Outlier

by Kyle Harris

After savoring what might be the second-to-last puff, Chaz pulled out her tasker. Finding any publications about the techy guts of facial-rec software wasn’t easy. Companies kept those secrets behind lock and key. But she searched anyway and scrolled through the results.

  A couple ski mask–wearing numbskulls had robbed a convenience store two months ago. Celebration hit a wall about ninety minutes later when the authorities crashed through their doors. According to the article, even with the ski masks on, facial-rec was able to match identifiers using only their eyes. Then some anatomist bigwig was explaining how the eyes were more complex and more unique than any other feature of the face—shape, size, spacing, convexity, and depth were all mentioned.

  Okay. The eyes were super important. Which ruled out any plastic face mask.

  Twenty-three-year-old Fiona Rice always ran into problems when trying to withdraw her monthly welfare benefits. The reason? There was an enormous birthmark on the center of her face. Chaz thought it looked like the silhouette of a lobster. And apparently it was enough to dupe facial-rec—something about the darkness of the birthmark being a constraint for the software.

  Facial-rec must rely on light. Visual imaging. It required contrast to map out topography.

  She had the tip-of-her-tongue feeling, except in her brain.

  Last puff on the cigarette.

  A man was filing a suit against the manufacturer of his home security system because the facial-rec door security feature wouldn’t recognize his or his two sons’ faces. The article described them as being of Ethiopian descent. Looking at the photos, they were pretty fucking dark. Okocha-level dark. Like a trio of shadows with eyes.

  Importance of eyes. Dark skin.

  She had an idea. It would need testing, but she had a fucking idea.

  And the weapon too. It flashed in her head like a fucking epiphany.

  Because she’d seen it before.

  Chaz dropped the filter into the empty pack and stood. Before she left the Methodist church, she looked around.

  And quietly said, “Thanks.”

  She laid the double-sided sheet of design plans on the chipped countertop.

  “Paper? Are you kidding me?”

  “Can you make it?” sighed Chaz. “I’ll pay you whatever.”

  Sandiford placed a pair of spectacles low on his nose, brought over his little battery-powered lamp, and stooped to have a look at her handwritten schematics. She waited. For near a full minute, all he did was nod his head a little and move his tongue like he was digging out the food between his teeth.

  Then he said, “How’s the leg treating you?”

  “Fine.” Chaz gave him five more seconds. “Well? Can you do it?”

  He pointed to some words. “What’s that scribble say? By the swirl.”

  “Spring-loaded release mechanism.” She watched his face for the reaction. If he thought she was talking out of her ass, she figured he would say so. But he went on looking like a schoolteacher judging an essay. “A spring would work, right? Or I was thinking hydraulics, because I know you got that shit lying around in here.”

  Sandiford nodded, absently. He rubbed his chin and looked over at the reverse side. “You want them to eject from your sleeves when…what now?”

  “When I snap my hands back.” She gave him a demonstration. “I was thinking like attaching a cord or something to—”

  “No, no, we can do that differently. Otherwise when you go to scratch behind your ear, it’s gonna shoot out right into your face.”

  Chaz considered this; she even moved her hand to touch behind her ear. Yeah, he had a fucking point there. The trajectory put the electrodes in line with her eyeball. That’d be messy.

  “A button would work better,” he said. “Put it on a delay timer so you can straighten your arms. All we’d need is a couple radio transmitters. I must have about a hundred of those things sitting in a box somewhere around here.”

  “So, you can do it?”

  He looked up at her. A question was apparent in his eyes, gleaming like the light from the nearby lamp. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll tally up what I got in inventory and knock out an invoice, and we can settle on what it’ll cost. If nothing gives me the fits and quits, I could have it ready tomorrow.”

  “Just spit it out, man,” she said.

  “Spit what out?”

  “That look you’re giving me. I see it all the time.”

