Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Yes, you do. People lie. It’s human nature. I’ve lied to you eighty times today.”

  “Agents don’t. It’s not that we can’t: it’s that we don’t. Network three hundred and fifty people together and you’ve created three hundred and fifty fact-checkers. At best, a major lie puts us six degrees from embarrassment and forced apologies.”

  They retraced their steps, winding back up the stairs and the forest of boxes. Those Agents they passed demurred to Santino, their colors flickering yellow as they fled.

  “They’re scared of me?” he whispered.

  Rachel shrugged. “Knowledge is power,” she whispered back. “You could shut us down, force us to go into hiding, all of the things that keep us up at night. They’re waiting to see what you decide.”

  “What? I’ve already decided.” Santino tried to catch the attention of a woman across the solarium, and she fled out the side door into the topiary. “Can you promise me they aren’t a threat? Shawn and the others?”

  “Yeah, I can. But I would have said the same thing before Shawn attacked you,” she said. “What I do know is that this will never happen again. Mulcahy’s already locked it down.”

  His colors did that weaving thing as he weighed a hundred outcomes. “You’d really go into hiding?”

  She nodded. “Got my tropical paradise picked out and everything.”

  “God,” he groaned. “Fine. Let them know I’ll keep your secret.”

  She hugged him. Neither of them were big on casual hugs, but sometimes the friendly pat on the back wouldn’t do. “Thank you,” she said against his chest.

  “If Shawn starts the apocalypse, I’m going to be so pissed at you.”

  She let go and grinned up at him. “If it makes you feel better, we’ll probably die in the first wave of bombing anyhow.”

  “Oh, sudden annihilation,” he sighed. “One of the many advantages to living in D.C.”

  They entered the empty kitchen. Like all good kitchens, it was the heart of their home and was usually thrumming with life. The room had escaped the heavy hand of renovation and had kept its classic cafeteria galley design, with worn oak floors and copper pots hanging from the crossbeams. The industrial-sized fridge was stocked with ice cream and beer, and a shopping list written in forty different hands curled down its front. Plastic bags from a favorite catering company covered the worn butcher block of an island stationed between the two counters. OACET was an army which marched on its stomach.

  Rachel dug through the bags until she found a chicken salad sandwich which was still reasonably cold, and slid it across the island to Santino. She was rummaging through the rest to find something for herself when Phil came in.

  “I’ve been drafted,” Phil said, helping himself to one of Rachel’s discards.

  “That does not live up to its labeling as roast beef,” she warned.

  He took a cautious bite and agreed. “Strangest-looking pastrami I’ve ever seen.”

  “Drafted for what?” Santino asked.

  “To see if you’re going to bring us down,” Rachel said. “I already told them but noooo…” She rolled her eyes. “Apparently this is serious enough to require confirmation.”

  “Hey,” Phil mumbled around a mouthful of mystery meat, “we’re terrified. No offense, we all think you’re great,” he said to Santino, “but you’ve got to understand we’re basically huddling together for warmth in our house of cards. We’re slowly reinforcing it with concrete, but there’s no way we can withstand a direct hit.”

  “Doesn’t it bother any of you that you’re putting a hell of a lot of pressure on me?” Santino asked. “I feel like I’m responsible for the survival of an entire civilization.”

  “At least it’s a small one,” Phil said. “So the guilt shouldn’t be too bad if you wipe us off of the planet.”

  “Dick.”

  “Yup.” Phil was relaxed in greens and blues, trusting in Santino.

  Rachel closed her eyes and rested against the counter. A summer thunderstorm had crept in while they were down in the catacombs, and the rain pounding on the skylights kept time to Phil and Santino’s bickering. The house was getting back to normal (coming back online, said that part of her brain she loved to drown in whiskey), and green avatars began to float through the kitchen to see if it was safe for their human forms to follow. Rachel waved them off, asking the collective for a few moments of peace, and the kitchen was theirs again.

  “Have you tried to get them professional help?” Santino asked.

