear-shredding groan of leg and floor. When power was provided to the vast table of microphones, all pointing in different directions and wired as if to throw off the plans of malicious electrical engineers, the earplugs would once again show their worth against a sonic boom of easily avoidable feedback. Sonia Sonora, whose parents had clearly been unequipped for the task of naming a child, was already waist deep in an article exploring these sinister attempts at deafening the press in every conference. ‘Auditory Assassination: When the New Met. Met My Ears’ was going to be her magnum opus, even if it looked like the title had a devastating typo.
Empty chairs behind the dubiously aggressive array of microphones awaited the officious rumps of Chief Commissioner Bertie Kazoo, Dr. Simone Hog and His Royal Excellency King Walter Windermere, whose representatives had been too embarrassed to admit that they’d made a mistake in their arrangements when booking him in for the panel. With so much of the press in attendance to hear the announcement of the modern world’s greatest advance in policing, a sudden cancellation from the king would invite far too many probing questions. What was he hiding? What had happened in the shadows? Who had ensconced what where on whom? It just wasn’t worth all the fallout; the best course of action was to let him sit in as if he had a vested interest in the judicial system and try to stop him talking too much. Situation normal, really.
Most of the press in the room, despite the precarious circumstances in which their ears found themselves, were entirely focused on the news story for which the conference had been called. Game-changing new technology was being brought into the fold, according to the official leak, and according to the unofficial leak it would allow dangerous criminals to be brought into custody with virtually zero resistance. 'Gone are the days of police shootouts with notorious gang leaders' claimed a source close to the unofficial leak, and a whistle-blower close to the source close to the unofficial leak had expressed minor concerns about the ethics of the whole thing. A further leak, seeking to limit the damage of the whistle-blower, claimed that there would be such stringent control over access to the technology that abuse would be functionally impossible, and a further anonymous insider added that only one model had been manufactured to date, so that there were very few items of which to keep track. By the estimations of most newspaper editors, over fifty percent of associated staff within the police force had leaked some information or other relating to the story, which somewhat undermined the police chief's campaign to increase data security within their department. That in itself was yet another juicy story in the making.
In any case, a sea of trilby hats with pieces of paper stuck in the headband were waiting in polite anticipation of receiving the information they'd already been given, and came prepared with as many unfairly undermining questions as they could think of in the preceding days. Hanging behind the microphone-laden desk was a silvery projection screen, ready for the audio-visual portion of the presentation. This much, at least, was a mystery to the assembled reporters. Many dreaded a tedious slideshow, and others held quiet optimism that they'd be watching a nature documentary, but thankfully they were all mistaken.
Promptly arriving ten minutes after the advertised start time of the conference, the presenters of the moment emerged from the dowdy pine door to a back room of some kind and walked their way to the desk. Sonia and her cadre in the know hastily shoved their earplugs into place, while those too junior or apathetic to have made appropriate preparations were subjected to the deafeningly over-amplified sounds of chairs creaking, people sitting, and feedback being actively encouraged by the sound engineers. Vitally, this did not stop them from partaking in the state mandated applause of the king.
The three figures, none as equal as any other, made for a visually discordant company. Dr. Hog was, of course, wearing a lab coat and a pair of spectacles, with over-glasses hanging at the ready from the top pocket. It was a certainty that she'd not come into the room directly from the laboratory, because her laboratory was over five miles away, but for reasons of catering to the lowest common denominator of the speculated viewers it was necessary to cement the claim that she was, indeed, a scientist.
Next to Dr. Hog sat Chief Commissioner Kazoo, wearing the decadent and confusing uniform of his rank. As always it was pressed to perfection, with creases on which one could make a credible attempt to plane down their door frame. The scratch and gouge marks in his office doorway were suspiciously close to shoulder height, and the shoulders often seemed to be dusted with sawdust, but none in the department were brave enough to make the accusation directly.
