by Jim Keen
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No. We need to go.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, Xavi, all right? I don’t know anything.”
She grabbed his chair with panicked strength, pushed him to the street, and turned right. At first she was just moving, the need to flee overwhelming, then she recognized her location: Brooklyn’s Methodist Hospital. Farther down this street, she could get an unmarked taxi—traceable, but they didn’t have a lot of options. The road was steep, and within seconds, she labored for breath in the cold air. The shops on either side were closed, rusted metal shutters reflecting her footsteps in a mocking echo. At least the street lights were still on, their bright yellow glare throwing her surroundings into sharp relief.
Her back crawled with unease. What was it?
She looked around for a cab before she realized there was no one to be seen, not even the unemployed. She’d become so used to the shuffling crowds clogging doorways and side streets she only noticed them by their absence. The street was as devoid of life as an old film set. She remembered what Conner had told her, that whole neighborhoods were being emptied one at a time. Ahead, a feral cat ran across the road, a silhouette under the lights; it saw them and hissed, voice cutting through the silence.
“They’ve all gone,” she said. “Everyone.”
“Alice, get us out of here.” Xavi’s cough ricocheted from the hard walls.
Out of options, she called a cab. They needed to get somewhere warm and dry fast or they’d be back in hospital by morning—the thought filled her with a creeping claustrophobia. She looked up; the elites flew in the distant sky, ghosted blue-and-red dots. She crossed her arms and waited for a cab to drop from the lowest lane.
20
“This is a hell of a place,” Xavi said as he dragged himself onto the bed.
“If you want, you can take my place.” Alice lowered herself with a hiss into an old, lumpy chair facing the door.
“That’s a kind offer, but I’m good for now.” He rolled over, face a rictus of pain, and stared at the mottled ceiling. “Where are we?”
“The Alpha Hotel, Sunset Park. It’s not great, but I’ve stashed witnesses here before. The elevator is behind that wall, so you can hear if anyone comes up, and the window doesn’t face the bed, so we can cover both entrances from where we are. They also take cash, which is a miracle.”
“I’ve lived in worse.” His voice was low and tired, his head nodding. “Conner?”
“Spoke at the hospital; he’s hurt but alive. Offered me a job.”
“Take it?”
“No, done my stint in the gangs. I’m on the other side now, no way back.”
“Any regrets?”
“I was lucky I ended up in the Marines and not jail, but I see where the world is headed. If I had my time again, I’d join the biggest gang I could find, then make a play for the top spot.”
“So, you’d most likely be dead now.”
He was right. The average life expectancy for an NY gang member was nineteen.
“Yes, but there are things worse than death, Xavi, and being left behind is one of them. Besides, I’m not walking away from an unsolved case, especially when Charles Takamatsu is requesting a sit down.”
“Why does Takamatsu want to see you?” Xavi’s eyes closed as he spoke, leaving Alice annoyed that he wasn’t more impressed.
“Seems he isn’t too happy about the NYPD spreading rumors of unlicensed Betas. He wants to check me out, see what my ideas are.”
“Be careful around him.”
“Yeah, I know.”
She leaned back in the chair, its fake leather creaking. Her body throbbed with pain, her repairs itched, and waves of exhaustion crashed over her. Traffic noise drifted through the window, the low hum of up-phased Dyson engines not far above their room. Her nose itched, irritated by the dust that puffed from the chair. The smell of fast food leaked under the door, the oily odor delicious. She was starving, body desperate for nutrients, but was unable to move. The seat had its own gravity field that sucked her in.
Xavi grunted, a noise that shifted into a snore.
She studied him in the soft light. “And what about you, Xavi? What are your regrets?”
21
Alice woke from a sleep so dark it felt like death. “Hey, c’mon, wake up. It’s time,” her jacket said from the armrest. It was five o’clock already; she needed to hurry to make Cortex by six.
