Grantville Gazette 38 gg-38

by Коллектив Авторов

  Big Brother isn’t watching, not really, but it is data mining-mostly stuff we’ve already put out there.

  See? Not even Orwell predicted that.

  I do read all the privacy articles, and I keep my location finder off. I don’t put personal information on the social networks such as the dates of an upcoming trip or when I’m away from home. I check my privacy settings often to make sure some change in one of the social networking sites that I use doesn’t suddenly turn on my location finder or something that I want off.

  And I dip back into the analog world a lot. My office-where I’m writing this right now-has no internet connection. It also lacks a telephone. There’s an iPod in here, but no iPhone. You can’t reach me when I’m working, unless you walk directly into my office and knock on the door.

  That’s not because I’m anti-technology, but because my superhero name would probably be Distracto-Girl. I could waste days tracking down a piece of information. For example, I just got a copy of one of my stories in Russian, and I would love to know what they changed the title to. But I don’t read the language. So I’d have to log onto the magazine’s website, copy the information, put it in a translator program, and see. And if I did that, then I might translate the whole story. Or the footnotes (yes it has footnotes-one of which explains what the Ohio Buckeyes are. I can tell that because “Ohio Buckeyes” happens to be in English).

  So Distracto-Girl keeps distractions to a minimum so that she can get things done. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like the sharing program. I have books in my library filled with other people’s yellow highlight marks, and I often stop when I see one, trying to figure out why someone would highlight that particular sentence.

  If I saw a sentence highlighted on my Kindle, I could ask the Kindle itself why the sentence got highlighted. I’m sure in that Grisham book, on that one sentence, there are 85 different reasons for the highlights. And I could spend an hour tracking them all down.

  Science fiction from the past assumed that we as a culture would always want the same level of privacy, that folks who told you unnecessary things like what they ate for breakfast bordered on rude. Reporters felt that the sexual affairs of politicians were none of our business. Now we see people’s business (and their junk) on various social networks (and regular networks) whether we want to or not.

  I know some of this is cultural. I also know it’s generational. I still believe there’s such a thing as sharing too much. I actually shut a guy down the other day with shouts of “TMI! TMI!” because I didn’t want to know half of what he was telling me. (I will never be able to scrub my brain of those images.)

  But the sharing isn’t always sexual or about bodily fluids. It’s often as mundane as a sentence, taken out of context from a book I haven’t read. I really don’t care that 85 people liked that sentence in that John Grisham book. All I care about is the story, and whether or not I get propelled from page to page, losing myself in a different world.

  The cacophony of voices appeared in Neuromancer, but they weren’t “liking” and “friending” and “sharing” things. Maybe the science fictional imagination is by definition a dark one. Or maybe that’s just the function of a good storyteller.

  Whatever it is, I don’t think any of us saw this level of minutiae inundating us like it has. Nor do I think we (the sf writers) saw the advent of data mining to cull out opinions, like a recent study did. The study, done using a key word data mine on Twitter, tried to see whether people in different cultures had the same moods at the same times of day.

  The study found that humans are generally happier when they wake up and when they find time to relax. Gosh. Data mining and Twitter told us that, because we overshare.

  Or maybe, because it’s just plain common sense.

  Well, I’m done sharing for the day. Now I’m toddling off to the couch in my analog office to read a pristine book just waiting for my underlines. Which I will share-with no one.

  For the Love of Sin

  Gary Cuba

  I rose, utterly befuddled, from my kneeling position beside the corpse. "This guy is completely free of sins, Henderson. I've never seen anything like it."

  The coroner arrived, and I backed off to let him do his thing. He didn't even acknowledge my presence. Most people considered me a freak and treated me like a pariah. That was difficult for me, but I'd learned to live with it.

  No doubt these guys had seen many crime scenes gorier than this one, but it was way too gruesome for my taste. The deader's throat had been slit open. Jeez, so much blood . . .

