Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  “Dinner?” Jason reached out to her through the link. He sounded hungry, and Rachel idly wondered if it was actually possible for a person to sound hungry or if her own moods were piggybacking on his.

  “Ready to eat?” She poked Phil.

  He sighed. “Always.”

  Rachel thought back over her day. She hadn’t eaten anything other than the occasional snack since she and Zockinski had gorged themselves on overpriced museum croissants. There had been some sneaking off to the side in the cornfield, but nobody had enjoyed a proper bathroom break in hours.

  They pulled off at a wreck of a strip mall with more empty stores than customers, a Subway and a McDonald’s the last remaining signs of commerce. Gallagher gave everybody a firm thirty minutes, to be cut short without notice. Most of the FBI started walking towards the sandwich shop, but some headed towards the fast food restaurant at the other end of the parking lot. The group from First District Station broke up, the police moving towards the American equivalent of health food, while the cyborgs pled the need for coffee that hadn’t been boiled in the same pot since noon and gravitated towards the calories.

  It was an old McDonald’s and hadn’t yet been renovated into a polished plastic café. This one had an agricultural theme, with farm hand tools nailed to the walls and a row of stationary saddles where the stools should be. Rachel ran her fingertips over one of these on her way to the counter; hard leather, shiny from decades of dropped fries and jeans. It’d be gone soon, plowed under when the building was razed to the ground, the old broken character of the place turned into so many pieces of brick. She had read the cost analysis of what it took to renovate old buildings and bring them up to code, and there was a definite logic in starting from scratch, but it seemed wasteful in a different way.

  They got their meals, found a table far away from those few from the FBI, and soaked in the grease.

  “This is going to kill me,” Phil complained.

  He was not referring to the cholesterol. Rachel patted her purse. “Energy bars,” she said. “I brought enough for all of us. Just snack when you take a bathroom break.”

  Jason snorted around a huge bite of his burger. “Men don’t have to piss fifty times a day. That’d be almost as suspicious as eating all the damned time.”

  They stopped talking to concentrate on their food. When the last of her fried chicken sandwich was gone, Rachel drew a breath and slouched forward, sated. “Think we can get away with shakes?” She balled up the last paper wrapper and dropped it on her tray. “I’m not sure when we’ll get another chance to eat. The kids, Glazer, those RFID readers… I don’t see us getting another meal in tonight.”

  “Oh yeah,” Jason said, and put down his third burger. “Rachel? I forgot. Here.”

  He reached out and grabbed her nearest wrist.

  “What’s up?” Rachel started to ask, and then she felt the new autoscript worm its way into her mind. She yanked her hand away from him and barely stopped herself before it completed the arc towards his face.

  “Asshole!” she hissed aloud.

  “Rachel! What…” Phil, engrossed in his food, had turned at the exact moment to see her nearly punch Jason. It took him a moment to guess what had happened. Rachel, furious, rubbing her wrist; Jason, annoyed and self-righteous… Phil’s colors drained out of him. “Jason, you didn’t!”

  “It’s the same RFID reader script I gave you this morning,” Jason glared at Phil, then back at Rachel. “Grow up,” he said to her.

  She had to keep herself from clawing at her own skin. “I didn’t ask for this.”

  He shrugged and picked up his burger. “Like we asked for any of this.”

  The restaurant muttered in data. Little plastic tags hidden in boxes chirped names, dates, and locations at her. Machines kept shouting their batch numbers. Down the hall, a copier kept telling her it was overdue for servicing, and every computer, each credit card, and the security badges worn by the FBI three tables down chimed like hollow clocks. It was worse than the usual clamor of the digital ecosystem. This was not a passive environment; these devices wanted to talk to her.

  She pressed her fists against her temples. “How do you shut it off?”

  “It’s already off,” Jason said, shaking his head. “The script doesn’t activate unless you’ve scanned an RFID tag.”

