The Nexus

by J. Kraft Mitchell

  “They’ve got photographs on them, don’t they? What else can we do? Shut down the government for the day?”

  “Right, sir. I’ll spread the word.”

  The phone rang again. The head of security rolled his eyes and snatched up the receiver. “What?”

  “I’ve received some new information, sir.”

  “Will it help us fix this problem?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Not as reassuring as he hoped, but it would have to do. “I’m listening.”

  “Do you recognize the name Martin P. Daniels?”

  “You mean besides the fact that everyone seems to have adopted it for the day? No, should I?”

  “His ID was stolen earlier this week.”

  “Yeah?”

  “By the girl who escaped from jail.”

  Now the head of security was listening intently.

  TEN stories beneath the chaos, Corey Stone parked a department car and led the way as he and Bradley Park entered HQ. They circled the balcony to Dino’s lab.

  “Dino, we got it,” Corey called through the door.

  The funny little man peeked out and looked at the device they’d brought back with them. “Yeah, that’s a VCR all right.”

  Bradley Park nodded. “Took some serious hunting.”

  It turned out Mr. Love wasn’t interested in watching illegal videocassettes so much as selling them or renting them out. He didn’t own a VCR—or if he did it was so buried beneath the clutter of his apartment that they hadn’t been able to find one despite a thorough search. But as Dino had observed, Love’s clients had to own VCRs or they wouldn’t be Love’s clients. They had tracked down the address of one of them, obtained a search warrant, and finally nabbed a VCR.

  “And you rounded up the rest of Love’s videocassettes for me, right?” asked Dino.

  “They’re in the evidence storage room,” said Bradley. “About fifty of them.”

  “Well,” said Dino, “looks like I’ll be verifying the content of those videotapes for a while.”

  Corey rolled his eyes. “You mean you’ll be sitting back in your easy chair watching illegal movies for a while.”

  “Work, work, work,” Dino said shaking his head. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of popcorn to pop in preparation.”

  Dizzie appeared just then in the doorway. “Finally, you’re back!” She seemed out of breath.

  “You missed us that bad?” asked Corey.

  “Aren’t you off shift until this evening?” asked Bradley.

  She ignored both comments. “Do you have any idea what’s going on up there?”

  They shook their heads.

  Corey dashed away before she’d finished explaining.

  BY the time Jill made it through the line at her gate, the female security guard at the scanner smiled apologetically. “Sorry about the delay, Miss. We’re having some technical difficulties this morning.”

  “No problem.” Jill handed over her GoCom ID. It had her picture, and the name matched the name on her current standard ID. She hadn’t used Matt at Northshore Garage for that job. She found another reliable source who wouldn’t keep ogling her and asking her out.

  The guard waved her through with hardly a glance at the ID card. “Have a nice day.”

  “You too.”

  She was in.

  Now she crossed the lobby toward a door in the corner. She’d carefully studied the GoCom layout (illegally accessed by Jerry G) to figure out the best route to the elevator which led down to Holiday’s department. It wasn’t a very long walk. Another security guard hurried past her as she went.

  A moment later this guard was handing a printout to the guard who had just let Jill through. “This just came from upstairs,” he told her, handing her the paper. “Keep your eyes open for this one.”

  The woman looked at the face on the printout.

  She cursed under her breath.

  JILL was in the hallway off the main lobby. She turned a corner, then another, then branched into a narrow corridor with no doors. The farther she got the fewer people she saw.

  After another turn or two she was alone in the wood-paneled room with the elevator. She pressed the button, and stepped on the moment it arrived.

  When the doors closed behind her she felt a bit of relief. She was safe...for the moment.

  Not safe enough to forget to take her gun out of the specially sealed briefcase and tuck it in her suit.

  With one hand she held the button that kept the doors closed. With the other hand she took the panel off the elevator wall. She’d seen the code punched in twice, now, and she’d remembered it perfectly after the first time anyway.

  It didn’t work. They must have changed the code.

  Jill had planned for the possibility. She hadn’t just remembered the code; she’d remembered the manufacturer of the console. It hadn’t taken much work to find the override mechanism. She pulled it out of her briefcase. Within seconds the number appeared on the console.

  The elevator started descending.

  The doors opened half a minute later. There was the blue carpet with the department insignia, the framed photos of Home Planet skylines. She stepped off.

  ...And felt cold metal touch the back of her head.

  “Don’t move.”

  She knew it would be Corey Stone’s voice before he spoke.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to turn up,” he said.

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t have time—”

  “You don’t have time to argue with me. Look on the bright side: No more being on the run all the time!”

  She ducked, spun, reached for her weapon.

  He was ready. He blocked her move, sent her gun flying, still had his leveled at her. “Not this time, Jill.”

  Her eyes said she was genuinely impressed. Her mouth said: “You know why I came back, don’t you?”

  “I don’t care why you came back. I just care about where you’re going next—and I think you know where that is.”

  “Holiday said he would give me another chance if I came back and accepted his offer face to face.”

