State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  The woman’s wristwatch was large, and just barely on the fashionable side of clunky. It was meant to be seen, falling like a bangle from beneath the cuff of her suit sleeve. It was right at home on the arm of a high-end makeup artist. Rachel played with the resolution until the image squealed in blurry pixels, but she couldn’t quite get a clear impression of the winding crown.

  “We’ve sent the files to digital specialists at Quantico and the MPD,” Alimoren said. “I’ll put in a call and see if they can get us a good close-up on the watch.”

  Oh, did you now? Rachel thought to herself, and reached out to locate Jason Atran through the link. She pulled back once she found him, but he might not have noticed her even if she had pinged him directly: he was burning the midnight oil in his private lab at the MPD’s Consolidated Forensic Laboratory. She lurked in his computer system just long enough to see that he was working on the footage from the White House’s security cameras, and then drew her mind back into her body.

  Santino was watching her. She nodded at him; her partner rolled his eyes and took on an undertone of scornful orange.

  “Who’s on Forensics tonight? I’ve got something I want tested for batrachotoxin.” Alimoren spoke low and hard into his phone. Behind him, the archivist skulked away as quickly as she could, pushing the cart laden with white boxes before her.

  “If this is the murder weapon, why’d she ditch it?” Zockinski asked, taking his turn examining the pin in its baggie. “She had to know we’d find it.”

  Hill and Santino both grinned at him, a smug pink running through their conversational colors.

  “Knock it off. We could have found it without Peng,” Zockinski insisted. “We got along just fine before the freaking Agents showed up. No offense,” he added, nodding at Rachel.

  “None taken, asshole,” Rachel replied in a voice just above a whisper—they were still in the White House, after all. “Would you risk trying to stick your poison-covered weapon back into its holster? I’d chuck it as far as I could and run.”

  “Still.” Zockinski’s opinion wouldn’t be moved. “We would have vacuumed the scene.” He jumped as Hill elbowed him in his ribs. “We might have vacuumed,” he amended. “But if there was even a chance in a million we could have found the murder weapon, why did she leave it behind?”

  “Probably because it won’t help us find her,” Alimoren said as he rejoined them. His conversational colors were a bright yellow-white, with alternating threads of red, yellow, and blue hope moving through his excitement. “Our pathologists say that batrachotoxins are easy to make. All you need are the right frogs.”

  “Or beetles,” Santino added. “Probably be smarter to extract batrachotoxin from beetles, anyhow. Melyrid beetles would be easy to smuggle into the U.S. because they look like ordinary bugs, but it’s hard to miss a poison dart frog.”

  Alimoren blinked at Santino. “They… Forensics didn’t mention beetles.”

  “I can get them some literature on the topic,” Santino offered.

  “Can we head upstairs?” Alimoren asked Rachel. “I want to get this to Forensics as fast as possible.”

  “Yeah—yes,” Rachel said, as she cast her senses over the room once more. Nothing resonated on her scans, and that annoying too-smart voice which popped up whenever her subconscious wanted to nag her about something she had missed stayed silent. “We’re good.”

  The news of their discovery had spread. Hope was the most complex emotion Rachel had deciphered: hope wasn’t made of one color but many, each of them woven into each other for support. The primary colors that made up blue relief, yellow joy, and red passion were worn by each Secret Service agent, and they smiled and nodded their thanks to Alimoren and the small group from First MPD as they passed. Most hadn’t fully shed the grays and oranges, but these had subsided somewhat beneath vivid hope.

  Another flight of stairs and a long corridor, and Alimoren took them through a set of doors and into the East Room.

  Again, it was both smaller and grander than it had right to be. Rachel had never attended a formal function at the White House—she had only attended photo shoots in the Rose Garden and the Oval Office—and the East Room came as something as a surprise. It was beautiful, certainly, with its inlaid wood floors and crystal chandeliers, but it was beautiful in a way which refused to tolerate nonsense. It was a room used to hard but perfect use, like a truck stop where the bikers minded the carpets and china or else!

