Liquid Cool: The Cyberpunk Detective Series

by Austin Dragon

  "This was the only way to break through the cover-up," one of the widows said.

  "I don't disagree, but my way would have accomplished the same thing," Hub said.

  "Yeah, if we wanted to wait for the next twenty years," another officer said

  "It would have taken time, but it would have happened," Hub said back.

  "But then the people responsible are never the ones who pay for misdeeds," Wilford G. Jr. Said.

  "You want my job?" Hub asked him directly. "We can switch jobs right now. Say the word."

  Wilford's expression said it all. He was not interested, nor was anyone else.

  "Being a revolutionary is easy," Hub said. "Running a department of 500,000 men and women in a 50 million super-city is a far different thing. My humble suggestion is that we send 90% of the forces to do what the man says and take the remaining 10% with me back to City Hall and get those Up-Top spaceships off our planet! That should be acceptable to everyone because if there's a possibility of any real violence, City Hall is where that will be. Maybe you'll get what you want after all and I'll get shot for real there."

  The two sides stared at each other. I had to get the ball rolling.

  "Can someone escort me to my hover-limo?" I asked. "It's not what it sounds like. It's donated. And a guy like me with a red Ford Pony can't exactly drive around incognito. Let's bring this whole matter to an end and get the real bad guy."

  It worked. Cops volunteered. I knew the tension wasn't going to go away soon, if ever, but at least the city could get its streets back.

  Chapter 61: Police Watch

  As I sat in hover-limo with Flash at the wheel and two police cruisers following as escorts, I reflected how this whole mess unfolded. Run-Time gave me a simple gig and it snowballed into this. Since I planned to make this my new permanent career, I hoped that this was a once in a lifetime event. I don't think my nerves could handle any repeats.

  "Oh, Mr. Cruz?"

  "Yeah."

  "Mr. Run-Time is sending his security to meet you at the Watch Division."

  "The cops are protecting me now."

  "You can never have too much security."

  I nodded. "After today, never a more true statement was spoken."

  We arrived at Police Watch Division and there was Run-Time's VP, the Mick, waiting. He had a compact machine gun in hand and behind him were no less than a dozen armed men. I exited the elevator capsule and he spoke into his cupped left hand. He lowered his hand as he approached me and the two police officers with me.

  "I'm leading Mr. Run-Time's additional private security for Mr. Cruz. Everyone calls me the Mick," he said to the officers.

  "Officer Break and my partner Officer Caps."

  "If I may suggest a security strategy," the Mick said. "I will maintain a close detail on Mr. Cruz. My men can take positions in the hall and secure the restrooms on the floor. You can maintain security of the main elevators."

  Officer Break nodded. "Sounds like a plan."

  "Mr. Cruz," the Mick said to me and gestured me to follow.

  I didn't like this at all and couldn't wait for life to return to normal. Bodyguards were supposed to be an as-needed thing, not a permanent part of life. Politicians, rock stars, and gazillionaires could keep the life. I wanted no part of it.

  We arrived.

  Exe may have been worried but she was one of those people who had an outgoing demeanor that radiated congeniality. She walked me through the underground watch room of the division. I was being given a tour of a place most people had never and would never see, which in itself seemed strange. The civilian Police Watch Commission was made up of only civilians to protect civilians but the civilian population had no oversight over them.

  Weeks ago, when I was doing my own informal survey of the Police Watch Commission, I called a random sampling of criminal defense lawyers from the Yellow Pages. I made up a cover-story that I was some victim who wanted to sue the police. They all laughed at me. One lawyer put it to me succinctly, "Body-cams on police monitored by the civilian Police Watch Commission made the City legally bullet-proof." Police brutality criminal cases were nearly impossible to prove, even before the body-came regime. The main reason wasn't even police protecting their own or political cover-ups, but because civilian juries wanted police to beat up criminals. But that left the domain of civil cases, which was where trial attorneys lived and, for ages, became filthy rich suing the police. But that was a long time ago.

