Zack texted,
1 2 U in 30. Y WB.
She ghosted over to the middle of the long corridor, spotted the guy, then pulled off her PanOpts and stood with a lingering wooziness. She’d let Yellow Windbreaker Man come to her, let him see her face, that she was cop, knowing Zack was on the ghost end and would be watching to see if he bolted. Not that this guy would be their guy. Otherwise, why would he be walking away from the train platforms?
The man approached on her left. She waited until he was two steps away, gliding briskly into his path and sliding down her shades in one practiced motion.
“Los Angeles police. May I see your identification, please?”
The stranger grunted and yanked down his dust mask. A byline reading DONRIK BARBOZA popped into the space overhead. Zack texted,
nice name, dipshit
“Thank you, sir.”
She sat, palmed her eyes, and slipped on her shades, returning to the long hallway. Reintegrating herself as the ghostly eye of law enforcement, she watched a man in a dust mask walk down the long hallway with a stiff formality, his strange, calculated gait seemingly requiring concentration. He was far too tall to be who they wanted. Zack texted,
Yeah, I saw this guy walking like that on the other side. U think it’s Eshkol, or perpy shit?
She followed the man for twenty feet, her motion as smooth and cinematic as if she’d been mounted on a dolly for a tracking shot. She wrote,
Eshkol. He’s following walking instructions.
Zack texted,
OK. But do me a solid? Go ahead & arrest anyway 4 being a geeky jagoff who is actively making the world 1 person more stupid.
She nodded. Eshkol people used movement notation to govern every possible aspect of life—walking, exercising, eating, the repetitive motions of labor—to ensure maximum efficiency. It veered close to religion for some people. She’d heard that thousands of couples used it for sex. She shuddered slightly, turning and whipping down the hallway and back into the main room.
The mighty crush of commuters surged and receded, leaving the long-distance travelers scattered in its wake. After standing to interrogate a half-dozen annoyed men, she settled into her seat for the long haul, starting a timer to remind her to shift legs, another to get up and walk around. At eight, she rose and grabbed a tea from the bustling little tourist kiosk, admiring all the shiny, unsold souvenir key chains dangling from a counter display. By nine, she was already bored with being a ghost, doing aerial loops around the hall.
She eavesdropped. Union Station’s mapping included acoustics, and she could drop herself into the airspace of any unsuspecting traveler she chose. Near the south side entrance, a little boy paused to take in the yawning chamber, looked up to his distracted mom, and said, “Are we taking a train to see Daddy?”
“No. I told you, Daddy’s in Heaven with the koalas now.”
Terri floated down the hallway toward Zack, finding him slumped against a wall and looking genuinely angry. She moved the aural net cursor over his head.
“Seriously. Seriously. You’re being serious right now.”
He paused and tensed his mouth. She couldn’t imagine he was fighting with anyone but Janice. She was always curious about the inner structure of their marriage. Janice invited speculation, being so good-naturedly neutral. How would a couple like that fight?
“You did not say that. In fact, that’s the fucking opposite of what you … no. Nuh-uh. Wrong.”
His right hand extended, as if to ring an imaginary doorbell. After wagging his index finger furiously in space, opening one unseen window after another, his hand suddenly found what it sought, poking sternly at nothing and then rapidly waving up and down. He was scrolling through something. Suddenly the finger halted and pointed downward, as if accusing someone.
“Jan, I’m in the transcript right now. You want to know what you said? What your exact goddamn words were? You … LISTEN! I am trying to tell you this.”
Any time anyone resorted to digging up transcripts of old conversations, the fight had gotten ugly. She floated off back down the hall. Being cops, their public personas were especially open for abuse: perhaps Zack should have been reminded about the dangers of talking in public. In the main waiting room, she called up one of the cheap civilian programs that aggregated public tags. Sure enough, they were both listed. He already had fourteen comments. Being female, she had ninety.
Terri stacked these comments like a totem pole over the head of her sitting self. She read:
Man, I’d get that piggie so fucking preggers
no way to old NEXT ha ha oinkers
orange ass skin eewwww
Nice rack, nice shitcutter … I’ll take it
She wondered how this conclusion had been reached, since it was posted fourteen minutes ago and she’d been sitting for the last hour. Then there were the more sinister notes:
Good try puerco, but we see you
u can run but u cant HIDE
ICU COP
The tone of these comments was always a surprise, the overt implication that she, as a police officer, had somehow been caught trying to deceive someone. She’d read in the news somewhere that one out of every four online comments was now made by a machine. She thought of her fake customer service rep. Was he leaving notes somewhere?
The totem pole scrolled upward, losing her interest as text and instead resembling something artistic. Halfway up, she saw a three-dimensional animation of a cartoon elephant mounting her from behind, naked, bent over the chair she was sitting in. Above this—meaning, lower in chronology—someone had redone this same animation with the cartoon elephant wearing a top hat and a star-spangled vest with the word GOP emblazoned in glittering rhinestones. From there, the thread degenerated into political flaming between commenters, something so esoteric and boring that she couldn’t be bothered to read it to the end.
