The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue

by Louis Shalako

  Francine got up, stepped in close and read it.

  “So they ended up in Pennsylvania. That’s where the car was dumped, anyways.”

  Parsons nodded.

  “And not chopped, not flogged off anywhere. It’s a long way from the point of origin for a joy-ride.”

  She looked at Parsons, sinking back into her seat.

  “So where do you think they’re going?”

  He pursed up his lips to speak but Gene beat him to it.

  “Canada—the only question is where. How do they plan on doing it?”

  He met Parsons’ eyes.

  Parsons gave him an intensely earnest look.

  “It’s either that, or west. The top tier states are still pretty sparsely inhabited. If they try that, they will have to change their appearance and identity. All the roads up there do have cameras, and they have a better record of keeping them operating. But Canada is so much closer. There are places where they could cross by land—New Brunswick, southern Quebec. There are lots of hills and forests. The prairies are less likely. It’s all open country out there. They’re going the wrong way for anything east. But a river crossing, at night. Maybe.”

  Gene made him go back through the slides. On the U.S. side, the islands in the delta of the St. Clair River were all developed, but the Canadian side was a wall of bull-rushes with a screen of low trees in the background.

  “Not the Niagara River?” Francine had seen it. “Or the St. Lawrence?”

  Parsons looked thoughtful.

  “No. There are much better places. More remote, with maybe less of a current.” Parsons pointed, streaming a few slides. “Walpole Island. Shit, that’s a couple of hundred metres in a rubber boat. They could almost do it on an air mattress. Or the Detroit River. Ah. Farther upstream, maybe.”

  Other than that; there was Mackinac, but Lake Michigan and Lake Superior seemed to offer some pretty big hurdles, not least of which was getting there undetected. Going around Chicago involved a long detour.

  Dystroit. And why not? They might even go to ground there. There was all kinds of liberal underground activity up in that neck of the woods.

  “Hmn.” Gene considered.

  He looked at the time of the theft, and when the discovery had been reported in the local police records. It was barely a day ago, and Parsons had been using his contacts well.

  “Okay.” His lips pursed. “It’s still a small area. I’ll call the Pennsylvania State Troopers, and the feds.”

  It was like a breath of fresh air.

  “Let’s see how many drones and other passive systems we can get on that.”

  Parsons pointed at Ohio, Indiana, northern Kentucky, and upstate New York as Gene nodded in comprehension. He nodded again when Parsons pointed at Vermont and the fellow’s hand dropped to his lap.

  Parsons sat up straighter, leaning forward to study the screen.

  “All righty, then.”

  Gene spun around, leaned back, and his chair was angled perfectly to put his feet up on the end. Francine shifted away and Parsons rolled his chair to the left to give himself more room. Not unexpectedly, Parsons pulled out his own device and began flipping through pages and contacts. Gene noted the beginnings of sweat patches under his arms. Clearly, this meant a lot to him. He had the motivation, as the saying went.

  He seemed like a pretty useful guy. First impressions are lasting ones. Especially if borne out by subsequent events. Gene’s left hand reached for his desk-top multi-phone and after few seconds with the list, he was dialing his first number.

  ***

  Letitia’s personal hatchet man and a few trusted souls had built a replica classroom in a very short period of time. A dozen of their newest employees sat straight, fresh-faced and optimistic. They had their hands in their lap, knees close together, and their feet flat on the floor. Their eyes followed her around the room.

  She bit back any sign of approval.

  “All right. Today’s session involves the simulation of an unknown threat. Suffice it to say that we are cooperating with authorities, and we are on nationwide lookout for a small number of unidentified persons, working with minimal inputs so far.”

  Each student, still in their probationary period of a full year here at SimTech, had been cleared on moral grounds, although some of them were a bit skimpy on their technical qualifications.

  Sometimes this was a good thing. It made them expendable.

  All of them had talent, and all of them were the cheerful, optimistic sort that had no trouble seeing the good in everyone. More than anything, they had a foot in the door at SimTech, and must have had high hopes for the future.

  They were looking for jobs for life and that was good.

  They might even succeed.

  Across the front of the room, behind a rollaway three-metre blackboard, the big screen took up the entire upper half of the front wall, and each student had a console of three screens. On the sides were a half dozen more screens on the left, while the right wall was blackboard near the front, and corkboard back to the rear corner and the doorway. They had a few memos up on there already. Closets and a small coffee nook completed the layout. In this part of the SimTech campus, the ceiling was an impressive honeycomb of reinforced concrete, ducts, tubes and light fixtures which emitted a pleasant and reassuring buzz.

  Boyd came in with long rolls of cable dangling from one hand and a tool belt on his waist.

  “Can it wait until later?”

  “Uh, I suppose. But it’s just the TV, the news feed. I’ll keep it quiet.”

  Letitia nodded. It was part of the act as much as anything. Everything was all very new here.

  Twenty-four eyes followed her every move as she picked up chalk and a long maple pointer.

