by Cadigan, Pat
‘That’s all right, as long as we know where they are.’ Konstantin handed her the bagged headmount. ‘Look after this, the kid was wearing it when he died. I’m going to screen some surveillance footage in the manager’s office and I thought I’d question the staff there as well.’ The people on the couch were gazing up at her expectantly. ‘Is this the entire night shift?’
‘The whole kitten caboodle,’ Pleshette assured her.
Konstantin looked around. It was a small lobby, no hiding places, and presumably no secret doors. Small, drab, and depressing – after waiting here for even just a few minutes, any AR would probably look great by comparison. She turned back to the people on the couch just as the one in the middle stood up and stuck out his hand. ‘Miles Mank,’ he said in a hearty tenor.
Konstantin hesitated. The man’s eyes had an unfocused, watery look to them that she associated with people who weren’t well. He towered over her by six inches and outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. But they were soft pounds, packed into a glossy blue one-piece uniform that, combined with the gooey eyes and his straw-colored hair, gave him a strangely childlike appearance. She shook his hand, which was even softer than it looked. ‘What’s your job here?’
‘Supervisor,’ he informed her. The gooey eyes gazed past her at Guilfoyle Pleshette. ‘Well, unofficial supervisor. I’m the one who’s been here longest, so I always end up telling everybody else how things work.’
‘Oh, don’t stop there, Miles,’ Pleshette urged. The kimono sleeves snapped like pennants in a high wind as she stretched out her sticklike arms and refolded them. ‘Go ahead, tell how if they promoted from within here, you’d be night manager. Then I can explain how they had to go on a talent search for an experienced administrator. It’ll all balance out.’
‘There’s experience and there’s experience,’ Mank said huffily. ‘Nobody ever died while I was acting night manager.’
‘Very true, very true – everybody survived the riot where you had to refund all the customers. But nobody died so that made it all good-deal-well-done.’
Miles Mank strode past Konstantin to loom over Pleshette, who had to reach up to shake her skeletal finger in his face. Konstantin felt that panicky chill all authorities feel when a situation slips the leash. Before she could break in, the mustached officer, Wolski, tugged her sleeve and showed her a taser set on flash. ‘Shall I?’
Konstantin nodded, stepping back and covering her eyes.
The flash was a split-second heat that she found oddly comforting, though no one else did. Besides Guilfoyle Pleshette and Miles Mank, Wolski (and her ginger mustache) had also failed to warn her fellow officer, the other two employees, or Taliaferro, who had chosen that moment to step back inside. The noise level increased exponentially.
‘Everybody shut up!’ Konstantin roared, and was shocked when everybody did. She looked around. All the people in the lobby had their hands over their eyes. It looked like a convention of see-no-evil monkeys.
‘Thank you,’ she added awkwardly. ‘Now. I’m going to screen surveillance footage of the victim’s final session in the manager’s office, and then interview the rest of the staff.’ She turned to Taliaferro. ‘After that, I want to question anyone who was in the same module and scenario.’ She waited, but he didn’t take his hands from his eyes. ‘That means I’ll be phoning you down the block, partner, to have select individuals escorted to the office.’ She waited another few seconds for him to answer. ‘Understand, Taliaferro?’ she added, exasperated.
‘Yeah, just let me do some prelims on the customers,’ he said, speaking to the air where he thought she was. He was off by two feet. ‘They’re gonna be getting restless while you’re doing that. We’re going to have to give them phone calls and pizza.’
Konstantin rolled her eyes. ‘So give them phone calls and pizza.’ She turned back to Pleshette. ‘Now, can you show me to your office?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Miles Mank said genially, ‘but I’m afraid I don’t have an office. I’ve been making do with the employee lounge.’
‘Suffer, Mank,’ Pleshette said, taking a peek between her fingers. ‘She was talking to me.’ She started to lower her hand and then changed her mind.
Konstantin sighed. Their vision would return to normal in a few minutes along with their complexions, assuming none of them suffered from light-triggered skin rashes. Perhaps she could have been more sympathetic, but she wasn’t sure any of them would notice if she were.
She put her hand on Guilfoyle Pleshette’s arm. ‘Your office?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Pleshette, ‘if I ever see well enough again.’
Pleshette’s office was smaller than the smelly cubicle where the kid had died, which was probably a good thing. It meant that Konstantin didn’t throw anything breakable against the wall when she discovered that the so-called surveillance footage was an AR log. There just wasn’t enough distance to make a really satisfying smash and still be safe from shrapnel.
‘Invasion of privacy,’ Pleshette explained when Konstantin called her in.
‘What privacy?’ asked Konstantin. ‘Every public area has three-four cams running on it twenty-four hours a day –’
‘This isn’t a public place.’ Pleshette’s smile was suddenly cannier than Konstantin would have thought possible. ‘It’s a private area that people pay admission to get into. Which means that it can’t be put under surveillance because one of the commodities the clientele purchase when they come in here is privacy.’