  Detective Henderson grunted from behind me. "That's mighty curious, Pete. This sleazeball-Manny Greer, street alias Manny The Snake-spent more of his life in jail, than out. How do you figure it? You losing your touch or something?"

  There was no way to figure it. No one was without sin. Everyone had the evidence of their prior misdeeds riding their bodies. Only a few sensitive people, those with special acuity like me, could spot those manifestations.

  And that was the way I made my living, as a police consultant: Pete Conklin, sin-seer par excellence.

  But here was the conundrum: the sins were always there. I could see them clearly, clinging and crawling like tiny glassine worms on everyone. On me, on Detective Henderson, on everybody, living or dead. We were all human beings, after all, and sin naturally went along with that condition. Some folks had more of them, some less-but they were always there.

  "No, Henderson, I haven't lost it," I said. "You want me to tell you about your latest sins? One of them is sitting on your left shoulder as we speak." I watched him shiver and start to raise his hand, then abruptly catch himself.

  "Don't do that to me, Pete. Just don't do it. I believe you."

  Isolating and extracting the sins of dead people could never, of course, provide names and places. Sins were mute. But sometimes, simply identifying and cataloguing them by their phenotype could lead to motives, and once in a rare while that would crack a crime like this one, when there was little else to go on.

  I stripped off my latex gloves and tucked them into a plastic bag inside the satchel containing the tools of my trade: collecting vials and chemical fixatives, a few customized extraction tools, and a thick field identification guidebook. "I can only conclude that he's been intentionally wiped clean. It might be that the killer didn't want us to know about one or more of the dead guy's sins. And that implies the perp had sin-sensing capabilities. Or that an accomplice did."

  "That's interesting, but it doesn't do us a whole lot of good," Henderson said. "It's not like we have a list of all you cootie-spotters back at the office." He frowned and added, "Unless, of course, you'd care to provide us with one."

  I looked Henderson in the eye and shook my head. "You know I won't do that. You also know better than to ask me."

  "Can't fault me for trying. I know you've got lots of contacts within that . . . whatcha call it, that marshal-filly crowd."

  "Hamartiaphily." I'd corrected him at least a dozen times before about the craft name, derived from the Greek, meaning "love of sin." "Yes, I personally know quite a few sin collectors out there. But I can vouch that none of them are murderers."

  Henderson only huffed in response. He knew the legal line as well as I did.

  "There's just one thing I don't understand," I said, waving an arm toward the corpse on the floor. "It would have taken a lot of time to do a full wipe. Especially if the victim was so heavily riddled with sins, as you claimed. Why go to all that effort, if only one target sin was the prey?"

  Henderson shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe the cootie-snatcher could see 'em, but wasn't experienced enough to type 'em. So he just grabbed 'em all, figuring that the target one was in the bunch. I dunno. Just guessing." He scratched his forehead. "And going along with that, I suppose he didn't want to take the easier route, which would have been to remove the body as it was and dispose of it where we couldn't find it. Too much risk of discovery in that. But sitting here in this dive, he had al
l the time in the world."

  "Makes as much sense as anything else," I said. "Look, Henderson, I have to get out of this place before I blow my breakfast all over your shoes. The stink of blood is really getting to me. Are you done with me?"

  Henderson tilted his head toward the door, and I wasted no time leaving the murder scene.

  ****

  I hate it when things don't add up right-and they certainly didn't in this case.

  Another scenario had entered my mind at the crime scene, one which I hadn't floated to Henderson. What if the murder had been committed by an overzealous sin collector, for no other reason than to glom onto a harvest of goodies that he could then sell to other hamartiaphiles on the open market? In other words, some sort of sick, psychopathic sin reaper?

  But that didn't ring right. The victim may have had a lot of resident sins, true-and they were all worth something. But not much. The sins you'd get off any typical two-bit hoodlum like Manny simply weren't that much in demand in this limited market. They wouldn't appeal to any discriminating collector. It wouldn't have been worth murder to obtain the small amount they'd bring.

