by M. H. Mead
Talic shrugged. “He resisted.” Amused agreement rippled through the rest of the Vice squad. Andre looked from one to the other, forcing them to meet his eyes. All these men and women in kevlar and kincloth, carrying assault weapons, not one of them with a single scratch. He turned and looked at Reem on the ground in shorts and a t-shirt, his unprepared bodyguards at his side, one of them barefoot. How much could they have resisted?
“He shot first,” one of the younger officers insisted.
“Really.”
Talic walked away, motioning Andre to follow. He turned the corner into Reem’s front yard. “I can prove it. He pointed across the street to the attic where Andre had been hiding. “Actually, you can prove it. Thanks.”
Andre stared at the missing chunk of siding where he’d set up his camera. Talic had screwed him to the wall, making sure he was present at Reem’s execution so that Quigg wouldn’t be. Andre’s sting had gotten him less than nothing—he was now Talic’s witness, his recording with its inconclusive perspective the only record. He’d only cemented Talic’s position.
Talic waved at the camera, again touching fingertips to head in the okay sign.
Andre clawed at his holster, whipping out the Guardian.
Talic ducked away, arms up. “Whoa, whoa.”
Andre ignored him, took his stance, and fired. It was far for a short-range weapon, clear across the street and three stories high, but he hit his target on the first shot, leaving a very neat hole where his camera used to be.
Talic stood upright as Andre holstered the Guardian. He closed his mouth, pursed his lips, and shrugged again. “Makes no difference. If the biggest glaze dealer in Detroit wants to suicide-by-cop, I’m not going to stop him. One way or another, he needed to be taken out.”
“And you’re the hero who did it.”
“Somebody is.”
Andre nodded. “Which makes me the asshole for insisting you do it legally.”
“Here’s some more advice,” Talic crossed his arms over his chest. “If I have to choose between hero and asshole, hero wins every time.”
THE MORNING AFTER HIS interrupted tryst with Sofia, Andre wove his way through the technical department’s maze of cubicles. He kicked aside a fast-food wrapper that a careless tech had left, wrinkling his nose as a sour whiff hit him. It smelled like the twisting streets of the zone. He concentrated on finding his way to Jordan Elway’s office.
They called it The Labyrinth. He walked the maze of sound-absorbing poly-board walls, glowing screens, and tech experts lost in the world of the unreal, consulting his pad and counting lefts and rights, ignoring expressions that changed instantly from recognition to hostility. He hoped his geek shield would hold long enough for him to find Elway.
Jordan Elway rated a tiny cubicle near the center of the labyrinth. It was basically all holostage, leaving room for a float chair and a single flatscreen. The flatscreen was running three programs, all of them so cryptic and bizarre that Elway had no need for a privacy shield, since nobody would understand what he was doing anyway. The tech reclined in the chair, like an astronaut or an embryo, headphones over his ears, datashades over his eyes, leaving his body vulnerable while his mind disappeared into the electronic universe.
Andre had the urge to kick the younger man, or soak his pants with coffee, or shave half his head—anything to show Elway that he couldn’t just check out like that. Instead he tapped Elway’s outstretched foot until Elway found his way back to the tangible. He sat up in his chair and offered a hand which Andre shook. “Thanks for coming on a Sunday, Sergeant.”
“You said you had something.” Andre glanced around the open office. “Something you didn’t want to say over the phone.”
“Right. Let me make sure we can’t be disturbed.” He called out commands and a baffle of white noise filled the cubicle.
Elway reached into a pocket, produced Andre’s fourthing badge, and pressed it into his hand. The badge looked fine, holographic seal in place, name and badge number still legible on the face.
“You were right,” Elway said.
“It’s being tracked?”
“Also wrong,” Elway continued. “See, that was the difficult part. Once we knew it was transmitting, we had to reverse-engineer the receiver. It was harder than you probably imagine.”
