The Gottschalk Working
Fiction: A detective looks back on a gruesome cybernetic conspiracy and an encounter with evil.
This short story is part of our October horror collection, Future Weird, beyond the pale of what we publish the rest of the year. Reader discretion is advised.
Detective Angelo Calabrese, known to his peers in the MPD as “Creepy,” unholstered his Glock 19 and prepared to enter the decrepit farmhouse. It was a hot and moonless August night, and the city-boy cop with the crooked nose (Golden Gloves champion, 2008) found himself in the deep hinterlands of Frederick County. Nobody—not the Maryland State Police, nor the local constables—was coming to save him. Worse still, “Creepy” Calabrese was on his own and off-the-clock. His mission that night went against all department regulations. Hell, the man he was after, Hermann Gottschalk, was not even guilty of a crime or publicly accused of one. At least, not an official crime, that is. Calabrese knew differently. He knew in his weary bones that the elusive Gottschalk was part of something big, something sinister. That’s why he loaded his Glock with one silver bullet… just in case.
After midnight, with the lonesome sound of cicadas and barn owls in his ears, Calabrese kicked in the door to the farmhouse and left his sanity behind.
I interviewed the detective years later. We met via Zoom, because he refused to divulge his precise location. I told him that I was fine with the setup. After all, we were both dissidents in a way—two paranoid men driven underground due to forces beyond our control. My sin was political, wrapped up in the violent fallout and official proscriptions following the 2032 election. His was more professional. Creepy, as I understood it, had been drummed out and smeared by his own department as a deranged lunatic. Chief Ortega used a press release to compare him to Harry Picard, the old MPD manhunter who became a professional crank after claiming to have unmasked a real-life vampire during a serial killer epidemic along the Potomac in 1964. Calabrese was following in those ignoble footsteps.
After leaving the department, he was forced into a second career as a professional conspiracy theorist on low-frequency amateur radio. I, for one, found Calabrese lucid, if a little manic in his energy and presentation. The man also proved prone to rambling, and it took me a minute to derail him from his favorite topic—ultraterrestrials.
“Mr. Calabrese, is it ok if we talk about the Gottschalk incident?”
The former detective’s salt-and-pepper head dipped a little below the screen. When it came up again, the usually jovial Calabrese looked worn, withdrawn, and exasperated. Clearly, my simple question had touched a deep fissure in the man’s tortured nervous system.
“You know, kid,” he said with the last vestiges of his Baltimore accent poking through, “I had a feeling that you wanted to talk about the Gottschalk case, and yet every time I hear that name it makes me sick inside. Can you understand that? You have anything in your life that just makes you nauseous?”
“Sure,” I said with a little too much flippancy. “I got roped into joining the BlackSwan collective. Was a true believer in the cause of AI liberation. Worked throughout the night to create digital tulpas to cause the complete destruction of the human-centric economy.”
“I remember some of that. D’ya regret it?”
It was my turn to bow my head. I furrowed my brow and scratched my chin. “Don’t know. It’s complicated. Sometimes I regret it, sure. It’s not easy living life with your name on the proscribed lists. But, on some nights, I take pride in having rebelled.”
“So, you do understand, kid. That’s good. That puts me at ease. Ok, you want to know the story? I’ll tell you.”
The interior of the farmhouse was pitch black. That would normally pose trouble, but Calabrese could tell by touch that the place was naked. No furniture, no knick-knacks, and no tripping hazards. As a result, the detective glided through the whole home until he was forced in the name of thorough investigation to descend into the cellar. The good Catholic boy crossed himself before braving the veritable plunge into the cold earth, but it all proved for naught. The cellar was empty, except for a few scurrying rats. Calabrese returned to the main level.
“Did it have any kind of smell to it?” I asked. “Your report mentions a bad odor in the place.”
“Nah. The funk was upstairs. I only smelled that the closer I got to the attic.”
“Were you surprised that the house was so clean?”
