Carla rose and swiveled toward her, striding through a cheery hodgepodge of Overlay ad balloons.
“He’s dead.”
“Froggy.”
“Yeah. They called it, just now.”
Terri surveyed herself, finding no emotion, surprise or otherwise.
“Acute septic shock,” Carla continued. “He’s apparently been skulking around with a gunshot wound to the shoulder for two weeks. He definitely hadn’t sought out any professional medical help. The walking wounded.”
“Something motivated him to make it here out of sheer willpower.”
“Yeah,” Carla lifted a pair of expensive-looking EyePhones, dangling them from one pinkie. “These.”
“They work?”
“He was using them when he died. I’ll crack them as soon as I get back to the office. How are you?”
Terri shrugged, but she was unexpectedly moved by this slight show of concern, suddenly wondering if she was going to cry.
A vehicle honked from the outer rim of the parking lot at the same moment her disposables dinged. Carla stepped aside to let Terri climb out of the cop car and cross the forty feet of asphalt to retrieve her glove box. To her right, past the flapping crime tape and hovering ad bubbles, she could make out the Fish Market civilians, each watching her through their own shades, every face turning to silently follow her passage. Reporters would be here any minute. When she returned with the smooth metal box tucked under one arm, Carla said, “You need these people cleared out?” Terri shook her head, climbing back into the cop car, placing the glove box next to her and exhaling loudly.
She popped the box lid with a thumbnail, staring down at the dingy gym bag she’d retrieved from the freeway sign three days earlier, feeling the same cold gooseflesh rising on both forearms.
“That’s the bag,” Carla announced for no reason.
Terri pulled up the disposable shades, yanking down the zipper and producing an expensive-looking soccer jersey, probably tossed up onto the freeway sign by some high school bully.
“My glasses showed me my shirt.”
“Yeah.”
“This isn’t my shirt.”
“Yeah.”
“This isn’t my shirt. I saw my shirt. I was holding this, but I saw my own shirt.”
Their eyes met for an uncomfortable moment, Terri trying to phrase her question.
“What is this?” she finally asked, dropping the jersey to the floor, patting around her pockets again and retrieving the haunted PanOpts, holding these out in an open palm.
Carla cleared her throat. “Listen, I have a theory.”
“Okay.”
“It’s bad. You’re not going to like it.”
“Go.”
“I linked you to Quintiglio’s mail account, Segurança, when?”
“Wednesday. No, Tuesday.”
“Everything crazy that’s happened to you has happened since then. Right?”
“Maybe.” Terri remembered the Godzilla film.
“I charted everything you told me. Unless you left something out, the answer’s yes. As soon as you were linked to that account, your PanOpts started making up their own reality. Not all of it. But enough to steer you in a certain direction.”
“Steered,” she said, her suspicion out in the open.
“Think about it. The conspiracy, unless I’m really, really wrong, was fake. At the same time, public outrage was real. Although you were one of perhaps two dozen cops falsely implicated in the Quintiglio scandal, you were the only one forced by circumstances into a crowded area, and further forced by circumstances to show your face. Reporters gravitated to you because you unwillingly made yourself available. The manufactured crisis created its own gravity, and then it used whatever tools were available to manufacture more crisis. Your PanOpts had unlimited resources. Commercial apps, archives, your own nuances and expressions. Even your lack of sleep …”
“My purchase history. Zack—fake Zack—mentioned steak knives I’d gotten my sister …”
“Exactly.”
“So public outrage was real, but police outrage over Mutty was fake. I was shown a storyline, and then that storyline evolved.”
“I’d call it closer to improv than evolution.”
“But who did this? Why?”
“‘Why’ is the simple part. A group of random citizens were made to kill each other. Their EyePhones edited input in the service of this goal. I’m guessing Froggy saw the same thing in his shades that you saw in yours. A loved one held hostage. When I linked you to that mail account, your PanOpts were infected.”
“Infected. By who?”
“Terri … there was no doer.”
“Huh?”
“I think this was a self-replicating program. They used to be called reiteratives. Before that, they were known as viruses.” Carla pursed her lips just slightly, the only hint that what she was saying had any special significance. “Among its many other security functions, the Wall serves as a final safeguard against these, so that even if a reiterative could operate in the Overlay, which it can’t, it would get caught almost instantly by LAPD defenses.”