  “Shawn and the others? No. This is one of those there-but-for-the-grace-of things,” Phil said. “Even if they could get better therapy somewhere else—and I sincerely doubt that, since our psychologists are pretty much the only ones in the world who have experience working with cyborgs—I don’t know if we could leave them with anyone outside of OACET.”

  “How hard was it, going public?” Santino asked as he went to the fridge for a soda. He snapped the tab and took a large swallow to chase the codeine in his system with a Tylenol. Rachel had been watching a small but intense spot of red in his conversational colors hovering over his left arm, its center burning bright white and traveling the length of his stitches. The spot pulsed along with his heart and grew stronger as the local anesthetic wore off. It was morbidly fascinating; this was her first time tracking injury progression, and her growing curiosity was keeping pace with her partner’s level of pain.

  “Toughest thing we’ve ever done,” Phil replied. “The only good part is that now we’re together as a group. If we didn’t have each other, we wouldn’t have made it this far.”

  “You know,” Santino said as he poked through the sandwiches in search of more chicken salad, “it might not be so rough if you guys were open about your problems. I’m appalled—seriously appalled!—that you guys feel as though you have to hide people in your basement like it’s the nineteenth century and they’re your mentally-ill cousins or something.”

  “And he’s already forgotten how he nearly pissed himself when he found out about them,” Jason Atran said, pushing open the swinging kitchen door. With dark hair over dark eyes, Jason had the polished features of a European male model and dressed to match. He positioned himself directly across from Santino and leaned back against the counter: there was ample space in the rambling kitchen, but Jason was there for no other reason than confrontation, flowing in reds and jealous greens.

  “Did you tell him to come down here?” Rachel asked Phil, who shook his head.

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t spoken to him in weeks,” the small man replied. “This probably got grapevined.”

  “Outside voices, remember?” Jason said to them, quick to notice the glassy stare that marked Agents chatting via a private link. “We have a guest.”

  “Thanks.” Santino smiled at Jason but his colors were ramping up to red as he picked up on Jason’s antagonism. Rachel would have been worried if Jason had come in and thrown a punch at Santino, but her partner was a seasoned gladiator on the verbal battlefield. The Agent didn’t stand a chance.

  “Heard you met Zia,” Jason said. “Tight little lay, isn’t she?”

  Rachel was struck dumb. The comment was beyond the pale, even in their home where civility was so lax it was barely an afterthought.

  “Did Zia and Jason have a thing?” Rachel asked Phil, who was so mortified he was blushing pink from head to toe.

  “Not recently,” he answered. “Maybe back in the early days, but who knows? Can you remember everyone you were with those first couple of months?”

  She couldn’t. It had been a carnal madhouse. They had all agreed to forgive, forget, and dig up the past only if the tests failed to come back clean.

  “Agent Atran, right?” Santino extended his right hand. It hung out in space until the Agent shook it to make it go away. “I thought so. You’ve got something of a reputation.

  “But I have to be honest, man,” Santino said as he sighed and shook his head. “This interview is
not going well.”

  Jason blinked. “What?”

  “You probably heard? Someone’s murdering people out there. We’re putting together a team to help catch him, and your name kept coming up as a top pick. It’d be me, Rachel, two MPD officers, and two other Agents. We thought one of them would be you, but you come in here insulting Agent Hallahan?”

  “Technically, that was a compliment,” Jason said with a thin, angry smirk.

  “Technically, I don’t care,” Santino said. “It was rude and unprofessional. You really think I want someone who is rude or unprofessional on my team?” He was furious but smiling kindly, bubbles of cheery springtime yellow moving in and out of his reds. Rachel saw traces of Zia’s violet core within the yellow: he was defending Zia and was happy to do it, she realized, and Rachel was suddenly fiercely proud of her friend.

  “Your team?” Jason was building momentum when Santino held up his injured arm. He wasn’t done shutting Jason down.