‘Oh,’ Konstantin said, half-afraid that Pleshette was going to go on to cite the case that had established the precedent. She thought for a moment. ‘That would cover, say, anything admissible in a court of law, right?’
Pleshette nodded her hairdo.
‘Fine. So, what about the inadmissible footage?’
‘What?’
‘Just show me the inadmissible footage – the illegal surveillance recording – and we’ll call it a night.’ Konstantin waited, but Pleshette only stood there, looking at her with vague puzzlement clouding her funny little features. No canniness in her expression now. ‘Look, since that surveillance recording’s illegal, it doesn’t exist, I never saw it, and no one’ll know about it. I’ll figure out how to build a real case later. Just show me what you’ve got.’
‘But there isn’t anything,’ Pleshette said, her cartoon voice turning a bit gravelly with fatigue and stress. She pulled the kimono tighter around her sticklike body. ‘There really isn’t. Bring in a squad and search the place, you won’t find anything. People buy privacy and artificial reality here, and that’s what they get.’
Konstantin gave a short, incredulous laugh. ‘You know people could be coming here and doing just about anything in those cubicles, then? Without ever touching the AR rigs?’
‘Well, they could,’ Pleshette admitted. ‘But the boot-logs on all the equipment say it was in use for as long as each cubicle was occupied by a paying customer. Except for the few minutes it takes to put the stuff on and take it off again. So maybe some people go back there, leave the ’suits and monitors on the floor, but run the programs, and stand around enjoying the quiet. I don’t know for sure. But after they leave, the ’suits sure smell like someone’s been using them. And they register as having logged into AR as whoever they want to be and done whatever they wanted to do until their money ran out and they left. So, yeah, I guess I don’t know for sure what anyone does back there, but I just take it for granted, because that’s what I’m paid to do.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Konstantin.
‘Anything else?’ Pleshette asked.
‘No, I think that about covers it, thanks,’ Konstantin said and settled in to watch the video.
She watched every moment, including the instructional lead that told her the only pov available would be detached observer. The editing option was available for close-ups or odd angles, along with a primer to pull down if she were feeling less than Fellini, or even D. W. Griffith.
Helpful, she thought, freezing the footage before the lead faded into the scenario. Excessively helpful, even. Was she supposed to decide how to edit the footage before she watched it?
But of course, she realized, this came under the heading of souvenirs. Footage from your AR romp, or video of your friend’s wedding, or prepackaged quick-time scenics from a kiosk in the Lima airport for a last-minute gift before you boarded the flight home – you made it look however you wanted it to look, for whomever would be looking. Maybe you didn’t want it to look the same to everyone – a tamer version for one friend, something experimental to hold another’s attention, a gratuitous orgy to keep your garden club awake.
Konstantin tapped the menu line at the bottom of the screen. Options? it asked her, fanning them out in the center of a deep blue background. Pick a card, any card, she thought, memorize it and slip it back into the deck. There’ll be a quiz later. If you last long enough. She chose No Frills.
The image on the screen liquefied and melted away into black. A moment later she was looking at an androgynous face that suggested the best of India and Japan in combination. The name came up as Shantih Love, which she couldn’t decide if she hated or not. The linked profile informed her that both the Shantih Love name and appearance had been reversed and were protected. No age given; under sex it said, Any; all; why do you care?
‘Filthy, thankless job, Shantih, but somebody’s got to.’ She tapped for the technical specs of the dead kid’s session. Full-coverage hotsuit, of course, which would tell her when the kid had died. She scrolled past his scenario and module choices to see how long he’d been in AR. Duration: four hours, twenty minutes.
Konstantin winced. The kid must have been case-hardened beyond belief – most people, even serious addicts, had to take a break after two hours at least. She called up his vitals so she could note the exact time of death in the archiver. Then she just stared at the figures on the screen, tapping the stylus mindlessly on the desk.
Shantih Love – or, rather, the kid presenting himself as Shantih Love – had shuffled off his mortal coil just ten minutes into his projected four-hour-and-twenty-minute romp in post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty. The Shantih Love persona, however, had managed to go on for the remaining four hours and ten minutes quite nicely without him.
Konstantin watched as the sequence faded in.
In the middle of a glitter-encrusted cityscape at dusk, the androgyne made his/her way toward some kind of noisy party or tribal gathering on the rubble-strewn shore of the Hudson River. The rubble was also encrusted with glitter; more glitter twinkled on the glass of the silent storefronts on the other side of a broad, four-lane divided thoroughfare partially blocked by occasional islands of wreckage. As Shantih Love swept off the sidewalk, ankle-length purple robe flowing gracefully with every step, and crossed the ruined street, one of the wrecks ignited, lighting up the semi-dark. Shantih Love barely glanced at it and kept going, toward the gathering on the shore; Konstantin could hear music and, under that, the white noise of many voices in conversation. What could they possibly have to talk about, she wondered; was it anything more profound than what you’d hear at any other party in any other reality with any other people? And if it were, why did it occur only in the reality of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty?