  There was the main executive committee of the Police Watch Commission, who maintained their watching duties, but there were tens of thousands of watchers on duty at any given time manning the body-cam feed from police in the field. Police were not allowed to engage in any contact with the public or suspect without an active body-cam interface. It wasn't police procedure; it was mandated by the Police Union contract.

  Everyone in the City knew someone who was on the police watch commission, if even they didn't realize the fact. All 500,000 active police in the city were not on the streets at any given time (except the unfortunate animal gang skells who tried to assassinate me earlier), but even with being off-duty, on vacation, or in the station doing work, nearly 100,000 were in the field. And that is actually how many police watchers were here at the Division plugged in.

  Exe pointed to an old picture on the wall just before she introduced me to her colleagues. It was over thirty years old and showed a younger and more slender Exe. Everyone in the photos was there in the room as she introduced me. There was Cisco, who as twenty-something pseudo radical looked rather cool with his ponytail, but as a sixty-something, with practically all his natural hair receding to the point of invisibility, his ponytail looked rather silly--kind of like a seventy-year old with a twenty-year old buxom girlfriend. Let's be age appropriate, shall we? There was Mr. Link and Mz. Mosaic. Exe had an afro too in her youth but she let that go a long time past. Mz. Mosaic still had hers, tall, fluffy, and who knows how much time she spent having it dyed black. Of course, her eyebrows were her natural gray. Mr. Link wore these old zoot suits that I remember wannabe gangsters used to hang out on the street wearing. They looked synthetic and cheap on them, and looked the same on this old guy too. Every member of the executive board was some type of social radical in their youth, but here they were in their sixties and seventies still trying to maintain the fiction, except for Exe. It was real back then when they were started, but it was all show now. They were all so booshy with their mansion-sized apartments, multi-hover-cars, when they weren't being chauffeured around by hover-limo, all their kids well-placed in society, their grandchildren attending the best universities. I didn't like fake people, which was one reason for me to like Exe. She didn't pretend to be something she wasn't anymore.

  "And the President of the Commission, Mr. Stone," Exe introduced last.

  "Ah, the thin man," I said.

  He laughed. "I'm too thin, Mr. Cruz."

  "Let's move to the Watch chambers," Exe directed. "We can't keep Mr. Cruz here all day."

  "Yes, Mr. Cruz is Mr. Popularity these days," Mr. Cisco said.

  "Tell me, Mr. Cruz," Mz. Mosaic began. "You're a champion of the people, a champion of the cops..."

  "An enemy of the politicians and an enemy of the criminals," I laughed. "But then I repeat myself."

  She liked my little joke and laughed.

  "True champions of the people rarely last long without becoming politician or criminal," Cisco said. "What's your views on the megacorporations trying to take over Metropolis, Mr. Cruz?"

  I gave him a slight frown. "Don't all your children work for megacorp firms in Silicon Dunes and a few of your grandchildren got megacorp college scholarships?"

  Exe quickly jumped in. "Mr. Cruz is here for a tour, not political debates."

  "You seem to know a lot about us," Cisco said. "Did your new cop friends share our FBI files on each of us with you?"

  I paused for a moment and said, "Yeah."

  There was nothing special about the
chairs they sat in, maybe some extra padding, but no cup holders or any compartment for a mobile. Each row had six chairs across and there were six rows in each room. Exe was the last to sit in the front. They all donned black opaque shades and sat back in their chairs. Behind the lenses began to glow white; the virtual-reality interface was activated. They were plugged in to their designated police person.

  I stood at the back. Each room had its own army of technicians to monitor and maintain the hardware, and legal aides to consult with every police watch commissioner as needed by headphone. It all looked so low-tech but all this was the foundation of the Metropolis civil and criminal justice system.

  "What brings you to Police Watch?" Mr. Stone asked me when they had their first extended break after 45 minutes in the chair.