Finally, there was the king himself, bedecked in all the regalia and royal splendour that one might expect from a monarch on a visit to their vassal states. A military-adjacent uniform in fluorescent green and pink practically lit the room, throwing off the colour balance and exposure time of the television cameras, and his velvet cape stretched away behind him, reaching clear through the doorway. Even when he took his seat the hem was well out of sight, and could have been harbouring any kind of national secrets. His characteristic red face stared demurely at the crowd of reporters, and he gave a gentle wave to permit them to cease their applause and start their sitting. Veins on the royal neck bugled from tensed muscles at the strain of holding up a solid gold crown, which shone tantalisingly under the spotlights focused on the speakers' table. It was the very same gold crown that had broken the spine of his father, and his father before him, and her mother before him. Despite the desperate pleas of the royal physiotherapist, the medical community at large and the queen consort, the king's unwavering deference to tradition left no room for the crown to be anywhere but upon his regal bonce. A healthy gambling industry had been propped up by speculation on the snapping-date of his own neck, and it showed no sign of abating.
The police commissioner had brought a few sheets of paper with him. Immediately, representatives of the more sensationalist publications started to construct headlines such as 'Papergate: What was so important that the commissioner couldn't even grab a GREAT BRITISH notebook?" Other, more reasonable, journalists assumed he had some notes to read and access to a printer, and instead decided to accuse him of expenses fraud. With the confidence of someone who has worked on one and only one project for the last decade, Dr. Hog forewent any kind of memory aid, and the king, of course, would be able to draw on his limitless supply of polite, interest-feigning phrases which said nothing and meant even less. He looked interestedly at some of the microphone cabling as if it was a great novelty, and then smiled at his people. This was his only job of the day, and soon he would be able to go home and have a very nice soup, so his mood was about as buoyed as it could be.
The final few straggling reporters shuffled their way into the remaining chairs, all behind pillars or with threadbare seats or covered in glitter and gravy, while the production crews signalled to one another that they were ready to start recording. One of them gave a thumbs-up to the police commissioner, and received a cordial wave from the king by way of response. A wave of shushing swept over the room.
"Shushgate: What were they REALLY trying to silence during that audience?" scribbled Jansen Hardcrest of The Nightly Piper, alongside a selection of his favourite libellous accusations.
One last preparatory squeal of the microphones, taking by surprise those who had prematurely removed their ear defences, was the final herald of the conference's impending start. Sonia Sonora finally swapped her earplugs for a set of comfortable and fashionable light-duty defenders, suitable for listening to officials whilst remaining protected from sudden balloon pops or especially egregious sneezes.
"Thank you for being here, everybody." said the commissioner, his voice gruff and gravelly. He didn’t normally speak that way, having a natural soprano voice with easy airiness and an almost choral quality to every word. When it came to official announcements, however, there was something about a gruff tone that gave him a legitimacy with which his true voice would never contend. "I would like to especially thank his royal majesty the king for showing such a sudden and personal interest in our revolutionary new techniques of policing. Truly, we will be able to uphold your rule of law more easily and more safely with this development on our side."
The king, a veteran of being thanked for doing very little, gave a short, grateful nod. It put a strain on his neck that would have been unacceptable for any normal human, and even a good cross section of cranes, but he expertly kept each vertebra in place and experienced minimal cracking. It was a marvellous display of ceremonial professionalism.
"Now, I'm aware that there have been several leaks to various outlets in the past few days, so I hope that what we are about to show you will put to rest these rumours of unethical approaches to keeping the peace." Commissioner Kazoo told the room. Notepads were scratching, Dictaphones were recording, and bottoms were already shuffling uncomfortably, particularly those in gravy. "For as long as there have been police forces there have been those who resist arrest. With the advent of more freely available weaponry, more sophisticated networks of communication, and a surge in architects plying their trade for evil, making arrests of the most dangerous criminals operating on our shores has been a perilous task. The risk of loss of life, injury, collateral damage, improper conduct and loss of shoes has gone up by over fifty percent in the last six years."
As the commissioner spoke his statistics, a large '50%' appeared on the projector, wearing a sombrero embroidered with '6 years' as a hat. As was the tradition with pictures, its value became equal to a thousand words despite communicating very little. Mobile phone and large, telescopic-lensed camera flashes told of how valuable the press community found this graphic, and Theresa Coalveins jotted down "Riskgate: Police Commissioner celebrates fifty percent rise, aims to hit one hundred within the week".
"Who could forget the dramatic shootout prior to the arrest of Gerald 'The Pockets' Tambor? Eight hours of exchanged gunfire between gang members hunkered down in a busy bus station, with services still running thanks to improper emergency response protocols. We lost six officers and three important routes that day, impacts which continue to be felt in our community."
