Cold

by Robert J. Crane

  “So…” she said, after I’d covered a brief summary of what had happened in New Orleans, with a heavy emphasis on how I felt about it, since that was apparently all she cared about, “what do you believe?”

  “What do I believe?” I chewed on the words experimentally as I parroted them back to her, trying to give real, sincere thought to what she was driving at here.

  “You went through this whole case protecting a very bad man,” Dr. Kashani said. “Do you believe killing this Brianna Glover was the right thing to do?”

  “There are gradations of ‘right,’” I said tepidly.

  “But was what you did ‘right’?” she asked. “To any degree?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I believe it was. To some degree.”

  “Would you mind explaining your feelings about this—”

  I moaned, making a noise that would do a teenager proud, complete with eyeroll. “Fine,” I said. “You want it? Here we go. Here’s what I believe.” I sat up on the couch and stared right at her. “I believe there are evil people in this world. You can define it however you want, slice it however you want—call it lack of empathy, call it total lack of attunement to the cares and survival of others in favor of your own wants and desire, but whatever you want to call it, it’s out there. It’s malevolent, it’s horrifying, and while there may be less of it these days than could have been found a hundred years ago, what of it there is? It’s as strong as ever. I’ve watched people try and scourge the earth to remove it, try to eliminate free will to get rid of it, to blunt its impact once they got a good taste of it directed at them. And I saw it, this viciousness, looked it right in the eye this week in New Orleans.” I sat back in my seat, arms folded over my chest. “In the face of the damned governor, no less.”

  “That’s a power attitudinal driver,” Dr. Kashani said, her eyes warm, voice soft. “How does it make you feel, knowing that evil, as you call it, is out there?”

  “Like I have a certain amount of job security,” I said, flippant to the last.

  Dr. Kashani shuffled her papers and smiled. “That’s an easy answer.”

  “It’s sort of true, though,” I said, looking down at my arms, like a wall in front of me. “You know what the worst part is, though? It’s watching someone like Brianna Glover get a taste of evil and react like I did…except not get away with it.” I looked up at the doctor. “I killed my Warringtons. Killed the people who took from me. If there’d been a Sienna Nealon in my path…well, hell, I probably would have gotten shot down like a dog, too, because no way was I letting go of that bone.” A little wet spot formed in the corner of my eye. “I have a cold hate for people who do evil things. It has built and burned and now it just seethes and radiates and freezes everything it touches.”

  “Who is it aimed at?” Dr. Kashani asked quietly.

  I looked her right in the eye. “Whoever I catch doing wrong that week. And I’m trying to hold it in, like with Warrington, trying to find the way to move within the system so I don’t just burn it all down myself. But it’s…so hard.” I let my anger out in a puff with the last word. “So hard. Because the dark thought I carry with me all the time? I could do it, you know?”

  Dr. Kashani stared at me blankly. “Do what?”

  “Absorb a hundred metas. A thousand metas, all their powers,” I said. “Become a god…dess. Loom large over this world, judging everyone for their wrongs. If I wanted to, I could wipe out this evil I see, everywhere I see it. Become the great arbiter of all things for humanity.”

  There was a slight edge of worry in her voice. “Why not, then?”

  “Because no one is good enough to judge like that,” I said, “least of all me. I’ve done terrible things. Arguably evil things. So I act small. Locally, if you will. Go after the Warringtons of the world where I stumble on them. You want to know what I believe? I want to believe in a system that keeps anyone from being that grand judge. Because I’m not a goddess and no one should be. Not one of us is good enough to rule the rest.” I shook my head. “All I want to do is fix the little wrongs I see, remove the corruptions, and leave the rest to a system where people can just try and carve out their own happiness, knowing it won’t always work out. I want to put a check on power, on the worst offenders, so the system can work without them blocking everything up and making things horrible. Because to try and turn it all over and start anew?” I shook my head. “That way lies misery. Chaos.”

  She was quiet for a moment, but her last question? Killer.

  “What if you can’t?” Her voice was almost a whisper. “What if they’re too powerful, the forces that try and take over parts of the system for themselves? What if you can’t stop them?”

  I had to think about that for a while before I came up with an answer. “Well,” I said at last, “then I guess maybe I’ll have to re-evaluate whether me being the goddess that looms over the world is better or worse than having someone else do it.”

  I don’t think that was the answer she was looking for. And hell, it didn’t satisfy me, either.

  92.

  Jamie Chapman

  San Jose, California

  It was night, and the 1337 cafe was still buzzing.

  Jamie Chapman didn’t do much coding himself these days. He had people to do it for him, after all, being the owner of Socialite, the most widely used social network on the planet, but every once in a while…

  He really liked to get back to his roots.

  So here he was, a Venti Soy mocha at hand, and nothing but code in front of him, doing just that. He’d been at it for almost six hours, eyes blurred from looking at the screen, tiredness creeping in as he tried to solve a very particular problem. He was getting close, he could feel it. He focused all his attention, all his thought on it. Maybe if he…

  His phone buzzed.

  He ignored it. At first.

