Headspace

by Damien Boyes

  I scan the small apartment while I wait, searching for something, but not sure exactly what. There’s something gnawing at me, weighing on me like the elementary spectre of unfinished homework.

  I haven’t been cleaning up after myself. Mom would be shocked to see the state of my apartment. Dishes in the sink, laundry piled on the floor. I still haven’t bothered to find the bed. But that’s not what’s troubling me.

  The mysterious message still has me spooked. It isn’t that either.

  My acute grief has curdled to an angry sadness that’s become constant presence in my head, but it’s not that. No, this feels more remote, something pressing on me from outside.

  And then I realise: I’m not looking for something, it’s an absence of something.

  I have nothing to do.

  For the first time in a long time, there’s no one who needs me. No to-do’s waiting to be crossed off a list.

  I’ve already scanned and rescanned and cross-referenced SecNet for information on Woodrow Quirk, the owner of the van that killed us. He was found dead in the van’s empty parking spot, presumably murdered by the same man who stole the vehicle and crashed into my life with it.

  Just like Karin Yellowbird said when she came to recertify me for Service duty—there’s nothing. Not a witness or inconsistency or single knotted lead to worry. Just dead air where the records should be. The investigation is cold and getting colder.

  Maybe that anonymous message has something to do with it all, but who knows.

  I’m at a loss.

  I’ll likely never know who it was behind the wheel of that TACvan. Connie’s death will end up unsolved like the other sixty percent of crimes the Service sees. Another statistic.

  Weeks and then months will pass, and like any other victim of an unresolved violent crime, I’ll learn to live with the nagging uncertainty. Let the drone of day-to-day living numb me to not knowing…

  I can’t let that happen.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I notice movement on the counter—the six shyfts I’d gathered up in the Market cycling through their animated displays. Xiao’s hanzi, the brush-stroked red Chinese letters spelling out his name, glow on the non-contact end of the cylinders. They’ll need to go back to evidence. I forgot I picked them up.

  I collect the cylinders, walk to the small sofa and sit. Three are filled with a liquid rainbow that moves like mercury. I set them down on their silver contact ports, hanzi-up. Two more contain a glowing green wisp, bouncing around as if trapped inside and searching endlessly for a way out. I set them down in line next to the other three. The last contains a grey-white mist pulsing with a rhythmic blue light charged with electricity.

  I recognize this one. It’s a Revv.

  Detective Galvan Wiser, my whiz-kid of a new partner, identified it in the Forensics Lab earlier this afternoon. This was after we’d used the new app he’d written to identify cyphers—unknown minds in illegal bodies—and intercepted a massive shipment of shyfts. All this and just his first day in the field.

  Had it really been only a few hours ago? It seems like days.

  I bring the cylinder closer, shake it and watch the captive mist swirl in response. It’s mystifying, possessing depth and fullness, and I conjure faces and images from the shadows.

  If I was wearing a cuff, I could take this vial of blue mist, press its silver cap against the contact port and empty the contents into my head. The code it contains would infiltrate my psychorithm—the computational representation of everything I am, everything I think and feel—and crank up my thought rate. Slow the world down around me.

  What would it be like to think twice as fast as I do now?

  Would I have been able to out-manoeuvre the cypher today? Prevent that dangerously enhanced skyn from escaping? Who knows where it is, what it’s doing, who it’s hurting. It’d be in custody now. We’d know where these shyfts originated, be closer than absolutely nowhere to finding Xiao, the cypher’s boss. To cracking open his burgeoning criminal empire.

  Maybe, if I’d been faster, I’d have avoided that TACvan in the first place. Connie would still be alive, instead of a ghost in my head and an ache in my heart.

  I close my eyes and Connie’s face is there, smiling, then screaming as she blurs into the face of the man driving the van.

  The driver’s face.

  My eyes snap open. The blue mist roils.

  Is there some other shyft that would get me a better view of the driver’s face trapped in my head? If I could get his image out I could plug it into SecNet. Track him down.