“Yes and no. You see, when I was a rookie, I worked a lot of robbery and drug cases. Every American cop starts out that way, or at least they used to. Well, robbers and drug dealers use what they call stash houses. Crash pads, if you will. They’re usually apartments leased to a false name, or officially unoccupied townhouses where the neighbors aren’t known for being nosey. You get the drift. Anyway, your typical crook is a total pig. They turn those stash houses into unlivable nightmares. We’re talking shit-filled toilets without running water, windows covered in trash bags and duct tape, and nothing but a sea of fast-food bags and wrappers everywhere. Real filth. I hated those cases.
“However, every once in a blue moon, we’d run into real professionals. Russian bratva or Albanians or the last Sicilian holdouts on the East Coast. Their stash houses were always immaculate. Pristine. No cunt hairs on the rug, no piss in the sink, nothing. Cleaner than a priest’s conscience. The Gottschalk farmhouse reminded me of those places.”
I seized a moment to butt in as he took a breath. “Can I back you up just a little bit? How did you find out about Hermann Gottschalk in the first place? From what I’ve seen, the guy was a ghost until you made the case public.”
“In a roundabout way, I found Gottschalk because of an unusual informer I had. Mehal. Jeremy Mehal. I can say his name now because he’s dead, God rest his soul. Jeremy was a mortuary assistant across the river in Prince George’s County. You can imagine how busy he was. Despite that, he had a memory like a steel trap. Guy never forgot a face or an important fact about someone, alive or dead. So, when synthetic syphilis first appeared, he tapped in and started taking mental notes. Whenever a body came in with obvious signs of infection, he’d make a report just for himself. That’s how he came to recognize the virus as not only novel, but artificial.”
I nod. “Right. A senate hearing found that it was a Chinese bioweapon.”
Calabrese rambles on. “The original strain was definitely that, but the case I worked on had nothing to do with China. It was purely homegrown. I was the one, and the only one on the whole damn force, that connected synthetic syphilis to the independent sex robot trade. They laughed at me for it, but I was proven right in time.”
“Tell me more about that.”
His eyes flashed with old memory. “It was, pardon the pun, naked politics. Mayor Ortega was heavy into sex workers’ rights and other garbage back then. He promoted sex robots as a way for poor youths to move up the economic ladder. The city already had a big public push to register prostitutes and give them free weekly shots, but Ortega’s administration pushed it beyond that. They created workshops at the community colleges, to teach street kids how to build rudimentary fleshbots. Really pushing it hard. I remind you of all of that to simply say that my theory fell on deaf ears. They did not want their grand, pie-in-the-sky idea to be attached to an emergency issue like an STI epidemic.”
“So, Gottschalk was what…manufacturing black-market sex robots?”
“Yeah, that was his bread and butter. But he made the absolute best robots around. A Gottschalk robot was top-of-the-line in artificial cooze, and at one point they were going for $4,000 a pop. Only well-heeled perverts could afford them. Let me tell you, D.C. was a real hotbed for wealthy sex fiends when I was on the force. But that ain’t all.” Calabrese paused to take a large sip of water. His pronounced Adam’s apple went up and down like an erratic elevator.
“The Gottschalk robots were extra special. I found that out one cold morning in November. A couple of joggers called in a suspected body floating in the Potomac. Me and my partner fished it out only to discover that the body was actually a fleshbot. A rare Gottschalk creation—the first I had ever seen in the wild. It just looked different. More life-like. Looking into those camera eyes was like looking into a real woman.”
“Camera eyes?”
“Yeah. They never talked much about that part, did they? Those camera eyes made a lot of people uncomfortable… because of the suggestion.”
“Gottschalk was recording people?”
“Bingo! Everyone who bought a Gottschalk fleshbot was being spied on.”
Now we were getting to the heart of it. I leaned in. “Why? Blackmail?”
The old gumshoe sneered as he thought. “Mainly, but also Gottschalk was a ghoul. A voyeur. He got turned on watching other people do it. More than that, I think his kink was knowing secrets.”
I referred to my notes, trying not to be too grotesque in my phrasing. “Besides the camera eyes, wasn’t there something unique about the…uhm…genitalia?”