  Now instead, if you were marketing a juicy sin of, say, Adolf Hitler, one with a good provenance? That could bring a tidy sum-on up into six figures. Sins of notorious historical characters were always in big demand. I'd recently seen an old Pol Pot mass murder sell at auction for close to a quarter million dollars. But it would be hard to conceive how anything gathered from a local thug would be worth much to anyone.

  I poured myself another glass of scotch and shook my head. No, the more likely explanation was the one Henderson was already running with. Still . . .

  When all else fails, I thought, read the manual. I walked to my bookshelves and fingered the thick edges of the ten-volume compendium published by the Hamartiaphily Collector's Guild. It held the definitive description of every known type of human sin that had been isolated and identified to date, close to fourteen thousand of them, catalogued in the Linnaean taxonomic scheme that governed the system: family, genus, species, subspecies. The volumes were printed on quality stock, with four-color glossy illustrations of the obverse and reverse sides of the best known collected examples. My eyes drifted to the even larger array of HCG supplements and updates that sat on the shelf below, many of the more recent ones as thick as the main volumes themselves.

  The study of human sin was complicated and ever evolving. Where to begin?

  I picked a volume off the shelf at random and flipped it open to a page showing HCG 14-54-13-230: family "murder," genus "familial," species "premeditated," subspecies "sanctioned." The illustrated example was a sin extracted from a Pakistani father who, with community approbation, had killed his unmarried daughter because of her promiscuous sexual behavior. It displayed as a brownish-mauve color, and because the collected example was quite "pure"-that is, the man had felt no sense of remorse after committing the sin-its shape was symmetrical and regular. Specifically, in this case it took the form of a stellated hexecontahedron.

  A very attractive specimen, to be sure. It would certainly complement any serious hamartiaphile's collection. But this was not going to get me anywhere. I closed the volume, re-shelved it and went online to check the hamartiaphily forum sites. Maybe something new had shown up there, something that might relate to last night's crime.

  It didn't take me long to turn up an interesting post.

  ****

  Every apprentice has a master, and mine was a rich old Dutch sin-seer and collector named Gerd Vanderhout. He'd taught me everything I knew about hamartiaphily, and had developed my youthful incipient talent for seeing what few others could see. I owed him everything.

  In truth, he was more a father figure to me than anything else-which was easy to understand, since I didn't even know who my real father was.

  I drove to Gerd's manor house, which was ensconced within a guarded residential enclave on the wealthy side of town. He appeared at his front door in response to my knock, a little bit stooped but still taller than me.

  "Peter! How nice to see you! But . . . it is not our normal chess day-is it? Or perhaps this old man's brain is getting addled. No matter: Welkom, come inside out of the rain."

  I entered the foyer, sat my soggy umbrella in the stand by the door and removed my raincoat. "Please excuse my unannounced visit, Gerd. No, it's not Tuesday. But I have a problem, one that I hope you can help me with."

  "Ah!" Vanderhout raised one bushy, gray eyebrow. "Another titillating crime mystery, yes? Here, come into the library and let us have a glass of schnapps to take the night's chill away. And you can also be the first to see my latest acquisition!"

  Gerd had one of the finest hamartiaphily collections in the country, comprised of a huge number of unique, one-of-a-kind items. Many of them had been selected for display in the HCG catalogs, being as they were the best prototypical examples. Some were the only known specimens of a sin subspecies. Gerd himself had been a founding member and had served as president of the Hamartiaphily Collector's Guild for a number of years, back in its early days. No one had better craft credentials than him.

  And no one knew more of what went on in the trade at any given time. I'd often consulted with Gerd on police cases. The man was a fount of knowledge, full of insider information.

  He poured a splash of liquor into two snifters at his bar. I took the one he offered and sat down in a comfortable wingback chair in front of the low wood fire burning in his fireplace. Gerd moved to one of his many mahogany display cabinets and retracted a vial, then handed it to me.

  "Is it not exquisite? I obtained it from a collector in Cairo, just the other day. There was quite the competition for it, but I prevailed."

