by Jim Keen
She’d been outside for thirty minutes waiting for Xavi to make his way up to the Bronx, and in that time, not one person had passed her car or walked down the street. She retrieved her phone and studied the pictures of Xavi’s tattoos and fingerprints. After a few moments of doubt, she forwarded them to the NYPD MI for image recognition and fingerprint history.
Someone tapped on the window and she looked out to see Xavi. Christ, he’s so quiet. He cracked the stock of his shotgun revealing its vertical double barrel and made a show of sliding a red shell—high explosive—into the upper and a green one—shrapnel—into the lower. He snapped the gun shut with a loud click.
“You gonna sit there all day drinking coffee or you gonna help me catch bad guys?” He walked toward the warehouse, shotgun in the crook of his arm.
Fuck.
Alice set out after Xavi, then stopped and checked her gun. The Walther was great when she was undercover, but she’d been outgunned at the dock, and maybe Xavi had a point in his approach to munitions; in a stand-up fight, a cannon was more useful than something discreet. She tucked the Walther into her shoulder holster and opened the secure rear hatch of the car. The DNA sampler read her sweat before sliding back to reveal a variety of riot gear. She looked up to see that Xavi was almost at the warehouse entrance, so she grabbed a Beretta EMS riot gun and ran after him.
As she moved, she clicked the toggle to its first setting—rubber suppression rounds—and the gun whined as it charged twin capacitors. Her training kept her upright and focused while her feet followed the contours of the road, boots skipping over glass vials and one-shot syringes.
Xavi moved fast and quiet, his slim back to her, and ignored the main truck entrance with its double doors. The staff entrance was to the left, door sealed. When Xavi was ten feet away, he fired his shotgun, the boom rolling down the street to echo from distant walls. The door blew inward, and Xavi reloaded, then walked into the dark, out of view.
Alice quickened her pace and reached the plastic siding a moment later. She gathered her breath and ducked inside.
The warehouse ran the full length of the block, the far wall two hundred feet away and barely visible in the dim light. A sawtooth roof spanned the space, its windows illuminating the cavernous void. The air was dry, and dust motes caught in the faint light, while pigeons fluttered overhead, cooing alarm. It was quiet, apart from the faint drip of water.
Alice moved to the left to hide her silhouette. Xavi was ahead of her, shotgun loose in his hands as he checked the corners for booby traps. Alice followed, covering him as they traversed the space.
Her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Truck bays lay to either side, fifteen to a wall, the parking lanes zoned in white paint. Long ceramic induction plates sat in the middle of each bay, ready to charge the trucks when they parked. The whole building was empty and shut down, the loading doors chained and locked. To the side, a thin spiral staircase rose to a dull metal office glued haphazardly to the roof.
Xavi crouched at an induction plate; he ran his fingers over the tough surface and sniffed them with a frown.
“I’ll check the office out,” Alice said. The spiral stairs creaked under her weight, the whole frame wobbling left and right as she inched upward, the riot gun locked to her shoulder. If she was going to booby-trap this building, she’d put it here—the office too juicy a target to resist. She crept up step by step but found nothing, so she entered the tiny room. It was stripped as bare as the main space, nothing left but an old plastic table and a Strength Through Unity poster taped to one wall.
She walked back to Xavi who still knelt by the induction plate. “What’ve you got?”
“What do you know about cargo delivery?”
“Zero.”
“In LA, the drugs came through the ports and were shipped by truck to a distribution center. That place was like this, just a long, empty box where the trucks parked, recharged, and were loaded. These plates”—he nodded at the induction pad—“were scratched to hell. They’re just loops of metal encased in ceramic and linked to the power grid. The autonomous system just rolls the wagon over it, no need to connect. They’re covered in ceramic for protection, as the floor tolerances are all over the place. If the trucks are loaded, they scrape the pads as they enter and exit. After two years, they looked like barcodes.”
Alice studied the pad in front of her. “This is hardly marked.”
“This whole place is new; the plates still smell of their factory wrap. My guess is it’s only been used for a few months.”
“And then there’s the security system.”
Xavi stood and studied the roof, then the walls. “What security?”
“Exactly; there isn’t any. Someone built a warehouse in a wasteland surrounded by gang turf and didn’t even invest in cameras. They wanted no record of what was going on, so used human guards and transmitted them off world when the job was done.”
“Clever.”
“What we’re looking at is someone who hired Five Points to bring equipment into the country, off the books. They built three warehouses for this one job, warehouses that hold thirty trucks each. When the shipments finished, they closed everything down, bulldozed the buildings, and sent the workers off world.”
Xavi scanned the cold, echoing space. It was utterly silent; even the pigeons hunkered down in hiding. “If Conner was right and they were moving scanners, what do they need so many for?”
“I’ve no idea, but we need to get to the Hudson Unemployment Center before John Stokes is uploaded.”
“Any information on his company?”
She sighed. “No. I guess we’ll have to use the V-Net.”
“Can you afford it?”
“Of course not. I’ve nowhere near the credit scores, but each NYPD detective gets a thousand dollars a month for research.”
