Snapshot

by Brandon Sanderson

  His phone buzzed. He ignored it. He just stared at the dead man, then dropped his gun, shocked at himself.

  “Did . . .” the Photographer’s voice called. The man started back down the wooden steps. “Did you just do it?”

  “Got to . . . got to protect the Snapshot,” Davis said, his voice trembling. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “You know them for what they are,” the Photographer said, sounding proud. “But you should know, we’re not supposed to kill them. We let the Snapshot do it, like the immune system of the body. Clear them out.”

  The Photographer walked up to him. “That one, my uncle, he can’t see. We wait until he’s thirsty, then let him pick a drink. But he can’t read the labels. So the system kills him.”

  “I’ll do it right next time,” Davis whispered. “What’s the plan? Who is next? I can help.”

  The Photographer licked his lips. “I’m running out of people I can find on the street,” he said. “We’ve got to be careful though. The cops from inside will try to stop us. They don’t understand.”

  “I do.”

  “Mary Magdalene School,” the Photographer said. “Seventeen children have peanut allergies. I’ve been working out how to do it, so we can be hidden. But if you’re with me, if the cops outside the Snapshot don’t care, then maybe I don’t have to worry. Either way, we move on May twelfth. I’ve found out that—”

  A gunshot went off: loud, arrogant, unexpected. The Photographer dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Davis turned to see Chaz at the top of the steps, lit from below, gun in hand.

  “Holy hell!” Chaz said. “Davis, you all right? How’d he disarm you?”

  Davis blinked. Chaz, you idiot.

  His phone buzzed a long buzz. The alarm.

  20:17 on the dot.

  Davis calmly picked up his gun. They were a distance from Warsaw, but he’d have to go forward with his plan anyway. It would work, right? It was plausible?

  Did he care?

  Chaz shoved past Davis and knelt by the killer. “Wow. He’s just a kid.” He looked up into the room with the dead man. “Hell! What happened, Davis?”

  In response, Davis raised his gun and pointed it at Chaz’s head.

  Chaz stumbled back. “Davis?”

  “Goodbye, Chaz.”

  “Whoa. Whoa, Davis! What are you doing!”

  “Tell me,” Davis said softly. “When you go see Molly in the Snapshot, do you have to seduce her anew each time? Or do you flash your badge, convince her she’s not real, and just take her that way?”

  Chaz’s jaw dropped, his eyes wide.

  “You do it so quickly,” Davis said. “Every time I visit Hal, right?”

  “Davis, think about this!”

  “I have thought about it, Chaz!” Davis shouted. “You see this gun? This is me thinking about it!”

  Outside, distantly, gunfire went off. The gang violence on Warsaw.

  “This gun,” Davis snapped, “came from evidence, IRL. Those shots you hear—someone is using this gun right now to fire on another gang member. I thought, how to disguise a murder in the Snapshot? I could use the same gun we know a gangster had. I could shoot you. Claim it was a stray bullet, and the ballistics will back me up. Nobody will know. They’ll think it was an accident.”

  “Hell,” Chaz whispered. Then he sighed and dropped his gun. “I guess you have thought about it.”

  Davis held his own gun, palms sweaty, teeth clenched. For once he wasn’t nervous. For once he wasn’t trembling, or breathing quickly. He was angry. Furious.

  “My wife, Chaz,” he whispered.

  “Your ex-wife.”

  “You think that makes it all right?”

  Chaz shrugged. “No. Probably not.” He closed his eyes.

  Here we are. Need to do it quickly. Davis wiped his brow, gun arm steady.

  And then . . . then he thought about second chances. About pretty smiles, about his son.

  You were just thinking earlier about how you need to get over Molly, a piece of him whispered. If you let her force you to do this, then what are you?

  Still, he’d just shot a man. An innocent man. Now here he was, with Chaz, at exactly the right moment. Just like he’d planned and imagined it. Why not take this step?

  It was all inevitable, wasn’t it?

