Autos.
She tries to imagine the server that Nick Brady has hidden away. The BBX4001 server which is running Greg’s auto.
But she can’t. She can’t see that metal and plastic box with the flashing lights at all. She can only see Greg, like he’s standing in the room talking to her.
Greg: “Can you give me a minute, Jo? I’m just sorting a few things out. Stand by!”
Joanna rises from the chair on nerveless legs. The screen is flowing with activity now, as everyone in Greg’s Circle sends messages, emoticons, videos, links... invitation acceptances. A constant stream of reactions, from the hundreds of people in his life. And Greg is replying to every single one instantaneously.
Automatically.
She steps backwards across the room, eyes fastened on the screen. Her entire body is shivering from head to toe.
Greg: “So we did well today, didn’t we Jo? Job done. Mission accomplished!”
She sinks to her knees.
Greg: “Another victory for the good guys. We make a pretty sexy team, don’t we?”
She collapses onto her side, brings her legs up to her chest and wraps both arms around them.
Greg: “I promised I’ll always be your backup.”
She squeezes her eyes shut.
Greg: “Come on Oirish lass, talk to me. Share your toys!”
Joanna curls up into a quivering ball, down on the floor where she always used to end up with her man, listening to his voice fill the room.
Greg: “Share your toys!”
Link
Detective Sergeant Yvonne Young can’t be arsed with all this.
She takes her time as she walks through Scotland Yard’s greenish-grey corridors, all the way from the basement up to DCI Henney’s office on the fourth floor. Treading slowly, step by step. Normally she’d take the lift, but she doesn’t want it to look like she responded to his request quickly. So she takes her time, trudging up stairs one by one. Step. By. Step. Can’t. Be. Arsed.
Eventually, DS Young strides down the busy hallways of the fourth floor, where the boys and girls of Homicide and Serious Crime Command rush around looking oh-so-busy. Someone is shouting. Someone else is typing with gritted teeth. Even the woman making a coffee is doing so urgently. These are the Met’s golden people. They’re just so bastard busy.
DS Young deliberately barges right through them, pushing even brawny policemen aside. Many see her coming and get out of her path well in advance. Those who have been shoved by her before, maybe. More than a few. She’s walked through a lot of people over the years.
At precisely two metres tall, she knows she’s the most imposing figure in an entire building full of them. She’s huge and heavy-set, shoulders sloped inside her overcoat, thick legs bulging her trouser suit. Her large, soft face has a square chin and no trace of make-up. She has a frizzy halo of vanilla-blonde hair and is wearing oval glasses tinted strawberry-pink, with a chocolate-brown scarf coiled around her thick neck.
DS Young knows she stands out, but so what. So. Fucking. What.
She doesn’t bother knocking as she walks into DCI Henney’s office. He doesn’t bother saying hello or offering her a seat. Instead he just starts talking, with that furrowed-forehead scowl of his. It looks like someone’s taken his face in their hands, pressed it until it’s thin and wrinkled, and then it’s stuck that way. Or maybe that’s just what DS Young feels like doing. Tempting. One of her hands is bigger than Henney’s entire head. She imagines what it would be like. Her thick, strong fingers can actually feel his facial flesh giving way under them, as she stands in front of his desk, listening.
Not really listening. Hears, yes. Understands, always. Listens to, almost never. Other people’s voices are mostly noise.
The gist of what DCI Henney’s saying is that he wants her to work harder, and give him more results. He wants her to provide the Homicide Task Force, which he runs, with the data they need to be successful.
Well, there’s a switch. Didn’t see that coming. Nobody on the force ever wants to give her department anything. They just want to take. They need her to give them all the answers, so they can look good / meet their targets / justify their budgets / award their bonuses / all of the above.
Funny how success always flows in the same direction. Like piss.
