Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  The dealer took the house cut and slid the rest toward Marcus.

  “Cheat,” Danny said softly.

  “Excuse me?” Marcus smiled and looked around the table; no one was backing Danny. “You should call it a night. Come back when your luck’s better.”

  Danny leaned forward. “Risk all that on a trip? I don’t think so.”

  The dealer said, “Sir, please.”

  Marcus gave an indignant bark of a laugh. “And look at what you risked the same on!”

  “But you didn’t need to,” Danny countered. “If you’d raised again, you knew I couldn’t match it.”

  “I didn’t know what was in your wallet!” Marcus blustered. “You could have borrowed from someone – I’m not a mind reader!” I could see the blood draining from his face, and I understood: somehow, he really had known Danny’s hand all along. And he’d betrayed himself, just so he could twist the knife.

  Danny reached across the table and plucked Marcus’s glasses from his face, like some curiously gentlemanly preamble to a pounding. The dealer raised his hand to summon a bouncer, but Danny didn’t hit anyone, he simply perched the glasses on his own nose and looked down at the table.

  “I knew it!” he declared triumphantly. He removed the glasses and offered them to the dealer. “Every card has a number in green!”

  The dealer hesitated, then tried on the glasses for himself. “OK,” he said nervously. “Everyone stay seated. The game’s annulled, and you’re all getting your bets returned.”

  Two bouncers and the manager joined us as the eye-in-the-sky vision was replayed and the chips were redistributed. Marcus sat in silence, his face blotched with fear. I knew the cards weren’t marked with any kind of dye: his glasses had to be finding the same pre-existing subtleties as I was, then making the job easier for him by numbering the patterns in an overlay laser-painted on his retinas. I’d noticed the small dark circle in the center of the bridge, but I hadn’t given it much thought – molded plastic always came with all kinds of odd impressions that its makers fancied were invisible. It was clear now, though, exactly what it was: a tiny multispectral camera, with sensors exactly like the ones in my own eyes.

  #

  When I got home the apartment was in darkness, so I took off my shoes and sat in the living room, planning to sleep on the couch. I was only twenty nine; my life was hardly over. Thousands of people slacked off in high school, dropped out of university, quit their first few jobs … and still found a way to succeed in the end. If I’d wanted the one thing that lifted me above the crowd to be part of the answer, too bad. No one was going to pay me to see the world more clearly than they did – let alone stand by and let me use that talent to fleece them. Lucy could paint her paintings for our tiny circle of hep friends, and we could walk side by side marveling at the beauty of the sea and the sky and the squalor of the city. But in the end our powers of vision would die with us, outsourced entirely to unthinking machines.

  #

  “The ship is going down, and you only have time to grab one item and take it with you to the lifeboat: a sheet of plastic, a mirror, and a compass. Which do you choose?”

  My interviewer leaned forward expectantly, his hand paused above his notepad.

  I said, “This is a shelf-stacking job. I’m not applying to the ocean cruise department.”

  “Just say, ‘plastic, to collect rainwater,’” he replied wearily. “Didn’t you google the answers before you came?”

  “Plastic, to collect rainwater.”

  He tapped the final box, and I heard a somber chime.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You didn’t make the cut.”

  “Why not?”

  He glanced down at the screen. “No stability in your employment history. And honestly, you’re too old.”

  I looked around his office, desperate for an idea. A poster showed a celebrity chef reaching down into a carton of plump apricots – though even a tri couldn’t have missed the bizarre retouching of the fruits’ appearance. “Can I show you something?” I offered. “In the produce aisles?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I could save the company thousands of dollars a month,” I boasted. “If something’s on the verge of going rotten, or infested with insects—”

  My interviewer was smiling. He shook his head in disbelief, or perhaps a trace of admiration at my chutzpah.

  He said, “Sorry, we already have that app.”

