Duckett was not sure if the three-eyed mutants in the mall stalls of New Indianapolis could tell the future when they went into their trance or if they were just bilking tourists but he had no interest in either outcome. He usually just hurried by them as quickly on the way to NCAA headquarters, coat buttoned up against the elements and against the crowds of hustlers, unlicensed augmentors, and thieves. He knew these alleys, and he knew what was waiting for him. "It's Duckett," he said to the NCAA guards who never remembered who he was and how many pairs of pants he had confiscated in one legendary raid. He even forgot, sometimes.
"Hell, it's cold out there," Duckett said, settling into the dingy basement office he shared with Crandall. To get there, he had to go through three checkpoints across rows of auditing machines and past the authenticators that now took up most of the investigations department and down four flights of stairs to a subbasement now mainly used for storage.
"What's going on up there, three ring circus?" Crandall said. Duckett hadn't noticed anything. He generally kept his head down these days. There was very little pants-related activity, and no one up there wanted to hear from him.
"No, what's going on?" Duckett said.
"You didn't see the decks last night? They got 'em. They say they do. Brutal Bolus. All hell's breaking loose."
"Damn."
Brutal Bolus. The top basketball player in the country, and he was augmented to hell and back. At least, that was what the NCAA thought, although Bolus had passed every test they made him take for three years, even when he blasted Laser State's entire roster of forwards with his forehead cannon.
"And no one bothered to ask me about his socks," Duckett said. Crandall couldn't smile, but he managed a jocular grimace.
Duckett was not sure why the NCAA kept him around. He was their most senior investigator but that had happened largely by default after the Meltdowns. He served at first largely as a symbol that the NCAA still had a mission and still cared about amateurism even after basketball stopped becoming recognizable and became a violent basketball-related spectacle that evolved from a four-volume Codex of Futuristic Violent Basketball Rules invented by Bill Laimbeer that also had full color illustrations about speculative haircuts.
The NCAA was not interested in pants anymore. Nor was it interested in shoes, cars, or even cash. The NCAA was now issued in augmentors. Every college basketball player these days was augmented somehow. In the early days, they had their arms replaced with cannons or grappling hooks fused to their backs. But soon players began to show up with strange abilities, eerie abilities to float slightly longer in the air than they should, abilities to move the ball around without touching it, slightly different cannons grafted onto their arms that the NCAA didn't like. These augments were sophisticated and increasingly undetectable. The players were rumored to come from vats and then show up at AAU tournaments with unconvincing backstories and the same few dozen memories. The NCAA's investigations department shifted to unearth these illegal augmentors and ban them from college basketball.
Duckett used to sleep in cars and in fetid piles of laundry in frat houses to catch an illegal pants transaction, but that was not how the NCAA worked anymore. Its analysts monitored patterns: patterns of how players moved, how they bludgeoned, how they spoke in interviews. Players suspected of illegal augments could be seized, and investigators subjected them to a series of cognitive tests. Even the augments from big time programs who had been coached to pass would eventually crack, except for one. For three years, Brutal Bolus had been called in multiple times a season. They gave him the Ramper test. They subjected him to Graschman's Paradox. It did not matter. He passed with ease, he smiled, and then he went out and put his forehead through a point guard ineffectively menacing him with a chainsaw. The NCAA made him his top target.
"How did they finally get him?" Duckett said. He didn't really understand the new methods and did not particularly want to. The whole enterprise seemed sort of grotesque to him, and the new analysts were blank and busy in a way he did not understand.
"Don't know yet," Crandall said.
"Duckett up here. Now." The call on the old deck in the office startled him. No one had called down here before. He did not even realize it was connected to anything and thought it was a piece of junk like everything else. But there was no mistaking that voice. It was Lauck, the Subdirector. Until that second, he would have bet that Lauck had no idea he was still here or even alive, but now he was summoned upstairs. "On my way," Duckett said.
The NCAA offices were in chaos. Chairs were strewn everywhere. Analysis stations had dent in them. It was eerily empty, and he had no idea where everyone was until he found them. The hallway to Lauck's office looked like a field hospital, and analysts and other NCAA personnel lay around. The lucky ones were getting bandages. The unlucky ones were getting sheets. It looked like when they tried to bring Bolus in, he had other ideas.
Lauck looked banged up. He had blood on his sleeve, but it wasn't his. You could fit a change of socks into the bags under his eyes.
"Duckett, how familiar are you with the Bolus case?" Lauck said.
"Just what's on the deck," said Duckett. "Crandall told me you got him?"
"Got him is one way to put it," Lauck said. Duckett realized now that they had a much bigger problem than eligibility on their hands. Bolus was dead. Bolus was dead and Duckett was up here. The mercury drained from his spine.
"You're probably wondering why I asked for you," Lauck said. "Bolus is in there, what's left of him. Whatever augments he had are now gone. No one we know about is capable of anything like his. But when we got him we did manage to salvage these." He opened a biohazard crate and steam hissed out. Duckett leaned over. It was a pair of pants. Pretty standard model, decent stitching, athletic cut. He reached out to feel them but Lauck grabbed his arm.
"Look closer, Duckett." Duckett leaned in. The pants were moving. It was subtle, small undulation, almost impossible to spot without staring at it. It was like a breathing motion. Duckett looked at Lauck.
"Is that a living tissue? You found these on Bolus? What's going on here, Lauck? What the hell kind of pants are those?" Duckett said.
"That's what I want you to find out," Lauck said.
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