  If the universe really was a hologram, then life was just a game-space and nothing really mattered anymore. There were no unchanging truths and hence no morality. All of that was just a way of keeping the dummies in line and docile.

  It was a kind of justification.

  She smiled brightly and then let it drop.

  “Okay. Our job here is to filter data. There’s a lot of it, as you can imagine. We’re taking inputs, theoretically, from the entire United States, as well as a broad swath of our neighbours’ surveillance uptake, both in Canada and in Mexico.”

  There was a collective squirm and some muttering when the implications of this set in.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Call me Chief. Yes?”

  “That’s a lot of data.”

  “Ah, yes, in fact it’s very consumptive of machine-time, which is why this is only a simulation. All of our data is simply generated by random human algorithms, and it merely provides us with the environment in which to conduct our exercise. Even so, we are sucking up to one-third of system resources during this exercise, so pay attention.’

  This was greeted by a nervous chuckle from the young man in question. His name tag read Ned.

  The end of her pointer touched the blackboard and her first images popped up.

  “Subject one. Caucasian male, approximately thirty-eight years old, quite tall, thinning brown hair, brown eyes. He’s also blind.”

  She engaged their eyes for a second.

  Boyd was down on hands and knees, working inside the rear closet which took up two-thirds of the back wall.

  “Subject two. Female robot—”

  There were gasps and giggles.

  “Don’t laugh. It could happen. They are traveling together. We’re looking for anomalies, as they have disappeared right off the radar.”

  A young woman in the front row nodded sagely.

  “Marnie. What sort of anomalies are we looking for?”

  Marnie sat up.

  “Well, we could look for anomalous hits. That would be IDs with no point of origin, in the case of newly-created citizen profiles.”

  Letitia nodded, beaming at the girl. She had this one all picked out for some nascent leadership qualities. As long as no crime
had been committed recently in that area, these kinds of hits were merely anomalous. No one went looking when there was no real reason.

  “We can measure sightings over a time-line. Too big a jump, and it’s a giveaway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Some guy named Rick’s hand shot up.

  “They couldn’t have gotten from point A to point B in the time allotted using available means.”

  She pointed at Rick.

  He stood, taking a quick glance down at his screen. He was a surreptitious reader, probably not realizing she could monitor all the screens in the room from her own big desk, sloping there, and up off the ground a good ways, like a big drawing table. All of them were educated. This guy was a few pages into the manual already.

  Nice.

  She put the chalk down and went to her desk.

  “Well, Chief. There could be a new ID but with no prior activity. A ghost citizen. The same could be said for vehicles—a new fake number and yet no backup history to go along with it.” He looked at the others for reassurance. “A car appears on a road. It goes past a reader and yet, where did it ah, emanate from?”

  “Very good. Go on.”

  “Kids have been chipped for years now. A kid, a bit too young, one with a new chip, one out of sequence, might be an illegal immigrant, or it must have a proper data trail to account for it.”

  He looked uncertainly around at a classmate to his right, who stared at her readout as if mesmerized.

  “…I’m saying he’d have to have a visa and some kind of status listed with other agencies to account for the discrepancy.”

  Letitia nodded, encouraging them with a sweeping glance.

  Without rising, the red-haired girl spoke up. Arlene.

  “There would be obvious frauds, those who had simply stolen ID. They would not match the biometrics on the card, but in some circumstances the card is enough to do a certain job…”

  She was on thin ice and she knew it, but she had the idea. The kid went on to talk about drones, street-level surveillance, vehicular movements, store-front cameras, Neighbourhood Watch cameras, money machines, access points. The kid knew her stuff to some degree.

  Letitia picked another face, another name tag.

  "Ed."

  “On an older vehicle, the card might get you in and the motor started. What you do after that is pretty chancy.” This young man, bearded and beaded and tattooed, had the air of experience, like someone who knew what he was talking about.

  The corners of her mouth tugged upwards.

  He blushed at the first sign of approval.

  It struck Letitia that she might be a kind of mother-figure, at least to some of them.

  “Very good. Next.”

  She pointed at the guy with the ring in his nose.

  At SimTech, employees were trained in complementary pairs. They were ones and twos, rights and lefts. She'd have them put the buds in with their study-partners and head-jack each other next, and then they could go to full immersion and the next part of the exercise.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thomas Da Busey Khan loved his little cubbyhole, way downtown where there was constant amusement, movement, and customers by the minute.

  Chicago was his town and he loved her so. It was also his fourth major city in as many years, but he had a way of being familiar, blending in right from the start and becoming a fixture with his grab-bags of dollar candies and three smokes for a ten-spot.

  There were three mega-high-schools within a four-block radius.

