Analog SFF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  So far, nobody's come up with a way to add nanos to parking enforcement, but as I pulled to the curb near a sign reading, “2-hour limit or Zone F Residential Permit 7 A.M.-6 P.M.,” it crossed my mind that this was only because nonconsensual nanos were outlawed. If Darryl's truth nano opened the door for others, a parking ticket might someday be accompanied by a nano on your door handle, with the ticket serving double-duty as a warning. Hi, you owe $40 for overstaying your meter and, by the way, you've been infected with a nano that will make your fingernails drop off if you don't pay within a week. Oh, joy.

  Not that my present plan gave me any right to complain.

  Getting Marion to shake hands was the tough part. Even among enemies, the handshake is a strongly engrained custom, but divorce trumps social convention and she left me standing long enough with my hand out that eventually I pulled it back.

  “My lawyer said not to talk to you,” she said, starting to close the door.

  “Wait.” Gambling, I reached out and grabbed her wrist. “I just want to understand."

  She pulled free, then, discovering the moisture and the tingle from whatever it was that carried the nano through your skin, wiped her hand on her jeans. Too late, but dermal contact was an awkward means of delivering the nano. Megan really needed to find a better way, like dissolving it in cologne. Of course, then you'd wind up infecting everyone within breathing distance.

  “I'm not here to talk about the property settlement,” I said, remembering at the last moment that the nano worked both ways and I had to be scrupulously honest or I'd wind up blushing and sweating myself. Luckily, talking property hadn't been my primary goal and I had a split second to decide I didn't really want to do it at all.

  “What else is there to talk about?” she asked.

  “I just want to understand what went wrong."

  “Oh, Alex, we've been through this a thousand times."

  “Yes, but this time I'm prepared to really listen. Was there really nobody else?"

  “You've asked that before."

  “I know. Just tell me the truth. I promise I'll believe."

  She stared at me long enough I was sure she was going to refuse. Then she sighed. “No. Not then, not ever. The problem was that too much of the time there wasn't you, either."

  No sweating, no blush. Not at all what I'd hoped for. “What does that mean?"

  She sighed again. “How many times are you going to ask that?"

  “This is the last, I promise.” If you'd asked me, I couldn't have told you whether I meant it, but the seconds ticked by and I wasn't sweating, and presumably not blushing. Nano as self-lie detector. How interesting. Let's put the psychologists out of business along with the lawyers.

  “Okay,” she said. “But it's nothing new. When I married you, we were both pretty committed to our jobs and didn't have a lot of time for each other. But at least when we were together, you were witty, fun, alive. Then the recession hit and you lost your job. I kept telling you it didn't matter, that you could do anything you wanted: write the great American novel, make good art, make bad art, whatever. But all you did was rant against nanos. Somewhere along the line, that obsession started meaning more to you than I did."

  I drew breath to speak, but Marion beat me to it. “Let me finish. This is the point where you always say that this isn't so, that you always loved me, etc., etc. Maybe you thought you did, but you forgot what it meant. You weren't you anymore."

  “People change."

  “Yeah. But you changed into someone I didn't want to be around. I kept telling you, but you wouldn't listen. At first, you just talked about feeling useless. Then you became useless. You wouldn't lift a finger around the house. You'd never been a great lover, but after a while, you didn't even try. Then you started that PI business, which would have been okay, except look at what you wound up doing: mostly it's just helping your old law buddies screw rich people in divorce cases. Well, now you're getting a taste of your own medicine. You deserve whatever my lawyer can do to you.

  “Goodbye, Alex. Don't come here again. You don't care about anyone but yourself, and you never will. Maybe you never did."

  And with that, she shut the door. There had never been a blush, never a bead of sweat. I didn't know how much of what she said was true, but she definitely believed it.

  When I got back to the car, I found a canary yellow envelope stuck under the windshield wiper. The officer had checked a box labeled “Other parking violations, described below,” then scribbled, “section 137 (f), Thurs., $53,” which wasn't very informative.

