Текст книги "Lock in"

Автор книги: John Scalzi

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Chapter Eleven

I WAS ON THE corner of Pennsylvania and Sixth Avenue, walking away from the Eastern Market Metro, when I heard them in Seward Square: a bunch of young, probably drunk, and almost certainly stupid dudes braying at each other about something.

That in itself didn’t interest me. Stupid, drunk young men are a fixture of any urban setting, especially in the evening hours. What got my attention was the next voice I heard, which was a woman’s, and which didn’t sound particularly happy. The calculus for that many drunk young men and a single woman didn’t strike me as especially good. So I continued on Pennsylvania into Seward Square.

I caught up with the group where the little walkway cut across the grass from Pennsylvania and Fifth. There were four dudes who had taken it on themselves to surround someone, who I assumed was the woman in question. As I got closer, I saw that the woman was also a Haden.

That changed the dynamic of what was going on a bit. It also meant these guys were drunker or more stupid than I had previously guessed. Or some combination of the two.

The woman in the center of the dude pocket was trying to shoulder her way through the group. When she did, the four would move and re-form their pocket around her. It wasn’t entirely clear what they were planning to do but it was also clear that they weren’t interested in letting her get away.

The woman moved again and the four men moved again, and that was the first time I saw the aluminum bat one of them was carrying.

Well, that was no good.

So I walked up, making as much noise as threepily possible as I did so.

One of the men caught the movement and got the attention of the others. In a minute, all four of them were looking at me, the woman still in the center of their pocket. The one with the bat was bobbing it lightly in his hand.

“Hi there,” I said. “Softball practice get out late?”

“What you want to do is just keep walking,” one of them said to me. It was clear to me that this was meant to be threatening, but he was pretty drunk, so it just came out as the drunk version of threatening, which isn’t very threatening at all.

“What I want to do is check on your friend here,” I said, and pointed to the Haden in the middle of the group. “Are you okay?” I asked her.

“Not really,” she said.

“All right,” I said, and then looked at each of the men in turn, using the second I held each one’s gaze to scan their faces and send the scans to the FBI database for identification. “Here’s my idea, then. Why don’t you let her walk away, and then you all and I can talk about whatever it is you wanted to have a conversation with her about. It’ll be fun. I’ll even buy a round for you all.” Because what you need is another drink, I thought, but did not say. I was trying to make this all nice and pretend friendly. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to work, but it was worth it to make the attempt.

It didn’t work. “How about you fuck off, you fucking clank,” said another one of them. He was just as drunk as the first, so this was as ineffectively blustery as the first threat.

So I decided on a course of lateral motivation. “Terry Olson,” I said.

“What?” said the dude.

“Your name is Terry Olson,” I said, and then pointed to the next one. “Bernie Clay. Wayne Glover. And Daniel Lynch.” I pointed to the one holding the bat. “Although I’d bet twenty bucks that you go by Danny. And your last name is full of irony at the moment.”

“How do you know who we—” Olson began.

“Shut the fuck up, Terry,” said Lynch, thereby inadvertently confirming the identity of at least one of the four. These guys were geniuses, all right.

“He’s right, Terry,” I said. “You do have the right to remain silent. And you probably should. But to answer your question, I know who you are because I just did a facial scan of the four of you, and your information popped right up from the database I’m plugged into. It’s the FBI database. I’m plugged into that database because I’m an FBI agent. My name is Agent Chris Shane.”

“Bullshit,” Lynch said.

I ignored him. “I tried to be nice to you, but that’s not how you wanted to do this,” I said. “So why don’t we try it this way. While we’ve been standing here having our little conversation, I’ve already put in an alert to the Metro police. Their station house is just two blocks away, which is something I have to believe you didn’t know, because otherwise you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to try to bash someone here.

“So. You are going to let her”—I pointed to the woman—“come over and stand by me, and then you four are going to go home. Because if you’re still here when the cops show up, at least one of you is in trouble for underage drinking, Bernie, and at least one of you already has an assault charge on his sheet, Danny. The cops take a dim view of each.”

Three of the four looked at me uncertainly. The fourth, Lynch, I could tell was calculating his odds.

