Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  Sanjiv struggled in the back seat for the five seconds it took to figure out who they were, one flying punch coming perilously close to Zack’s chin. Zack ripped off the dust mask and slapped him across the face, hard enough to knock the EyePhones off.

  “Sanjiv Goswami, you witnessed a murder on Monday morning and you didn’t report it to the authorities,” Zack said, worked up into a bullying fury. Terri always secretly enjoyed these rare transformations, Zack channeling all his bulk and resentments into something approaching theater, a type of drama as over-the-top as Nick Charles’s suspect gatherings. She thought, Didn’t this kid only witness a shooter?

  “What? Naw, man!”

  “Yeah, you did. Put those back on,” Zack said, motioning to the shades. Sanjiv did this, his hand fluttering.

  “You watch old cop movies?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Sanjiv said, impatient in his desire to say the right thing.

  “You know ‘good cop bad cop’?”

  The kid nodded idiotically.

  “I’m the good cop. So what happens now is, you go back to Monday morning at 5:14 a.m. You were on South Fig, walking home after a long night. You’re going to retrieve that footage and then you’re going to link me on the playback. If I see any funny stuff—seizure-flash, booby traps, snuffy-crush films, anything I might find personally objectionable—my partner here is going to take off her PanOpts, place them on your face, and blind out your eyeballs. We clear?”

  He nodded slowly, mouth pinched tight.

  “Let’s do this then. Monday morning. 5:14.”

  Sanjiv reached up into the air, his timid hand gestures birdlike as he called up his own playback. Zack said, “Good, good …”

  She nudged Zack in the ribs for a link. He tagged her back and then she was looking at the same pre-dawn Swap Meet scene he’d already shown her, but from a first-person POV. She wondered if he’d memorized which cars they were supposed to be looking at. Under a streetlight, something fluttered, the POV suddenly shifting, following a dimly lit moth as it passed overhead and then trembled down into a space between two cars. Then the footage was of running, first-person bolting down the street.

  “Oh Christ,” Zack said. “Is this Monarch? Are you doing Monarch? Pull up your desktop.”

  The running footage was now overlaid with dozens of ridiculous civilian apps. In Sanjiv’s upper-left field of vision, she saw a box reading MONARCH WARNING. She pulled up her PanOpts as they slowed and pulled to a curb, Zack having already commandeered the car’s control box.

  “Out.”

  Sanjiv exited, looking both bewildered and crestfallen, as if he’d failed an initiation.

  “What? What happened?” she asked as the door closed back up, Zack palming his face.

  “It’s a game. For housewives. Monarch. Janice plays it. They get points for doing things, like if you do certain tasks, more butterflies show up. It’s fucking stupid.”

  “Huh?”

  “He saw the ‘black butterfly of death.’ If it touches you, you lose points. That’s all. No shooter.”

  “Wow,” she said, placing a hand on the back of her neck, trying to come up with some witty punchline to the morning and then thinking better of it.

  They stopped at a workstation, and while Zack was in the men’s room, Krista called to say she’d gotten the day off from school, asking if they could meet up for lunch. Terri agreed a little too quickly. Every month she worried that her hold on Krista’s respect seemed more and more tenuous. When Zack emerged, he seemed taken aback.

  “You’re going to let a ten-year-old girl ride alone into downtown?”

  “Krista’s thirteen.”

  “Since when?!”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “She good thirteen or bad?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Good thirteen is ‘kissing is gross.’”

  “I don’t know. Which were Ashley and Audrey?”

  “Those two idiots were on their second marriages by thirteen.”

  Krista had chosen Jazz Hands, some fancy restaurant of unknown, high-end cuisine, just two long blocks down from City Hall. Maybe her niece had thought she was being considerate by picking someplace close by, but on the three-minute ride, Terri realized she should’ve steered them toward someplace outside her jurisdiction. There were too many street scums who could recognize her, too many chances for people from her one life to make a cameo in her other, better life.

  As the car brought her down from the state park, it had to shoot through the human gauntlet, the ever-present scrum of protestors outside the front entrance to City Hall, swamping both sides of the street. Sometime in the last decade, these scenes had solidified into a daily scenario: outraged citizens, victims’ families, clashing advocates demanding whatever undeliverable version of justice they felt would keep the earth from flying off its axis in outrage.

  The public’s capacity for self-delusion never ceased to amaze her. Citizens allowed themselves to accept the most amateurish of footage; faked political exposés with bad dialogue, continuity errors, time codes that made no sense, impossible police interrogation scenes, nighttime phone calls between investigators, even courtroom testimony—which any adult knew was not recordable—showing officers discussing framing suspects, sometimes so clumsily executed that the forgers left in the swells of background music from whatever movie they’d cribbed from. It was all fantasy, a million fantasies, tens of millions, the unrestrained psychic canvas for the entire city and the connected world beyond. She kept remembering that, how many of the world’s eyes were on them, even now that the Southland had abdicated both its entertainment and aerospace thrones.