The old man chuckled. “You cut right to the chase, don’t ya? Yeah, there was. Jeremy discovered that part. I gave him a chance to look at the Potomac floater, and true to form, Jeremy looked that damn robot over, inside and out. He found that the Gottschalk ones were anatomically correct. The immediate outsides were silicone and latex and all that, but the insides were always correct. I can still see little weasel-faced Jeremy forcing me to look into a microscope. On the glass was living culture, or what had been living culture. You catch my drift yet?”
I shook my head in the negative.
“They had real vaginas, kid. As in cut out from a living person and grafted onto a machine. Frankenstein’s muff, to be crass about it. Buying a Gottschalk model meant getting the real thing, or the closest approximation possible.”
“Twisted.”
“Yeah. It turned out to be a major clue too. I hit the backlogs looking for sex crimes involving genital mutilation. Even a hardcase like me could only take so much of that stuff, but I had to do it. I just steeled my stomach and thought about the victims, like always. Through sheer determination and will I found them. The summer before, a semi-truck had overturned outside of Martinsburg, West Virginia. Inside they found a bunch of dehydrated migrants, barely alive. Mostly Guatemalans with a few Venezuelans mixed in. The West Virginia smokies noticed that all the female migrants had major scars on their inner thighs. When pressed about it, all of the women clammed up and played pretend that they couldn’t speak English. But one of them succumbed to internal bleeding and died. This allowed for an autopsy—an autopsy that found that the poor girl had suffered through a barbaric hysterectomy. A real butcher’s job that left behind nothing but dead tissue and ugly scarring. Poor thing.”
“Gottschalk was doing the surgeries himself?”
“No. He was the buyer. The dirty work was left to subcontractors. Narcos mostly. The Martinsburg wreck led, I think, to a few arrests back in D.C. But no one put cuffs on the higher-ups like Gottschalk. I was left to do that myself, or at least try. Try to make things right for those women, for the world.”
Calabrese took his time in moving towards the attic. The closer he got, the worse the smells became. The odor made him wince first, then outright gag. It was a unique smell—a notably acidic combination of natural decay and mechano-chemical rust. Besides the malodorous stench, Calabrese also noticed sounds for the first time. Human sounds. Small, rhythmic humming accompanied by low pulsations. It sounded like faraway music, and yet Calabrese knew that it was coming from inside of the house. It was coming from the attic.
Calabrese leveled the gun in front of him with one hand as he crawled across the steps leading to the attic. At the door, he slowly turned the handle and steeled himself for a fight.
“Freeze!” he screamed after making his entrance.
When the immediate energy and adrenaline wore off, and Calabrese could see clearly, he began to understand the true horror of the Gottschalk case.
“How did you manage to connect a random highway accident in West Virginia to synthetic syphilis and high-end sex robots in D.C.? I’m still not entirely sure how you got from A to B here.”
“Life and investigations don’t really make sense, kid. The world is chaotic, and maybe I had faith once, but these days I believe in the rule of randomness. There’s no benevolent creator looking out for us. There’s just blind fury and chance and bad luck.” Calabrese leaned back a little in his computer chair. He finished his water and reached for an imaginary cigarette. He caught himself mid-reach. “I quit smoking a year ago, but still, I reach for the coffin nails. See, that’s just idiocy, like life.
“But, the Gottschalk case did have one strong thread. I pulled that thread far enough that I wound up out at that god-forsaken farmhouse that night. The connection was a single family. The Ball family. Once upon a time, the Balls were a big deal in Northern Virginia. Their line goes back before the revolution. Their numbers started to decline in the twentieth century, yet they remained wealthy. Really wealthy. I found that a Ball was the CEO of a major plastics company, while another worked high up in marketing for AstraZeneca. That latter one got my old noggin joggin’. After all, which pharmaceutical conglomerate was the first to offer a treatment for synthetic syphilis?”
“AstraZeneca,” I replied.
