by Peter Watts
The Watcher signs on to a forum where the expat Chinese congregate to reminisce and argue politics in their homeland. He posts the picture of the man in the video and writes below in English, “Anyone famous?” Then he sips his coffee and refreshes the screen from time to time to catch the new replies.
The Watcher doesn’t read Chinese (or Russian, or Arabic, or Hindi, or any of the other languages where he plies his trade), but linguistic skills are hardly necessary for this task. Most of the expats speak English and can understand his question. He’s just using these people as research tools, a human flesh-powered, crowdsourced search engine. It’s almost funny how people are so willing to give perfect strangers over the Internet information, would even compete with each other to do it, to show how knowledgeable they are. He’s pleased to make use of such petty vanities.
He simply needs a name and a measure of the prominence of the man, and for that, the crude translations offered by computers are sufficient.
From the almost-gibberish translations, he gathers that the man is a prominent official in the Chinese Transport Ministry, and like almost all Chinese officials, he’s despised by his countrymen. The man is a bigger deal than the Watcher’s usual targets, but that might make him a good demonstration.
The Watcher is thankful for Dagger, who had explained Chinese politics to him. One evening, after he had gotten out of jail the last time, the Watcher had hung back and watched a Chinese man rob a few Chinese tourists near San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The tourists had managed to make a call to 911, and the robber had fled the scene on foot down an alley. But the Watcher had seen something in the man’s direct, simple approach that he liked. He drove around the block, stopped by the other end of the alley, and when the man emerged, he swung open the passenger side door and offered him a chance to escape in his car. The man thanked him and told him his name was Dagger.
Dagger was talkative and told the Watcher how angry and envious people in China were of the Party officials, who lived an extravagant life on the money squeezed from the common people, took bribes, and funneled public funds to their relatives. He targeted those tourists who he thought were the officials’ wives and children, and regarded himself as a modern Robin Hood.
Yet, the officials were not completely immune. All it took was a public scandal of some kind, usually involving young women who were not their wives. Talk of democracy didn’t get people excited, but seeing an official rubbing their graft in their faces made them see red. And the Party apparatus would have no choice but to punish the disgraced officials, as the only thing the Party feared was public anger, which always threatened to boil out of control. If a revolution were to come to China, Dagger quipped, it would be triggered by mistresses, not speeches.
A light had gone on in the Watcher’s head then. It was as if he could see the reins of power flowing from those who had secrets to those who knew secrets. He thanked Dagger and dropped him off, wishing him well.
The Watcher imagines what the official’s visit to Boston had been like. He had probably come to learn about the city’s experience with light rail, but it was likely in reality just another State-funded vacation, a chance to shop at the luxury stores on Newbury Street, to enjoy expensive foods without fear of poison or pollution, and to anonymously take delight in quality female companionship without the threat of recording devices in the hands of an interested populace.
He posts the video to the forum, and as an extra flourish, adds a link to the official’s biography on the Transport Ministry’s web site. For a second, he regrets the forgone revenue, but it’s been a while since he’s done a demonstration, and these are necessary to keep the business going.
He packs up his laptop. Now he has to wait.
Ruth doesn’t think there’s much value in viewing Mona’s apartment, but she’s learned over the years to not leave any stone unturned. She gets the key from Sarah Ding and makes her way to the apartment around 6:00 in the evening. Viewing the site at approximately the time of day when the murder occurred can sometimes be helpful.
She passes through the living room. There’s a small TV facing a futon, the kind of furniture that a young woman keeps from her college days when she doesn’t have a reason to upgrade. It’s a living room that was never meant for visitors.
She moves into the room in which the murder happened. The forensics team has cleaned it out. The room—it wasn’t Mona’s real bedroom, which was a tiny cubby down the hall, with just a twin bed and plain walls—is stripped bare, most of the loose items having been collected as evidence. The mattress is naked, as are the nightstands. The carpet has been vacuumed. The place smells like a hotel room: stale air and faint perfume.
Ruth notices the line of mirrors along the side of the bed, hanging over the closet doors. Watching arouses people.
She imagines how lonely Mona must have felt living here, touched and kissed and fucked by a stream of men who kept as much of themselves hidden from her as possible. She imagines her sitting in front of the small TV to relax, and dressing up to meet her parents so that she could lie some more.
Ruth imagines the way the murderer had shot Mona, and then cut her after. Were there more than one of them so that Mona thought a struggle was useless? Did they shoot her right away or did they ask her to tell them where she had hidden her money first? She can feel the Regulator starting up again, keeping her emotions in check. Evil has to be confronted dispassionately.
She decides she’s seen all she needs to see. She leaves the apartment and pulls the door closed. As she heads for the stairs, she sees a man coming up, keys in hand. Their eyes briefly meet, and he turns to the door of the apartment across the hall.
Ruth is sure the police have interviewed the neighbor. But sometimes people will tell things to a nonthreatening woman that they are reluctant to tell the cops.
