“Is it always like this?” Phil asked as the officers stampeded out the door. He poured himself a cup from the pot before she emptied it. For him, coffee was coffee.
She nodded as she dumped yesterday’s grinds in the trash. “Yeah, but it’s gotten worse now that there are three of us. You and Jason reminded them I was here.”
“It’s pretty unbearable. This is almost Old Testament-style shunning.”
“Oh, we’ll survive,” she replied. “You know how it goes. Repress, ignore, endure.”
He popped in sickly yellows and grays. “Rachel, no!”
“Hey, those are coping skills now,” she said, and pointed him towards the cupboard with the supplies. “They’ve let me get through months of aggressive hazing.”
“Coping skills?” Coffee shook over the lip of his cup. “No... No! I won’t live that way again.”
“Calm down,” she told him. “It was supposed to be a joke. I can’t help that I’ve got no sense of humor, remember?”
Phil didn’t reply, his colors ratcheting up from anxiety to agitation as he looked past her to the officers in the hall, so Rachel pulled out the juicy gossip as she lathered up the coffee pot. “Speaking of coping, somebody’s finally found a way to block digital feeds. Mulcahy showed me on the way to work. It’s like sealing yourself in a bubble, shuts them out completely.”
“Really?” Phil seized the change of subject like a lifeline. “Show me?”
“I can’t.” She shook her head. “He had an autoscript.”
“Oh.”
She was awful with autoscripts. Phil had given her the one which allowed her to set parameters for incoming callers, so he had been deeper in her head than almost anyone else and was intimately aware they scared the everloving shit out of her.
The Agents had found themselves in the unenviable position of living with awkward words. The term “autoscript” had been stolen from programmers and hobbled by Agents to describe an aspect of their relationship with their implants. The implant was a dynamic device and was designed to evolve with its user over time, changing itself to complement its user as they navigated their environment together. With practice, Agents could eliminate the tedious process of imposing conscious control over the implant, and their shared experiences would become second nature to both.
Agents could not avoid creating autoscripts any more than someone tossed out and left to survive on the frozen tundra could avoid learning how to find food, water, and shelter. Rachel was aware she was constantly writing autoscripts herself. She and Mulcahy had created one together as they experimented with BB gun physics, and each day it was easier to find the frequency she needed for a specific task without running the full gamut.
She did not, however, know where her brain shelved the damned things.
An autoscript could be passed from one Agent to another to help them shortcut the adaptation process. A foreign autoscript would have to be handled and reshaped through use before it fit snugly into the recipient’s repertoire, but giving an Agent an autoscript cut down on the time it would take to develop one from scratch: someone had used the analogy that passing an autoscript to a friend was the equivalent of handing them a preprogrammed GPS and a gas card before they set off on a cross-country trip.
Rachel knew if she could just figure out where she kept her scripts, she could give all of OACET a strong head start on learning how to see via the unseen. But finding them was the first problem. Even if she tripped over an autoscript lying around in her own head, she would have no idea how to pass it to another Agent. She barely understood what to do with those foreign autoscripts she had received; since her implant had become fully active, Rachel had accepted a grand total of two. She had practically bludgeoned these small and harmless scripts to force them to behave, smacking them around until they crept off to pack with her own native scripts somewhere in the back of her mind.
She hadn’t seen those foreign scripts since they had come to her, but they worked like magic charms. Autoscripts made life easier, and she knew she should join in the fun of passing them around with the other Agents, like siblings who pooled their baseball cards. But to get an autoscript from one Agent to another, the walls had to come down, and she was happy with her walls where they were.
“Give me a few weeks and I’ll get a copy to you,” she sighed. “Direct orders from Mulcahy. He told me to get my ass to school.”
“Autoscripts?” Phil guessed.
She nodded and watched the water swirl around and around the glass pot as she rinsed it. It was hypnotic; she had problems understanding water.
“They just take a little practice,” he said. “I’ll bet if you accept a few more, you’ll get the hang of them.”
“Do you ever…” Rachel tipped her chin up towards the fluorescent lights, the working man’s substitute for the sun. “Do you ever wonder what will happen if the implant reaches capacity? Just…you know…fills up so we’re left flopping on the linoleum like tuna?”
He laughed out loud. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“How do you know?” She turned her back on him and prepped an extra cup for Santino.
“Because I do. Mine grows with me. You’re asking if we ever run out of brain cells to store memories.”
Cup, cream, sugar, done, and she wouldn’t let herself look at Phil. “Who says we don’t? We know next to nothing about how the human brain works, and we went cramming all sorts of garbage into it.” Unbidden came a memory of early childhood and the unforgettable sensation of shoving a crayon up her nose as far as it would go.
Phil chuckled as he rubbed his own nose to take the sting of preschool out of it. “I think this is one of those things you have to take on faith.”
“Faith?” She gave a dark laugh. “No.”
Phil poked her with his free hand.
“Fine.” Rachel finished setting up the machine and got a fresh pot brewing, then unbuttoned her left shirt sleeve and pushed it up her forearm. Physical contact had to be involved for the transfer. No one knew why, the educated guess being that the implant was itself partially organic and maybe biology had to be involved with the process.