  We had convened in the break room for refreshments.

  "I wanted to see how it all works for myself," I answered.

  "Mr. Cruz, we must thank you for getting the police back on the streets. There can be no Police Watch without police."

  "The system looks so simple, but I bet it's far more sophisticated than I think."

  "It is," he answered. "You're looking at the only full-use digital technology anywhere in Metropolis. Actually, when Police Watch was formed, we were hand-picked to pilot the conversion to digital. Decades later, we're still the only one, but our record is spotless and none of city divisions can say the same with their out-dated analog tech. We have move into the new. Do away with the cables and cords for wireless and near-teleport transference. I've been a strong advocate for pushing technological advancement. That's why humans are in space."

  "Well, some humans are in space," I said.

  "Don't worry about those things, Mr. Cruz. No one can stop the progress forward for all. They can try but they always fail."

  "The technology Police Watch uses is the same as is used Up-Top."

  "That's correct," he said. "That really is the only reason all of Metropolis doesn't use the newer generation technology. Nationalism. They use it, so we won't. That's how low modern politics has become and, unfortunately, the thinking of the average Metropolitan."

  "The heart of this whole crisis is where did the body-cam tapes go from the shoot-out in question."

  F"Yes. Quite the mystery, but I have faith in our techs. Since you're a detective, maybe you can give them some ideas."

  "It's funny you say that. I said the same thing."

  "Do you have any theories? It's shocking to think that someone at Metro Police or the Mayor's office could break into Police Watch and erase the tapes of that day. A true scandal. They should be fired for such incompetence."

  "You know what I think about when new technology comes around? All the new ways criminals will find to exploit it. My girlfriend says I have a very dark view of the sunny things in life, but that's just the way I am. I remember when I was a child I read a story that whenever the latest and greatest safes came out that criminals would be the first to buy them in bulk so they could break it apart and learn everything about it and learn to break into it. If you could break into one then you could break into them all.

  "When I was kid too, I used that same principle to get into hover-cars. I spent time at hover-car repair shops and the salvage yards. I learned all about cars from the scraps. I learned how to build them from ground up. Once I understood the basic concepts, I could build any car from an old junker to a classic like my Ford Pony.

  "The Police Watch's body-cam interface is some kind of technology. Deceptively simple, but it's all digital tech. Easy Chair Charlie told his buddies that he'd make enough money to buy his way Up-Top. Easy didn't brag, and he never went anywhere without his wife. So he was talking an astronomical amount of money times two. That's what made me keep looking at the system over and over again. My OCD tendencies are like that. They won't let me stop until I get to a resolution. Then I figured it out. Is the system that the Police Watch uses fool-proof, hack-proof? That's what Exe was scared of. If it was shown that the system was hacked into, then that would put every past, present, and future case in jeopardy. Lawyers could argue their criminal punk clients didn't do this, and that because the system was hacked, it would render all videos inadmissible in court. We'd be back to eye-witness only testimony which would put the whole court system into chaos."

  I could see Exe wasn't smiling as she and other Police Watch people were watching me, quietly but nervously.

  "Well, I'm happy to say one thing."

  "What's that?" Stone asked me.

  "The interface wasn't hacked."

  I could see them all breathe a sigh of relief.

  "The system recorded that night perfectly. The incident was even watched real-live as it should have been. There were no unauthorized entries. But no recordings of that night were filed. How is that possible?"

  "It's not," Stone said. "There are a minimum of two watchers per police team, and every watcher has to sign off on their partners to end their shift and when their shift is over, the recordings are logged."

  "Isn't it funny how we humans say that computers are in error when in fact they are doing exactly what we programmed them to do? Then we get mad at them because we're too dumb to remember what we programmed them to do. The police watch system, even now, isn't faulty or broken. It did exactly what we told it to do."

