DIGITAL DIVIDE
K.B. Spangler
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012-2013 K.B. Spangler.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Digital Divide is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com
Cover art by Rose Loughran of Red Moon Rising, at redmoonrising.org
This file was sold online via ebook distribution networks using Smashwords and its affiliates. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit agirlandherfed.com to learn more.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Acknowledgements and Apologies
ONE
Three. Days. Three. Days. Three. More. Days.
She loved high heels, how their tak-tak-tak against the concrete implied purpose. A woman in heels had places to go, things to do. They kept her company on quiet nights like this, each step an affirmation.
Just. Three. More. Days.
Her shoes used to say Debt. Debt. Debt. Ninety. Thousand. In. Debt. Loans, oh God, those hideous student loans, and living off of credit instead of sense. Then came an eternity of paychecks in portions, divvied up and rolled into snowballs thrown against interest. Along the way, and she couldn’t remember when, her shoes stopped counting down the money and started counting down the time.
Twelve. Months. Two. Months. Thirty. Days. Ten... Nine...
Such a lame joke, the one where her shoes had been there each step of the way, but every Friday for the past eight years they had carried her to the ATM on her way home from work, telegraphing her progress.
Strange, though, how this ritual had changed. These visits were nothing more than comfort food. She had replaced the weekly receipt with an app which reported her balance in real time, and all of her bills were paid online. She couldn’t remember when she had last mailed a check. Her money no longer needed a chaperone: she was a bystander to her own finances as funds moved from her employer’s account to her own with happy reliability, then fled to her creditors as they carved it up like a Christmas ham.
These days, everyone might as well be Agents.
She slipped her card into the reader and stepped into the vestibule. The room was cool in the early August evening, and the door closed behind her to seal off the heat and the noise of the city. It was an old bank, done up in worn marble, and the vestibule still had hints of its past life as a teller’s office before it had been adapted into an alcove for the ATM.
The screen danced, the bank’s animated logo twisting into an ad for loan refinancing until she entered her pin. Welcome, valued customer Maria Griffin. Would you like to apply for a low-rate credit card? No? Would you like to be emailed about an exciting new savings account? No? Then please continue.
Her account flashed before her eyes, a very small, very manageable number.
I will never do this again, she thought.
He grabbed her from behind, one arm across her mouth and the other tight at her throat with the knife. She reeled, not at the attack itself but the shock of it. Muggings, yes, practically an annual event in D.C., but not in this familiar, empty room.
She lost sight of the knife as he threw her towards the ATM.
She tried to scream, tried to run, but it burned when she tried to catch her breath. A shoe slipped beneath her and she lost her footing on the floor. Wet? Yes, and slick, and...
Oh God. Red.
Her hands went to her throat and came back red.
TWO
Rachel Peng kept her back to the door so she saw them before they saw her. Most days, Rachel would have stuck it out in silence, but this morning had started off with an emergency trip to the hardware store. The handyman she kept on call would cover over the graffiti (CY-BITCH in neat black letters; she appreciated this tagger’s creativity and penmanship), but she had bought a five-gallon drum of paint for this purpose and, in the way of all necessary things, it was nowhere to be found. She knew it would turn up at some point, probably under the bathroom sink or some other place a huge tub of paint had no business being, but she was not in a mood to suffer fools or co-workers with axes to grind.
They rumbled towards the lunch counter, cut young bucks sporting a mix of cheap suits and uniforms, and she had one brief moment to relax when it seemed they’d pass her by. Then Zockinski went red, quick and hot across his core of autumn orange, and she sighed into her sandwich. Game on.
They came at her in a pack, Zockinski at the lead. “Hey, freak.”
“Not today, Zocky. Keep on moving.”
Rachel had never before said anything with an ounce of personality to Zockinski and he flashed sickly purple-gray, a color she was beginning to associate with doubt. Anger, passion, violence, those were the reds, and stability and peace were the blues. Odd combinations of surface colors showed internal conflict, maybe. She was gradually building an ontology of emotions, but she was self-taught and it was slow going.
Zockinski shifted back to a red-tinted orange and sat down across from her. “Freak,” he said again. “Cy-borg,” he spat, hitting the second syllable too hard to sound like a rational adult. His gang swarmed around the table, hemming her in her booth. They were beginning to pick up Zockinski’s hue, red spreading from him through his small crowd like a virus.
Mob mentality is literally contagious, Rachel realized. She reached out to the OACET community server and began recording, just in case.
“Walk away, buddy. Don’t make me break out the d-word.”
“Been called a douchebag before, freak.”
“And I’ve been called a freak by scarier men than you, Zocky, so that word’s lost its teeth. No, I meant ‘discrimination’.”
