“Your chefs, huh?” I said, unable to keep the disdain from my voice as I recalled her attempts at plying sympathy or guilt from me over her loss of personnel during the marketplace attack.
“I do have some human staff,” she said, chafing at my words. “My executive chef and his sous chef were murdered at the marketplace.”
“Why didn’t you send the robots to pick up the groceries?”
“They lack olfactory programming. Not very useful for when unscrupulous vendors try to pass off rotting fish to robots who don’t know any better.”
I arched an eyebrow at her, unsure if she was making a joke.
“It’s happened,” she said. “Not to me, but to others. So I use humans to purchase foodstuffs.”
She pressed her hand to the wall-mounted pad, and the gizmos verified her optic coding, scanned her palm print, and came back as a match. A soft click released the door, and we went down a flight of creaky stairs to the basement. The security measures clearly meant this was not simply another stock room. They protected more than Alice’s surplus of bok choi and snap peas.
LED lighting cast white, sterile light over a long row of access terminals, data storage bins, and digital pads. A group of fifty, mostly men—but I saw a few pockets of women, as well—busied themselves at the terminals. All of them were plugged in, and each had large collections of memory chips at their stations. I almost laughed in disbelief, shocked again at the reach of this Tong’s fingers and of Alice’s personal involvement.
“You’re a memorialist,” I said.
The look on my face made her smile. The gulf between us closed as she took my hand in hers, and I wondered how much of it had been my imagination, my paranoia. Our hands fit together nicely. She giggled, revealing her inner youth, how she must have been as a child filled with hope and promise, and I wondered when, exactly, it had all started to go wrong and what it had taken to make her the woman standing beside me.
“I’m a historian,” she said, full of good cheer.
Our private joke.
I had told her that line some time ago because it sounded better than telling her I was a DRMR addict and a death fiend who sometimes needed the rush of DMT to stop myself from going crazy. She saw through it. She knew what I was.
I moved slowly down the aisle, watching the methodical work of chips being slotted into the physical media players, which weren’t much different from the one I had, and plugged into data tablets for download and analysis. Once the security scans came back clean and the data was dumped, the workers unplugged the DRMR devices from the tablets and plugged the players directly into the data ports on their bodies. They had multiple levels of storage, each one a redundancy for back-up. The bioorganic machines inside their skulls could hold a virtually unlimited amount of information, but natural limitations imposed on how readily accessible that information could become. To make things easier, the same data was also recorded to cloud and nanoether storage as well as physical servers containing a host of yottabyte drives.
The memorialist movement had begun overseas, back when DRMR was still a largely underground technology and protested by the religious right and lawmakers who didn’t understand it. A small collective of French data enthusiasts had taken it upon themselves to upload mem records on a nightly basis, always from different locations and with masked transfer protocols to avoid pings and trace-backs from the authorities. What began as a counterculture meme quickly grew into a world-wide following and birthed a technocratic movement that was religiously zealous in its perseveration of memory and the sanctity of the present.
Even after mem-sharing became a standard part of the daily grind, memorialists were fanatical in their devotion. They downloaded everything they could then organized and cross-referenced it through keywords and tagged data points. They searched for convergences of moments and lives, from deep, meaningful relationships to casual acquaintances and the interaction of random strangers in random situations. They hunted constantly for an answer to a question so intricately complicated that humanity had no words to ask it with.
I had once heard it explained that they were seeking the societal version of the grand unification theory—the answer to everything. The more religious members adhered to the simple maxim that God was in the details, and they believed that was what they were searching for. God. The invisible hand. The hidden force guiding every life and bringing one person into contact with another.
They were voyeurs and collectors, obsessed with the lives of others. The few memorialists I had met struck me as strange, cultish followers with an unhealthy degree of interest in other people’s lives and actions, and not enough interest in their own. They were shy, socially inept, and prone to loneliness and isolation. They were troubled and psychologically damaged.
And I had found myself in a room full of them.
Nobody had exchanged words, not even a glance, with Alice and me, or even one another. They were lost in their own little worlds built from the existence of people they had never met or interacted with.
A tiny clock inside me was ticking down to zero. My heart ached with the realization that I was on borrowed time. If I didn’t find Mesa soon, she would be lost to me forever. She could be anywhere, with anyone.
He has Mesa, Alice had said to me earlier. And whoever he was, she believed he had been responsible for the death of her parents.
All of the work stations were occupied, but Alice found me a chair, and I sat. She gave me a tablet, an outdated, one-Exabyte model that was nearly full. I pushed the data spike into the port behind my ear, felt the customary electric chill as the electronic receptors flared to life, and accepted the connection. The tablet felt heavier than it should have. It carried the weight of answers. The weight of knowledge. The weight of lives.
I pressed play.