  The archivists had turned the East Room into a processing zone. The white boxes laid out in row after row were tidily organized, the archivists stacking their contents neatly on the clean linens beside them. The boxes and their contents had been grouped by size, with the larger items on the far side of the room, the smaller items closest to the main doors.

  “Smart,” Hill said.

  The rest of them agreed. It made sense to exclude items from the search based on size alone: the murderer hadn’t snuck into the White House with the goal of stealing a framed oil painting. Whatever she had stolen would be small enough to conceal on her person.

  A murmur went up from a group of archivists, their conversational colors flaring briefly with yellow-white excitement. A taller man broke away, carrying something carefully with both hands down one row of boxes and up another, before placing it on a folded tablecloth in front of an empty box.

  “What happened?” Rachel asked.

  “They found another misplaced item,” Alimoren said. “Right now, they’re eliminating what could have been stolen by making sure each item is in its proper place. After that, they’ll make a list of what’s still missing. That’ll be what we use to start tracking down possible buyers.”

  Alimoren excused himself, and left to deliver the possible murder weapon to the FBI’s Forensics team. The team from First MPD was left on the edge of the room, alone, but not unsupervised: the Secret Service agents stationed around the East Room gave Rachel the impression that she’d be shot if she tried to open any of the doors.

  “What do we do now?” she whispered to her partner.

  “We do what we do best,” Santino whispered back.

  “Wander around, try to look like we know what we’re doing, and hope we trip over something useful before they learn we’re frauds?”

  “Exactly,” he said, and moved off down a nearby row.

  Rachel headed south, towards the smallest boxes. This section held the most archivists; she assumed it was because more of the smaller items had been rearranged or gone missing. She turned down a row, keeping her scans steady. Her boss would never forgive her if she accidentally stomped a path through a century’s worth of accumulated history.

  Her scans roamed across the hoard. There were plates and cutlery of every possible description: apparently, foreign dignitaries had once feared America’s presidents lacked appropriate tableware. There was less jewelry than she had expected, and most of that came in the form of ornate broaches and pins. She saw an almost countless number of decorative containers, as well as carvings of animals, and, occasionally, containers carved from parts of animals.

  She wondered if she could track America’s rise to power through the quality of the gifts. There, resting near a handwritten sign noting that the items came from 1800 to 1830, was a well-worn religious icon with a decidedly Byzantine appearance, the gilt all but gone from the holy Crown. By the middle of that century, presidents were given gemstone-dotted statuettes from the Middle East, and small tapestries woven with rich colors and metallic threads. Another fifty years down the aisle, and the items became more precious still: small portraits, cameos in jade and ivory, and miniaturized depictions of nearly every walk of life, both foreign and domestic.

  And that didn’t even begin to cover the antiquities.

  Even when she still had her eyesight, art museums had never appealed to Rachel. Paintings bored her: a certain kind of person might appreciate the effort that went into placing the head of St. John the Baptist on its party platter, but she wasn’t that
person. She was drawn to the antiquities instead—relics of nations long gone to dust, living on through their statues, their curios, their assorted objets d’art—the older the better.

  Much of what was here was ancient.

  Cultural artifacts, she was sure, pieces of a country’s oldest memories given to help forge new ones. Gifts given to a young nation to help them remember the grandeur of the old.

  (And maybe, just maybe, that all empires crumble.)

  And these were just the castoffs! What did the archivists decide to keep, or display, or send out as examples of prizes won to museums and presidential libraries?

  She paused by a set of boxes placed just offside the last row. These were empty, the archivists moving between them and a couple of desktop computers that had been hastily set up on a folding banquet table. Rachel recognized the pale pink core of the archivist from the crime scene, and decided to see what would happen if she started pushing buttons.

  She sidled up behind the woman, and said, “You seem to be good at this.”