  She nearly went to hit him again, but closed her eyes and grabbed the edge of the table instead. Her fingernails skidded across the old laminate. “I’m almost never not scanning, idiot.”

  Jason slowly lowered his hands, the self-righteous blues fading. “Oh shit, Rachel. I didn’t think.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” she said.

  “Rachel, I—”

  “Quiet.” She cut him off and put her hands over her ears as she wrestled with frequencies. The majority of RFID tags around them were the cheap disposable kind and she could weed those out by dropping the microwave and radio bands from her environment scans, but those on the copier and food machines were more complex and broadcast their own signals. She had heard all of these before but they were just more of the ever-present white noise; now, they spoke, crickets and locusts that begged her for restocking or to change their ink. “How do you get rid of the active tags?”

  “Oh God, Rachel, I don’t think you can,” Phil said, deeply gray. “I just ignore them.”

  “Shit. I can’t do that,” she whispered, and gave up and shut down all radio. The room lost detail and depth as she shut away those familiar frequencies, but the passive tags were silenced.

  The active tags howled on.

  “You will fix this,” Rachel snarled at Jason. His expression was fuzzy but she knew that was her own fault. “I’m not giving up radio or microwave. They’re my staples. Can I delete the script, or overwrite it, or what?”

  They didn’t know; no one had tried to eliminate an autoscript before. Phil put a general call out through the link for advice, and Jason flinched when Josh responded with a harsh: “He did what?!”

  “Rachel?” Jason pleaded as the collective beat him down. “I am so sorry.”

  “I know,” she said. The emotional spectrum was not carried by radio frequencies: Jason was miserable. “But you fucking ask first. Always.”

  Across the room, the FBI suddenly burst into bright colors.

  “Oh, what now?” Rachel asked the others. They didn’t know, and she could barely make out the outlines of the Special Agents as they stood and frantically gathered their trash. She sighed and flipped on radio frequencies. The FBI bloomed into high definition and the RFID tags on their badges and credit cards welcomed her back. Outside, Gallagher and her team were driving towards them across the parking lot, multiple cars in a quick-moving line as they came to pick up their missing members. She could track each of them by the name and credentials in their wallets.

  Maybe this wasn’t so bad. Maybe the radio signals were just another layer of data within her already-saturated environment. She had taught herself to see through walls and to stay sane in the midst of the emotional maelstrom around her; maybe she could learn how to use these, too.

  Ah crap, Rachel thought, picking Santino and the others out of a car at the rear of their pack. She had been so preoccupied with the RFID data that she hadn’t noticed how the men from First MPD were running red again.

  “I think they got a lead,” Rachel said. “It’s not good.”

  Gallagher entered the restaurant and came towards them. Rachel assumed the woman was headed towards her own team members, but she stepped past them to reach the Agents, a large piece of paper in her hand. Before Rachel could scan it, Gallagher wordlessly slid the photo across the table. Rachel flipped to reading mode, then blinked her implant off and on as she took a closer look at the satellite image.

  “You’re kidding,” Rachel said.

  FIFTEEN

  The Portsmouth Marine Terminal had wharfs sized for battleships and encompassed more than two hundred acres of open land. Their guide, an office administr
ator whose job responsibilities had suddenly veered into the grim, drove a glorified golf cart through truck-sized dirt roads lined with the steel shells of shipping containers stacked five, six, seven tall above their heads. It was a different version of OACET headquarters and its forest of groaning cardboard, remade in rusting steel on a giant’s scale.

  “How many of these are here?” Rachel shouted to their driver, and pointed to the containers.

  He glazed over in annoyance; everyone who came to Portsmouth must have asked him that same question. “We don’t know. We’ve got an inventory for everything sent here after 1986, but this port’s been around for almost a century and they’ve been using these FEUs since the 1950s.”

  “FEUs?”