  Was it inevitable that he’d failed before, IRL? Was he the Deviation, or was Chaz? Did it matter?

  I can start fresh, he thought. Get a new life. Date new people. But if I pull this trigger, I’ll never be able to do that. I’ll never be able to live with myself if I kill him.

  He took a deep breath. In the end, people became cops because they wanted to do something good. At least that was what they told themselves. That was what he’d always told himself.

  Davis lowered his gun.

  Ten

  “How long have you known?” Chaz asked, raising a shot of whiskey to his lips. They were in the kitchen of the small townhouse, the one with two corpses upstairs.

  “I caught sight of you up in the window about five months back,” Davis said softly. “After that, it was obvious. You kept prompting me to go see Hal.”

  Davis poured himself another shot, and had to be careful not to spill, with his hand shaking. How could Chaz drink so calmly?

  “I did it once in real life, Davis,” Chaz said, leaning on the counter. “Shouldn’t tell you that, should I? But I need to come clean. It was just before the divorce started.”

  Davis closed his eyes.

  “That’s why it works in the Snapshot,” Chaz continued. “I don’t show my badge. She thinks it’s the second time, each time. I promised to come see her again, but never did, IRL. I figured I needed to confine it to this place. Out of respect for my partner, you know? It’s a Snapshot. Nothing matters in a Snapshot.”

  “Yeah,” Davis said, then opened his eyes. “To nothing mattering.” He raised his shot glass.

  Chaz nodded, raising his own.

  Davis drank and looked at his phone, which sat in front of him, the text he’d sent to Maria glowing on the screen.

  Photographer, the serial killer, it read, is going to try to kill a group of peanut-allergic children from Mary Magdalene School. Tomorrow, May 12th. Set up a sting, catch him. You can find evidence of his activities at the following addresses. He’d then sent the address of the school and the house they were in now, hoping the evidence there would corroborate his words, even if the Photographer had moved on from them IRL.

  Maria hadn’t responded, but the message had gone through. He could imagine her shock. And her likely anger.

  “We did good, partner,” Chaz said. “Didn’t we? We’re going to do great things together moving forward.”

  “Chaz?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I never want to see you after today. Never again.”

  Chaz looked down at his empty glass. “Right. Okay.”

  They drank in silence.

  “I’m glad you didn’t shoot,” Chaz eventually said. “Glad you couldn’t shoot.”

  Davis finished his whiskey. “You know why I insist on turning off the Snapshot myself, each evening?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Every time I do it, I kill Hal. Every time. Someone has to do it, so I do it myself. But it rips me up each time, knowing. And if I’ve killed my son a hundred times, do you really think I couldn’t shoot you?”

  Chaz went white.

  Together, they took their things and walked to the front of the building. Outside, the air smelled sweet, a breeze coming in off the ocean. Davis climbed down the steps, exhausted, then stopped at the bottom. A couple of people were on the street here. A tall black man. And a woman. The woman from the diner. She had changed her outfit.

  “Detectives Davis and Chavez?” the tall man asked. “Can we have a word with you?”

  Davis shared a look with Chaz, who shrugged.

  “What’s this about?” Davis asked. “You from the precinct?” His frown deepened. “Yo
u’re from IRL? Are you feds?”

  “We’ll explain,” the tall man said, taking Chaz by the shoulder, leading him a little farther down the street. The woman stepped up to Davis.

  She was pretty. Like he remembered. “I lost your number,” he blurted out. “Sorry.”

  She blushed. “Detective Davis. Why didn’t you kill your partner today?”

  “How do you know—”

  “Please just answer the question.”

  Davis rubbed his chin. “Because I’m not a monster. Pointing the gun at him was a momentary lapse.”

  “A momentary lapse?” she asked. “That you planned for months, waiting for an exactly perfect Snapshot, where you would be able to hide your actions and pretend a gangster shot him?”

