Vanadium Dark

by Ben Sheffield

  “And he's my help.” Viktor felt squashed flat.

  “We've allocated a bit of a schedule. You will alternate days with Gideon through the week. He does Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and you will do Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends.”

  “What do I do on my days off?”

  “Anything you like. But obviously, the Handling portion of the Zoo will be off limits to you.”

  “We're lightening your load, Viktor.” Gideon’s weird grin stayed in place. “We're helping you out. You get more time to sleep. I get the experience of a lifetime. The nation gets fresher and more-alert service. The Secretary here gets peace of mind. We all win.”

  Viktor shook his head, still wondering if a fast one was being pulled on him. “So why are you at my desk? It's a Sunday.”

  Gideon's smile vanished like a dagger put back in a sheath. “Because you weren't here, and everyone thought it would be a good opportunity for me to learn how the system worked. I've finished up three of your cases.”

  “He's quite good,” put in Joyce. “A fast learner.”

  “Well, okay then... ” Viktor said. The Secretary stared at him, as if expecting some kind of reaction. “My own fault for having a broken phone, I guess. I'll send for a new one later today. I guess I'll have to accept this.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Gideon said. “I don't want to think I'm stepping on any toes.”

  You're stepping on the nation's toes, Gideon. It's what you signed up for when you took this job.

  “Well, it was good to meet you. I'll begin now, if I may?”

  “With pleasure.”

  “No half-finished cases I need to deal with?”

  “No, none at all.”

  Viktor sat down in the chair, feeling the warmth of Gideon's ass on the chair. It seemed the final ignominy. His unannounced replacement left, leaving the Secretary in the Zoo.

  “You're not bothered by this, are you, Kertesz?”

  “Not at all, sir.” Viktor slipped on the headset, suddenly aware that he was eager to do some Handling. Leave all this bullshit behind, Lose himself in the machine.

  “You understand why I'm doing this, I suppose. It's for your own good.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure.” Christ, just leave me alone.

  “You're privileged enough to catch our little project at a growing stage, Kertesz. This network is going to get much bigger and much more powerful. Be proud that you've got a ringside seat, even if it seems like you're the one getting beaten around at times.”

  “Thanks. I'll take that to heart.”

  The Secretary of Defense turned and left the room, exposing a spectacular bald patch. His guards followed him.

  “Business as usual, Joyce. Give me what you've got.”

  “Three cat-threes. They seem interrelated. Want to accomplish a hat trick?”

  “Gimme.”

  Amenuensis 2

  Excerpt from Viktor Kertesz's diary, auto-transcribed with better than 99.5% accuracy. Compensated to remove stutters and repeated words...

  When people talk about spying and voyeurism, focus is usually kept on the victim. How is the victim affected? What are the victim's rights?

  I've always looked through the other end of the telescope. What does spying do to the spy?

  As a person who has been wiretapping and secretly filming people for twenty years, maybe my perspective on the issue would be appreciated.

  Basically, it changes you.

  You feel primitive emotions and rushes of chemicals. You see your mark's head turn toward you, and you freeze. His head turns away again, and you realize he hasn't seen you. It's like a drug. There's nothing else like it in the world.

  But there's more than that. It connects to basic human impulses that we spend all day restraining. The satisfying thing is prying. How can I describe it? It's like scratching an itch.

  You're thinking in sexual terms now, I suppose. But although voyeurism is recognized as a fetish or paraphilia or whatever the term of art is, I have never felt anything sexual from watching people.

  Or have I? Would I admit it if I had?

  In the early days of the Internet, there was a young woman called Jennifer Ringley, who did strip shows, I believe. Records of exactly what she did have been lost. I wish Project Elephant existed back then.

  One day, she finished a show and decided to leave the webcam on.

  It filmed her brushing her teeth, eating pizza, and doing her homework, and broadcast it to the Internet.

  Broadcast it to the world.

  Month after month of lying around in her bathrobe watching TV.

  She became an Internet sensation. Traffic blew in like a hurricane. She got featured on national TV. This was in 1996 or so, before the fad of reality TV shows. There was something very exciting about a person filming herself twenty-four hours a day, sharing her entire life.

  Once it was thought that tabloids were popular because they humanized celebrities. If you don’t have millions of dollars, it’s nice to think that people who do have millions of dollars are also miserable.

  Now I think that’s only part of the story.

  Jennifer Ringley wasn’t a celebrity. She wasn’t even very pretty. But somehow, we love invading people’s privacy, and it doesn’t matter who that person is. We love jamming our presence into people’s lives and escaping the consequences. We can intrude on someone's life, but they don't enjoy an equivalent privilege to view ours. Evil? Yes. Evil, and empowering. When a weak man gets his hands on this emotional switchboard, beware the results.

  What would have made Jennifer Ringley's activities even better is if she had been unaware.

  She knew she was being watched, and that took away some of the fun. She picked her pajamas knowing that millions of horny creeps would watch her sleep. She angled her body for the camera. That's fun but somewhat cheap. It hurts the excitement of watching when you're watching an actress.