Various minds drifted to their local bus stops, none of which were on the routes to which the commissioner referred and all of which had been unused for years. Front page articles formed with photos of these monuments to public services, with taglines such as 'Another GREAT BRITISH Loss to Crime', 'From Transportation to Devastation: Gun Crime Wreaks Toll on Bus Services' and 'Police Commissioner Mocks Lost Bus Service, Labels Users "Improper"'. None of them questioned why the routes could not be reinstated following the gunfight, inadvertently securing next year's generous donation from the public transportation think-tanks to the umbrella media corporations.
"But, despite our heroic work, that gang still operates. In other guises, with resources hidden from us, with members about whom we did not know, they are able to rebuild and carry on." continued the commissioner, blissfully unaware of tomorrow's headlines and their trajectory to becoming next week's small-print apology. "Some of you may wonder what the point of the whole thing is, in that case. We ourselves were included in that number until recently. But let me ask you all a question: what if we could deliver the same result of getting villains off the street, but without causing irreparable damage to public services and innocent people? What if we could apprehend the heads of these organisations and force them to tell us how to dismantle their operations fully? Would that not be a better world in which to live?"
There was quiet apprehension among the crowd and much of the television audience. It wasn't just a leading question, but the kind that has you strapped into a moving carriage running along a set of well-defined rails. All arms and legs, real or figurative, were to be kept inside the bounds of the question's intended answer at all times. Dutifully unwilling to suggest that it would be better if gang leaders walked free and more buses were destroyed, the journalists mostly submitted to a half-hearted nod. The king, recognising perfunctory agreement when he saw it, smiled approvingly.
"Exactly. We're all after the same thing here: a safer country for our people and a more reliable bus service for those who require it. Until recently it felt impossible to deliver those things at the same time, but now, thanks to the tireless innovation of Dr. Hog and others, we are proud to announce the creation of two game-changing tools in our crusade against organised and disorganised crime alike. Dr. Hog? Would you care to explain?"
Commissioner Kazoo sat down, shuffling his papers a little for the look of it, as Dr. Hog stood. Her eyes narrowed and scanned across the trilbies as if reading a rapidly scrolling stream of data from some nerd machine or other. Nadine Gutter of The Three-weekly Dirge began to mentally write an article entitled 'Police Commissioner Commendably Stands Aside for First WOMAN SCIENTIST to Speak at This Press Conference in Display of Feminism After Misogynistically Giving her Instructions', a tonal rollercoaster of praise and condemnation that missed all the points it thought it was trying to make at the outset.
"There were two primary problems that the commissioner tasked my team with solving. The first was one of safety and minimised collateral damage; officers under the commissioner's control were suffering an unacceptable level of wear and tear on the kinds of high profile arrest he has described, variously coming back with faulty articulations, fluid leaks, foreign objects lodged in inappropriate spaces, and dead. This kind of low longevity and inadequate resilience was much to his personal shame, as well as the shame of those officers who engaged in such poor displays of suitability for these operations." said the doctor, calmly and clinically, maintaining eye contact with individual journalists and police officers in attendance as she spoke. Gossip columnists watched hungrily as the commissioner's eyes widened in shock and outrage at the doctor's framing of his private remarks to her. Not only had she aired them in front of the press, and some of the injured officers to whom he had been directly referring, but she had quoted him verbatim without an ounce of spin. Hundreds of articles, entitled things like 'Schism in the Ranks", "Speculated Romance Between Dr. and Commissioner Breaks Down Under Shocking Revelations" and "Commissioner Bravely Remains Silent While Dr. Reveals Dark Secrets" began to spawn unbidden in the notebooks and laptops of the crowd. Many eagerly anticipated some kind of dramatic rebuke from the commissioner.
"We considered many options to rectify the egregious shortcomings of these frankly lazy and worthless officers. The first suggestion was to hire better people, ones who were less feeble and prone to bullet wounds, but this was discounted as too difficult. Next we looked into training the officers in question to simply take more pride in their work and actually try to avoid the gunfire, but this idea too gained very little traction. With the obvious courses of action discounted immediately, we had to ask technology to swoop in where natured had failed us."
Dale Washington of the Old London Shrieker began to draft an opinion piece on the shocking revelation of officers simply not trying not to get hurt, and why it could probably be blamed on the younger generation having different taste in music to their parents.
