He shrugged and held the rectangle out between two fingers. “So … I assume you want to limit your outdoor movement? And loud noises? And fresh sunlight?”
“That’d be great,” she said, taking the disposables, slipping the evidence into a baggie and then zipping that into a side pocket on her coat. “I’ll get the basic itinerary and then take off to deal with the shades.”
Zack squatted again, half-rolling the body to search for an exit wound. When that turned up no bullet, he did a quick scan of the pavement, his shades finding it ten feet away. He stood, wiped both temples against a forearm, circled around one of the cars, and retrieved this, standing to examine it like a jeweler with a diamond. They’d linked forensic boxes, so they both saw the same identification at the same moment.
“Browning HP, Mark I, nine-millimeter” she said. “That narrows it down.”
Zack looked back at the body. “Hey, at least this dipshit got popped by a real gun. Some dignity in that, right, Farrukh?” If no progress occurred, Zack would tire of this particular case after only a few days. At best, Farrukh Jhadav had a week. Probably less.
She did routeline while he worked the crowd. Of the two floating PanOpt boxes used most, cops generally set their sign box, that universal menu, to appear at elbow height, and their call box, the window of visual communications, to appear at somewhere close to waist level. Many rookies learned this lesson the hard way, setting both boxes at eye level—all the better to intimidate by pointing a finger directly in a perp’s face—and developing tired limbs, “monkey arm,” halfway through an arrest.
Terri kept her own boxes horizontal, at waist level, sliding them into new positions on a case-by-case basis. In her sign box now, she scrolled through menus, finding the Routeline controls. A bright red tube appeared to materialize from Farrukh’s chest. The tube rose perpendicular to the pavement, like a piece of playground equipment. Six feet up, it bent and continued parallel to the ground, its squiggly path tracing the route Farrukh had walked—as recorded by civic surveillance—crossing back over South Figueroa to disappear into the Swap Meet. They’d try their luck inside, but the place was a notorious warren, the perfect setting in which to ditch a weapon or hide for a day. Tens of thousands of people would enter and exit in the next few hours.
She glanced around the sidewalk, taking in the staggering excess of public information that accompanied all citizens: age, address, family, occupation, associations, degrees, estimated income, average rent, frequented haunts. Four years earlier, courts had ruled in the LAPD’s favor that face-tagging comments could remain delinked from police records, and thus inaccessible to citizens. Ever since then, face tags had taken on a Wild West, tell-it-like-it-is quality. A severe-faced black woman strode past with two little boys in tow. Overhead, a cop tag read “COUGH DROP STEALING DOO DOO MAMA / CONSIDER SHOOTING ON SITE.” She wondered if the officer of record had intended the weird misspelling.
Terri removed her PanOpts for a moment, always careful to take in faces as they were, to exercise her own intuition whenever possible. She scanned the crowd for feigned indifference or dawning horror, thankful that the days of families IDing bodies were long gone. People surged past on the sidewalk, murmuring, selecting, purchasing, debating, spying, cooing to children, flicking at unseen objects, punching codes into the air, instructing or cajoling or laughing with partners eternally offstage. Even the passing refugees, most without eyewear, seemed lost in their own private hustles. She was never sure why this surprised her. A hundred million people were still looking for a soft landing, two million squatters in southern California alone.
Her car shot up the freeway. Vehicles swooped and coasted with the rhythm of sync and release, taking advantage of slipstreams, cars beholden to their ever-changing cargo, weaving gracefully to the contours of their shared master map, recording and re-recording every obstacle or pothole or sharp turn. Cars used to serve as extensions of the human nervous system; now people were just specks inside an infinitely larger nervous system.
The car synced with a battered jalopy sporting a primer-gray quarter panel, its closest window covered by a thick cut of plywood. For a moment, the two vehicles moved like one unit. There was a click and a knock and then the other car dropped out of sync and zipped off at the interchange, having physically transferred some bit of cargo from one auto to another. Terri tried to visualize what kind of ghetto-ass nastiness might be in this particular glove box, as if the car itself had passed part of its essence instead of offering itself as a node in a vast decentralized network.
