Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  “It’s my fault,” he shook his head. “I should have let you know what was coming. It hit me hard the first time, too.”

  She took one of his hands with both of hers, and he lifted her up like a kitten. “Look,” he said, smiling.

  They stood at the center of an opaque silvery-gray bubble, the edges of which sealed away the pervasive digital world. Rachel could still perceive those same fourteen signals if she went looking for them, but their pressure was blocked from this sanctuary of Mulcahy’s making. Nor could she feel the timers on the traffic lights, the Wi-Fi blanketing the park, the chatter of cell phones in the cars driving by... The digital ecosystem was silent.

  The sphere around them was centered on Mulcahy, whose conversational colors nearly matched his cerulean core. This was probably as close as he came to being at peace.

  She understood. It felt as though she had stepped from the water and could move without its weight.

  In their secret selves, every Agent wondered when they would end up like Shawn. It seemed inevitable; they could never escape from the pervasive presence of mechanical things. It was possible to narrow the scope of what was perceived to the immediate area, but even that left dozens—sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands!—of devices. These formed an unrelenting pressure on the mind which could be ignored but never avoided. The only real relief was to turn off the implant. For Rachel, for the others, this was not an option; they might go insane as quickly without the implant as with it. There was no going back.

  Then, suddenly, sanctuary. Control without the clamor. Little wonder she had fainted.

  Things were…fuzzy in the sphere. She was having difficulty seeing Mulcahy as anything but his colors, and when she looked down, her torso and legs were fit together like a jagged jigsaw. Their feet, the ground beneath them, these were barely visible at all.

  She reached out, halfway expecting to feel the edges of the bubble as her fingers vanished into the gray, but they fell through empty air. Rachel pushed her arm forward and found the more of her body that extended past the edge, the greater the pressure of the oppressive chattering things. She stopped before she moved her face beyond the barrier, sure that they would surge over her in force when her head and its blended circuitry were exposed.

  “Is this yours?” she asked. It seemed the sort of thing he would discover.

  “No,” he said, his eyes closed. He let the railing do the work of holding him upright as he drank in the silence. “Danny in Accounting figured this out, can you believe it?”

  Danny in Accounting… Danny in Accounting… There were several Dannys in OACET, and she tried to place his face among those Agents in other departments before she realized her mind had gone out through the collective to locate him. She backpedaled quickly before the many Dannys felt her and thought she was trying to call. “The link is still active?”

  Mulcahy nodded, and the railing gave a slight creak in protest as he shifted his weight. “We can’t even keep ourselves out,” he said with a trace of fierce red pride.

  He pushed himself off of the railing. “I have to drop the barrier. Ready?”

  Rachel took a deep breath and nodded, steadying herself for the rush of the shrieking things. Instead, as the gray slowly faded and the details of the park returned, they crept back like beaten dogs and slunk around the edges of sense. She closed her eyes and exhaled in relief.

  “Danny found it when he was looking for a way to block the paparazzi.”

  Oh. That Danny in Accounting. Josh and Mulcahy were merely movie-star handsome. Danny in Accounting had stepped straight off of the pedestal of a Renaissance sculptor. The man couldn’t take out the trash without ending up on the cover of a magazine, and Mulcahy’s standing agreement with the press to leave OACET alone was ignored by those bottom-feeders who thought that holding a camera gave them the right to use it. Someday there would be an object lesson so profound it would pass into press corps legend.

  “I can’t maintain it for long,” he said. “I’m still training the autoscript. But in a few weeks, it’ll be an independent program. I still have to test if it blocks traditional film photography, but streaming digital is cut off at the barrier.”

  “Nice.” Rachel flipped off her visuals and felt her way through the digital ecosystem. It was muffled, as though she had slammed the window shut to block out the summer screech of the cicadas. She wondered what her implant had learned while the sphere was active. “Can you do anything about the gray?”

  Mulcahy’s blue took on a streak of yellow. “Gray?”