  “So I heard. One last test of your skills. And you almost passed.” He pressed the gun harder against her temple. “But not quite. So close and yet so far.”

  She made another move. He was ready again. He caught her hand, seized it, held it behind her. “I can lead you back to jail,” he said, “or I can have your unconscious body carried back to jail. Your choice.”

  She didn’t try to escape his grip. She didn’t try to argue with him either. “I don’t blame you for what you’re doing.”

  “Don’t try to soften me. I’ve learned how you operate.”

  “I was raised in crime, Corey. It’s all I’ve ever known. I’m guessing you didn’t accept Holiday’s offer right away either.”

  He hesitated for an instant. “Stop. I know what you’re trying to do.”

  “Look, throwing me back in jail would be the only logical thing you could do. I know that. But it seems like there’s more to this place than that kind of logic.”

  Corey didn’t respond. He didn’t lower his weapon either. Jill assumed it was loaded with stunners—but it would be understandable if he was packing something more potent.

  “If we all went behind bars if we deserved it,” said Jill, “you’d be in the cell next to mine, wouldn’t you?”

  He wasn’t looking at her any more. He was staring at nothing.

  She kept going. “Listen, you have no reason to believe me. But I promise you, the minute I step out of line again I’ll be the first one to bring myself back to jail.”

  A touch of softness appeared in Corey Stone’s hardened expression. His gun dropped slightly.

  “This is the only chance I’ve got, Corey. I know I don’t even deserve it, but this is it. You know it. Please don’t take it away from me.”

  He sighed and slowly holstered his gun. “In his office,” he said, gesturing to the stairway off the side of th
e wide lobby.

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  By the time Corey could bring himself to look her direction again, the office door was closing behind her.

  THE last time she’d been in this room she was handcuffed and accompanied by two rather large men in armored uniforms.

  Giles Holiday stood from behind his desk. His expression was unreadable. The slightly raised eyebrows may have meant surprise, or maybe amusement. Maybe neither.

  “Purpose,” said Jill.

  His steel-gray eyes told her to go on.

  “If I did something with my life,” she said, “that I would do no matter what, even if it meant giving up all the money and all the comfort and all the convenience in the world, then what would I have?”

  He smiled.

  They said it at the same time: “Purpose.”

  “You knew the answer all along,” said Holiday, “didn’t you?”

  “Somewhere deep down I guess I did. You were right: it’s the one thing I’ve never had.”

  “Until now,” he said. He took a touch screen from his desk drawer, and walked over to Jill. On the screen was a lot of fine print. “The contract,” he said, handing Jill the electronic pen.

  She signed the line at the bottom.

  “Welcome to The Nexus, Jillian. Let me show you around.”

  PART III: Home

  12

  “WHY was Anterra built, Jillian? Why did the United Space Programs create it in the first place?”

  Jill knew what answer to recite. Anyone who had gone to school on Anterra past the third grade knew. “The nations of the Home Planet were becoming more and more corrupt. The United Space Programs wanted to build a better place for humanity—a place that was more advanced, more progressive, safer.”

  Holiday nodded. They were standing at the back of his office, where the wall panels had slid into the ceiling and revealed a bank of windows. They looked down on the great floor of HQ, abuzz with activity.

  “The floating city was to be a step toward heaven—literally,” Holiday continued. “As you know, the first eight metropolitan satellites were largely experimental. Engineers from all over the world worked on them. They had a lot of problems to solve. How would they create an illusion of gravity similar to the gravitational force felt on Earth? How would a breathable atmosphere be maintained? Finally they built MS9, the first inhabitable satellite city. Of course, as it turned out, our biggest problems have not been engineering problems at all.”

  He led the way out onto the balcony surrounding HQ.

  “Apparently,” Holiday picked up, “building a floating city is not as hard as establishing a functioning society on it. As they developed a governmental system, Anterra’s founding fathers decided to focus upon one issue above any other.”

  “Criminal justice,” said Jill.

  “Precisely. Or, more exactly, crime prevention. The builders of our city envisioned the most crime-free society in history.” He smirked. Jill was noticing Holiday smirked a lot. “I don’t have to tell you that this vision has not been accomplished. Many Anterrans,” he gave her a significant look, “make their living quite outside of the law.” Funny how things turned out...

  She ignored his gaze. “And your department is changing that?”

  “Indeed. The work you see going on here is a critical experiment in law enforcement methodology.”

  “So how does it work?”

  “To answer that question,” he said, “I must first introduce you to Sherlock.”

  SHERLOCK turned out to be a computer.

  A really huge computer.

  Jill saw the computer through a bank of bullet-proof glass doors at the end of a long hallway off of HQ. From here Sherlock just looked like rows and rows of columns with blinking lights.

  “We’ve named him after the fictional crime-fighter created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

  “What does he do?” It felt a little weird calling a computer “he” instead of “it.”

  “To put it briefly, Sherlock is a data collector and analyzer.”

  “What data does he collect and analyze?”