She walks over and introduces herself, explaining that she’s a friend of Mona’s family, here to tie up some loose ends. The man, whose name is Peter, is wary but shakes her hand.
“I didn’t hear or see anything. We pretty much keep to ourselves in this building.”
“I believe you. But it would be helpful if we can chat a bit anyway. The family didn’t know much about her life here.”
He nods reluctantly and opens the door. He steps in and waves his arms up and around in a complex sequence as though he’s conducting an orchestra. The lights come on.
“That’s pretty fancy,” Ruth says. “You have the whole place wired up like that?”
His voice, cautious and guarded until now, grows animated. Talking about something other than the murder seems to relax him. “Yes. It’s called EchoSense. They add an adaptor to your wireless router and a few antennas around the room, and then it uses the Doppler shifts generated by your body’s movements in the radio waves to detect gestures.”
“You mean it can see you move with just the signals from your Wi-Fi bouncing around the room?”
“Something like that.”
Ruth remembers seeing an infomercial about this. She notes how small the apartment is and how little space separates it from Mona’s. They sit down and chat about what Peter remembers about Mona.
“Pretty girl. Way out of my league, but she was always pleasant.”
“Did she get a lot of visitors?”
“I don’t pry into other people’s business. But yeah, I remember lots of visitors, mostly men. I did think she might have been an escort. But that didn’t bother me. The men always seemed clean, business types. Not dangerous.”
“No one who looked like a gangster, for example?”
“I wouldn’t know what gangsters look like. But no, I don’t think so.”
They chat on inconsequentially for another fifteen minutes, and Ruth decides that she’s wasted enough time.
“Can I buy the router from you?” she asks. “And the EchoSense thing.”
“You can just order your own set online.”
“I hate shopping online. You can
never return things. I know this one works; so I want it. I’ll offer you two thousand, cash.”
He considers this.
“I bet you can buy a new one and get another adaptor yourself from EchoSense for less than a quarter of that.”
He nods and retrieves the router, and she pays him. The act feels somehow illicit, not unlike how she imagines Mona’s transactions were.
Ruth posts an ad to a local classifieds site describing in vague terms what she’s looking for. Boston is blessed with many good colleges and lots of young men and women who would relish a technical challenge even more than the money she offers. She looks through the resumes until she finds the one she feels has the right skills: jailbreaking phones, reverse-engineering proprietary protocols, a healthy disrespect for acronyms like DMCA and CFAA.
She meets the young man at her office and explains what she wants. Daniel, dark-skinned, lanky, and shy, slouches in the chair across from hers as he listens without interrupting.
“Can you do it?” she asks.
“Maybe,” he says. “Companies like this one will usually send customer data back to the mothership anonymously to help improve their technology. Sometimes the data is cached locally for a while. It’s possible I’ll find logs on there a month old. If it’s there, I’ll get it for you. But I’ll have to figure out how they’re encoding the data and then make sense of it.”
“Do you think my theory is plausible?”
“I’m impressed you even came up with it. Wireless signals can go through walls, so it’s certainly possible that this adaptor has captured the movements of people in neighboring apartments. It’s a privacy nightmare, and I’m sure the company doesn’t publicize that.”
“How long will it take?”
“As little as a day or as much as a month. I won’t know until I start. It will help if you can draw me a map of the apartments and what’s inside.”
Ruth does as he asked. Then she tells him, “I’ll pay you three hundred dollars a day, with a five thousand dollar bonus if you succeed this week.”
“Deal.” He grins and picks up the router, getting ready to leave.
Because it never hurts to tell people what they’re doing is meaningful, she adds, “You’re helping to catch the killer of a young woman who’s not much older than you.”
Then she goes home because she’s run out of things to try.
The first hour after waking up is always the worst part of the day for Ruth.
As usual, she wakes from a nightmare. She lies still, disoriented, the images from her dream superimposed over the sight of the water stains on the ceiling. Her body is drenched in sweat.
The man holds Jessica in front of him with his left hand while the gun in his right hand is pointed at her head. She’s terrified, but not of him. He ducks so that her body shields his, and he whispers something into her ear.
“Mom! Mom!” she screams. “Don’t shoot. Please don’t shoot!”
Ruth rolls over, nauseated. She sits up at the edge of the bed, hating the smell of the hot room, the dust that she never has time to clean filling the air pierced by bright rays coming in from the east-facing window. She shoves the sheets off of her and stands up quickly, her breath coming too fast. She’s fighting the rising panic without any help, alone, her Regulator off.
The clock on the nightstand says 6:00.
She’s crouching behind the opened driver’s side door of her car. Her hands shake as she struggles to keep the man’s head, bobbing besides her daughter’s, in the sight of her gun. If she turns on her Regulator, she thinks her hands may grow steady and give her a clear shot at him.
What are her chances of hitting him instead of her? Ninety-five percent? Ninety-nine?
“Mom! Mom! No!”
She gets up and stumbles into the kitchen to turn on the coffeemaker. She curses when she finds the can empty and throws it clattering into the sink. The noise shocks her and she cringes.
