Oversight

by Thomas Claburn

  “Triple-O online,” another voice says off-mic. “RUSSAT 3 good to go.”

  Jenny responds, “Take him out.”

  “The agent doesn’t have the sight, Jenny. We can’t get precise coordinates.”

  Another muted voice speaks, Cayman this time. “Make him sovereign,” he orders.

  “That’s weird,” says Jenny. “He was flagged but then got deactivated.”

  “That’s the professor’s file. Re-set the permissions.”

  Sam sprints west toward the convention center across the street. People are lined up there, presumably getting new eyes or supplies of some sort. Members of the National Guard can be seen nearby, but they don’t seem to be aware of what the FBI is up to.

  Marilyn recites, “Sam Crane, you have been granted Sovereign Operator privileges—”

  “—Sam, you need to target—” Jenny interrupts, trying to talk over Marilyn.

  “—Active weapon is—”

  “—Stop, turn, and point at him—”

  “—Kurograd Tetanizing Laser—”

  Sam is running fast enough to trigger ads for athletic shoes on the variable display of a bus shelter he passes. The sidewalk is wide and there’s no one near. Flags flying in a row above snap in the breeze. “You want me to stop?” he asks, confused.

  “Stop, turn, and point at the agent,” Jenny repeats. “Make sure he stays lined up with the tip of your finger.”

  Sam comes to a halt and wheels to face his pursuer. He extends his arm at the agent and points. A targeting reticle forms at the edge of his field of vision. After a moment’s delay, it constricts around the obscured image of the agent’s head.

  “Keep focusing on him and say, ‘Fire,’” says Jenny.

  Sam obeys. The agent collapses in spasms and goes still.

  Across the street, someone in a suit and tie devotes a curious glance to the fallen man before continuing on.

  “Neat trick,” Sam mutters.

  “Keep heading west, Sam,” Jenny says. “The rest are on their way.”

  Once more, Sam starts running. When he’s about three-quarters of the way down the block, the remaining agents emerge from the hotel.

  “There’s an air taxi approaching the intersection ahead,” Jenny says. “Take it.”

  Breathing heavily, Sam reaches the end of the block. To his right, an air taxi approaches along what would ordinarily be a busy street. He hails the cab and gets in.

  “Where am I going?” Sam says to Jenny.

  “You asking me?” the driver replies with a thick Ukrainian accent, turning to address Sam. His cratered face is further furrowed by a smirk. A gold cross rests on a patch of graying chest hair in the V-shaped frame formed by his inadequately buttoned polyester shirt. The shirt is several sizes too small for the beer belly it struggles to contain. “This is not tourist drive.”

  “Just go,” Sam answers, looking back down the street at the approaching agents. “I’m on a call.”

  The driver shrugs. The air car accelerates, heading south on Fourth Street.

  “Jenny?”

  No answer.

  “Jenny? Are you there?”

  “No reception,” the driver says.

  In the jumble of electronics grafted to the dashboard, Sam notices an active block box. “You know you can get in trouble if you’re caught with a jammer,” he says.

  “You planning tell someone?”

  “Nah, just saying.”

  “Don’t say. And I don’t say. No one getting caught, right?”

  “Fine by me.”

  “You get privacy extra for free in this cab,” he explains. “Is park.”

  Sam guesses that the driver means “perk.” He doesn’t correct the pronunciation. He leans back against the slick vinyl seat, staring at the lens mounted above the rearview mirror. “What about the video camera?” he asks.

  “Is private log, for my protection.”

  “What do you file with the Department of Public Vigilance?”

  “I have friend who sells dummy video,” the driver confides. “Is much better. No reports to fill out when network doesn’t like customer.”

  Sam grins, recognizing a kindred subversive.

  “You first customer I have to today,” the driver continues. “I drive by, no one sees me.”

  “Obviously you weren’t affected.”

  “I take vitamins. You want that I keep going?”f

  “No,” Sam answers slowly. “I’d like to go to Hayes and Lyon.”