If it had been her glove box, she would have retrieved her personal items from the panel next to the front seat. Instead, this car would switch packets with another, the cargo moving on and on to its final destination. She was old enough to remember a time when packet switching had been a luxury. Now it was something closer to a courier service.
Just past the 101, her car caught up to the Rolling Juggernaut. The Juggernaut was a drifting, mile-long traffic jam, the granddaddy of all annoyances. Its solitary traveling wave moved across the freeways of Los Angeles, a chaotic entity that defied predictive models. In its persistence, the Juggernaut was both complex and chronic. There wasn’t a passenger in the city who hadn’t fumed against the irony. The same progress that had liberated cars from traffic also contained an error that enshrined a bit of this congestion for all time.
Terri’s car, containing an on-duty cop, accelerated as she approached the stalled wall of traffic. Zippering through the Juggernaut may have been one of the more minor perks of the job, but it was also the most thrilling, and a great way to scare the bejesus out of a cuffed perpetrator. Even now, having experienced this action so many times, she felt her hands dampen as the car shot toward seeming death. Only in the last few seconds did she finally see the zipper, the passageway formed as the cars in the traffic jam edged aside, her own car shooting into the narrow channel between vehicles, doors and windows and bumpers whooshing by within an inch of her own car.
Slowing to exit, she passed a freeway sign on which a Caltrans worker was in the act of scrubbing off graffiti, every other traffic marker in the city apparently hit in a blitz. Swooping down onto surface streets, she glimpsed a public health banner featuring a shirtless, glistening boxer, the caption next to him reading “K.O. CHOLERA,” and for a moment she thought that was the fighter’s name.
Even though it was only in El Sereno, going to the Networks And Retrieval building felt like trekking to Arizona. A concrete bunker framed the entry, surrounded by a teardrop-shaped parking lot bordered by hearty scrub and spiny, Jurassic-looking plants. Downstairs, she found the office of Carla Morales, the door already open, exposing a desk cluttered with instruments that looked like a cross between soldering irons and dentist tools. A vintage table lamp with a paper shade cast a warm glow over the workspace.
Carla emerged from a back storeroom. She was a squat, bulldog-faced woman with an overgrown crewcut and PanOpts set to show her weary eyes. They’d met once before, but it’d been long enough ago that Terri wasn’t quite sure if she should reintroduce herself.
“Hey, I’m Terri …”
“Disposables, right?”
Carla took the flimsy wraparounds, vaguely reminding Terri of a bartender she’d once known, not so much in appearance as in sheer ugly depletion. Both women gave out a signal that they’d never fully figured out how to make their lives work with any efficiency or joy.
Carla wrapped the disposables around a faceless wooden hairdresser’s dummy and clipped two mystery tools to either end.
“So. Your first step is what, memory or draggage?”
Carla shrugged. Terri looked around the confined space for a place to sit, seeing boxes and papers piled on the room’s lone chair and sofa. Zack called in VT, materializing as if standing inside a stack of banker’s boxes.
“Okay, you there?”
“Yeah, lemme punch you in.” She tagged and flipped Zack’s VT into the room.
“Hey �
� this is my partner, detective Zendejas.”
Carla looked over her shoulder, nodding at Zack’s apparition.
“So, ah, we’re just seeing what the memory and draggage are,” she said, semi-embarrassed by Carla’s lack of social skills.
“The baggage you draaaaaag around,” Zack sang to himself, taking in the flamboyant slovenliness of the office.
Draggage could solve a case in minutes or it could provide weeks of unrewarding grunt work. Everyone kept different items on their private desktop. Some people brought a few photos and shopping lists around with them. Some people lugged around their entire lives. Everyone she knew kept some representation of their finances floating nearby. In general, the brass were okay with cops keeping draggage on their PanOpts desktop, as long as it was in one tidy folder and you didn’t let the physical manifestations of your outside life in any way interfere with the Job. Zack waved a hand in front of her face, pointing to himself and mouthing, “Mute me.”
Terri tagged him, muting his audio to Carla as she bent over the wooden head, tinkering with unseen panels in her own PanOpts.
