Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow Read Online Free PDF

events.
    The most recent chat session had been Strand with employees Sami, Gary, Carl, Jerry. Talk of data trees, pointers, trends, traces, all centered around stray data sets that sparked up in the wake of the Annetka murder. A text from an ambulance driver. Voice messages among NYC homicide detectives. Web searches from police IP addresses that hint at details of the superstar’s apartment. And there is the single photograph captured from a personal email. Some overworked official’s hasty blunder, sending such an image on an insecure coffee shop Wi-Fi.
    It is a face. It is only a face. It is a face flawlessly removed from its skull. Lips, eyelids and lashes, ears, strands of long hair from the scalp. It is Annetka’s face, devoid of everything that had made her alive, the mere covering from her perfectly-formed skull. It is Annetka’s face, stapled to a wall in her Park Avenue apartment, so nicely placed that even with blood trailing down it forms perfect composition with a small Renoir oil and a Dali pen-and-ink.
    The rest of the apartment conjures a horrific movie set, where human bodies have been diced by whirling blades and sprayed through giant nozzles, as fertilizer. Every wall, every window, each piece of furniture, sink, bathtub, shower, doorknob, kitchen appliance… all carpets, Oriental rugs, magazines, chairs and tables are covered with a slippery red substance which on a fishing boat would be called chum .
    No one outside the apartment heard anything, no one saw strangers come or go, security videos reveal nothing. The camera net inside her apartment had ceased to function. Neither the doorman nor the five building security agents staffed 24/7 saw the slightest hint of anything wrong, until Annetka’s manager used her passkey to open the door, and ran screaming.
    Skeletal parts , remarkably, are undamaged though all flesh had been cleanly removed. Forensic experts carefully wrap the bones and spirit them away to a morgue annex for autopsy. DNA testing is underway.
    Strand knows this murder will hit the streets and tweets as the new bogeyman in the closet. Details close-held at this moment will be everywhere within hours, will feed a fresh epidemic of worldwide fear. The common fallacy: whatever happened to Annetka can happen to anyone anywhere. Fearful egos will ignore the facts, such as the superstar’s glamour, fame, money, incredible voice, voluptuous body and sexual allure. Even now, friends of the singer, friends of friends of friends, acquaintances of people who had known her only marginally, are being queued up for talk shows, two-hour marathons with rotating hosts. The horror is beyond imagining, and all the world wants a taste of it. Privacy? Hell, it’s show biz.
    The crime scene details will leak, Strand knows there is too much quiet money itching to pry things open. Who can resist a story about four people whose body parts are so intermingled it’s not possible to tell who from who? One homicide cop called it The Blender Murders . Tweet and search traffic on the term now accelerates. The savage icon is the image of Annetka’s face, stapled to the wall, perfect. An eyeless gape of horror.
    Fantasia Records has already filed suit against Next History. Merely because Strand’s computer models provided no warning of the superstar’s impending death. Annetka’s contribution to Fantasia was half a billion annually. They are after Strand for eight times that.
    The police have no workable theories. Zip. A team of forensic psychologists, after two of them finish puking and swear they’ll never eat meat again, can match this with nothing they have known. Not the methodology, not the means, no psychological profile in all of forensic history can explain what happened to the angel-voiced singer and her three companions.
    Or in particular, why?

Eternal Gratitude
    He does not know why he was summoned here. If human, he would be a tower of seething white rage. He is possessed of surpassing intellect,