Zockinski and Hill exchanged a brief sidewise glance.
“Blind,” Hill said. “That’s…”
“… an easy accusation to disprove,” Santino finished.
“Unless you’re Rachel,” Zockinski said. The three of them turned to look at him. “Dunstan had a point,” Zockinski said, with a trace of brick-brown defensiveness. “I’ve seen you put on a blindfold and still put a full magazine dead center in the bull’s-eye during target practice. It’s not like you need your eyes.”
“Yeah,” Rachel agreed. “I don’t. Not for target practice. That’s point and shoot. But for everything else?” She threw up her hands to take in the street, the people, the vehicles, trees, the scraps of trash blowing by…
Hill nodded. To tell by his colors, this was an unnecessary conversation. Interesting, maybe, but the flecks of curious yellow were overpowered by a glaze of irritation. We have better things to do, folks. Move along. Nothing to see here—no pun intended.
“Sure,” Zockinski said. His conversational colors were an uncertain orange, and there were dimples puckering his colors across shoulders and temples: he was lying.
God damn it all.
FIVE
WHEN THE SUN WAS IN the right place in the sky, the Consolidated Forensic Laboratory was a hard wall of light. Some architect had had the novel idea to run aluminum and brushed steel across blue-tinted glass; the goal was to get the MPD’s new state-of-the-art forensics facility a coveted LEED Gold status by tossing extra heat away from the building, but the end result looked like a chicken coop. An expensive chicken coop, to be sure, but wire was wire and the whole place looked ready to cluck.
The MPD had given Jason Atran his own media lab on the third floor, and they had invested some hard cash to try to keep him happy. Jason might complain about the shoddy equipment, but that was his prerogative as its designer and primary user. Any other tech guy would have killed for the high-resolution monitors, the computers and their corresponding motion sensor input devices which he had programmed to track both his body and his mind. Jason was fully integrated into his system, and it bent and twisted at his will.
Rachel ground her teeth together as she entered the room. She hated visiting Jason at his office. The room wasn’t hostile to her, not exactly, but there was a constant hard twang in her mind, like she had hit the wrong key on a piano in the middle of someone else’s tune. She couldn’t shake the impression that the room resented her presence: the Agents were welcome to Jason in his off-hours or when he was in the link, but when he was working, he belonged to his machines.
Settle down, she thought at nothing in particular. Don’t make me block you.
The pressure eased ever so slightly; Rachel decided to pretend it was coincidence.
Jason was standing in the center of the room, digital media flying from screen to screen, and surrounding him in green. The green had nothing to do with emotions: invisible to anyone but an Agent, a baker’s dozen of detailed life-sized three-dimensional recreations of human beings circled Jason like a human wall. Santino and the detectives walked through them, oblivious, but Rachel paused to inspect Jason’s work. She pinged one to check the source of the signal and the computer pushed back. Jason might be creating the images, but the computer was running the program.
“Nice,” Rachel said through the link, examining a rough-looking man taller than she was. He had a cell phone pressed to his ear and spiral tattoos creeping out from under his collar and shirt sleeves.
“Thanks,” Jason replied. “Those guys were all flagged in the RISC,” he said, referring to the FBI’s Repository for Individuals of Special Concern. “But I doubt they’re worth more than a follow-up interview.”
The green figures vanished with a pop, and the screens froze as Jason and the men from the MPD exchanged hellos. Zockinski passed Jason a doggie box containing their leftover pizza, and the five of them sat on the floor and waited while the other Agent tore through a late lunch.
Zockinski and Hill were living proof that it was possible to get used to anything. If Rachel were to chart her eight-month history with the detectives on a calendar, the first six months would be solid black with harassment, the last month-plus a gradual easement from tolerance to genuine friendship. Not everybody (hell, almost nobody other than Santino) had welcomed Rachel to the MPD, and her early encounters with Zockinski had been absolute nightmares. Hill hadn’t been as verbally vicious, but that was because he let his partner do most of the talking.
But hunting madmen was a great bonding experience, and Zockinski and Hill had learned that palling around with Agents had plenty of advantages. Agents were commodities: they knew people. Yes, Jason could program Hill’s new alarm system without bothering to drive over to his apartment, but he had also gotten Hill into one of the pickup basketball games at the congressional gym, and a city cop could always use good political contacts.
(Not to mention that Hill was single, and Agents knew how to party. The first time Rachel, Phil, and Jason had taken Hill out on the town, Rachel had warned him to dress for one part HazMat cleanup, three parts Freddie Mercury’s 39th birthday party. Hill had shown up in jeans, a tight t-shirt, and an old leather jacket, and by morning these looked as though they had been dipped in acid and then run afoul of a Zamboni. Hill said it was totally worth it, and tagged along with them again the following Saturday night.)
When the pizza was done, Jason wiped the grease off on his pants and motioned them over to his main system console. There were chairs conveniently arranged around Jason, and as he gestured to them to sit, Rachel had no doubt that he had prepared to perform to an audience.
She stood behind Santino, arms crossed.
“You pissed at me?” Jason asked, as he went through a well-worn lecture with the officers about camera angles and video compression rates.