“How much time does that buy you?”
“Seven minutes.”
Alice sat in the car and finished her coffee while Xavi prowled outside. She pulled two small rubber and metal beads from the Hopper’s center console and attached them to her temples. Her vision flickered, wavered, and was replaced with augmented reality. A Log-In button blinked in her lower right view, the display a more detailed version of the visor she’d worn in the Marines. A lot of the younger cops lived for this stuff, couldn’t function in a street environment without knowing the type of car they were looking at, or when a certain building was constructed. If they ever got into a real fight, one where EMP guns were brought into play and all their toys broke, they’d get flayed alive.
She closed her eyes and concentrated, the Log-In button clicked with a soft beep, and the darkness grew thin white lines, a grid that resolved itself into a white-marble corporate lobby.
A young male Virt—an artificial re-creation built to deal with entry applications—greeted her from behind a long wooden desk. “May I help?”
“Business registrations.”
“Identification please.”
“Alice Yu, NYPD. Am accessing through Hopper Designation Rapid Response_016_TIA.”
The secretary consulted a terminal while Alice looked around. If this was the NYPD’s default interface, then it had improved since her day. Back then, it had been nothing but a blank screen with a mechanical keyboard. Now, double-height windows opened onto dew-dappled lawns. Birds chirped as they flitted through the blue sky; small deer nibbled at bushes. The smell of cut grass blew over her.
“Credit check authorized. Please proceed.” The receptionist pointed to a slim white door that had appeared in the marble wall.
She crossed and entered an antechamber to a dark, wood-walled library visible through an ornate wrought-iron arch. The library faded to a perspective point; a tall central atrium was flanked by perpendicular racks of leather-bound books. The floor and walls were a honey-yellow oak, the racks a darker rosewood inlaid with pearlescent jewels and gold trims. Twin shafts of sunlight twinkled over dust motes disturbed by the library’s users. The air hun
g heavy with the scent of old wax and paper. People dressed in claret velvet jackets with cream pants and black shoes ghosted among the shelves, retrieving information.
Alice recognized what this was: a Victorian server farm. The V-Net was as decentralized as the old internet—it belonged to no single controlling entity. However, if a clan maintained key pieces of infrastructure, they were allowed to overwrite the greeting protocols with their own flavor. Obviously, some Victorian Blade Tower held and maintained the business registration library, hence the false nostalgia. Some towers were bleeding-edge high tech, others looked to the past for morals and rules to separate them from the filth of the streets.
Alice hated the ’torian towers; it always took hours to get anything done, and she had a couple of minutes credit left at best.
“Yes?” A small, fat male lawyer sat at an old wooden table covered with manila folders. He wore a white wig and small brass glasses. His mouth turned down at the edges when he saw her; his frown made sense as she was projecting in via a cheap NYPD console with no Victorian costume module. She must look like street shit to him, blowing the carefully curated atmosphere.
“I’m interested in who owns the following business. Please look up the—”
The scene froze, and an empty credit dialogue box appeared, stating she had timed out and any further use would be charged against her bank account.
Which was empty.
She pulled the beads from her forehead with a faint feeling of loss and swung up the door. There was a reason the police never used the Net for chasing down crimes: it was a world for the Ones these days. Their crimes were too discreet and high-powered for the likes of her.
“Waste of my life,” she said to Xavi. “Get in. We’re leaving.”
“About goddamn time.”
Manhattan’s geometries moved gray and slow beneath them, the Hopper's engines chewing the air as Alice told Xavi about her meeting with Takamatsu. He listened in silence, face as hard as iron, until she described the human experiments. At those, his expression folded into revulsion. She ended with Four’s analysis of the data package.
“You trust this machine?” he asked, eyes boring into her.
“It’s difficult to explain. Every MI I’ve dealt with has been cold and relentless; you knew it was a machine that understood language but nothing more. They were like sociopaths; you felt the personality emulation layers covering a lack of empathy. Four was different. She was funny, kind, and alive in a way I’ve not seen before. For what it’s worth, I think she was telling the truth.”
“You trust it?”
“Her, Xavi, not it. And yes, I do. We don’t have many people on our side, and if the NYPD and FBI MIs are compromised, we might need something else.”
“Everyone has an agenda. If you don’t know what it wants or why, you shouldn’t be fooled.”
She faced the window and watched the architecture below. Humanity was invisible from this height, with nothing but computer-generated geometries on display. What would an entity with the power and intelligence of Four want?
“She was right about the warehouses, so let’s see if she’s right about Stokes.”
A vertical line of oily gray smoke pinned the unemployment center to the Hudson. The Hopper tracked straight toward it—first a tiny ellipse on the black water, then growing to reveal its layout in more detail. There were no coyotes today, the water empty of rafts other than white Coast Guard tugboats that chugged in lazy circles.