Chapter 10
I followed nearly a dozen datastreams, examining the most recent memfeeds first, from the previous two days—the marketplace bombing. The convergence web was incredibly complex and deeply layered, composed of fifty-nine solid data points and over five hundred null-void sectors. Ninety-seven people had been caught in the blast. Thirty-seven were killed instantly. The fifty-nine data points accounted for the memory stacks that had been harvested from the dead, the wounded, and witnesses who had allowed their memories to be shared. The null voids, buried between the verified data points, were a minor convergence web in their own right. Each void was a link in the larger web based on the implied, but unrecovered, observations of the people present at the market. The data points were organized and coherent enough to present a faithful recreation of events, but the system AI presented the voids as markers for missing information and extrapolated statistical data from the surrounding clusters.
Official estimates said that seven hundred people had been at the market within an hour of the explosion, but that figure didn’t account for post-explosion crowds that had gathered out of curiosity or to help. The high number of visitors accounted for the many null voids processed by the AI. Visitor estimates were calculated from statistical records that averaged the traffic trends of visitors to the marketplace over the last decade and took into account local population counts, deaths during the war, weather fluctuations, fishing and crop yields, social trends, and the number of vendors and purchasers.
At the center of this web was a seven-year-old girl. She was four feet tall and weighed approximately fifty pounds. Her brown hair, which matched her eyes, was pulled into pigtails. She was a cute child, and according to the mathematical speculations two hundred and seventy-six people had seen her. She was wearing a small yellow vinyl backpack, scuffed sneakers, faded jeans that were worn thin at the knees, and a light-pink jacket that was zipped to her neck to hide the vest of explosives beneath it.
She held her head high, in a sort of odd defiance that was unnatural for a girl as young as she was. The war had made everyone older than their years. She carried herself with pride, and she made eye contact with several people, c
urtly nodding her head in acknowledgement. She stood at the center of the market, a large open parking lot with vendor stalls set up for the weekend, and waited.
People passed in thick clumps, bumping and jostling one another, but somehow steering clear of the young girl in their midst. She was a jetty in a sea of shoppers. A few brushed up against her. A large Asian woman almost knocked her over, apologizing brusquely as she shoved past, though she was clearly not at all sorry. The girl’s face flushed with anger, as if she’d had enough.
The explosives she wore weighed almost a quarter of her body weight. Her backpack was loaded with nails and small ball bearings. When she detonated, shrapnel arced away from her body and into the crowd around her. The violence was sudden, loud, and horrendous.
None of her memories could be recovered. The explosion had vaporized her body.
I watched the turmoil of her actions through a composite filter. Fifty-nine memories merged by their commonalities presented a seamless view. The safety protocols were active, lest the adrenal dump of fifty-nine emotional sirens kill me. I doubted my brain would survive all of the conflicting physiological inputs—fear, horror, shock, adrenaline, flight responses. Pain receptors fired as I relived the trauma of shrapnel and the evacuation of hormones at the moment of death as I lay bleeding on the ground, squirming and in shock. I watched the dazed survivors, their eyes glassy, try to collect themselves, trying to comprehend what had happened. A few had nails sticking out of their arms, chests, and faces. Ricocheting metal had turned the face of the man next to me to hamburger. My ears buzzing, deafening me.
I didn’t need the complete sensory dump to be set on edge by what I had witnessed—a girl so young and haunted, capable of taking her own life and numerous others. The conviction in her eyes had been frightening. She hadn’t been angry until the fat woman ran into her, but even that had quickly been replaced by… almost docility, but that wasn’t quite right. The calmness of assured purpose had soothed her and given her the power to obliterate herself and those around her.
The next datastream was another labyrinthine web of mnemonic episodes collected from the 101 bombing. Traffic had been heavy but was stalled to a halt by a car crash. Confusion was a predominate theme of the memories, which had come from drivers caught at the edge of the blast zone or survivors who had witnessed the chaos or had been peripherally involved.
After multiple explosions, it became clear that the crash and the subsequent explosions had been coordinated. The lead vehicle had initiated the crash and caused a pile-up of thirty-some vehicles before drivers were able to stop. Traffic quickly grew congested between the exits, and three vehicles had smartly positioned themselves to block other motorists from exiting. The ramps onto the 101 were blocked by traffic attempting to merge, unaware of the problems on the freeway.
The lead car and all three cars blocking the exit ramp had been rigged with high-yield explosives. Smack-dab in the middle was a fifth car, also packed with high-yield explosives. A sixth car had inadvertently been caught in the pile-up, but it ultimately made very little difference to the plan.
The main aim of terrorism is to cause terror. The psychological effects of inexplicable acts of violence can be far more devastating to the group mentality than strategic warfare. Sometimes, there is virtually no difference between the two. The state of mind behind the first strike of shock-and-awe warfare is not terribly distinct from the mind-set of suicide bombers. What separates them are the responses of a state actor and the acknowledgement of warfare and battlefield conditions and readiness.
The drivers on the 101 had no warning. Many woke up that morning under the delusion that combat had officially ceased several months prior. They weren’t aware that for some of their fellow commuters, the war was ongoing.
The synchronized explosions were huge. They took out neighboring vehicles, causing a chain of additional explosions. Shock and panic set in quickly as people tried to escape the blast zone. Some succeeded, by sheer miraculous luck, but most did not. Shrapnel tore through windows, killing passengers where the flames failed to reach.