  Taking in shoes to be mended, reading tea leaves, repairing digital scales and phones and wristwatches, he did it all, including his three-minute tattoo-removal. The Tarot card-reading machine just inside the vestibule was pure genius, and if someone wanted moloko—a good old fashioned moloko, one needled with a little something extra, Thomas was just your man. He knew everybody and his phone list was extensive. The real money was in what were euphemistically called life-hacks. Nothing too serious, just getting people out of their pesky tele-communication service contracts, (Thomas was also a paralegal and notary public,) help in disappearing when the bailiff found you, and all that sort of thing. A quick makeover on the ID when your teeth no longer matched the photo-chip embedded in your BMs as people called them. Even your shit had biometrics in it these days, a recent study demonstrating an uncanny match-up between recent fast-food purchases and any number of trace elements in the typical sample.

  To say that Mister Khan was good with the SEO would be an understatement and he wasn’t too particular with his methods either. One of his little companies did a fair bit of consulting. All off-shore stuff. The whole IT thing fit in a briefcase, as Thomas was wont to say and you could always build a few websites for people and then leave town.

  The whole place was four hundred fifty square feet in area. He had just enough space to hang out on a bar stool, and sit in behind a glass case, displaying every scratch-and-sniff lottery ticket under the flag. Behind Thomas was a pop cooler, and a few gum-pushers were kind enough to rent a square foot of display space on the end.

  All of this had been enough for a down payment on Gerta. Unfortunately not enough to keep up the payments on her, but that was just a minor everyday challenge for one such as he, and not unanticipated right from the start. To be honest. It was all in the plan, and a clever and nefarious one it was, even if he did say so himself.

  More than anything, he loved Gerta, and when a buzzing alarm went off on his pocket-device, his heart beat a little faster. Gerta was the love of his pathetic little life, and he knew it.

  It was with a slathering of excuses that he pushed a customer out the door, reaching for his pork-pie hat and locking and bolting his stainless steel shutters. He shoved his hat in the packsack. He mounted his bike with the orange flag on an old CB-antenna whip, made sure his bicycle clips were in place, gave his cone-shaped orange and white-checkered helmet a rakish push slightly up on his forehead, and entered midday traffic nervously.

  But changes in Gerta’s system were troubling indeed. It could only mean one thing, and while his firewalls and detectors were very good, there was always the possibility of somebody better—much better, somewhere out there in the real world.

  He’d worked with some of them over the years. The thought that one of them might have finally caught up to him was deathly frightening.

  The physical exertion of just making it home was enough to contain him for the moment.

  ***

  Betty was blocking a new threat. She had been for some time. She told Scott, but he barely nodded, still half in shock. He didn’t understand that the persistence of the threat was annoying and took up valuable system resources.

  Scott had his own concerns.

  It had been a long week and he was flagging, even just sitting there on the passenger seat, just going down the road. They’d had this vehicle something like thirteen hours, which seemed like a long time. If the talkative GPS system was any real indication, they were making very good time, even though they were avoiding anything that looked like a proper highway.

  Judging by the thumps, the bums and the tilting back and forth of the vehicle, the roads they were using must be very rough indeed.

  He kept taking a long slow breath, and then blasting it out in a forceful and yet despairing manner. It helped a bit. It was like he needed more oxygen than he was getting.

  Scott was absolutely fucking beat.

  The two of them needed rest more than anything.

  “Honey. Can we slow down a bit now?”

  The big vehicle jounced up, down, and from side to side.

  “In a bit, Honey.”

  She seemed very tense, very focused. Scott had no idea that they were cutting through a state forest in Illinois, or what had once been one. This once-popular state park was reverting, and not in a good way judging by sagging house trailers and shanties tucked in small clearings under the trees.

  All the roads were rutted clay, and not a
name or number marked anywhere…she was going strictly on her own reckoning, but while a compass bearing was one thing, none of the roads was being very cooperative.

  She didn’t even answer him.

  Scott shut up for a while. The car skidded to a halt when she was confronted by an unfamiliar sight.

  “Turn…left.” The GPS was adamant, but she wasn’t buying it at first.

  She checked all other sources before deciding, but there were still no road signs. Finally she went, accelerating slowly as if suspecting a trap. She kept it at about fifty kilometres an hour.

  This road seemed to be maintained, and she relaxed somewhat.

  There were increasing signs of a big city ahead, even on this obscure two-lane black-top running through regenerating forest-like scrub and small, subsistence farm plots. Her mouth opened and she grabbed his arm beside her as a pale, attenuated form, a household robot bringing out the trash paused by the side of the road.

  Straightening up, it met her eyes in a silent flash of infrared communication. She kept her head straight ahead but in the mirror the unit turned and followed the receding car with its gaze.

  “Okay, Scott. It looks like we might have a problem.”

  ***

  Mister Boyd entered the room, pleased by their industry. The form tied on the plywood board writhed weakly against his bonds. The décor was a testament to their honorable trade.

  “Hello.”

  The pair, a small, bird-like man and an incredibly fat woman, both clad in 1920s bathing attire, nodded politely.

  “Is there gonna be many more?” She had been looking forward to Rio.