Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  In the car, Terri sat and let the shakes pass. She recalled a rumor from five or six years ago, the ancestor of the blinding story that had so terrified Bottlecap. For six months, criminals of all stripes had persuaded themselves that the LAPD could somehow remotely tap into EyePhones and see, in real time, what the wrongdoers themselves saw. It’d been a wonderful fear to exploit. Now that she no longer trusted her PanOpts, she appreciated how stressful it would be to believe that someone could always see what you were seeing. She needed a new pair of eyes.

  And anyway, she’d need a few things if she was actually going to be temporarily homeless. Searching for a pharmacy, she reduced the city to a high-contrast outline, with mammoth mortars and pestles floating over its drugstores. In the distance, she saw a cluster of these. Did LA have a pharmacy district? She wondered whether, if she kept this layer active, she’d see these mortars and pestles loom, huge, over whatever store she finally selected. This led to the image of Farrukh, desperately searching for a pharmacy in Panama. This was still his case, even with the hunt switched to his killer’s killer’s killer.

  The pharmacy was an underlit, forlorn little space in the Fashion District. Terri grabbed toothpaste, sunscreen, hand moisturizer, floss. In one aisle she hesitated and then selected a pair of disposable EyePhones, the force-issued disposables in her jacket being as conducive to paranoia as the PanOpts themselves.

  That word—“disposable”—had always irked her, being a weird inversion of its former meaning, always making her flash back to all those extinct throwaway luxuries of her youth: sporks, tin foil, fabric softener sheets. These disposables had to be “disposed” of in seemingly ubiquitous purple and yellow receptacles, or roving jump dumps, or back at participating stores, each unit being smart enough to tattle on its former owner if discarded improperly.

  At the counter, a miniature landscaping trellis framed the cash register, its funereal arch decorated with fake roses and pulsing Christmas lights, connected to the drop ceiling by dusty strands of cobweb. A pursey-lipped, bald little clerk appeared under this gloomy ornament, ringing up her purchase and handing over a receipt without saying a word. She walked to the corner of the front window and slipped the flimsy shades onto her face, the miniscule ridged border creating a tight seal and a disconcerting blackness. It was strange that something so thin and light on the bridge of her nose could bring about such total darkness. There was a pause and then a glowing pyramid arose from the darkness, flying up from the maw of nothingness to face her. As a teenager, her sister had suffered from optical migraines, baffling, half-hour episodes of blindness that left her couch-bound and morose. Tammi had described the lights that crossed her field of vision as neon zigzags and triangles, and Terri wondered now if this was close to what she’d seen.

  The pyramid unfolded into a menu. She tagged this to her debit account and pinged a box that filled in her personal information. Then she was back in the drug store, seeing the shelves and floor and front window overlaid with a flurry of banners and commercial Easter eggs that would erupt into more boxes and banners and dancing animations if given a chance. In her upper-center field of vision, a hot-pink drop-box read ONE PERSON ON THIS BLOCK HAS JUST TAGGED YOU.

  Back in the waiting car, she turned off and pocketed her PanOpts, trying to gauge how alert she was. The relief at not having to worry about her cop glasses was offset by the effort of trying to figure out what she had to worry about with the civilian glasses. Her face still came up as cop. No one could contact her directly, but they could still harass her with pop-up messages.

  The pink drop-box faded into view again, alerting her that now three people in her immediate neighborhood had tagged her. What constituted a tag? She tapped the box, unscrolling it into a snazzy ad for a service she didn’t understand. In the middle of a mass of candy-colored link buttons, bright red letters announced, SEE WHAT THEY’RE SAYING. She clicked this, reading,

  I just sold this bitch a pair of throwaway shades three minutes ago. Maybe she went renegade? If this was Sweden, I could’ve just fired her.

  Terri circled the car back to the pharmacy. The bald little clerk stood framed by the small arch, talking with a pair of citizens, all three heads snapping up in sync as she barreled down the aisle. He raised both hands, perhaps thinking he was under arrest.

  “You got a fucking problem?” she growled.

  “No problem.”

