Retiree 2.0

by John Douglas Powers

  It wasn’t an easy one for Alana. Every oath she had ever taken in her life, she had taken seriously. Even when she joined the rebels against the sitting United States government decades before, she had done so to uphold the Constitution she had sworn to defend when she joined the US Army as a JAG officer. Alana said, half-bluffing, half-not, her voice steadily increasing in volume as she spoke, “I think you may be overestimating my feelings about Gabriel Stone. He isn’t my son. To me he’s merely an acquaintance who happens to be connected genetically to my former, living self. As much as I’d like to be able to help the kid out, I’m not going to submit to blackmail to do it. I promised Tremblay that he’d be tried in an American court, and he will be. If you petulantly withhold Gabriel’s save profile, then that’s on your head, and you’ll have to live with yourself and any consequences that follow. But don’t you dare do so and then call anyone else a scumbag. Vira, end!”

  Alana paced a circuit around her sofa three times before she finally changed course, walking upstairs and into her shower to prepare for her morning meeting. She scrubbed herself down fully twice, but she still felt unclean, and no amount of hot water and android skin wash seemed to change that. When she was fully clothed, choosing one of her formal police dress uniforms with its navy blue coat, tie, and skirt, she called Bob Smith. As she slipped her pistol into her shoulder holster, Bob answered, “Chief Inspector? What’s the news?”

  “Not good. Security Division has a save profile for Gabriel Stone, but they’re not going to release it to me, and since it was made for a surrogate interrogation, I don’t think they have to let it go. Do you know of any legal way to compel them?”

  “Hmmm... I’ll check the regulations, but I think you’re correct. If it’s being held by a law enforcement agency, that means they own it. They don’t normally keep things like that, do they? I mean, don’t they purge them after they’re through with them?”

  Alana instinctively shook her head, “We couldn’t keep one if we did it as part of an investigation. Once our cases are closed, we have to destroy forced saves. Security Division has different regs though. I don’t like it, but it’s really no different than the NSA was before the revolution.”

  Bob said, “Well, as long as they are holding onto it, then there’s still a tiny, little hope. I’ll dig around and see if I can find a loophole, but keep those hopes tiny. That does raise the option of whether you want to pay out-of-pocket to keep Gabriel on life support if he doesn’t recover before Thursday.”

  Alana looked down at her shoes and saw that her reflection was blurry. They needed to be polished. She said, “I can’t afford to pay for that. It would probably cost my monthly discretionary income just to keep him alive a day or two.”

  Bob said, “I know it won’t register in my voice, but I want you to know that I am truly sorry for what both you and he are going through. How much more of my time do you want me to put into it?”

  “Is it pro-bono?”

  “I can give you my basic consultation rate, but that’s still two-hundred credits a day. So far, you owe me for two days.”

  Alana said, “Extend it long enough to find out if there’s any way to sue Gabriel’s save file out of SD’s hands, and to handle any paperwork if they have to take him off of life support.”

  Bob said, “I’ll take care of that. Is there anything else that I can do for you?”

  “Not that I can think of, Mister Smith. Vira, end.”

  Alana looked at her internal clock. It was now nine. She would have to go to the station for her morning case briefing soon, and she didn’t have time to ponder her personal life or further question her decisions about her...son. At a subconscious level, she was still fighting to come to grips with the implication. She barely knew Gabriel, and had nothing to do with his birth and no contact with him through the twenty-odd years of his life. However, she felt she owed him a debt of honor for allowing the police to break open a colossal case which was flying under everyone’s radar, including Security Division’s. She also knew what her monthly income was, and that if she simply assumed responsibility for keeping the kid on life support, she’d likely be bankrupt just in time for Christmas. She shunted her concerns to her mental backburner and quick-stepped out her door and to her car. Although she tried to focus on what she was going to say in her briefing, her mind kept drifting back onto her son’s dilemma, but she remained at a loss for a solution she could manage. She arrived at the police station without incident, and made it to the situation room with five minutes to spare.

