“Not too long after that? Drones attacking American citizens. And after that? Snowden, who’s got an insane amount of evidence to prove that all of the things that Homeland and the NSA promised they won’t do? Absolutely, totally doing.
“Politicians are scared. The only thing they’ve got going for them is the attention span of the average American. News fatigue is a politician’s best weapon, because Americans have been whipped up into a frenzy over trivial bullshit so many times that it’s hard to get them to pay attention when a real problem shows up. But they know that the country is getting close to a breaking point, because the average person is getting tired of being lied to and misled by their leaders.
“Finally? The extremes are looking for an excuse. Liberals hate conservatives, conservatives hate liberals, the rich and the poor loathe each other… It’s an unsustainable system on the verge of collapse. We’ve reached a point where only thing that’s holding the country together is the people in the middle, those decent, average folks who recognize that nothing good will come of fighting each other.
“But if the middle tips to either extreme? The situation becomes unbalanced. The guys in the Capitol are terrified of hitting that tipping point, the one where the middle decides it’s finally worth the cost to act.”
Josh’s anger had been amping up along with his speech. He looked red and ready to attack someone, the neck of his beer bottle seized in a death grip.
“If you’re going to throw that, go outside,” Rachel told him.
He closed his eyes and his reds slipped in intensity as he recentered himself. “You guys do realize that if Homeland is in any way responsible for Gayle Street, we’ve probably hit that tipping point, right?”
“What?!?” Mako, the eternal optimist, couldn’t consider the possibility. “Why in the hell would we do this to ourselves?”
“Public pressure is powerful,” Rachel told him. “If Homeland thought Gayle Street could be used to achieve a specific goal…”
“No,” Santino said. “It doesn’t matter what the goal might be. Nothing justifies Gayle Street.”
Santino was unconvinced. So were Mako and Phil. Must be nice to be innocent, she thought. Rachel didn’t know how any Agent could still have faith in their own government after what they had been through, but more power to those who did.
“I’ve got to go to work,” Josh said, standing. “This might—God, I almost said explode. This might get bad.”
“You’re taking some food,” Rachel said. It wasn’t a request; Josh was as bad as Phil when it came to remembering to eat. She grabbed the nearest pizza box and brought it to the kitchen with her, then started scanning through the mess under the shelves for tinfoil wrap. The tinfoil was on the very bottom of the cabinet, covered with a hodgepodge of plastic to-go plates from restaurant carry-out meals.
We really need to start cooking, she thought. Waste of money, eating out every—Damn!” She yelped the last word as the rigid cutting edge on the side of the tinfoil box sliced the side of her finger open. She wrapped a clean paper towel around her hand before shoving the whole mess into the pocket of her sweat pants. “Damn,” she said again, quietly this time. Nothing looked less professional than a cop with a big old Band-Aid, except maybe a cop with a Band-Aid and whose hands were already covered in scratches and transparent semi-permanent goop. She’d probably have to wear gloves for a month.
She yelled at Josh and told him to finish wrapping up his own stupid pizza, and retreated to the den. The mood was black; she curled up against Mako and the four of them pretended to watch the second quarter. Phil and Santino started passing a tablet back and forth, showing off their collection of recent Internet finds. Rachel and Mako quickly grew bored with clever macros, and Mako headed home to be with his wife and baby girl.
“Going to bed,” Rachel announced to the room at large.
“Night,” Santino replied. She got a quick wave and a distracted hug through the link from Phil.
She shut her bedroom door behind her and threw a casual scan around the room, noting how she had really let her housekeeping skills slide. Her sex life had been nonexistent over the last few months, so she had abandoned the pretext that the state of her bedroom might matter to anyone other than herself. It was part therapy, she reminded herself; she’d break that old Army habit of making the bed the moment her feet hit the floor if it killed her.
The tub, at least, was clean, but the urge to take a bath was gone. And she didn’t want to sleep, and she couldn’t get lost in a book, and watching television in her own lonely head was a step down from wearing nothing but purple and filling her house with pets…
“Fifty-seven thousand channels in your brain,” she muttered to herself, “and nothin’ on.”
Deep in her pocket, her finger throbbed.
She reached out to Phil before she could think it through. “Do me a favor?”
“Sure, what?” he answered.
“Ping me in half an hour. If I don’t answer, come and shake the shit out of me, and then call Jenny Davies.”
“Wha—” Phil was hot with concern in her head. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, pressing her finger down into the wad of paper towels in her pocket. “I’m about to try a new autoscript, and I’m not sure how well it’ll work.”
“Ah, right,” he replied, his concern fading. Autoscripts were a funny sort of thing. “Do you want me to babysit while you play with it?”
“Nah,” she said, suppressing her anxiety from their link as best she could. “Thanks, but I shouldn’t have any problems.”
She procrastinated by spending a precious few of her allotted minutes tidying, then yanked the sheets flat to cover the bed, kicked off her shoes, and laid down with a sigh. She folded her arms as Shawn had done, then uncrossed them just as quickly; this was stressful enough without mimicking a corpse. Instead, she tucked her hands behind her head, crossed her ankles, and did her best to ignore how her heart was racing at NASCAR speeds.