"Although the full list is too great to read out here, the biggest flaw with the police officers in question is their fragility. And how better to remove that fragility than to encase their pathetic biological frames in a pristine, impenetrable shell of wondrous technology?" announced the scientist grandly, clicking the button on her presentation remote control and switching the slide, to a wave of gasps which quickly became sniggers. Displayed before them, in stunningly stretched resolution to fit the page, was a metal shell straight from the pages of a comic book. This wasn't a turn of phrase; it was very obviously an image torn from a comic. "You see here the blueprint of our solution. The Wondrous Shelled Cretin, as he is known in nerd circles, provided us with all the necessary design information we needed to create something very similar for our own officers." the next slide star-wiped into place, showing a staggeringly faithful recreation of the Wondrous Shelled Cretin suit. It was all gleaming chrome, illuminated visors, scaled articulations and heavy, chunky boots. If there had been a lightshow of flashes for the statistics slide, then the response to the image of a metal super suit could only be described as a catastrophic spike in solar activity. Every outlet, from The Mid-Afternoon Sensationaliser to Garden Screaming Enthusiast Monthly, sought to record and report on the extravagant claims laid before them. "Our own shell suit, dubbed 'Officer's Shame' after the motivation behind its conception, aims to replicate every superpower that the Wondrous Shelled Cretin boasted in his popular story arc 'WSC Versus the Poor', giving our officers a complete set of tools to make up for their frankly insulting inadequacies in the pursuit of removing gang influences from our society."
Behind her, the knuckles of the police commissioner turned as white as his face was red. The doctor's assessment of his officers was not painting the picture of reliability for which he wished.
"The other issue was one of the apprehension and cooperation of the arrested party. You see, not only are our enforcement agencies incapable of reaching the perpetrators in question without suffering critical harm, when they eventually do get to their targets they often fail to arrest them, or fail to extract confessions and other relevant information when the subject is returned to the cells. This was a more difficult challenge to resolve, because it required us to make the officers less pathetically incompetent, and it took us many months of development cycles, iterations of failed ideas, and tussles with HR over acceptable working hours. Finally, however, we were able to devise a solution which, in combination with Officer's Shame, would resolve both of those problems in one swoop. I present to you now, the Bindings of Sincere Submission." Another click of the remote flipped the slide to what looked, for all intents and purposes, like a pair of iron manacles which had been disguised for the set of a space opera. Much like Officer's Shame their surface had been brightly chromed, and they were laden with glowing lights of various colours and dubious purpose. A series of short antennae pointed outwards like delicate spines from the circumference of the shackles, and appeared worryingly breakable if the item were to be packed underneath a heavy bag of shopping. Grocer's Digest journalist Barry Yrrab made particular note of this shortcoming for a cutting article on the waste of public money on nonsense developments. "As their name might suggest to you, assuming you are not all as morally and intellectually destitute as you appear, the Bindings of Sincere Submission make use of powerful neurotransmitters, amplifying latent psychic powers to enforce the wearer of the ‘victim’ end to abide by the wishes of the ‘victimiser’ end."
"We really do take issue with that naming convention." blurted the commissioner. It was mildly surprising to the press junket that this was the particular statement to which the police took most offense, and many made a note of it for blackmail purposes later.
"And I still do not care about your pathetic emotions.” Dr. Hog replied, matter-of-factly. “No longer will the officer be defied by their quarry. If we wish for a confession of all crimes, then the victim will be forced to speak it. If they are commanded to come quietly and tell their subordinates to lay down their arms, then there will be a peaceful arrest. In short, we have delivered a complete resolution to all problems plaguing the arrest process of armed criminals in their strongholds and hideouts. Are there any questions?"
For the briefest of moments the room was silent, as the assembled crowd tried to take in what they were being expected to believe, but then the flood of queries and demands for attention burst through the dam of incredulity.
"Dr. Hog! Dr. Hog! Angela Gunn here from the Bi-fortnightly Brick Summary. When you say that Officer's Shame has all the powers from 'WSC Versus the Poor' what does that mean? What are the powers exactly?"
"A tedious question from a tedious person." declared the scientist, with the king's approving smile at her side. "You can find the list of superpowers online if you care to even try to do your job properly. Officer's Shame replicates these powers completely."
"I have looked already, Dr. Hog, and I find the results surprising. You're telling us that Officer's Shame has rocket boots, capable of granting flight to the arresting officer?"