  “Forty-foot equivalent units. It’s cheaper to build new ones than ship them back and reuse them, so once they’re emptied, they’re usually dumped. We’ve got another yard for the twenty-foot units. And we’re state-owned, but a private shipping company leased another three hundred acres from us, so when they get overflow they’ve got the option to dump.

  “It gets pretty bad,” he admitted. “The state shut us down for containerized cargo a few years back to give us a chance to manage the surplus. As soon as we finished clearing one yard out, they went and dumped another fifty thousand units right back on it. All combined… I don’t know. High end? There might be almost a quarter of a million FEUs on site.”

  They sped through the yard, the utility cart bumping along the bare earth. The ground was as dead as if it were paved; Rachel was no engineer but she assumed no matter how thick the concrete pad, it would still sustain damage from the weight and the movement of the freight. Cheaper to leave it as they had found it, and pray to keep the rain away.

  The yard was the equivalent of an archeological dig site for the Agents. Shipping containers were part of the digital ecosystem, the tracking devices embedded within falling into various stages of decay. Newer containers with RFID tags were layered atop three generations of radio receiver units and ancient data buses. Those old systems were mostly long dead, their power supplies drained dry decades ago, but every once and a while Rachel had caught a flicker of movement in the lowest layers, a twitch of energy like a run-down rabbit trying to drag itself out of the road.

  It was shockingly sad. She wished she could turn off everything other than straight visuals and ignore the slow rot around them, but there was a chance they might drive past the container with the kids. Rachel was running a continuous scan at the very limits of her abilities, but this had accomplished nothing other than showing her how the container yard was freakishly, terrifyingly enormous. The scope of the place was beyond her comprehension. The very fact the yard existed seemed somehow unfair, as though the human race had no right to make something of this size.

  Rachel glanced behind her to where the other members of the task force rattled around in the rear of the cart. To a man they kept a stoic face, but each was moving in greens and curious yellows. A crane swung directly overhead, another container dangling in midair. Santino glowed. He caught Rachel’s eye and the thumb on his good hand flew across the screen of his cell.

  “If I wasn’t so pissed off right now, this would all be so damned cool.”

  She grinned at him, then turned back to watch the dust clouds sheer off the windshield.

  Their cart was the tail on a convoy moving towards the last place Glazer’s truck had been spotted. A private communications satellite had been perfectly positioned to follow Glazer’s semi as it moved past the Terminal gate, through the security checkpoint, down the main road, into the graveyard, and disappear. The security checkpoint registered one semi entering at that time; then, thirty minutes later, the same truck leaving minus its payload. Glazer’s bill of lading had put his cargo as Virginia soybeans bound for China, but it had never arrived at the docks.

  Glazer had slipped a purloined letter into the stack.

  They hadn’t fully appreciated what Glazer had done until they entered the container graveyard. The satellite images had distorted the problem; what had seemed on paper a matter of finding one misplaced container among many was now the equivalent of finding a single Lego at Legoland.

  Rachel stepped from the utility cart, the sole of her boot hard against the ground. In the cart closest to her, a technician opened up a crate with a portable sonar array. He stared at it, then at the metal hulls around them, and went gray. Sonar was useless here.

  An FBI helicopter flew low. Rachel flipped through a few frequencies and caught the resonance streaming from it as they scanned the nearby containers, deploying thermal imaging across the graveyard.

  Good luck with that, she thought. She had tried it herself before abandoning those frequencies. August in acres of baking metal made for poor resolution, and she was sure Glazer hadn’t stuck those kids into a standard shipping container. Based on what Ellen Lewis had told them, Glazer had modified it in some way. Even if the FBI’s thermal imaging hit on Glazer’s container, he had probably shielded the interior to compensate for the temperature. Rachel was hoping this meant air conditioning; she was holding on to the belief that Glazer might have a reason to kidnap nearly a hundred people and keep them alive.