“I figure at least one of you is thinking he’s not going to get into that much trouble for taking a shot at a threep,” I said. “So this is where I remind you that D.C. law treats crimes against threeps the same as it does against human bodies. So all of you are going to be on the hook for assault. And, since it’s pretty clear to me you’re targeting this person because she’s a Haden, you’ve got a hate crime charge to go with it.

“So you just want to think about that,” I said. “While you’re thinking about that, I should mention that I’ve been recording this entire event from the minute I walked up, and that footage is already in the FBI’s servers. So far, all I have is four guys being drunk and stupid. Don’t let’s change that.”

Terry Olson and Bernie Clay stepped aside. The woman began walking toward me. As she cleared the men, Lynch let out a grunt and pulled back the bat to take a swing at her head.

Which is when I zapped him, because I had my service stunner behind my back the entire time and had him already zeroed in as the target. All I really had to do was fire when my interior reticle went red. I had him pegged as one of the “not quite clear on long-term consequences” types as soon as I had walked up, on account of there was only one idiot in attendance with a bat. He’d come out to dance. The others were just drunken wingmen.

Lynch stiffened and then fell to the ground, convulsing and vomiting. The other three men bolted. The woman knelt next to Lynch, checking him.

“What are you doing?” I asked, coming up to the two of them.

“I’m making sure he’s not aspirating his own vomit,” she said.

“What are you, a doctor?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah,” she said.

“Can you do that while I’m cuffing him?” I asked. She nodded. I cuffed him.

“Great,” I said, and stood back up. “Now I really do have to call the police.”

She looked up at me. “You hadn’t already?”

“I was pulling their data from the database and targeting this asshole,” I said. “I was a little bit busy. Why didn’t you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“They just seemed like harmless drunks,” she said. “They came up from behind me and I didn’t think about it until they started talking to me. And I didn’t realize they were a problem until this asshole started asking me how far I thought my head would fly if he took a bat to it.”

“Tell me you have that part recorded, at least.”

“I do,” she said. “And I told him that I did. He just laughed.”

“I don’t credit Mr. Lynch here with too many brains,” I said. “Either that or he figured that after he was done playing Babe Ruth with your head, there wouldn’t be a recording left. Now. Are you done examining him, Doctor?”

“I am,” she said. “He’ll live. And thank you, by the way.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. I held out a hand. “Chris Shane,” I said.

“I know who you are,” she said, taking it.

“I get that a lot,” I said.

The doctor shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. “I’m Tayla Givens. I’m your new housemate.”

*   *   *

Tayla and I had just finished up our statements to the arresting officers when I noticed someone walking up on us. It was Detective Trinh.

“Detective Trinh,” I said, to her. “This is unexpected.”

“Agent Shane,” she said. “You’ve had an exciting evening.”

“Just wrapping up,” I said.

“You planning to make a federal case out of this one, too?”

“Not really,” I said. “The Haden in this case lives in D.C. So this is going to be handled by Metro.”

“That’s probably wise,” Trinh said.

“Are you planning to be involved?” I asked. “We’re in the first police district right now. I was under the impression you worked out of the second.”

“I work out of the second,” Trinh said. “I live here. I was having a drink at Henry’s when the report came in over the radio. Thought I’d come over and see how you were doing.”

“I’m fine now,” I said.

“And maybe to have a chat with you.”

“All right,” I said.

“Privately,” Trinh said, nodding to Tayla.

I looked over to Tayla. “You want me to get them to take you home?”

“We’re less than a hundred yards from where we live,” Tayla said. “I think I can make it on my own.”

“All right,” I said.

“See you there soon,” she said, and headed home.

“You live with her?” Trinh asked, as Tayla walked off.

“New housemate,” I said. “This is actually the first time I’ve met her.”

“Interesting way to meet your new housemate,” Trinh said. “She’s lucky you were around. We’ve been having a spike of Haden bashings today.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“The walkout and the stunt with the trucks on the loop, but I’m sure you knew that,” Trinh said. “When you spend days making it difficult for other people to do their thing, they get pissy about it. And because so many of you are flooding into town for the march, there are lots of targets of opportunity, as it were. It’s open season on threeps. We had five attacks in the second district today.”

“And how do you feel about it?” I asked.

“I’ll be happy when the march is over and I can get back to busting college kids for peeing on the sidewalk.”