The men instantly ran a fierce dark crimson. These days, cops were taught to avoid committing hate crimes the same way they were once taught how to avoid getting shot.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” she said, moving her lunch out of harm’s way. “Wait, let’s use the legal. Tell me I don’t have a case against you, with this…” she gestured at the group, “pinning me down, harassing me.
“Oh,” she added before Zockinski could respond. “By the way, you’re on camera.”
They glanced, almost as one, at the black half-moons mounted behind the register to discourage employees from pilfering the till. When they looked back at Rachel, she was shaking her head and tapping her temple, a sugar-sweet smile wide across her face.
They froze. Everything about them stopped, even their kaleidoscopes of emotions, and Rachel watched as they tried to process something beyond their experience. She had seen this a couple of times before, an internalized struggle to take what was alien and squish it into familiar packaging so it could be safely handled. She didn’t think she’d ever fully shake the memory of watching it happen in her own parents.
Two of Zockinski’s group spun towards the counter, changing direction like sharks that had scented blood. The others abandoned Zockinski as he fumbled
for a way to save face. Hill, his partner, tugged on Zockinski’s shoulder to get him to move. Zockinski paused, his surface colors moving through a full spectrum of reds before he finally went a dusky reddish-gray and slid out from the booth. Rachel guessed she had just seen him try and fail to find the perfect comeback.
A lone man, tall and slender, with curious yellows wrapped around a core of ultramarine, came up behind them.
“Goodbye, Zockinski.” Rachel said, ripping open her bag of chips. “This never happened.”
Zockinski muttered something unintelligible, a threat or thanks, perhaps, Rachel couldn’t say. The red had faded from him, so she chose to believe he had thanked her and offered, “I erased the recording.” He ignored her and moved towards his friends at the counter.
The tall man slipped into Zockinski’s seat. Rachel slid a wrapped sandwich across the table to him.
“You should have done that weeks ago,” Raul Santino said, studying his sandwich through wire-rimmed glasses.
“I’m under orders.” Rachel rolled her eyes. “Be friendly, be courteous, be an example.”
Don’t mess it up for the rest of us, was what her boss had meant but hadn’t needed to say. She was their first police liaison and she was aware of the weight she carried.
It had been a fast six months since the human mind had gone digital. In point of fact, the cyborgs had been created five years prior, but a joint federal-level handwashing had hidden the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Enhancement Technologies from the general public. The Program had failed, the politicians had said, sadly shaking their heads. Such a tremendous waste of resources. Perhaps we’ll try again after technology has caught up with theory.
Except the Program hadn’t failed. Patrick Mulcahy, self-appointed head of OACET, had waited until a clear day in early spring when the cherry trees were almost ready to bloom. Then he called a press conference and took a frenzied media corps on a long walk around Washington to discuss how their elected officials had secretly invested in cybernetics. He explained how this particular technology had been sold to Congress as a method of communication for operatives who couldn’t carry external equipment into the field. Unfortunately, there was a wrinkle: it seemed the Agents who had received the implant were able to circumvent all electronic security. Passwords, firewalls, airwalls… these meant nothing. If a device could talk to another machine, an Agent could connect to it and take control of it.
Yes, even the nukes. Don’t worry. We live here too.
They had stopped at a streetcart for burgers. The media coverage had shown Mulcahy the golden boy, the all-American hero, laughing over a quarter-pounder as he changed the world.
The revelation that the U.S. government secretly employed three hundred and fifty OACET Agents had caused no small damage in Washington. The cyborgs were one thing, their government’s decision to sacrifice them another. Mulcahy had gone to the press armed with plenty of evidence to show how certain politicians had panicked and managed the potential OACET scandal through quick, quiet murder. There had been five hundred Agents, once.
Mulcahy and the other members of OACET’s administrative team had linked arms with the press and dragged a reluctant Congress into open hearings. The discovery process would probably last for years, but each day a little more information slipped into the news cycle. The Agents were agreeable about letting others carry out the inquiry, as they were more sympathetic if they weren’t their own messengers.
Besides, they had better things to do.
Or they had seemed better at the time, Rachel groused into her chips. Mulcahy had approached D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and suggested a liaison between their organizations, with Rachel acting as the MPD’s first in-house Agent. The police would benefit from a cyborg on staff, and Rachel could put a human face on OACET for the local law. The MPD had jumped at the idea, but it was now brutally obvious that someone high up in management had hitched themselves to the pro-OACET bandwagon without consulting the officers. Resentment was thick among everyone with boots on the ground except for poor good-natured Santino, who was forced to watch his own promising career collapse under their dead end of a partnership.