She wondered if she was about to do something incredibly stupid. Patrick Mulcahy had told everyone that sleeping with the implant on could be dangerous. Rachel believed him; everyone believed him. The mischief a subconscious mind and an active implant could get up to? Nobody wanted to be the one who accidentally nuked Miami. The moment an Agent decided to go to bed, the implant was turned off.
Nobody but Shawn would have discovered this, Rachel realized. Shawn knew the rules and obeyed as best he could, but he did tend to forget. The others would consider meditating with the implant on to be dangerously close to sleeping, and would remember to turn it off, but Shawn might not be as careful.
She took a deep breath, checked her clock, and summoned the new autoscript.
It was a soft ball of wool in her mind, and she spent an awkward moment fighting it before taking several deep breaths and relenting. The autoscript wrapped itself around her. Jenny had been right: it didn’t feel a thing like Shawn. It felt like Jenny, all confident and reassuring and safe.
Then, peace.
Her timer went off precisely fifteen minutes later. She woke, fully alert and able to see her bedroom upon waking since the first time she had lost her eyes. She ran Jenny’s diagnostic scan through her own body, bemused to find her blood alcohol content had dropped almost a full 0.06 percent. Agents metabolized alcohol at a fantastic rate, but even for her, that was fast. When she got to her hands, she pushed the scan as hard as she could, concentrating on the little details…
Well.
Rachel wasn’t sure what she had expected to find. Her hands were still a mess, the cuts and scratches still red and sore to the touch. But the older ones were no longer weeping pus, and when she unwound the paper towel from her finger, she saw the cut from the tinfoil box had stopped bleeding.
Could mean anything, she decided. Could be you just stopped using your hands for fifteen minutes.
She flipped off visuals and sat in the dark, running her thumb over the stitches on her left
palm.
But…
Every cop the world over was aware their subconscious was just as smart as their conscious mind. It was what ticked away on the problems of the case even when the workday was over. It was what drove her to return to the scene again and again, to keep working the witnesses until they were past the point of breaking, until she found that one overlooked detail which locked the separate pieces of the crime together.
She used to be okay with this—she used to think it was normal. Hell, she had been told it was normal! During her early CID training, Rachel had suffered through long lectures from an officer who believed that Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences explained this division between the conscious and unconscious minds. The officer had turned every class into a discussion of how different people can excel at sports but can’t carry a tune in a bucket, or could speak a dozen languages while mathematics left them cold.
Rachel took this a step further: there may have been different forms of intelligence, true, but she carried around the strengths and weaknesses of those intelligences with her in different parts of her own head.
And after she got the implant, she became absolutely convinced the damned thing was smarter than she was.
She processed information a little better these days. New information was a little easier to handle, routine tasks completed a little more quickly. She told herself she didn’t have to like this new aspect of herself, she just had to like what it did for her, and it was definitely an improvement over Old Rachel, back when she was the only one inside her own head.
But…
But, oh, how she wished she could remember why she had stared at the sun.
She decided to chalk her hands up to the placebo effect and a good nap, and went back downstairs to catch the rest of the game.
ELEVEN
OF THE MANY CHANGES THAT had happened at First District Station over the last few months, the one she liked the most was her new desk. Prior to August, she’d had a lap desk, its bottom stuffed like a beanbag, tucked underneath a small chair in the corner. Now, she had a desk equal to Santino’s own, one which held her computer monitor and keyboard, their shared printer, a large carved wooden owl, and nothing else; she had threatened to pistol-whip her partner if even so much as a dried leaf touched its worn laminate surface.
An extreme threat, yes, but well-deserved. If Rachel’s house had become a tidy secret garden, their office at First District Station was Conrad’s living heart of darkness. Santino had staked claim to the space with as many plants as he could cram into it, and then went up from there. Rachel had to untangle the Golden Pothos from her hair whenever she stood upright, and Santino walked hunched over to keep his head from crashing against the pots.
“Well?” he asked her as he crabbed his way towards his desk, the last of his lunch swinging from his hand in its plastic sack.
They had played this game before. “It all looks the same to me,” she said, scanning the room. It was a wall of vegetation, the plants growing into each other in a curl of ozone and greenery, exactly the same as the day before…
Her implant did that nagging thing again. She let it work as she threw out her hand, and found herself pointing to something with dagger-shaped leaves and a spray of tiny purple flowers. “Wait. No. That one’s new.”
Santino was pleased in pinks. “Phalaenopsis,” he said. “A Moth orchid. Nice job.”
“Not entirely happy with you using me as a test subject,” she said, as she pulled her own chair away from her desk and sat, facing him. Over the past month, he had been testing her response to environmental stimuli. Zia had been playing around with autoscripts that provided itemized inventories for objects she encountered during her daily routines, and it had inspired Santino to see if he could get Rachel to write a similar script independent of his girlfriend’s. Rachel had agreed to the experiment before she learned it was also an excuse for him to buy more plants.
