Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  Ruth refrains from explaining that the police detectives are all fitted with Regulators that should make the kind of prejudice she’s implying impossible. The whole point of the Regulator is to make police work under pressure more regular, less dependent on hunches, emotional impulses, appeals to hidden prejudice. If the police are calling it a gang-related act of violence, there are likely good reasons for doing so.

  She says nothing because the woman in front of her is in pain, and guilt and love are so mixed up in her that she thinks paying to find her daughter’s killer will make her feel better about being the kind of mother whose daughter would take up prostitution.

  Her angry, helpless posture reminds Ruth vaguely of something she tries to put out of her mind.

  “Even if I find the killer,” she says, “it won’t make you feel better.”

  “I don’t care.” Sarah tries to shrug but the American gesture looks awkward and uncertain on her. “My husband thinks I’ve gone crazy. I know how hopeless this is; you’re not the first investigator I’ve spoken to. But a few suggested you because you’re a woman and Chinese, so maybe you care just enough to see something they can’t.”

  She reaches into her purse and retrieves a check, sliding it across the table to put on top of the file. “Here’s eighty thousand dollars. I’ll pay double your daily rate and all expenses. If you use it up, I can get you more.”

  Ruth stares at the check. She thinks about the sorry state of her finances. At forty-nine, how many more chances will she have to set aside some money for when she’ll be too old to do this?

  She still feels calm and completely rational, and she knows that the Regulator is doing its job. She’s sure that she’s making her decision based on costs and benefits and a realistic evaluation of the case, and not because of the hunched over shoulders of Sarah Ding, looking like fragile twin dams holding back a flood of grief.

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

  The man’s name isn’t Robert. It’s not Paul or Matt or Barry either. He never uses the name John because jokes like that will only make the girls nervous. A long time ago, before he had been to prison, they had called him the Watcher because he liked to observe and take in a scene, finding the best opportunities and escape routes. He still thinks of himself that way when he’s alone.

  In the room he’s rented at the cheap motel along Route 128, he starts his day by taking a shower to wash off the night sweat.

  This is the fifth motel he’s stayed in during the last month. Any stay longer than a week tends to catch the attention of the people working at the motels. He watches; he does not get watched. Ideally, he supposes he should get away from Boston altogether, but he hasn’t exhausted the city’s possibilities. It doesn’t feel right to leave before he’s seen all he wants to see.

  The Watcher got about sixty thousand dollars in cash from the girl’s apartment, not bad for a day’s work. The girls he picks are intensely aware of the brevity of their careers, and with no bad habits, they pack away money like squirrels preparing for the winter. Since they can’t exactly put it into the bank without raising the suspicion of the IRS, they tuck the money away in stashes in their apartments, ready for him to come along and claim them like found treasure.

  The money is a nice bonus, but not the main attraction.

  He comes out of the shower, dries himself, and wrapped in a towel, sits down to work at the nut he’s trying to crack. It’s a small, silver half-sphere, like half of a walnut. When he had first gotten it, it had been covered in blood and gore, and he had wiped it again and again with paper towels moistened under the motel sink until it gleamed.

  He pries open an access port on the back of the device. Opening his laptop, he plugs one end of a cable into it and the other end into the half-sphere. He starts a program he had paid a good sum of money for and lets it run. It would probably be more efficient for him to leave the program running all the time, but he likes to be there to see the moment the encryption is broken.

  While the program runs, he browses the escort ads. Right now he’s searching for pleasure, not business, so instead of looking for girls like Jasmine, he looks for girls he craves. They’re expensive, but not too expensive, the kind that remind him of the girls he had wanted back in high school: loud, fun, curvaceous now but destined to put on too much weight in a few years, a careless beauty that was all the more desirable because it was fleeting.

  The Watcher knows that only a poor man like he had been at seventeen would bother courting women, trying desperately to make them like him. A man with money, with power, like he is now, can buy what he wants. There’s purity and cleanliness to his desire that he feels is nobler and less deceitful than the desire of poor men. They only wish they could have what he does.