  As she had done before, Alana waited until the precise meeting time of ten o’clock to enter the briefing. She strode confidently toward the head of the room, her demeanor not betraying the conflict that was raging inside her. “Good morning, people. As everyone knows, and thanks to all your hard work over the past few days, we’ve caught most of the people who were behind all the retiree kidnappings. The hard part is still ongoing, with DI Alvarez heading up the team that’s getting the victims sorted out and returned to their daily lives. Thanks to Detective Washington and the officers of our sister precinct, District Three, we’ve retrieved several hundred of their bodies, which will save the insurance companies well over fifty million credits in replacement costs.”

  A round of “whews” and whistles came from the audience. With Alana and Rhys being the only cyborgs present, the actual cost of a cyborg body was likely not fully appreciated by the living. Washington asked, “Is there a finder’s fee?” which prompted a round of laughter from the assembled team.

  Alana continued, “Sadly, no, but we all get to keep our jobs and you can all expect shiny letters of commendation from both me and Chief Bennett.”

  Bennett looked at Alana, as if to say, ‘Thanks for making me work harder.’

  “Unfortunately, we still don’t know who was behind the kidnappings. All the evidence and interviews of the victims suggests, against technical feasibility, that the kidnapped were hacked somehow and forced to travel to Los Angeles against their will. I have to confess that I’m not sure what the best course of action is from this point. Srinu knows the most about it, but he’s in denial about the possibility. So, with Chief Bennett’s approval, I want to take the case straight to Zumpco Robotics and try to get some cooperation from their engineers.”

  Bennett said, “We can talk about that later today. I have a window at two o’clock. There’s something else I want to discuss anyway. My office?”

  Alana nodded, “I’ll be there. In the meantime, Washington is still waiting on Kaloyanov’s body to be found, so until that turns up, I’m placing him with Alvarez to connect the recovered cyborg chassis with their brains. If his body turns up, go back onto that task until it’s resolved.”

  Bennett stood, “Graves, send me a written preliminary report on your progress so far. Enough to give me some bullet points in case I have to give another press conference.”

  Alana nodded, and the meeting adjourned, with DI Alvarez remaining behind to brief DI Washington. Alana and Rhys returned to Alana’s office and cooperated to produce a document with as much detail as they could cram into it. By one-thirty, they had finished their report.

  As Alana and Rhys stared at each other across the desks, the six feet of floor in between serving as an extended metaphor for the distance that remained between them, there was a quick rapping on the door. Alana yelled, “Come in!”

  The door opened, and Brett Crabtree poked his head around the corner, “Hi. Interrupting anything?”

  Rhys said, “The gearbox driving the wheel of justice is currently in neutral.”

  Brett took that as an invitation to enter, and he did, carrying a glossy brown shopping bag with ‘Olde Beacon Hill Shoppes’ stenciled on the side in white, Brush Script lettering. He asked, grinning, “Is my chair at the right height for you, Rhys?”

  Rhys leaned back in what was his former chair, now Brett’s, and propped his feet up on the desk, “Reminds me a lot of the old office I had before I died. Do you
need it back right away?”

  Brett closed the door, “Nah. I still have to drop off a couple souvenirs before I buckle down on my case again. I’m still pretty lagged from the flights. I took a suborbital to Boston, but I took a standard flight coming back, and that was a painful four hours.”

  Rhys prodded, “You said something about souvenirs?” as he placed his feet back onto the floor.

  “Nothing much. I just had a couple hours to kill waiting on the return flight, so I did a little shopping and sightseeing while I was there. Never been to Boston before.”

  Rhys said, “Did you find it bucolic, as did I?”

  Brett began fishing around in his shopping bag and produced a palm-sized acrylic hemisphere, “I’d probably say, ‘quaintly antique.’” He handed the object to Alana.

  Alana shook the object. Staring past the flurry of liquid-suspended particles, she asked, “A Boston snow globe?”

  “Never snows here. Get it?”

  Alana set the globe down on her desktop, “No, but it’s the thought that counts.”

  Brett fished into his bag again and withdrew a solid cube of clear acrylic. A thin slice at one end was tinted deep red, and the other end was deep green. There was a small, jagged pebble in the middle, about three centimeters in diameter with some writing etched into the surfaces and filled in with gold paint. He offered it to Rhys, “One for the baseball fan.”