  I walked up and down the block until I found a sign reading, “No parking this side, first Thursday each month, street sweeping.” Damn this neighborhood. Damn Marion. Damn Megan and her nano. Damn everything.

  * * * *

  The next day, I went back to looking for Darryl's electronic trail. If he'd gone to ground in a cheap motel using a prepaid chit as well stocked as Megan's, he was going to be hard to find. But why fly here for that? He had to know how easy it would be to trace his ticket, which meant he didn't care because he was long gone. For most people, that meant a car.

  One of my divorce clients manages a firm that archives records for companies wanting off-site backup. Much of that data, nobody could get without a subpoena. But there's a lot I can view with only a modicum of arm-twisting, including most of the airport's security vids.

  Picking cameras located near the rental-car desks, I downloaded the feeds, scanned a portrait of Darryl into a face-and-body-recognition program I'd once been rich enough to purchase, and went back to counting bricks. Every now and then, the computer would inform me that it had found nothing useful, and I'd sic it on the next vid. Tedious, but computers don't eliminate tedium; they merely expand its scope.

  There were nine rental-car agencies and twenty-four cameras. When they all came up blank, I called it a day and tried to loosen my thoughts with a beer. One became three, but nothing loosened except endless replays of Marion's blush-and-sweat-free accusations, so I forced myself to go home before I was in hangover territory. At least, for the first time in months, I didn't want to sleep away half the next day.

  In the morning, I went back to basics. Darryl had landed at gate E4 at 1:29 P.M. His baggage had gone to carousel 7. If he'd bothered to bring it, he must have collected it, and there were plenty of security cams near the baggage carousels. I pulled three feeds, each spanning the hour from 1:30 to 2:30, and set my software to work on them.

  Still nothing. To say that I was getting frustrated was a colossal understatement. But I reminded myself how much I needed Marion's money and started viewing the vids by hand.

  By lunchtime, I had a big-league headache, but also a likely candidate. He'd not shaved and was wearing a shapeless windbreaker and a baseball cap: three of the world's oldest disguises and ones my software was supposed to be able to see through. But he'd done a good job of keeping the hat pulled low, so that combined with the stubble, the program saw only a seventy-eight percent match, even in image-enhanced freeze-frame. Still, who else could it be?

  I watched Mr. Baseball Cap retrieve his luggage—a small duffel and a wheeled suitcase that didn't look big enough for a week, let alone a permanent disappearance. Then I followed him from camera to camera toward the rental-car ghetto.

  He didn't immediately go to a clerk, but instead took a seat in the waiting area, watching. After a while, he got in line, pulled something from his pocket, and handed it across the counter. There was a brief conversation, then he retrieved whatever he'd given the clerk and wandered off, eventually taking a new seat. A few minutes later he repeated the process with a different clerk.

  Ha! I had him! Hand in the pocket ... finding an excuse to get the clerk to touch something ... questions.... It had to be Darryl, doing his own bit of nano-interrogation.

  On the fourth or fifth clerk, the conversation lasted longer, and when I zoomed in, damned if the clerk didn't appear to be red in the face.

  The cl
erk's flush faded as the conversation proceeded, and I'd have given several hours of Megan's money to be able to listen in. Still, I bet I knew the gist of it: Darryl was looking for a dishonest clerk. The lack of an antidote was a problem, but if I were in his shoes, I'd have rehearsed a few times to see just what I could say without triggering the nano. Then I'd imply that I was some kind of auditor and ask the clerks if they ever bent the rules. They'd all say, “Of course not,” but the nano would sort them out. If I started sweating myself, I'd just hope the clerk put it down to the weather.

  When I found a liar, I'd shift gears and try to convince him that no auditor would ever ask such an obvious question (though once the nano hits the market, they all will). Then I'd see what kind of deal I could strike up. If necessary, I'd switch to extortion and threaten to turn the clerk in for the rule bending I already knew he was doing.