“Huh,” I said. “What can I help you with, Detective Trinh?”

“I was curious about what you think of your new partner,” Trinh said.

“We get along so far,” I said.

“You heard about her last partner.”

“What about her?”

“Did Vann tell you what happened with her?”

“I understand there was a mishap with a firearm,” I said.

“That’s one way of putting it,” Trinh said. “There are other interpretations.”

“Like what?”

“Like Vann’s partner decided putting a bullet in her gut was a better option than dealing with Vann anymore.”

“Seems drastic,” I said.

“Desperate times,” Trinh said. “Desperate measures.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” I said.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t,” Trinh said. “You also know Vann used to be an Integrator.”

“I’d heard that,” I said.

“Ever wonder why she quit?”

“I’ve known her for two days,” I said. “One of which I mostly spent in the mountain time zone. So we haven’t had time to exchange life stories.”

“Pretty sure she knows yours,” Trinh said.

“Everyone knows mine,” I said. “It’s not a big trick.”

“Let me catch you up on hers, then,” Trinh said. “She left because she couldn’t hack it. The government spent all that money making her an Integrator and she ended up being phobic about people using her body. You might want to get her to tell you about her last couple of integration sessions. The rumors about them are pretty dramatic.”

“I wouldn’t know about that either,” I said.

“It explains all the self-medicating,” Trinh said. “Unless you’ve missed the smoking and drinking and barhopping, looking for people to bang.”

“I’ve noticed it,” I said.

“She’s not hugely picky on that score.”

“Really,” I said. “Does that explain you, then?”

Trinh smiled at me. “I never fucked Vann, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m not entirely sure about her and her old partner, though. I don’t suppose it will be an issue with you.”

“Do you have a problem with Hadens, Trinh?” I asked. “Because you don’t just punt in a crack like that last one right out of the blue.”

“I don’t think you understood me,” Trinh said. “I think it’s a good thing she won’t have an opportunity to fuck with you that way. But I won’t be surprised if she finds another way to do it.”

“Right,” I said. “Look, Trinh. It’s late and I’ve had a really long day. So if you could get to the point of this little conversation, I’d appreciate it. I mean, aside from you taking a dump all over my new partner.”

“The point is that you should be thinking about your partner, Agent Shane,” Trinh said. “She’s smart but not as smart as she thinks she is. She’s good, but not as good as she thinks she is, either. She talks a good game about what other people should be doing but when it comes to her own shit, she gets sloppy. Maybe you’ve noticed that already and maybe you haven’t. But speaking as a voice of some experience on that matter, if you haven’t noticed it yet, it’s something you’ll notice soon.”

“So she’s a ticking time bomb ready to explode, and I don’t want to be anywhere near her when she goes off,” I said. “Straight from the cliché checklist. Got it.”

Trinh held her hands in a way that expressed bored equanimity. “Maybe I’m wrong, Shane,” she said. “Maybe I’m just an asshole who had a bad experience with her when I had to deal with her. And maybe the two of you will get along just fine and you won’t feel like putting a bullet into your gut, or whatever. In which case, great. I hope the two of you are happy together. But then, maybe I’m not wrong. In which case, watch your partner, Shane.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

“There’s some weird shit going on with Hadens,” Trinh said. “That thing at the Watergate. And I know you’re involved with whatever’s happening with Loudoun Pharma. If the two of you are working on something big, then the last thing you’re going to need is her falling apart. When she goes down you don’t want her to take you with her.”

“More clichés,” I said.

Trinh nodded. “It’s a cliché. Fine. On the other hand, you’re one of the most famous Hadens out there, aren’t you. Or used to be, anyway. Still famous enough that people called you a scab for showing up to work the other day. How will it look when you fuck up because of Vann, Shane? How will it look for your dad, the next senator from Virginia?”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

“Just a little something for you to think about,” Trinh said. “Take it however you want. Have a good night, Shane. Hopefully you don’t have to save anyone else before you get home.” She walked off.

*   *   *

There was a welcoming committee of threeps waiting for me when I got to the town house. They tossed confetti at me when I walked through the door.

“Whoa,” I said, fending off the tiny bits of paper.

“We wanted to make you feel at home on your first night,” Tony said.