  “I’ve got a problem,” one of the shoppers said. He was a young kid in a frizzy afro and turtleneck. “I’ve got a problem with cops who kill people who tell the truth.”

  “What?”

  “Nuestro Quintiglio?” a frumpy college-aged woman said in righteous outrage.

  “What about him?”

  “He was trying to get to the bottom of the Tournament of Roses story. Now he’s dead.”

  “So?”

  “So we all saw the footage,” the afro kid said with steely self-confidence. “We all saw the footage of cops executing him on his own lawn. And we all saw you there, laughing at the whole thing.”

  “Easy,” she said.

  “Easy or what? You gonna kill and frame us, too, now?”

  She turned and saw another small flock by the front door, drawn to the drama in real time. Who knew how many people were watching this scene unfold on the networks. The hot pink drop-box read, EIGHT PEOPLE ON THIS BLOCK HAVE JUST TAGGED YOU.

  “Easy or you’re going to be under arrest for threatening a police officer. Is that clear?”

  “How about me?” the frumpy girl said. “You going to arrest me too?”

  A chorus of “me too”s erupted from the doorway, a dozen or so citizens of wildly different ages and backgrounds gathering by the entrance to the store.

  With affected deliberation, she strode in silence back out through the small, glaring crowd, wondering if anyone had the balls to get in her way, then reaching the car and whispering, “That’s what I thought.”

  Ten blocks away, she pulled over and tried to figure out a destination. An idea came to her. Rujuta wasn’t where Liney had said, but the odds were low that she’d left the city. Knowing her backstory, there wasn’t much of anywhere else to go, especially for someone with no registered identity, and double especially for a young female with no registered identity. Rujuta’s vulnerability would have made her hunker down somewhere.

  There was something else besides the EyePhones. The niece might be eligible for a California Victim Compensation Program handout, especially if Farrukh had been supporting her. If Terri could just get the word out about possible compensation, that would go a long way toward finding the missing niece. Human beings would crawl out of any woodwork for a cash money payout.

  Crawling out of the woodwork: the phrase seemed somehow apt for the events of the last week, and especially the last twenty-four hours. Ever since the reporter’s house, any problem she could have had had crawled out of hiding. She yawned and rested her head against the car’s headrest, wondering if there was some way Nuestro Quintiglio could have booby trapped his own death, maybe arranged for a series of baffling and borderline terrifying things to happen to whatever police officer found him murdered. In her fatigued funk, the thought almost made sense. After India and China had murdered each other, dead-hand programs had launched massive cyberattacks against India’s biggest ally, crippling America in one afternoon; the world’s biggest booby trap. If it was good enough for America, it was good enough for her, she thought with a drowsy distance, leaning against the glass of the window.

  The car honked her awake ten minutes later, as she’d instructed it to. She woke surprised that her mind had cleared space for a plan of action. Terri attempted to open a map box, realizing she was in the Overlay, not PanOpt; different interface, different everything. She brought up a dashboard box and set a course for the LAUSD, the school-district building half a mile down the freeway from the Temple. In motion, she peered at the sharp red neon reflected in the back window of a passing car, watching, transfixed, the w
ay its electric squiggles rolled off the glass, realizing she was looking at the car through a public layer, viewing the reflection of fake neon that floated over the city.

  Ads spilled in on her peripheral vision. Billboards changed every time she blinked. Some walls turned into female body parts; huge, glossy lips, a bare shoulder, the top of a bikini bottom, giant eyes that followed her motion, a massive pair of shapely women’s legs, grotesque, perhaps a half-mile tall, with panties stretched between the ankles. Working in PanOpts, it’d been easy to forget how much of the Overlay was dedicated to sex. There were private-pay layers that were nothing but raw copulation, nonstop, everything an orifice, the air filled with squawks and groans of delight, like bird tweets.

  The opportunities were endless for truly anonymous sex, people who met up for brief sessions in secluded spots, both seeing each other as anonymous hardbodies, sometimes exotic, sometimes fulfilling a specific erotic requirement. She imagined these people reaching for a bare thigh and finding seemingly supple flesh having far more slack and elasticity than it should have, or reaching for a waist and finding their hand connecting an inch above the seen.