Phil took her wrist, his fingers resting against her pulse. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”
“Of course!” She smiled brightly.
“You’re not,” he said aloud, and pulled his hand away. “It’s okay. Maybe after work.”
“When we’re exhausted from a full day of mind games with a wacko killer? No. Come on,” she said, and snapped her fingers twice, quick. “Show me. I promise I’ll pay attention this time.”
Rachel hadn’t bothered to track how those two foreign autoscripts had come to her. Josh had given her the first script in his own inimitable way, grabbing her face and shouting: “My mind to your mind! My thoughts to your thoughts!” By the time she was done laughing, the new script was lodged comfortably in her cellular chemistry.
Phil had introduced her to the wrist technique when he had passed her the second script. When she had realized his technique was more intrusive than Josh’s, Rachel had retreated to the Agent’s equivalent of closing her eyes and thinking of England: she had flipped off visuals and used the implant to stream acid rock directly into her auditory processes until the transfer was done.
“Don’t go gray on my account,” she said, seeing Phil’s conversational colors fall. “If I have to learn, I have to learn.”
She held out her left hand. Phil paused, then moved to find her pulse again.
“What script do you want?” he asked.
“Surprise me.”
It all happened in the mind; there was no physical sensation beyond the pressure of an unfamiliar hand on her arm. Then came a nagging thought, but instead of pressing out, like the drive to go clean the toilet or pick up milk at the store, it pushed in. Rachel tried to follow the new autoscript as it took on form and function, and watched it as it leapt the barrier she had put up to preserve a small part of her mind from t
he voices of the link.
Damn, she thought. All of this time her autoscripts had been hiding out in the one part of herself she thought was still her own. Nothing was sacred.
And then, just as she thought she had discovered where she stored them, the new autoscript stopped being separate from her and vanished.
“I lost it,” she said. “I saw it come in and then it was gone.”
“Run it and check to see if it took,” Phil said as he removed his hand. “That’s a baby script, absolute basic level. It’s a locator for any Agent within a specific radius. I had it set to a thousand feet when I passed it to you, so just do a search for me and see who else pops up.”
“Sure.” Rachel dropped her connection to Phil, then searched for his GPS as if he wasn’t standing beside her. Phil’s position came up, along with Jason’s, one block south.
“Jason’s almost here,” she said, amazed.
Phil smiled. “Train it a little and you’ll know exactly where everyone is without having to do an individual search. It’s really handy. I think you’re probably the only Agent left who didn’t have a copy.”
“Yeah, I think Josh was nagging me about this script last night. Thanks.”
“No problem. Do you think you can pass it back to me?”
She leaned back and closed her eyes (oh, habits), and searched for anything alien or new. “No,” she said as she shook her head. “It’s gone.”
“It’s not,” he said. “But I don’t know how to help you find it. Mine are… They’re just there. I can put a finger on them without trying.”
Rachel moved to the coffee machine and started pouring. “Mulcahy wants me to package up all of my perception scripts.”
“Man, I’ll help in any way I can with that. To do what you can do?” Phil whistled dramatically and held out his cup for a top-off. “That’d be incredible. Would guarantee a place for me with Andrews and the bomb unit, too.”
“Want to explore?”
“Hell yes,” he said. He grinned and put his mug down. “Link me in.”
She did, and Phil shut his eyes as the building shifted from concrete and metal to a chromatic spectrum. Level after level of mass and void and mass again, with people throughout, each painted in a chaos of color and texture… “I don’t know how you understand any of this,” Phil said, smiling. “It’s unreal.”
“Practice, practice, practice,” she replied. “Can you see how I’m doing it?”
“Nope. I can’t follow your process.” He opened his eyes, then squeezed them shut again as information from two sets of visual stimuli broke within him. He groaned and dropped from their link. “Whoa. That’s… That’s too much.”
He staggered over to a chair and put his head on the table while his senses realigned.
“You okay?”
“Remind me to wear a blindfold next time,” he said into the cave of his arms. He sat up and blinked furiously. “Why is everything green? That’s definitely not right.”
“Your mind is playing tricks on you. Give it a second.”
“Yeah, there it goes. I wonder,” he said, “you ever think maybe the reason you can’t find your perception scripts is because they’re part of you?”
She had. Every autoscript became native, but hers had been formed by trial and fire and nearly breaking her nose on every wall in her old California apartment. Autoscripts were by their nature supplemental; her perception scripts were unique. No one else in the Program had written scripts to replace something they had lost.
“I should still be able to find the others,” she said. “Even the one you just passed to me is gone.”
“Maybe you should practice with Jason.”
She stared at Phil in open disgust.
Phil shrugged. “I know, I know, but you might resist his scripts, and they’d be easier to track.”
I’d rather swallow broken glass. She wasn’t sure if she had intended for Phil to pick up on that thought, but he smiled into his coffee anyway.
“Just an idea,” Phil said. “Or maybe we can try with a more complex script next time. It might take longer to disappear.”