“I don’t usually have confetti thrown at me when I come home,” I said.

“Maybe you should,” Tony said.

“Why do you have confetti anyway?” I asked.

“Left over from New Year’s,” he said. “Never mind that now. We also wanted to thank you for stepping in with Tayla’s little problem out there. She told us about it when she came home.”

“It’s not the usual way to meet your new housemate,” Tayla said.

“Let’s not make it a regular thing,” I said.

“I would be okay with that,” Tayla said.

“And these are your other new flatmates,” Tony said, pointing at the two remaining threeps. “That’s Sam over there—”

“Hey,” Sam said, raising a hand.

“Hello,” I said.

“—and this is the twins, Justin and Justine,” Tony said, pointing to the remaining threep. I was about to ask for clarification when a text popped into my field of vision, from Tony. Go with it, I’ll explain later, it said.

“Hello,” I said, to the twins’ threep.

“Hello,” at least one of the twins said back.

“Can we do anything for you to make you comfortable?” Tony asked. “I know you’ve had a fun-filled couple of days.”

“Actually, all I want to do right now is get some sleep,” I said. “I know that’s not very exciting, but it’s been a really long day.”

“Not a problem,” Tony said. “Your room is like you saw it the last time you were here. The desk chair has an induction pad in it. It should work for you until you get something better in there.”

“Perfect,” I said. “In that case, good night, everyone.”

“Wait,” said the twins, and then handed me a balloon. “We forgot to throw this at you when you came in.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking it.

“We blew it up ourselves,” the twins said.

I thought about the implications of that statement. “How?” I finally asked.

“Don’t ask,” they said.

Chapter Twelve

AND OF COURSE I couldn’t sleep. After three hours of trying I finally gave up and went to my cave.

For a Haden, personal space is a touchy subject. In the physical world there has always been a debate on how much space a Haden actually needs. Our bodies don’t move and most of them are in specialized medical cradles of greater or lesser complexity. A Haden needs space for their cradle and the medical equipment that attaches to it, and strictly speaking that’s all we need.

Likewise, for our threeps, space shouldn’t be an issue. Threeps are machines, and machines shouldn’t need personal space. A car doesn’t care how many other cars are in the garage. It just needs space to get in and get out. Put both of those together, and when people first started designing spaces for Hadens and their threeps, they were all like the efficiency apartments LaTasha Robinson showed me: small, clinical, no-nonsense.

Then people started noticing that Hadens had developed a spike of major depression, independent of the usual causes. The reason was obvious if anyone took any time to think about it. Haden bodies might be limited to their cradles, and threeps might be machines, but when a Haden was driving a threep, they were still a human being—and most human beings aren’t happy feeling like they live in a closet. Maybe Hadens don’t need as much physical space as naturally mobile people, but they still need some. Which is why those efficiency apartments were the Haden residence of last resort.

In the nonphysical world (not the virtual world, because for a Haden the nonphysical world is as real as the physical one) there is the Agora, the great global meeting place of the Hadens. Dodgers—the people who aren’t Hadens—tend to think of it as something like a three-dimensional social network, a massively multiplayer online game in which there are no quests, other than simply standing around, talking to each other. One reason they think this is because the public areas open to Dodgers (and yes, we call them Dodger Stadiums) work very much like that.

Explaining how the Agora works to someone who is not a Haden is like explaining the color green to someone who is colorblind. They get a sense of it, but have no way to appreciate the richness and complexity of it because their brains literally don’t work that way. There’s no way to describe our great meeting places, our debates and games, or how we are intimate with each other, sexually or otherwise, that doesn’t sound strange or even off-putting. It’s the ultimate in “you have to be there.”

For all of that, in the Agora proper, there is no substantial sense of privacy. You can close off the Agora for periods of time, or temporarily create structures and rooms for exclusivity—people are still people, with their cliques and groups. But the Agora by design was built to create a community for people who were always and inevitably isolated in their heads. It was built open on purpose, and in the two decades since its creation it had evolved into something with no direct analogue to the physical world. It’s an openness that leaks into how Hadens deal with each other in the physical world as well. They leave their IDs visible, have common channels, and swap information in a way that would strike Dodgers as promiscuous and possibly insane.