  As she approached the LAUSD headquarters, she saw a clean Helvetica Student Of The Month announcement floating over the rooftop, barely distinguishable between the jumble of floating neon and block-high banners. Her brain fired off a random epiphany: your good deeds may be tallied, but they weren’t banked. A person’s Virtue Points were just another invisible limb, no more or less important than one’s bank account, or credit score, or family history, or married life, or web of friendships. Although most people had a few more of these phantom limbs than she.

  In the lobby of the district building, shiny metallic balloons for twos and fives and zeroes bobbled along the ceiling. Most of the back wall was taken up with a photo of one of the main cricket stadiums, somewhere inland. The space featured beautifully crafted wooden bleachers, and soaring, solar-powered sodium-vapor lamps. Two police chiefs ago, a concerted effort had been made to eradicate the public cricket courses, an exercise in futility and group tone-deafness. These days, refugee teams had snazzy uniforms and official sponsors, intramural sports being one of the very few legal outlets for refugee youth besides religious protests. The LAUSD had arguably the most solid connections with the refugee community of any governmental agency.

  A half hour later, she sat in Sam Bustamante’s office, watching as he scrolled through his own databases, seeming to peer through her and the wall behind her.

  “Well … all you got is a name and a scar?”

  “Yeah. It’s a thin ID, I know.”

  She’d dealt with Bustamante years ago, when she and Zack had been on the hunt for a vicious psychopath SSK hitman. They’d wanted this guy so badly they’d picked up his younger brother, a mostly straight-arrow tenth-grader, on the hopes that the suspect would dispatch someone to bail the kid out, providing some sort of trail back into the ether. They nabbed the poor teen on an attempted murder charge after he’d posted a classmate’s name as the last in an online game of “fuck, marry, kill.” It hadn’t been her proudest moment, but she’d been up for anything to get her man, and Bustamante had negotiated the takedown without asking for a quid pro quo, able to see the big picture in the whole ugly scenario. It was funny: she remembered Zack and her being ferocious about that case. But she was already in so much deeper on this one.

  “Nah, sorry. We can’t track deformities. That’d be, you know, a big red flag. You understand.”

  “Sure. Long shot. Let me ask you. A kid like this, no registered name … there’s no way this girl, Rujuta, that she would have even made it into the school system to begin with, right?”

  “She could be going under a different name. But yeah, she’d need at least an immunization card, and some sort of quasi-proof of residence. If she lives in a skyscraper, then she’d have to do this through RALA.”

  Terri shocked herself by yawning. “Oh man, sorry.”

  Bustamante looked at her sternly, and for a moment she thought he was genuinely angry for wasting his time. But then he pointed to a poster on the wall reading GET A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP BEFORE COMING TO SCHOOL and she realized she actually had wasted his time; she could’ve done all this legwork in her PanOpts in ten minutes. How to remedy that situation?

  Just after dusk, she pulled into the teardrop-shaped parking area of the forensic science division and had the car park near the curb, as far from the brassy lot lights as possible. A cluster of stragglers had gathered at the other end of the lot, waving to each other as a formation of cars gracefully swooped in and popped their passenger doors. Two of the men slapped hands as they ducked into their vehicles and zipped off toward the Friday night excitement of the civilian world.

  She’d tried calling Carla Morales five times with the disposables, and each time she hadn’t gotten any farther than the webroom foyer for the science division. The logic of coming here in person was slippery, although she supposed Carla would have to emerge sometime, and when she did, she’d have to come up here. Or maybe not. Who knew how many entrances and exits this unit had.

  From somewhere past her left side field of vision, Santa Claus lumbered across the parking lot with weary steps, finally lowering himself to squat on the curb twenty feet away, perfectly illuminated by the streetlight, his shoulders slumping as if he simply could go no further. She sighed. This ad campaign had been dogging her all day. Buying the disposables, she’d steeled herself for an onslaught of dating ads, all the subtle cues and lures of automated matchmakers that found her face an irresistible target. Instead, she’d been barraged with the annual post-holidays anti-depression campaign that had come to feel like as much of a Christmas tradition as discarded tree fires, so prevalent that it felt like she was hearing about it every January.