“Bumped into Dunstan on the way over,” she replied, as she watched the data move through his systems. It meant nothing to her in this form, but she did appreciate how it ebbed and flowed. “Been chatting about me?”
“What are you talking about? I think I’ve said twelve words to him over the past six months,” Jason said. “And at least half of those were some version of ‘go fuck yourself’.”
“Were the other half, ‘Rachel taught us how to use different frequencies to see’? Because he’s been digging, and he’s got suspicions.”
“Oh, shit.” Jason’s mental voice was small, and he faltered in his speech to Santino and the detectives.
“There are reasons it’s policy to file a report whenever we have a run-in with Hanlon’s goons,” she snapped. “And one of those reasons is so they don’t catch us blind—see what I did there?—and use what we’ve said against us.”
The men from the MPD were watching them with familiar bemused expressions. “You two need some time to talk privately?” Zockinski asked.
“Nope,” Rachel said as she dropped in the empty chair beside Hill. “Just managing some administrivia.”
“Mind if we get back to the dead people?” Hill said, pointing to the screens.
Rachel shrugged, and Jason resumed his lecture. By the time he was done with the briefing, she, Zockinski, and Hill were thoroughly educated in the methods he had used to survey the street and pick out each individual person and vehicle for analysis (and judging by Hill’s colors, she could probably talk him into helping her strangle Jason). When Jason’s seminar disbanded, the five of them clumped into smaller groups, asking questions and picking through pieces of data for something they could use. Jason’s digital simulations reappeared in a burst of sudden green, and Rachel resumed her slow walk around the circle, peering into each face as though the hollow motes of light might hold an answer.
Off to one side, a sequence of faces began to run together in a vivid green blur. Rachel threw a quick scan through it to investigate, and found a separate digital construction that Jason had stuck in the unoccupied space. She waited until Santino and the detectives were quibbling over som
e bit of procedural minutiae, and then reached out to Jason in the link.
“What’s this?”
Jason didn’t bother to look up from his screens. “Double-checking my work. I already ran the crowd through the MPD’s standard facial recognition software and cross-referenced with the RISC.”
“Yeah, you mentioned.”
“Well, this is my own program. It’s a hybrid of our federal software and a few choice programs I ganked from China and Germany. Surveillance states write the best biometric snoopware.”
“Don’t let Germany hear you call it that…” Rachel said, throwing her scans towards the shifting green. She prodded the projection and felt resistance from Jason: he was running the program directly.
“Whoa!” She recoiled. “Is that good for you, processing this much information yourself?”
“Hmm?” he said, finally glancing towards her. “I have to run it myself. I haven’t gotten around to writing the program for the computer.”
“Jason, come on,” Rachel said, wiping her palms against her pant legs. “This can’t be safe, this much raw data running through your brain.”
“I’m fine.” Jason’s face didn’t change, but she felt him smile through the link. A nice smile, one with a hug in it; he never failed to surprise her. “I use this program a dozen times a day. Have some faith, Peng. We’re more resilient than you think.”
She nodded, unconvinced, and broke their link. The green faces fluttered like wings.
As the men from First MPD prepared to leave, Jason called out: “Hey Rachel, stick around for a minute. I want to show you something.”
She dropped back, motioning Santino to go ahead without her. Her partner nodded and followed the detectives out of the lab.
“Here,” Jason said. He twisted his fingers and a projection appeared in the center of the room. It was a sheet of solid green, running the length of the room. “One-fifth scale,” he told Rachel proudly. “Don’t scan it until you’re inside or it’ll ruin the effect.”
The green rectangle was taller than she was, but not by much. She bumped herself up on her toes to try and peer over it; she couldn’t quite make it. She glanced at Jason, then stepped through it, noting as she passed that it was as thin as a mote of light.
“Damn,” she said quietly.
The other side of the featureless rectangle was a fully-realized city street, etched in painstaking detail in shades of chartreuse and pine and lime green, complete with pedestrians and vehicles. As she watched, cars stopped for a traffic light. Individual figures scurried across the road to the beat of the WALK signs, opened tiny doors to shops and offices, chatted silently on cell phones…
“Holy shit,” she said in a low voice. “You recreated Gayle Street?”
“Ten minutes prior to the bombings,” Jason said. His conversational colors glowed with red pride. “Rendered the security feeds from every camera I could find, and compiled them into a single 3-D image. Don’t worry,” he said quickly, feeling her panic. “The computer is running the program. I’m just running the construct.”
“This is incredible.” The details were too much to take in at once. Rachel saw a little girl stumble, her father pause to help her up. Half a block ahead, the girl’s brother scattered a flock of pigeons at a run. She felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, or—as she accidentally put her foot through a hot dog cart—Godzilla. “I’ve never seen a projection like this.”
The twanging in her mind eased again. If Rachel didn’t know better, she would swear Jason’s machines enjoyed performing for an appreciative audience.
“I’ve got up to three days prior to the bombing in the queue,” Jason said, kneeling down to inspect the miniature license plate on a windowless van. “It’ll take time to render properly, and I’m not going to rush it. But this part’s done, and it might be enough to give you guys a place to start.”