  The program beeps, and he switches back to it.

  Success.

  Images, videos, sound recordings are being downloaded onto the computer.

  The Watcher browses through the pictures and video recordings. The pictures are face shots or shots of money being handed over—he immediately deletes the ones of him.

  But the videos are the best. He settles back and watches the screen flicker, admiring Jasmine’s camerawork.

  He separates the videos and images by client and puts them into folders. It’s tedious work, but he enjoys it.

  The first thing Ruth does with the money is to get some badly needed tune-ups. Going after a killer requires that she be in top condition.

  She does not like to carry a gun when she’s on the job. A man in a sport coat with a gun concealed under it can blend into almost any situation, but a woman wearing the kind of clothes that would hide a gun would often stick out like a sore thumb. Keeping a gun in a purse is a terrible idea. It creates a false sense of security, but a purse can be easily snatched away and then she would be disarmed.

  She’s fit and strong for her age, but her opponents are almost always taller and heavier and stronger. She’s learned to compensate for these disadvantages by being more alert and by striking earlier.

  But it’s still not enough.

  She goes to her doctor. Not the one on her HMO card.

  Doctor B had earned his degree in another country and then had to leave home forever because he pissed off the wrong people. Instead of doing a second residency and becoming licensed here, which would have made him easily traceable, he had decided to simply keep on practicing medicine on his own. He would do things doctors who cared about their licenses wouldn’t do. He would take patients they wouldn’t touch.

  “It’s been a while,” Doctor B says.

  “Check over everything,” she tells him. “And replace what needs replacement.”

  “Rich uncle die?”

  “I’m going on a hunt.”

  Doctor B nods and puts her under.

  He checks the pneumatic pistons in her legs, the replacement composite tendons in her shoulders and arms, the power cells and artificial muscles in her arms, the reinforced finger bones. He recharges what needs to be recharged. He examines the results of the calcium-deposition treatments (a counter to the fragility of her bones, an unfortunate side effect of her Asian heritage), and makes adjustments to her Regulator so that she can keep it on for longer.

  “Like new,” he tells her. And she pays.

  Next, Ruth looks through the file Sarah brought.

  There are photographs: the prom, high school graduation, vacations with friends, college commencement. She notes the name of the school without surprise or sorrow even though Jess had dreamed of going there as well. The Regulator, as always, keeps her equanimous, receptive to information, only useful information.

  The last family photo Sarah selected was taken at Mona’s twenty-fourth birthday earlier in the year. Ruth examines it carefully. In the picture, Mona is seated between Sarah and her husband, her arms around her parents in a gesture of careless joy. There’s no hint of the secret she was keeping from them, and no sign, as far as Ruth can tell, of bruises, drugs, or other indica
tions that life was slipping out of her control.

  Sarah had chosen the photos with care. The pictures are designed to fill in Mona’s life, to make people care for her. But she didn’t need to do that. Ruth would have given it the same amount of effort even if she knew nothing about the girl’s life. She’s a professional.

  There’s a copy of the police report and the autopsy results. The report mostly confirms what Ruth has already guessed: no sign of drugs in Mona’s systems, no forced entry, no indication there was a struggle. There was pepper spray in the drawer of the nightstand, but it hadn’t been used. Forensics had vacuumed the scene and the hair and skin cells of dozens, maybe hundreds, of men had turned up, guaranteeing that no useful leads will result.

  Mona had been killed with two shots through the heart, and then her body had been mutilated, with her eyes removed. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted. The apartment had been ransacked of cash and valuables.

  Ruth sits up. The method of killing is odd. If the killer had intended to mutilate her face anyway, there was no reason to not shoot her in the back of the head, a cleaner, surer method of execution.

