by Jim Keen
Toko studied her through swirling cigarette smoke. “It was Hurricane Sendai, wasn’t it? Our aerostats had trouble following your car. We ghosted you to the Holland Tunnel; after that you were out of our jurisdiction. Jersey customs held us at the barrier for an hour. We were late, missed the arrests.”
“Then who”—slumped forward, head between her knees, her hand a twitching spider on the floor. Sweat dripped to the concrete, dark hair in her peripheral vision. Another juddering pull of air, another summoning of depleted resources. Julia stood, silhouetted in the warehouse’s gloom, as Katz took hold of her right arm and raised his blade. Then the windows exploded, the shock wave showering her in razor-sharp fragments as she screamed—“sent SWAT in?”
“The FBI.”
Alice’s mouth hung open, tongue stuck to her lower lip. “The feds? What the hell were they doing?”
“There was a federal undercover team running alongside ours. I didn’t know.”
“You ask why?”
“Of course. They said it was need to know, and that I didn’t. We were bag holders, nothing more.”
“That’s just awesome, Toko. I’m glad you visited.”
He gave an exhausted sigh, a subsonic rumble that shook the table. “May I finish?”
“I wish you would.”
“By the time we got to the warehouse it was over. They had Julia in protective custody until last night.”
“What happened?”
Toko reached into this pocket and handed her a brown envelope. She flipped it open and removed a small plastic packet marked with an NYPD evidence number. It looked empty until she held it up to the ceiling fluorescents. It contained a single black grain, like a large salt crystal. She held it close to her eyes, but the object was too small to decipher anything else. “What is this?”
“Julia.”
She looked back at the grain. “Molecular acid?”
“Unknown.” Toko put his phone on the table. “Voice and location ident.”
“Confirmed,” the phone replied.
“Project encrypted feed at twelve local,” Toko said.
A small light glowed as it projected grainy black-and-white video onto the wall. The windscreen of an open-top buggy framed a nighttime view of fast moving terrain—the video showed sky, then sand dunes, then sky, before leveling out over a white beach.
“This an autonomous system feed?” Alice asked.
“Night vision from a stolen beach buggy. Julia was due to testify in the Six-Thirty inquest today—looks like she wanted a joyride before she got out.”
“Testify? What has she got to do with Six-Thirty?”
Toko shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Alice watched Julia run to the water’s edge, her white dress glowing under the image enhancement. Seeing her again, even on a cheap night-vision camera, ripped open the scab covering Alice’s pain. Julia had been as charismatic, cruel, and manipulative as anyone she’d ever met, but Alice had liked that. She never admitted it to anyone, but those two years running with Five Points had been the best of her life; doing what you want, when you want, was seductive. She pushed that away, let the past fade, and concentrated on the video. Julia reached the shore and jumped in the water, face happy and free. A man in a dark suit ran to her, hopping on one foot as he threw away his shoes.
“Who’s the fed?”
“One of her protection details, an affair maybe. They hid her on an island off Hawaii.”
Alice watched Julia and the agent splash through the surf. “More likely she was using him and he was too dumb to know. She could be very convincing.”
The feed continued, then Julia vanished—there, gone. The agent stepped back, hands fumbling for the pistol hung on his belt. Panicked, he dropped the weapon, its slim ceramic form tumbling into the shallow black water. He turned to run when his head exploded in a dark cloud that caught the wind and blew away. His heavy corpse fell to the sand, twitched, then lay still as the waves washed over it.
“Replay the whole file.”
The phone complied and Alice zoomed in as far as the video allowed, but it was designed for anti-collision feeds, not forensics, and the clarity wasn’t there. All she could see was Julia freeze then vanish. She studied the evidence bag.
“Toko, what the hell happened?”
He shrugged again, huge shoulders moving with the precision of a hydraulic press. “We filtered the surrounding sand—it was clean apart from three organic crystals. One is in that packet, the other two are with the feds. We ran the tests. Our results correlated. Under any standard analysis, that reads as human flesh that has undergone cellular breakdown. But we found something else.”
Alice didn’t want to hear this, wanted to crawl back up the ladder and pretend the last ten minutes hadn’t happened. “What?”
“There were remnants of a print support structure.”
“What are you telling me?”
“She was a reprint.”
The words echoed in Alice’s mind like a rung bell; it wasn’t possible, full-body reprints weren’t that good.
“No way, Toko,” she said. “I worked with her every day for two years and would have spotted if she was a Beta. No print’s that perfect, and there were no registration tags anywhere.”
“The tests are conclusive. She was a copy.”
“But there has to be tags, the reprint protocols are built into every Mechanical Intelligence.”
“It appears that assumption is incorrect.”
“So you’re saying we have an MI out there that has overridden its inhibitors and is printing unregistered people?”
“Yes.”
“Which is impossible.”
“Yes.”
“Well, she didn’t get scanned and replaced without someone knowing about it.”
“Her family has full genetic records going back to birth. We can confirm she’s not a generic model. The Julia in that video was a genetically accurate copy of the original person.”