  He flipped the paper back over. “I’m just trying to put it together. I mean, here you’re saying you want the voltage doubled to a hundred thousand. You want rubber handle grips. You want a”—he held the paper up and squinted—“toggle switch for lethal and nonlethal modes.”

  “So the bad guys stay down,” explained Chaz. “Like you said, the streets aren’t safe.”

  “Uh-huh. You hit the nail on the head. But that doesn’t explain the contraption, or why you need two of them. What’s this for?”

  She defied the impulse to yell at him. “I just need the fucking thing,” she said, in as calm a voice as she could muster. “Why does it matter?”

  “It matters,” said Sandiford, firmly, “because these things have encoded serial numbers. If I sold you one untampered for personal protection, that’s one thing. But you want me to retrofit something that’s designed to stun people into a lethal weapon. Two of them.” He removed his spectacles and set them aside. “Your business is your business. But if you get caught with these, that’s gonna put me in hot water. You understand?”

  Chaz nodded. “I won’t get caught with them. I promise.” Her voice seemed sure of it, anyway.

  Sandiford nodded in return. “As long as we’re on the same page. Get it? Same page?” He flapped the sheet of paper.

  She fought the temptation to roll her eyes.

  “Okay. But first off, voltage itself isn’t what hurts people. It’s the amperage. The rate of the charge flowing between the two electrodes. If you want lethal, that’s what you need to jack up.” He jerked his thumb toward the ceiling. “And installing a toggle switch is no problem. I’ll have to take a look, but I think I can just cut through and run a wire. Put it next to the power button. And it’s gonna have to be a telescopic model—it has to fit between your elbow and your wrist if you want it to stay out of sight.” He measured out the air with his hands, approximating forearm length.

  “Right on.” Chaz tapped one of her crude sketches. “And you can get arm braces like these from Case civvy skeletons. I saw some in your junk aisles last time.”

  Sandiford made a soft grunting sound. He slid the paper aside. “You still on that job you talked about? Something about a rich girl? How’d that one go?”

  She hesitated. Then: “Still on it. But it’s almost done. Just one more thing I gotta do.”

  He nodded, then stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “Let me check the dust piles back there, and I’ll ring you up a total. Sound good?”

  “Yep. Thanks, man. And can you ship it to me when it’s finished?”

  He shrugged his hands as he walked away. “You’re the boss, boss.”

  On the way back to her apartment, Chaz opted for a slight detour. The route was longer by about thirty minutes; more importantly, it took her directly past the Wehrlein building.

  With the high probability that Kennedy or one of his mutts was keeping tabs on her, playing spy might raise some premature alarms before the big show. But this was just a little recon. Cameras might tag her, and Kennedy might receive a notification that she had been in the area, but it would look like she was just passing by. She timed the trip so she would arrive at exactly five o’clock—closing time.

  The building came into view right on the dot.

  The square was packed, and the mass migration was in one direction: toward the Metro station at the south end. The going-home swarm. Give it another fifteen minutes and the whole area would be a total fucking ghost town—she’d watched it on the CWS feeds. But what those cameras didn’t have were definition enhancement and w
orth-a-damn digital zoom functions.

  When the herd of foot traffic thinned out a little, Chaz deposited her tasker into an inner coat pocket that was specially prepped with elastic harnesses to hold it firmly in place. The reverse-side camera aligned exactly with a hole in the coat. While the Wehrlein building was off to her left, she discreetly recorded some video. The pros might hire paparas with prosthetic eyeballs to snoop around and compile hours of footage, but she didn’t think her method was too bad for amateur work.

  Once Innovation Square was behind her, she hopped a train at the next Metro station. The ride home gave her time to review the video.

  First, she collated the individual frames to assemble a wide panoramic shot of the whole bottom floor. Getting the definition to her liking was a little tricky, mainly because none of the fucking preset adjustments could separate out the reflections on the glass from what was on the other side. So first, she had to manually target sections of the glass for glare removal. Better, but it was dark inside. She moved on to the contrast sliders and black-level brightening tools until the detail started to come out.

  Bingo.