  “Yeah. The bubble…” and she trailed off as she realized Mulcahy’s field of vision didn’t stop at the barrier.

  “Listen,” she said, and cocked her head as if checking the time. “Today’s going to be a bear and I need to get to First District Station.”

  “Rachel.”

  She waited. She was not about to lie to him, and she definitely didn’t want to deal with his guilt when she told him that since his new program blocked digital frequencies, it also blocked some of the media she used to see.

  He must have guessed; his colors went pale.

  “I need some time to play around with it,” she said through the link. “I was able to see, just not as well as usual. It’s just a matter of finding the right spectrum. Don’t worry about it.”

  She started walking, and he fell in a few steps behind her.

  “Rachel.”

  “Hey, look. Geese.”

  He relented and they made their way across the park.

  “Have you learned how to move your autoscripts yet?” Mulcahy asked.

  Rachel shook her head, slightly annoyed. Mulcahy hadn’t shown up on her doorstep by accident but she had assumed this meeting would be about Glazer and the case, the facts she reported to him carried back to OACET for dissection and analysis, their plans within plans adjusted to cover all possible new scenarios. She was wrong. Apparently this was a strategy meeting and her performance review, all rolled up in a brisk morning walk.

  “Please make that a priority. I’d like everyone in the Program to have at least some of your capacity. And maybe they’d have some feedback or advice that would help you, too.”

  Doubtful, she thought to herself, then glanced at Mulcahy to check if she had accidentally sent that through the link. If she had, he chose to ignore it.

  “You’ve been keeping up with your therapy?”

  “You know I have,” she said, and kicked a rock at a trash can. She regretted it as soon as her foot moved, acting the petulant child in front of her boss.

  “You ran out of the bank yesterday.”

  Rachel kept her back straight and bit down on her first response. She’d take it out on Jason later. It had to have been him; Phil would run tattletale to Mulcahy only if she posed a risk. Jason had probably called Administration the instant she had burned Charley’s note in the parking lot to tell them how poorly she was managing OACET’s affairs at the MPD. “It won’t happen again,” she said.

  “Good. Also,” he added, and smiled tightly, “kindly remind Jason Atran that even if I were to pull you, he would not be the one to take your place.”

  “One might say he’s a whiner.”

  “One might.”

  Pigeons mobbed their feet as they cut through the thick of the park. Somewhere high over her head, Mulcahy hummed a few bars from Tom Lehrer.

  “Life is skittles and life is beer?”

  He grinned; she had caught the reference. “Not the nicest song out there. Reminds me…” he said, and tossed an audacious pigeon off of his shoe, “tell me about Zockinski.”

  “He’s bumping chests with Jason,” she said. “But in the rah-rah manly-man way. Zockinski is still keeping him at arm’s length, but I think that’s more because of what we are rather than who Jason is. You should probably ask Phil; that’s not my culture.”

  It wasn’t. Every day she had been in the military, she was thankful for those women who had come before her, the ones who had marche
d through thirty years of hell so she merely had to slog through waist-deep heck.

  “I meant his wallet.”

  Oh crap, she thought. She had meant to tell Mulcahy about this herself. She had filed her daily report last night but had left this little bit of information out; Jason had struck again.

  “Yeah. High-end RFID blocker.”

  “What’s your opinion?” Mulcahy asked over the link.

  “I don’t think he’s a technophobe,” she replied. They left the relative peace of the park and blended back into the tangle of the city’s streets. “Maybe he’s just a privacy buff. Either way, it explains why he went after me for six months straight.”

  “Do you see him as a potential problem?”

  She shook her head. “I would have before all of this, but now? Not if we bring down Glazer before anything else happens. We do that and OACET will have made his career. He’ll be ours for life.”