  “Mine and Rachel’s. It’s our call who joins, and I’m sure as hell not working with someone who doesn’t have any respect for his teammates. Or…” and Santino let the word hang long enough for Jason to fill in the void with whatever word he wanted before he added: “co-workers.

  “So,” Santino continued, and she saw he had borrowed this particular smile from her own toolkit, “we’ll go, and you’ll stay here and do… What is it you do again?”

  Jason didn’t answer, so Phil chimed in. “Data entry.”

  “Oh,” Santino said, rounding the word with scorn. “Exciting. Well, we’re about to head back over to First District Station. Be sure to let me know how data entry works out for you.” He clapped Jason on the shoulder and turned away, stalling to grab one last sandwich for the road.

  “What do you want, an apology?” Jason was running gray, his best opportunity to get back in the field snatched out of his grasp.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Santino said. “Or,”—and he was suddenly much, much taller. Rachel was envious; she lacked the physical presence to loom—“You recognize the next time you go after Zia, I’ll have to do something about it.”

  “I want her to marry him and have beautiful nerdbabies,” Phil said.

  “He didn’t know she was alive an hour ago,” she replied. “Give them some time to get around to the nerdbabies.”

  Jason relented. “Fine.”

  “You done here?” Rachel asked. “Because the odds of me making a good alpha male joke are low.”

  “Oh, you’d do the best you could,” Phil said. “You can’t help that you have no sense of humor.”

  NINE

  “This is sick,” Phil whispered.

  The cameraman was in his late thirties and running gray; Rachel had read him as clinically depressed. She and Santino would have to break out the whiskey and that damned notebook of his to pin down the ethics of interrogation via the emotional spectrum, but, Phil’s opinion aside, this new technique seemed to fit comfortably in her old bag of tricks.

  On the other side of a one-way mirror, two men strutted and postured around a third. Zockinski had taken Jason into the interrogation room, saying that if they had to keep the freaks around, they might as well get some use out of them. The detective had tapped Jason for the chore because, in Zockinski’s words, “he looks like he should look,” but Jason also acted like he should act, and the two of them were slowly stripping the real story from the cameraman’s bones.

  “Tell me about the money,” Jason said. He leaned forward as the older man pushed his chair away, their movements so perfectly aligned they might as well have been choreographed.

  “I already told you, they offered me money. I didn’t take it!” Chris Burman couldn’t take his eyes off of the Agent, who was so happy to be back in action and tormenting another human being that he practically glowed.

  “Is he lying?” Jason asked.

  “Yes,” Rachel replied. Lies were easy to spot; skittish dimples puckered the surface colors of the speaker across their shoulders. Santino had exaggerated; he was almost unfailingly honest and lied to her maybe a dozen times a day, tops.

  “And if I go through your accounts?” Jason dropped his voice conspiratorially. “Are you sure I won’t find anything?”

  “Do you have a warrant? You can’t do that without a warrant!” The cameraman jumped, then threw a panicked look at Zockinski. “Can he do that?”

  Zockinski spread his hands wide. “Buddy, you’ve heard about them. They can do anything.”

  “Phenomenal,” Phil growled into his milkshake. “They’re doing Good Cop, Cyborg Cop. I’ve always wanted to visit the Supreme Court.” He was no longer complaining to her through the link; Phil needed some sort of public record, even if it would only exist among the four observers.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Hill said from the other end of the room. He was pressed up against the mirror while he watched his partner work. “We do this with racists.”

  “What?”

  “You play off of their hate. They don’t think as quick, as clean, when they’re talking to someone they hate.”

  “I can’t believe you let yourself get used like that,” Phil muttered.

  Hill laughed without humor. “Nine times out of ten, Zockinski’s the bad guy. You wouldn’t believe the hate that’s out there for white cops. Everybody already thinks Zockinski’s there to put them away, doesn’t matter whether they’re innocent or not.”