Not all Hadens, mind you. Hadens who were older when they contracted the disease were tied more deeply into the physical world, where they had already spent almost all of their lives. So after contracting the disease, they lived mostly in their threeps and used the Agora—to the extent they used it at all—as a glorified e-mail system.

The flip side of this were the Hadens who contracted the disease young and were less attached to the physical world, preferring the Agora and its system of living to forcing their consciousness into a threep and clanking through the physical world. Most Hadens existed between the two spaces, both in the Agora and in the physical world, depending on circumstance.

But at the end of the day, neither the physical world nor the Agora could provide what most Hadens really needed: a place where they could be alone. Not isolated—not the lock in that Haden’s syndrome forced on them—but by themselves, in a place of their own choosing, to relax and to think calmly. A liminal space between worlds, for themselves and the select few that they chose to let in.

What that liminal space is depends on who you are, and also the computing infrastructure you have to support it. It can be as simple as a house from a template, stored on a shared server—free “tract housing” supported by ads that presented themselves in picture frames, which computationally collapsed once the Haden went out the door—to immense, persistent worlds that grew and evolved while the very rich Hadens who were the worlds’ owners resided in floating palaces that hovered over their creations.

My liminal space was something in between those two. It was a cave, large and dark, with a ceiling from which glow worms hung, imitating a nighttime sky. It was, in fact, a re-creation of the Waitomo Caves in New Zealand, if the caves were about ten times larger and had no traces of being a tourist attraction.

In this cave, cantilevered out over a dark, rushing subterranean river, was a platform on which I would stand, or sit in the single, simple chair I put there.

I almost never let people into my cave. One of the few times I did was when I was dating another Haden in college, who looked around, exclaimed, “It’s the Batcave!” and started to laugh. The relationship, already a bit rocky, blew up not long after that.

These days I think the comment was more on point than I would like to admit. Up to that point I had spent a lot of my time being a public person whose movements were followed no matter where I was. My own space was dark and silent, a place where I could be an alter ego—one who could methodically hack away at homework, or muse on whatever notions of mine were posing as deep thoughts at the time.

Or in this particular case, attempt to fight crime.

Over the last two days, too much had been happening to allow me to spin out all the connections among events, to process the data and maybe get something useful out of it. Now was the time. I was up and awake anyway.

I started pulling images out of memory and throwing them up into the darkness. First, the image of Johnny Sani, dead on the carpet of the Watergate Hotel. This image was followed by the image of Nicholas Bell, hands up, on the hotel room bed. Samuel Schwartz and Lucas Hubbard followed, represented here not by threeps or Integrators but by file photos of their approved media icons—images based on their physical body’s facial features but altered in such a way to give them the appearance of mobility and vitality. The icons were artificial, but I couldn’t fault them for it. They weren’t the only Hadens with approved media icons. I had one. Or used to, in any event.

Next up, Karl Baer, from an image taken from his Loudoun Pharma ID, and Jay Kearney, from his Integrator license. I paused for a moment to access the Integrator database, to find the woman Schwartz had integrated with the night before.

Her name was Brenda Rees. Up went her image.

After a moment of consideration, up went images of Jim Buchold and my father, the latter mostly for my own internal sense of navigation. Finally I put up a placeholder image for Cassandra Bell, who had no approved media icon.

Now to add connections. Sani connected to Nicholas Bell. Nicholas Bell to Hubbard, Schwartz, and his sister, Cassandra. Hubbard to Schwartz and to my father. Schwartz connected to Hubbard, my father, Brenda Rees, and Jay Kearney. Kearney to Schwartz and Baer. Baer to Kearney and Buchold. Buchold back to Dad. It was a cozy little sewing circle.

Background now. Off of Sani I placed his last money order to his grandmother, paused for a moment to access the FBI server to make a request to search the serial and routing numbers to get its location of origin. That done, I popped up the Window Rock Computing Facility, and drew a line off of it for Medichord, and connected that back to Lucas Hubbard.

From Buchold I connected a line to Loudoun Pharma. I did a search on the news stories of the day about the bombing. Baer’s confessional video had been first leaked and then officially released, so intense speculation was now falling on Cassandra Bell for being either explicitly or implicitly connected to the bombing. I put a line from her to Loudoun Pharma.