  The woman turned. Rachel ran a quick scan of her face; she was about Rachel’s own age, maybe a few years older, with glasses and tight brown eyes. She gasped and ran her gaze around the room, searching for help, and barbed-wire ribbons of yellow fear and red hate mixed within her conversational colors.

  “Agent Rachel Peng, OACET,” Rachel said, holding out her hand. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  The woman took Rachel’s hand with all the enthusiasm of someone handed a used plague mask. “Maddie Peguero,” she said. “No, I’m… I’ve got to finish—”

  “I’ll just take a few moments of your time.” Rachel was enjoying herself. Public opinion of the Agents had its ups and downs, but Peguero bore the hallmarks of a woman who had Made Up Her Mind about cyborgs, and nothing Rachel did or said would shake that. “Can you explain what you’re doing?”

  “Inventory,” Peguero stammered.

  “Well, yes,” Rachel said, smiling kindly. “What’s your methodology?”

  Peguero must have realized the Agent wasn’t about to go away. She pulled herself together, her colors wrapping tight around her body to protect her from Rachel. “Come with me,” she said, her voice flat. “It’s easier to show you.”

  Peguero took her over to the computers. “We did a full inventory in 2009,” she said, pointing to the larger monitor. Rachel plucked the image from it, and found a detailed history and description of a cut-glass wine decanter. High-resolution photos of the vessel sat in an attached file, waiting to be called up when needed. She browsed these, and saw the archivists had taken multiple shots from all angles.

  “Nice,” Rachel admitted. “You did this for every item here?”

  The archivist nodded. “And in the other storerooms. Took us the better part of a year. It was the first full inventory that’s been done on gifts of state.”

  “I bet you found things you didn’t know you had,” Rachel said.

  Peguero nearly smiled. “Absolutely.”

  Rachel waited, but Peguero wasn’t about to keep talking. “What’s missing?” Rachel asked. “Anything special?”

  “No…” Peguero hesitated before adding, “There are still about twenty items missing. We don’t think any of them were worth the effort.”

  “Why not?”

  Peguero shrugged. “Because we didn’t keep unique items in the storerooms. If it was of historical or academic interest, we’ve got it either on display or on loan.”

  “What about items of monetary value? I see a lot of gold and gemstones.”

  “There’s no need to break into the White House to acquire those.” The archivist’s colors took on the dull orange of scorn. “You can find gold and gems anywhere.”

  “What’s your personal opinion?” Rachel asked. Peguero glanced at Rachel, her colors weaving as she weighed her options, so Rachel added, “Off the record, I promise. I just want to hear what you think happened.”

  “Honestly?” Peguero glanced towards the rows of small white boxes. “I think a private collector needed something we had to complete a set.”

  Perfect, Rachel thought. Private collectors left muddy footprints through the art community. High-level art theft required deep pockets and aggressive purpose.

  “Do any of those twenty missing items belong to a set?”

  “All of them could.” Peguero’s orange scorn flared again. “When I say ‘set’, I’m not talking about a matching set of jewelry. Collectors might be after a certain artist’s work, or period pieces, or…anything,” the archivist finished. “Anything can be part of a set.”

  Ouch. Tracking down a collector for a random item was harder. Not impossible. Just much, much harder.

  A second muted shout went up from the archivists, as another misplaced item was discovered in the wrong box.

  “I’ve got to go,” Peguero said.

  “One more question,” Rachel said. “Do you have a list of items that are still missing?”

  “Yes,” Peguero replied. She shuffled a stack of papers around until she came up with an inventory. The list had some fifty-plus objects, but more than half of these had been crossed off by various shades of pen. “Ignore the ones that have been scratched out. We’ve found those. You can use the computer if you want to see what the missing ones look like. Do you know how to cross-reference a…” Peguero trailed off and her colors went pale, as she realized she had been about to give an Agent instructions on how to use a database.

  “I’ll figure it out,” Rachel said, and gave Peguero another merry smile.