  Chaz panned back and forth across the wide landscape shot, looking all the way through the building. She counted only a couple heads that weren’t security—probably a couple staffers a little late for the five o’clock rush home. If she came at five-thirty, they shouldn’t be a problem. The public entrance on the south side had a message on the glass: THIS ENTRANCE IS CLOSED AFTER BUSINESS HOURS - USE SIDE ENTRANCE. She swiped all the way left, then all the way right. There it was. Security checkpoint, east side. One dude in uniform standing alongside a metal detector and a belt X-ray machine. That would be her way in.

  She would have preferred total stealth. But Wehrlein was a multibillion-dollar company. One visible guard was about the best she could hope for.

  Chaz thumbed over to the solar forecast. There would be sunshine this time tomorrow, but in two days it would be dark.

  In two days, then.

  The Metro bumped to a halt at her station, and she got off.

  Before heading home, she stopped at a women’s clothing store and cleared out the stock of black eyeshadow.

  Chaz wolfed down a vending-machine fungal burger while fifty pages deep in a quest to find Wehrlein building blueprints. She felt how she imagined diamond miners on Fross probably felt, because there was zilch.

  About the only way to obtain the blueprints was to go through the official channels. In other words, through the city’s municipal clerk. At which point they would ask her why in the fuck she wanted blueprints, and she would say she needed to know the layout of the building she was going to sneak into.

  Foolproof.

  The search wasn’t a total bust. Somewhere around ten pages into the results, she had stumbled upon a presentation file from a temp agency’s unprotected FTP server. Besides the usual fare of rules and safety regulations, there was a cross section of the entire seventy-floor skyscraper detailing fire-escape routes with red arrows and dotted lines. Furthermore, the diagram delineated all the major rooms and stairwells. It wasn’t the floor-by-floor map she wanted, but it was something. She noted that there were two stairwells—one in the northeast corner, the other in the northwest. Important to know.

  What was also important was the escape plan. The obvious choice was to go out the way she entered, but if everything went how she saw it in her head, she might as well handcuff herself just to save the pigs the trouble. Looking at the cross section again, one of the fire-escape paths went out the back. Some kind of emergency-only exit door. Might be something. She pulled up some of the CWS feeds in the area to take a look.

  Or maybe not.

  The camera IDs called it an alley, but it really wasn’t. It was about as wide as the street outside her window. Long sightlines both ways. Could be less crowded back there when shit hit the fan, but it was basically a decision of where she wanted to be arrested.

  She sat back in her chair, thinking.

  The camera showing the rear fire-exit door also showed a couple of steam-spouting subtrain grates about ten meters to the east. She pulled up the overhead map and overlaid the subtrain rail lines. Nothing there. Odd. She browsed back to the search engine and queried up older subtrain maps. Line 12W went directly underneath Innovation Square—and it had been decommissioned a couple years ago after the expansion of the above-ground Metro service.

  Chaz felt a smile coming on. It was a fucking lucky find. She finished the last of the burger, wiped her hands on her pants, disposed of the trash, and grabbed two things: her clothing store purchases and a Renell camera.

  Make that three: a can of Diet Tri-Cola.

  She took the six compacts of eyeshadow—a Maybelline color called SHADOW CAT, which was the darkest they offered according to the pigment chart on the back—out of the bag and arranged them in a line on the desk. Then she set up a Renell camera—also on the desk—to broadcast to her private server and established the link to stream it to the monitor.

  Finally, she fired up the facial-rec to run in tandem with the feed. A green rectangle appeared around her face, and a bubble of information faded in at the top right—Charlene McCune, nineteen years old, Caucasian, yada yada. A 100 percent match.

  All right, let’s make you disappear.

  It had been years since Chaz had last fiddled with makeup. Most of what she knew came from watching girlfriends. It seemed simple enough. Brush in hand, she opened a compact and dabbed the bristles with eyeshadow. Then she flipped the feed horizontally so she could use the desk monitor like a vanity mirror.