“So sometime between her last doctor’s visit and being killed on the beach, she was scanned, reprinted, and reintroduced into society with no one noticing?”
“That’s our working hypothesis. Did you notice anything while you worked with her?”
Alice leaned back on the table. She’d met a few Betas—full-body reprints—before and hadn’t needed their registrations tags to tell them apart. There was an oddness about them, a lack of micro muscle movements that screamed fake. But Alice got none of that from Julia. She’d been alive, human.
“Nothing. She was as real as you or I,” she said.
“Then we have a problem.”
He was right. If Julia was an untagged Beta, it would be naïve to think she was the only one; there could be hundreds of copies out there.
“You run facial recognition searches for other prints?”
“Of course. None were detected. I don’t think we should trust data searches if we have a rogue MI though. There’s no way of knowing how wide its influence spreads.”
“Who knows about this?”
“Just us. The feds are being equally discreet. You knew Julia better than anyone. Reconnect with your contacts, find out what they know.”
And there it was, the real reason for his visit.
“Tell me your offer,” she said, her voice emotionless.
“Solve this case, you’ll get your job back. The last year will be marked in official records as a recovery from a long undercover operation. No one will know what happened.”
“And what if my contacts are gone and my knowledge leads to nothing?”
“The offer is rescinded.” Toko shrugged. “That’s all you’re going to get. The bosses are ready to fry you in the chair if you refuse.”
She stared at the floor. It was hard to believe it had been a year since she’d been caught, chopped up, and fired. She’d barely made it through those last twelve months, days on end with no reason to get out of bed. In the early months, before she started the sculpture,
she would stand by the main road near her apartment and imagine stepping into traffic. Death, a quick fix for the pain. But she was hard, and beneath the despair lay a kernel of iron that refused to quit. More than anything, the lack of purpose came close to killing her, the echoing void of a pointless existence. How could she stand another thirty years like that? She couldn’t, and here was a reason to get up tomorrow, so why the hesitation?
Because she was outraged at the way her friends vanished the moment she had nothing to offer. People whose lives she’d saved wouldn’t return her calls—moved on, left her behind. Could she forgive and forget? Go to work tomorrow, grab coffee, and start over? No, she couldn’t. But this was her way back in; who knew when there would be another? The years stretched ahead, thousands upon thousands of hopeless days.
“I’ll need a new hand,” she said at last. “This piece of crap is a liability.”
“Okay.”
“I’m talking about a Hymann Boutique model.”
“Expensive. If they don’t have your scan on file it’ll have to be an MI mock-up.”
“Good enough.”
“Anything else?”
She looked back at the towering sculpture, its clumsy construction mocking her. It was an ugly, crude thing—the work of a damaged mind and body. The small, humid garage reeked of oil and sweat. She felt Toko watching as she shed her past like an old jacket.
“No, I’m done here,” she said. “Let’s go.”
4
Alice rested her head against the cold glass canopy and looked down at the Hudson River; the setting sun glittered from scattered wave tops as heavy snowflakes swirled under the headlights. Manhattan beckoned to her through the clouds, its dark silhouettes emerging through pale fog.
Toko had said the right things, but the deal was worthless if she couldn’t find something the FBI and NYPD had missed. A year was a lifetime on the streets, her lower-level contacts would be dead or in jail by now, while the high levels would kill her on sight.
One thing at a time. Enjoy this while you can.
The Hopper flew in the upper police lane reserved for rapid response; only the isolated rich flew higher—chauffeured passengers as far removed from the streets as they could be. Emergency response teams took the lane below, their strobing lights cutting streaks in the encroaching darkness, while farther down sat the civilian lanes—thousands of twinkling lights trapped in rigid, automated lanes.
At the bottom, illuminated by the sun’s last dregs, sat the Hudson Employment Center. It festered in the water like the carcass of some deep-sea creature that had bubbled to the surface. She saw the mottled texture of crowds surging back and forth as they fought for food and water. There were yellow flashes that looked like gunfire and blue electrical arcs of submission systems. The upload spire sat in the middle of the disk; its red strobe pulsed like a heartbeat.
“How many people get transmitted from there?” she asked.
Toko looked through the canopy and squinted. “It’s been upgraded as part of the president’s Back to Work policy. It got a new reactor and MI, so can push six people per hour. That’s one hundred and fifty per day. Seventeen hundred a year, give or take.”
“Not enough.”
“No, it isn’t. Have you been watching the inquests?”
“Didn’t think we had them anymore, what with there being no senate.”
“Most escaped the Six-Thirty bombing; they just can’t be in the same room at the same time anytime. It’s done through a Virt now.”
“Must’ve missed that one.” Alice hadn’t watched the news in months; there was nothing in it that mattered anymore, so she’d given up.
“The Department of Employment has a prototype running in Arizona that industrializes the broadcasts. If it succeeds, they’re going to build camps across the country.”
“Are the scans still going to Mars?”
“Most, but the outer-system habitats will be online soon. When that happens, people will be sent all over. First arrivals get sovereignty. The push is on.”
“I didn’t know we were spreading that far.”