  Could I do it? Could I shyft? Muck about with my mind?

  The idea had always disgusted me. Terrified me. To treat my brain like an out-dated bot and upload new firmware.

  But for Connie…

  What wouldn’t I do for her?

  I stand, leaving the shyfts where they are, walk into the kitchen, pull back the lid on my dinner and swallow spoonfuls of scalding soup until the can is empty and skin hangs in tatters from the roof of my mouth.

  ***

  SysDate

  [05:32:11. Saturday April 13, 2058]

  Exactly six hours after I lay down and close my eyes, I’m awake. If I dreamed I don’t remember.

  It’s been the same thing the past two mornings. Six hours of ‘sleep’ and then I’m up. There’s no in-between grogginess. No transition period. No fumbling around in a stupor until I get a cup of coffee into my system. I don’t think I could sleep-in if I wanted to.

  Another one of life’s simple pleasures made obsolete by the march of progress.

  I shower, dress and exit the apartment into a chilly morning so early it still feels like night, deserted but for the very dedicated dog-walkers and city utilibots collecting trash. I walk the bridge over the river and arrive at work half an hour early.

  Galvan’s already here—he might not have left.

  He’s wearing different clothes so I assume he went home at some point, but based on the bags under his eyes, he wasn’t gone long. He’s at a desk on the main floor, three additional displays propped up around him. He sees me come in and waves me over, starts talking before I get there.

  “—been running traces all night,” he says, the words tumbling out of his mouth. He’s probably coasting on stims. Won’t drink coffee but pharma’s fine. “Digging up the Market cypher’s bio/kin traces, cross-referencing with any other hits I’ve recorded. Turns out I passed within thirty meters of our suspect a week ago when I was testing the app and nothing triggered.” He runs his hands over his face and takes a swig from a cup on his desk. “I can’t figure out why only your instance of the sweep detected her. I’ve analysed the code-bases—they’re identical. It doesn’t make sense.” He looks at me like I’ll have the answer. I shrug and he continues with a sigh. “Anyway, anyway—I’ve expanded the search parameters to include the bio/kin from the cypher. We’ll see what it comes back with.”

  “What about the shyfts?”

  “Oh yeah. I sorted them out fairly easily.” He shuffles through the displays on his desk, picks one up and scans through a list. “They all violate Standards—on top of the cypher, the Ministry is going to want to hear about this. Did you ever fill out that report for them?” I shake my head. I was just getting started last night when that threat came.

  I will find you, flutters through my head and I suppress a shiver. “Set aside about a half day,” Galvan says and smiles. “Their forms are more detailed than the Service entrance psych exam.”

  Great, more busywork.

  “Anyway,” Galvan continues. “I was right about the Revv—it’s new, has to be the four-point-oh release. The reference pattern is 23% different from Revv3, and the design skin has been tweaked. But that bag contained more than just Revv. It was a buffet of pre-release shyfts. There’s one that ramps up confidence and likely extroversion at the same time. A Bliss bootleg that amplifies the intensity and duration of the commercial version. One that negates all pain sensation entirely and anot
her that dulls empathy and remorse—together those two would be a nightmare. There’s a street version of the a memory scanning and playback app like the techs downstairs use—” as he says that my ears begin to ring, drowning out the sound of his voice. A memory playback shyft?

  “The memory one,” I say, cutting him off. “How’s it work?”

  He blinks at the interruption but answers. “It’s is a version similar to one we use in-house. When an investigation uncovers a damaged or hardlocked Cortex, the techs use it to index through any stored memories that might be relevant to the case. Then another app pulls them out and renders it to show in front of a jury, like any other feed.”

  “And from a functioning Cortex?”

  He shrugs. “Human Standards make captured memories from an active psychorithm inadmissible.” So if I put my service weapon to my head and pulled the trigger, Galvan would be able to enter my memories and get the evidence I need, but if I do it myself while I’m still ‘alive,’ anything I find is useless in court.

  My stomach falls. Even the system doesn’t want me to succeed.

  “Seems like an arbitrary rule,” I say.