  CHAPTER Eight

  City Water sponsors the intersection of Hayes Street and Lyon Street. The road has been painted deep blue with gold letters that proclaim, “You’re drinking City Water now.” On a bench outside the corner laundromat, one of the water company’s hulking customer retention agents, conspicuous in his blue and gold uniform, sits with a blue and gold bat in hand. Next door, a sign in the window of a Chinese-owned dry cleaner reads, “City Water flows here.”

  Several dozen people are waiting in line to have their eyes replaced, queued up at a bloodmobile that’s been pressed into service as a mobile surgical unit. Two soldiers are supervising. Out in the street, a handful of kids are playing blind man’s bluff without a blindfold.

  Clouds course overhead, moving in from the sea. Sam emerges from the cab. The breeze hints at a coming chill, but the air is warm still.

  Halfway down the block, Tony Roan is presiding over a yard sale outside his restored Victorian, as he often does on weekends. Seated on his front steps, he’s offering a few pieces of furniture for sale at impossible prices, just for the appearance of legitimacy, but his hacked dolls are the main attraction. He’s demonstrating one for the neighborhood kids, a vintage twentieth-century G.I. Joe retrofitted to walk and talk like gun-fu superstar Miles Oreo.

  “You can buff my Cadillac,” the action figure snarls—a line that went through rigorous focus-group testing and, backed by a substantial marketing budget, became the most repeated phrase in the nation for about a week last year.

  “Inselting,” using an insult to sell a product, is all the rage among commercial copywriters and Hollywood scriptwriters—a good inselt can earn in all manner of free products and other perks that never show up on tax returns—and has spawned a number of books and seminars on technique in recent years. Inselts entered the vernacular through the work of Harris Cayman. Rather than paying people to make positive comments about clients and their products in the course of casual conversation, he favored a more subtle approach. Working with a few trusted locals, he encouraged them to replace the mention of general product categories such as “car” in their artful, elaborate slurs with specific brands such as “Chryslerbishi.” Rappers, smack-talkers, and street poets were brought on board. It didn’t take much to convince them to abandon antiauthoritarian sentiments like “Fight the power!” in favor of consumption-friendly banter along the lines of “Gonna mess ya with my Tesla.” When it was done, insults amplified by emotional associations with products became the shortcut to street cred.

  “You want Kleenex with that Nuckle Sandwich?” the toy taunts.

  Grins grace the faces of three teens watching from the sidewalk. Tony puts G.I. Joe on the ground and the little solider struts a short distance, delivers a spinning roundhouse kick, then folds its arms.

  Tony looks up as Sam approaches. He’s dressed for comfort rather than style. His eyes are completely bloodshot, as if he just had the operation. “Hello, Sam,” he says, offering a restrained smile.

  “Looks like a slow day,” Sam says. “Usually there’s quite a crowd here.”

  “Wonder why?” Tony volleys.

  “New eyes?” Sam asks.

  “Yeah. It’s kinda creeping me out.”

  “Just wait until you find out about the undocumented features.” Responding to Tony’s quizzical expression, Sam continues, “I’ll explain later. Can we talk in your safe room? I suspect I don’t have much time.”

  Tony sends the neighborhood kids on their w
ay, grabs the modified toys, and heads into his garage. Sam follows.

  The safe room occupies the back end of the house. It’s a windowless office built with radio-proof wallboard. Tony does his unlicensed tinkering there, surrounded by a workbench, some shelves, two stools, a mini-fridge, and a few cardboard boxes. The overhead light is unnecessarily bright for their new adjustable eyes.

  Tony grabs two bottles of beer from the fridge and hands one to Sam. “It’s been pretty weird the past few days,” he observes. “I got the call to get my eyes fixed Friday morning. Most of the law enforcement people were done Thursday. It was way too efficient. It’s like they were ready for this.”

  “You better sit down,” Sam says, sitting down himself on one of the stools. “I’ve got some things to tell you.”

  Tony takes a seat and waits. In the distance, rotors churn the air.

