Null Set

by S. L. Huang

  “Don’t gotta like it,” Arthur said.

  “Didn’t say you did.”

  He sighed. “Seems Pourdry’s gone on offense. What’s the plan?”

  “Checker’s doing some more research into his front businesses,” I said shortly. “Once we get a lead, we’ll offense right back.”

  “Your MO, always so elegant.”

  “When did you get so sarcastic?” Jesus, I wished it were more elegant. “Elegance would be fighting back at the goddamn root. One bad guy here, one there—it’s ass-backward. On the scale of … we’re doing fucking nothing, you know that?”

  I expected Arthur to argue back that at least we were making a difference to the people we helped, as paltry as that number was. Or gently tell me off for biting his head off when he wasn’t the one I should be mad at.

  Instead, he said quietly, “I know.”

  The anger and powerlessness that had been building in me deflated just a little. At least I wasn’t the only one who saw the fucking problem.

  And Arthur was a smart guy. “All those maps you were looking at,” he went on. “That got something to do with this?”

  I studied the road. “Yeah.”

  There were plenty of good reasons not to tell Arthur what I was working on, the first and foremost of which was that there was a better than even chance he’d side with Checker and try to stop me. Arthur had tried to stop me from doing things a couple of times in the past, and I’d always plowed right through his moral stance with a nice fuck-you and done them anyway. It usually resulted in people getting killed.

  He was a hard man to read, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to keep tolerating it. I’d promised him I’d try to stop doing that shit.

  But more than that …

  Everything was wrong, nothing I did made a damn difference, I didn’t trust my own mind, and for the first time in my life I wanted to hear someone say this was a good idea before seeing it all the way through. I was unmoored in space with my brain folding in and a telepath lurking in my rearview, and God help me but I wanted Arthur to tell me we could do something about it.

  I licked my lips. “I think … I think I might have a way to clothesline the crime rate.”

  “Yeah?”

  I explained.

  Arthur let me talk without interruption as I outlined the plan: Arkacite technology, my math, and metropolitan Los Angeles as a testing ground. I kept my eyes on the road, steadily framing out his reaction. If he said we shouldn’t—if he shot this plan down the way Checker had—what other options did I have to fight against all this? What was left to try?

  “And I think Pilar’s right,” I finished out my summary. “The technology, they had it functioning. It was just a matter of the mathematics.”

  “How does it work?” Arthur asked. I couldn’t tell yet from his tone what he thought.

  “I don’t have the technical specs yet, but I can give you the report summaries.” I made an effort to keep my voice calm. Reasonable. “First, they discovered the unique brain pattern that comes from the deindividuation state. You know about brain waves, right?”

  “Know they exist.”

  “We’ve been able to categorize brain waves for a while—what they look like in the normal waking state, for instance, or what they look like in deep sleep. But the researchers figured out the unique Fourier series—or rather, the narrow range of Fourier series—”

  “English, Russell.”

  “They managed to pick up what the brain is doing when you hit that deindividuated state. The mathematical characteristics of the brain waves.”

  “And then what?”

  “It turns out brain entrainment has been around for a long time,” I said. The science was making the explanation easier. I concentrated on the black and white, the facts that existed outside of morals or responsibility. “People have discovered all sorts of ways to get a subject’s brain frequencies to align with an imposed frequency. Like, they’ll play beats in the subject’s ears and get their brain frequencies to slow down to a more meditative state.”

  “Subject,” said Arthur. “You mean a human being.”

  “Yeah. We’re all math inside.”

  He shifted in his seat. “Go on.”

  “It’s only recently that the social psychologists and the neuroscientists started to cross over and talk to each other more. They did heavier research into the neuroscience of different psychological states, and somewhere along the way someone with funding got wind of it.”

  “Arkacite Technologies.”

  “Or the military grants, or some combination. The important part is, they figured out how, when someone is in that deindividuated place—they figured out how to use a combination of audio and electromagnetic frequencies to realign the brain out of it.”

  “Side effects?” Arthur asked. “Is it dangerous?”

  “No more dangerous than listening to music.” That wasn’t strictly true. After all, as Pilar had said, when it hadn’t worked properly it had caused some … unexpected behavior. “As long as it’s working the way it’s intended, it’s not dangerous,” I amended reluctantly. “All it’s doing is realigning brain frequencies to a more normal level, taking them out of that state. It’s returning people to normal.”

  “What about people who aren’t doing the mob thing? What kind of effects does it have then?”

  “None.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. It’s mathematically impossible for it to take people out of a normal brain state.”

  “Thought you said we have more than one normal brain state. Like when people sleep or meditate.”

  “It won’t affect those either. It’s, uh—” I thought about how to explain. “It’s too far off. Have you ever seen the thing where people break glass with a resonant frequency?”

  “Like opera singers? That happens for real?”

  “It can. But it’s not like any frequency does it. It has to be resonant with the glass. This isn’t quite the same thing, but—mathematically, what they put together, it’s too far off anything else to affect states other than the particular range of waves they wanted it to.”

  “Then what’s the catch?”

