by Sean Platt
“You don’t think that’s a little creepy?”
“I thought it was creepy when the ID in it began to degrade halfway through the key sequence,” Dominic countered, trying to pretend that harvesting a girl’s hair wasn’t a step above beating off in her panty drawer.
“Well then,” said Kate, eyeing the police captain. “I guess we both have secrets.”
She held the drive beside her head, brought up her dashboard, and authorized the transfer. A moment later, Doc Stahl was inside her, and she had to repress a laugh at the idea that she’d finally found a way to literally fuck herself.
“Done?” Dominic said.
Kate held up the drive. “Yeah. You need this?”
“It’s Gaussed. Trash.”
Kate tossed the thing into Dominic’s trash can — a metal basket, without so much as a reclaim filter. She wondered why she’d always been afraid of the cops, if this was the most important station in the entire city.
“Now what?” Kate said.
“Go home. I assume Omar told you what to do with it?”
“I know what to do with it.”
“You know it’s worthless, right? No different from a folder of vacation images.”
“Omar wants me to wear it like a disguise. In a manner of speaking. Once we’re in, obviously.”
“It won’t work. Set aside the fact that this guy Stahl wouldn’t have any more luck getting into Braemon’s business than we would; you can’t just pretend to be him.”
“I can do more than you think. As for Doc, I know why Omar chose him. Part of it, anyway. He’s dead but not dead. He may have got lost in the shuffle.”
“Omar said he was a ghost. He said, ‘They can’t catch ghosts.’”
Kate nodded. There was much here that she didn’t want Dominic to know, but she could explain enough to soothe his mind, seeing as his compliance (assigning the right security, accepting police commissioner’s access) was necessary to making everything work.
“That’s the idea. If Doc had died, The Beam would have made him a nonperson. The AI would have closed his box, so to speak. He wouldn’t have any access at all if he came back surprisingly alive because The Beam doesn’t pander to the dead once they’ve been neatly packed away. It wouldn’t even treat him like someone without an ID or an unknown because flyby nanos would match his ID to Doc and know he didn’t exist. Or at least that someone should be pinged to sort him out, as a mistake.”
“Okay.”
“But he didn’t die, so it’s not like that,” Kate explained.
“The real Stahl will leave conflicting traces. The system will be alerted to a discontinuity.”
“He’s not alive, either. It’s not a stolen ID. It’s a nowhere ID.”
“What is he, a cleric?”
“No. He’s nothing.”
“So he’s like SerenityBlue?”
Kate laughed. “Yeah. Her and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.” When Dominic didn’t laugh back, Kate went on. “Trust me. Doc is clean for use. His lack of…of anything…makes Omar think he just got lost when he…well, I guess he sort of skipped town without leaving a forwarding address, and now the Amazon drones won’t deliver his packages.”
“You’re expecting a package?”
Kate rolled her eyes. “Figuratively speaking.”
“Even so, and even if you think you can somehow impersonate him to Braemon’s canvas, why would Stahl have more access than anyone else? Was he a hacker? An adept?”
“He was something, all right.” And although she herself didn’t totally understand this part of the plan, Kate’s mind spooled off affectionate adjectives to describe her former self: Wily. Conniving. Slippery. Scrappy.
Dominic squinted. “Did you know this guy or something?”
“Who?”
“Stahl. You keep calling him Doc.”
“He went by Doc.”
“And you talk like he was a friend of yours.”
Kate swallowed, pretending to cough as a cover. “We ran in some of the same circles.”
Dominic seemed skeptical. To soften his contemplations, Kate smiled a transparently flirtatious smile. Like a stupid puppy, he melted.
“Look,” Dominic said. “Captain’s Beam access gives me the ability to see metadata that’s normally hidden for privacy reasons.”
“Good for you.”
“This guy Stahl. Seems he’s connected to Isaac Ryan.”
Kate’s eyebrows raised. She, even as Doc, had never met Isaac.
“Through someone close to Ryan. Nicolai Costa?”