"Obviously, yes."
"And a wrist-mounted tear-gas launcher for 'encouraging peaceful protesters to move along'?
"Everything on the list is on the suit."
"But why would an officer ever need a set of disembowelling knives to sprout from their knees? Or a flame to jet from their eyes? Or a ballistic weapon crafted with the express purpose of shooting out lampposts?" pressed Angela, her imagination clearly lacking.
"Ask the commissioner any questions about what the officers need their equipment for. Especially the cruel and sadistic stuff. They seem to really like it.” The commissioner’s pen snapped in half. “Next question, please."
"Janet Nugent, Tyres and Teeth Daily. Does this super suit have the formal endorsement of the crown?"
With reluctant deference to his legal authority in not only the room but the whole country, earned by bravely being born into money, Dr. Hog turned to the king for his response.
"Oh, one would imagine so, yes. Anything which keeps the country great and stops us from suffering on rainy days is something of which this monarchy approves." was the official regal line. There followed the mandatory three-minute standing ovation for such a brave, insightful and clear statement from the king, which he lapped up with quiet dignity and a biscuit wrapped in single-use plastic. Although Janet was, of course, fully committed to the rapturous applause prompted by her question, her mind was busy drafting a scathing report on the king wanting to personally disembowel the poor with knife-laden knees.
"Siddarth Khan, The New Wristwatch Times. I'm more interested in these Bindings of Sincere Submission. They appear to be more like truth serum, handcuffs and mind control combined into a single tool. How is that possible, and would that interfere with wearing a metal-strapped wristwatch? Would a leather strap be more appropriate if combining the two accessories?"
"Finally, a question that doesn't make me want to flip this table and burn down the police commissioner." sighed Dr. Hog. The commissioner was practically glowing with flush-cheeked rage, but with the king present he couldn't afford to let his decorum slip. "It's quite simple; handcuff technology already existed, so all we had to do was augment it with the capability to enforce the victimiser's will on the victim. This, it turned out, was most easily achieved with the use of gravel. You see, gravel has a latent level of psychic activity, which is why it persists as a driveway surface for so many people despite being evidently unsuitable for the job." summarised Dr. Hog, while a sea of copy editors searched for stock footage of gravel and pebbles scattered across the pavement and residential streets. It would be front page material for many weeks. "We have taken the essence of gravel and implanted it into receptors and transmitters in the cuffs, thereby allowing full control over another human."
"Does that not sound a little bit... you know...unethical?" asked an airy voice which made no attempt to introduce either itself or its associated publication. This lack of credentials was plausible justification for ignoring the question, and Dr. Hog was all too happy to jump on that opportunity.
"Any other questions?"
"I believe," said the king, in his ineffable wisdom, "that you already had one about ethics to answer."
Anyone else would have received one of Dr. Hog's grant-revoking, career-ending and lunch-losing looks, one of the really powerful ones that could melt the paint off a jet engine. With so many royal bodyguards in the room, however, it wasn't worth trying ocular regicide.
"I must have missed it." she lied flatly, putting her back onto solid and familiar ground. "I am not concerned that this is unethical. Next question."
Despite having answered the query fully and thoroughly, the questioner spoke up again immediately, revealing himself as a gaunt-looking young man in a worn-out pinstripe suit. His paper-stuffed trilby hat was about ready to split in two, but the obligation of reporting the stories that matter was keeping its more destructive intentions in check.
"How so? Surely arming an officer to be utterly physically unstoppable, as WSC was shown to be in issue 563: "WSC Survives the Judicial System", and then giving them the means to force a false confession, is too much power to be placed in the hands of any human?"
"You'd have thought so, but it turns out that it's fine. I now consider the matter closed and so should you unless you wish to be declared a formal dunce."
To a low level chorus of goading 'ooh's all eyes turned on the scruffy young man, waiting eagerly to see whether he'd bow out to the scientist's taunts or self-declare as a dunce. It was a masterpiece of a trap that Dr. Hog had laid, and it would be the stuff of many features in the Sunday supplements.
For his part, the young man held Dr. Hog's gaze for a few seconds, silently, and then raised a flat-palmed hand in supplication. Ethics be damned, he would not cause his colleagues to think him a dunce.
"Good. Anyone else?"
