After another interview with the police that involved an apology from a senior officer of the force, they had discharged Ray from the hospital that morning. Nurse Jane had been by, bearing a coat and a set of clothes she claimed to have discovered in the lost-and-found closet. There was a hat in a pocket of the coat. Ray had nodded at her wordlessly, not trusting himself to speak to her lest he break down again. A social worker had also come by, handing him a printout of an address for a shelter that was expecting him, and another place for outpatient care. He’d left the paperwork on his hospital bed.
He was done with false hope.
Instead, he’d slipped out of the hospital, anonymous still, and half-walked, half-slid his way across the city, trying to keep his back to the wind as much as possible. Darkness had fallen by the time he made it to Santoro’s Bar. When he’d lived in this area, it was a place he avoided; everyone knew it was a gang stronghold. Today, it was the only place he could think of to be.
Santoro’s was a tiny watering hole located in a shabby old plaza just off Sheppard. It was dim inside; what little illumination there was came from the yellowing lights in the ceiling, filtered through a cloud of cannabis and tobacco smoke. The smell gave Ray an instant headache, but at least it was warm and dry. The walls were lined with booth seats that had dull green upholstery, while the middle of the room was filled with low wooden captain’s chairs and small tables.
At this time of day, the bar wasn’t crowded, although it wasn’t empty either. A couple of men sat near the window, older guys originally from the Mediterranean dressed in white shirts and dark slacks, the sort he’d seen before who seemed to have little to do all day but sit and watch and smoke and occasionally talk to each other in a language Ray didn’t understand. They stared at him brazenly, looking at him go across the room. Some pothead drifters sat in a corner, laughing too loud and too often, and eating something greasy Ray couldn’t quite see through the haze. There was one woman at the bar, drinking beer, and watching a hockey game on an ancient television screen. She was cursing at the hometown Leafs and shouting abuse at the goalie. Ray chose a stool at the far end, well away from her.
He pulled off his hat, as it was already dripping cold water down his neck in the warmth. The ice that had coated it cracked and fell off, shattering and skittering along the floor. The bartender, a woman with heavy makeup and a face that had seen too much sun, gave him a look and came over.
“Hey hon, you here just to make a mess of my floor or you gonna buy a drink?” Her voice sounded like she’d been inhaling the smoke in here for years and chasing it with scotch.
Ray nodded and reached inside his coat. By chance, he’d come across an open recycling bin behind a corporate office downtown and had found a pile of dead tech — old mobile phones, cracked tablets — just there for the taking. The waste disgusted him but was a bonanza he desperately needed. He’d grabbed everything he could and stashed all but one phone in Mick’s old hideaway by the culvert on the way here. He slid the phone across the bar now.
She picked it up, gauged its heft, and gave it a look-over to see if the case was still intact, or if it had been stripped of its precious elements. Ray knew it hadn’t been as he’d already examined it himself. Finally, she nodded. “That’s good for a fair few,” she said. “Mind, it’s worth what he says it is, okay? I’ll set you up a tab. Food or drink?”
“Food. I’ll take a plate now. Give me your cheapest special. And the name is Ray.” She tossed a towel at him and took the phone away, disappearing into a room behind the bar. He mopped up the ice chips. After a few minutes, she returned with a steaming bowl of borlotti beans and rice. Then she leaned back against the counter behind her and crossed her arms, not bothering to disguise the fact she was looking him over, assessing whether he’d be trouble.
He pulled off his coat and draped it dry-side up on the bar stool before sitting down again. He tucked into his food, knowing he must look a sight with his hair still not grown in yet, a livid scar up the side of his left cheek and another slashing through his right eyebrow. There were similar marks elsewhere on his body. The hospital had done what they had to by law to make him healthy again, including physiotherapy and giving him a few packets of pain drugs to take away. But they didn’t do any cosmetic work as he wasn’t registered under the province’s health plan. Perhaps he would have gotten that later, had he gone to the shelter. It was too late to think about it now.
He was also skinny, pale, and weaker than he realised. His legs were throbbing, and his feet felt like they were smouldering. Everything was stiffening, and now he had stopped walking, he wasn’t sure he could stand up a second time.
“I haven’t seen you in here before,” she said after he’d eaten nearly half of the meal. It tasted so good, especially after his long, cold walk. She brought him a glass of water, which he drained immediately. “You new to the neighbourhood?”
“Old,” Ray said between bites. “Was here before, went away, came back.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “I’d have stayed away.”
Ray shrugged, trying to remain nonchalant. “It didn’t work out.”
“I can see that. So what now?”
“I dunno,” Ray mumbled, chewing. “Find a job, I guess. Find a place to stay. Right now, just eating is good.”
She seemed to take pity on him and brought him some hot cider, unbidden. Someone else approached the bar, and she went to serve him. Ray noticed the other patron knew her by name, calling her Sylvie. A regular, then. He looked around. A place like this wouldn’t get too much in the way of random, drop-in traffic. It was likely almost all regulars here, which was why he’d gotten the examination.