  “Well...all of it, actually.”

  “All all of it?”

  Holiday nodded. “Have you heard of the Digital Information Exclusivisation Act?”

  Jill shook her head.

  “Most people haven’t,” said the director. “It was ratified over twenty years ago by the Anterran Congress in conjunction with the United Space Programs. It states that all information on Anterra must be in digital form.”

  “Like, computerized?”

  “Essentially.”

  “Isn’t pretty much all information computerized anyway in this day and age?”

  “Mostly, yes. But Anterra is the only society that requires it by law. The same can’t be said of the Home Planet’s societies—even the most modern regions. For example, on Earth it is still legal to own books printed on plain paper.”

  Jill wrinkled her brow. “Plenty of Anterrans own printed books.”

  “They do. But I assume you’re familiar with digital paper?”

  “Sure. You can write or mark on it, and it shows up on your computer. You can also print on it, and the hard copy can be uploaded to another computer directly from the paper.”

  “Correct. Digital paper is hardly a new invention, but it’s only lately that it’s become inexpensive enough to be widely used. There are microscopic devices embedded in the paper which detect whatever is marked or printed on it. But what you may not know is that all paper on Anterra is now digital.”

  “I thought only special kinds of printer paper were digital.”

  “Most people think so. The truth is that your personal computer will only interact with those special kinds of printer paper. But legally, all paper on Anterra must be digital—every page of every book, magazine, newspaper, or any other published volume.”

  “Even sketch pads and sticky notes?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Journals? Diaries?”

  Holiday nodded. “We neither manufacture nor import any non-digital paper on Anterra. Furthermore the devices in our digital paper are designed to send their information directly to Sherlock’s database.”

  “So if I make a shopping list, Sherlock knows about it.”

  “Unless your handwriting is terrible, yes. Even then Sherlock has a copy of it on file. And of course paper is just one small example of what Sherlock keeps track of.”

  “Let me guess: He listens to phone calls.”

  “And records them all,” Holiday confirmed.

  “He taps into security videos?”

  “Those in public places, yes. We’ve even planted many of our own cameras and microphones in the city’s public areas.”

  “Televisions and radio broadcasts?”

  “Sherlock has them all on file, of course.”

  “How about my personal computer? Can anything go on my hard drive without Sherlock knowing about it?”

  “I’m afraid not. Your computer has an invisible port built into it which transfers all of your information to Sherlock. Any personal computer manufactured or imported by MS9 contains such a port. The same goes for digital cameras, voice recorders, cell phones, et cetera. If anyone snaps a photo, makes a phone call, writes an email, visits a website, posts a blog comment, writes a poem...”

  “Sherlock has it on file.”

  Holiday nodded.

  “So why didn’t people vote down this law...this Act of Digital Exa-whatsit—?”

  “Digital Information Exclusivisation Act.”

  “Right. Why didn’t people vote it down? Who wants a government agency reading all your emails or eavesdropping on all your phone calls?”

  “First of all, citizens don’t vote about laws. They vote on representatives. The representatives do the voting about laws. Didn’t you take an Anterran government class?”

  She ignored that last part. “Okay, then why didn’t the representatives vote it d
own? I assume they don’t like being spied on any more than the rest of us.”

  “Probably not. But the Digital Information Exclusivisation Act doesn’t say anything about spying. All it says is that all information on Anterra must be digital. The fact is, there were plenty of practical reasons for this law. Modern societies have been shifting more and more to digital information for some time, now, whether they have laws requiring it or not.”

  “So not even our government representatives know about your department?”

  “Very few of them. Our department has a small governing board which holds us accountable for our activities.”

  “You mean they make sure you’re not just hoarding people’s data for your own amusement,” muttered Jill.

  Holiday smirked again. “A very good way of putting it. The first rule of The Nexus is that we cannot review any data unless it is red-flagged.”

  “Red-flagged?”

  Holiday’s smirk became a smile now. This was obviously one of his favorite topics of conversation. “As I said before, Sherlock is not merely a data collector; he is a data analyzer. Sherlock has been programmed to recognize crimes when they’re being committed. If any data he gathers suggests that illegal activities are occurring, the data is red-flagged. This data is then examined by one of our analysts—human analysts.”

  Jill was skeptical. “How can he recognize crimes when they’re happening?”

  “For one thing, he knows when any information is being illegally accessed—a student hacking his teacher’s test answer keys, someone stealing the formula for a new drug compound, and anything in between. Sherlock also recognizes the sound of gunshots or other acts of violence, and red-flags us to respond. I could go on and on. His programming is extensive.”

  Jill scratched her head. “But no matter how well you programmed him, there’s no way Sherlock could notice every crime that’s being committed.”

  “Sherlock wasn’t made to notice every crime. He was simply made to notice as much as possible. And he notices a lot of things no one else could. For example, Sherlock is equipped with state-of-the-art VOFARE—you’re familiar with VOFARE?”

  “Vocal and facial recognition software.”