by Sean Platt
Lewis’s hand flew to his head as if smacking a fly. He made a furious, disbelieving noise.
“You will find your visual and cache records erased as of fifteen-oh-four today. Do not attempt to recover them. Erasure of records implies your confidentiality regarding any biological records you may have formed. DZPD public statue oh-one-oh-seven-point-four-dash-beta-six prohibits you to speak of any matters pertaining to information transferred cross-authority here today. Thank you for your compliance.”
The agent looked directly at Dominic. “My scan shows you do not have any Beam-interfacing bodily hardware at all. Is that correct?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Dominic said.
The agent extended a hand the size of a small dinner plate. “Please give me any physical records you have taken.”
Dominic hesitated, wondering if this was a fight worth having. Nobody really knew how far Quark’s intel went these days, now that The Beam had infected the city like a plague. Crossbrace and the add-on proliferation had given Quark billions of eyes, and The Beam had doubled that number — or tripled it, or increased it tenfold. Whatever he withheld, he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t be caught. He was on the cusp of a big promotion. Was it worth risking over two dead guys in a shithole apartment?
On one hand, no — it definitely wasn’t. But on the other hand, Dominic couldn’t help wondering. Whether or not Quark’s claim to their own police force to “keep The Beam safe” was legitimate or not, one flatfoot cop couldn’t convince anyone to stand up for what felt right. But if Quark had busted in, what did that say about this seemingly simple and forgettable double murder? Their first queries to City Surveillance had come up empty, as if nobody was watching this section of town. The dead men, like Dominic, didn’t seem to have any technological add-ons or nanobots. That was strange. Usually, Dominic was any room’s only Luddite.
Dominic fished out his notebook and handed it to the agent, gritting his teeth.
His thoughts turned to the creeper in Lewis’s pocket. Had it done more than to erase the dead men, making them anonymous? Had it eradicated their technology as well? Had there once been records of what had happened here, but two worms — and now two big Quark agents — were making it all go away? What about this routine scene had drawn Quark’s attention…and merited the fixing power of two creeper worms?
“Thank you for your compliance,” said the agent. “Please report back to your precinct.”
Dominic had known that was coming, but hearing an order from the mouth of Quark — a company, not a civil service — burned his cheeks.
“Maybe we don’t want to go.”
“Please consult your badges,” said the agent. “You will find your assignments to this incident revoked. You are hereby — ”
“Revoked? Or erased?” Dominic interrupted.
“ — requested and required to return to your precinct. Further instructions on this matter, if there are to be any, will come from your captain.”
Dominic’s jaw worked. He looked over at Lewis, who had his handheld out, trying to pull up his records, aghast at how easily the agents had reached inside him and yanked out everything he’d recorded on-scene.
Dominic snatched the handheld. He tapped a few buttons and watched as the Quark agent’s eyes hardened, becoming still of swarming nanobots.
“Detective Long,” the agent said, “you are hereby requested and required to — ”
“You’re not in charge here as long as my query’s open.” Dominic held up Lewis’s device, which showed a pair of arrows chasing each other in a circle, superimposed over Lewis’s badge image.
“You are wasting time,” said the agent.
“Tell me how you know this is a Beam crime,” said Dominic.
“I am not obligated to — ”
“You’re right. You’re not obligated. You can keep your big fucking mouth shut, and we can both pretend that you have any goddamned authority to be here at all. Eventually, my query will make its way through the corrupt guts of city hall, and predictably, your company and its influencers will come out on top, and I’ll be ordered to vacate. At that point, my query will unlock the case, and you will be able to proceed.”
Dominic opened Lewis’s coat and fished the NuLon evidence pouch from inside, then held it up.
“There’s something in here that I’m told will self-destruct,” said Dominic. “I imagine it’s important.”
“What is it?” The agent looked like he might reach for the pouch, but instead he kept his hands still. He wouldn’t break protocol. Clerics could be cops, but in the strictest sense they were also software subject to if/then rules. Right now, nobody was in charge. That put the DZPD and Quark PD officers on the same footing for as long as the query hung.
“It’s something you’ll want,” said Dominic. “But something that will be useless in…” He looked at Lewis.
“About an hour,” said Lewis.
“Is it a creeper?”
“You’ll know the minute you’re officially in charge of this crime scene, and I’m required to hand it over.”
The agent’s eyes narrowed. He was half-AI, but also half-human. Anger was there, just behind the logic.
“You can’t win this,” said the agent.
“I know I can’t. But I can delay it. For at least an hour.” Dominic shook the pouch containing the evidence that, in short order, would lose all its usefulness.
The agent’s jaw worked. The other Quark agent came up behind him, now curious. They could have been twins.
“What do you want?” the first agent asked.