"Buster Looms! The Herald Bugle Boomer!" roared the eponymous Buster, his barrel chest and sonic waves vibrating the whole room. Those watching at home saw their picture quality crackle with white noise, thanks to the raw electromagnetic power of his bellowing. "I have a question! When will we, the tax paying public, see the benefit of these technological marvels? Can we expect a protracted development and prototyping cycle, or will we see the first models in the field within this quarter?!"
Around Buster there was now a void of chairs and other journalists. The concussive waves of his voice had pushed them clean away, and also managed to further validate Sonia's earplug decisions.
"You can take this one, commissioner. It's down at your level and I grow tired of dealing with questions about your snivelling real world problems." said Dr. Hog, taking her seat and folding her arms in self-satisfied disappointment.
Incandescent with indignation, but not willing to show discord in the presence of the king, Commissioner Kazoo stood and spoke tersely into the microphone array.
"There will be no waiting. The first prototypes are in the field as we speak." He drew a breath and forced a little more calmness to override his demeanour. "If the live video feed could please be initiated..."
"Then we'll all be able to get on with our day of very important work." sniped Dr. Hog from her seat, ever eager to engage in outreach and PR activities. The king, not one for noticing sarcasm, nodded sagely. Behind them all the slideshow abruptly shifted to washed-out live video, showing a group of police officers gathered around a parked fleet of vehicles. Their chosen parking place, as observed by many of the motoring journalists in attendance, was in the cul-de-sac of a high-rise estate in one of the dingier districts of the city; soulless grey blocks and stained, off-white rendering loomed over them as if threatening to infect the world with its own decay.
"We are now seeing the body-cam footage of Officer Isabella Grunt, outside the confirmed residence of the East End's most notorious cartel boss, one Jimmy 'The Gate' Taylor. The Gate rose to notoriety as an enforcer within an organised crime syndicate, owing mostly to his distinctive style of beating victims with a small iron gate, such as one might normally have on the access way to their front garden. For many years we've been building a case against him, but to make an arrest would involve a direct frontal assault on one of his safe houses and, thanks to the limitations of biology that Dr. Hog has so heartlessly laid at the feet of my people, this was not possible to conduct safely. The..." he sighed "…Officer's Shame, a working title that will definitely be changed..."
Dr. Hog shook her head at the suggestion.
"... And the Bindings of Sincerity will not only allow us to deliver justice for Jimmy's victims, but also enable us to dismantle the whole criminal web of which The Gate is at the centre. Would Sergeant Hearnes please activate his camera and step into view."
After a short delay, possibly as a result of Sergeant Hearnes eating a chocolate biscuit on the job, a terrifyingly convincing replica of WSC's chrome-heavy super suit stepped into view. Reflecting every light source in the Greater London area, it was like a man made of mirrors had taken personal offence at the idea of other people being able to see, and had subsequently made it his mission to right that wrong. Even the visor, which was a blackened glass of some sort, was lined with powerful LEDs to add to the photonic assault; they also helped to obscure a couple of small exhaust ports, which presumably served to direct the jets of flame alluded to previously.
With a brief flickering and some protracted buffering, the video feed showing Sergeant Hearnes was pushed to one side of the screen. Greedily taking up the liberated space was a second video feed, rather like the first, but provided by the cameras mounted in Officer's Shame. All eyes were on the screen, fascinated despite the fact it was footage of two police officers standing still and looking at one another. Geraldine Yule of Diving Denier Monthly, the only magazine brave enough to be dedicated to actively proving that diving does not exist, scoped out an article entitled '7 Oscar-worthy scenes from the notably diving-free police press conference video feed'.
"Is everything working with the suit, Sergeant?" asked the commissioner theatrically. The metal-clad man on the screen gave a thumbs up, accidentally firing a tranquilliser dart into a nearby officer in the process. No-one paid it any mind. "Excellent. Then you are authorised to proceed with the operation."
"Surely you aren't going to show us live footage of this?" complained the scruffy young man from before. "We might see someone die or be terribly injured. Anything could be happening in there!"
"No questions during the video." barked the commissioner, just after the instruction would have been most useful.
"And what if The Gate is watching? You'll have tipped him off!" continued the man, rudely ignoring the 'no questions' rule.