“Why did you pick Carla Morales?” he asked, the small red M floating next to his face her only assurance that they weren’t being overheard. She texted,
Doesn’t she have good rep? I thought she’d been on The Wall forever
Zack smiled with a malicious edge. “Yeah, and you know why she’s not on the wall now, right?”
I hadn’t really thought about it
“She used to be a raging goddamn drunk. Isn’t that right, Carla,” Zack said.
U just lost mute privilege
She tapped the little red M as Carla looked up from her seat.
“Nothin’.”
“Nothing, meaning? Nothing of consequence?”
“Nothing as in, he just bought these. There’s a ten-second recording from the convenience store where he bought them and a receipt folder with one receipt. For this. No draggage. Your victim didn’t have the chance to use these yet.”
Zack gave out his thin smile of annoyance. “Why exactly did Detective Pastuszka have to go all the way out to your office for this info?”
Carla stood, rubbing the back of her neck. “Because if these hadn’t been new, who knows what kind of nastiness your guy might’ve stashed on them.”
“I don’t know, I’ve seen some nasty footage in my day.” His smile faded. “If we’re running against the clock, I don’t see why we can’t swipe a victim’s EyePhones with an alcohol swab and check it out our own selves.”
Terri wasn’t quite sure what to make of this back and forth, although Zack’s question had crossed her mind more than once.
“First of all, most systems will be viewer-locked, so …”
“Disposables aren’t.”
“… so you’d need an eye cracker just to get inside. Second … you ever hear of Jimmy Nakamura?”
“Nope.”
Carla sighed, exuding weariness.
“There are two types of illegal EyePhones. The common ones are the closed systems, the Calleciegas. After IIPACT, no one manufactured Calleciegas, meaning the best you could buy back in ’36 was maybe, I don’t know, a five hundred-terabyte system. With good money, maybe eight hundred terabytes. Either way, without networking, it’s a self-secure loop. Meaning if you’re a pedophile, or into snuff stuff, you might have a big dungeon to work with, but it’s still a dungeon of finite storage space. So these guys found themselves needing harder and harder images, while at the same time having to store all that generated footage on eyewear they couldn’t afford to break or lose. Every year that passed meant that much more accumulated nastiness.
“Maybe five years ago, detective Nakamura answers a domestic violence on a place in Topanga. In the basement, he finds an off-network pair of EyePhones. They confiscate these, and when they get back to their work station, they realize they’ve found one of the last of the old-time Calleciegas. Because Nakamura found them, he volunteers to put them on and see what they’re dealing with. Ten minutes later, he takes them off, leaves the station without saying a word to anyone, goes home, shoots himself in the head.
“After that, the department only lets root viewers go down. Automations being able to handle content that most people cannot.”
“The plumbers.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard them called that. It’s the root-viewer programs that go in, the plumbers. They hunt around for illegal footage. Whatever bad stuff they find gets distilled into black-and-white outlines, like a coloring book. They pass the evidence up to us, and only then can we go to the DA with charges. I’ve seen some of these outlines, and it’s bad. Bad. Stuff you’ve never thought of before and, trust me, don’t ever want to see. That answer your question, Detective Zendejas?”
“What’s the other one?” Terri asked.
“What other one?”
“The other type of illegal EyePhones?”
“Oh. Bypasses. Open systems.”
“That thing in Tarzana,” Zack said, his interest barely still there.
“What thing in Tarzana?” Terri asked.
“There was a bank robbery maybe ten years ago. Maybe longer now. Those guys knew they couldn’t get to all the tellers quickly enough, that somebody was probably going to get to 911. So they used a bypass. When somebody did call the cops, it only looked like they were talking to the cops, when actually they were talking to one of the robbers’ girlfriends. That’s what a bypass does.”
Zack caught Terri’s eye long enough to make a face of boredom, winking out.
“What happens when your office gets a bypass?”
“We have a few here, under lock and key. I think the Tarzana guys got eight to ten for the robbery, and another thirty years for possession of the bypass. It’s serious shit.”
“Hopefully under serious lock and key.”
