Maker Space

by Spangler, K. B.

  After the dust came the response. Nobody had to remind Rachel that human beings could be selfish pricks—OACET existed because of selfish pricks—but she knew the average person was genuinely decent, and usually compassionate. When she was in the Army, she had seen so much that was good. In times of crisis, whole communities would come together. She had been an outsider, she knew that, but she had still seen families reach out to strangers, entire towns pool those few resources they had to help each other rebuild. Altruism not only existed, but was embedded within the human experience.

  (She couldn’t understand the almost-universal decision to dismiss altruism, compassion, kindness of any type… These were treated as failings or, at best, a quirky human interest story good for nothing but a filler segment on the evening news. Sad, really, how people needed to believe the worst of themselves.)

  Here, the explosions triggered the Good Samaritans. Green figures poured from the stores to help those in need. Nearby, a man in a business suit helped a tourist to stand, then escorted her into a coffee shop before returning outside to help…

  The windows of the coffee shop exploded, and the man disappeared in a transparent chartreuse cloud. When the program was able to render the details again, he was gone.

  She almost forgot him as she walked by—too much to take in, too many victims—but noticed a pile of broken bricks half-covering a metal awning.

  “Jason?” she called out. “Could you back up sixty seconds and replay?”

  “Sure.” The green figures scurried backwards in time, then resumed their molasses-slow pace. They turned to look up the street, to shield themselves as the dust cloud swept over them. Some of the pedestrians fell to the ground, while others ran for cover. The man emerged from the coffee shop, helped the woman stand…

  “Pause,” Rachel said, and the scene froze. “Can the program track one person?”

  “Not during this part,” Jason replied as he walked over to join her. “There’s too much data fragmentation because of the dust. What you see here is mostly an extrapolation of the scene built around the bits and pieces that were caught on camera.”

  “Okay,” she said, and pointed to the green man in the suit. “Can it predict the most likely location for where this guy ended up? I think he’s the one I rescued.”

  “Maybe,” Jason said, his eyes losing focus as he spoke with his system. “Yes.”

  The city scene vanished, then rebuilt itself with the man in the suit at its center. The scope of the scene was tighter, a mere ten feet in all directions as the processing power shifted from playback to possibility.

  “The computer removed the dust cloud,” Jason said. “Same routine as before. If you can see through it, it’s a rendered probability. If it’s opaque, it was captured on a video.”

  The man, solidly green, pushed the woman into the coffee shop and returned to the street. When the explosion came, he faded instantly, occasional opaque spots painting him like a leopard. Rachel and the others watched as he was blown off of his feet, twisting in the concussive wave like a thing already dead. He caught a lamppost right above his waist, and fell and rolled in the wake until he washed up against an old Buick. Then came a second wave of debris, covering him from head to toe. The scene gradually became more solid as the dust settled and the cameras were able to resolve the details.

  “Damn,” Santino whispered. “Poor guy. He was stuck like that for nearly an hour before we found him.”

  “He’s a witness.” Hill stood rock-still like usual, but he was burning yellow-white with excitement. “He was in the shop just seconds before it blew.”

  “Hang on,” Rachel said. She pushed her way through the crowd of MPD officers and forensic specialists who had taken over the hall, ducked back in Jason’s office, and retrieved the victim’s wallet from her purse. “Jordan Meisner,” she said as she handed the wallet to Zockinski. “Thirty-two, lives over in Dupont Circle, so he’s local.”

  Zockinski flipped through Meisner’s wallet. “Where did you get that information?” he asked absently. “There’s nothing but credit cards in here.”

  She tilted her head and blinked at him.

  “Right, sorry,” Zockinski said. “Did you find out where they took him?”

  “No,” she said. “There’s no DMV database for hospitalizations. We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way and call around.”

  “I’ll do that,” Zockinski told her, and took out his cell as he left for the privacy of Jason’s office.