Xavi navigated the Hopper around the disk in a downward spiral that let Alice study the scene below. The basic design was a wide concrete circle that had been divided into wedges like a clock face. Various gray and ochre structures were built on the hour marks around the central upload spire in the middle. The spire’s tall red lattice stretched upward two hundred feet to end in the transmittal plate, a flat gray triangle connected to the geostationary satellites overhead. Those satellites collated and boosted the scanned human transmissions outward to the colony printers in the solar system. Its upload light blinked as another soul left the planet, life reduced to ones and zeros.
As they descended, Alice saw people dressed in bright orange overalls moving among the human backdrop. She knew the camp was crowded but was shocked to see the reality. The basic building designs reminded her of the Marines’ barracks, utilitarian shacks built from cardboard and composite. These buildings were overwhelmed, every open space crammed with people clustered around some node of heat or food, while stuffed canvas tents stretched between the huts.
Lower still and she smelled the camp now, the Hopper’s filters unable to block the stench. It reeked like a cattle farm she had visited as a kid, the abattoir awash with blood and filth. It was the stink of humanity, of people unable to wash, of bathrooms overloaded while red fires burned piles of trash.
Xavi guided them to the landing pad atop the Homeland Security outpost. Cries and shouts came from below, a noise that rose as the Hopper landed. The armor-glass doors slid up and the intensity of the camp flooded the cabin—smells and sounds ten times worse. It was hard to breathe, the humid, fetid air gagging her. A glass bottle twinkled as it arced to shatter by her feet, spraying glass shards. Another followed, this one full of yellow liquid.
“Over here.” A guard waved at them from a door leading into the structure below. He wore a face mask and held a riot shield overhead like a Roman centurion.
Alice and Xavi ran into a stairwell that stank of antiseptic.
“If you’d given us more warning, we could’ve cleared them away from the pad,” the guard said.
“No problem,” Alice said. “We’re in a hurry. We want to speak to a …” What did they call people here? Inmates? Unemployed? Prisoners? “Individual due for upload tonight.”
“You got paperwork?”
“Nope.”
“Then you’re fucked.”
27
The warden sat behind a wide metal desk smothered in paper. His large gut expanded as he leaned back in his chair. He was pale and sweaty; strands of greasy hair scraped across his bald head; a crumpled orange Homeland Security overall stretched over a worn white T-Shirt. The far wall held a TV showing silent images, the volume off. Alice jolted as she saw FBI Director Barragan marching down a cold street surrounded by journalists. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read: Six-Thirty—do the feds have the answers?
The warden stood and held out one fat palm. “Welcome, welcome. Always happy to help a fellow officer.”
Alice shook it; Xavi ignored it until the warden grew uncomfortable and sat again. Alice lit a cigarette. The blue smoke curled up to pool against the stained brown ceiling. “Thank you. We need to speak to a John Stokes that we believe is due to upload tonight.”
“Cutting it close, aren’t you? He may have already been processed. You got his number?”
“What number?”
“His unemployment number. I have access to the full register here.” He waved to the thin screen, eager to please. “All two hundred million of them.”
“No. All I have is a name and that he’s due to leave today.”
The warden searched his database, fingers fast on a keyboard. “Okay, found him. Seems he was due to go a few weeks back but was delayed.”
“What was the holdup?” Alice asked.
“Hmm, this isn’t right.” The warden scratched his cheek and ignored her. “We have a wait time of six months for broadcast now, but he comes in scheduled for immediate upload. That’s impossible. This is all MI-coordinated.”
Xavi and Alice exchanged a glance.
“There was a delay,” the warden continued. “Doesn’t say why. He left, then came back and is shipping out tonight. Must be an IT mix-up; we’re not running a hotel here. I’ll look into it and let you know. Still, I got him, so let’s go see.” He stood, his gut pushing the table with a squeal, and approached a small locker. He retrieved a thick bulletproof jacket and long metal stun baton. “Ready?”
Alice stubbed out
her half-smoked cigarette and stood.
Ground level was worse than the roof. The press of people multiplied into a faceless mass. A four-man security team cleared a path for Alice, Xavi, and the warden, but the sheer quantity of people made Alice feel as if she were in a submarine—steel walls smothering, no way out. Everyone was emaciated, skeletons wrapped in skin; their rations designed for a stay of a few days, not months. The roar of voices and machinery was deafening, a thunderous clamor that made communication impossible, so Alice kept moving and pushed forward.
A cold breeze brushed over her, its salty tang neutralizing the organic stench, then they entered an adjacent barrack. The sky’s brittle white light shifted to a soft yellow glow of interior lighting. The noise dropped to a background hum of whispered conversations and music.
On her flight to Mars, space had been at a premium, but that was nothing compared to her current surroundings. The beds were small plastic boxes contoured for easy stacking. One wall of boxes was open, allowing access to a sparse interior which held nothing but a compressed foam mattress, screen, and water nozzle. The beds rose above and across from each other in towering columns that filled the tall space, the only breaks narrow zigzagging alleyways that stretched up to the dull ceiling. Duct tape held thin aluminum ladders in place while power cables crossed the gap.
Alice followed the guards as they moved deeper into the room. The noise dropped around them and rose after their passing. Whoops and whistles broke overhead, alerting the room to their presence.