Exhaustion hit him like a ton of bricks; he swayed on his stool. He’d exerted more energy today than he’d done for weeks. Ray wondered sleepily whether he’d said enough to Sylvie, or if it had been too much and too obvious. Was everything as it had been before?
He hoped so. Because unless something had changed, the Twins controlled the bar. And the Twins were his key to getting involved in J-District’s crime scene.
There, he’d have access to the tools he needed to hack into the system.
He would find out who had killed Mick.
MAURA
“I’m not sure I understand,” said Pauline. “What’s the significance of this set of queries? I mean, when I flagged these for you, I thought they would be of interest but not a major concern. Forgive me for saying so, but you seem quite upset.”
They were in Maura’s office, sitting across from each other — Maura at her desk, and Pauline seated in a chair in front of the desk. Maura was reading and rereading the report on the screen. She gave Pauline a half-smile.
“You were right to follow your instincts,” Maura said. “And this is why I have human personal assistants here at the office. As good as the AIs are, they still don’t make the broad leaps of pattern recognition and understanding. You saw something here that was interesting, even if you weren’t one hundred percent sure why.” Maura shut down her computer, feeling troubled. “Did I explain to you why we intercept and monitor traffic to the patent sites on the thingweb?”
“No,” Pauline replied, shifting in the seat to get more comfortable. “But I assume, based on the summary reports that land in my email, that we’re watching for filings from competitors and for a technology of interest in order to acquire it?”
“Yes, we do that. However, if that were the only thing we were looking out for, we’d only be tracking a narrow set of queries and a mundane kind of traffic to the site. We’re also watching for patents that can disrupt the VR industry altogether.”
“I still don’t follow,” Pauline said, looking puzzled. “These queries came from a neuroscience lab that works on, from what I can tell based on the publicly available research papers, the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. The queries seem to be focused on methods for recording brain states. When I highlighted these, I was wondering if we could use whatever they were devel
oping to get an edge on improving the VR experience. You know, like what Sensate was trying to do, only not with something random, like odours. If we could see exactly what the brain was doing during a VR session and compared states between people who aren’t negatively affected to it to those who are, we might see what the difference was.”
“Oh,” Maura turned her computer back on and made a few notes. “Actually, that’s fantastic. I hadn’t considered that. My focus was on the brain state replay queries.”
“Why? What’s the big deal about them?” Pauline asked.
“Don’t you see?” Maura said, leaning forward. “If I could get a recording of your brain and play it back in me? It’s the ultimate in voyeurism. Wouldn’t you love to know what it was like to feel like someone else?”
To Maura’s surprise, Pauline blushed. She looked to be profoundly embarrassed by the thought. But her voice, when she spoke, betrayed none of what she seemed to be feeling. “Okay, but still, what’s that got to do with us?”
“Because VR is all about vicarious experiences,” Maura said, getting up to pace. “Simulations. Even those universes where we’ve lavished huge amounts of attention to detail, like the individual leaves on the trees. It is one person’s best attempt — usually the VR storywriter — to convey what it’s like to experience something. The story can be something the author has actually experienced in real life, but they still need to translate it in a way you or I can experience it. And no two people interpret a VR session the same way. It is, by definition, virtual. These brain recordings would be the real thing.” Maura stopped pacing and turned to face Pauline. “If this tech got released to the public… everyone would try to hack into everyone else to take a recording. And it wouldn’t stop with humans, I bet. Animals, too. Everybody would want to know what Fido felt like fetching the ball.”
“What is it like to be a bat?” Pauline mused, half to herself.
“What?”
“Nothing, sorry, just thinking of my undergrad philosophy courses.” Pauline said, and then her eyes widened. “Okay, I get it now. VR would seem like old news.”
“Precisely. The market would evaporate overnight.”
“Would it really, though?” said Pauline. “The patent site queries were very, very basic. There’s nothing else out there like this on the market, so far as I can tell. That suggests this is early in the game and the tech is primitive.”
Maura sat down again. “It is now. But there are two things to keep in mind. One is that technology can advance quickly if it has the right people working on it. Where some inventions languish for years, others take off like a rocket. It all comes down to backing and marketing. Two is that if this person at…” she frowned at her computer, “this University of Toronto affiliate, has thought of something like this, then someone else has something similar, and we don’t know about it yet. The history of science has shown this quite a few times — lots of people having the same idea at roughly the same time. And Pauline, there are eight billion of us in the world, at least half of which are smarter than you and me.”
“So what do we do?”
Maura clenched her jaw. “We get control of this technology, come hell or high water. Find out who ran those queries and let’s dig up everything we can find on him or her.”
HAROON
Haroon’s head was spinning.
He was in a stuffy meeting room in the Cadillac Fairview tower, listening to a recruiter talk about how to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was way more complicated than he thought it would be.
He would have to have an official hearing test, and an official vision test; he would need to go through a battery of psychological assessments, and he would have a physical check-up, too. They would look into his past, establishing whether he had a criminal record. And that was just the first stage! Haroon considered the physical training requirements the recruiter had on display at the front of the room. Just to complete the cadet training — assuming he was even invited to become a cadet — he would have to complete an obstacle course, a push/pull test and a weight-carry test. Haroon looked down at his body. He was reasonably fit, but he was no athlete. It was looking like he would have to train five days a week, for at least eight weeks, just to get up to speed.