“Never heard of him,” Kate lied. “Why?”
Dominic watched her, skepticism returning to his face. It was probably second nature to the police captain, like flinching from a fake punch.
“I know Isaac Ryan,” Dominic said.
“Do you know this Nicolai guy?”
“No. But I know about him. He just defected. I looked it up. It’s big Beam gossip. So did Isaac’s wife, Natasha.”
“Okay,” said Kate.
“Looks like Costa is on the guest roster for Braemon’s Respero fundraiser too.”
“I hope he’s a party animal,” Kate said.
Dominic’s tongue moved into his cheek as if searching for leftover food. Then, with an air of conferring a secret, he said, “I don’t trust Omar. I guess you’ve figured that out.”
“I don’t trust Omar either. But I think that what he wants, in this case, is what I want. And if I trust one thing about that slippery bastard, it’s that he’ll always do what’s best for himself.”
Across the desk, Dominic’s jaw was still working, still pensive. “I have a hard time believing that Omar selected this Stahl guy at random.”
“I told you. He’s undead. It’s the only way any of this works.”
“Yes, but how did Omar know that?” Dominic tapped the desk blotter with drumming fingers. “Turns out, Stahl’s circle overlaps a lot with his own. Doesn’t that seem convenient that Omar has us shelling a lowlife who, if I had to guess, he’s been working with all along? Someone I never knew about, even though I’ve been working with Omar for quite some time, too?”
“So what?” Kate said, trying not to bristle at Dominic’s “lowlife” assessment.
“I’ve just learned to never give Omar the benefit of the doubt. He’s turned on me once already in a very big way. I keep getting sucked in because working with him is always, conveniently, the only way things ever seem like they might work. Stahl mysteriously vanishes, and no one knows how or why. Except Omar, who’s kept tabs on him and knows — or pretends to know — that this guy’s access will magically open doors that can’t be opened.”
“You think Omar is lying?”
“I know he’s not telling us the whole story; he pretty much said so to my face, like he wanted to surprise me. But what if he’s planning a double-cross?”
Kate, who knew exactly why and how Omar knew about Doc Stahl, kept her face neutral.
“I don’t like it, Kate. Maybe he’s got an ace up his sleeve. Maybe this will somehow work: You’ll be able to get to Braemon as you then manage to get into his system as Doc. Maybe there’s more here than Omar is saying, and it’ll actually help all of us. But I don’t want to be fooled twice. And I know he must have fooled you at least once, too; I can see it in the way you talk to him. So maybe we need an agreement.”
Kate watched Dominic, wondering if his preferred agreement involved his tongue going down Kate’s throat.
“Okay,” said Kate.
“Braemon is Enterprise. Very powerful and rich guy with a lot of pull. Costa, until recently, was Directorate. But that’s not even what bugs me. What bugs me is Isaac Ryan.”
“What about Micah Ryan? He’s Enterprise.”
Dominic looked around, seeming again to decide to share a secret. “I don’t want to go into detail, but I happen to know about some internal stuff between the Ryans.”
“Isaac and Micah?”
“And their mo
ther,” Dominic said, nodding. He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know how to explain it, but something about this Shift has bothered me for a while. Ever since the big riot at Natasha Ryan’s concert. There’s been more unrest than ’91. The air feels different. And now this shakeup with Carter Vale talking about that Mindbender bullshit. I’ve been watching the Ryans for a while, on the down-low, and I know that bombshell shocked a lot of people. Maybe this is policeman’s intuition and maybe it’s crap, but I can’t shake the feeling that something big is brewing. Add a connection of Isaac Ryan’s to this party we’re supposed to be infiltrating ‘for the good of all of us’ with Omar’s not-subtle political ambitions, and it feels like a bomb. Does that seem like the kind of environment you want to be in the middle of, trying to get away with ID-jacking and West knows what else — using one of Omar’s old buddies as a tool?”
“Coincidence,” said Kate. But she’d grown up with a life of trusting her instincts same as Dominic, and a lot of what he said rung true.