“How long did it take you to reach Mars?”
“A hundred and sixty-eight days—every one of them squashed into that tin can.” Alice rubbed her arms, flesh cold and tight.
“Fast for chemical propulsion.”
“Didn’t feel like it. The Fucker was a research ship built for a crew of ten scientists, not one-hundred bored Marines. A lot of us felt sorry for the Moles; you pioneer your way up there only to find technology has made your life’s goal irrelevant.”
“I never understood why they declared independence. A dumb move for a group of Nobel prize winners.”
Alice looked across at Toko, the cabin’s sparse instrumentation up-lighting the deep contours of his face. It was dark outside now. Constellations of light drifted below as the Hopper’s engines chatted to themselves. She didn’t know him that well, she realized. Educated, one of the expensive East Coast schools and used to be a scientist; then, when all the jobs went away, became a cop like everyone else.
“You can’t blame them,” she said. “Mars was supposed to be a fresh start, just a few hundred people per year, then printers arrived and started pumping out thousands per month. The new world became just another resource to fight over.”
Toko turned to her. “Heard it was bad.”
Alice scratched her USMC tattoo—mouth dry, tongue too large. The armor glass of the Hopper’s canopy pressed in upon her, lights distorted in the thick glass. She needed to change the subject before old memories woke up.
“Where have the remotes gone?”
“Twenty to Jupiter’s moons. Their MIs are building habitats right now. Another hundred or so are still in transit. Some are carrying printers right out to the edges; it’ll take years for them to arrive. Once established, all they need are the scans, hence the push to automate.”
“They got the energy loads sorted?” Alice asked. “Mars was always underpowered once the printers started running.”
“Each drone carries a reactor. After that, no idea.”
The cancerous disk of the employment center faded away as the Hopper crossed over the environmental defenses and into downtown Manhattan airspace.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He sat, silent, huge head silhouetted by the faint city light below. His breathing was slow and steady, the tang of his aftershave faint in the car. “My mother was from Aleppo,” he said at last, then lapsed into a long silence. He studied his hands, then continued.
“The skin of society is thin, Alice. The only things holding it together are the institutions we trust, the police, the government. It’s so easy for the scales to tip; all it takes is a shift in the environment. I don’t mean global warming—we already know how that’s going to end—I mean the unemployment. All those desperate people will have an effect somewhere. Maybe the uploads are the solution, I don’t know, but I’m worried where this is headed.”
“Any developments on Six-Thirty?”
“No. It’s been a year. If they haven’t got them now it’s not going to happen.”
Outside, Manhattan grew as the Hudson shrank—the city, always in flux, always the same. Blade Towers monopolized the architectural style: taller, thinner, some steel, others grown from modern composites. It was spectacular. Orange low-energy lighting picked out the streets—at first an organic jumble like frayed rope—then a strong grid as the Hopper flew north. The private towers crowded each other like blades of grass, dark at their armored podiums, then brighter the higher they rose. Light had become the latest display of wealth—energy an expensive and rare resource. Most of the five boroughs sat in darkness as their occupants huddled around feeble lamps while Manhattan blazed with brilliant light. She saw empty duplex apartments lit like beacons. Entire floors glowed like sports arenas with no one home, the light caught in the dirt and scratches of the Hopper's canopy. The separation between the streets and the skies grew d
ay by day.
The Hopper approached Tribeca, and the hum of the engines lowered as they banked down and to the right. Rounding the skeletal void of an unfinished skyscraper, Alice saw the NYPD headquarters for the first time in a year. A building of three parts, two at ground level and separated by a road, the third a bridge connecting them. Ground level held the main functions while the bridge, a delicate steel cube, held the garage and chop-shop. Its glow lit the plastic trees of Madison Square Park, snow sliding from their fake leaves. The Hopper tilted farther, and Alice sank into the foam sides of her seat, straps compressing her chest. She stopped breathing, lungs burning, while her hands clenched so tight they tingled with pain.
Home.
The Hopper spiraled down to the cube, then slotted into an open bay on the upper floor, views across the park visible through layers of armor glass. The engines clicked off, and silence ghosted into the cabin.
Toko turned to her. “Ready?”
5
Alice pulled the door handle and a quarter section of the bubble canopy scissored upward, landing lights starring in the scratched glass. The garage was bitterly cold, her breath condensing as she pulled herself out. The background hum of city life echoed from the hard surfaces—music in the distance, words just audible, screams and sirens. The smell of oil and ozone, fast food and fires, was strong around them. Aerostats hissed back and forth running errands for the police below.
She crossed to the far wall and looked down at the building. Lines of cops entered and exited, ants dressed in blue and black. Her family. She gripped the guardrail, its frigid galvanized steel burning a line across her palms. Breath frosted around her head, giving the lights a soft haze as she closed her eyes. The city thrummed through her as if she held the end of an electrical cable. Longing burned her heart, the desire to get back onto the streets. Tears pressed against her eyes, huge wracking sobs she wouldn’t be able to stop. Goddam it, pull yourself together. It’s been a year. Deal with it.