“Tell me who those men are.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Bullshit!” Dominic snapped, feeling power slide into his court. “You’re surprised we caught a creeper, but you’re not surprised there was one. We didn’t hear you come in and didn’t get a ping. The door was locked. So not only were you let in by building security; you knew exactly where you were going without DZPD telling you — something I can tell just by looking at my com channel. We haven’t ID’d them yet, and I’m sure you turned our sweeper crew away at the door, but the only way you’d be here, on this exact spot, without other intel, would be if you had word through The Beam. On Crossbrace, I’d have believed you’d be able to sniff your way here without an ID, but privacy is one of The Beam’s big selling points, isn’t it? Not inherently, but because the AI keeps its mouth shut. Except, perhaps, when other AI is doing the asking.”
Lewis looked over at Dominic. Lewis was his superior, but Dom was the one who, according to rumor, might be knocking on the door of a promotion. Lewis had always seemed baffled by that, but right now Dominic could see respect on his face. Apparently, Dom was DZPD’s secret weapon after all.
The agent seemed to war with something inside. His eyes clouded with the stir of nanobots, and Dominic could imagine invisible communication running between the agents, through The Beam.
Go ahead and tell him, or we’ll never get the creeper in time, Dom imagined the second agent saying to the first.
“Off the record, subject retroactively to the purge I have already enacted and that will resume once authority over this case returns to Quark, Quark PD positively identified the presence of a creeper worm erasure in progress at this location.”
“How? What does it mean to you?”
“Creeper technology is traceless and results in perfect erasure and anonymization. The data edges on this particular operation are particularly fine and indicate the work of worm technology we haven’t seen before. But data-native agents parsing the sector saw the absence of data itself and crawled the surrounding code.”
“What does that mean?” Dominic asked.
The agent didn’t break eye contact. “That is confidential information.”
Dominic shrugged. He pocketed Lewis’s handheld and said to his partner, “You want to get a slice of pizza? This kind of bureaucratic spat takes forever to resolve.”
Dominic actually trie
d to push past the agent before the man’s big hand stopped him.
“Because you are organic — and especially because you are wholly organic, with no biological connectivity at all — you cannot appreciate the metadata of existence.”
Dominic looked at the agent with scorn. That was machine talk.
“I’m talking about what used to be called the Internet of Things,” the agent elaborated. “Everything in the physical world is replicated and updated several times each second by Crossbrace and Beam sensors combined with data fed into the network by users who see and touch things throughout their daily lives. The code shows the world differently. Once we saw the worm’s work, it was simple to reach into the data around it, through several local sensors and the remains of these men’s native add-ons.”
The agent tipped his head toward the two dead men on the floor. Then he looked again at the second agent and reluctantly went on.
“A reverse search allowed us to identify the victims,” he concluded.
Dominic hadn’t been expecting that. Apparently, neither had Lewis because he practically blurted, “They were erased! And they were privacy encrypted! We were right here, and we could never have identified them without — ”
The agent cut him off. “Different capabilities exist when you are able to look from the inside out rather than from the outside in.”
The second agent’s jaw became hard and firm. Apparently, clerics could get angry, just like people. He said, “You don’t even understand your world. To you, The Beam is a toy.”
“Who are they?” Dominic asked. Then, when the agents paused, Dominic tapped his pocket and tried again to push by.
“Oates, Marshall,” said the second agent, pointing at the dead man near the ramshackle couch. Then he pointed at the other. “Hawes, Colin.”
Dominic’s mind churned. He looked at Lewis then at the agents.
“The Plasteel baron? And the…” He couldn’t even get out Hawes’s claim to fame before the agent cut him off again.
“Yes.”
“Why are they here? In the ghetto?”
“We do not know.”
“Who killed them?”
“We do not know. But we have seen the nature of the damage. Both had protections in place that Quark does not have on file. Whatever was done, it was…advanced.”
Dominic looked at Lewis again. Then at the agents. The dead men on the floor: two of the richest, most powerful people to ever live, dead here below the line. They’d both been shoddily dressed. Their faces obscured. They’d both been armed, traces of various narcotics scattered about. Whoever had set up this little diorama to cover two extraordinarily high-profile crimes had done an excellent job. If not for Dominic’s prickling sense of unease and the Quark agents’ arrival and ensuing gambit, nobody would ever have known.
And, because Quark was about to take over and erase all records, nobody ever would know. Except for Dominic and his partner, who would know to keep their mouths shut unless they wanted a visit from Quark — or maybe a creeper — too.
The first agent held out his hand. Reluctantly, knowing how far he could push and where he’d need to stop, Dominic handed over the pouch containing the creeper.
“And your query,” said the agent, nodding at the handheld in Dominic’s pocket. “Release your challenge on Quark’s takeover of this case.”
Dominic pulled the handheld from his pocket and hovered his finger above its screen, ready to release the query. Then he looked up and met the agents’ churning gray eyes.
“One more question,” Dominic said.
“You cannot do anything with the information we’ve given or will give you,” said the second agent.
“It’s for me. Personal curiosity.”
“You are forbidden to mention any of what’s happened here,” said the first agent. “It is irrelevant.”
“Indulge me,” said Dominic.
Beside Dom, Lewis looked ready to head out. His tough veneer had cracked. They’d pushed too hard — not just against the rapidly rising power of Quark PD clerics, but against something bigger. Something that obeyed the first rule of conspiracy: the less you know, the better.