  "We don't understand you, Mr. Cruz," Exe said to me. "Our techs have been over the system hundreds of times at our direction and on direction of Police One, city hall; a lot of people want this. This city is holding its breath until we can find those tapes or determine how they were destroyed."

  "Sometimes humans can't even properly read all the data it collects," I continued. "They can't see the patterns. There are some great data people working for the city. They mentored me back when I was a police intern. Looking at the data, sometimes the patterns are hard to see. You have to stare at it and assimilate all the data over days and weeks to see it. But you know, sometimes things are so obvious, it's sitting right there in front of you."

  "Mr. Cruz, I'm sure you fancy yourself a clever person, but I for one am getting bored. What is it you think you found that all of our techs haven't?" Cisco asked.

  "You said there has to be two people on the same police watch team to end a session and send the recordings to file?" I asked.

  "Yes," Exe answered.

  "What if there was only one?"

  All of them were thinking. The techs and the legal aides were thinking. Everyone trying to figure out my riddle.

  "People," I said. "If you program a computer system not to end a session until two people are plugged into a session and sign off, then you get an error or...it goes into stand-by mode and recordings stay in the resident memory...forever."

  "He's right," a tech said. "But that can't be. A shoot-out of that magnitude would have had as many watchers as police officers. There were fifty officers on the scene that night."

  "58," I corrected and looked at the Police Watch President. "When you look at who was the logged in as watcher for Officer Bus, it was you. And Officer Boot, you. Officers Singletree and Azure, you. Everyone was only looking for unauthorized access into the system. They saw the trees and examined each one closely, looking for an outside unauthorized user, but no one ever stepped back to see the forest, look at the big picture. How did you manage that, Mr. Stone? You were the designated watcher for all 58 officers on scene, at the same time. What was the plan, Mr. Stone? You found an unbelievable, exploitable vulnerability in the system. Sell that knowledge to the Up-Top criminal world? With that, they could break into global banks, raid government general funds; maybe sell to terrorists to crash a space cruiser into a lunar base? They could manipulate the entire City's criminal justice surveillance system through its very own police force. Recordings could be changed, modified, replaced from within the system itself. Untraceable. Fool-proof."

  Stone stared at me like he was a mannequin.

  I said, "Easy Chair was your go-between, but somethin
g this big...you couldn't leave him alive, because he could identify you. You couldn't take the chance, especially when he wanted to take his wife and self to join you in the Up-Top good life."

  I pointed at him with a simmering anger. "You killed my friend and now you're going to burn for it. Don't bother to run because there are police and security all over this floor. You were the one who thought he was some great master criminal, but you're like every other criminal punk who trips themselves up in the end. Note to self, when you meet your criminal partner who wears a stupid rabbit mask in a dark alley somewhere, it might be a good idea not to drive your own personal hover-car there that can be captured on video. There it is, Mr. Stone. What do you have to say now?"

  Say? Mr. Stone did what so many people recently seemed to like doing--he shot me.

  "Sir, just remain still," the medic said to me as I looked up at the ceiling in a haze.

  My chest felt like a Hippo had punched me center-mass.

  "Your bullet-proof vest took most of the blast," she said.

  My chest didn't think so. I turned my head and tried to sit up.

  "Sir, don't sit up." Despite her objection, I did anyway.

  Mr. Stone was lying not far from me, dead! His eyes wide open and there were bloody marks all over his shirt, a knife sticking out of his belly, and a pool of blood slowly growing around the body.

  I looked at the crowd behind the yellow crime tape. On one side were the Police Watch Commissioners, including Exe. They all looked at me quietly, almost indifferently. On the other side, was Wilford G. Jr, Chief Hub, and a whole lot of police. Their expressions were as empty as the Police Watch. And finally there was City Hall--the Mayor and council members.

  The main coroner arrived and looked at Stone's dead body, and glanced at me. He noticed my gaze, so he knew I didn't kill him. He looked at the Police Watch, the police, and City Hall. A tiny smirk appeared on his face.