  #

  I looked up the app. It wouldn’t work on older phones, like my own, but the very latest models now carried reconfigurable quantum dot cameras as standard. It was not just art galleries and DIY-card-sharks who could access the whole spectrum; early adopters could do it already, and in five years it would be ubiquitous. Phones, notepads, glasses – every small, cheap camera would soon be seeing more of the world than its human owner.

  After Lucy’s last day at the gallery, her colleagues took us out to dinner. I sat watching them, feigning bonhomie, laughing when everyone else laughed. One man took a photograph of his steak to assess its rareness and quantify the risk of food poisoning. A woman looked around furtively then snapped the dessert, in the hope of recreating it at home. These people would never learn to see the world for themselves – but they were already accustomed to asking their gadgets to advise them every few minutes.

  Lucy glared at me as if I was someone’s mad uncle at a wake.

  My mother had watched Zelda for us. When Lucy and I were alone, I said, “Remember the treasure hunts?”

  She groaned. “Oh, please – not the good old days!”

  I said, “Do you still have the recipes? For the inks you used?”

  “Why?” Then she understood. “It would only be a fad,” she said. “A novelty. We’d be lucky if it lasted a year.”

  “A fad can make a lot of money in a year. Software, posters, spray-cans, marker pens, clothing, tattoos. A whole secret world that’s hidden from ordinary eyes – but not some virtual reality overlay: solid objects you can touch with your bare hands.”

  Lucy was skeptical. “And whose kidney are you going to sell to fund this empire?”

  I said, “We’re going to need a backer. Someone who’ll understand the idea. So let’s hope my cousin hasn’t blown all his prize money.”

  3

  Zelda stretched her arms above her head and waved her hands at me impatiently. “Lift me, Daddy!” She wouldn’t let me carry her comfortably on my hip, or even riding on my shoulders: she had to be gripped under the arms and held up at chest height, half a meter ahead of me, like a kind of advanced scout, seeing everything moments before I did.

  “You’re getting too old for this,” I told her, as I staggered through the gallery’s automatic doors.

  “No, you are!”

  “That’s true as well.”

  I put her down and she ran toward Lucy, stopping shyly at the sight of the two strangers talking with her mother. Lucy smiled at her, and so did the customers, but then they all turned back to the painting.

  “You’ve captured the river perfectly!” the woman marveled, making a sliding gesture beside her glasses to shift between false-color renderings. “Whatever wavelengths I map … the natural detail’s there.”

  “That’s what I was aiming for,” Lucy replied.

  “How long did it take you?” the woman’s partner asked.

  “About a year.” Lucy glanced at me, but I kept a poker face.

  “I can believe that.”

  I stood back and waited for her to clinch the sale.

  Tris can never really join us in the wider world, but having learned to peek out through the keyhole of their prison and take in the view incrementally, they’re no longer willing to spend their whole lives staring at the blank stone walls. The individual gimmicks come and go: the TV shows with points of view mimicking multispectral glasses, the plays where the actors have trained to emote with their capillaries for suitably equipped audiences, the advertising signs with
secret messages that seem more profound and persuasive after the five-second hunt across the rainbow that it takes to reveal them. And the need – among the sufficiently wealthy – to hang a picture on the wall that actually resembles the thing it portrays.

  When the customers had left with their painting, Lucy took off her shoes and sat down wearily on the gallery’s fashionably white bench. It was covered with her buttock-prints – and mine – but we varied the location to form a tasteful pattern.

  “I want to do some drawings,” Zelda demanded.

  Lucy sighed, feigning reluctance, but then she fetched a stack of paper and the bucket of pencils she kept out in the back. Zelda sat on the floor, carefully choosing among the six hundred hues on offer. She drew a garden of striped flowers, three stick figures with wildly mottled faces, and then above it all began meticulously shading in the bands of an eleven o’clock sky.

  THE NEAREST

  1

  Kate heard a knock on the open door of her office, and looked up to see Anneke from dispatch, grimacing apologetically.

  “I’ve got a shocker for you, Sarge. Sorry.”