Her arm ached, and her chest hurt when she rubbed it, but otherwise was as rested and warm as she had been in months. She arched her body into a line, stretched, yawned and stood. The room was dark and silent. She turned to the window and opened the curtain; cold air pooled at her feet. The winter sky was a clear gray that faded to black, strung through with glittering clusters of early morning traffic. The hotel was the tallest building in the neighborhood, and she gazed down at the rows of old houses below, flat roofs covered with plastic furniture and dead vegetable gardens. Brick chimneys pushed gray smoke upward as crowds huddled around burning trash or shouted from survival tents cobwebbed between walls. Children ran back and forth fighting with sticks while their parents flapped their arms and stamped, trying to warm themselves.
Alice let the curtain fall back and turned to Xavi. He was still asleep on his back, propped up by a pillow, hands palm up on the sheets. She didn’t want to wake him—he needed rest—so she sat back in her chair and laced her boots. The final shreds of sleep faded as she grabbed her jacket and crossed to the door. She stopped and looked back, uncertain, then walked over to sit next to him.
The threadbare blue sheet and rose and fell with his breath; she lifted it from his chest and folded it to his waist. A constellation of bright red circular weals ran across his torso and arms. The surgeons had cored out tubes of his body from each bullet wound and replaced the damaged tissue with new plugs of artificial flesh. Each insert was tagged with a tiny barcode labeling the date, location, and type of injury. She knew without looking there would be similar marks across the patchwork of her new skin.
She ran her fingers over his inserts, feeling their warmth as they knitted themselves into his frame. His body was cool, the muscles tightly wound, and blood pulsed beneath her touch. The hospital stench of plastic and painkillers had been replaced with sweat and salt; he smelled human and alive, and she had to restrain herself from running her hand over his chest.
She’d glimpsed his tattoos in the hospital but had been panicked and distracted; now she studied them with more care—intricate swirls of snakes and dragons, the fractal patterns disappearing into themselves the closer she looked. Tattoos were a rite of passage in certain gangs, and she recognized their use as a tribal messaging system. Modern patches differed greatly from their ancestors; no longer skin deep, they extended into the body, tagged with isotopes to date their creation, and were impossible to remove. She imagined Xavi getting them, face unmoving as he drank tequila amidst an admiring crowd.
With silent care, she used her phone to run a photo-recognition scan of the markings, analyzing everything from background radiation to visible spectrum, but the results were confused and inconclusive. Some dated to his childhood, others were months old at most. Whether Xavi got them in the FBI or before, she couldn’t tell. Maybe he’d been a gang runner like her? But if so, why hadn’t he said?
Alice took a macro scan of one palm to collect Xavi’s fingerprints. She’d run a search on him in the federal database later. She put away her phone then looked up to see him watching her, black eyes unblinking in the low light. She startled, body twitching in surprise.
“See anything you like?” His voice was quiet and steady.
Alice instantly knew two things: one, she found this man extremely attractive, his proximity and vulnerability sparking desire she was having a hard time resisting; two, if he wanted to kill her, she’d have no chance.
“When did you get these?” she asked to cover her confusion. “My phone says some
carry isotope tags twenty years old.”
“Your point?”
“You had a disposable gun yesterday. Those are illegal—only mob hitters and government assassins get those. I’ve never seen one on the streets.”
“It came from a contact in LA. I did him a favor once, he paid me in equipment. There’s no chance of blowback to you. It won’t impact the case.”
Alice sat back on the bed, the foam mattress compressing under her. “I saved your life yesterday.”
He stared at her, eyes unwavering.
“The way you fought was professional, military, way beyond FBI training. To trust you, work with you, I need to know who you really are.”
She waited for him to react. She didn’t know what to expect; so far, he’d been true to his word, but now?
“You saved my life, so I’ll talk to you now, one time. Understood?”
She nodded.
“If this helps you trust me, good. If not, there’s nothing I can do.”