  I laid out for him how they hadn’t been able to figure out a way to blanket a large area evenly. “The short version is, they could do it if the experiment subject was one person standing still—they tested it on people playing video games and such—but in real-world mob scenarios, that’s never going to be the case. It’s always going to be a lot of people over a big area, and they couldn’t get the right combination of frequencies to stay constant enough over a large field.” When people had moved out of the sweet spot and into the places where the frequency bands weren’t correct anymore—that was where any trouble had sparked. “And for what we want, well, we want an even bigger scale. We want a consistent impact and we want it everywhere; we don’t want people to wander in and out of the effects.”

  “We don’t?” said Arthur dryly.

  “For two reasons,” I argued. “This isn’t going to have a large-scale impact if the people in vulnerable situations”—I leaned on that, thinking of Katrina and the old track marks scarring her skin—“if they’re just going to get indoctrinated once they wander over to the next city block. Think of people fighting addictions. Or kids in gang neighborhoods.” Like Pilar’s cousin. Christ, there were way too many people’s lives at stake here. “Second, we want to be able to see if there’s actually a statistically significant effect, and for that we need to test it out over a substantial enough area—”

  “Hey, calm down, Russell. I’m hearing you out.”

  I counted out the median seconds in each breath, forcing it to moderate itself.

  “So, what, you suggesting all of LA?” Arthur continued after a moment. He spoke as if he were feeling through. Digesting. “That’s a lot of ground to cover, isn’t it?”

  “I did a back-of-the-envelope. Setting enough of them will take some time, but it’s
doable. Especially if Checker and Pilar will help.”

  If they would help. I thought of Checker’s reaction and it mixed with my rapidly souring feelings.

  “But you say the math, it works out,” Arthur confirmed.

  “I can make it work.” I wasn’t there yet, but the computation was so close I could taste it. I was going to be able to adjust the devices precisely and position them around the whole city, and it would work, and there would be no more nights of Arthur getting shot or Pourdry’s men shooting up a hospital or all of us depending on the fucking LA Mafia to keep other crime lords in check. I’d be able to blanket the whole metropolitan area evenly, so everywhere would be within the right frequency band, and I’d watch the violence fall and know that I had solved it.

  Arthur coughed. “So let me get this straight. You’re saying a racket like Pourdry’s, or the kids in South LA who get sucked into the life…”

  My breath caught. I’d started to brace for his objections, dug in so hard I wasn’t even sure I was hearing him right at first. But the optimism in his words—he was agreeing. He was agreeing.

  Adrenaline began tingling through me in the other direction, like fireworks under my skin, as if I wanted to laugh at the sheer relief of it. Every emotion tonight felt forged extreme and too raw.

  “I—I’m going to get Checker to run simulations,” I managed to answer him. “But yeah. It should have a nontrivial impact.”

  “Right. Okay. Russell, I realize you’re not asking my permission, but … I worry, you know? About what we haven’t thought of. But if this has got even a chance of helping … you say it’s only gonna affect people who are caught up already, right? No one else?”

  “No, no, no one else.”

  “If that’s the case, then—I don’t think we’ve got a right not to do it, just ’cause we’re scared of what might happen. But I want us to think this through every step, right? Nothing hasty. Anybody sees anything concerning, we call it off.”

  “Yeah, of—of course.”

  “And I want you to explain it to me in more detail. Want to see their studies and the like.”

  “No problem.”

  “After that, if it seems like this is gonna do what you say, I want to help.”

  Holy shit. I didn’t even know how to react. This was—this was excellent, and freeing, and suddenly I had a goddamn ally and I didn’t understand how that could feel like everything.

  “Don’t know that I’d be much help right now, of course.…” Arthur gestured down at his leg.

  “Oh, bullshit.” I did laugh then, giddy and sharp-edged but absolutely genuine. “I don’t need you for a gun hand. You’re useful for the things I’m bad at.” Namely, any investigative or undercover work. Suddenly, taking on all of Pourdry’s operation—and anyone else we’d managed to piss off—by myself didn’t seem so overwhelming. Not when Arthur had my back on the rest of it. I’d get control of my goddamn mind, and we’d fix the city.

  “One condition,” Arthur said then. And I wanted to feel sandbagged, but his voice was so gentle I couldn’t. Gentle, and open, and nonjudgmental, which was ridiculous, because Arthur was one of the most self-righteous people I’d ever met.

  He shifted around to face me fully from the passenger seat. “Tell me what the heck happened between when you dropped me off and when you came to pick me up.”

  Arthur always saw more than I thought he did.

  I swallowed and told him about Simon.

  eight

  INSTEAD OF trying to calm me down, Arthur was flat-out shaken. Much more than I’d expected him to be.

  “We need to find out more about this guy. Stat,” he said, as I helped him up the walk and into a ground-floor apartment. Somewhere close by, I heard sirens going again. Not related to us this time.

  Except in the way everything was related to us. The way every new death was on our heads.