“Maybe,” Dominic said, shrugging. “But what a lot of people don’t know is that Braemon did something other than currency manipulation, though it was never proven.”
“What?”
“Just rumors,” Dominic said, “but there’s a lot of buzz that back in ’91, Braemon was involved in Shift-tampering. Just go into some of the Deep Beam forums sometime and search. People there, they think that Braemon and his crew missed their chance in ’91 and have been gearing up to try again since. Pitting the Ryans against each other might not be a bad way to play puppeteer.”
Kate shifted in her chair. She was about to say something — anything, really — when Dominic’s connection pinged. He looked at his shitty console screen, seemed to read something, then looked up.
“What a coincidence. City Surveillance has sent out Pacifiers to quell another riot in progress, and this time, it looks like the riot squads are through pretending to play nice.”
Kate flexed as Dominic stood and reached for his coat.
“Why is that a coincidence?”
“It’s in the dooryard of Wellings Place,” Dominic said, “where Isaac and Natasha Ryan live.”
Isaac was looking out the window when Natasha came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. The affectionate gesture made him flinch. They’d been married for sixty years, and for maybe fifty-five of them Natasha only came at Isaac from behind when she meant to hit him with something.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
Isaac left Natasha’s hands where they were, backing carefully so as not to dislodge her. His assault-then-salvation at The Sap was intended as a political move meant to knock Natasha down from her pre-Shift noisemaking but had instead won back his wife’s affection. For days now, Natasha had been her old, sweet self to Isaac. And Isaac, as calloused as he’d grown in the wake of her constant insults, found he rather liked being his wife’s hero.
Isaac dragged a rectangle on the window with the finger and thumb of both hands then pulled it forward to expand it into a semi-holo. He rubbed the three-dimensional scene’s back to increase its opacity and give it a dark background, and then they watched events in the yard below play out in front of their eyes like a living diorama.
“Another riot? Right in front of the building?” Natasha asked, her voice uncharacteristically sweet. Normally, she’d have said those same words bitingly, as if implying the clash below was Isaac’s incompetent fault. Now she said it airily, as if on top of the world without a care.
Isaac almost joked, At least I didn’t start this one to impress you, but stilled his traitorous tongue in time. Instead, he said, “Looks that way.”
“Does it make you nervous?”
Isaac gave her a dismissive look. “Nah. I’ve already checked the police feed. They’re sending bots.”
“Bots just stir them around.”
“This time, they sent Pacifiers.”
Isaac expanded the hologram. Sure enough, they watched as bullet-shaped drones moved in from the scene’s edge. Seen in miniature, it was comical. Down on the street, the ministrations of Pacifier robots and the accompanying human riot squads would have filled the air with screaming.
Natasha laid her head on Isaac’s shoulder, her hands still around his waist. “Serves them right.”
Isaac swiped the hologram away and turned inside his wife’s embrace to face her. He said, “Callous bitch.”
Natasha stared at him for a minute then broke into a laugh. Then Isaac kissed her, and she didn’t fight him.
“Do you think this all will end when Shift is over?” Natasha asked.
“I thought we agreed: no politics.”
“It’s not politics. I’m just talking about the reality of the world around us.”
Isaac thought: There isn’t a reality. There is only the bullshitting of politics. But again he held his tongue.
“I imagine it’ll die down after Shift,” he said.
“I’m ready for it to be over,” Natasha replied, again laying her head on Isaac’s shoulder. He felt its weight, appreciating it and wondering at his wife’s allegiances. She wasn’t especially loyal to anything, but hers was a childlike disloyalty. She adored what made her feel good and resented what made her feel bad. She was the kind of person who stopped being an atheist and found religion when things were dire because the thing she disbelieved was the only thing left to offer hope.
“Five more days.”
She looked at the window. The magnifier hologram was gone, and they were too far from the pane to look down, but Isaac knew she was thinking of the crowd outside, and the beatings in its middle.