  Alliances were her priority. Her role in OACET’s plans within plans was to entrench herself within routine police work: she was to make allies while simultaneously proving that the MPD benefitted from having an Agent on staff. It was a long-term strategy designed to play out over years, but as of two days ago, Glazer’s campaign had launched Rachel ahead of schedule. While the MPD officers on the task force were concerned that their careers might hinge on Glazer’s arrest, Rachel was terrified that OACET’s ground game might be ruined if she fumbled.

  “Good.” Mulcahy’s conversational colors dropped some of the cool grays and shifted towards a more peaceful shade of blue. “And Detective Hill?”

  “He had an actual conversation with Phil yesterday, said he and Zockinski would defend Jason if they had to. His mood was pretty stable. He’s started to overcome that instinctive aversion to us, too. I like him.” Rachel realized with mild surprise. “Did you look into a connection between him and Mako?”

  He nodded at a passerby who recognized them. “Yes. Cousins, but as far as I can tell they haven’t seen each other since they were kids. Detective Hill’s family moved to New York when they were both about ten and their families lost touch.”

  She knew it. Rachel nearly clapped her hands in delight. “Did you talk to Mako yet?”

  “No. Carlota’s almost ready to go into labor and they don’t need any extra stress right now. But I did put extra security on them in case they’re a target.”

  They passed a bakery and were buying doughnuts before they realized it. Doughnuts were an undignified pastry, she told him, lacking the stateliness of muffins, or the secret shame of cinnamon buns who at least tried to live the lie they weren’t really cake. Mulcahy went purple and laughed into a napkin.

  They left the bakery and made their way through the usual small crowd that gathered when Mulcahy could be viewed through the safety of a window. Someone shouted something venomous at him from the other side of the street. The Agents ignored her and kept walking.

  “Did you know it would be this bad?” Rachel took the chance; she had always been afraid to ask. He had told them they should prepare for war but at the time she had felt this was mostly rhetoric. She had changed her opinion almost immediately after they went public. Rachel still felt he couldn’t have predicted how they would be treated; no one in their right mind would willingly turn themselves into a public target for this much hate.

  “Yeah. It’ll pass.”

  “You don’t honestly believe that,” she replied, watching the red swell among those who noticed them. “We’re the new monsters.”

  “I do believe it,” he said. “Monsters don’t exist. We want them to, because enemies are convenient, but sustaining a delusion takes a lot of effort. It’s easier to forget. In 1826, my great-great-grandfather was beaten to death for the crime of being Irish. Forty years ago, you wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near West Point.

  “It’s a process.” He sounded almost wistful; Rachel doubted he would have said any of this outside of the link. “It’s slow, it’s hard, and yeah, the odds are against us. I can’t even tell you how glad I am you’re the only one who’s almost been shot…”

  She coughed politely around a huge bite of her third doughnut.

  He grinned, then gestured towards the street. The foot traffic was aggressive; Washington woke ready for battle. He took in the people around them, the rooftops, the windows covered with slitted blinds. “There’s nothing we can do about a sniper,” he said, “or cyanide, or a speeding car. But we are protected from discrimination, and we can work within the system to prove ourselves. In the long run, our best defense is to change public opinion, to show them we’re still just people.”

  “I know the party line,” she said.

  “But I need you to believe,” he answered in hard steel blues. “We have to be committed to more than lip service if we ever want to be seen as anything other than monsters.”

  She turned her face away but he was still there in her mind. “I know it’s hard,” he said, understanding but not quite sympathetic. “Next year, it’ll be easier for us. We’ll get a huge sympathy bump around March.”

  God! March! Rachel thought to herself. It’s so soon.

  OACET had always planned to allow the full details of what had happened to them during their five years off of the grid to be disclosed, but only after the public had plenty of time to recognize the cyborgs were not going to reduce the planet to a smoking crater, or render the credit ratings of their enemies to digitized dust. It seemed as though their Administration had decided the public was ready. Sometime during the next few months, a certain member of the press who had been friendly (but not fawning) to OACET would trip over a small piece of evidence that would point her in the direction of the story of the century.