  A minute or two later, the vid confirmed my hunch. Apparently the clerk didn't know he was on camera, because the recording caught him accepting a big wad of cash. A few moments later, Darryl walked away with a set of keys.

  I noted the time stamp on the vid, then dipped into another database to check for matching transactions. And there was what I was looking for, a rental at exactly the right time to a David Miller.

  What is it that draws people to pseudonyms that preserve some imprint of their true names? Is it a Freudian wish to be caught, or merely a desire to hang onto a shred of their real identities? Either way, “D.M.” confirmed an identity that my software still questioned.

  There was no nano on the rental. No surprise about that. There's no nano on most vid rentals, either. Nanos encourage timeliness. If you're reasonably certain of eventually getting your property back, there's a lot of money to be made on late fees. And I'm sure “D.M.” had put down a substantial deposit.

  * * * *

  Once I had the car, the next step was easy. The state has vid cams on a lot of highway overpasses. Officially, they're for studying traffic patterns, but the resolution is good enough to read license plates. I'm sure the police have direct access to the data, but I have to go through another of my grateful clients, who works in a radio station that uses the cams to create “drive time” traffic reports.

  Darryl had left town two weeks ago, but one of the axioms of computer life is that nothing is ever erased. For 150 miles he went south at a sedate sixty miles per hour: a man who was either in no hurry or who absolutely didn't want a ticket. I lost him briefly, but then he reappeared forty minutes behind schedule, presumably having stopped for dinner. He continued monotonously south, well into the evening ... then vanished again a few miles shy of the California border.

  I'd been wondering what I'd do if he continued all the way to California. Presumably, the Golden State also had freeway cams, but the radio station didn't link to them, and while I have access to a couple of pretty esoteric databases, I was going to have to pull some major favors to tap into the California system.

  As it turned out, this was as far as he went. I set up a macro to fast-scan license plates at the next cam to the south, but he didn't reappear that night, nor the next morning—nor, or for that matter, anytime until the present. Just to be thorough, I checked both directions, but there was no sign of him coming back this way, either. He'd left the freeway at the tiny town of Franklinville, more or less in the middle of nowhere, and apparently stayed there.

  As a hiding place, it stank. It was the start of tourist season, so for a while, he could blend in as a vacationer, but Franklinville lay in a horseshoe valley surrounded by mountains, with no way out except the freeway. Darryl had rented his car for a full month, so it wasn't due back yet, but when he failed to return it, I wouldn't be the only one looking for him, and even though he was obviously ignorant of the freeway cams, he had to know he couldn't drive around forever in a stolen car.

  * * * *

  The next morning, I called Megan to see if she knew why Darryl would hole up in such an odd place. She didn't and was all for dashing straight to Franklinville to check it out.

  It took some effort, but I talked her out of it. Darryl's self-imposed trap was a lot smaller than the West Coast as a whole, but he still had a lot of room to hide and I didn't want to scare him underground by floundering around at random. Especially not before I had at least a basic understanding of why, of all places, he'd picked it.

  “And how do you think you're going to do that?” Megan asked.

  That was simple. I needed to know more about Darryl: the person, that is, not the shadowy figure in the baseball cap who'd nearly eluded the airport vids. I needed to understand the man who created a truth nano, then stole the key to a fortune. “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “Well, he's brilliant. Straight A's at Harvard. Then dual PhDs, one in biochem and the other in computer science. After that—"

  I shut off the stream of useless data. “Not his resume. What makes him tick?"

  There was a long pause. “Well, he works really hard."

  “That's obvious.” What is it about these career-driven folks that keeps them from truly seeing even the people closest to them? “What about when he's not working?"

  There was another pause, and while I was still convinced they'd slept together, I began to wonder: did she really know him other than in the biblical sense? Abruptly, I realized it wasn't just techies: it was anyone who melted so deeply into their careers. Like me, according to Marion. Maybe like her, too? Had we, a lawyer and a computer tech, simply been a pair of Megans?