  Kate said, “Go ahead.” She’d been back from maternity leave for two weeks; she did not need a content warning for every case that was grimmer than the scenes of cavorting bunnies on her son’s nursery wallpaper. And after spending the morning reviewing a spike in missing persons that was probably just a meaningless statistical blip, she was ready to do anything to get away from her desk.

  “Three deceased: a father and two daughters. Mother’s location unknown.”

  Murder-suicide, with the fourth body yet to be found? Kate’s heart sank, but she kept her face expressionless. “Gunshot wounds?”

  “No, all stabbings.” Anneke hesitated. “The girls were young: five and six. If you want, I’ll ask Roma Street if we can hand this over to Petrie.”

  Kate shook her head impatiently. “So do I get a DC, or am I on my own?”

  “No DC, but there are four uniforms at the scene you can use for the day.”

  Kate bit back a string of expletives; Anneke was just the messenger. Some half-baked algorithm had already decided that this was a self-contained domestic that posed no threat to the wider public, and would more or less solve itself. Until she could prove otherwise, there was no point begging for more resources.

  Anneke flicked the report from her notepad to Kate’s; Kate opened the document as she got to her feet and picked up her key fob.

  On her way to the car, she read the summary from the officers who’d attended the scene. The deceased were believed to be Robert Mellish, Angela Grimes, and Isabel Grimes; the missing woman was Natalie Grimes. Natalie’s mother, Diane, had tried to call her daughter the previous evening. When she still hadn’t been able to make contact by mid-morning, she’d gone to the house and let herself in, finding the deceased lying in their beds. There were no obvious signs of a break-in. The family’s station wagon was gone, but Natalie’s phone was on the bedside table.

  When Kate reached the house there were two squad cars and a SOCO van parked in the street, but their presence had attracted no onlookers; it seemed the neighbors here had the decency not to flock around the blue-and-white tape, gawking, while the ever-economizing clickbait sites were probably waiting for a chance to outsource their photographic needs to the next fast food delivery that overflew the crime scene.

  Kate spoke with the officers who’d made the report, and the two colleagues who’d joined them; they were from the small community policing station in the nearby shopping precinct. With no crowd for them to manage, she decided to send three of them door-knocking.

  Diane Grimes was sitting in one of the squad cars, drinking coffee that the shopfront cops must have brought for her. Kate introduced herself and joined her in the back of the car.

  “Who’d do this?” Diane asked. Her teeth were chattering. “And why would they take Natalie? She would have torn their eyes out before she let them touch the girls.” Her daughter’s house was modest, single-story brick. Diane looked about seventy, plainly dressed, with no jewelry. Kate was fairly sure that she hadn’t stumbled on a hitherto-unknown crime family, enmeshed in a bloody feud in the suburbs of Brisbane.

  “Did Natalie or Robert have any debts that you know of?” Kate asked.

  “Just the mortgage.”

  “They weren’t asking you for money lately?”

  “No. Why would they be?” Diane seemed annoyed at the sheer absurdity of the question; it made too little sense to be offensive.

  Kate found it hard to see how the couple could have racked up drug or gambling debts that merited a more severe punishment from even the most sadistic loan shark than a broken limb or two. And two teachers at a government high school would make unlikely targets for the kind of heist or abduction that could go so wrong that it left three bodies in its wake.

  “Robert was the girls’ father?”

  “Yes.” Diane scowled. “Natalie kept her own name when they married, and she gave it to the kids. Why shouldn’t she?”

  Kate shook her head, disavowing any opinion on the matter. “I just need to be clear what his relationship was. And as far as you know, was he ever violent toward her, or to the girls?”

  Diane said, “Even if I’m the world’s worst judge of character and he fooled me completely, she would never have put up with that.”

  “Okay. Were either of them depressed, or medicated for any reason?”

  “No.”

  Kate reached over and squeezed her arm. “There’s an alert out for the car. You don’t have to stay here; we’ll call you as soon as we have any news.”

  “I want to be here,” Diane insisted. “What if she comes home?”

  Kate spared her an opinion on how unlikely that was looking. “Is there someone we can call, to be with you? A friend, or a family member?”