“I don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Imagine that kind of thing.” Andre turned the badge over and over in his hand. It seemed lighter somehow, as if signals emanating from it carried away part of the badge itself. He focused on Elway. “Go on.”
Elway spoke to the air. “Give me dogtag one.”
A holostage lit and a ghostly image of a badge hovered in the air and solidified until it was visibly identical to the one in Andre’s hand. “This—” Elway’s hand brushed the interface and a barcode pattern of blue lines rose out of the card. “—is the encoded signature, the information the state encodes on a fourthing badge when it is issued. The buried tech is just microns, as are the transmission bursts. The nanotech is brilliant.”
“Why does the state want to track fourths?”
“They don’t. Or, it doesn’t appear that way.” Elway tried, and failed, to look humble. “Once I had the receiver, it was easy to trace the microburst emissions to Ann Arbor.” He nodded at Andre’s confused expression. “To Honeywell, to be exact.”
Andre leaned against the cubicle doorjamb and pressed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Elway, can you turn off the fireworks? They’re giving me a headache.”
“Sure, sure.” The holographic display disappeared and Elway’s lights returned to office normal.
“What’s Honeywell? Some kind of tech company?”
“It’s a person. Dr. Brenda Honeywell.”
“That’s a name?”
“She’s a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. Doing a study on the intersection of technology, movement, and commerce in Detroit. Specifically, she’s studying the fourths. She even has tacit government permission—I’ve read her prospectus—although I’m almost certain the university didn’t share the details of the study’s methods.”
Andre had already made the next jump. “Can she tell us where individual fourths were at certain times?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. We have an appointment with Professor Honeywell.”
Professor Brenda Honeywell. The kind of name that conjured up images of long blond hair and even longer legs, high heels and low-cut blouses, too much eye make-up and bright red lipstick. Brenda Honeywell was every gorgeous but slightly slutty girl on the daytime telenovelas. Andre stood straight and put his fantasies on hold. Economics professor? She’d be fifty if she was a day.
HE WAS WRONG. BRENDA HONEYWELL wasn’t fifty. She was at least sixty-five. Overweight, with gray hair lopped off at the chin, a drooping butt, and tits to match. She stood in front of her office door on the University of Michigan campus, her arms crossed and shoulders sagging, as if six decades of gravity were pressing down on her all at once. “You’re the cops, huh? Let’s see some ID.”
Andre produced his police shield.
She studied it then turned her watery gaze on Elway. “What about you? Where’s your credentials?”
“I’m not an officer. I don’t have a shield.” Elway held up the laminated card that dangled from his neck lanyard. “I have a glorified hall pass.”
She ushered them into her office, which made Elway’s cubicle look like a monk’s cell. Everything was shiny metal or matte black, with enough glowing red LED’s to stop traffic on Woodward. She ignored Andre and held out a gnarled hand to Elway. Honeywell’s eyes flicked left, then right, gazing into the middle distance, then away. Was something wrong with her vision? She didn’t wear glasses and her eyes were bright and focused, just not on them. “Only three years out of school, which makes you, what, twenty-five?”
“Twenty-six next month.” Elway stared at Honeywell like a little-leaguer meeting a starting
pitcher for the Tigers. He actually sighed a bit.
Honeywell crossed her arms. “You got a boss I can talk to?”
“Well,” Elway said. “I report to a task force that—”
“No,” Andre interrupted. “We’re not here to question your methods or shut down your study. We just need some answers. Your work is crucial to an ongoing police investigation.”
“That’s vague.”
“Your work in tracking fourths around the city.”
“Ah.” She seemed to be looking around them instead of at them.
Elway asked, “Did you fabricate the tracking tech?”
“I had nothing to do with that. The embedded nano is part of the manufacturing. Baked right in at the outset. Contracted with a grant from my funding.” The set of her jaw was self-righteous. “When they redesigned the badges thirty months ago? That’s when the chips went in.”