  Farther down the street, Chaz suddenly shoved back from the tall man. “No!” Chaz shouted. “No, no, no!” He reached for his weapon.

  The tall man calmly gunned Chaz down in the street.

  Davis stared, feeling cold. It can’t be.

  “It would really help our investigation,” the woman said, “if you could tell us what we did wrong.”

  “You’re Snapshot detectives too,” Davis said. “It . . . Damn! That’s why they don’t have us on the Photographer case. They’re using someone else!”

  “You’re a distraction, Davis. A way to cover up the real teams, who come into the Snapshot on different days from you. We can file your records though, and show the city is using the Snapshot device that people paid for. We can pretend that we’re not—”

  “Doing something deeper,” Davis said. “With secret cops. Watching people. Damn! That’s why they don’t want us working real cases, at least not the in-depth ones.” He shivered, then continued, whispering. “Right now, you’re here to investigate me. Today’s a Snapshot . . . It’s a Snapshot of a Snapshot.”

  “We weren’t sure if it would work. No cop has ever before needed to be investigated for killing his partner in a Snapshot.”

  “But I didn’t kill him.”

  “You did, in real life.” She pointed. “After stopping the Photographer, you shot your partner.”

  “My plan—”

  “Was clever, but you were too far from Warsaw. Maria found Chavez’s death suspicious. You confessed under pressure, but then recanted, and a judge threw out the testimony. Now we need to catch you doing it, but we failed. Why?”

  “Help you incriminate me?”

  She shrugged.

  “You really don’t know how this works.” He paused. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  “Newly promoted. You weren’t deemed important enough for the other two teams. They thought we could learn from this. And the classes say—”

  “The classes won’t replace living it,” Davis said, numb. “You shouldn’t have given me your number.”

  “So that was it,” the man said, stepping up to them, leaving Chaz dead in the street. “I told you.”

  “I had to do something,” the woman said. “He spotted me paying attention to him! It would have been weirder if I hadn’t responded at all.”

  “No,” Davis said. “You gave me something physical—that slip of paper. That created a persistent Deviation, and it changed me.” He raised his hand to his head. “It changed what I did. I didn’t choose. You made me choose. . . .”

  The two nodded to each other. Then they started to walk off.

  “Wait!” Davis said. “The Photographer! Did they get him?”

  The man frowned. “Well, that case really is above your clearance—”

  “Hell with that!” Davis said. “You’re going to turn this all off in a moment. Tell me. Did they get him?”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “The information you sent from inside the Snapshot proved accurate. They caught him trying to contaminate food supplies at the school.”

  Davis closed his eyes and sighed. So he had done something. But not him. The other him.

  He opened his eyes. “I’m the Deviation,” he said. “But I’m the one who didn’t kill my partner. I’m a better man than the one you have in custody, but I’m the one you’re going to kill.”

  The woman looked apologetic. How could you apologize for destroying a whole city? For murdering a man, for murdering him?

  “At least show me,” he said.

  “Show you?”

  “The badge,” Davis said. “Mine looks just like a metal shield. Prove it to me.”

  The woman reluctantly got out her wallet. “Yours looks like a shield to you because, in the day we’re copying, that’s what you saw. It has to be re-created exactly—”

  “I know the mechanics of it. Show me.”

  She held up the badge.

  In it, Davis saw his life. A child. A young man. An adult. He saw Molly, good times and bad. He saw Hal’s birth, and saw himself holding the boy. He saw tears, rage, love, and panic. He saw himself huddled in a shopping mall, in the middle of a nervous breakdown, and he saw himself standing firm, gun pointed at Chaz’s head. He saw a hero and a fool. He saw everything.

  And he knew. He knew he was fake. Up until that moment, he hadn’t really believed.

  He blinked, and it faded. The other two were already walking away. They’d leave through a doorway that dupes couldn’t see.

  Davis walked over and sank down beside Chaz’s dead body. “I guess you got it one way or another, partner.”