“Let’s go, Dom,” said Lewis. “Release the query.”
But Dominic ignored him. “This vacuum of data you mentioned. It erased these two’s minds and identifiers. But did it touch anything else? Is there any other specific information you know that went missing today?”
“Only coincidentally, and only by association,” said the first agent.
Dominic moved his finger a millimeter closer to the handheld’s screen with its circling arrows.
“If it’s a coincidence,” Dominic said, “there’s no harm in telling me.”
The agents looked at each other. Dominic could imagine untold volumes of information and arguments streaming between their AI, trying to reason out the dilemma, wondering how far this troublesome human cop could be trusted.
“Ryan Enterprises,” the agent said. “An insubstantial metatrail between Oates, Hawes, and Ryan Enterprises vanished today as well, but our best analysis suggests it means nothing.”
Dominic smiled.
He couldn’t investigate any of this once he released the case to the agents. He couldn’t search The Beam to learn more…because these weren’t really men sharing the room, but something else entirely. He couldn’t even discuss it.
But he could wonder. And, although he could never share it, he could know.
“Come in, dear,” said a doddering old voice.
Kai stood in front of Rachel Ryan’s complex, Alpha Place written in stone above the door. There had been a doorman, but Kai had found an entertaining way to distract him without raising his suspicions — though she had managed to raise something else. Right now, that doorman was two blocks down, asleep behind a refuse bin. Kai didn’t think he’d wonder why when he woke up. Men naturally relaxed after they came — but thanks to some creative sex toys and a bit of nanobot help, this one had come six times. Kai had given him a sedative before dragging him away with her obfuscation add-on activated, but when he woke, the man would probably just assume he’d jizzed himself out cold with the attractive stranger.
“Come in?” Kai puzzled at the intercom. She’d stuck a piece of chewing gum over the camera, but in a building like this it was entirely possible there were a dozen other sensors watching her at all times. She’d slipped in and out of Isaac and Natasha Ryan’s home without being seen, but that was only because nobody had known to sic spies on her. Rachel Ryan — who according to Micah was cream of the Beau Monde — apparently knew better.
“Yes, dear,” said the intercom. There was no video. Maybe Micah’s mother had stuck gum over her camera, too. It seemed impossible in a building this nice that the thing could simply be broken. “Come in.”
“You don’t even know who I am.”
“You’re Micah’s friend.”
Kai looked up then around. She was trying to spot flying cameras — a joke, considering they could be hidden just about anywhere, or possibly watching her from space. But there was more setting off her alarms than just recognition; “Micah’s friend” implied not just that Rachel knew a brown-haired woman in a short skirt was at her door, but that she knew who Kai was and how she was tied to Micah. The first could have come from Beau Monde Beam access. But the second? Nobody other than Nicolai and Doc (ahem…Kate) knew her connection to Micah.
There was a click as the door’s lock disengaged. At the same time, a barely audible hum stopped purring. Kai hadn’t noticed the hum until it was gone, but hearing it stop gave her a chill. If she’d used her add-ons to force the lock, what strange force field would have she found herself stepping through? She’d heard rumors of anti-augment protections, but they were only rumors — and, she thought, highly illegal to develop. Those rumors alone were enough to give her Orion memories a run for their money.
“Come on in, Kai,” said the voice.
Kai stared at the elegant-lookin
g front door of Alpha Place. It looked like polished oak, but its heart was probably three-inch Plasteel. She verified this by touching the fine brass knob and dragging it partway open. The door moved without friction, but she could tell it was heavy. Plasteel could practically withstand a nuke blast at one inch thick, so using this much in the door made a statement beyond practicality. This place is serious business, it said. And Kai, looking at it, heard a second warning behind it: If we’ve shown you the door’s defenses, you’d better believe there are plenty of defenses we’ve kept hidden, too.
This wasn’t how this visit was supposed to go. She suddenly felt woefully underprepared. Usually, Kai felt confident to handle just about anything, knowing that if a situation turned against her, at least she’d be able to fight or sweet-talk her way out. Even if she had to flee a murder scene, Kai felt confident she could get through any window, climb to any roof, leap to safety and hide among the gutter’s forgotten tribes.
But she hadn’t expected Rachel’s first words to welcome her inside.
She hadn’t expected Rachel to know her name, and her tie to Micah.
Micah had implied that as advanced as he and his Beau Monde friends were, Rachel was somehow above them. At the time he’d said it, Kai’s usually unflappable confidence had brushed it aside as beneath concern. But right now, the reality struck her, and she suddenly felt as if the old woman was a dozen steps ahead.
But if that was true, was there any reason not to enter?
Probably not. If Rachel had a problem with Kai, she could probably command Kai’s Beam connection to turn her own nanobots against her and kill Kai in her sleep.
She looked into the lushly appointed lobby. From where she was standing outside, Alpha Place looked like a fabulously expensive hotel. There was an immaculately dressed woman behind a counter, watching Kai. The room was strewn with fine, comfortable-looking chairs. Cut-glass chandeliers hung overhead, and the sounds of a pianist tinkled from somewhere out of sight.