  The archivist hurried away.

  Rachel dropped into a folding chair and swung herself around to face the monitors. She flipped through the inventory, comparing objects on the list to those in the database. At the prompt, she saw a dozen objects. Carved ivory. Gold upon wood. Bracelets of cloisonné irises running together in a chain…

  And one little lump of metal the size of the palm of her hand, worn down to blue and green and gray.

  One of these things, she thought, is not like the others.

  FOUR

  The timer released her, and Rachel climbed out of a strange, old dream of the sea.

  She awoke in the parking lot of the MPD’s Consolidated Forensics Laboratory, feeling as though she had grabbed a three-hour nap instead of a fifteen-minute catnap. She hadn’t wanted to—the induced sleep state lowered her defenses—but Santino had insisted that one of them needed to stay sharp until they got off the clock. If she had set the timer for an hour instead of those fifteen minutes, she would have felt as though she had gotten a full night’s sleep, but she would have been an unwakeable lump unless she received a ping or a good old-fashioned slap.

  The Consolidated Forensics Laboratory was a state-of-the-art facility, at least for a few more years. It had been commissioned to replace the chaos of individual forensics labs stationed at the major police precincts, and to keep the MPD from farming out data analysis and drug testing to the lowest bidders. The building had been designed for expansion: the MPD had learned the hard way that it was impossible to integrate new technologies into the legal process if there was no place to put them.

  They had not, however, expected to give up prime real estate so quickly to OACET.

  Jason Atran, fellow Agent from the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Technologies and on loan to the MPD, had staked out a private office on the third floor. The lights were on in his office, a band of gold against the slumbering blue glass of the rest of the building. His car wasn’t the only one in the lot, but it had little company: scientists in the public sector tended to keep bankers’ hours.

  Rachel badgered the security guy to let them in, and they shuffled their way towards the elevators. She was more tired than she had been before her forced nap. Even when spun from the depths of slow-wave non-REM sleep, fifteen minutes of sleep hadn’t been nearly enough. It would have been better to ride the false cleverness of a caffeine high, like Santino.

  The e
levator swept them up to the third floor. Around the second floor, her thoughts twitched, an awareness not of her making moved her mind as her implant gave her new information. “Phil’s here,” she said to Santino.

  Santino’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket to check the message. “So’s Bell.”

  He noticed Rachel’s expression. “It’s a proximity alert. You’ve got one in your head, I’ve got one in my phone. It lets me know when I’m within a hundred feet of a friend.”

  “That’s a thing?”

  “You haven’t heard of Grindr?”

  “Grind her? Not without asking!”

  His conversational colors glazed over as he steadied himself for an explanation, and then saw Rachel’s grin. “Please don’t fuck with me,” he sighed. “Not at three in the morning.”

  The elevator let them out, and then there were just a couple more steps to Jason’s office. Santino knocked, and the electronic lock popped open.

  “What?” Jason asked them through the crack. “I’m working.” He was polished in the way of a male model, every inch of him long and lean and haughty. His core was the deep wooly charcoal of expensive overcoats, and this was draped with conversational colors of irritated oranges, professional blues, and cold gray exhaustion.

  “Hello to you, too,” Rachel said, pushing the door into him. “We know you’re working. That’s why we’re here.”

  Beneath the windows on the far side of the room was a leather couch. A shock of wild blond hair was all that could be seen of Phil Netz. The rest of him was a snoring lump covered by a blanket; even his silver-light core was indistinct under the soft colors of his dreams. On top of that lump, a girl—woman, Rachel reprimanded herself, but she had a hard time applying that term to someone who was barely of legal drinking age—sat reading, her legs draped over the sleeping man. Her smooth gray core was surrounded by traces of silver-light and charcoal, and her conversational colors flared into bright, eager gold when she saw Rachel. The woman—Nope, can’t do it. Girl.—leapt off of the lump of sleeping Phil and ran into Rachel’s arms.