  A note was found at the scene in Chinese, which declared that Mona had been punished for her sins. Ruth can’t read Chinese but she assumes the police translation is accurate. The police had also pulled Mona’s phone records. There were a few numbers whose cell tower data showed their owners had been to Mona’s place that day. The only one without an alibi was a prepaid phone without a registered owner. The police had tracked it down in Chinatown, hidden in a dumpster. They hadn’t been able to get any further.

  A rather sloppy kill, Ruth thinks, if the gangs did it.

  Sarah had also provided printouts of Mona’s escort ads. Mona had used several aliases: Jasmine, Akiko, Sinn. Most of the pictures are of her in lingerie, a few in cocktail dresses. The shots are framed to emphasize her body: a side view of her breasts half-veiled in lace, a back view of her buttocks, lounging on the bed with her hand over her hip. Shots of her face have black bars over her eyes to provide some measure of anonymity.

  Ruth boots up her computer and logs onto the sites to check out the other ads. She had never worked in vice, so she takes a while to familiarize herself with the lingo and acronyms. The Internet had apparently transformed the business, allowing women to get off the streets and become “independent providers” without pimps. The sites are organized to allow customers to pick out exactly what they want. They can sort and filter by price, age, services provided, ethnicity, hair and eye color, time of availability, and customer ratings. The business is competitive, and there’s a brutal efficiency to the sites that Ruth might have found depressing without the Regulator: you can measure, if you apply statistical software to it, how much a girl depreciates with each passing year, how much value men place on each pound, each inch of deviation from the ideal they’re seeking, how much more a blonde really is worth than a brunette, and how much more a girl who can pass as Japanese can charge than one who cannot.

  Some of the ad sites charge a membership fee to see pictures of the girls’ faces. Sarah had also printed these “premium” photographs of Mona. For a brief moment Ruth wonders what Sarah must have felt as she paid to unveil the seductive gaze of her daughter, the daughter who had seemed to have a trouble-free, promising future.

  In these pictures Mona’s face was made up lightly, her lips curved in a promising or innocent smile. She was extraordinarily pretty, even compared to the other girls in her price range. She dictated in-calls only, perhaps believing them to be safer, with her being more in control.

  Compared to most of the other girls, Mona’s ads can be described as “elegant.” They’re free of spelling errors and overtly crude language, hinting at the kind of sexual fantasies that men here harbor about Asian women while also promising an American wholesomeness, the contrast emphasizing the strategically placed bits of exoticism.

  The anonymous customer reviews praised her attitude and willingness to “go the extra mile.” Ruth supposes that Mona had earned good tips.

  Ruth turns to the crime scene photos and the bloody, eyeless shots of Mona’s face. Intellectually and dispassionately, she absorbs the details in Mona’s room. She contemplates the contrast between them and the eroticism of the ad photos. This was a young woman who had been vain about her education, who had believed that she could construct, through careful words and images, a kind of filter to attract the right kind of clients. It was naïve and wise at the same time, and Ruth can almost feel, despite the Regulator, a kind of poignancy to her confident desperation.

  Whatever caused her to go down this path, she had never hurt anyone, and now she was dead.

  Ruth meets Luo in a room reached through long underground tunnels and many locked doors. It smells of mold and sweat and spicy foods rotting in trash bags.

  Along the way she saw a few other locked rooms behind which she guessed were human cargo, people who indentured themselves to the snakeheads for a chance to be smuggled into this country so they could work for a dream of wealth. She says nothing about them. Her deal with Luo depends on her discretion, and Luo is kinder to his cargo than many others.

  He pats her down perfunctorily. She offers to strip to show that she’s not wired. He waves her off.

  “Have you seen this woman?” she asks in Cantonese, holding up a picture of Mona.

  Luo dangles the cigarette from his lips while he examines the picture closely. The dim light gives the tattoos on his bare shoulders and arms a greenish tint. After a moment, he hands it back. “I don’t think so.”

  “She was a prostitute working out of Quincy. Someone killed her a month ago and left this behind.” She brings out the photograph of the note left at the scene. “The police think the Chinese gangs did it.”