  Like brushstrokes in paint, her subconscious whispered, and tossed her the memory of dried blood against a white marble floor. Rachel ignored it and paced towards Gallagher’s team, grouped together in the center of a rough crossroads.

  Jason followed closely, always a step or two behind her but making himself available. He was still trying to atone for what he had done at the restaurant. Rachel knew the main reason for his remorse was the group ass-kicking he had received from the entire collective, but you had to start somewhere.

  She was loath to admit it, but this new autoscript was phenomenally useful. Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Customs and Border Protection, Virginia state police… and U.S. Navy? Rachel had taken a page from Glazer’s playbook and was pinging the RFID tags in the security badges to get an accurate head count. She did a quick search to learn why the military had dropped in, and found the shipping yard was within spitting distance of the naval base at Craney Island.

  Add these newcomers to Special Agent Gallagher and staff, and you got an especially fragrant potpourri of state and federal law enforcement.

  Or… witnesses.

  Rachel stumbled as she finally realized what Glazer had done. Jason grabbed her shoulder to catch her. As his fingers brushed the skin on her neck, her fear jumped across to him. He recoiled as if struck.

  “Stop!” Rachel ordered as his hand flew to his gun. “Get your shit together right now.”

  She grabbed his arm through his suit coat and forced him over to the side of the nearest container. Jason faced the side of the truck and started whispering in French. Rachel didn’t speak the language but she knew a prayer when she heard one.

  Rachel leaned against the side of the truck and pretended they had stopped so she could shake a stone from her boot. Phil came up beside them and joined her and Jason in the link.

  “What’s wrong?” Phil asked.

  “Look around,” she said. “Do you see what’s happening?”

  Jason rose up past his emotions and saw what she meant almost immediately. Phil, who in spite of the last five years still failed to appreciate how horrible people could be to each other, didn’t understand the problem until Jason told him: “It’s a trap. For us.”

  “How is this a…” Phil, trained to see the threat in the inanimate, instinctively looked towards the heavy machines swinging high overhead, then back down to the near-infinite rows of shipping containers. Last came the humans, small and fragile in comparison, walking in staggered rows around him. His colors fled as he caught on, and his voice was small in her head. “Rachel, all of those kids…”

  “I’m taking the lead,” she told them. “You can beat me down later, but here, now? It’s us against them, and you’re standing with me.”

  Jason agreed without a se
cond’s hesitation. Phil, who had broken into a run and was already a hundred feet down the road, stopped to stare back at her.

  “I won’t let it get to a point where the kids are at risk,” she promised him. “Glazer only thinks he’s got us in a Catch-22. You can’t profile somebody unless you can get in their heads, and nobody gets in our heads but us.”

  Phil almost laughed.

  Rachel pushed herself off of the truck and walked towards where the others had gathered, kicking up dust with each step. The small group of who’s-whos had reached the central hub of the shipping station. She knew she was on display as she marched up the road, Jason at her side. They met up with Phil and formed the most meager of phalanxes, three abreast.

  When they reached the center hub, she drew them off to the side. “With luck,” she told the others, “they won’t even consider us as an option. They usually see us as a liability, not a possible solution.”

  “You’ve been flaunting your X-ray powers all week,” Jason retorted. “It’ll be a miracle if they don’t.”

  She ignored him and pretended he wasn’t absolutely right.

  Twenty feet away, the clash of bureaucracies was heating up. Gallagher held her own against those others fighting for control of the scene; under the circumstances, every agency represented had some claim over the shipping yard, and they all wanted the credit for the rescue. But, as the children were still missing, seizing claim and credit might boomerang in the worst possible way. Rachel watched the core and conversational colors sweep over the group in grayish-reds; the search parties had already gone out, the first reports coming back to their supervisors, no news, no trace, no small voices calling out for help. This was a Herculean task, a quarter of a million units to search, winnowed down to perhaps fifty thousand if geography and timeline were applied, and they could not summon enough manpower to cut the burden.