“Go ahead.”
“I grew up in Bogota, Colombia. My parents were good people, but we had no money once analytical engines took all the jobs. It got real hard. You know what that’s like.”
“I do.”
“I wanted to quit school, see if I could make some money on the streets, but my father made me stay. He said knowledge was worth it. Then the street gangs appeared from nowhere, and it got real hard.” He paused, voice fading as he sank into memories.
“What happened?” Alice said.
“He got black fever. A few years back, the hospitals would have cured him, but the gangs were in charge now and wouldn’t help. He was dying. I couldn’t stand it. They said they would cure him if I joined up, so I did. Then guess what?”
Alice stayed silent.
“They fixed him and he hated me for it, spat in my face. My mother said he’d rather have died than see me be a hitter. I loved him, but the door was closed. I left home to pay off the debt.”
“The tattoos?” Alice asked.
“You needed a patch to survive; they said who you were, where you belonged. I did some tests which showed a certain … aptitude to violence, so they trained me to be a button man. I was good at it. Got my own place, first time I ever had money. Then things got more desperate; the violence spiraled.”
Alice remembered the Colombian and Mexican gang wars, the bloodshed and destruction as their societies buckled under the weight of the unemployed.
“One day, my folks went to the cinema, and a car bomb took the whole street out. Had to ID them through cellular reconstruction. There were drone strikes every day, targeted molecular diseases, whole neighborhoods nerve gassed. The streets were filled with corpses, the government washed away. With my parents dead there was no reason to stay. I ended up in LA and took low-level work for B13, port security, that sort of stuff. I didn’t want to kill anymore. It was getting too easy. I’d started not to think about it, pop someone, then go get dinner, watch a movie. That scared me, how easy it was. Then one day, the FBI picked me up, made me an offer.”
“Turn witness for citizenship?”
“This was right after Six-Thirty when breaking up street gangs was a priority. They gave me FBI employment and citizenship if I worked undercover and helped bring down B13. We were a few weeks away from the big sweep when someone talked. I was in Vegas delivering a package of Dust. Got back to find everyone butchered. It was a military hit. I knew the signs—too organized, too clinical for some small-town beef. I went to the FBI; the local team had been hit at the same time. My partner, my friend, was dead. I read his field reports. They said a pattern had emerged, that one by one import gangs across the country were being taken out. I spoke to DC, asked for reassignment. That brought me to you.”
He studied her, faint light accentuating the lines on his weathered face. “Enough?”
What more did she want? It was just his word, but she believed him as far as it went. She had enough to follow up on at least. “For now.”
“How much do you trust your handler?”
“Toko?”
“Yes.”
“Completely.”
“With your life?”
She paused. If she couldn’t trust Toko, who could she? “Yes.”
“Is he good at his job?”
“Sure. What’s your point?”
Xavi ignored her. “You trust him to follow the handler protocol and encrypt all records of your undercover work?”
“Yes. He’s serious about data integrity.”
“He told no one about you, and the NYPD MI encrypted all records of your undercover work?”
“Yes.”
“So, how did they know about you?”
“We never found out; they closed the case before I was back in service. You think someone cracked the FBI and NYPD encryption feeds?”
“We did everything right. Raul, my partner, took every precaution. It had to be the MI that leaked. Once you start thinking that, this gets big, fast. To break a federally sealed MI, you’re looking at something bigger than a street gang, maybe military or nation state. We can’t trust the system anymore. No data traffic. We need to go old school, face to face or handwritten and delivered.”
“Agreed. We keep everything between you, me, and Toko for now.”
“I want to be clear about something.”
“What?”
“Raul treated me well, saw beyond the gang ink and arrest sheet. He was my brother. What they did to him and Mar—” His voice cracked. He stopped and looked down. “I’m not letting his killer enter the system to get a plea deal and witness protection. When I find them, I’m taking their head off.” He looked back up, black eyes bottomless pits.