Henney says something about focusing her efforts on finding leads for the incident at Docklands yesterday, the police officer who was shot and killed outside the Hilton Hotel. He blathers on about having nothing to go on except a car wreck with two dead businessmen, neither with any previous criminal records, possibly hostages of an unknown third party. He tells her to stop wasting resources trying to find bits of software and start trying to get murderers off the streets, blah blah blah, that sort of thing.
You’d think the little scrote was her boss, the way he’s carrying on. He isn’t. DCI Crowe runs the Central Digital Crime Unit, and he never gives her a hard time like this. He wouldn’t dare.
“We’re pursuing leads,” DS Young interrupts when her boredom becomes too great to bear. “We’re tracking all the people you told us to track. If we find any relevant data we’ll communicate it to you.”
That should be enough, she thinks. But Henney keeps talking. He drones on about not being satisfied with her team’s performance, CDCU should be doing a lot more on this case, you lot need to start pulling your weight. He actually looks her up and down when he says ‘pulling your weight’. Thinks he’s funny.
“As you probably know,” she tells him, “we’re working with the Support Unit at the moment to implement the new HOLMES 5 system. So that’s taking up some of our resources. In fact some departments may find their access restricted. Essential downtime, you know.”
It’s obvious what she’s really saying here: Get off my back, Detective Chief Inspector, or I’ll make it look like your people couldn’t detect their own arseholes if they were sitting naked on mirrors.
Henney becomes more alert. Of course he does. Everyone in his department relies on HOLMES, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. God forbid that homicide detectives should get out there and do some detecting, when they can sit urgently on their ergonomic chairs, urgently necking coffee while pulling the data to them. HOLMES 5 is the upgrade everyone’s been waiting for: it incorporates sim-autos as agents and allows them to deep-search people’s timelines. Something that all the private investigations agencies have had for years. By the time it gets here, it’ll be proper blunt-edge technology.
But DCI Henney is too stubborn to take the hint. He says something about not taking kindly to veiled threats, and that she should be very careful with attitude like hers, it could get her right back in uniform and plodding the streets like an elephant if she’s not careful. He looks her up and down again.
The instant he says ‘elephant’, DS Young decides she’s going to open up the man’s soul and take a massive shit right inside it.
Henney’s online profile is already being displayed on the inside of her glasses. They’re outfitted with Spex™, which turns ordinary prescription spectacles into digital eyewear, similar to iGlasses or Vades™. From DS Young’s viewpoint there is a translucent icon hovering above Henney’s head. It resembles the classic symbol for a power button – the open circle with the vertical line halfway inside – except the line is a cross. A crucifix.
She triple-blinks, activating the link. The icon glows bright gold. She scans the surge of text that flows past, speed-reading.
He starts talking again, something about respect, but DS Young’s voice silences him. “You’re addicted to porn, Detective Chief Inspector.”
She sounds tired, but it’s mainly boredom. “You have five separate paid accounts with porn streaming sites. You regularly enjoy three or four hour sessions on your days off when your wife is at work and your son is at college. In the last few months you’ve started developing a taste for bisexual porn which now makes up 65% of your viewing.”
DCI Henney’s thin face
is even thinner with his mouth open. His trembling arms spread out on his desk, like a shipwreck survivor grasping driftwood.
“Yes, it’s blackmail,” sighs DS Young. “Yes, the data will be sent to the press if you mention this conversation to anyone. Are we done?”
He’s staring at her and moving his jaw, making a croaking noise that might be a yes but it’s hard to tell. He looks so scared. The icon glows above his head.
“Bless you, Detective Chief Inspector.”
DS Young straightens her pink glasses and walks out of his office, leaving a high-ranking member of the Metropolitan Police quivering like a kicked puppy.
Sometimes, people need to have their faces pushed down into their own shit. It’s the only way they learn.
Plodding through the corridors of Scotland Yard, she passes uniformed police officers, men and women in smart suits, and more casually-dressed support staff. All of them have the same icon floating serenely above their bobbing heads as they pass her by. Like a digital halo that only she can see.