Then she struggles into the shower, sluggishly, painfully, as though the muscles that she conditions daily through hard exercise were not there. She turns on the hot water but it brings no warmth to her shivering body.
Grief descends on her like a heavy weight. She sits down in the shower, curling her body into itself. Water streams down her face so she does not know if there are tears as her body heaves.
She fights the impulse to turn on the Regulator. It’s not time yet. She has to give her body the necessary rest.
The Regulator, a collection of chips and circuitry embedded at the top of her spine, is tied into the limbic system and the major blood vessels into the brain. Like its namesake from mechanical and electrical engineering, it maintains the levels of dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin and other chemicals in the brain and in her blood stream. It filters out the chemicals when there’s an excess, and releases them when there’s a deficit.
And it obeys her will.
The implant allows a person control over her basic emotions: fear, disgust, joy, excitement, love. It’s mandatory for law enforcement officers, a way to minimize the effects of emotions on life-or-death decisions, a way to eliminate prejudice and irrationality.
“You have clearance to shoot,” the voice in her headset tells her. It’s the voice of her husband, Scott, the head of her department. His voice is completely calm. His Regulator is on.
She sees the head of the man bobbing up and down as he retreats with Jessica. He’s heading for the van parked by the side of the road.
“He’s got other hostages in there,” her husband continues to speak in her ear. “If you don’t shoot, you put the lives of those three other girls and who knows how many other people in danger. This is our best chance.”
The sound of sirens, her backup, is still faint. Too far away.
After what seems an eternity, she manages to stand up in the shower and turn off the water. She towels herself dry and dresses slowly. She tries to think of something, anything, to take her mind off its current track. But nothing works.
She despises the raw state of her mind. Without the Regulator, she feels weak, confused, angry. Waves of despair wash over her and everything appears in hopeless shades of gray. She wonders why she’s still alive.
It will pass, she thinks. Just a few more minutes.
Back when she had been on the force, she had adhered to the regulation requirement not to leave the Regulator on for more than two hours at a time. There are physiological and psychological risks associated with prolonged use. Some of her fellow officers had also complained about the way the Regulator made them feel robotic, deadened. No excitement from seeing a pretty woman; no thrill at the potential for a car chase; no righteous anger when faced with an act of abuse. Everything had to be deliberate: you decided when to let the adrenaline flow, and just enough to get the job done and not too much to interfere with judgment. But sometimes, they argued, you needed emotions, instinct, intuition.
Her Regulator had been off when she came home that day and recognized the man hiding from the city-wide manhunt.
Have I been working too much? she thinks. I don’t know any of her friends. When did Jess meet him? Why didn’t I ask her more questions when she was coming home late every night? Why did I stop for lunch instead of coming home half an hour earlier? There are a thousand things I could have done and should have done and would have done.
Fear and anger and regret are mixed up in her until she cannot tell which is which.
“Engage your Regulator,” her husband’s voice tells her. “You can make the shot.”
Why do I care about the lives of the other girls? she thinks. All I care about is Jess. Even the smallest chance of hurting her is too much.
Can she trust a machine to save her daughter? Should she rely on a machine to steady her shaking hands, to clear her blurry vision, to make a shot without missing?
“Mom, he’s going to let me go later. He won’t hurt me. He just wants to get away from here. Put the gun down!”
Maybe Scott can make a
calculus about lives saved and lives put at risk. She won’t. She will not trust a machine.
“It’s okay, baby,” she croaks out. “It’s all going to be okay.”
She does not turn on the Regulator. She does not shoot.
Later, after she had identified the body of Jess—the bodies of all four of the girls had been badly burnt when the bomb went off—after she had been disciplined and discharged, after Scott and she had split up, after she had found no solace in alcohol and pills, she did finally find the help she needed: she could leave the Regulator on all the time.
The Regulator deadened the pain, stifled grief and numbed the ache of loss. It held down the regret, made it possible to pretend to forget. She craved the calmness it brought, the blameless, serene clarity.
She had been wrong to distrust it. That distrust had cost her Jess. She would not make the same mistake again.
Sometimes she thinks of the Regulator as a dependable lover, a comforting presence to lean on. Sometimes she thinks she’s addicted. She does not probe deeply behind these thoughts.
She would have preferred to never have to turn off the Regulator, to never be in a position to repeat her mistake. But even Doctor B balked at that (“Your brain will turn into mush.”). The illegal modifications he did agree to make allow the Regulator to remain on for a maximum of twenty-three hours at a stretch. Then she must take an hour-long break during which she must remain conscious.
And so there’s always this hour in the morning, right as she wakes, when she’s naked and alone with her memories, unshielded from the rush of red-hot hatred (for the man? for herself?) and white-cold rage, and the black, bottomless abyss that she endures as her punishment.
The alarm beeps. She concentrates like a monk in meditation and feels the hum of the Regulator starting up. Relief spreads out from the center of her mind to the very tips of her fingers, the soothing, numbing serenity of a regulated, disciplined mind. To be regulated is to be a regular person.