She wasn’t fazed by commenters, although a stray bit of depravity might occasionally take her off guard. In general, comments were zero sum. Every second a real person spent trash-talking an officer was a second not committing a real-world offense. What got her was the knowledge that Krista generated comments as well, even as they had sat together at lunch less than a week ago. It was leering made corporeal, part of humanity’s accrued archives.
She was up by the ceiling now, peering down at the entire waiting room. Some people were already sleeping in chairs, citizen refugees, with their belongings crammed into backpacks. Not quite below her, the group of students remained huddled around their luggage. Maybe their field trip was to the train station. As she watched, one leaned over her own seat to say something to a classmate, then reached back and scratched her lower back. Terri felt a stab of déjà vu, an occupational hazard. You couldn’t float, as in dreams, and not have this happen.
Increasingly bored, she propelled herself higher still, through the station’s ceiling, emerging into the sun. A patchwork of advertisements and photos covered most of the original station roof. She’d talked with cops old enough to remember when rooftops had been painted with street numbers, creating a useful grid for overhead surveillance. Now it was all ad space, every building owner in Los Angeles complicit in the drone trade, legal or otherwise. She kept floating up, a weightless entity soaring over the city, rotating to take in the freeway, Olvera Street, a distant, tiny band playing in a public square. She pictured a supervisor looking at her essentially goofing off and got spooked, tracing a path line in the air to control her descent without queasiness.
She drifted back to earth at a curved forty-five-degree angle. The mechanics of unreal motion, she realized, were weighted toward the next generation. No one propelled themselves. All she did was move her phantom self through space using hand gestures. The sensation was of the world moving to accommodate her, not the other way around.
In front of the station at eye level, a family had gathered between the two huge Saguaro cacti flanking the outer doors. These iconic landmarks drew visitors from all over
the planet, and as the clan gathered now, a man on the curb said, “Say cheese!”, raising one finger to the sky and then dipping this finger to signify that a photo had been taken, randomly tagging one instant among the multitude being recorded. She texted Zack,
This job is turning us into tourists.
They pulled into Uganda well after dinnertime. Benny Cuevas acted as a greeter from one of the small round tables up front, sitting across from a slumped young guy she realized was Carlos the vice detective. Benny was several serious drinks into jolly, probably off duty by hours now, and with his button down open to expose a beige undershirt, his fat gut rested on his lap, like a housecat.
“Hey, Detectives. How the hell ya doin’, Terri?”
“I’m good, same old. Still Central.”
Once, way back when she’d been a rookie and eager to network, Terri had signed up for some community outreach neighborhood thing, drawing Benny as her one-night mentor. All she could remember about him was that he’d talked nonstop in the car, talked nonstop to a roomful of obliging seniors, then talked nonstop on the ride back to the workstation. And nearly the entire time he hadn’t taken his eyes off her, one part or another.
“Zack too, awright!” Benny said. “Hey, pull up some chairs. You both know Carlos Moisey?”
“I’m going to grab a beer,” Zack said, walking off.
“I was just telling Carlos about this bullshit thing with this armoire I tried to sell on Emporiumpire. You ever deal with that place, Terr?”
“No,” she lied. Before the divorce was finalized, she’d posted a few small furniture items in their webroom. When two college girls came by to pick up the stuff, she’d been so dejected she’d just given them everything for free.
“Yeah, well … don’t.” Benny laughed, recalling some tale of minor woe, Terri palming her face and nodding when it felt appropriate. Looking up, she spotted Trinh Nghiem farther back, at the bar. She didn’t see Chuck the Trainee. Maybe he’d gotten eaten. When she returned to Benny, she saw that he’d put his shades back on. Even though they were PanOpts, something about his sly little grin put her on edge. She’d seen somewhere that 50 percent of all men were running some sort of naughty program at all times, and that the other 50 percent ran at least one background program to dissuade themselves from naughtiness; nudity blockers, ugly filters, the shocked, semi-transparent ghosts of their dead relatives materializing in moments of weakness. It was a different case with cops, whose workspace was under constant supervision. But there were always exceptions, or aging guy cops who simply didn’t care who knew. Years ago, she used to confer with female coworkers over their strategies for figuring out who was and wasn’t running these apps. Now she mostly didn’t care, although the first thing she had any male suspect do was remove his EyePhones.
Benny seemed like a good candidate for Guy Cop Who Didn’t Care Who Knew. If she had to guess, she’d say he used Harem Builder, an app that allowed men to build fake, private harems from even one glimpse of a woman. But there were lots of options. There were the countless layers that visualized women naked, or tried to determine who was menstruating. Then there was Gynovore, an app that enveloped the wearer in a world of graphic sexual carnage. She had no idea what exactly this entailed; it only worked for men.
Terri looked back toward the bar and said, “Why is there a TV out?”
She rose and walked over to the handful of cops gathered in a crescent of chairs with Trinh and Zack and Chuck the Trainee, who looked slightly less shell-shocked, but still clearly out of his element. The TV was a poster of plastic that’d been rolled up long enough that it wanted to curl inward, its four defiant corners lashed to a rolling sandwich board with packing tape. On the screen, a heavyset woman stood on a street in old town Pasadena.