Andre nodded, remembering that he’d liked the more professional-looking badges. “So your study is federally-funded.”
Honeywell did not say, “Of course.” She didn’t need to. “Every city in the US wants to know how Detroit renewed its urban core, how the boom keeps on booming.”
“Which is why the econ summit is being held here.”
“Don’t interrupt me, Sergeant.” She looked off again, her expression remote. “My grant is from the NTSB. They are curious about fourths.”
“And, it just so happens, so are we.”
“It’s pure data,” Honeywell said. “You won’t be able to touch it or feel it or lick it or whatever you kids do with your real. Nothing leaves this room.”
“Agreed.”
Again with the eye flick, this time slightly above their heads, as if she were examining their auras or seeing something just beyond them. Andre turned to look over his shoulder.
Elway continued to stare at Honeywell, wide-eyed and awestruck. His hand crept to the spot just behind his right ear. “How long have you had it?”
“The chip?” Honeywell asked. “Longer than you’ve been alive, young man.”
Elway sighed again, this one tinged with envy. Andre understood. Honeywell had something Elway would never have. Head chips had been outlawed for years. Too many failures, too hard to update. But you still found people with fully-functioning processors in their heads, most of them senior citizens with superhuman recall and an arrogance that bordered on nasty.
“My data isn’t going to do you any good.” Honeywell turned her back and called out commands. The blank wall at the back of the room bloomed to life, showing a satellite-assisted map, not only of Detroit proper, but the entire sprawling immensity of all of southeastern Michigan. The main highways—94 and 96—crossed the city like a giant X, with 75 running north and south through the center. Cityheart and New Center were twin black holes that swallowed workers every weekday. Around the city was the dark gray oh-zone—wider on the western and northern edges, with the eastern edge disappearing into a thin slice as city and suburb bumped against each other. She’d labeled it disincorporated zone. The lighter gray suburbs and the Downriver area were called commutable. Beyond that was pure white, labeled edge city. Andre realized that the regions on the wall exactly matched the map in his head. Honeywell had codified what every fourth instinctively knew.
Overlapping multi-colored lines crosshatched the city in a pronounced pattern, flowing along the spiderweb of highways.
“I don’t study fourths,” Honeywell said. “I study fourthing. I track fourths only in aggregate over long periods. I don’t violate privacy laws, nor do I breach the ethics standards of U of M.”
Andre approached the map and she blinked it away. She folded her arms and glared. “Anything else I can help you with?”
Andre found the screen he wanted on his datapad—the murdered men and their badge numbers. He held it out to Honeywell. “These are the fourths I’m interested in. So if you can just plug them into your system, or whatever, I’d like to see where they went.”
Honeywell either rolled her eyes or consulted information at the top of her vision. Hard to tell with a chip-head, although he supposed the effect was the same. “Even if I could track individual fourths—which I can’t—what good would that do me? The data from a single source doesn’t tell me about the movement of fourths in general.”
“Um, professor?” Elway broke in. “Isn’t your receiver set up in an intersticing spiral configuration?”
“So?”
“The only way to isolate individual signals is to tag them with an identifying marker, and they’re already coded with a badge number. Even if that information is stripped out before the signals enter your lab—”
Honeywell snatched the datapad out of Andre’s hands and waved it in Elway’s face. “And I want a lawsuit from these people? Unless you have a court order—”
“I don’t need a court order.”
“You do if you want my data. If these people don’t sue me, the university will.”
“They can’t sue you,” Andre said. “They’re dead.”
“Dear dog.” Honeywell blinked and the map was back, minus the colorful webwork. “Does it always take you this long to get to the point? What do you want, a week’s worth? Two?”
“Six?” Andre glanced at Elway, who nodded. “Yes, six.”