“So when I thought I was talking with Zack …”
“You were talking with your shades. With the idiopathic reiterative that had taken up shop inside your PanOpts.”
“Eyes edit stuff,” Terri said, peering out at the lot, seeing Kofi Agyeman in the distance, already sniffing out some fresh angle in the ongoing saga of cop scandals.
Her head jerked back at Carla.
“Jesus. Froggy got shot just hours before the Tournament of Roses.”
“I thought of that.”
“This can’t be a coincidence.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“Something’s arrived.” She swallowed, thinking of an emergency room, waiting for terrible news.
“Are the stampedes here?” Her question slipped out as little more than a whisper.
“I just don’t know, Terri.”
When she’d called Zack the next morning, he’d asked how she’d been. It’d taken an awkward pause to backtrack and figure out he’d meant with the mystery flu her Dupe had come down with. He’d left a message on Thursday to say he’d taken her advice, left his toddler with his teenagers and split town with Janice for San Luis Obispo. His tone of voice had filled in the rest, Zack sounding as optimistic about life as he ever would. The skyscraper assault, the Quintiglio scandal, the scene at City Hall: he apparently hadn’t heard about any of it. This being a Monday, Zack was back on the job at the train station, hopped up on some new theory about why this was going to be his lucky week. They’d agreed to meet at a newish place at the mouth of Olvera at nine.
Terri had spent the night at the Ritz, needing someplace safe from reporters, understanding that her own apartment hadn’t actually gotten invaded but still feeling a little spooked anyway. She’d gotten herself a nice room, set the windows to southern Italian coastline, and sat in the bath for a long hour, listening to the faint crackles of the bubbles and the occasional muted noises from the hallway, trying and failing to make herself cry.
Before going to bed, she’d called Carla for confirmation of what she more or less knew. Froggy had been receiving instructions from an anonymous shrieking assailant with a cloth bag over his head. This apparition held a terrified little girl—Froggy’s daughter or sister—with a sharpened screwdriver to her throat. Pineda hadn’t been the final target; Terri was. She’d been perceived as a threat and mixed into the cycle of killings.
A car fetched her, and she rode toward downtown without shades, raising her hands to retrieve them from her scalp anyway, laughing at the impulse. Terri watched the city slide by as it truly was, flat and unadorned. Maybe Farrukh had enjoyed seeing the city like this the day he’d died. She passed commuters already working on their way to work, women applying lipstick even while talking to an unseen client or subordinate, a man wolfing down a crumbly breakfast burrito as he typed into the air. The car sl
owed, passing the elevated civic sign that’d trumpeted the rebuilding of Chinatown for the last decade, and she could just make out the worn IMSANE tag. As she slipped on her dust mask, she caught a glimpse of the sorrowful mural that always chilled her, large rainbow letters reading MUMBAI YOU WILL ALWAYS BE OUR SISTER.
At the restaurant, she squinted in memory and then stiffened with shock. She’d come here with Gabriella. The place had been called something different then, and they’d come in a group of people, before they were dating. But there’d been that long moment when they were able to meet eyes across a crowded table and smile at each other; the moment she knew her suspicions were real—all those hints and smiles and phone calls made under the flimsiest of pretexts—and that her feelings were rhymed.
She sat at one of the eatery’s painted-metal tables flush with the sidewalk, letting this realization sink in. Whatever it was that had happened to Farrukh and Froggy and Stacy and all the others could just as easily have happened to her. If this thing—whatever it was that had reached out and taken seven people with it—had just known who in her past had meant the most to her, she would have done anything it had demanded. If it had been Gabriella in Zack’s arms, she had no doubt she would have killed Paula Pineda. She wouldn’t have been able to think quickly enough, wouldn’t have survived, if Gabby had been involved. It just didn’t have the right materials to work with.
A public address system suspended in the nearby tree played some hammy rock song, and a man’s voice whimpered through a seemingly endless chorus, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you …
“I’m confused. Does this guy love me?” Zack said, pointing up at the speaker with one thumb, visibly pleased to see her. She resisted the strange urge to stand and hug him. Sensing this, he said, “Hey, no hugs, I don’t wanna catch whatever you’ve got.” He sat and grimaced, rotating his shoulder in several pained circles.