  “But we’re not threatening that guy in there with loss of due process,” Phil snapped. “You’re basically waving technological witchcraft at him like a loaded gun!” The small Agent had been with Special Operations and knew eight ways to blow up the room with a bag of potato chips, but his job stopped when the cuffs went on the suspect. He had never been part of an active interrogation and was disgusted to learn where the others drew the line. For them, an interrogation with a third-tier suspect like Burman was usually a waste of time, so they had to find ways to keep themselves engaged (Creativity was key. Rachel had once started an interview with a coulrophobe by reading him the first three chapters of Stephen King’s IT. Poor little George, swept beneath the street… Her suspect had broken like a twig.).

  “What’s-his-name, Jason?” Hill nodded towards the mirror. “Is he going to pull those accounts?”

  “Nope,” Rachel said, working on the last dregs of her chocolate shake. “Not unless you get him a warrant.”

  “Then we’ve got his back,” Hill said.

  “This isn’t about what you do,” Phil said, tapping a closed fist, slow but hard, against the cinderblocks beneath the glass. “It’s about what we do… This guy? This guy will never trust us. Never. And he’s gonna go home and tell all of his friends that an Agent threatened to wreck his financials, and his story will be blogged and Tweeted and…”

  Phil trailed off, forehead pressed against the glass. Hill looked at the small Agent, really looked at him, and Hill’s wall of warm browns and golds softened around the edges with a gentle wine red. She had seen that hue at funerals and nowhere else. Sympathy? Pity?

  Who knew?

  On the other side of the glass, Chris Burman was having a very bad day. He had been filming a local high school team’s football practice when he was hauled off of the field by two uniformed officers. During the early stages of the interview, he had described himself as a freelance cinematographer who picked up odd jobs wherever he could. He claimed he was friendly with a staff sergeant at First MPD who passed work his way; this staff sergeant had thrown his so-called buddy under the bus by saying he only requested Burman when his first choice in audio-visual guys couldn’t make it.

  The cameraman was close to frantic. “Okay! Okay, listen,” Burman said, spreading his hands wide on the table and rubbing it with the balls of his hands. “I didn’t help anyone. I came in, shot some training videos, and got paid. That’s it.”

  “He’s obsessive-compulsive,” Rachel said, following Burman’s movements.

  Santino, sitting in
the room’s only chair with his paper cup pressed against his injured arm to chill it, perked at this. Rachel had observed the same type of tactile grounding behavior in him when he wasn’t watching his own body language. He stood and crossed the room to watch Burman trace small spirals on the tabletop. “Yeah, he is. Tell them to put something on the table in front of him. Make it messy.”

  Hill’s hand was moving towards the wire in his ear when Jason roughly shoved a stack of papers at Burman with the tough guy line of burying Burman under the evidence. The papers slid out of their pile and cascaded towards the cameraman, who restacked them and placed Jason’s pen at the top like a mint on a pillow.

  “Perfect,” Santino said. “How much do you think a guy like this makes in a year?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Rachel shrugged. “I’d be very surprised if he breaks forty-k.”

  “Yeah…” her partner mused as Burman sheltered the stack of paper in a cradle of his arms, protecting it from Jason and Zockinski. “Control freak, probably broke or close to it. I’ll bet you the next round of drinks this guy made a one-time payment to a credit card around the same time he shot the video. Not a lot of money, probably a couple hundred bucks. He wouldn’t get more than that for a digital copy of the film and a weird camera angle.”

  She smiled. There was no way Santino could have gotten that from hands laid on a desk. “You’re on,” she said, and sent Jason the bait over the link.

  In the interview room, Jason leaned forward and whispered something about debt and money and suspiciously-timed payments to Burman, whose grays faded as his head slumped forward. Caught. Resigned. Done.

  “Aw, damn,” Rachel sighed. Santino would no doubt order something from a fancy bottle and request for it to be served in an unreasonably large and fancy tumbler.

  Jason and Zockinski knew Burman was theirs. They stopped circling and sat down on the opposite side of the table, all cheery yellows and self-satisfied blues for a job well done.