"Only a loser would keep asking questions instead of watching." sneered Dr. Hog with a snug grin. He was once again ensnared in her devious, terrifyingly well-crafted ambush. Although he was many things, the man knew he was not a loser, and therefore could not in good conscience continue raising his concerns. The supplicating hand went up once more.
On screen, events were progressing. On the commissioner's orders, Sergeant Hearnes had begun to approach to tower block. Whether out fear of being labelled a loser, or simple common courtesy, nobody in the press junket spoke. The video feed rolled on, and it looked as if Sergeant Hearnes was a little off target in aiming for the door, instead walking on a direct vector towards a ground floor wall. His path took him through the bins, for which he refused to stop or divert, scattering litter and black bags surprisingly far with his powerfully mechanised legs. A few environmental journalists made displeased notes to libel the commissioner for that later.
Officer Grunt's feed showed the super suit stop in front of the building, while Hearnes' showed a disinteresting and disintegrating patch of wall. It appeared that he was committing a significant amount of time and attention to inspecting the quality of the ageing render, until both videos showed a metallic fist slam into the masonry. The commissioner pinched the bridge of his nose, Dr. Hog shook her head and muttered something, and the king smiled politely, as befitting a panellist of his standing.
Once the unprovoked assault of an innocent structure had been completed, Sergeant Hearnes wiggled his fingers unsurely, while his head flitted around as if watching an unseen fly or distant pelican.
"Your Sergeant has not done a good job of learning the operation of the suit. It seems that Officer's Shame has shamed him once again." observed the doctor. It was unnecessary both in being said at all, and in the way she purposefully leaned into the microphones before speaking, but such were her ways. Article plans were split between praise for her transparency and condemnation for her haircut.
All such planning stopped suddenly. This wasn't due to a spontaneous lack of concern for time management, but as a direct result of Sergeant Hearnes' feet erupting with twin jets of blue flame. His video feed showed a blurred mess of grey and beige, only intelligible as the rushing ascent of a tower block by virtue of Officer Grunt's impressive camerawork at ground level. Rumours of the police force hiring professional film crews were planned for circulation in the next morning's gossip columns, while the science journals worked on praise for Dr. Hog's outstanding achievements despite being utterly unlikeable by every reasonable metric. She sat on her plastic chair with legs crossed, fingers in a steeple, and sense of superiority on full display. That she had also written the commissioner a note detailing how much she despised him, and that she had held that note up for the photographers to see first, were added bonuses.
By this time, the feed from Officer's Shame was showing a much more static scene. The sergeant, having finally got to grips with the boot-based flight controls, was hovering outside a tenth storey window, while the flames from his jets melted the paint below. Officer Grunt’s view showed the full extent of the scorching damage he’d done to the exterior of the building, but nobody seemed terribly worried.
"Proceed with breaching! Go, go, go!" ordered Commissioner Kazoo, as if he were acting in a tiresome police thriller and not behind a plywood desk in a church hall. Dr. Hog threw a ball of paper at the back of his head, and the king gave a royal wave with a cupped hand to signal that he was still paying attention.
A reflective pane of stained and murky glass, which had hitherto given nothing away, burst into a star field of cuboid fragments ahead of Sergeant Hearnes' practiced hammer-blow punch. Unveiled to both the officer and the viewing audience of reporters was a juxtaposed amalgamation of decadence and dinginess, a fusion of styles that could only be the result of organised crime or a misspent lottery fund. Damp-stained walls were adorned with gold-framed artwork. Rotting sofas held boxes of fine jewellery and expensive gadgets. Cigars had been stuffed into gaps in the floorboards, which seemed like a waste and an accident waiting to happen, and the charred, sparking toaster was situated on a solid gold coffee table. Sergeant Hearnes floated inside, setting the drab curtains ablaze, before switching off the jets and slamming down onto the cracked laminate flooring.
Rapt journalists were watching with wide eyes as the suited officer stomped through the flat, their hands typing and writing blindly to embellish what they were seeing for the morning’s stories.
Unfortunately for Hearnes, but perfectly for the demonstration, his breaking and entering into The Gate's flat didn’t leave him lonely for long; emerging from the doorway was a stream of what could only be described as faceless cronies, fodder for any armed and armoured sergeant's demonstration of unnecessary force. Fitting this description nicely, they unleashed a torrent of futile and ill-advised violence at Sergeant Hearnes, coming at him with iron bars, knives and small arms gunfire, according to the notes made by Filipe Smithers of The Violent Crime Tribune. Their actions would receive a respectable seven out of ten on the unacceptability meter, missing out on higher marks only because of the nature of the sergeant's arrival. The sergeant himself, meanwhile, would be at a ten almost immediately.