  As the comparison formed, I wondered how much of Marion's anger might be self-directed. Before the nanos, making partner at a large law firm, even in the supposedly laid-back Pacific Northwest, was an exercise not just in working midnights and Sunday mornings, but being seen doing so. It took years, and by the time you could relax, you'd forgotten not only how, but why. Marion's job had been much the same.

  Perhaps, when it all fell apart, she had realized what I had not: that the nano-depression had given me a way out. But instead of jumping at the chance, I'd hared off after a new all-consuming career, even when it hadn't given me much to do but count bricks and grumble. Deep inside, where even the nano wouldn't find it, had she realized that she too was trapped by her own ambition?

  None of this had anything to do with finding Darryl. I heard Megan draw breath, and for a moment, feared I'd missed something. But apparently not.

  “I'm not sure I know what you're looking for,” she said, and I suspected that if she were under the nano, she'd be right on the edge of blushing, because the real answer was probably simpler: I don't really know him. But that didn't mean there wasn't a good, practical solution. “Why don't you come down here and take a look at his apartment?” There was another long pause. “That might be more useful than talking to me."

  * * * *

  Megan's invitation came with two revelations, one big, one small. The big one was that hotshot researcher Darryl had an apartment, not a condo: strong confirmation that he too had no life. The small one was that “here” was New Orleans. That explained the French pronunciation of his last name.

  Megan, not one to waste time once a decision had been made, booked me on the next flight while I packed. That evening, she met me at the New Orleans airport and hustled me to Darryl's French Quarter apartment.

  I'd never been to New Orleans before, and the first thing I noticed was that even though it was after 11 P.M. on a Sunday night, the downtown was very much alive. The second was that Bourbon Street reeked of beer and vomit.

  “We're in a drought,” Megan said. “It's not so bad after a rain.” Which was probably the case, but party-till-you-puke is just another form of not having a life. Between alcoholism and workaholism, I'll go with work. If nothing else, it's better for your liver.

  Darryl's building was on a side street, just far enough from the main action to almost qualify as quiet. Megan let me in, then snapped on the lights with the ease of someone who knows exactly where to find the switch. But howe
ver many times she'd been here, the apartment showed no sign of feminine occupancy. The living room was a manly haven of wraparound video and infinite-channel sound—so state-of-the-art that I could barely recognize the components. Beyond it gleamed a steel-and-polish kitchen suitable for a master chef.

  I'd never seen such a kitchen except in movies, and I wandered in, amazed. “I take it he cooks."

  Megan shrugged. “Usually he eats out. But when he does cook, he likes to do it right.” She paused. “I guess that's the type of thing you're looking for, isn't it? Darryl won't do anything unless he thinks he can do it right. Otherwise he doesn't bother."

  Her voice had an odd tone, and I wondered whether I might just have gotten an insight into something else about their relationship. Maybe their sex life? Or mine and Marion's? Don't go there, I told myself, and surprisingly, I didn't.

  Back in the living room, I examined the vid-and-sound system. There were no racks of chips, which meant everything was on an optical stack in one of those stylishly melted-looking boxes whose functions I could barely guess. Luckily, Darryl wasn't a control freak (another interesting piece of information) and he'd let Megan use his toys whenever she wanted.

  I asked her to show me the index to the drive, because, if books are windows to the mind, music is a window to the soul. Darryl's collection was enormous—nearly 100,000 titles of such diversity I suspected he'd bought the whole thing intact: an instant music library for the man with a soul, but no time for life. Or maybe a man in search of a soul.

  “When did he get this?” I asked.

  Megan hesitated. “Shortly after his mother died,” she eventually said, and I perked up at yet another tidbit of information. “About a year ago."

  “Did he take her death hard?"

  “It had been coming for a long time,” she said, which she thought was an answer, but wasn't. Marion and I had been sick for a long time, too.

  With a lot of experimental button poking, I pulled up the machine's play log, which showed a recent taste for opera. High drama, high emotion. Not surprising for a man about to abandon his entire life for ... what? That, of course, was the question, and the answer wouldn't be in Wagner. Time to check a few of those windows to the mind.