  The two detectives suddenly vanished ahead. No need for stealth in leaving—not when they were about to turn the Snapshot off.

  “I pulled the trigger,” Davis said. “When I needed to. So I guess the Snapshot did change me, eh, partner?” He sighed a long, deep sigh. “I wonder what it feels like when—”

  POSTSCRIPT

  It’s probably easy to guess that I’m fond of detective stories. Legion and Dreamer both have their roots in this genre, and you can find hints of it in my epic fantasy as well—whether it be Vasher searching for clues in Warbreaker, or Gawyn trying to track down a killer in the Wheel of Time.

  At the same time, this is a genre that’s been around since Poe—so a lot has been done with it already. I always want to find something that I can add to the conversation, rather than just copying things that have come before.

  I’d say that the core of Snapshot was the desire to tell a multi-layered story, with different layers of reality matching different layers of crimes being planned. The first and coolest idea for me was that of a detective planning to kill his partner while at the same time investigating a different murder.

  This story didn’t start with a superhero/villain as the (magical) origin of the Snapshot technology. Originally, it was just a far-future story where the technology had been developed. I really loved the idea of going into a replication of a day in the past to investigate crimes. It felt very classic cyberpunk to me, with some nice Philip K. Dick vibes as well.

  Unfortunately, the story ended up having a huge problem. I needed this fantastic, amazing technology—but at the same time, couldn’t progress the society too far. I couldn’t let this story be diverted by bizarre, far-future worldbuilding or cultures. That would draw it too far away from the personal story between two detectives that I wanted to tell. (Beyond that, the Snapshot idea was already strange enough. If the world they investigated in was too weird, then I felt the story wouldn’t have any grounding.)

  Early readers, Peter and Moshe (my editors) included, identified this issue as their main hang-up in the story. Why did most of the technology seem like this was only a few years in the future? Surely if they had the technology to create a city from raw matter, they’re post-scarcity, even post-singularity. It just didn’t gibe. There were too many potential extrapolations of the science presented. If you can do things like create a Snapshot, why waste it on solving crimes? Why not create fantastical worlds to live in?

  We needed the story to be near-future instead, with a normal technological curve—except for one or two hyperfantastical pieces of technology. And that felt exactly like something I�
�d already done, with the Reckoners. Changing this from a scientific origin to instead a fantastical (superhero) one solved this problem.

  This is the sort of thing I talk about when I explain to readers the difference between what I perceive as a science fiction writer (someone who tries to realistically extrapolate the future) and a fantasy writer (someone who comes up with an interesting effect to explore, then justifies it with worldbuilding).

  In the end, both are trying to explore what it means to be human. One starts with what we have, and works forward to reach something interesting, then extrapolates the ramifications. The other starts with the interesting thing, then asks how this could have come about. That’s obviously not a catch-all definition, but it has worked for me as one way to explore the genres.

  Anyway, Snapshot turned out very well. I’m particularly fond of the subtle intertwining of the three investigations: Chaz and Davis hunting the serial killer, the reader’s growing understanding of what Davis is planning, and the other Snapshot detectives investigating Davis. These overlap with the three timelines. The Davis/Chaz timeline, the future they think they’re from, and the future beyond that that the real detectives are from.

  In reading this, I assume that the reader is going to guess that Davis himself isn’t real. (The protagonist turning out not to be real is a staple of this genre—from Blade Runner to The Sixth Sense.) My goal is to use that twist as the one the reader is expecting, so that when Davis raises the gun to kill Chaz, you’re completely blindsided—because you’ve been focused all along on the question of whether or not Davis is real. I wish I’d been able to reverse the surprises, so the one you’re expecting (that he’s not real) comes first, and then you’re hit with the deeper twist, that he’s planning to kill his partner. (And did kill his partner, in the real timeline.)

  This never worked in my plotting or outlining, so I had to be satisfied with the current order of events, which I do think works. Particularly because I could end with the lights going out mid-sentence.

  Brandon Sanderson