That had been twenty years previously and Dex had risen through the ranks fairly quickly. He discovered early on that he truly liked the work and demonstrated a definite aptitude for it. He first expected that he’d make a pretty good goon, but as it happened he was actually more inclined to sort out puzzles than sap guys on the head, so now found himself as a Lieutenant in the detective squad. The organization took its structure from historical police departments, though functionally once people advanced out of the goon squad, they operated more or less independently.
The organization was really a loose group of individuals who pooled resources and shared information. It didn’t even have an official name. One of the detectives who had worked in Dex’s division years before was a fan of old superhero comics, though, and for laughs started calling the squad the Cubicle Men — nondescript people who work at faceless jobs in cubicles by day and fight crime by night, that sort of thing. The name stuck and soon spread throughout the Namerican branch of the organization and by the time Dex joined everyone in his zone referred to themselves by the lighthearted name.
The captains of each detective squad often assigned cases, though each member of the team was free to refuse a case or ask to work on a particular file. Or a particular detective would get a reputation and clients would just show up. Dex’s meeting the previous day was one of those, but he would have asked to work on this one anyway, if it had come up for grabs. The case was fairly unusual, after all, and Dex did enjoy the strange and unusual. He looked at the still image of his client while explaining to the customer on the call how to calibrate the new neural enhancers. Her avatar was pleasing to his eye, he had to admit, but that wasn’t why Dex was staring. It just wasn’t every day that you got to investigate the murder of your client.
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