It’s been thirteen years since Yvonne Young joined the force. Nine years since she started work with the Police Central e-crime Unit, as it was back then. That was always where her talents were going to take her. The PCeU was the Met’s front line on ‘cyber-crime’ as it used to be called, something which was already very costly and dangerous for the country.
She had anticipated that the demands on her department would increase on an exponential curve. The world was rapidly becoming more digital. People were finding more ways to do illegal activity online. Banks and institutions and governments were reliant on internet technologies. Ofnet, the regulatory body for all civilian online activity, could only do so much. They needed the thin blue electronic line. They needed her!
And then the auto came along.
No, autos weren’t the problem. DS Young had seen those coming years back, when smartphones started including voice-controlled personal assistants. Autos were inevitable. It was when the International Telecommunication Union brought in the IIR that things changed. When people were forbidden from accessing the internet unless it was via their autos, the amount of online crime plummeted overnight. Either because your auto wouldn’t let you do anything illegal, or would identify you easily if you did.
Which means although the PCeU did evolve into the Central Digital Crime Unit, it isn’t the highly-budgeted department she expected. It doesn’t have its own giant headquarters with its own greenish-grey corridors, or hundreds of suited professionals making coffee with two spoonfuls of urgent in it. They’re still Geek Division, down in the basement.
That’s all right. It doesn’t bother DS Young these days as much as it used to. Actually it kind of suits her, being low on the totem pole. Last year, DCI Crowe offered to promote her to Detective Inspector, which would mean she had operational command of the unit. Piss off, she told him. Give it to Lester instead. So he did. DS Lester (now DI Lester) is ambitious, enjoys the internal politics, enjoys speaking to the press, volunteers for all the seminars. He takes care of all that, while she does the work. It’s like having a shield, made from reinforced wanker.
She’s not worried about Lester, or Crowe. Both of them know the score. They know she could take either of their jobs, if she fancied it. They know she could put both of them in prison, if she fancied it. Knowing what she knows. So they mostly let her get on with it.
Bless them.
DS Young walks through the main entrance of Scotland Yard and out onto Victoria Embankment, and tells her auto to book her a taxi. She crosses the road to wait on the tree-lined concrete walkway along the bank of the Thames, hands deep in her overcoat’s pockets. She doesn’t bother admiring the skyline of London behind her, all the bridges and buildings. She doesn’t watch the boats gliding along the water.
Two black cabs glide to a halt at the kerb, but it’s the nearest one that’s hers, according to her auto’s message inside her glasses. She heaves herself into the back seat. Darkens the windows. Tells it her destination. She doesn’t have to order her auto to lock down her location, or disable sharing her journey, or block all incoming feeds. It does all that by default anyway.
She has a lot of work to do. She only has to unroll her portable tablet to get cracking, and make use of the time. But instead DS Young sits there with her arms folded and thinks about how much of a cocking nightmare this year has been.
It had started badly. Very badly. The bust on New Year’s Day initially looked like a real victory. While everyone else was out celebrating the night before, getting drunk and having fun, DS Young had been hunting. She tracked down someone who was not only breaking the IIR, but obviously had access to some of the illegal software her department was in charge of stopping. She’d set the digital dogs on him. Hounding him out into the open. She knew within twenty-four hours she’d be making an arrest.
That had happened all right, out west in Ealing. They’d kept that Somalian man in interrogation for weeks. But he had nothing to do with it. Someone had transferred their online activities into his timeline. And the auto for ‘Lee Berners’ turned out never to have existed at all.
That had shaken her, at the time. The online world moves fast, but she always felt like she was at the head of the pack. These days, though, it’s all changed again. Some of the blackware out there now makes her feel stupid. Makes her look stupid, in front of the rest of the force. Every now and then she comes across something which stumps her. Either blackware so powerful it shouldn’t exist, or someone whose knowledge of autos surpasses even hers.