  But what would have made it even more fun is if she was unwilling—if she'd longed to turn the webcam off, but couldn't for whatever reason.

  Ever since my childhood, I have found a way to spy, to pry, and to peer. I've seen all sorts of things that I'll never share. My work has trained me too well. A loose mouth causes teeth to fall out.

  It's not really a healthy thing.

  But at least an individual can only do a limited amount of spying. A pervert can watch a woman get dressed through her bathroom window. But he cannot watch every woman get dressed.

  A government can.

  A government can spy on as many people as it wants to. And it has something an amateur spy will never have: plausible deniability.

  Two magic words.

  Spying rots something in your soul. When you pick up the binoculars, you feel excitement, but that excitement is mixed with bone-deep shame at your cupidity. It hurts like a rotten tooth. Some people have made themselves numb to that guilt, but others will be forever limited in how far they choose to step across the line. Fun though it is, they still have to look at themselves in the mirror each morning and wonder what to make of the man or woman looking back.

  The government has none of these limits, none of these scruples. There is no line a government will not cross because a government believes there is no line at all.

  I once met an old Romanian man. We had the most disturbing and memorable conversation of my life.

  We went drinking together, and in his cups, he told me about how he'd worked as a police chief for Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime in Romania, thirty years previously.

  Ceaușescu's Securitate embarrasses us all when it comes to spying. Hard to imagine a system of informants and prying more comprehensive.

  There were wiretaps, of course. But they went further into the heart of innocence. They recruited children as informants. These children had to spy on their friends and classmates. Was anyone expressing badthink? Did anyone like listening to Western music? What were their parents doing? They targeted athletic and popular children, the ones who w
ere at the center of things, always listening to the gossip of their peers.

  They took the nation's young and turned them into the state's eyes, the state's ears.

  “Marx and Lenin have taught us that anything is ethical, so long as it is in the interest of the proletarian class and its world revolution,” Ceaușescu said, and he practiced what he preached. No, he did not have the Vanadocam network. But he would have leaped at the chance to use it.

  A government can rationalize to itself that spying is essential for national security. And what higher purpose is there? A chance to strike at the root of threats to your own survival? Well, of course you must spy.

  So now we have the Vanadocams, feeding yottabytes of data to warehouses of hard drives. Everything happening everywhere is documented and recorded. Hardly a single thing passes beneath the attention of the United States government. And the net is ever being drawn tighter.

  What do I, personally, think?

  Well, I work for Project Elephant, so you might think I support the project. In truth, I usually feel nothing except ambivalence.

  Sometimes, I don't like it.

  We now walk stiffly through the streets, knowing that all our actions are being recorded for posterity. It's like a ten-ton anvil weighing on you.

  And I am on the bad guys’ payroll: sixty thousand new dollars a year.

  What's my excuse? Do I need one?

  I had nothing to do with Project Elephant. It would have happened with me or without me. And I might as well be paid to scratch this little itch of mine.

  No matter what I feel about the subject, I at least have the comfort that I'm an irrelevant cog, important, but entirely replaceable. This machinery goes far beyond me. The United States has changed forever.

  And I hear talks of France using us as a model, and constructing an even denser nanocamera network.

  God help us.

  We are not on a slippery slope. We are in a free fall.

  The Pentagon

  Hours passed inside the Zoo. Viktor slogged through case after case, not even aware of time passing.

  He'd found that it was not a good idea to have a clock on the job. They damaged his workflow.

  He'd make it through a few hours. Then he'd glance at the clock and start to feel impatient. Soon, he'd be checking it every few minutes, then every few seconds. Timekeepers turned into time takers.

  Even worse, his mind would automatically start shutting down in the final hours of work, like a clerk's desk being cleared as the business day draws to a close. In security, the final hour is the most dangerous. You're not alert. You're fatigued. You're looking forward to clock off time. And that's when things go wrong.

  Viktor found that the way around clock-off time fatigue was to eliminate the clock. He simply worked and let the end of the day come when it would.

  It wasn't a usual day, anyway.

  He no longer trusted the things he saw.

  He tracked a hijacked vehicle in Detroit—or did he really?

  He followed the source of a death threat to a senator and sniffed the perp out for the FBI—perhaps. Maybe it was a figment of his imagination.

  It was as if a film of unreliability had slid between his vision and the Vanadocam mainframe, preventing the two of them from becoming one. He worked the machine the same as he had before, transmitting information that would be used to make arrests and indictments, but his faith in the Vanadocams was damaged.

  Finally, at what felt like mid-afternoon, he accepted a case in Florida. He had to investigate the source of a drive-by shooting.

  Some time earlier that morning, the windows in an Orlando apartment complex had been shot out from a moving vehicle. A dull crime, hardly worth bothering with, except a Project Elephant director had rented office space there earlier that month.

  Viktor thought it was a waste of time.