“Here you go. Matthew Davis Shepler.” A blue line retraced itself in a right-angle over the roadways, rarely in the same place twice. It glowed and faded. “Arthur Yalna.” A purple line this time, performing the same dance around the city, branching and re-branching; fading. “Homer Carcassi.” Yellow. “Douglas Ming.” Red. “Russell van Slater.” Orange. She put her hand on her forehead, plastering gray bangs over her eyes. “What does that tell you? Fourths get around.”
Andre frowned. He’d only glanced at the original map, but something about the movements of these fourths didn’t ring true. “That isn’t . . . it’s not how . . .”
“Look, Sergeant LaCroix. I’m very busy, and I’ve given you what you’ve come for so if you don’t mind, I believe we’re through.”
“Put me on that graph.”
“What? No. I’m not going to let you put in names willy-nilly. I agreed on those others only because—”
Andre moved a step, putting himself in Honeywell’s line of vision. “I’m standing right here, giving you permission. What do you want, a signed privacy waiver? Or would you prefer a court order? You can help me now when I’m happy or help me later, when I come back cranky.”
“This is happy?”
“You’d make me happier if you put me on that graph.”
Honeywell sighed. “Badge number?”
Andre read it off his license. A few blinks later, lines of green began sketching over the city. His line tracked back and forth, tracing and retracing the same patterns day by day. Downtown from home and back. Downtown and out to Oliver’s house. Out and back, out and back, occasionally a little scribble off to the side while he was still wearing his badge. There and back. There and back.
Andre raised his eyebrows. “The fourths again?”
The multicolored web appeared, so different from Andre’s line that Elway gasped. “They’re not on the highways. Your badge followed the highways almost every time.” His finger moved through the projected lines like he wanted to pick them up. “They were close to the highway. See? Here and here and here. But they aren’t on them, hardly ever.”
“They weren’t fourths at all.” Andre felt relieved and cheated at the same time, like he’d wasted sympathy on strangers.
Honeywell stuck out her chin. “If they had legal badges, they were fourths.”
“They weren’t fourthing.”
“Outliers,” Honeywell said. “Every data set has some.”
“If they weren’t fourthing, what were they doing?” He paced in front of the map, seeing how the pattern moved along the side of the highways, focused in one place, but not in others. “These places where the patterns merge, anything special about these?”
“Damn right there is.” Honeywell had already leapt ahead of them, thanks to the processor in her head. “It’s Overdrive, isn’t it?”
“The Overdrive failure—” “The crash—” Both men spoke at once, but she’d gotten it.
“Not a malfunction, was it?”
Andre stared at Honeywell. Who would she tell? He’d found it almost amusing when Madison Zuchek had insisted on keeping things covert. Now he saw the necessity of it.
Elway consulted his datapad, then marched to the map and pointed. “Here. Here. And here.” He highlighted a measured series of locations, seventy or so of them around the highways, the arteries of the city. “Each of these is a processing node, a dedicated AI. They each have a territory. There’s some overlap so they have to cooperate and communicate. Intelligence X has to hand off a car going out of her region and into Intelligence Y’s jurisdiction. It has to be precisely controlled. There is a hardened network of communication lines between them, fiber optics and superconductive backups.”
“So our dead guys were following that network.”
“It certainly looks that way. It wouldn’t be difficult, but it would take some time to be sure you were following the right set of signals.”
“And you can’t just wander along the highways all day or someone might notice.” Andre was a little startled by the savage tone of his own voice. “You need a cover. So you apply for a fourthing badge.”
“No,” Honeywell said. “No, no, no. You two, you have to leave right now.” She hooked Elway’s arm and pushed on Andre’s back, propelling them toward the door. “I don’t care how you do it, but you were never here. I never saw you, I never spoke to you. Erase your logs, your car’s travel record, delete my name from every police database it’s in.”
“We can’t just—”
“I was an uncooperative witness. I missed our appointment. We never spoke. Figure it out.” She ushered them through the door and slammed it behind them.
They both stared at the closed door.
“Isn’t she something? Just like that.” Elway snapped his fingers three times. “Bing, bing, bing. She processes so fast.”