  The first application was just to the eyelids. She smeared the eyeshadow around, taking extra care to make sure no trace of skin was left exposed, then she admired the final result. Needed a few more piercings and a spiked collar—then she could pass as the lead drummer for Lesbo Gang. The matte finish of the eyeshadow also rendered away all the definition from her eyelids. And if she had trouble seeing detail, then so would facial-rec. Theoretically.

  But it was still a 100 percent match.

  She extended the radius of the eyeshadow circles all the way around. Not so much Lesbo Gang drummer anymore; now coke-snorting runaway. Probably crashing at a dealer’s apartment in exchange for regular blowjobs.

  No change to facial-rec.

  Same thing again, widening the circle of eyeshadow out about another centimeter in all directions. She also took the opportunity to touch up and add another layer to the original brushstrokes. Because any pores or wrinkles that showed through might tip off facial-rec. Couldn’t have that.

  Match confirmation had fallen to 97 percent. That was barely above the threshold.

  Holy shit. It’s actually working.

  Chaz expanded the black circles one more time, spreading them all the way up to her eyebrows and in toward the bridge of her nose. The person on the monitor looked like a real fucking freak, but more importantly…

  IDENTITY NOT RECOGNIZED. In other words, nothing in the database matched. The green rectangle was still there, so it saw a face in the frame, but the algorithms couldn’t pull enough topographic values from the image. Because the contrast in the region around her eyes was gone.

  Chaz sat back in the chair and sipped on her soft drink. She was totally anonymous to cameras. Kennedy would have no idea she was coming.

  Two more days. She would have her weapons and the cover of darkness. She would be ready.

  In two more days, he would be dead.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Couple more minutes yet until 5:30 P.M. The numbers were moot for the most part; she could have marched in right now. But she chose to wait, finish the cigarette. Tranquilize any last lingering doubts. She had been chain-smoking since waking up, and still it didn’t feel like enough.

  Seventy floors of the Wehrlein Industries headquarters stood tall and mostly dark. An occasional window was lit up. And somewhere around the midpoint was the man she was after. The man who had ordered the hit on Libb
y. The man she was going to fucking kill.

  This was it.

  Chaz savored deep, long puffs.

  She wasn’t just killing a little extra time; she was also keeping her eyes out. Scouting. In the last ten minutes, the number of people she had seen walking throughout the square could be counted with her fingers and maybe a few toes. Five o’clock was like the white-collar evacuation bell. Every once in a while, some tired-looking suit emerged from the Wehrlein building and beelined for the Metro station. But she hadn’t seen anyone in the last seven or eight minutes.

  And what of Kennedy? He was inside. The last confirmation on the tether was about six hours ago—going into the building. It would have hollered at her if he had come out. Same for his henchmen duo, whom she’d also made datafiles for with surveillance footage and FACE-MAPΔ.

  Speaking of, Chaz tethered her own name next to Kennedy’s and waited for the program to scan all active CWS feeds. No results turned up. And yet, from against the wall she had her shoulder to, she saw at least a dozen cameras within her vicinity. Cameras on city streetlamps, on flagpoles, above doors and windows. Cameras that she could view on her tasker and see herself on.

  But when she pressed her fingertip to the image of her face, that same message from two days ago came up: IDENTITY NOT RECOGNIZED.

  Like a motherfucking shadow. Nothing to see here, bitch.

  5:29 P.M.

  She flipped over to the Project Doomsday program. Following her little reunion with the Pruitts, she hadn’t touched it. The timer was still set at twenty minutes. Twenty seemed like enough—any fewer and she risked not making it up thirty-four flights of stairs before the fireworks; any more, she might be dead. Still, it was only a backup plan—she didn’t want to use it unless she absolutely had to. But if shit went south, she might not be in a position later to activate it. Better to have it on a timer.

  5:30 P.M

  She touched the big red button that said BEGIN COUNTDOWN. Then she slipped the tasker inside her coat.