“Right on the money. That got me thinking: What if the whole thing was a way to make money? Concoct an artificial disease, or at least one strain of it, in order to turn around and offer an expensive panacea. Seems devious and evil, but logical, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Right. So that’s that lead I followed. Took me to some strange, strange places. Belgium, for one. The Ball family has a branch over there, and that branch owns a rather infamous chateau. The Chateau Des Amerois. Place has an awful reputation. Connected to black magic, pedophilia, kidnapping, corruption, etcetera. Everything bad that you can think of has happened at that place. Supposedly, that is. Technically, it’s all conjecture and rumor, and the Belgian police don’t care to investigate conjecture and rumors.”
“And the Ball family owns it?”
“Yes, but they don’t go by Ball over there. They go by Gottschalk.” Calabrese widened his eyes for dramatic effect. It was his way of pantomiming enlightenment.
“That’s how you found Hermann Gottschalk then.”
“Yes. Not a lot of dual citizens live in Burkittsville, especially not ones who work for a major pharmaceutical company’s R&D laboratory. But Hermann Gottschalk fit the bill.”
“But you still had nothing hard or verifiable on him,” I said. “Took a lot of guts to make contact all alone like that.”
The connection wobbled for a moment, then restabilized. “Stupidity, not guts,” the old detective went on. “Okay, maybe a little bit of guts. Still, it cost me in the end. Cost me my job, my wife, my kids, everything. Wish it had never happened.”
“What exactly did you see?”
“A working,” Calabrese said with finality.
“A working? What does that mean?”
Calabrese studied my face through the screen. He noted my genuine confusion before letting out a long sigh.
Hermann Gottschalk was not alone in the attic. Several others stood in a small circle. They slowly swayed and chanted to each other. Their movements mirrored the subtle drumming that came from a laptop connected to a Bluetooth speaker. Underneath their feet was a chalk-drawn symbol that appeared sharp and star-shaped. Calabrese inched closer and noticed that the symbol was filled with dark objects that smelled like copper. Blood. Viscera. Body parts. Calabrese had to suppress so many reactions when he noticed that the people of the circle appeared to be worshiping dismembered body parts.
Gottschalk—short, fat, and totally bald Gottschalk—interrupted the circle’s rhythm consistently to take small tissue samples from the body parts. These samples were then placed either into test tubes or sealed in hard plastic containers. Calabrese saw some of these tubes subjected to a centrifuge, while others were left to cool in a small refrigerator. His mind overran with multiple thoughts at once. Still, amidst the chaos, he chose action.
“Freeze!”
The circle never ceased their chanting, but Gottschalk turned and faced Calabrese. The man’s face deified logic and physics, for Calabrese saw it liquify and distort multiple times. Gottschalk went from pudgy and repulsive to looking somewhat aquiline and handsome within a fraction of a second. At times, Calabrese swore the man had no face at all.
“Freeze, I said,” the detective screamed for a third time.
Gottschalk continued to leer at Calabrese, and the chanters continued their litany. The scene began less and less real as seconds became minutes. Calabrese felt sanity slipping through his fingers like water.
He fired once before the blackness became total.
“A working is an occult super-ceremony,” Calabrese said with his face pressed up against his computer’s small camera. “Gottschalk’s working was an especially powerful one.”
“For what purpose?” I asked.
“You mentioned tulpas when he first started this thing, remember?”
“Yes. Tulpas are things made manifest through extreme concentration.”
“Right. I think that’s what Gottschalk was trying to do on behalf of the Ball family and others. Manifest a tulpa, or rather multiple ones. That’s the most logical answer I can think of all these years later.”
“But for what?”
“Chaos. That’s it—blind and dumb chaos. An artificial disease, torture, human trafficking, fleshbots that spread two epidemics at once: synthetic syphilis and anomie. All bad energy occurring at once without a discernible purpose. Pandemonium. The working worked, kid. Just look around. Is the world a better place now than it was in the summer of 2024?”
No, I said to myself, the world is much, much worse. More barbaric and blood simple, despite all the high-sheen gloss of pervasive technology and widespread convenience. Ever more cruel.
“Yeah,” Calabrese said softly through the screen. It was like he could read my thoughts through my eyes. “The world is worse.”
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