“Notices new objects?” he asked, leaning back and knitting his hands behind his head. They had been doing this on a daily basis, and he didn’t need to consult his questionnaire any more.
“Check,” she sighed. “I’m going to have to stage an intervention for you.”
“Plant hoarding isn’t a real thing,” he said.
“It is. It so obviously is. You have a serious problem.”
“Time taken to recognize new object?”
“Uh…” she consulted her internal clock. “Three centiseconds? That doesn’t sound right.”
“It probably is. You corrected yourself as you were talking, so it was working as fast as your mouth was.”
She lobbed a cheese puff at him. He scooped it off of the carpet where it landed and deposited it in the trash: no floor food for him.
“Was any other object moved in the room?”
“Yes, uh… No,” she decided. After she had started making progress, Santino had begun to rearrange the plants to throw her off. Except for the addition of the new orchid, it seemed as though he had left the room untouched since yesterday. “Been busy?”
He arched an eyebrow.
She chuckled and returned to her lunch. It had been a stupid question: she didn’t know when he had found the time to buy a new plant. Additional proof he created them from raw aether, maybe.
There was a knock at the door.
“Jason,” she said to Santino. “Irritated, angry verging on furious, but also pleased with himself.”
“Six-pack of hard cider says he’s done something he wants to brag about.”
“You’re on,” she said. “I bet he’s found something critical to the case, and wants to be praised.”
“I can hear you,” said the far side of the door.
“Come on in, Jason,” Santino called out.
“You two are assholes,” Jason said as he entered, pushing through the curtain of Pothos and spider plants.
Santino looked at Rachel, who said, “You didn’t know? He’s right. We’re totally assholes.”
“Here,” Jason said, dropping a newspaper on Rachel’s desk. “Thought you guys would want to see this.”
She glared at Jason, then flipped her implant to reading mode and began to struggle with the text. She made out the name of the reporter and gave up: anything on the front page and with a byline by Jonathan Dunstan couldn’t be good news. Rachel shoved the paper towards Santino and read the article by his colors. Nope, she thought as he went orange, red, and gray by turns. Certainly not good news.
“Dunstan broke the news of the connection between Homeland Security and Gayle Street,” Santino said.
“What?! Is he trying to blow up the country?” she snarled.
“There’s an unnamed source who confirmed this information,” Jason said. “Apparently, this source sits on a Senate defense committee. Any guesses?”
“God damn him,” she said, and kicked the back wall of her desk as hard as she could. The wooden owl rocked on its base and she lunged to steady it. “Josh was telling us just last night how every politician knows the country’s starting to destabilize. That… That person will do literally anything to save his own skin.”
She didn’t have to use his name. Even if Dunstan hadn’t written that article, the others would know who she was talking about. Senator Hanlon was never far from their minds.
“Is there anything we can do?” Santino asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing that I can think of, anyhow. This is politics, not police work. I guess we just try to not get shot.”
The three of them sobered. The officers who had been fished out of the Potomac had been family men, and the entire city was mourning. Rachel felt a new wave of anger towards Hanlon; he had just increased the pressure that every officer or federal agent was already feeling. If Hanlon had walked into the room that instant, she probably would have dug her fingernails into the thin line where his skin met his hair, and then peeled his face apart like an orange.
Or maybe she’d just wait a few days, and then f
eed him to his own mob.
Santino’s phone rang. Rachel and Jason tensed.
“Do I want to answer this?” Santino asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s Sturtevant.”
“Oh hell,” Santino muttered, pressing the button.
It was a short call, and the cyborgs listened to every word of it. When Santino dropped the receiver, the three of them started their slow march to Sturtevant’s office.
Rachel never visited the Gold Coast if she could help it. As First District Station had been renovated from an old public elementary school, she felt the sinking dread of visiting the principal’s office every time she walked the long length of the hall. The MPD had set aside an entire wing for their supervisors, and she knew they were on display, Sturtevant’s roving team of freaks and weirdos, marching past the brass and their staff.
She made sure to smile warmly at each and every one.
Sturtevant’s secretary, a mousy gossip of a man whose name Rachel couldn’t be bothered to learn, tried to make them wait in the hall. Santino cleared his throat, loudly. The phone chirped on the secretary’s desk, and Sturtevant’s voice crackled in the room. “Send them in.”
Sturtevant’s office was small, barely large enough for the four of them and the furniture. When Sturtevant motioned for Rachel to close the door, she gave the secretary a glare; the man made a habit of trying to listen in on their meetings.
“Why haven’t you fired that guy yet?” Rachel asked, loudly, as she shut them in Sturtevant’s office. Through the door, she saw the receptionist’s colors blanch.
Sturtevant didn’t bother to answer her. His conversational colors were hard browns and professional dark blues; he had called them down on business, his walls firmly in place.
“Sit,” he told them. There were two chairs and she let Jason have the other, preferring to spend her mental energy on reading Sturtevant instead of sparring with him. She fell into parade rest and listened as Santino updated the Chief on what had happened over the past twenty-four hours.
Maker Space Page 15