“What’s on the agenda?” Rachel asked. Mornings were spent doing paperwork filed by officers who claimed their cases had something to do with technology, and thus defaulted to Santino’s office. Scut work, all of it, with lost smart phones making up the majority. Afternoons were more interesting, with plenty of time to kill on the shooting range or crawling through the rubble of pawn stores to find stolen electronics.
Santino, engrossed in his footlong turkey sub, wouldn’t meet her eyes.
She groaned. “Passwords?”
He nodded. “Sixty-eight of them,” he said through a mouthful of sandwich.
She threw up her hands and slumped back in her booth. Passwords were meaningless busy work. When an officer seized a piece of equipment protected by unbreakable encryption software, they sent it to Santino. He would set it up, turn it on, and she’d reset the password to a universal code used by the First District Station of the MPD. It was tedious, made more so by the need to call the office of each judge who had issued the original warrant to ensure the equipment was covered in the search. OACET was too vulnerable to be caught up in accusations of misuse of power.
“Let me guess, they all have to be done by end of shift,” she said. Months could go by between password sessions, then suddenly dozens of machines would need to be opened and cleared as quickly as possible. Rachel suspected dickery.
“Actually, no,” he said, getting up to refill his soda. “I asked. We’ve got until Thursday.”
Rampant dickery, then. Someone was setting them up for failure, and at end of shift today they’d catch hell for not getting their work done.
Across the restaurant, Zockinski and his pack were huddled together, food forgotten. Rachel killed time by watching their colors pop and shift; their cores were consistent, but their surface hues were moving towards alignment. Someone, and it looked like Zockinski from the invading autumn orange, was making a persuasive argument.
Most Agents used their implants to interface with technology, but Rachel couldn’t care less about that particular ability. Outside of the office, she talked to tech so rarely that she wouldn’t give it a second thought if she woke up one morning and machines had gone back to being inert lumps of plastic which chittered and binged. She wouldn’t have traded the implant for anything, though. An unexpected side effect of connecting the implant to the audio and visual centers of the brain was the capacity to perceive an almost countless number of frequencies. Information from both force and matter was turned into a sixth sense which wrapped around and through objects, letting her know their qualities more clearly than her eyes ever could. Form, location, even texture and sound, all of these stood out in her mind, allowing her to move through an environment so rich and vivid that she had tried to describe it only once, and badly.
Rachel wasn’t sure what she perceived in other people, be it body temperature or energy emissions or the magical residue of unicorn kisses, but whatever it was translated into color. The space a person occupied in her consciousness was defined by a signature hue, overlayered by an ever-changing rainbow which reflected their mood. This rainbow was hard to read (Why would someone flash pink, brown, and green? What did it mean when these colors aligned to match? Did it matter if they clicked into alignment quickly, or if they swirled around in a mess like a child stirring fingerpaints?), but she was getting better at it.
It fascinated her sometimes, those traditional relationships linking mood and color. She wondered whether she perceived someone as blue when they were calm because that was how they appeared to her expanded senses, or whether her mind interpreted something otherwise unknowable as blue because she had been conditioned to think of it as a calming color. Rachel would have loved to stick the implant in her grandmother’s head, a woman who kept to the old Chinese tradition of white as the color of death. W
ould she and lăo lao see white at the same time, or would Rachel see black where her grandmother saw white? She had no one to talk to about these things: honestly, she was usually frustrated as much as fascinated.
“You’re staring,” Santino said as he dropped back into the booth.
She snickered. “Not exactly.”
He dropped his voice to just above a whisper. “You’re listening in?”
“No. You’d be surprised at how fast the fun of hearing what other people really think about you wears off.”
They stood to leave, gathering up their cellophane carnage, when Zockinski and his partner came at them.
“Ah crap. Round two, fight.” Santino said. “You better get out of here. They won’t bluff off this time.”
“Hang on,” she said, seeing some blues and greens among the orange. “Let’s see what they want.”
Jacob Zockinski was a homicide detective and Rachel supposed he fit the part. He wore off-the-rack for plainclothes and was in fair shape. Her frame of reference was different on such things, but she assumed he was decently attractive for a man some years her senior. Matt Hill, his partner, had that rare basketball player’s build of tall, whip-thin, and sturdily muscled. He also had the loudest body language of anyone Rachel had ever met. With his height, he might as well have paid for his opinions to be displayed on a billboard. He was there (arms crossed, torso slightly turned towards the door, and standing several steps behind Zockinski) for no other reason than to show support for his partner.
“We’d like your advice,” Zockinski said. His hands were deep in his pockets and he appeared casual, but he was flickering that same sickish purple-gray.
“I really don’t think you do,” Rachel said.
“We have a tech problem,” Zockinski spoke over her.
Digital Divide Page 1