  “My son’s at work.”

  “Can’t he take the afternoon off?”

  Diane said numbly, “I haven’t told him yet. How can I tell him?”

  Kate got the number from her and made the call. Patrick Grimes was an electrician, working on a building site in the city; it would take him forty minutes to get here.

  She left Diane with the constable, and knocked on the side door of the van. The SOCO, Tim Ng, let her in and she joined him in front of the console.

  “What’s the swarm got so far?” she asked.

  “No signs of forced entry,” he said. “There’s a window that’s been left open in the laundry, probably just to cool down the house overnight, but no footprints or scuff marks anywhere near it to suggest that it was used to gain access.”

  “What are you thinking for time of death?”

  “Breakdown profiles from the bloodstains all say yesterday morning, but we’ll really have to wait for the autopsies.”

  “Yeah. And the weapon?”

  Tim turned to the console and took the view of the interior into the kitchen, tracking in on a slotted wooden block holding a set of knives. The largest slot was empty. Then he pulled back and turned into a passageway that led to the three bedrooms. On the floor, outside the nearest bedroom, was a bloodied knife whose blade the overlaid dimensions showed as matching the slot.

  “Whose room is that?” Kate asked.

  “The older girl, Isabel, according to the grandmother. The next one is Angela’s, and the parents’ bedroom is at the end of the hall.” Tim steered the view down the passageway, into the master bedroom. The drones had imaged the whole house at a moderate resolution on their first pass, but even as Kate watched, the scene in the bedroom was growing visibly sharper as new data flowed in.

  Robert Mellish lay on his back on one side of the double bed. The top sheet had been drawn toward the foot of the bed, down to his knees. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, and his glasses were sitting on the bedside table. A single, deep stab wound pierced the middle of his chest; an anatomical overlay suggested that the blade had entered his heart.

  He had
no defense wounds on his hands. Kate supposed he might not even have been awake when he was killed.

  “There’s a blood trail that starts from here,” Tim said, aiming the viewpoint toward the floor on Robert’s side of the bed, then following a series of congealed droplets out of the room and down the passage. Kate steeled herself as they pursued the trail into Angela’s room. This time, the killer hadn’t pulled the sheet away; the knife had gone right through it, and through the girl’s nightdress too. Kate felt acid rising in her throat, more from anger than nausea.

  There was no more frenzy here than there had been with Robert: a single wound, positioned with care, had done the job. If not for the improvised weapon, it could almost have been a professional hit. A mother in the grip of psychotic depression was more likely to drown her children, or feed them sedatives – and then join them in the darkness herself. What kind of delusion would it take to make a woman kill the people she loved, and neither soften the act with some degree of faux-gentleness, nor explode in uncontrollable rage, but just dispatch them, methodically and efficiently, with whatever tools were to hand?

  “Go on,” she told Tim.

  The scene in Isabel’s room was almost the same, the modus operandi identical. A bloody handprint had been left on the doorframe; unwrapped by the software, its size was consistent with a woman of Natalie’s stature, which Tim had estimated at around one hundred and forty-five centimeters from wedding photographs on display in the living room. Still, a hypothetical intruder need not have been particularly large or strong, especially if they had an accomplice to help keep Natalie from intervening. If there was no apparent motive for malevolent strangers to do any of this, nor was there one for Natalie herself.

  “Any meds visible?” Kate asked.

  Tim shook his head. But the drones couldn’t weave their way into every closed drawer and childproof cabinet in the house. “We could go for the sewerage pipes and do a metabolite analysis,” he suggested.

  “That’s too slow.” Getting access to the family’s medical records would probably take even longer. Either Natalie was severely ill, and a danger to anyone she encountered, or she’d been abducted and was in danger herself; Kate needed to know which it was. “Can you plot me a route to check the likely places?” Once she set foot in the house, there was nothing she could do to avoid contaminating the scene to some degree, but if she did as she was told it would be easier for the system to subtract her out of the picture.