  And then the shit would really hit the fan.

  He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. They did not have what one might call a hugging relationship, but even if Mulcahy hadn’t heard her, he had picked up on her panic.

  “I want to tell Santino,” she said in a rush. “I don’t want him to find out through the news.”

  “No.” He removed his hand. “Everyone has friends outside of the Program. Santino won’t be the only one who’ll be hurt at having been kept in the dark. We maintain control over this, no exceptions.”

  “Like we keep control over Shawn, no exceptions?”

  “That couldn’t be helped,” Mulcahy said as he looked out over the street. “You handled it well, by the way.”

  “But if Santino can be trusted with Shawn—”

  “No,” he said. It was quiet and final.

  They walked a block in silence. Lulls in conversation were always awkward with other Agents. You could still feel them rattling around in your head, waiting. She groped around for a safe topic to get him to drop those hard and distant blues. “Did you learn who let Shawn out, or how he found the razor?”

  “I have a good idea,” he said. His expression, his posture, his presence in her mind hadn’t changed, but he was instantly bleeding cold in reds and grays. Rumor had it that Mulcahy had searched and had come up empty but she hadn’t expected this type of response; he was balanced on the edge of serious violence. Rachel was almost ten feet away before she knew she was moving.

  He stopped and drew his anger back into his core, his conversational colors draining until there was little left; it was always guilt with him. Rachel took a quick breath, then calmly stepped back beside him and pretended she hadn’t nearly mown down a regiment of passing accountants to get out of arm’s reach.

  “Sorry, Penguin,” he said. “I forgot.”

  “Have you been keeping up with your therapy?” Rachel asked.

  He nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “The Shawn incident is… It’s a sore spot for me.”

  They walked in silence until they turned down M Street and the First District Station came into view.

  “Rachel,” Mulcahy began, then stopped and pulled her out of the way of the foot traffic. “What you’re doing with the MPD, there’
s no way I can tell you how important it is for us. Thank you.”

  “Thank me when all of this is over.” Rachel looked towards the sturdy brick building. “I can’t promise I’ll get this guy, and there’s probably a lot of people hoping I fail.”

  “Well, we Irish have a saying,” he said. “May those who love us, love us. And those who don’t love us, may God turn their hearts. And if He doesn’t turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles so we’ll know them by their limping.”

  Rachel laughed. She had read the abridged version on a bumper sticker a long time ago and preferred his full-length one. “And if you’re wrong and nothing ever really changes?”

  “Aim for their ankles.”

  She smiled and looked towards First District Station a second time, and when she turned back he was gone. Rachel could pick him out of the crowd by his core colors but the rest of him had blended into the morning masses. Quite a trick, considering. She sent him a quick wave, and Mulcahy waved back before he vanished into the day’s chores.

  She barged into the temporary office in the fishbowl and sat down in the same chair she had occupied yesterday, an old Army trick of validating her place in time as well as space. Santino and Jason were late. Phil said hello and the detectives each gave her a nod, and they all busied themselves in the forensics reports that had come in during the night.

  Santino crawled into work ten minutes after she arrived, the sleeves on his dress shirt pushed up just enough to reveal the edge of a fresh bandage. When Zockinski pressed him for details on the asskicking, Santino said he had broken up with his girlfriend and left it at that. (Rumors of Santino’s breakup coincided with Zockinski’s trip to the bathroom, new opinions forming throughout the precinct of the nerd cop who dated women wild enough to wield knives.) It also gave Santino a much-needed reprieve; as they waited for Jason to saunter in on his own schedule, Santino commandeered the couch, put his jacket over his face, and dropped into a dead sleep.

  Rachel and Phil left to get coffee. The break room was one of the busiest places in the building but it cleared out as soon as they walked through the door. Rachel yanked the coffee machine’s cord from the outlet and dragged the machine over to the sink. No one else bothered to clean it properly and she refused to let herself suffer through coffee that tasted of soap.