“Let’s do that instead.” Rachel turned them towards their office, where they joined up with Jason in the hallway and entered as a group. Zockinski gave Jason a half-handed wave. Rachel went over to the couch and poked Santino’s legs with her shoe until he growled and moved so she had space to sit down, and then she poked him with her elbow until he lurched upright.
“How much sleep did you get?” she asked in a perky cheerleader’s voice.
Santino glared at her with bleary eyes. “Five minutes less than I could have had.”
She held out his coffee and he purred something about eternal gratitude as he cupped it in stiff hands.
“Did you check the forums?” Rachel asked. The previous evening, she had followed him around the Internet as he had prodded the maker community to action. She had periodically visited his posts to check if new replies had come in: if so, whether they contained any information good enough to justify waking up the task force. They had, and they hadn’t. The replies were nothing short of paranoid rambling and she wanted Santino’s opinion before she wrote the whole thing off as a false lead. “And don’t bother lying. The answer’s no.”
“Then why bother asking?” Santino reached into his briefcase and pulled out his laptop.
“Because I’m reminding you how you’re a cop and this is your job and I think you should take a look at what they posted. They claim to have some info on our guy.”
His colors brightened as he came fully awake. “No kidding?”
“Yeah, but it’s all… Ah, look for yourself.”
Santino loaded the forums and scrolled down. His original posts had exploded, the words liar or fraud peppering each response. “Eric Witcham? That’s not possible.”
“I saw his name come up on a few threads,” she said. She hadn’t bothered to read the messages in detail once they were dragged down by the surreal. “Who’s Eric Witcham?”
“A dead man,” Santino replied.
“Yes, thank you. I noticed that. But why do they think he’s back?” She stuck her fingers out straight and let her eyes roll back as her head drooped to the side. “We’re chasing zombies?”
“Wouldn’t that be fun? No, Glazer’s plagiarizing Witcham’s signature. The tech community is pissed. Witcham was a legend.
“Hey guys,” he called out to the others, who were still poking through the reports from Forensics. “We’ve got some feedback on the signature.
“Okay,” he said, skimming a biography of Witcham at lightning speed while he spoke. “Here’s the abridged version. Glazer is using a maker’s mark unique to a man named Eric Witcham. We would have gotten responses last night as soon as I put up the posts, but Witcham hadn’t been active since 2001 and he died in 2004, so anyone who isn’t a community veteran wouldn’t know of him. When he was active, he was the leading authority in pretty much everything related to tech. He gave lectures, he wrote textbooks, you name it. His specialty was encryption and he did a lot of work in biological enhancement…”
Santino looked up from his laptop to where Rachel sat, Phil and Jason standing behind her. “Guys, some of his research was used to build your implants. He was working on the first-generation tech right before he disappeared.”
Another OACET connection, Rachel thought. Glazer did his homework.
Then an idea niggled at her, and she did a quick search. “Guess who his employer was,” she said to Phil and Jason.
She wasn’t sure if one or both answered: “Hanlon Technologies,” but Phil bled white and Jason tore open in reds.
“Add it to the list, guys,” she told them. “It’s got nothing to do with the here-and-now.”
“And there’s no doubt he’s dead?” Zockinski asked. “We still haven’t found the assailant from the gas station, the older man.”
“Um… No, Witcham is definitely dead,” Santino found the right link and scroll
ed down through the news report on Witcham’s death. “Murdered, actually. They found him in the trunk of a junked car. He had been killed about six months before, so they had to ID the body through DNA and dental.”
“Is Glazer his son?” Rachel hadn’t seen any mention of family in Witcham’s obituary, but it was worth asking.
“I don’t think so,” Santino said. “There’s always the chance, but he never married and there’s no record he had any children. It’s more likely that Glazer worked with him, or maybe was a student of his when Witcham was still teaching.”
“Or Glazer just admired Witcham’s work and plagiarized his signature,” Rachel said. The detectives agreed with her—they only considered zebras after every horse had been shot—but Hill still went to update Sturtevant and to assign a few officers to track down any possible relationship between Witcham and a man who would now be in his early thirties.
“So, dead end, literally,” Santino said, and pushed his laptop aside. “I guess we’ve learned Glazer knows his history, but that gets us nowhere. Did Forensics find anything?”
“No,” Zockinski rifled through the stack of files and threw one to Santino. “Of the three sets of prints from his apartment, one belongs to his superintendent and the other two are unknowns. I’m thinking his prints and DNA aren’t in the system.”
“Strange,” Rachel said, reading over Zockinski’s shoulder from her place on the couch. “Hill and I would have sworn Glazer was military.”
“Nope,” Zockinski said. “He’s not in their databases.”
The huddle broke and they fell back to their tasks. It was a repeat of the previous evening; after the run on the bank and Glazer’s apartment, they had nothing to do but wait for something to break. They had been counting on Forensics finding something they could use as a new starting point, but the tests that were already back had yielded nothing.
Still…
The flutter of motion through the walls drew her attention first, followed by a quick change of colors which jumped from person to person. Bad news moved almost preternaturally fast and she saw it seep into the building, those outside of their office shifting from the colors of early morning boredom into the oranges and reds as fast as spoken words.
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