  As Sam ponders how to begin, something catches his eye. It’s a hard black eyeglass case, sitting on Tony’s workbench. Panicked, he reaches for his jacket. But the case is still in his pocket.

  “What’s wrong?” Tony asks.

  Sam shakes his head. “For a second there, I thought those were my glasses.”

  “They are your glasses.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I meant to mention them when we were down by the Ferry Building, but…”

  Sam stands and grabs the case from the table. He opens it. The spectacles inside are identical to the decoy pair in his vest pocket.

  “How did you get these?” Sam stammers.

  “Jacob brought that little blue dachshund by last Monday—”

  “Duke.”

  “—and wanted me to check his voice box,” Tony explains. “Said his voice sounded distorted. Anyway, he mentioned that you’d given him these and he planned to auction them. But he wanted to me to run some scans first.”

  “And?”

  “They’re complicated. But I have a pretty good idea what they do.” Tony leans forward. “Spread-spectrum cancellation.”

  “Spread-spectrum wave cancellation,” Sam repeats, mulling the words. “For jamming network broadcasts?”

  “That’s probably the effect. But it’s not jamming, technically. Jamming interferes with a signal in a larger area. Those glasses put out radio waves that cancel the network signal at a very specific location.”

  Sam’s eyes widen. “Mako made himself the antidote.”

  “That’s not all,” Tony says. “They have a micro-emitter that could communicate with network nodes. I don’t know what it does yet because I’ve been afraid to use them outside of this room.”

  Gingerly, Sam dons the glasses. All about him, a luminous representation of the network appears. It’s as if he’s stepped into an architectural model of the virtual world. His viewpoint changes as he moves his hands, zooming from an image of a house with local file storage to a map of network node traffic patterns rendered over the floor to a view of Earth and its legion of satellites.

  Words appear in the air. “Root access enabled. Waiting for network authentication.”

  “Wow,” Sam says slowly. “The key to the kingdom.”

  “What?” says Tony, now multihued beneath layers of semitransparent graphics.

  Sam struggles to respond. “That’s what Harris Cayman meant. The glasses function as an authentication key. I’m seeing interface elements all around me.”

  “Really? I didn’t see anything when I tried them on.”

  “Maybe because…” Sam stops as the answer dawns on him. “It’s because don’t have the right eyes.” Shuddering, he reaches up and pulls the glasses off. Nothing changes. He instinctively waves his hands in front of his face, and the interface fades.

  “Why would yours?”

  “Because they’re not mine. They were…how shall I put it…installed without my consent, courtesy of Harris Cayman.”

  “Get out of here,” Tony exclaims, slack-jawed.

  Sam spreads his arms, as if to show he has nothing to hide. “I’m quite serious. It didn’t occur to me that I’d been given specific eyes for safekeeping. Unless I’m totally delusional, I’m looking through Xian Mako’s eyes.”

  “Are they yours now, or are you just a mobile eye bank?”

  Grimacing, Sam shakes his head. “Good question,” he answers. He starts to put the glasses back on, but then it occurs to him they’re no longer necessary—the door they unlocked is open. With another gesture, he recalls the interface.

  Dr. Mako’s virtual workspace appears once more. The gesture command system proves to be surprisingly intuitive. After a few moments, Sam is flailing his arms like a traffic cop to navigate the data sources. To his amazement, the interface seems to anticipate his directions; he realizes the system is wired to take its input from his motor-control system.

  Tony chuckles. “What are you doing?”

  “Navigating. There’s a satellite-weapons control dashboard here, but it’s offline.”

  “I would hope so,” Tony answers. “We’re in a shielded room.”

  “Give me a second here,” Sam says, scanning the digital files Dr. Mako stored in his eyes.

  There are a surprising number of files related to business correspondence with Sinotech, some in English and some in Chinese. Though Sam is only skimming them, it looks like Mako was negotiating the sale of Synthelegy trade secrets.

  An air car approaches. The drone of its rotors does not fade. It’s not passing by; it’s landing.