  “It just keeps us all on a level playing field.”

  No, it puts me at a disadvantage.

  “What’s it look like?” I ask.

  He tilts his head at me but taps his display a couple times and flips it around to show me an image of a cylinder containing a rotating series of POV scenes: marshmallows browning over a campfire; a stroll through a misty, moon-lit forest; a heavily-iced chocolate cake with a single glowing candle. They change in quick succession, lingering on each for a moment before fading.

  My throat tightens. Galvan’’ lips are moving but I can’t hear him.

  There it is. That’s what I need to get the driver’s face from my head.

  “Fin? You okay? Should I continue?” he asks. I snap out of it, hand him the display.

  “It have a name?”

  “Dwell,” he says and the word bounces around in my head. “Are you sure you’re okay? You’re all pale.”

  He’s stopped pawing at his screens and he’s looking at me. Puzzled.

  I’m being weird. I have to keep it together.

  “Yeah,” I say, and laugh at myself. Like I’m embarrassed. “I just had a little—it might have been another nerve surge.”

  “Ohh, boy,” he laughs. “You’ve been getting those? Do you need some time alone?”

  “Funny,” I say, but I think it he bought it. I don’t think he suspects anything. Not that there’s anything to suspect, I haven’t even done anything. Just the thought of shyfting is enough to spike me with paranoia. How could I ever possibly work up the nerve to use one? “ I’m gonna get a coffee, you want something?”

  He looks wrung out, and I need a minute to think. Downstairs there are hundreds of doses of Dwell. With just one I could slow down those last moments with Connie. Luxuriate in them.

  Or gaze into the eyes of her killer.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” he says.

  “How about something to eat? A printwich?”

  The shyfts would already be checked into evidence. Even if I could get near them someone would eventually notice, set off an internal investigation—

  What am I thinking? Yesterday I was dead set on never wearing a cuff, and now I’m contemplating breaking into the evidence locker to steal code that could very well scramble my brain.

  “Yeah, sure, thanks. Nothing with pickles though,” Galvan says. “The lunch gun can’t make pickles worth a damn.”

  I nod and head to the break room to print a couple pickle-less breakfast sandwiches and consider, now that I know it’s out there, just how long I’m going to be able to resist lacing my head with unlicensed code.

  ***

  SysDate

  [07:00:11. Saturday, April 13, 2058]

  At the morning rundown, Galvan does sixty seconds on the cypher and the shyfts we recovered, and he mentions Forensics managed to recover a single genetic specimen from the otherwise DNA-slippery bag. They’re running traces on it now, but it’s definitely artificial, comprised of a number of off-the-shelf geneblocks mixed with some way-Past-Standard custom sequences.

  The Inspector announces that Galvan’s cypher sweep app is to be run by all duty officers and will be monitored by the AMP as part of the always-on tools in the Service vehicles. If Galvan’s right, with the sweep collecting that much information, we should soon be overwhelmed with cyphers very soon.

  After rundown we head out again, Galvan driving, while Daar and Brewer, the two Psychorithm Detectives assigned to shutting Xiao and his operation down, are out fucking up our leads. We check up on a tip about a small mod shop pushing shyfts but it’s long abandoned by the time we get there and we spend the rest of the day finishing up reports while cruising around the city trawling various Reszo hot-spots for cyphers without finding a single one.

  Another productive day in Reszo Squad.

  I thought being back at work would be a good distraction. Even chasing after shyft-slinging low-reps in the Psychorithm Crime Unit instead of murderers in Homicide, I thought it would be something to keep my mind occupied. Keep me from obsessing about Connie. After yesterday, after we nabbed two cyphers and pulled a load of shyfts off the streets, I thought it might even work.

  I should have known better.

  Yesterday I got lucky. Police work is as much about empty leads and mindless documenting and sitting around waiting for something to happen as it is about taking down bad guys. More even.

  It’s not enough. I’m going to need something stronger to quell my anguished mind.

