"To protect the First Lady," she said. "You've seen that before, too. It's okay, Ty."
"No," he said. "It's not. I want to go home."
She sighed. Hadiya had been his friend. It was his right to mourn how he wanted.
She rounded the front of the SUV, and climbed into the driver's side. She shut the door, and was about to turn the key in the ignition, when she hesitated.
"What else, Ty?"
He bowed his head.
"Ty," she said in the voice she always used to get his cooperation, the voice that still worked, even though he was getting bigger than she was.
"I was in that park, Mama," he whispered. "And I am not going near anyone with a gun ever again."
"Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we at Slate have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day.... That information is surprisingly hard to come by.... [For example] suicides, which are estimated to make up as much as 60 percent of gun deaths, typically go unreported..."
—Chris Kirk and Dan Kois, Slate,
February 21, 2013
Snapshot: 2019
His grandfather smelled of mothballs. He hunched in the passenger seat of Ty's car, clinging to the seatbelt like it was a lifeline. In the past year, his grandfather had become frail.
Ty hadn't expected it. His grandfather had always been so big, so powerful, so alive.
"Your mama said I'm bothering you." His grandfather stared out the window at the neat houses on the old side street. Half the lawns were overgrown, but the others were meticulously cared for. "You're too important to bother."
"But she wouldn't come," Ty said.
"I didn't call her. I just called you." His grandfather shifted slightly, then looked at him sideways. "This is man-stuff. She'd yell at me for saying that."
Ty nodded. Man-stuff. No one talked like that any more. But his grandfather was from a different generation, and in that generation, each gender had a role. His mother hated it, but sometimes Ty thought such strict definitions made life easier.
"Besides, she thinks I'm worrying too much," his grandfather said.
Ty did too, but he didn't say that. He'd made his first argument on the phone. Gramps, everyone's entitled to go dark now and then.
But his grandfather had insisted: his friend Leon never failed to answer his phone. The police wouldn't check and Leon hadn't set up any health services, so no one was authorized "to bust into his house," as his grandfather so colorfully said.
I'm worried, his grandfather had said. When Laverne went, she took part of him with her.
Leon, his grandfather's best friend for as long as Ty could remember. Both men laughing, teaching him cards, giving him his first beer, teaching him to be a man, because, they said, his mother never would.
It was only a three-hour drive to his grandfather's house. Ty hadn't seen him enough anyway.
Ty pulled into Leon's driveway, thinking about all those marathon movie sessions on Leon's big TV in the basement, Laverne bringing popcorn, then pizza, and then grabbing the remote so they would get some sleep. Her funeral had been one of the saddest Ty had ever been to.
"I'm sure it's nothing," he said. "Leon'll be mad at us."
"I hope you're right." His grandfather opened the car door and got out, fumbling in the pocket of his plaid coat for keys. He found them, and grabbed the one marked with blue dye.
Then he walked to the garage door, and unlocked it. He'd already let himself in by the time Ty got out of the car.
The garage smelled of gasoline, even though Leon hadn't had a car with a gasoline engine in five years. The door to the kitchen stood open.
Ty frowned. It was too quiet. There should've been shouting or laughing or some kind of ruckus. That was what he always thought of when he thought of his grandfather and Leon. Ruckus.
He climbed the two stairs into the kitchen and the stink hit him first. Something ripe mixed with an undertone of sewer. But the kitchen was spotless like usual. The table clean, no dishes in the sink.
Ty rounded the corner into the living room, stopped when he saw his grandfather crouching. At his feet, some kind of gun.
Ty took one more step, saw Leon on his back, eyes open, half his face gone.
"Fucking son of a bitch listened to me," his grandfather said.
Ty's breath caught. "Excuse me?"
"I used to say, you don't use a gun to kill yourself. What if the shot goes wrong? What if it only wounds you? He used the right bullets, made sure there was no risk of living."
His grandfather stood, knees cracking. "Shoulda known when I seen Bobo. It don't always happen in Chicago."
Ty didn't understand him, but he didn't have to. "Let's get you out of here, Gramps. I'll call the police."
"Because," his grandfather said bitterly, "calling the police always does so much good."
"Because while there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil, if there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there is even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try."
—President Barack Obama,
January 16, 2013
Snapshot: 2025
"I don't see how this could work," Deputy Chief of Police Hannah Fehey said, holding a small tablet in her left hand. She rested against the windowsill in her office, the skyline of Chicago behind her, blocking all but a bit of blue from Lake Michigan. "Guns are still mechanical. No virus will shut off every single gun in the city."
Ty smiled. His lawyer, Robert Locke, stood beside him, arms crossed, trying not to look nervous. Everyone expected Ty to be arrested by the end of the meeting.
He didn't care. He had spent years thinking about this—ever since Hadiya and those bullets whizzing over his head in that park. Ever since his grandfather telling the same kind of stories. And Leon. Ty still didn't want to think about Leon.
Ty had found a way to stop the violence. It would be slow, but it would work.
"I didn't send a virus to the guns," he said. "I sent it to the phones."