“The warrant is for arrest and prosecution only. So, that’s what we have to do.”
“Why? To get your job back?” The way he said it made her feel small, that she was nothing compared to his grief.
“I’m a cop not an assassin. The law is the only thing holding this country together. We start breaking it for personal reasons, everything will fall apart.”
“I’m not debating this with you. You saved my life, so I’m giving you this warning one time only. Don’t get in my way.”
Alice remembered his weapon, a nasty object built for revenge. “Is that Raul’s shotgun?”
“We used to train together at the local range. He liked antiques. I made a few alterations. It has a job to do.”
Her jacket beeped an alarm; she had to go. “Break the law, and I will arrest you. I can’t be any clearer about that.”
“Then we have a problem.”
“Yes, we do.”
They stared at each other, neither breaking eye contact or backing down.
“Make your mind up, one way or the other,” he said at last.
“This isn’t finished between us, but I have to go. I don’t want to keep the most important man in the world waiting.”
She broke free from his dead stare and left the room.
22
Alice shivered on the street corner as the sun rose, its pale fire pushing through the clouds as she called in a Hopper. She thought about Xavi. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, let herself end up back on the streets, but she was no murderer either. This was an FBI investigation, so she had to work with him, but that didn’t mean she had to be complicit. She made up her mind—partner with him for now—but the moment they had a suspect, she’d tell Toko, make sure there was an arrest, not a body.
A faint hum grew as a battered NYPD Hopper settled in front of her, lights bright in the yellow pollution. She slid into its empty interior and put her phone in the drive slot.
“Cortex HQ,” she said, and the craft rose to the aerial lanes. Cortex, the company that ruined the world. What did she know about them? Alice opened a terminal and read the latest press releases, but there weren’t a lot of new details. Their founder, Charles Shin Takamatsu, was a genius to match Newton and Einstein. The only son of a Manhattan real-estate billionaire, he foun
ded his first synthetic intelligence company while studying at Cambridge University. Then, a few months later, he visited London’s science museum and saw Charles Babbage’s difference engine. The Victorian clockwork computer inspired him to develop the so-called Babbage circuits. Those first iterations were huge, brass cubes inches across, but he used his father’s fortune to shrink them to atomic scales. His true genius revealed itself when he designed their interconnects. The Cortex Pathway, as it was called, finally enabled his machines to cross the Turing threshold.
The designs for his general-purpose analytical machines—the first Mechanical Intelligences—had been revolutionary, the human soul replicated in brass. The sudden arrival of vast, incomprehensible intelligences alongside mass automation led to the inevitable public protests. The government outlawed and subsequently destroyed Cortex’s Generation One MIs. The second generation were abandoned, and the third had ethics protocols built directly into their circuitry.
Alice skimmed for details about Takamatsu, but found nothing of substance—the occasional interview from a few years back, some recent discussions of Takamatsu’s increased political involvement—but he had retreated from view following the construction of his headquarters. The final photograph was a year old, Takamatsu meeting the president. It seemed Cortex was providing technical advice for the new government upload centers, his company charged with automating the scanning and transmission process.
She looked through the armor-glass canopy as the Hopper crossed what used to be Central Park, the saturated colors of the plastic landscape false in the white winter light. She’d visited the park when Cortex reopened it a few years back and had hated the new version. On the surface, little had changed. The ponds were full of reprinted ducks that quacked and nibbled at food, while gray squirrels chased each other along fence tops. The new ownership was easy to spot though. Everything was too perfect. The lawns glowed with the false life of artificial grass; the trees glistened with the internal plasticizer that had mummified them where they stood. There were no benches, nowhere to sit. It was silent. No music, no conversations, just the odd chirp from the reprinted wildlife. The few people she’d seen were huddled together, eyes down, separated from their neighbors. It wasn’t a garden any longer; it was a historical sculpture park, frozen the moment Cortex purchased it.