“I got bumped down here six years ago, and I’ve seen the bypass collection exactly once.”
“So you’ve never handled any fresh catches?”
A momentary look of puzzlement crossed Carla’s face.
“How would I? We don’t find them any more. No machine built in the last twenty years will present unauthenticated content as real content. Even the Manila PD finally got serious about that one particular problem. When they did the big switch, it was just a matter of time before they rounded up all the problem equipment.”
“Big switch?”
“Before the Overlay got standardized, everyone operated on just a few computer monocultures. That made everyone vulnerable to all kinds of malware and reiteratives.”
Terri rubbed her chin, no longer sure how to contribute to a conversation she didn’t understand. She pointed toward Farrukh Jhadav’s disposables, still wrapped halfway around the head-shaped block of wood.
“Can you dispose of those?”
“No next of kin?”
Now it was Terri’s turn to shrug, not caring enough to even say that she didn’t care.
An hour later, she was still in the parking lot, reviewing her own footage to dispel that nagging feeling that she’d forgotten something. The compulsion to second-guess herself had only emerged in the last three years. She called up Zack, seeing that he’d hiked all the way over to the northbound 110 on-ramp, having deputized two uniformed officers to help him gather a group of refugee teens into the graded no-man’s land between access road and freeway.
“Yo, yo, yo,” he said, corralling the handcuffed boys into the center of the dirt rise. “Who’s the killingest?”
“Hey,” Terri said, flipping herself into the scene. Behind the group, she spied the saddest of all makeshift memorials: actual flowers that had lived and died, plucked and placed in a netherzone to honor a nobody.
“Okay, whoever wants to be not arrested, raise your hands,” Zack said, turning to face her VT.
“You see this?” He pointed up to the green freeway sign looming above the low hill. Over the names of the downtown exits, someone had spray painted the
word “IMSANE” in huge white letters.
“Here’s what I don’t get. Is he appealing to our sense of decency, like ‘I’m sane?’ Or is he so fucking banana-time bonkers that he can’t even spell the word ‘insane’ right?”
“Are you asking me to guess?”
“I’m a bit more scientific than that.” He turned back to the kids, spreading his arms wide.
“Any of you guys give up the shithead who did this”—he made everyone turn and take in the defaced road sign, like a teacher chewing out a class—“You get a thousand dollar re-ward. Straight up.”
She squinted. “Really?”
“Yeah,” he answered, oblivious to the kids in front of him, “Me and like twenty other guys did a pool.”
“You didn’t do a pool for that Williams kid murder, but you do a pool for this?”
“Yeah, well, Williams was a done deal. This is a mystery. You! Moose McGillicuddy!” Zack pointed at the largest kid in the group, a sweaty monster of a fifteen-year-old. “Want a thousand bucks?” Before the kid could think up an answer, Zack was back working his captive audience, stuffing business cards halfway down each kid’s waistband.
Terri turned, scanning the other street corners, seeing a family scurrying behind a stand of trees, above this the backside of the Ritz, the behemoth Wilshire Grand building looming beyond that, the thought of all those people making her angry, the huge tower one mini-Calcutta out of many. She said, “Huh,” and rewound what she was seeing. Her gaze moved backward, back down to the trees and the family that had darted away so quickly. She froze and zoomed in, realizing the youngest girl, a toddler held in the arms of her mother, had no byline.
Refugee girls made it off the grid far longer than refugee boys. On raids, she’d come across Indian women in their twenties whose faces still came up unregistered in PanOpt. Some women lived entirely feudal and indoor existences. Muslim women had it the worst. In the Swap Meet, she’d once glimpsed hennaed fingers dart from under a faceless black robe to squeeze a pomegranate. It had lasted only a second.
No one would compile data on these women. Their lives were absolute solids. She sometimes thought of these surplus people as she rode through the city, glancing up at blackened skyscraper windows. Women never allowed from their rooms. Women without history, who survived only as desperate scrawls on drywall, as whispered names or tiny grooves scratched into windowsills by fingernail. Some women departed the world without even these records or remains, like animals built of pure cartilage. No bones.
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