And then, the academic part. Cadet training would take him twenty-six weeks at the academy, which meant lots of intensive studying. He’d had a hard enough time concentrating throughout high school, much less in a pressure cooker. It would also mean leaving Toronto for a while. He had never been outside Toronto; the thought scared him. A lot.
And if he passed all of that… he’d be working four days a week and taking university-level courses one day a week, since undergraduate degrees were the minimum requirement for staying in the force these days.
Haroon squirmed in his seat. Now he understood what Yoshi meant when he complained about the bioengineering program being hard work. This seemed overwhelming.
The recruiter finished his presentation and forwarded the application form to everyone’s wristband. A few people surged forward to ask the recruiter questions. Haroon nodded a polite thanks to the officer and left the room.
Out on the flow, it was evening, with the sun kissing the horizon. It was getting hazy, and there would be fog tonight as the night chased away the tenuous spring warmth. It should have felt great, being out here right now, standing in full view of everyone walking by or whizzing by in pods, and not having to slink through the shadows. Instead, everything felt… weird. Like it was all about to go upside down.
He hadn’t told Yoshi or Saba he’d been kicked out of his home. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because it was because he knew Yoshi’s family would offer him a bed and he was tired of being a charity case. He was tired of being their charity case. And he sure didn’t want Saba to think he was some homeless loser. Instead, he took a chance on an apartment search and found a tiny place that would take him in now because he was due to qualify for the basic income next month, when he turned eighteen.
Haroon tapped his wristband to call for a pod to go home and then pulled his hands up into his sleeves to keep them warm. His bed. His kitchen. At first, he was giddy with the idea. When the landlord left him alone, he’d run around the whole apartment like a madman, for the sheer joy of racing about in his own space. He ordered a bed and some bedding from the megafab station and assembled it with his own hands. He fantasised about how he could decorate the place and planned where he’d squeeze in a desk and his very own reader, and he debated what he’d call his personal assistant. Last Sunday, Haroon had spent the entire afternoon browsing in the animal companions shop, wondering if he was ready to apply for one. It seemed like a daunting responsibility.
Then he’d run up hard against the limits of his budget if he wanted to eat and travel in the city at all for the next month. And there was no one else in the apartment with him. Subhan had never been home very often — if he wasn’t working, he was drinking — but at least there had been the comfort of knowing it was a shared space. That there was someone you were at least vaguely connected to in the same orbit. He thought about Saba and wondered how far along someone had to be into a relationship before they considered living together.
Someone walking by bumped his shoulder. Haroon popped his hands out of the sleeves, instinctively ready to defend himself. But the person simply mumbled an apology and moved on without giving him a second glance.
It was so different out here.
And he was very much alone in the crowd.
RAY
Ray awoke to stabbing pain.
He blinked, looking around in confusion. He was on his side, on a bench, and there was a wooden table in front of his face.
Ray tried sitting up, gasped as what felt like lightning shot down his left leg. He grabbed at it, nearly falling off the bench to the floor.
“Tsk, tsk,” said a voice. “Sciatic nerve, probably. Hurts like a sonofabitch when it’s pinched.”
Ray groaned and pull
ed himself upright as gently as he could, bracing one elbow on the table and the other on the top of the bench.
The bar.
He was still in the bar and had been lying on a booth seat. Morning sunlight streamed into the windows at the front of the bar. He had never felt so stiff and sore in his life. Another shot of lightning seared up his leg, forcing him to stifle a gasp.
In front of Ray, a man had pulled over a chair and put one foot up on it, leaning forward with one elbow braced on his raised knee, his hand casually holding a long cigar. The smoke curled upward in the silence. His posture was at once relaxed and yet coiled, tensed. He was lean, dressed in deep black trousers, an exquisitely tooled belt, and an ivory shirt. The sleeves were rolled to the elbows to reveal intricately tattooed forearms. His face was all angles and sharpness, and his black hair was wavy, short, and worn tucked behind his ears. He wore bright gold loops through each earlobe.
Ray mumbled apologies and moved to get up. The man made a single gesture, a simple ‘no’ movement with his free hand, and something told Ray he’d better obey. He subsided.
The man took a deep pull on his cigar, then exhaled the smoke in Ray’s direction. “I come up here,” he said quietly, “every day, to eat my breakfast, and generally do not find people sleeping in my restaurant. But Sylvie here tells me you passed out at the bar. You must have been very polite to her for her not to just dump you outside to freeze to death. You wouldn’t have been the first.”
Ray tried to speak, found he couldn’t, cleared his throat, and tried again. “I suppose I was. No reason to be rude.”
“How interesting,” the man said. “There are lots of people who find they can be rude for no reason at all.” He flicked ash off his cigar into an ashtray. “Why did you pass out? What are you using? Smack? Special K?”
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