“Everyone was just screaming and running, and I got separated from Dylan. And then … and then I saw him there …”
The camera cut to footage of a row of bodies lying in grass. As she talked, the actuality anchor, the little solid black letter R icon, winked out and was replaced by a question mark, the producer’s way of presenting their unreal footage as something yet-to-be-verified, coyly misleading viewers that there might be some gray area.
“Hey, why are we watching this K-Cal bullshit?” somebody said.
Someone else said, “I’d rather watch K-Cal bullshit straight up than some aggregator rehashing K-Cal bullshit.”
“Can you please?” an older cop said, motioning to the TV. He was narcotics, Norm or Norman something, she’d met him once.
The small crowd hushed as the woman in the story said, “I don’t understand how this could happen. And why the city isn’t following up on this.”
To the cop next to her, Terri half-whispered, “Is this the Tournament of Roses thing?”
“Yeah.”
“What are they saying it’s up to now?”
“Thirty-nine bodies and counting.”
Another alleged witness came on, describing in low tones how his brother had gotten trampled in a melee. “Where are the police in all this? And why is all this footage just coming out now?”
It was the power of images laid bare. Mobs were moved by footage, regardless of veracity. The city grappled with potent rumors of scrubbed watermarks, of powerful institutions trying to pass off the real as the unreal. Then there were the testimonials; actual footage of people, alleged witnesses, looking into a camera and soberly describing something that they didn’t actually see. This footage actually was real, required no scrubbing of watermarks or adding of watermarks. It was actual footage, of actual people, describing actual bullshit.
“Sand trap,” the guy next to her said.
“Naah. This is on Pasadena. If they try to wriggle out of it, there’s still a whole sheriff’s department between us and them.”
“This thing is growing. It’ll be county before the end of the week. That’ll make it the Wall, meaning our problem. Wait. Terri?”
She glanced over and saw she was speaking with Billy Bustamante. In all the times she’d consulted with him about some housing matter, always choosing him out of sheer alphabetical laziness, she’d never actually met the guy face to face. In person, he looked larger and rounder. Zack and Trinh crossed behind the half circle of chairs toward them, followed tentatively by Chuck the Trainee. “Sand trap, sand trap, we’re gonna get sand trapped,” Zack sang. “Somebody should start a pool.”
Trinh said, “I’ll put a C on Thursday.”
“What’s Thursday?” asked Chuck.
“Thursday is when the big ball that is your job goes into the sand trap.” Seeing the confused look on Chuck’s face, he added, “You Philly guys have a sand trap. Don’t even tell me you don’t have that.”
“Is that like a thing with the Wall?”
All three of them stared at him, and then Trinh explained, in the calm tones of a mentor, “Yes, Chuck.”
“Philly’s still under Delmarva for another few years. So that wasn’t really my department back east.”
“Well out here, when the public whips itself up into a sandstorm of flying bullshit, you feel it. Expect a marked difference in every civilian you speak with all throughout the week. By Saturday they’ll be egging us.”
“No one believes cops,” Trinh said, “because anybody can make footage of any event involving cops. People make fake footage because they don’t trust cop footage. And they don’t trust cops because of all the fake footage.”
“The endless waterwheel of bullshit,” Terri said, looking back at the TV, the same shot of bodies on trimmed grass, a title graphic reading “ALLEGED COVERUP?”
“They’re repeating this footage today,” Trinh said. “But in six hours, there’ll be hundreds of fresh scenes. It’s like it’s a …”
“A feeding frenzy,” Zack said. “And since they know they can’t get away with rehashing obviously jacked pass-along crap footage, they’ll do it with real footage of ‘witness testimonials.’”
“… a lot of which are j
ust people describing what they feel when they watch …”—Trinh seemed to search for the words to match her disgust—“the bullshit footage.”
Chuck looked like he was struggling with the concept. “But … what about the forty-one people they said died?”
“You see any last names? You see the bodies? I’ll shed some tears when I see some bodies.” Zack glanced back at the screen. “Eyes edit stuff. People see what they wanna see.”
Benny stalked over to see what the fuss was about. He glanced at the TV and pronounced, “No artistry.”
“Exactly. Exhibit A,” Zack said. “You fake something, fake it. Don’t do this halfway crap.”
She put her shades back on, wondering if she could discretely pull up an app that might give her some clues if Benny was viewing all women naked.
“It’s like that graffiti guy, hitting all those freeway signs? All that work scrambling up past the barbed wire, you get to the one graffiti-proof surface in the whole city, and for what? Just to scrawl your name?”
“Kids look up to that jackass,” Zack said, staring hatefully back to the TV set, its loop of outrages.
“They have to,” Benny said, chuckling to himself.
Terri glanced from Carlos to Trinh, struck by how utterly unruffled both seemed.
Benny added, “Now, throw some Godzilla in the mix …” She and Trinh exchanged eye rolls.
“You catch that one? Um. Hold on.” Zack fiddled in the air, scrolling through his mail. “‘Godzilla Plows the Statue Of Liberty.”
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