  Making everything one shade more confusing, every now and then an actual bit of real life got mixed up in the ocean of falsity. Five years ago, someone actually obtained three-angle, immersive footage of Bob Delagarza spelling out the framing of a small crew of go-nowhere stick-up kids in Morningside, fessing up to his misdoings in language so expository he sounded like a comic-book villain. Perhaps he’d thought the absurdity of his dialogue would have covered him in the event that anyone taped anything, although no one would ever know for sure. The day after the indictment came down, he had his car drive him into the Mojave, took a fire axe to the dashboard, and climbed into the trunk with a bottle of Cutty Sark. By the time his wife had the force do a search for him the next afternoon, he’d been cooked.

  Her car pulled up to the restaurant, and she was shocked to see her niece standing aimlessly on the sidewalk. Daytime streetwalking wasn’t really a thing this far from West Ninth, and Krista’s jeans and hoodie weren’t the standard candy girl getup. But her pensive body language and lack of a backpack radiated vulnerability.

  “You should have waited for me inside,” Terri said as she stepped onto the sidewalk, masking her annoyance.

  “Oh, it’s okay. I like the sun.”

  As she held the door open for Krista, she instinctually looked for a No Cash sticker, finding it discreetly placed on the wood frame of the door itself; a small circle showing a red slash over George Washington’s head, a wordless warning for illiterates. Years ago, there’d been a fizzled federal effort to force retail businesses to accept cash, which had meant accepting refugee business. In those days, No Cash signs had been actual signs, not stickers, able to be quickly removed if and when an inspector came. These days, no one even acknowledged the law. Accepting cash meant tapping into the vast refugee economy, but between the hassles of dealing with actual refugees and the hypothetical risk of vandalism by anti-immigration groups, most ground-level shops and eateries in Central didn’t bother.

  An unsmiling young man in a black apron seated them toward the back and brought menus and thin glasses of fizzy water. The walls sported smooth butcher paper covered with elegant, swooping line art drawings of celebrities that fell somewhere between caricature and respectful portraiture. Krista sat down with her back to the wall, flanked by Jackie Chan and Humphrey Boga
rt. Oddly, autographs accompanied both drawings.

  “Fancy place you picked.”

  “Grammy Jane gave me some money for Christmas.”

  “So how’d you get the day off, anyway?”

  “There was a gas leak in the gymnasium. Mr. Leverence threw up in front of an assembly, but I didn’t see it. Everyone got sent home.”

  “Sweet,” Terri said, feeling dumb for saying it. There was some relief that Krista was still a kid, not as developed as her VT had led Terri to believe. She wondered if her niece had set up her own online representation to show her more grown than she actually was. Perhaps this was a service telecom companies provided to their adolescent clients. Or maybe it was the new default.

  “How’s Rex?”

  “He’s okay,” Krista said with a drop on the last syllable.

  “Meaning …”

  “Uhn. He’s always asking me questions. Like, ‘How was your test’ or ‘What do you want for dinner?’”

  “What a nightmare.”

  Krista studied her menu with pursed lips. After they’d ordered, she said, “Aunt Terri, did you hear about the girl from that college who got killed?”

  “Girl from that college. Stacy Santos?”

  “Yeah, her. Do you know anyone working on that case?”

  “No. Not directly.”

  “I thought maybe you did.”

  “Why, you have a hot tip?”

  Krista hesitated, then leaned in across the table and half-whispered, “I heard she had her head cut off. And the guy who did it? He shipped it to her dad. On his birthday.”

  “Huh?”

  “And it was wrapped up like a present, like in a box with gift paper and a big ribbon on top. And there was a card, with the present? And the card said, ‘This is the only way I could get your attention. Please catch me. Don’t let me kill again.’”

  “That makes zero sense.”

  “Oh.” Krista leaned back, looking disappointed. “I guess it doesn’t.”

  “Sorry. Good rumor. But yeah, I can guarantee it didn’t happen like that. And the father is the District Attorney, not the chief of police. So he prosecutes criminals, he doesn’t ‘catch’ anybody.”

  “Yeah. Who knows what happened, I guess.”

  “Well … just not that.”

  “I mean, maybe she wasn’t even killed in the first place.”

  “Say what?”

  “Most of the news is fake anyway.”

  “That’s not true,” Terri said, genuinely distressed. “Do you think that?”

  “Sure. Everyone knows it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “There’s all kinds of fake news. You could see one show with something about a bank robbery, and in the next news show, the bank robbery could be completely different. Like, maybe the guys were refugees or from Brazil or something.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  “And then, really, it’s just whoever made that news show, they’re the one changing or making up the footage because they’re prejudiced.”

  “I don’t think that happens as much as you think it does.”

  Krista widened her eyes. “It happens all the time!”

  “Look. When you watch the news, you really have to look out for two things. First, what’s the agenda? Nine times out of ten, really ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they’re going to be removing things, not adding them. An Orthodox Jewish news feed might remove women from news stories, or a Scientology feed might take out politicians they don’t like. Then there are the business interests. You ever watch any of the Odeon networks?”