  Luo looks at the photo. He knits his brow in concentration and then barks out a dry laugh. “Yes, this is indeed a note left behind by a Chinese gang.”

  “Do you recognize the gang?”

  “Sure.” Luo looks at Ruth, a grin revealing the gaps in his teeth. “This note was left behind by the impetuous Tak-Kao, member of the Forever Peace Gang, after he killed the innocent Mai-Ying, the beautiful maid from the mainland, in a fit of jealousy. You can see the original in the third season of My Hong Kong, Your Hong Kong. You’re lucky that I’m a fan.”

  “This is copied from a soap opera?”

  “Yes. Either your man likes to make jokes or he doesn’t know Chinese well and got this from some Internet search. It might fool the police, but no, we wouldn’t leave a note like that.” He chuckles at the thought and then spits on the ground.

  “Maybe it was just a fake to confuse the police.” She chooses her words carefully. “Or maybe it was done by one gang to sic the police onto the others. The police also found a phone, probably used by the killer, in a Chinatown dumpster. I know there are several Asian massage parlors in Quincy, so maybe this girl was too much competition. Are you sure you don’t know anything about this?”

  Luo flips through the other photographs of Mona. Ruth watches him, getting ready to react to any sudden movements. She thinks she can trust Luo, but one can’t always predict the reaction of a man who often has to kill to make his living.

  She concentrates on the Regulator, priming it to release adrenaline to quicken her movements if necessary. The pneumatics in her legs are charged, and she braces her back against the damp wall in case she needs to kick out. The sudden release of pressure in the air canisters installed next to her tibia will straighten her legs in a fraction of a second, generating hundreds of pounds of force. If her feet connect with Luo’s chest, she will almost certainly break a few ribs—though Ruth’s back will ache for days afterwards, as well.

  “I like you, Ruth,” Luo says, noting her sudden stillness out of the corner of his eyes. “You don’t have to be afraid. I haven’t forgotten how you found that bookie who tried to steal from me. I’ll always tell you the truth or tell you I can’t answer. We have nothing to do wit
h this girl. She’s not really competition. The men who go to massage parlors for sixty dollars an hour and a happy ending are not the kind who’d pay for a girl like this.”

  The Watcher drives to Somerville, just over the border from Cambridge, north of Boston. He parks in the back of a grocery store parking lot, where his Toyota Corolla, bought off a lot with cash, doesn’t stick out.

  Then he goes into a coffee shop and emerges with an iced coffee. Sipping it, he walks around the sunny streets, gazing from time to time at the little gizmo attached to his keychain. The gizmo tells him when he’s in range of some unsecured home wireless network. Lots of students from Harvard and MIT live here, where the rent is high but not astronomical. Addicted to good wireless access, they often get powerful routers for tiny apartments and leak the network onto the streets without bothering to secure them (after all, they have friends coming over all the time who need to remain connected). And since it’s summer, when the population of students is in flux, there’s even less likelihood that he can be traced from using one of their networks.

  It’s probably overkill, but he likes to be safe.

  He sits down on a bench by the side of the street, takes out his laptop, and connects to a network called “INFORMATION_WANTS_TO_BE_FREE.” He enjoys disproving the network owner’s theory. Information doesn’t want to be free. It’s valuable and wants to earn. And its existence doesn’t free anyone; possessing it, however, can do the opposite.

  The Watcher carefully selects a segment of video and watches it one last time.

  Jasmine had done a good job, intentionally or not, with the framing, and the man’s sweaty grimace is featured prominently in the video. His movements—and as a result, Jasmine’s—made the video jerky, and so he’s had to apply software image stabilization. But now it looks quite professional.

  The Watcher had tried to identify the man, who looks Chinese, by uploading a picture he got from Jasmine into a search engine. They are always making advancements in facial recognition software, and sometimes he gets hits this way. But it didn’t seem to work this time. That’s not a problem for the Watcher. He has other techniques.