  “I’d like to punch his face in, but I think we have higher priorities, unfortunately,” I said to Arthur. I ran the algorithm for the flat’s key location and stabilized Arthur for a minute to pry the key out from beneath a slat of the building’s warped siding. Now that I’d calmed down, I could be an adult here. “The way he came at me was creepy as fuck, but if I step back from it—objectively, I was probably overreacting.”

  “What? No. No way in hell you were overreacting. That’s what people say to excuse—” He cut himself off, then gusted out a sigh and put his hand back on my shoulder to limp inside. “Russell. I saw how you were acting out there. He had you scared bad.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I was being a baby about it. He never even tried to come at me physically, and he clearly wasn’t influencing me much if I still want to bash his skull against cement. Let’s file him under ‘annoying wet noodle’ and move on.”

  “Russell? Think through what you said just there.”

  I shut the door behind us, puzzling through Arthur’s words. What…? Oh.

  Oh.

  “You’re saying he might have influenced me to say that,” I said slowly.

  “Even if he was being honest about not reading you—if he made us not notice him without trying, he can probably do some kind of, I dunno. A harmless impression. Something that’s making you doubt your suspicions of him.”

  I was a suspicious person by nature, but when it came to someone who could manipulate minds … Arthur was right. If I took Simon’s “not an exact science” comment on good faith, every gut feeling I had about him was probably manufactured.

  And Arthur was also right that I didn’t even have one singular gut feeling about him. Impotent fury collided with rabid fear, which was now smothered by this newfound determination to ignore him as irrelevant, and when had that even crept into my brainspace?

  I sank down on the threadbare futon that was the studio’s only furniture. “I hate psychics.”

  “At least it sounds like he’s not gone full-on aggressive yet,” Arthur said, stretching out the leg on his injured side to sink down next to me. “Unless he isn’t as strong as Dawna. Or unless he’s got some larger plan.”

  “Aren’t you pleasant.”

  “We gotta find him again.”

  The fear and anger lifted their heads again. I wasn’t sure if finding him was the last thing I wanted to do or if I wanted to dog him into the ground until I could take disproportionate revenge for his power over me.

  “He’ll probably find me,” I admitted reluctantly. “I got the sense he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.” The impression that he wasn’t going to give up may even have been a bleed-through thought he’d accidentally projected, which meant I was definitely right. “But even if I do see him again, it’s not going to do us much good, is it? He’s not going to tell me anything he doesn’t want to.”

  “Hmm. I’d like to look into him, and not to his face. You get a last name?”

  “I’m not sure ‘Simon’ is even his real first name.”

  “What about how he found you?”

  “Well, he knows me. Apparently.”

  Arthur scoffed. “You switch phones every few weeks and don’t even keep a driver’s license. Knowing you isn’t the same as finding you.”

  That was a good point. I thought for a minute. Could he have tracked me through my clients…?

  Arthur snapped his fingers. “I got it. The cemetery.”

  “What does that have to do with Simon?”

  He tilted his head at me, as if I were being worryingly slow. “I went back to talk to ’em about your note, the one you found in the wall niche. Somehow, the cemetery folk couldn’t find any records on that wall niche, even though they were sure they’d called the next of kin when it got vandalized and all. Totally sure. Said it was a real nice gentleman, too. I’m betting it was him, Russell—pretending to be your family and all.”

  The realization punched through me slow and heavy, with the speed and inevitability of an oil tanker. How had I not seen what Arthur meant immediately?

  Because Simon hadn�
��t wanted me to, probably.

  “I’m betting they called him all those months ago when you broke the stone,” Arthur went on. “He comes running back to LA, and then … how long did you say he’s been following?”

  “A day or so,” I said numbly. “That’s how long I’ve felt like someone was behind me.”

  “Could be he was here in town trying to find you, but then that damn caretaker saw us this morning. Probably gave this Simon guy a call without even knowing he did.”

  I pushed my fingers against my temples, an ache pulsing through them.

  “I’ll keep digging at the cemetery,” Arthur said. “They’ve got to have some kind of records I can get at.”

  “Track down Pourdry first,” I said. “He’s the more dangerous one.”

  “Russell, you don’t know that.”

  Fucking psychics. Everything around me was fracturing, and the feeling was swamping me again that I might not have enough time or resources or sanity for any of it. “All right, then we put Checker on Pourdry, you on Simon, and I get Pilar.”

  “What are you gonna do?” Arthur asked.

  I stood up. “I’m going to break into an old Arkacite warehouse and steal a bunch of top-secret prototypes.”

  That, at least, was something I could do without second-guessing myself about telepathic influence.

  * * *

  ARKACITE TECHNOLOGIES might have gone bankrupt and died a fiery death as a company, but the detritus of their empire was still everywhere. Large chunks of their technology had been bought out by other corporate behemoths, all of their old brands now carrying a subtitle marking them with whoever the new overlord was, from their operating systems to their smartphones.

  Some of the tech that had dead-ended had been bought up wholesale with everything else, but some had been wallowing in limbo, particularly the research sensitive enough to be mired in legalities with the government or military. Pilar had located the old Signet Device materials locked up in a well-secured warehouse that nobody wanted to pay for anymore.