  “Sometimes”

  “Okay. So their parent corporation is owned by one of the biggest shipping companies in the world. Which means when there was that strike a few years ago at the Port, Odeon just didn’t cover it. Or if there’s something about, I don’t know, shipping lane piracy in the Philippines, they probably won’t cover that either. But it’s not a problem. Because I know that other news outlets will cover it.”

  “But how do you know who owns what in the first place?”

  “Well, that’s the second part. There are plenty of news outlets that are trustworthy, and if you pay attention to their media coverage, they’ll spell out a lot of the details about who owns what, and who covers what. The New York Times has a great webroom. Which you’d probably never go to, right? But that’s fine, I’m sure all the same content is available in the Overlay. The point is, they’re a reliable outlet. Same with Viscera, and CSM and MCVN. They make money because they want people to be able to trust them. They need people to trust them.”

  “Yeah,” Krista said, coming off almost sarcastic. At least she wasn’t itching to peek at her own shades, like every other kid her age.

  “If you have a question about a news story, you know you can always call me, right? The police department has the best news feed in the country. Or maybe second best. Chicago’s is pretty good.”

  “Well, how do the police know what’s not fake?”

  “We have an entire division dedicated just to the networks. The Wall?”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, then you know that a big part of what they do is verification work. We have to have accurate information, because our lives could depend on that information. So the people who work the Wall make sure we have reliable intelligence from verified news sources and surveillance.”

  “But how do you know the information those sources give you is real?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If someone can fake a news story somewhere else, why couldn’t someone fake the information that the police get?”

  “Because … because they can’t.”

  “But why?”

  Terri rubbed an eyebrow, groaning softly. “Because there are safeguards, for starters. The little R in your EyePhones, in the corner? That means what you’re watching is real …”

  “I know that …”

  “… so if you see that R, you know it’s real.”

  “But couldn’t someone just fake the little R?”

  “Where would they play their faked footage? There’s no machine anywhere in the world built in the last twenty years that will present unauthenticated content as real content.”

  “Why can’t someone just build a pair of EyePhones that could play anything?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s sophisticated equipment. You’d need a warehouse, and network components, and secrecy … it just wouldn’t be possible to get all the parts you need to build something that could bypass all the mechanical safeguards.”

  “Why?”

  She flashed back to conversations she’d had with Krista back when her niece was a large toddler, meeting every patient explanation with that word—Why?—trying to break the world down into its atomic components. Terri sighed.

  “Basically, it comes down to trust. Why do we trust the power grid, or the traffic system, or that trains will transport food to supermarkets? A madman could poison the water supply, and yet we still use our sinks and showers. For that matter, the waiter could poison our food now. But what would be the motive for someone to poison us? How could they do it and not get caught? There are a million safeguards out there so that we all trust the system we need to, you know? Look, take your volumetric telepresence—your VT—as one example,” she said, inwardly wincing that she’d just tried to make herself look smart to a thirteen-year-old.

  “When I call you, you could have your VT set any way you want. You can sit, you can stand, you could float around the room. You could even set your own appearance any way you want. You could be Abe Lincoln if you want. I had to deal with a guy once, for a case, who would only answer the phone as a cartoon hippo. True story.

  “Point is, no matter what or how your VT is set, I still know it’s you. The system tells me it’s you. And because I have faith that this system is safe, I’ll continue to use it. Otherwise, no one would use it.”r />
  “I guess.”

  “Or take money. What is money? It doesn’t have value in and of itself. If you get a hundred dollars from Grammy Jane, it’s still just a number with a value attached to it. You can’t hold that hundred dollars in your hand. But you know it’s in your Geist account, and that it has value, and that the bank will honor that value, and anywhere else you want to spend it, it will have value. We all believe in it, so it exists. If these systems don’t work, then the systems wither and die and people establish new systems. If you think about it, that’s really all we have. Without that basic human trust, people would just go around killing each other.”

  “Like someone killed Stacy Santos?” Krista said, smiling slyly.

  Terri rolled her eyes, letting her gaze stay at the kitchen door, its narrow view of spotless tiles and stainless steel. Finally, she said, “Yeah, but we’re going to catch this guy. Thus reinforcing public trust.”

  “Do you really think he’ll get caught?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “But aren’t there lots of unsolved murders and stuff every year?”

  “Sure. And this one is different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Juan Santos is the District Attorney. And the police work extra hard to catch someone who kills a family member of the District Attorney’s office.”

  “That’s not fair! What about all the other people that get killed? They’re not as important as the District Attorney?”

  Thinking, Tell me about it, she said, “Hey, I’m just the messenger. But that’s a big part of being a cop. You have to make compromises, every day.”

  Krista sighed. “That’s what Rex says.”

  “Rex says that about being a claims adjustor?” Terri sighed and took in the room again. “Just don’t believe everything you see on Mind Narc. Real-life police aren’t that exciting.”