  Then it went again. Hadn’t he disabled notifications?

  It went a third time, just as he was narrowing down the problem…

  Chapman fished into his cargo shorts and came up with the offending phone. He had muted the notifications, he could see that plainly, but…

  The Escapade app had sent one anyway. As it should have.

  It’s time to play!

  Taking a moment to glance to his left, then his right, he found the seats vacant. The place was busy, but his back was to the wall and he was in as private a situation as he was going to get without leaving, and he’d vowed to stay until he worked out this damned problem. He slid the app and pressed his thumb to the biometric reader.

  The phone unlocked and the Escapade app opened, the text bar unrolling right in the middle of a conversation.

  HEATHER CHALKE: She saved Warrington’s life, but the dirt came out anyway. He jumped out a damned window, so now he’s dead.

  RUSS BILSON: I contacted her like you suggested, talked her through some of the politics going on there. I didn’t think she’d be able to turn it into anything.

  HEATHER CHALKE: She didn’t exactly spin straw into gold. Warrington gave her plenty to work with, was playing dirty. But he was on our side, and helping advance the “Gondry” agenda in Louisiana, so it’s a blow to lose him.

  Chapman frowned at all this. He hadn’t caught the news today, and he had little care about what happened in Louisiana. Any consideration of saying anything went by the wayside when he realized he didn’t have a dog in this fight, certainly not enough of an investment in Louisiana politics to put his valuable and waning mental energy into responding.

  MORRIS JOHANNSEN: To my eyes, this looks like a local story. I can’t imagine national publications wanted to delve much into this.

  HEATHER CHALKE: Good. Warrington’s dead; better to just let it go down quietly, and whatever comes out, let it come out in the Louisiana press.

  DAVE KORY: That should be simple. Like Johannsen says, it’s a local thing. I won’t cover it on Flashforce, and none of my reporters will, either. I’ll kill any story they try and post. Let it li
ve and die in the Louisiana swamps, lol.

  Chapman had another frown for this. If he’d learned anything from running the largest social network on the planet, it was that things that went big in a locality tended not to necessarily stay in that locality. He was debating how much he should say about all this when someone else spoke up and took the conversation a different direction.

  TYRUS FLANAGAN: How much did Nealon have to do with this disaster?

  HEATHER CHALKE: She unearthed the dirty parts. The child rape, though that might have come out anyway given the assassin gunning for Warrington was the sister. Any other cop probably would have gunned her down before it could all come out, but maybe not. Nealon got her in the end, though. She also came up with the school corruption business, though how that will play out, especially now that Warrington is dead—again, that’s more on you guys than me. We’ll investigate it up to a point, but I’m going to try and keep it local business rather than let it leak out onto the national stage.

  DAVE KORY: Should be easy to keep it down.

  MORRIS JOHANNSEN: I won’t cover it in my paper, or give it any signal boost.

  Here, Chapman felt he really did have to weigh in. These people were tiptoeing past the graveyard in his view.

  JAIME CHAPMAN: I don’t care how much you want to sit on this, if the local press covers it well enough, it has the potential to break out from the political opposition covering it and sharing it on social media. You might think you can deny it oxygen, but how many times have you guys thought you could suffocate a story, like, say, Sienna Nealon’s innocence video, only to have it go viral and bite us all in the ass? Don’t overestimate your ability to kill the truth here. If Warrington’s dirty and you think it hurts us somehow, let’s get out in front of it. Distance ourselves from him and/or the cause. Have Bilson get his political consultants on it and counter it before it becomes something.

  Nobody typed anything for a couple minutes, and Chapman was about ready to put the phone down and get back to coding when someone finally broke the virtual silence.

  HEATHER CHALKE: How about you suppress the virality of the thing this time instead of letting it blow up on us?

  Chapman’s cheeks felt hot, and he composed three replies in anger before settling on a more neutral one.

  JAIME CHAPMAN: Look, you can’t control the flow of information through the press anymore, if you ever could. And I can have my engineers suppress it, but I’m hardly the only game in town.

  BILSON: I’ve had some preliminary discussions with the guys over at Inquest, the search engine? I think they’re good candidates to join us at some point. And they probably have just as much influence over the flow of information as Jaime. Maybe between all of them and some of their other friends out in Silicon Valley, we could start to come up with a solution to problems like that?

  Chapman steamed, going between looking at his phone and his laptop. The coding problem called out to him, but these idiots talking on his phone needed answering, too.

  HEATHER CHALKE: We have months to deal with this, and it’s probably not even that big of a problem. I just want it contained so it doesn’t go any farther than Warrington. Let it get buried with him.

  Chapman typed his reply slowly, trying to dispense with the white-hot rage he’d felt upon her initial suggestion.

  CHAPMAN: Sure. We can talk to Inquest. Between us, we can cover a decent portion of the net. And maybe, yeah, we could rattle some other trees, see what shakes out.

  That would be kind of a cool expansion of theoretical power, being able to exercise that much control over so much of the internet.