  Sam looks toward the sound and then at Tony. “Company’s coming.” A wave of his hand banishes Mako’s file interface.

  Outside, a hailstorm of debris scattered in the downdraft of the descending air car clatters against the garage door.

  Tony stares toward the street, his face furrowed with concern. “What have you gotten mixed up in, Sam?”

  Stepping out of the safe room into the garage, Sam shouts over the roar, “Tell me you have a back door.”

  “Upstairs.” Tony leads the way.

  Back in radio contact with the network, Sam tells Marilyn to find Jenny.

  Marilyn responds, “There’s no one by that name in your vicinity or your contacts file. If you’d like to supply additional information, I will attempt to initiate contact.”

  Cursing, Sam emerges from the basement behind Tony. To his right are the kitchen and the back door. To his left, outside the front door, boots slam against wooden steps. He knows he should run, but he doesn’t.

  “Hold on, Tony,” he says. “They’ll probably catch me and they’re certainly going to hassle you. I don’t want you to get dragged into this.”

  “Too late for that,” Tony protests. “I’ll…try to hold them off.”

  Sam grabs Tony by the shoulders. “With what? Wake up, Tony. I’m trying to do you a favor. I owe you more than one.”

  A voice from outside shouts, “Sam Crane, come out or we come in.”

  Sam glances toward the street then back at Tony. “The whole reason I came here was to ask you to look after Fiona if something happens to me,” he says. “She’s not much trouble.”

  In the short silence between the two men, much is said. Finally, Tony answers with a nod. “No trouble at all, Sam.”

  “I appreciate it.” Drawing a deep breath, Sam musters something of a smile. He then recalls Mako’s files with a thought. They appear about him like leaves lifted by the wind. He tries to focus on the one with a satellite graphic, but it doesn’t respond to his will. He’s having trouble concentrating. Reaching out to open it proves more effective.

  Tony is staring at him, fascinated.

  “I’m hooked to this orbital artillery system,” Sam explains. “I’m trying to figure the damn thing out. I have this remote operator who has been helping me out but she seems to be offline.”

  “Orbital artillery? You’re joking?”

  “I’m not.”

  A settings menu unfurls in the air, draping the hallway wall. It reads:

  Fire Control Mode: Sovereign

/>   Active Weapon: Kurograd Tetanizing Laser

  Fire Source: RUSSAT3

  Targeting: Pinpoint

  ECCM: Disabled

  Reactive Suppression Fire: Disabled

  Predictive Tracking: Enabled

  Preemptive Defense: Disabled

  Target Verification: Disabled

  Collateral Damage Minimization: Disabled

  Observe Treaty Limitations: Disabled

  From outside, the voice shouts, “Sam Crane, you have sixty seconds.”

  “Marilyn, can you enable Collateral Damage Minimization?” Sam asks.

  “Setting saved,” Marilyn says. “Is your life insurance up to date, Sam? For a limited time, TGC is offering a low monthly premium of $129,000,000.99. Act now before it’s too late!”

  “No, Marilyn, I don’t want life insurance from The Gambling Company,” Sam responds aloud.

  “I think she’s is trying to tell you something,” Tony observes.

  Sam shrugs. “Any time there are more than three law enforcement officials in one place, the local risk index goes up.”

  “That much?”

  “Don’t worry,” Sam deadpans. “I won’t blow up your house.”

  “Please don’t even joke about that.”

  “It’ll be safer for everyone if I’m rid of these.”

  Sam removes the black glasses case—the one with the decoys—from his jacket and holds it over his head as he steps outside. He waits on the landing outside Tony’s front door.

  Scores of agents fill the street below, bristling with weapons. There’s something about their movements that suggests computer coordination. Like the algorithmically generated crowds in movie epics, there’s an inorganic quality that undermines the illusion. Sam surmises most of the agents are decoy projections. Amid the troops, several government air cars block the street.

  Two pedestrians stroll past, oblivious, as if nothing of note was happening.

  “On your knees,” commands one of the agents. “Drop your weapon.”