  Everyone in the project seemed antsy, paranoid. A lot of his caseload now came from paranoid elements within the US government, convinced that terrorism against Project Elephant was on the uptick. Maybe they were right. He'd seen the protests. But sometimes people shot out windows because they were drunk or crazy.

  He punched in the coordinates for Orlando's commercial sector, found the building he was looking for, set the time to the evening before the attack...and found that the windows were already gone.

  He stared at the smashed glass rendered inside his goggles for a few seconds, thinking he must have made a mistake.

  This wasn't expensive office accommodation. The view in front of him was of some sort of ghetto. The windows were all broken, sharp spears of glass suspended like knives from around the metal frames. The elegant stucco exterior had black trails across it, as if from a recent fire.

  The place was a dump.

  He'd seen photos of Detroit during the crack epidemic more than fifty years ago. This made those gunfire-blasted streets look like fucking Atherton.

  He operated the camera and went inside. He zoomed through the halls, panning and angling the view to get a better look.

  Something had gone very wrong.

  Computer stations were smashed. The carpet had burned, exposing blackened concrete. Handfuls of cabling had been torn out of wall mounts.

  At first he thought the building had been looted. He realized it went beyond looting.

  If it was glass, it was broken. If it was metal, it was bent. If it was stone, it was scratched.

  The destruction was senseless and random. Apes on angel dust couldn't have caused more havoc.

  He explored more rooms, performing a silent building sweep. There were no blips of darkness as he passed through a door, for there were no doors left. All the doors had either been forced open or blasted off their hinges altogether.

  What the fuck happened here? He felt a bead of sweat trickle down his back like a liquid ant trail.

  The same scene, repeated over and over.

  Carnage, and destruction.

  Luckily, everyone got out alive. He reached the basement level, turned on infrared, and saw how absolutely and completely wrong he was.

  The basement walls were blasted and bedecked with blood and bullet holes. Bodies lay strewn across the floor, across chairs, and across pipes.

  There were at least twenty or thirty bodies here.

  He sat in mute silence, not even daring to move the camera. There was no need. Things loomed out at him.

  A young girl, paying her mother an after-school visit at the office, perhaps. She had been gut shot at close range. Shredded entrails spilled like slick red snakes out on to the ground.

  A man in a fitted outfit, dressed to impress... but only below the neck. His head was missing. His neck terminated in a ragged flap of skin, and blood and brains lay in a starburst extending more than ten feet.

  A pregnant woman who seemed to be about thirty. She had a bullet hole in the center of her head. Her eyes were wide open, her vision crossed, as if her eyes were trying to focus on the bullet ensconced in her neocortex. There was a second bullet hole in her stomach. Two for two.

  Gasping, Viktor slowly zoomed out, seeing the bodies strewn like ragdolls. Their figures were testaments to the awesome firepower unleashed against them. Heads blown backward and snapped at the neck by the impact of steel-jacketed bullets. Twisted figures lying against walls with blood-flecked bullet holes punched into the wall above. The bullets had gone right through them.

  Anti-personnel rounds.

  He left the abattoir, directing his ghostly eyes back up the stairs and to the first floor.

  There was nothing more to see.

  “Sir? Is everything OK?”

  “Everything's fine, Joyce. Absolutely fine.” His lips moved. His eyes didn't. They were glued to what was happening inside the goggles.

  Out on the street, he realized things that should have been obvious:

  This was a war zone.

  The evidence of heavy bombing cried out at him. Huge chunks of asphalt had been torn loose and was scattered ar
ound in clumps. There were black radiant patterns on signs and billboards from air-exploded ordinance.

  Sandbags and piles of debris had been stacked across streets, and he saw the trails from where enormous machines had powered over them. Everywhere was strewn the detritus of war: expended shells, broken tangles of glass still held together with masking tape. A cloud of black dust hung over everything, as though the city was breathing its last, and the gutted and blasted streets were exhaling smoke.

  More bodies. More bellies shredded, disgorging their entrails into the streets. More shrapnel-shredded or fire-eaten flesh.

  For a long minute he contemplated a tangled-up ball of humanity lying beside the road. It didn't look human. It looked more like a swatted spider, limbs all knotted together.

  “Sir? You're taking a long time.”

  There was a human head, yes. It was connected to a torso and two arms. From there, things diverted from where nature intended. It was like a logic puzzle. He had to make sense of it.

  The lower body was a chaos of emulsified gore and bone shards, joints twisted into positions that would have puzzled a yogi. Somehow, a single long piece of bone penetrated the head and jutted a few inches out the other side, making the person look like a bizarre human unicorn.

  Then he understood.

  The person had been crouched down to make himself a smaller target, his knees pressed against his forehead.

  A mine or UXB or something in the ground had gone off directly underneath him. The force from the explosion had split one of his tibias and hurled it like a spear right through his head.

  “Sir!”

  Do you know what happens when a bomb goes off underneath you, Joyce? Now I can tell you.

  “I'm sorry Joyce. This is something I have to be careful about. There's a couple vehicles involved, and I need to be sure I'm getting the right one.” The lies came out quickly and without thought.