  RUSS BILSON: Great. Let’s work on our respective projects and catch up when we have something to report. Later.

  Chapman was the first to log off, tossing his phone onto the table in front of him. The lines of code on the screen were blurring, and he couldn’t tell if it was because of rage at all the stupid permeating that conversation, or just simple tiredness. Probably both, he conceded, yawning as he put his face in his hand—just for a second.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Jaime pulled his face out of his hand, blinking his eyes blearily as someone stood over his shoulder. The voice had been soft, delicate, but to the point, jarring him out of his momentary reverie.

  “What?” Jaime looked at the chair next to him. “Oh. No, it’s all yours.” He glanced back at his screen, still blurring his eyes. He wiped at them, trying to figure out if they were just tired from the day of meetings that started at 6 a.m. Eastern time, or whether they were dry enough to be tearing up. He looked at the clock in the corner of his screen:

  12 a.m.

  “Damn,” he muttered, looking at the person who’d just sat down next to him. “Is it really midnight?” he asked before he’d fully taken her in.

  Then…he was a little sorry he’d asked such a stupid, obvious question.

  She was a knockout, to say the least. She was tall, willowy. Her glasses were thick-framed and black like her raven-colored hair, which was up in a bun. She was freckled and tall, thin arms slightly tanned. Her blue eyes were bright and intense, and her nose had a tiny piercing in the left nostril.

  Plus her focus was entirely on the computer screen in front of her, where a window was open and her hands flew over the keyboard, spilling out lines of code onto the page.

  She didn’t look up as she answered. “Yeah. I do my best work after midnight.”

  “Yeah,” Jaime said, looking back at his screen. “I used to.”

  “Used to?” She still didn’t look up. “Seems like you’re still at it.”

  “That’s true,” Jaime said, wiping his eyes again. It didn’t help. “But I don’t think this is my best work anymore. That might have come a few hours ago. I’m starting to think it’s a young person’s game.”

  “Well, you do run a company,” she said, a little trace of a smile sneaking out as her fingers flew across the keyboard. She was good; he could see it by how fast she put things together. “Maybe leave the coding to the little people like me?”

  Jaime shifted in his seat. “Oh. You know who I am.”

  “Everybody in Silicon Valley knows who you are,” she said, not stopping for a second. Damn, she was good.

  “Yeah, but not many people would choose to sit next to me at a coffee house,” Jaime said. “At least not without pitching me some VC deal or mobile app they want to build or—”

  “There weren’t any other seats,” she said, waving at the cafe around them.

  Jaime blinked. That, he could see clearly, now that he looked. “What’s your name?”

  “Gwen Summers,” she said, pausing for a second like she was suffering for taking the break. She cracked her knuckles.

  “Do you work for me?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I used to be at Amazon, but I’ve been independent for a while…working on my own app, actually.” She grinned, and it was…wow. “But I’ve got all the VC money I need for now, so I don’t really need to pitch you, even though this seat was open.”

  “What’s your app do?” he asked.

  “You know, if you keep asking me these questions, people are going to keep pitching you every time they see the seat next to you vacant,” she said, still with that impish smile.

  “They’re going to pitch me anyway,” he said, matching hers with one of his own. “It’s Silicon Valley.”

  She laughed. “That’s true. I’m kinda new here, so I don’t really know all the ins and outs and protocol yet.”

  “Where’d you move from?” he asked, leaning just a little closer.

  “Seattle,” she said. “Been there for about five years. But everyone kept saying that Silicon Valley’s the place to be for what I was trying to do, so…” She smiled. “Here I am.”

  “An app developer and new in town, come to pursue her dreams?” Chapman felt himself chuckling. “Wow. That’s…”

  “A cliché, right?” Gwen laughed. “I know. But here I am anyway.”
/>   “Welcome to town,” Jaime said, smiling. “I think you’ll do just fine here.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Chapman—” she started.

  “Call me Jaime.”

  That smile turned impish again, and boy, did he like that. “Thanks…Jaime.”

  93.

  Sienna

  I came in from my morning run around Central Park just before 6 a.m. and hit the showers. The apartment was quiet, and I was sweating like a fiend even though the air was considerably colder than what I’d been dealing with in Louisiana.

  It was back to the routine, back to doing the job—back to preparing myself for trouble, not knowing where the next case would come from or when it would hit.

  I’d be ready, though.

  I always was.

  The hot shower felt like a million bucks, and was made better by the coffee cup I left sitting just outside the curtain. I let the water pour over me for a while, taking infrequent sips and then letting the scorching heat roll over my skin as I sat in this tight space, confined by the white subway tile on one side and the shower curtain on the other, enjoying the pleasant drumming of water against my scalp for about an hour before I turned it off, my coffee long since drained, much like the time I had remaining to get ready before going in to the office.

  When I stepped out of the shower, towel wrapped around me, I paused to look at the mirror. It was all fogged up, of course, and a thin scrawl was traced in the fog. I stared at it like I was looking at myself, hoping that if there were any cameras in here—and it was possible there were—they were fogged up, too.

  Two words were written in the fog.