“Has Phil seen this?” she asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Have you shown it to anyone else at First MPD?”
He sniffed. “Why? They couldn’t see it if I did.”
“You idiot,” she said. The twanging pulsed, and she pushed back until it subsided. “Ever heard of Google Glass?”
Thirty minutes later, Santino had returned from his fast round trip to First District Station and was walking next to her along Jason’s digital version of Gayle Street. They had moved the construct from Jason’s office to the nearby hallway, where there was sufficient space to display the miniaturized version of the full fourteen blocks without the risk of the men from the MPD smashing face-first into the walls. They weren’t alone: there was a crowd gathering in the open doorways all along the hall. Santino had offered to let one of the digital forensics specialists from the lab across from Jason’s use his glasses, and the woman, amazed, had put the word out.
Santino had been one of those invited to participate in Google’s smart glass trial, but he had opted out, choosing instead to build his own. Rachel didn’t know where he had gotten the parts, but she thought his new girlfriend might have had something to do with it. Zia was an Agent; she had connections. He had made three sets, each pair an improvement on its predecessor. His most recent version was a slightly unwieldy copy of his usual reading glasses, with thick lenses and heavy frames, but Rachel knew he wouldn’t be satisfied until he had a pair which passed as normal: his goal was to have a wearable computer which allowed him to see Agents’ projections while also letting him read a McDonald’s menu at fifty feet. For now, all three sets were more than adequate for the purpose of viewing Jason’s reconstruction, although Zockinski was wearing the earliest prototype and was complaining about the heavy battery pack throwing heat against his chest.
With some prodding, Jason had fed his projection into the three mobile displays, and the men from the MPD were moving up and down the street, looking for details that might not appear in two dimensions. Jason’s projection wasn’t flawless. There were voids, as well as false renders; the cameras hadn’t covered the entire street, and much of what was above the third story was supposition. Jason and his computers had worked to fill in the blanks, rendering these voids in a slightly transparent green. There were glitches when two or more cameras covered the same area; Jason had applied his master’s craft of stitching images from different perspectives together, but not every camera filmed at the same rate or resolution, and the lines between these got a little muddy. And the entire digital construct had a habit of faltering when Jason lost concentration; the computer was doing the rendering, but Jason was keeping it active, and the street wavered with each female officer who dropped by to watch him work. But besides these relatively minor limitations, Rachel had to admit that Jason’s digital projection of the scene was the best forensics tool she had ever used.
Not that it mattered. They had run the simulated timeline over and over, looking for something out of place. A single person running, maybe, or a car with a bomb-chucking madman behind the wheel. Thus far, nothing. They had covered the entire length of the fourteen-block incident until they knew the movements of the digitalized figures better than their own.
“Proves the explosions were on a timer,” Hill said, his free hand on his watch as he checked the duration between each puff of green smoke at his feet. “Ninety seconds exactly.”
“We knew that,” Rachel sighed. Phil had been right; ninety seconds was exactly the right amount of time to create panic and bring people running, and then, boom. Chaos dominoes, all the way down the street. “Good to know the exact time frame, though.”
She swept a foot through a bakery; the toe of her shoe disappeared into the green. Her cop’s brain was ticking. She knelt by the side of the street where the bombings had occurred, and dipped her hand into a coffee shop the size of a dollhouse. An untouched coffee shop the size of…
“Can you make it life-sized?” Santino asked Jason, breaking her train of thought. His colors were gray. “I want to see it from a different perspective.”
&n
bsp; Rachel winced and stood. She had already lived through her fair share of bombings. She could bear her role as a witness when the figures were the size of toys; it would be impossible not to empathize with people who looked real enough to touch.
“Yeah,” Jason said as he paused the scene. Everything—traffic, pedestrians, pigeons—stopped in their last moments of normalcy, then grew to fill the hall. Rachel fell into parade rest and pretended not to notice the father and his two children a few feet away from her…
“Ready?” he asked. Rachel and Santino nodded.
Jason released the feed, and the first bomb went off.
He had slowed the scene down to half speed, but the first puff of green smoke still roared out of the nearest coffee shop. Green fragments—glass or dirt or stone, she couldn’t tell, the cameras hadn’t had a frame rate fast enough to capture the details—flew towards them. Zockinski unconsciously threw a hand up to protect his face, lowering it as the shrapnel passed harmlessly through him.
Rachel walked up the digital street, putting the father and his children behind her. No good; the problem with her vision was her vision, and she saw what happened to them as clearly as she saw her own two hands clasped tight at her lower back. She forced herself to stop and notice the details outside of the radius of the explosion: people turning, their eyes and mouths rounding in shock. Some dropped what they were carrying, while others crushed their bags or briefcases against their chests. The kinesthetic signs of terror were all around her, and she was absolutely grateful that Jason’s construct didn’t carry the emotional spectrum.
When the dust cloud hit, the entire scene went transparent. The security cameras above the explosion and on the far side of the street had captured everything, but the dust had obscured many of the details and the program had filled in the blanks as best it could. It wasn’t an issue; the dust was a symptom, not a cause. They didn’t expect to find anything that would point to the bomber in those moments of dust.
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