  Rhys accepted the gift and read the writing on the ends aloud, “Fenway Park?”

  Brett said, “It’s a piece of the old Red Sox stadium they tore down a long time ago. I got it at the new stadium’s gift shop, so it’s authentic.”

  “You saw a game?”

  “No, I didn’t have time for that. It was close to the airport, and I still had a little time to kill, so I stopped by to get you something for helping me out with baseball stuff.”

  Rhys nodded approvingly, “Thanks, that’s very thoughtful,” as he set the cube down on the corner of the desk.

  Alana asked, “Did you get any closer to solving the baseball murders?”

  Brett sighed, “I fear it might have been a wasted trip, or else I didn’t ask the right questions. I was trying to find out why Veedock might want to kill Robertson, but nothing panned out. You were right about Robertson’s college transcript though. There was a story behind it, but I couldn’t connect it to the case.”

  Alana checked the time, and it was still twenty minutes until she was going to meet with Chief Bennett about her case, so she said, “I’ve got a few minutes.”

  Brett said, “Turns out that when Robertson was out partying for Boston College’s homecoming night, he was accused of date-raping one of the female students, but she didn’t file any charges. It was in the campus police records, but because she didn’t give evidence, it didn’t make it onto his permanent record.”

  Alana asked, really only half-interested, being focused mainly on strategies for navigating a Zumpco corporate bureaucracy that would probably be hostile toward her for getting them prosecuted a month earlier, “So, he didn’t rape anyone named Veedock then?”

  “No. No, the young lady was named Victoria Xun Chu, went by Vicky. She lives with her brother in Los Angeles now, but I don’t see any reason to contact her. I think it’s a red herring.”

  Rhys had been admiring his pebble souvenir when he perked up, “Chu? Chinese girl?”

  “Yeah, first-generation Chinese-American immigrant, like Wen Jing. Sort of hit close to home. I don’t know what I’d do if—”

  On a whim, Rhys started typing on the desktop interface, “Chu’s pretty common, isn’t it? Can you spell her full name?”

  Brett pulled his phone from his pocket and checked his detective’s notes. He spelled the name out for Rhys, noting that ‘Xun’ was pronounced, ‘Shoon.’ Rhys quickly and intently searched the database. Alana and Brett both looked on, as they did not expect the name to provoke such a reaction from him. Alana asked, “What—”

  “Give me a minute!” Rhys quickly held up his index finger, and then returned to typing and shunting files and windows around. He double-thumped one document with his thumb, enlarging it. Then he did the same for another. Brett peered over the top and saw that Rhys was comparing two personnel dossiers, the pictures on each being a young Asian woman and an older, middle-aged Asian man. Rhys stopped typing and leaned back in his chair, saying, “It’s a small world, after all.”

  Alana asked, “What?”

  Rhys rubbed his chin, “I don’t know if it means anything or not, but Victoria Xun Chu is the niece of ‘Mister’ Hui Zhou Chu, First Secretary of the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles, and he’s the man who stonewalled me when I interviewed him about their missing limo.”

  Alana said, “That’s...thin.”

  Rhys said, “Still, it’s an amazing coincidence in a world of over nine billion people.”

  Noting that it was now five minutes until she was scheduled to meet with Chief Bennett, Alana stood, and on her way out of the office, she said, “Then why don’t you two brainstorm a bit and look into Chu’s extended family? Maybe there’s a bigger connection?”

  The door closed. Brett and Rhys exchanged empty stares for a long moment before Brett finally nodded in the direction of Alana’s desk and asked, “Think she’d mind if I borrowed her desk since you’re using mine?”

  Rhys looked at the other desk, pondered the question a moment, and said, “Let’s just double up on yours. Pull up her chair, but don’t readjust it or anything. I know she’s finicky about that.”

  Brett said, “Tell you what. You take her chair, I’ll take mine, and we’ll both use my desktop.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Rhys said as he stood and the two detectives played a quick round of musical chairs.