  Although the campaign took many forms—graphics, walk-ons, signage that attached itself to every possible public surface—it adhered to a rigid script: Kris Kringle, having done his duty, had been consumed by clinical depression. Sometimes he appeared sprawled in an empty toy shop, sometimes slumped in front of a roaring fireplace, staring down into a mug with parted lips. She’d never been sure if this was an ad campaign targeted at overwhelmed first responders, or to the public at large, and the one time she’d remembered, years ago, to ask her sister if she’d ever seen any of the ads, she’d felt self-conscious and weird, as if she were trying to retell a bad dream.

  Over Santa’s head now, a floating band of red-and-green neon read THERE’S NO SANTA FOR SANTA. As she watched, the neon fluttered and then read HELP IS ONLY A PHONE CALL AWAY. She’d never once seen a contact number for this alleged help. Maybe she’d have to ask him for the number. Because the disposables tracked her eye motions, every time she glanced over at Sad Santa, or read, for the fortieth time today, his sad, two-stage message, he’d look back up at her with red-rimmed, beseeching eyes. She raised her hand to give him the finger, got spooked, and lowered it again.

  She stepped out of the car, opening a call box in the chilly space before her, trying Carla Morales one last time. The floating cubicle showed her a one-eighth-size version of the phantom waiting room of the SI Division, or maybe just an empty version of a real room somewhere below the parking lot. She again punched in Morales’ extension and was again rebuffed by a stern, androgynous voice telling her to leave a message.

  “Hey, ah, it’s Terri Pastuszka again. Just wondering if you’d have a moment to help me with a pressing technical issue. It’s actually kind of urgent, so, yeah. You can call me on this number, not my department line.”

  Commercial blowback was, by far, the worst part about using disposable shades to place an actual phone call. As if to spite her solitude, the parking lot suddenly swelled with dazzling banners and rectangles, the world of commerce grasping onto each individual word of her message, desperate to connect her with a product or service. A neon border around the call box erupted into a dozen free-floating bubbles, each jostling for airspace as they offe
red her time management seminars, dry cleaners, service plans, mechanics. The phantom luminescence of these bulbous announcements lit up the asphalt below, itself erupting into a riot of zig-zaggy lines and cascading alphabets. Over the low hill and the dark outlines of neighboring houses, a distant, mile-high billboard read TECHIE STRESS? SKIP THE MESS! Far above that, the almond-shaped half moon sprouted eyes and lips and chubby cheeks, looking down on her with benevolent concern, and when the silvery words VALLEY STYLE BIKRAM 1ST MONT/$300 spilled out of its mouth, the giant Helvetica letters tumbled toward the earth’s surface, edges glowing red as if actually smoldering as they entered the planet’s atmosphere.

  Terri yawned and pulled off the disposables, using this same hand to grasp both temples between outstretched thumb and middle finger. When she looked again, the lot was empty: no banners, no boxes, no onslaught of glowing alphabets. Sometimes this job required a “close sesame.” How do regular people interact with the Overlay like this?

  Turning to lock the car, she spotted a small rabbit in the weeds near where Santa had crouched, laughing when she realized this was an actual thing her eyes were actually seeing.

  At the door to the bunker entrance, she found a buzzer. The same no-sex voice said, “Scientific Division.”

  “This is Detective Pastuszka from Central Division. I’m here to see Carla Morales. In NR.”

  “Do you have an appointment, Detective?” Appointment: like a reservation? The question confused her.

  “Yes.”

  The voice said nothing, searching the bowels of the complex. She wondered how far down the building extended, trying and failing to remember something about a European police force that had recently relocated below ground, on the theory that this would make them less vulnerable to the bad guys. But which bad guys? Organized crime? A rebel army? Maybe it was a show she saw. Her mind was slipping. She’d need something soon; a pot of coffee at the least.