She looked up from the tablet. "Phones?"
"Cell phones," he said, trying not to treat her as if she was dumb. "And that tablet. And watches, glasses, clothing, and anything else computerized with a wireless or cell connection within a fifty-mile radius."
If he had any hope of staying out of jail, he would need her on his side. Because he had already done it. He had hacked every possible personal system in the Greater Chicago area.
But she didn't seem to notice that he had broken the law. She was still frowning at him, as if she couldn't quite understand his point.
"So what?" she said. "You still can't shut off a gun."
"No," he said. "I can't. But if one fires, the phones nearby automatically upload everything to the nearest data node. Numbers called, texts sent, fingerprints from the screen, retinal prints, voice prints. The phone closest to the shot fired sends the information first. If you can't identify someone from all of that and arrest them before the gunshot residue leaves their skin, then the Chicago Police Department isn't as good as it says it is."
Her mouth opened.
He didn't tell her the rest of the details. All he had done was tweak already-existing technology to make it work for him. His little virus, which he sent through all the major carriers, turned personal devices on, and made them record everything in the immediate area— sound, video, location—everything. All of that data went to a series of dedicated servers, rather like those every major police department had now to scan all the traffic cameras and other security devices littering city streets.
Only those public security cameras didn't activate when a shot rang out. They ran all the time, collecting too much useless data. These phones activated inside a house or a car, showing everything nearby. His servers instructed the personal devices to contact the police, all in a nanosecond.
It was the servers and data storage, his lawyers had told him when he came up with the idea, that made this action so very illegal.
So he wasn't going to admit to all of his illegal acts. Just some of them.
"Check the tablet," he said. "I'm sure someone has fired a gun in the last fifteen minutes."
She glanced down at the tablet he had handed her at the beginning of the meeting. Her frown deepened. Then she set the tablet on the desk, leaned forward, and tapped the screen on the desk's edge. Ty heard the chirrup as someone answered the Deputy Chief's page.
"Any report of shots fired near the Art Institute?" she asked.
"Yes, ma'am," said the male voice, sounding perplexed. "How did you know?"
"Anyone injured?"
"We're dispatching someone to the scene now." Now the male voice sounded businesslike.
"Thank you," she said, and tapped the screen again.
Ty nodded toward the tablet. "You have the information you need. You know who fired the first shot. If they have a criminal record, you already have their name and address."
She picked up the tablet. Its light reflected in her eyes. "There's more than one name here. Two of them belong to me."
It took Ty a moment to understand. Police officers. "Everyone carries a personal device, ma'am," he said. "You get reports of every shot."
She clutched the tablet to her chest, like a child hugging a stuffed dog. "Criminals will stop carrying devices."
"We don't broadcast this," he said. "We don't tell anyone. We just arrest whoever takes a shot."
"It's not legal," she said. "It won't hold up in court."
"Forgive me, ma'am." Ty's lawyer spoke up. Ty gave him a warning glance. Robert wasn't supposed to speak unless Ty was arrested. "But under the revised FISA laws, you only need to notify the Federal Court that you'll be doing this. You'll have to do it under seal, but it should work."
Ty let out a small breath. They didn't know that for certain. The damn laws changed all the time, generally in favor of the government. But of course, he was talking to the government.
"My God," she said.
For a moment, Ty had hope. She was going to try this.
Then she shook her head. "It's one gun at a time."
"One gun user at a time," Ty said.
"We'd have to exclude firing ranges," she muttered. "And weapons training facilities."
"You can do that by location, ma'am," Ty said. "Any guns fired in a sanctioned area wouldn't trigger the alerts."
The Deputy Chief blinked at him. "You're giving this to us?" she asked.
"I want it tested here," he said. "But it's mine."
She nodded once. "This might work," she said. "My God. This just might work."
"The data is dirty; it is not valid or reliable, there are all sorts of missing information," says David Klinger, a former Los Angeles police officer who is now an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "When I and other researchers compare what is there with what is in local police internal files, it just doesn't add up. So we don't have a national system for recording deaths at the hands of police. And we don't have information about police who shoot people who survive or who shoot at people and miss."
—Pat Schneider,
The Capitol Times, February 19, 2013
Snapshot: 2025
"You did what?" Cleavon asked.
Ty was sitting in his grandfather's kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee. "I gave it to the police."
"You gave it..." Cleavon sat down heavily. His body hurt. His head hurt. He could barely catch his breath. "And you think they'll use this technology to make the world better?"
"Of course they will," Ty said. "You know that."
Cleavon thought of his own grandfather, clutching a rifle on the rooftops of his South Chicago home in that hot hellish summer of 1919, fending off the police as they tried to destroy anyone with black skin, in the middle of the worst race riots of that horrible century.
He thought of the white police officers, who shot first and asked questions later in the gang-ridden Chicago neighborhoods where he grew up.
He thought of Emmett Till's mother, sitting beside her son's coffin, tears running down her cheeks. Of the bullet holes in Emmett's head, done by two white men who would never have been arrested by the police of their day.