DS Young had wanted to pursue the case. Bring in every customer and member of staff who had been in the Autotal Showroom (Ealing Broadway Branch) that day. Deep-search their timelines. Run full background checks. Shine bright lights in their eyes urgently, or whatever those dickheads in Homicide usually do to suspects. But when the HOLMES 5 implementation project came in, CDCU was ordered by the Deputy Commissioner himself to help fast-track it. Top priority. Back then, DS Young had no choice but to follow orders.
She knows now of course, months later, who had been behind those crimes. She only has to close her eyes – and she does, as the cab hums along the road – to see his face.
The face with all the tribal tattoos. The man from the Cook Islands. All bright and colourful and exotic. So much so that she’d ignored him. Her training taught her to look for the quiet types, the heads-down-avoid-eye-contact weasels. They were usually the guilty ones. But this guy had sat in the Autotal Showroom right behind her the whole time. Watching her chase the false trail he had – somehow – planted for her, inside another man’s auto.
She feels queasy at the thought. He hacked into an auto! So impossible it had never occurred to her. If it could be done, she would know how. But she doesn’t. So it can’t. It just can’t. Even now, she still thinks that way.
She’ll never forget that face. The fucking foreigner.
It gnaws at her that she didn’t track Eanga Tepaki down herself. Instead, somebody handed him to her on a plate. Last week, CDCU received an encrypted message telling them he was the guilty one, and that he was staying at the Hilton Hotel in Canary Wharf. Obviously DS Young tried tracing it back, but found she couldn’t. All she could tell was that it started out as an ordinary private message, the type composed by an auto. But millions of those are sent by autos every day. This one was untraceable.
Who was it? she demands of herself for the hundredth time, as if she secretly knows the answer somehow. Who gave up Eanga Tepaki to us? Someone he pissed off? An ex-lover? A partner in crime, deciding to go solo? A rival getting rid of the competiton? Why the arseing shitty ballbag don’t I know, why don’t I know this!
It’s a surprise, when she finally opens her eyes, to find that the cab is already driving through Haringey. She checks the readouts glowing inside the taxi’s smartwindow. Good, she’s only five minutes away from the hospital.
Amongst all the various displays on the windscreen, the rear view catches her eye. It
shows the line of traffic behind, at the head of which is another black taxicab.
DS Young shifts her bulk on the leather seat. There was a second cab behind hers when she got in, on the Embankment.
Coincidence?
She turns and looks out through the rear window, knowing it’s opaque from the outside so she can’t be seen. The black cab behind hers is empty. No passengers. But the TAXI light on its roof isn’t on, so it isn’t available for hire.
Is it the same cab?
As she stares, the taxi slows down, then peels off and comes to a stop by the side of the road. It sits there while her own cab drives on. Must have been booked by someone living around here. It isn’t following her.
She turns back round. Another false alarm. She gets about two dozen a day.
The taxi purrs to a stop in the concourse outside North Middlesex Hospital’s main entrance. DS Young instantly gets out, not even bothering to throw the cab door shut behind her. It gently closes by itself. The taxi’s light blinks on as it starts cruising slowly around the concourse, knowing this is a good place to pick up a new fare.
Ignoring all the sick-looking people standing outside smoking, she walks inside and strides along the wide main hallway. Takes a deep breath. She loves the smell of hospitals. That super-clean antiseptic smell. Hiding the odours and stenches of people. It reminds her of how clean her mother used to be, years ago. How spotless their old house was, the gleaming surfaces scrubbed every hour of every day. Hospitals smell like home.
Turning left, turning right, DS Young walks deeper into the complex. It goes on forever. That sheen of newness fades as she heads inside older buildings. The corridors are full of cracked plaster and rusting pipes. Scuffed strips of colour on the floor show directions to various units and wards. From the days when you had to put up signage.
The number of nurses, doctors, porters and patients all decrease, until finally its mostly her own footsteps she can hear on the linoleum floor. She comes to the entrance of an old ward. There’s a policeman outside, hunched over in a plastic chair and staring at his autophone. At sight of her he springs to his feet. She gets a sense that he instinctively wants to salute, but instead just nods at her, hands clasped behind his back.
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