  After my shift, I take a detour to the Second Skyn store downtown and purchase a cuff. A clerk in spekz and a shiny tie tries to upsell me on the model, pushing the added processing, storage and fancy inputs, but I stick to basics: a translucent concave rectangle not much bigger than a cash card with rounded-off corners, built-in link connectivity and a single contact port.

  I don’t need anything fancy. This isn’t for show. This is purely functional. A means to an end.

  The clerk throws in a variety pack of shyfts: six Alcosofts, an Uplift, a Synesthetic, a Heads-Up, a Climaxxx, a Bliss, a few others. Simple stuff. Nothing like we found on the cypher in the Market.

  I consider refusing, telling him I’ll never use them, that I’m only buying the cuff for one shyft in particular—a shyft that’s currently secure in an evidence locker and will allow me to dig through my memories and examine the face of the man who killed me, but keep my mouth shut and let him slip the freebie shyfts into the bag.

  Back at the apartment, I free the cuff from the box and sit it on the table next to the four shyfts I’ve yet to book into evidence. I log as Gibson and search the link for information on Dwell and ReCog.

  Turns out a ReCog would work better, let me pull the memory right out of my head and feed it directly to the Service facial imager, but a Dwell might get close enough. I’ll have to manually recreate the driver’s face from the image in my head, but it’s workable.

  The tricky part’s going to be finding one.

  I pick up the cuff. It’s almost weightless in my palm. I peel off the protective coating and press it against the base of my skull and it sticks, the sub-dermal anchor points holding it in place.

  It feels odd at first, but not as odd as the white text that overlays my vision.

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCESS THIS DEVICE?

  Two small spheres wait below the question, green and red, like someone hung coloured ping pong balls in mid-air. They hover there, waiting, their shading changing with the ambient light as I look around the room. I glance at the green dot and it grows, ripening towards blue. Glance away and it shrinks back to green.

  I make soup and spend the rest of the evening toying with the green dot, worrying it like a loose tooth, focusing on it just long enough for it to swell then looking away before it can erupt and show me the inside of my head.

  StatUS-ID
>
  [fdaa:9afe:17e6:a2ef::Gage/-//GIBSON]

  SysDate

  [22:13:51. Thursday, January 16, 2059]

  The reports say Dub’s body was found next to the train tracks running near a public park, so I throw on two extra layers then my parka before we speed walk from the lobby through the biting air to the waiting Sküte. It zips us along the deserted, snow-lit winter streets of the east end, big white snowflakes slapping and melting against the windscreen. As we ride, I scroll through feeds looking for more information, but they’re all telling the same story: promising New Gladiator commits suicide.

  Dora doesn’t speak the whole way, just stares out the window, hugging her bag and watching the city pass.

  When we arrive, flashing Ministry of Human Standards showtape cordons off the entrance to the park and the Sküte refuses to go any further. In the distance at the end of the path, lights blaze in the snowy air. We disgorge from the passenger pod and walk in silence, hoods up, hands jammed in pockets. I offer to carry Dora’s bag but she refuses to let it go.

  A stout wind sends snow snakes slithering across the solid surface of the Rouge River to the north, but the raised tracks and tree-lined berm to the south breaks the wind coming off the lake, protects us from its full frozen fury.

  Still, it’s fucking cold.

  I’ve never been this cold.

  The path ends at a small parking lot. A switchback ramp ascends to a white pedestrian bridge running parallel to the tracks. It’s fifteen below but the bridge is lined with people, most of them with their tabs above their heads, streaming the scene.

  The investigation into Dub’s death is centred near the east side of the trestle over the mouth of the river. There’s seven people working the scene, but we’re too far away to make out faces. Four Service constables in blue and red uniforms maintaining the perimeter, two detectives, and a FIS tech with his bot. A half-dozen floatlamps jitter in the wind, manoeuvring to capture all angles and zoom levels, flipping through the various filters and light sources required to recreate a virt simulation in any lighting condition. Big Standards drones whir above them all, stabbing out spotlights to scan the crowd and intimidating the circling snoop drones.