Of the bullet holes in Leon's head, and of the arrest that would never happen, because it would have been too late.
Cleavon had no idea how to tell Ty that. How to convey all he'd seen, all he knew.
"Science won't save the world, son," Cleavon said.
Ty's cheeks flushed, like they always did when he was angry and tried to hide it. He wanted his grandfather to praise him, not to criticize him.
"Mama said you would be negative," Ty said. "She said I shouldn't tell you anything I've done well because you always take the pride out of it."
Cleavon looked at him. "It's not about you."
Ty raised his chin. "Then what's it about?"
Cleavon started to answer, maybe quote some Martin Luther King, some Ghandi, words about changing men's hearts. And then he stopped, smiled, leaned back.
His grandson believed that people were inherently good. Black, white, purple. His grandson didn't care.
Yeah, the boy was naïve, but he was a new kind of naïve, one that didn't even exist in Cleavon's day.
"Never mind," Cleavon said, getting up to pour himself another cup of coffee. "You done good, Ty. You done real good."
* * *
Repo
Aaron Gallagher | 6294 words
It took concentration to perform delicate work in the cumbersome gloves of the suit. The rounded fingers were metal-tipped, and bulky. Elise painted the tips of her gloves with luminous paint for ease when working outside.
The octopus found the wires and shorted the alarm. The device glowed green and she triggered the manual release. The door popped, expelling a breath or two of oxygen.
Elise slipped into the airlock and closed it behind her, shutting the door on the endless black of space. The inside porthole looked into the cargo hold. She glided through the cargo room with three kicks.
The head-up on her helmet showed schematics in blue. She found the environmental control room.
She flipped open the airtight seal on a container holding a large slab of green gel. She snapped open a metal vial and sprayed dark liquid onto the slab. She sealed the container, turned the machinery to full, and crouched by the door out of sight.
At thirty minutes, Elise headed upstairs for the cockpit. Empty. She looked for the captain's cabin. In the cabin's refresher, she found his body slumped in a large rubber bag.
Great. He passed out in the shower.
Elise wrestled the naked man out of the rubber shower. Round globules of water drifted around them. She pulled a sedative pad out of her bag and slapped it onto Holland's arm. The chemicals seeped into his bloodstream.
He'd sleep twenty-four hours in a chemical coma. She left him in his bunk pouch, cinch closed around his neck. His balding head bobbed in the breeze from the vent.
Back in the environmental control room, she worked the O2 scrubbers at full blast for thirty minutes. She broke the seal on her helmet and sniffed the air, ready to clamp the helmet down the moment she felt dizzy.
Clean.
The ship was hers.
Elise floated through the ship to familiarize herself. It didn't take long. It was a small Beech Skimmer, cargo capacity of around five metric tons. The craft was cylindrical, with two floors. Cargo, environmental, and engine room below. Main floor above was one long corridor, sixty meters long, with the cockpit at the fore, two staterooms to each side, a combination kitchen, dining room, and recreation area at the other end. The ship was roomy for one, comfortable with eight, rated for a maximum of sixteen.
Down below she examined the engines, because no pilot she knew ran a ship within recommended specs. The big Beech was tuned
up to 122 percent efficiency. She studied the specs to learn what he had done. She shook her head. Sure, he'd managed to coax more power from the big engine, but it would need an overhaul twice as often. She shut off the display with a shrug. They never thought of the bottom line.
She finished her inspection and sealed her helmet. As she kicked out of the airlock, she paused to admire the view. It was worth ad miring: Pluto, with her single, sickly colony. The dock in orbit, half-full of ships in port, lit like Vegas, and shining like diamonds on velvet.
She slipped under Adage to where her Betty was Remora'd to the hull and went inside. She plopped into the pilot's couch. All her controls were custom, larger than normal. She spent a lot of time in her suit. Only two hours had passed since she used thrusters to come alongside the bigger ship. She watched the displays as she worked the controls by feel. Her deft touch meant hardly a small thump when she triggered the electromagnet and sealed to the hull of the bugger ship.
She looked around the small cabin, dingy with use. The Betty was a work-ship and looked it. She kept it neat, but it was still messy in that lived-in way.
After a last look around, she grabbed her bag and thumbed the power-down sequence, keeping the power plant only alive enough to keep the electromagnet on and her wine unfrozen.
In the cockpit, she entered her flight plan and engaged, then she removed her suit. She shook herself out, tugging the simple grey shipsuit straight. It was a relief to scratch. She scrubbed her fingers through her brown free-fall short hair. Her eyes itched from the low-humidity atmosphere of her suit.
Twenty days from Pluto dock to Lunar orbit. It took 140 minutes to get to full thrust.
Elise rooted through Holland's stores. Among his other qualities, Efram Holland had surprisingly excellent taste in both wine and coffee. While the plastic didn't improve the flavor of either, it wasn't intrusive.
She opened a box of 2105 Chateau d' Yquem. She put a clip in the reader and stuck herself to the wall. She squeezed a globe of wine into the air and leaned forward to sip from the bubble. The reader displayed the text of Jane Eyre.
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