Off of Cassandra Bell I ran a search of stories on the Haden work stoppage and the upcoming march on the Mall. Trinh hadn’t been lying—in the last day there were twenty attacks on Hadens in Washington, D.C., alone. Most of those came in the form of attacks on threeps. There were some bashings like the one I had broken up, but also a couple where people took manual control of their cars and ran them into threeps. One person pushed a threep into the path of a bus, damaging both the threep and the bus.

I wondered what the thinking was there. “Killing” a threep didn’t do anything but wreck the hardware, which was replaceable, while the person attacking the threep was still on the hook for physically assaulting a person. Then I recalled Danny Lynch to memory and remembered that logical thinking was not the strong suit in many of these encounters.

In at least a couple of these attacks, it was the Haden who ended up on the winning side of the encounter, which had its own set of problems. Videos of android-like machines thumping on human bodies called up something atavistic in the dumber, usually male, usually young, quarters of humankind. I didn’t envy the Metro police the next several days.

A ping from the FBI server. The money order had come from the post office in Duarte, California. I popped up an encyclopedia article on the city and learned that its civic motto was “City of Health,” which seemed pretty random until I saw that it was the home of the City of Hope National Medical Center. The City of Hope helped develop synthetic insulin, and was deemed a “Comprehensive Cancer Center” by the National Cancer Institute. Also, and more relevant for my purposes, it was one of the top five medical institutions in the country for Haden’s syndrome research and treatment.

If Johnny Sani was going to get a neural network installed, that would have been a good place for it.

But then, if he had gotten a neural network installed there, he would have popped up in our databases.

I went back to Cassandra Bell and opened up a search on her, plucking out an encyclopedia biography and recent news articles not attached to Loudoun Pharma.

Cassandra Bell was one of the very few Hadens who had never not been locked in. Her mother contracted Haden’s while she was pregnant with Cassandra and passed it on to her in the womb.

Normally that would have been fatal. In the large majority of cases where a pregnant woman contracted Haden’s, the virus slipped past the placental barrier like it wasn’t there and ravaged the unborn child.

Only about 5 percent of the unborn who contracted Haden’s survived to birth. Almost all of them were locked in. Half of those who survived childbirth died before the first year, due to the virus suppressing the infant’s immunological system, or other complications brought on by the disease. Nearly all those who survived after that experienced severe issues brought on by the damage the virus did to the early brain development of the child, and by the isolation Haden’s created, stunting their early emotional and social development.

That Cassandra Bell was alive, intelligent, and sane qualified her as some sort of minor miracle.

But to call her “normal” might have been stretching. She had been raised almost entirely inside the Agora, first by her mother, who ended up being locked in. When she died from unrelated factors when Cassandra was ten, the girl’s upbringing was shepherded by Haden foster parents and her older brother, Nicholas, who had been infected at the same time as his mother and who developed his Integrator abilities then.

In her way, Cassandra was as famous as I had been, another public curiosity among the Hadens. Far from being intellectually stunted, Cassandra showed remarkable mental acuity, passing a high school equivalency test at age ten and then rejecting admission to MIT and CalTech because they would have required her to use a threep, which she refused to do.

Instead she became an activist for Haden separatism, arguing that Hadens should let go of the limitations of the physical world, imposed on them by use of threeps, and embrace and extend the metaphor of living that the Agora afforded. She didn’t suggest Hadens not interact with Dodgers—just interact with them on their own terms, rather than on the Dodgers’.

One’s receptiveness to Cassandra Bell’s arguments correlated significantly to how much time one spent in the physical world versus the Agora. But the number of Hadens willing to listen to her had increased significantly once Abrams-Kettering picked up traction and was then signed into law. It was she who suggested and instigated the walkout. It was also rumored that she was finally going to breach the physical world to speak at the march on the Mall this upcoming weekend.

Basically, at the tender age of twenty, Cassandra Bell was compared to Gandhi and Martin Luther King by her admirers, and to various terrorists and cult leaders by her detractors.

Baer’s and Kearney’s actions at Loudoun Pharma would not be helping her image at the moment, and people were already beginning to thump on Hadens, including her, for the walkout. I scrolled through her recent comments and proclamations to see what she had to say about the bombing.