True to the claims made by Dr. Hog, Officer's Shame rendered him as impervious to harm as the Wondrous Shelled Cretin himself. Hard blows from heavy objects bounced harmlessly off the thick, metal carapace, and were met with stiff backhands, gouts of pepper spray, or egregious disembowelment from the knee-based weaponry. Gunfire ricocheted away into the surrounding masonry, or what was left of it after roaring blasts of flame that spewed from either side of the visor camera. Officer's Shame had transformed Sergeant Hearnes into an unstoppable wall of arresting power, unbothered by the resistance of The Gate's private army as he stormed his way through the two-bed flat with a single bathroom and barely functional kitchen. Bats, blows and bones broke under his one-man assault, and the press were treated to a first-hand display of the chokeholds, uppercuts and cracked ribs of mechanised justice. Many of them had ceased keeping a tally of the injured, or of the manifold methods that Sergeant Hearnes had employed to suppress resistance. They'd even stopped listing the various personal attacks he'd shrugged off during the assault. All they could do was watch in awe, particularly when he lifted a bothersome brute by the face and slammed him, back first, through a wooden door.
Behind it, when the debris and splinters of broken door had settled, Hearnes came face-to-face with the target at the heart of everything: Jimmy ‘The Gate’ Taylor in a gaudy but tidy bedroom.
To his credit, Jimmy didn't show fear as the metal monster approached him. He showed confusion, certainly, and was taken off guard by the speed of the advance, but he wasn’t scared. With the confidence of a man who failed to understand the nature of Officer’s Shame, he let rip with a furious barrage of blows from a huge wrought-iron gate that barely fit in the room, but Sergeant Hearnes either didn't notice or didn't care. Instead he slapped the weapon from Jimmy's hand, nearly taking the hand off with it, and produced from somewhere off-camera the Bindings of Sincere Submission.
The eyes of the wise, at this stage, should have been on Dr. Hog. She was watching the video with a mixture of maternal pride and condescending smugness, pleased by the performance and consequences of her creations. But when the sergeant began to fit himself and Jimmy with the manacles, all of her sneering joy was transformed into grey-faced, wide-eyed panic.
"No! No, stop him! Stop the fool!" she shrieked, scrabbled forwards and clawing at the commissioner.
"Unhand me, doctor!" the commissioner growled back. "Your derision is noted but my men can capably apply handcuffs!"
"He's doing it wrong! He's..."
She stopped, as the manacles on the feed clicked shut on both wrists.
"The lights on the bands! It's violet for violent victim, and viridian for virtuous victimiser. The system could not possibly be simpler and, apparently, neither could the officer in command of it." she wailed, clutching her head with both hands.
"What are you blathering about?!" the commissioner demanded, irritably watching the lack of affirmative arresting action from the video feed.
"He's put them on backwards!"
It didn’t sound like much of a problem. Commissioner Kazoo was half way through rebuking the doctor for wasting his time when he turned the same shade of grey as she had. Slowly, a heavy blanket of realisation draped itself down over the crowd, the TV crews, and everyone else in the room with the exception of the king. He wore a concerned expression, suitable for a royal hearing the plight of a peasant, but neither understood nor cared enough to do much about it.
"Then The Gate..."
Sergeant Hearnes' video feed went dark. On display on the screen was the same view of a scorched tower block from Officer Grunt, peeling panels of melted paint flaking away in the gentle wind. The other officers shuffled and milled uncomfortably while they waited, unaware of what was happening inside.
“Pull back! All units retreat. Officer’s Shame is compromised and you are all in danger; flee! Kill the feed!” the commissioner barked into his radio, for want of anything else to do. In line with his advice, the video flickered to black. He stood unmoving, staring at the blank screen, before rubbing at his cheeks with both hands. Dr. Hog slumped like a deflated cauliflower on her chair. The king smiled politely. There was silence in the room.
Slowly, a hand was raised in the audience.
"So... was it the police force's intention to arm a dangerous cartel with an impervious super soldier?"
There was no reply. The headlines would soon be made, but no-one was quite sure what they'd be made of.