  It quickly became clear to both of the men that one desk wasn’t big enough for both of them to work at, so Rhys stood and used the room’s electronic whiteboard instead. By the time Alana returned from her visit with Chief Bennett, almost an hour had passed. She opened the door to find the whiteboard plastered with dossiers of what must be the Chu family, five documents in all. She asked Brett, “Can I have my chair back?”

  Brett stood and rolled Alana’s chair back to its original spot behind her desk, and then returned to his, “That was a long meeting.”

  Alana decided to keep to herself that while half of the meeting was a conference call between her, Bennett, and Bennett’s boss, Superintendent Ruiz at Central, the other half was Bennett giving Ruiz advance notice of his intention to retire from police work at the end of the year. Bennett had taken the opportunity to recommend Alana as his replacement. Ruiz said he would take the recommendation under advisement, but Alana could tell from his tone that he wasn’t fully amenable to the idea. She imagined that it was because he preferred to promote his girlfriend, Tabitha Rhoem, instead.

  Rhys said, interrupting Alana’s thoughts on the realpolitik underpinning her career prospects, “I think that accounts for all of them.”

  Alana returned to her seat and, opened her log files, and began typing some notes therein, presumably from her meeting. After a minute where Brett and Rhys were silent, she said, “I’ll be done shortly. Don’t stop what you’re doing on my account.”

  Rhys said, “We may as well wait for you. I think we’ve got something.”

  Alana tapped away, focused on her desktop for another minute before swiping her fingers across the surface, closing her documents, and shunting them into their proper, virtual folders. She turned to look at the whiteboard and said, “Is this what their two-child policy looks like?”

  Brett nodded to Rhys, who began explaining as he pointed to the relevant dossiers, “This is First Secretary Hui Zhou Chu. He’s been stationed in Los Angeles as a consular of the Chinese government since February 1 of this year. However, he’s worked for the Chinese foreign ministry for over two decades.”

  Alana asked, “Why the First of February? That’s an odd date.”

  Rhys said, seeming as he h
ad always done to know the trivial explanation for everything, “Lunar calendar. The Chinese New Year was January Thirtieth of this year, so his was probably an annual appointment.”

  Brett said, “Which gives him plenty of opportunity to be involved in the chop-shop kidnappings.”

  Rhys pointed to two other dossiers, “This is his brother, Jun Lim Chu, and his sister-in-law, Su Yin Chu. They immigrated to the American Republic ten years ago, in 2080. They settled in the Boston area. Speaking of the two-child policy, they brought with them two children, their daughter, Victoria Xun Chu and their son, Louis Ning Chu. The parents moved back to China last year, but their children remained behind as naturalized Republic citizens.”

  Brett leaned back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head, plopped his feet on his desk, and crossed his legs at the ankles, “Tell her about Louis.”

  Alana asked, “Are you sure it’s the French pronunciation?”

  Rhys stopped mid-syllable, “Hmmm... No. I was assuming—making an ass of you and me again. But their family was originally from Haikou, on Hainan Island in the far South of China, so I was presuming that its proximity to the former French colony of Vietnam—”

  Alana waved both her hands in surrender, “Okay, okay! Fine. It’s, ‘Loo-ee.’ Go on.”

  Rhys continued, “Louis graduated magna cum laude and went on to get a master’s degree in information science from MIT at age twenty-four, in 2086.”

  Alana’s attention was firmly grabbed by that information, “Please, continue.”

  “Louis took a job with Zumpco Robotics right out of MIT, which prompted him to move to Los Angeles that year. In 2087, his sister, Victoria, was attending Boston College, where she was allegedly assaulted by Phil Robertson. She lived with her parents until 2088, when she also moved to LA and began sharing the same address as her brother.”

  Alana said, “I’m still waiting on the bombshell. Just because Louis worked for Zumpco and is a hotshot nerd doesn’t make him a cyborg hacker.”

  Rhys said, “On February Fifth of this year, three days after his uncle was assigned to the Chinese consulate, Louis Chu resigned from his job at Zumpco. As far as we can tell from his public records, he’s still unemployed. We looked at his professional social media, and as far as we can tell, he’s not even looking for a new position.”