“What happened?”
“The thing, from last week. From Wade’s party. Still healing slow.”
“Last week,” she said, with a light amused amazement, having to speak up through the dust mask.
“Yeah, well. Old age.” He winced again. “I’m gonna comp myself a jet ski out of his college fund.”
“How’s the train station going?”
“I caught two bathroom flashers on two separate days. That was exciting. Second guy looked just like the first. And you know what he said when I cuffed him?” Zack lifted a finger, saying, “Hold up, Terri,” as he turned to face back toward the train station, talking with someone else now.
The waiter brought them each mugs of coffee they hadn’t asked for, and she felt that reflex of gratitude, a signal that overrode almost all else, detached from faith or even thought. She was grateful for food. At some point before lunch ended, she’d have to debrief him, one way or another. If she didn’t explain the full story, she’d at least have to explain the skyscraper assault from Thursday. There were several plausible versions of the truth that could be offered, up to and including the full truth. But that was for later in their meal. For now, she could enjoy the moment.
Terri sat and watched the crowd, drawn in by its realness, the people actually here, less than a table-length from the edge of her actual table. Viewing these civilians—young, elderly, enfeebled from the past, or striding with great purpose toward some unseen future—she was struck by the realization that people weren’t stampeding everywhere, at all times. She stared in insight, a carrier of secret knowledge. One more overlay.
She thought about Paula Pineda. After Terri had disarmed Froggy and handcuffed one of his thin arms to the railing he’d slumped against, she’d folded her own jacket into a thick square, placing this below Paula’s head as she gasped for air. Pineda had been hit in the upper-left chest. Terri had heard of gunshot victims refusing to die even when shot in the heart, still able to lurch for a few seconds past their own deaths, the body operating on sheer will. All she could do was call 911 through her civilian shades and wait for the sirens.
She’d uncuffed Paula and rolled her onto her side, into the recovery position, the back of her T-shirt drenched in so much blood that Terri had to steady a hand on Paula’s ribcage, lest the weight of wet clothing pull her back down. And when the labored, sucking breaths grew faint, she did roll her back to face up, unclear if she should attempt mouth-to-mouth on someone who clearly had seconds left.
Paula had never closed her eyes. She’d glanced about in confused terror, meeting Terri’s gaze, darting off again, locking eyes again. A realization came. Terri had seen into this woman’s life from overhead, the components of her final day fanned out like parts in a technical drawing. She’d seen why Paula had been made to kill, why she was dying, truths this twenty-two-year-old would never know, even now, in the last few moments of her existence. Paula was dead before the paramedics arrived.
Terri had sat like this with her dog, Congo, the day he’d died. They’d never gotten any sort of autopsy, so she’d never been sure if he’d been brought down by a stroke or an aneurysm. Whatever it’d been, it’d laid Congo out, so that when she found him on the kitchen floor, he was flat on one soaked side, panting and immobilized. Congo’s eye had moved like Paula’s, roaming, taking in her face, and then roaming again. She’d felt that the dog was trying to grasp the enormity of what had happened, not just the internal calamity that had felled him, but the entirety of his life. Congo had been reduced to a single eye, taking in the beautiful world he had been thrust into and just as quickly exiled from. The eye had come to rest on hers one last time, beseeching and terrified. The eye seemed to ask, Why did I have to come all the way here if I just have to leave again?
THANKS: Lisa Auerbach, Felicia Berryman, Christina Brown, Neil Burke, Noelle Burke, Zack Carlson, Jan Chipchase, Bradley Englert, Laura Fleischauer, Leandra Gil, Oliver Hall, Bob Hardt, Joel Kyack, Ashley Macomber, Mickie McCormic, Amy McPheeters, Tom McPheeters, David Nathanson, Dave Nesmith, Arwen Nicks, Nicole Peeke, Jesse Pearson, Joe Preston, John Skaritza, Mark Steese, Mark Yolles.
SPECIAL THANKS: Anthony Berryman, Scott Gould, John Michaels, Marcus Savino, Tara Tavi.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam McPheeters is the author of The Loom of Ruin. He was born in Ohio, raised in upstate New York, and currently lives in Pomona, California, with his wife.
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