The Origin
THE BEGINNING
NICHOLAS HAZARD — PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS
New York City — 1947
Before Nick Hazard was a machine, he was a man.
Nicholas Hazard was somewhere in his late forties when the case came through his office door. He had already spent years making a respectable living finding missing people, exposing cheating husbands, locating stolen property and occasionally becoming involved in cases the police preferred he hadn't.
His office door read simply:
NICHOLAS HAZARD
PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS
Hazard had a reputation.
He was observant, patient and annoyingly difficult to fool. He had an equally well-earned reputation for ignoring instructions when he believed somebody was in danger.
But there was another Nicholas Hazard almost nobody knew existed.
Beneath his detective office was a laboratory.
Not the sort of laboratory one would expect to find in 1947.
Vacuum tubes glowed behind metal panels. Oscilloscopes traced green waves across glass screens. Wires ran between homemade machines whose purposes would have baffled most engineers of the time.
Nick had always been fascinated by electricity, machinery and, most of all, the human brain.
He believed thoughts were more than ideas.
They were patterns.
Electrical patterns.
And if a pattern could be measured...
perhaps it could be recorded.
It was an interesting theory.
Until the day Nicholas Hazard discovered he was dying.
THE CASE THAT KILLED NICK HAZARD
It began as an ordinary missing-person investigation.
A research scientist had disappeared from a private laboratory.
The police suspected the man had simply run away. His employer wanted the matter handled quietly.
Nick suspected neither explanation was true.
He found the scientist.
Dead.
What followed led Hazard into something far larger than a missing-person case.
Someone inside the laboratory had been secretly developing an experimental biological agent—something never intended to leave containment.
Nick discovered who was responsible.
Unfortunately, they discovered Nick.
During the confrontation, a containment vessel shattered.
Nick remembered the sound of breaking glass.
He remembered someone shouting.
He remembered a strange chemical smell.
And he remembered looking down at the liquid splashed across his hand.
Hazard still solved the case.
He exposed the operation and made certain the person responsible answered for what had happened.
Then he went to see a doctor.
The news was considerably less satisfying.
There was no treatment.
No cure.
Whatever had entered Nick Hazard's body was spreading.
The doctor gave him weeks.
Perhaps months.
Nick sat silently for several seconds.
He wasn't particularly frightened of death.
He was irritated by it.
There were still cases sitting on his desk.
PROJECT HAZARD
Most men given a few months to live might settle their affairs.
Nicholas Hazard went downstairs.
He turned on the lights in his laboratory.
For years he had experimented with measuring the electrical patterns of the human brain. He had constructed crude devices capable of recording fragments of neural activity.
Now the experiment had a deadline.
His own.
Nick began working almost constantly.
He expanded the equipment.
He recorded memories.
Speech patterns.
Emotional responses.
Investigative reasoning.
Instinct.
Fear.
Humor.
Moral judgment.
Everything that made Nicholas Hazard... Nicholas Hazard.
He called it:
PROJECT HAZARD
But Nick encountered a problem even he couldn't solve.
He could preserve the pattern.
He could not build the machine that would eventually contain it.
Not in 1947.
The materials didn't exist.
The processors didn't exist.
The artificial neural architecture didn't exist.
Humanity hadn't invented the technology necessary to finish Project Hazard.
So Nick did something extraordinary.
He decided to let the future finish it for him.
THE ARCHIVE
Deep beneath his office, Hazard constructed a sealed chamber.
Inside it he placed everything.
His neural archive.
His voice recordings.
His research.
Engineering specifications.
Personality maps.
Thousands of pages of notes.
And instructions.
Very detailed instructions.
Nick designed Project Hazard so that it could evolve.
As technology advanced, automated systems would monitor the outside world, acquire new information and gradually redesign the machine that Nick himself could never build.
Decades might pass.
Perhaps centuries.
Nick would never see the result.
At least...
the biological Nick Hazard wouldn't.
Eventually only one task remained.
The activation date.
Nick entered it personally.
OCTOBER 17, 2189
Why he chose that date was not included in the surviving records.
Perhaps he knew something.
Perhaps he calculated something.
Or perhaps the answer lies somewhere inside memories even Nick Hazard can no longer completely access.
Nick sealed the chamber.
The machinery went silent.
And sometime afterward, Nicholas Hazard died.
242 YEARS LATER
Cities rose.
Buildings fell.
Wars were fought.
Governments disappeared.
Technology transformed civilization.
Human beings reached farther into space.
Machines learned to think.
Artificial intelligence became commonplace.
And beneath a city that had forgotten Nicholas Hazard had ever existed...
a clock continued counting.
Year after year.
Decade after decade.
Century after century.
Waiting.
Until—
OCTOBER 17, 2189
A tiny red light illuminated inside the darkness.
SYSTEM DATE CONFIRMED: 2189
A relay clicked.
Then another.
Ancient machinery awakened.
Power moved through systems descended from equipment Nicholas Hazard had built more than two centuries earlier.
Lights flickered along the underground laboratory.
Hydraulic pumps engaged.
Diagnostic systems activated.
A mechanical hand moved.
Then stopped.
Two blue eyes opened in the darkness.
For the first time in 242 years...
Nicholas Hazard looked at the world.
He knew his name.
He knew his office.
He remembered the missing scientist.
He remembered the broken container.
He remembered the doctor.
He remembered rain against the windows of his office in 1947.
And he remembered dying.
Nick slowly raised one metallic hand and examined it.
He turned it over.
Moved the fingers.
Then looked at the other.
After several seconds he said:
"Well... that's new."
NICK HAZARD — PRIVATE EYE, 2189
The world Nicholas Hazard awakened into was almost unrecognizable.
The city he remembered had become a towering maze of neon, holograms, artificial intelligence, humans, robots and machines that would have seemed impossible in 1947.
But some things hadn't changed.
People still lied.
People still disappeared.
People still stole.
People still killed.
And innocent people still occasionally needed somebody stubborn enough to ask the questions everyone else had stopped asking.
So Nicholas Hazard did what Nicholas Hazard had always done.
He became a private investigator.
Again.
He found an office.
Put his name on the door.
Bought himself a fedora.
And went back to work.
HAZARD INVESTIGATIONS
Discreet. Efficient. Mostly Legal.
ERROR 47
There is, however, something wrong with Nick Hazard.
Or perhaps something unexpectedly right.
His mechanical architecture was never designed to contain an entire human consciousness.
Occasionally Nick experiences memories that shouldn't technically belong to him.
A rainy street in 1947.
The smell of coffee.
A woman's face he cannot quite identify.
His old office.
The doctor's voice.
The sensation of cold glass beneath his fingertips.
Sometimes they appear as dreams.
Sometimes as sudden flashes.
Sometimes they interfere with his systems badly enough to trigger a diagnostic anomaly:
ERROR 47
ECHO, Nick's artificial-intelligence partner, has attempted to explain the problem logically.
ECHO: "Those events occurred two hundred and forty-two years before your activation."
Nick's answer is always the same.
NICK: "I didn't say they happened yesterday. I said I remember them."
And that leaves one question even Nicholas Hazard cannot answer.
When those blue eyes opened in 2189...
did a machine containing the memories of Nicholas Hazard come to life?
Or did Nicholas Hazard himself wake up?
Ask Nick and he'll tell you the question is ridiculous.
He remembers 1947.
He remembers his office.
He remembers the case that killed him.
He remembers dying.
As far as Nick Hazard is concerned...
he never left.