  “I feel terrible for this guy,” Santino said, staring down at the pile of debris which had covered Meisner. He pushed at the bridge of his mobile display so it would sit solidly on his nose. “That must have been the worst hour of his entire life.”

  “We got him out,” she reminded her partner. “And his injuries weren’t life-threatening. If anybody can tell us what happened right before the explosion, it’s probably going to be him.”

  “Yeah,” Santino muttered, unable to look away from Meisner’s digitized tomb. “I’m sure he’ll think that makes it all totally worth it.”

  SIX

  OLD HOSPITALS HAD HARD FACES. Jordan Meisner had been moved to one of the older buildings in the Washington Hospital Center complex, and while the building had been renovated a half-dozen times over the years, there was an unshakable sense of permanence within it. Grumpy old man of a hospital, Rachel thought to herself as Santino pulled into a parking space. Seen and heard it all.

  They had left Zockinski and Hill with Jason, with the hope that the three men could find something of use as additional renders were completed by Jason’s computer. She and Santino had dropped by the site of the bombings to pick up Phil for the Meisner interview. The nurse who took their call had told them Meisner was awake, and Phil would know exactly what to ask him.

  Phil caught her looking at the hospital. “Going to wait here?” he asked.

  She shook her head, took a deep breath, and kicked open the passenger’s side door.

  They went in through the main entrance, guessing it wouldn’t be half as busy as the Emergency Department on a day like today. Wrong. There was a heavy line of visitors standing in front of the receptionist’s desk.

  “Stand in line or pull rank?” whispered Santino.

  “Back of the line, like the good little doobies we are,” Rachel whispered back. “And you’re the lucky one who gets to stand in for all three of us while Phil and I go find our respective bathrooms.”

  “Nope.”

  “Yup,” Rachel told Santino. “They might ask to see our badges, and we don’t need to run into the OACET road block if they decide they don’t want to deal with freaks roaming the halls.”

  Santino sighed and stepped into the queue.

  She threw a quick scan through the ground floor until she pinged on the nearest vending machine, and she and Phil dove into the candy bars. At her urging, Phil bought a couple of extra bars for later; he tended to forget to eat when he was playing with explosives. (A few weeks ago, she had gone down to the basement of First District Station to check up on him after he had dropped out of the link unexpectedly, and found he had passed out while dissecting an old inactive landmine, his head pillowed on a spare pile of Semtex.)

  They meandered back to the main hall to find Santino in a stalemate with one of the receptionists. Rachel guessed this receptionist was probably a lovely person on any day other than today, but the poor man had been running point for the victims’ families, the press, anyone who needed information about the people caught in the explosion. It had worn on him, and he was spitting at Santino like a viper.

  “Police. Officer.” Santino had his badge out and was tapping it against the counter.

  “You can go in,” the receptionist said, pushing a stack of clipboards and a digital camera towards Santino. “Just as soon as you fill this out.” He pointed at Rachel and Phil. “And if you’re with him, I need a form from each of you, and I also have to get photos of you holding your official IDs. We’ve had t
oo many bloggers pretending to be cops today.”

  “That’s illegal,” Phil said as he gathered up the clipboards.

  “You are more than welcome to arrest them,” the receptionist said, then forgot about them as he turned to the next person in the line.

  Forms. Handwritten forms. She gritted her teeth and took the top clipboard from Phil. She hated filling out forms, especially when there were strangers close enough to watch her struggle with the words like a barely literate toddler. The three of them scurried off to an unoccupied corner so she could set her implant to reading mode and take her time.

  “Made any progress with mixed frequencies?” Phil asked her through the link, as she scribbled her name and organizational information on the tight black lines. “It’s nuts how much effort you have to go through just to read and write.”

  “No,” she replied. “You?”

  “No.” He shook his shaggy head, guilt building in his conversational colors. “But I’ll be honest, it’s not a priority for me like it is for you. Sorry, I should be doing more to help.”

