The Detective sat comfortably inside the transparent cage as if it were another well-appointed library and the scientists and soldiers standing around it an assorted group of suspects, witnesses, the casually involved, and a murderer or three. To be a Detective was to be already at least half-fictional.
"Let me begin by clarifying the fundamental error that has shackled the official investigation. An understandable mistake: if one builds a secret research campus in the middle of Alaska to perform brain enhancement research of enormous economic and military value, it is natural to frame a safety breach followed by the violent death of a large number of researchers as a single act of sabotage."
"This assumption could explain the initial event at the lab but it falls short when it comes to the murders. Important researchers were killed, yes, but, with apologies to the memory of my colleagues, not in an order that would make sure first of the ones that would be hardest to replace. Add to these facts the complexity of the murders themselves, the practical difficulties of either a single murderer or multiple saboteurs, and... No, no. The hypothesis will not hold."
The Detective dismissed this idea with a wave of his hands. The cage was too small for pacing around in the way he clearly wanted to so he was compensating by using his hands almost as an orchestra conductor.
"Hypothesis:" The Detective raised a finger. "The lab event and the subsequent dispersal of the Sherlock Mod was an accident. The lab's security guidelines demanded strict air-gapping for any untested neural implant code but it's not a stretch to imagine researchers cutting corners as they hear the hungry snarls of budget cuts closing in on them. And there is of course the pull of curiosity. Who wouldn't be tempted to acquire in a moment nearly superhuman observation and deduction skills?" His smile was partly ironic and partly self-deprecating. "Mix these motivations with the promiscuous nature of peer-to-peer networking between heavily cyborgized researchers, and this aspect of the situation becomes not just plausible but inevitable."
"Hypothesis:" The Detective raised two fingers now before making an apologetic gesture. "Here we enter almost the realm of the metaphysical. Even here at the very epicenter of the modern view of the mind as an engineering and engineerable construct. The moniker "Sherlock Mod" was an universal but informal one. The neural implant code itself was designed, at least in theory, targeting cognitive specs less fanciful than a fictional character. But there was insight in Doyle's writing or we would not be still under its spell more than a hundred and fifty years later. More than once did Holmes and Watson speak of Sherlock's frightful potential as a criminal, had his ethical development followed a different orientation. And who, among the canon's crowds, is more similar to Holmes in the structure of his mind, if not the Napoleon of Crime, the brilliant and murderous Professor Moriarty?"
The Detective closed his eyes, grimaced, and opened them again to look at the audience that was keeping him captive. "I assume you have already studied all neural implant logs. It is possible you have already estimated a hundred-percent success rate as a cognitive amplifier. This is true as far as mental faculties go. It even induces obsessive motivational patterns that I suspect were included under the unconscious influence of the fictional archetype rather than engineering necessity."
The Detective made an unnecessary dramatic pause.
"In terms of ethical implications, the split between a tendency to commit crimes and a tendency to solve them is about three to two. In that order."
Another pause. A few in his audience had gone pallid in the stoic way favored by government agents.
"And then the murders began. I would encourage you to give greater weight to the recorded explanations of members of the research group than to any straightforward forensic analysis you might perform. Every murder was committed by one or more criminal geniuses with enough skill and knowledge to alter and redirect any obvious clue, and it accordingly took analytical genius to solve them, even if as the hours passed the size of both groups diminished with unrelenting pace. The last murder was, it must be said, not hard to solve. There were only two people left. Unable to imagine a way to escape justice," concluded the Detective, "when confronted with irrefutable proof the murderer committed suicide."
People pressed for detail, which was supplied with a mixture of sadness and professional pride. Investigators were able to reconstruct all murders, the forensic evidence matched his flawless memory and brilliant hypotheses, and soon the man was freed from the transparent cage.
(Originally posted on my blog.)