Soon, a stampeding crowd of people who had escaped their vehicles moved between the lanes of traffic, seeking safety in numbers. A contingency existed for this, too. Farther back in traffic, well away from the explosion radius, gunfire erupted. A four-man death squad dressed in body armor and wearing masks took flanking positions across the highway. Shooting at random, their goal was to increase the body count and incite further panic in the already heavily stressed crowds. They killed forty people, chasing them down the off-ramps, shooting into the cars stalled there, killing the men, women, and children inside. Eventually, they stripped off their armor, abandoned their hardware, and disappeared into the confused crowds.
I had not known about the shootings. The explosions were well-publicized, but the news report I’d read had been heavily sanitized. I remembered congratulating Jaime for his efforts. The memory turned sour and left me queasy. Thinking about the little girl in the marketplace, my stomach threatened to heave itself out.
I backtracked through the convergence web to find the center point from which all of the data had populated. I was searching for one particular name, and I found it. I reloaded the web for the marketplace bombing, hunting for that central spoke. Again, I found the name and face I had known would be there.
Jaime Kristoff.
I choked down the rising gorge and moved farther back through the datastreams.
I knew he had been involved in other terror attacks. I had even colluded in some, but I was slowly realizing that I had only ever known of a small fraction of the operation parameters. Jaime and his group of freedom fighters were highly compartmentalized, and they operated in cells. Nobody ever knew more than his or her small piece of involvement, so much so that I would not have been surprised to learn that the shooters on the 101 had been as surprised by the explosions as the other drivers.
Before me loomed the enormity of all the things I did not know—and did not want to know. I had been willfully ignorant and was content to stay that way. There were hundreds of datastreams in Alice’s databank, and easily twice that many convergence webs. Thousands of episodic memories, capsule recognitions, and multiple layers of complex null voids—Alice and her team of memoralists had searched for them all, hoping to fill the voids and further strengthen and add to their datasets. But I did not want to know about any more of it.
I was feeling nauseous. My limbs were heavy and fidgety. I unplugged, needing a breather.
“Your face is pale,” Alice said. She was sitting across from me, leaning intently toward me.
“This is…” I didn’t know how to describe it. Intense. Unbelievable. Horrifying.
I had thought of Jaime as a fighter, a patriot, somebody I could cheer for. I had done small jobs for him in an effort to further his cause. We had both been ready for the war to be over and were stuck on the losing side. I had wanted my old life back, or at least some small sense of it. But seeing a child detonate herself in the middle of a crowded square for him—and the fact that he would use a little girl to serve his own ends in such grotesque fashion—I couldn’t fathom that.
Extremists have come up with a hundred excuses for their actions, a hundred rationalizations to help them cope with their choices and to shrug off responsibility for the immorality of their behavior. Two datastreams in and after a small, cursory glimpse at several others, I found myself reevaluating Jaime, my relationship with him, and even my own actions.
I had taken jobs from him. Killed for him. The chiang for one. I’d been hired to do that job by both Jaime and Alice. He’d wanted the PRC general dead to further his own war, while she wanted the memory chips to further her own ends. I knew without looking that I would find a datastream devoted to the general.
“You need to see the rest,” she said, maybe guessing at my thoughts.
“What else is there?” I asked.
“What do you know about the Berkley massacre?”
“Not much.”
She squeezed my hand, urging me back down the rabbit hole. I took a deep breath to center myself and plugged in.
I waded through the streams, working my way backward. One of the earliest-archived entries had been from during the war. The date was familiar: May 26, the day of the massacre. The memory was another long, complex, interwoven map of convergences. I searched for the chiang, and was surprised to find that he was but one datapoint among thousands of others. I had figured him to be a more central figure in all of this, but the convergence point, the individual at the heart of it all, was a null void. The first half-dozen spokes to come out from the central null were also voids, with the data points finally populating the web two or three layers beyond that.
Some of the null voids had been identified and had either a name, a photograph, or, in a few cases, both. This time, Jaime was not the central null void. I didn’t even see him within the first few layers of faces. There were hundreds of firefighters, policemen, National Guard, and US Army. Each bore a rank designation, and somebody had done the extra legwork to uncover their years of enlistment and length of service. I rescanned the profiles and studied the faces closely, but I couldn’t find his. I was sure he had to be there, though. I went through the files again, taking my time, memorizing each face, and studying the contours of jaws and cheek bones, eye and hair color, hunting for a match.
The man identified as Samuel Hodgson had a passing familiarity. The name rang a bell, too. Kaften had asked me what I knew about him. I looked closer, reshaping the angle of view and drawing the face nearer. Small creases ran below his eyes, and the shape of his nose was about right. Hodgson was younger, and his face was unscarred. I called up the protocols for image analysis and tagged Hodgson for study. I received more than a hundred thousand hits and applied a smart filter to give me viewing angles of his left side. In the post-riot images, he was wearing a short-sleeve combat shirt with armor plating over it. He was smoking a cigarette and was clearly shaken. His left arm was exposed. Remembering Jamie’s outdated tattoo and the animated nanos, I tagged a second filter using my mem ident and ran a correlation.
Convergence Page 12