  “It’s fine.” Rachel said, and caught herself before she shrugged through the link. A pet peeve of hers was feeling another Agent’s physical gestures in her own head, so she tried to avoid creating pot-kettle scenarios whenever she could. “I’d like to be able to read a book again without giving myself a pounding headache, but it’ll just take time to find the right combination of frequencies.”

  “Got any spare time to practice this weekend?”

  Rachel looped a scan through the dull, smoky grief of those waiting in line, the pulsing black of the receptionists… “I think all of our spare time just got flushed down the toilet.”

  Phil nodded, and left Rachel alone with her ballpoint pen.

  Her scans were usually either short bursts as she pinged objects, or prolonged distribution of a penetrating wave. Reading was neither of these. The physician who had given Rachel the diagnostic autoscript had told her that the eye is a simple miracle, and that the frequencies which are found in light are only a small part of reading. When applied to reading, visual perception was a sum of many processes. She had learned about form consistency, and discrimination within a visual figure ground, and a hundred other individual terms and concepts she had never heard of, let alone knew existed. Rachel could duplicate many of these processes when she used a specialized visual mode made up of both pings and waves, but thus far it had proven impossible to blend this mode into her dominant set of environmental scans. Unless she was in reading mode, she could sometimes make out the forms of letters—usually when these were printed bold and large—but reading and writing? No. Basic literacy was no longer an effortless part of her life.

  It took her nearly five minutes to fill out the double-sided form. Both Santino and Phil knew better than to offer to help, but they were both an impatient yellow-orange by the time she was done.

  When they returned to the front desk, they found that the rude receptionist had been replaced by an older woman who barely took a cursory look at Santino’s badge before buzzing them through the security doors. Rachel tore her form from the clipboard and folded it up to stash in her purse, just in case, then dropped the clipboard in the nearest trash can.

  They struggled through the hospital in the way of Theseus in the labyrinth. The hospital was undergoing yet another round of renovations, and many of the wings weren’t where the wall maps claimed they would be. It was all the worse for her because she needed to continuously flip between reading and environmental modes to keep her place in the building. She wondered, briefly, if they should find some string.

  The Agents learned a little too late that they could navigate the hospital by way of the RFID tags stuck to the medical equipment, and they had to backtrack across most of the building to reach the wing with the majority of the ICU codes. And even then, they found that they had been following an older generation of tags: they ended up outside of an equipment storage room on the third floor, swearing at the churn rate of information technology.

  Santino was losing his patience. “We are intelligent people,” he growled, staring up at another series of useless signs and arrows. “Why is this so hard?”

  Rachel shrugged. Technically, the three of them were working and she wanted to judge the mood of those around her, so she had kept the emotional spectrum on. Today, though… It had already been a day full of negative emotions and the grief, anger, and loss coming from every direction of the hospital were beginning to overwhelm her. She didn’t need more of the same coming off of her partner.

  Phil reached over and laid his hand against her wrist. His usual good humor was muted, but it was still strong enough to break her out of her malaise.

  She smiled at him and relaxed, ever so slightly, so he could carry some of the pressure.

  They arrived at the main entrance to the intensive care unit a few minutes later. The windowless double doors to the wing were sealed, and the three of them shared a look before Rachel sighed and leaned over to push the call button. She looked through the doors to the ward beyond to check if the nurse was about to buzz them in, but found the nurse’s stand empty, with aggressive knots of medical personnel rushing from room to room.

  “What’s the holdup?” Santino asked.

  “The bombing victims,” Phil replied. “The unit’s over capacity.”

  Rachel reached out through her implant to unlock the doors, and the three of them entered as quietly as they could. It was wasted effort; she doubted if she could have made a dent in the noise if she had pulled her gun and fired into the ceiling. The unit was best described as a… Well, the word cacophony was so rarely put to good use.

  And there, down the hall and standing within the thick of EMTs and paramedics, Rachel spotted the twisting kaleidoscope of colors that was Hope Blackwell.