  The sin took my breath away. I could sense the energy of its spectral radiation leaking through the leaded glass of the container.

  "'Exquisite' is an understatement. I've never seen its match for color-and such perfect symmetry! Family 'avarice,' if my eyes don't deceive me. Although the shape of the crenellations seems atypical for that class."

  Gerd beamed. "That's because it is a previously undiscovered species, Peter. The provenance is somewhat shaky, but the specimen's conformation speaks for itself. I think it will justify a brand new HCG category entry-if my instincts are correct."

  I handed the vial back to him and took a sip of liquor. After Gerd replaced the precious item on his shelf and sat down in the chair next to me, I briefed him about the case. Then I handed him a printout I'd made of a recent hamartiaphily forum post.

  "This looks like a new person on the scene. Have you any idea who he is? He's trying to hawk some low-level sins that you might get from a petty criminal like our victim."

  Gerd glanced at the sheet. "No, I do not recognize the user name. I presume he uses an overseas anonymizer service, like many in our trade do?"

  I nodded. "Yes, I tried to trace him, only to run into a dead-end IP routing address in Romania. It's going to be difficult to officially track him down and follow up. Particularly since I have to abide by Guild rules. Naturally, I'd never reveal the identity of a fellow sin-seer to others outside the craft. That's a given. Still, we are talking about murder here."

  "Which makes this a difficult situation for you. If, however, we are truly dealing with a renegade seer, we may be obliged to take matters into our own hands. What is the expression . . . 'clean up our own house'?"

  "But how do you propose to do that? I question the wisdom of going in that direction. If it's our man, he's clearly very dangerous."

  Gerd reached over and patted my arm. "Let me make some discreet inquiries, Peter. In the meantime, try not to fret. Everything will seem better in the morning, when the rain stops and the sun comes out." He smiled and stood up. "Would you fancy a game of chess? That will help take your mind off these . . . distasteful subjects."

  ****

  I left Vanderhout's residence late. The rain had stopped and a thick fog had drifted in to blanket the wet streets. As I drove ho
me, I noticed that I was being tailed. Probably Detective Henderson or one of his lackeys.

  This business was getting complicated.

  What was worse, I discovered that someone had entered my apartment and gone through my things while I was gone. It had been a subtle job, and I might not have even noticed it-except that I'm scrupulous about filing my data CDs. I noticed that a pair of them were out of order in my desk file drawer. Looking further, I found other small hints of intrusion.

  Henderson again, no doubt. I felt the heat rise behind my collar. The bastard! Who did he think he was dealing with?

  Fortunately, there was no way he could've found any sensitive information on other sin-seers, even if he had scraped my computer's hard drive clean. Those data were safely stored where no one could find them without tearing the place down to its foundation. Still, I felt irate. I'd confront the son of a bitch in the morning and demand that he back off on me.

  Or maybe not. It wouldn't be wise for me to cut off my nose to spite my face. The fact was, I benefited greatly from my relationship with the police. By my consulting agreement, ownership of any sins I extracted from murder victims for identification transferred to me. And Lord knows I enjoyed a small but very tasty supplement to my regular consulting income when I sold the best of the little buggers on the open hamartiaphily auction markets.

  I took a deep breath and calmed myself down. There was one good thing, at least: It didn't matter if Henderson knew about my relationship with Gerd Vanderhout. Gerd had never made any pretext of hiding his involvement in the craft. After all, it wasn't an illegal activity. He was above reproach. And, while he might be questioned in the matter, Gerd was under no legal obligation to cooperate. The courts had been clear on that.

  Clear in more ways than one, actually. Physical sins couldn't be admitted as evidence in any court of law. Who but a few could even see them? And how could a judge objectively believe a person's claims to be able to do so? Likewise, any descriptions, classifications or analyses relating to the sins, even by persons known to be "expert seers," were inadmissible. One might as well admit court testimony from a palm reader, or a clairvoyant. We in the craft were fairly well-insulated from the law, and that included freedom from search warrants and court injunctions related to hamartiaphilic affairs.