“After Shift, nothing changes for the rioters,” Natasha said. “They’ve come at me twice because I’m a symbol of wealth and success. I won’t stop being that in five days, and they won’t stop being poor.”
“Shift gives people reasons to hate each other that they don’t normally have. It stirs up differences.”
Natasha shrugged against Isaac’s shirt. “I guess.”
After a moment, Natasha looked up. She met Isaac’s eyes. Her own were bright green. Her nose was thin and delicate, different from the nose on the songstress Isaac had fallen for all those years ago. Her cheeks were too thin, devoid of a woman’s natural softness. But despite it, she didn’t look as hard to him as she usually did. And now, temporarily able to see his wife as something other than an adversary, Isaac wondered how much of her anger had come from hurt. When they were fighting, admitting that Natasha was a fundamentally damaged person was tantamount to forgiveness for her bad behavior. But he could see her neediness. Fraught with danger as it was, Natasha was seeing Isaac as her rock. She’d believe whatever he said and not argue or fight.
For now.
“Do you hate me?” she asked.
“Why would I hate you?”
“Because I’m shifting.”
“I thought we said no politics?”
“I’m serious, Isaac.”
He didn’t hate her right now. But even in the storm’s eye, her decision was something raw between them.
“You could not shift,” Isaac said.
“I have to.”
“You don’t have to. You could hold a press release. Tell the sheets that you’ve changed your mind.”
“No. I don’t mean that I have to because of public opinion. I have to because I have to. For me.”
Isaac felt a bubble of resentment. The whole point of staging The Sap incursion had been to make Natasha owe him something, and see him as less than a failure. Doing so had hit two birds with one stone (setting a trap for insurgents that needed quelling regardless, plus obligating and humbling Natasha), but Isaac’s biggest motivator had always been pride. He’d spun a lot of bullshit about power balance between parties for Aiden Purcell, but even Purcell had known the coup-and-savior bit was about Isaac’s ego alone.
“You can do all the same things in Directorate than you can in Enterprise.”
“I can’t.
I feel like a — ” she hesitated then held up a palm as she continued to silently add…and you know I mean no offense by this, “ — a sellout by remaining Directorate. You understand, don’t you?”
“Understand that the party I head is about selling out?”
“I don’t mean it that way.”
“But you do. You just said it.”
Natasha gave a sad little smile and patted Isaac’s chest. “We’re just different is all. You knew that when you met me. I have to walk the edge to be happy, and I can’t walk on an edge when I know I can’t fall.”
Isaac watched himself from the inside, seeing his gut response rise and pause. He wanted to fight. This was an old argument, and he took offense every time. But the offense, he’d been seeing recently, was something he wanted to have. As if he could decide to not be offended but liked stepping into the stinging whip.
So he stuffed it down and nodded.
“So do you hate me?”
A little.
“No. Of course not.”
“And you understand? You understand why I still have to do this?”
No. Bitch.
“I suppose so.”
“I’ll cancel the concert. You’re right; I was doing that to hurt you. I don’t need a comeback show. I can quietly change parties. Because it’s not about showing the world. It’s about me. I’ll be as quiet as I can, and nobody needs to know other than the registrar and the sheets that just won’t leave me alone about it.” She stepped back, holding both of his hands at arm’s length. She gave his hands a squeeze: thin hands that felt emaciated, versus the water-fat hands he’d held at their wedding. “I owe you that much.”
“You don’t owe me.” But now he was being self-effacing — one or two steps from Aw shucks, ma’am.
“You saved my life. If you hadn’t shown up when you did…”
“I got lucky.”
“You knew. You knew it was a bad idea. My security wasn’t any help at all. I was so sure about it all. You tried to warn me. Even Jameson tried to warn me.”
“Jameson Gray? You talked to Jameson Gray about this?”
“I asked for advice.”
“Is there something going on with you and him?” Isaac’s eyes flicked toward Natasha’s office, suddenly wondering if Gray was her virtual lover, whom she met in the Viazo to spite him.