  “Hope’s here,” Rachel said.

  Phil perked. He liked Hope.

  Rachel really needed to teach him how to perceive the emotional spectrum.

  Hope’s surface colors were fireworks. She was always in motion, her moods shifting and popping as fast as light or thought. Her core was black at the edges and shifted towards a vivid cyan at its center. Hope’s core did not violate the single-color rule of cores: the black and blue were not two colors joined together, but were part of the same whole. It reminded Rachel of colors on the surface of an oil spill, the blue always within the black but visible only when the black was burned away.

  Hope noticed them almost as soon as they entered. She stepped away from the other paramedics and waved them over. “Hey guys,” she said. “Lemme try and find us somewhere quiet.” She checked the floor for some unoccupied space, then sighed and pulled them into the nearest bathroom. It was a single stall with a toilet, and built to accommodate a wheelchair; it would have been spacious for one person, but the four of them each had to pick a spot on the wall and stick to it.

  “How is it out there?” Hope asked in a low voice. “They’ve got me moving some of the overflow patients to hospitals in Virginia. I haven’t been able to keep up with the news.”

  “Not good,” Phil said, shaking his head. “Total chaos, no big breaks. But we’re here to see a patient who was at the scene. You know a Jordan Meisner?”

  “The one Rachel found,” Hope said, grinning at her.

  “They told you that?” Rachel asked.

  “They tell me anything that has to do with OACET,” Hope said.

  Rachel hadn’t seen Hope since her wedding a couple of weeks back. The two of them were friendly in the way of shared secrets; Rachel worked for Patrick Mulcahy, Hope’s new husband and head of OACET, and Hope was privy to all of OACET’s inner workings.

  All of them.

  Nobody else, not even Santino, was as close to OACET without also being part of the collective.

  (If pushed, Rachel might admit that Hope gave her the creeping willies. It’s not that Hope wasn’t trustworthy. As far as Rachel could tell, Hope would happily take what she k
new about OACET with her to her own grave. But she’d also take whoever was stupid enough to try and kill her into the ground with her, probably with her teeth clenched around their throat and her hands dug into their sternum to wrap around their beating heart. She was dangerous, but not in any way Rachel could understand. Hope’s wedding had been the most recent example of this—as part of OACET’s administrative team, Rachel had been asked to stand with Mulcahy at his wedding. As a woman who loved pretty clothes, Rachel had been asked to help Hope get ready in the bridal preparation suite before the ceremony. After the last of Mulcahy’s sisters had left, Hope turned towards Rachel, her surface colors bright and happy, but nearly lost within the light emanating from her blue-black core. This raven-haired beauty, a vision in her wedding dress, asked Rachel, “How do I look?” Rachel, without thinking, replied, “You look like Death.” And this weird woman, a wide smile lit up her face before she gave Rachel a sweet kiss on the cheek and said, “Thank you.”)

  Today, Hope was just another paramedic. “Wait here for a sec,” she said. “We don’t need any extra bodies running around right now. I’ll check and see if I can get you into his room.” She opened the door and was gone.

  They spent a few minutes talking sports and pretending they weren’t stuck in a hospital bathroom, and then there was a quick knock and Hope let herself back in. “You guys wasted a trip,” she said. “Meisner’s doctor says he’s incoherent. He’s got some second-degree burns and is on a ton of pain meds, so he’s gonna be out of it for a while.”

  “The nurse on the phone said he was fine,” Phil complained.

  “It’s not exactly a normal day around here,” Hope said. “It’d be easy to get some patients confused. Or he might have been conscious but took a turn. It happens.”

  “Can we see him?” Santino asked. “Rachel can usually get a read off of someone, even if they’re unconscious.”

  “We don’t need to clog the halls. I can check on him from here,” Rachel said. “I just need to know which room he’s in. I could go digging in the records, but—”