Shantih Love abruptly looked back in such a way that s/he seemed to be looking directly out of the screen into Konstantin’s eyes. The expression on the unique face seemed somehow both questioning and confident. Konstantin steered the detached perspective from behind Shantih Love around his/her right side, passing in front of the androgyne and moving to the left side, tracking him/her as s/he walked toward the multitude on the shore.
A figure suddenly popped up from behind the low concrete barrier running between the street and the river. Shantih Love stopped for a few moments, uncertainty troubling her/his smooth forehead. Konstantin tried adjusting the screen controls to see the figure better in the gathering darkness but, maddeningly, she couldn’t seem to get anything more definite than a fuzzy, blurry silhouette, definitely humanlike but otherwise unidentifiable as young or old, male, female, both or neither, friendly or hostile.
The shape climbed over the barrier to the street side just as Shantih Love slipped over it to the shore. The ground here was soft sand and Shantih Love had trouble walking in it. The fuzzy shape paced her/him on the other side of the wall and Konstantin got the idea that it was saying something, but nothing came up on audio. Shantih Love didn’t answer, didn’t even look in its direction again as s/he moved in long strides toward the crowd, which extended from the water’s edge up to a break in the barrier and into the road.
The perspective had slipped back behind Shantih Love. Konstantin tapped the forward button rapidly; now she seemed to be perched on Shantih Love’s right shoulder. The gathering on the beach reminded Konstantin of the sort of ragged, disorganized cocktail party that her ex had loved to attend. She was disappointed. Was this really all that anyone in AR could think of doing?
Shantih Love whirled suddenly; after a second’s delay, the perspective followed. Konstantin felt a wave of dizziness and the images on the screen went out of focus. When the focus cleared, Konstantin saw that the figure was standing on top of the barrier, poised to jump. Shantih Love backed away, turned, and began stumbling through the party crowd, bumping into various people, some less distinct than others. Konstantin didn’t have to shift the perspective around to know that the creature was chasing the androgyne. Now the pov seemed to be only inches in front of the creature’s face; she had a fast glimpse of bandage-wrapped arms and hands with an indeterminate number of fingers as it staggered into the party after Love.
The pov began to shake and streak, as if it were embedded in the pursuer’s body. Frustrated, Konstantin pounded on the forward key, but the pov didn’t budge. They called this custom editing? She fumed. Even worse, now that she was among the party crowd, almost every attendee was either so vague as to be maddeningly unidentifiable or so broad a stereotype – barbarian, vampire, wild-child, homunculus – that anonymity was equally assured.
Shantih Love broke through the other side of the crowd two seconds before she did and ran heavily toward a stony rise leading to the sidewalk. S/he scrambled up on all fours, a heartbeat ahead of the pursuer.
Love vaulted the low barrier and ran along the middle of the street, looking eagerly at each wreck. There were more wrecks here, some ablaze, some not. Something moved inside each one, even those that were burning. Konstantin realized she was probably alone in finding that noticeable, much less remarkable – living in a bonfire was probably the height of AR chic. This week.
She tried pushing the pov ahead again and this time gained several feet. Shantih Love looked over his/her shoulder, seemingly right at the pov. The androgyne’s expression was panic and dismay; in the next moment, s/he fell.
The pov somersaulted. There was a flash of broken pavement, followed by a brief panorama of sky, a flip and a close-up of the androgyne’s profile just as the pursuer pushed his/her chin up with one rag-wrapped hand. Perfect skin stretched taut; the blade flashed and disappeared as it turned sideways to slash through flesh, tendon, blood vessels, cartilage, bone.
Blood flew against the pov and dripped down, like gory rain on a window. Wincing, Konstantin tried to erase the blood trails; nothing happened.
Shantih Love coughed and gargled at the sky, not trying to twist away from the bandaged hand that still held his/her chin. Blood pulsed upward from the artery in an exaggerated display. The creature pushed Love’s face to one side so s/he stared dully past the pov and then bent its head to drink.
Konstantin had seen similar kinds of things in shock videos, including the so-called ‘slay-ride’ video that had supposedly been circulating underground (whatever ‘underground’ meant these days) and had turned out to be so blatantly phony that the perpetrators should have gone down for fraud, or at the very least, false advertising.
But where the blood spilled in th
at sort of video had looked more like cherry syrup, this looked real enough to make Konstantin gag. She put a hand over her mouth as she froze the screen and turned away, breathing deeply and slowly through her nose, willing her nausea to fade. At the same time, she was surprised at herself. Her squeamish streak was usually conveniently dormant. In twelve years as a detective, she had seen enough real-time blood and gore that she could claim to be somewhat hardened.
Still, there was something about this – was it the blood, the noises coming from Shantih Love, the sound of the creature drinking so greedily? Or the knowledge that the real kid was going through virtually the same nonvirtual ordeal?
Konstantin collected herself and tried jabbing fast-forward to get through the vampiric sequence as quickly as possible. It only made everything more grotesque, so she took it back to normal running time, just at the point where both the creature and blood vanished completely.
Startled, Konstantin rewound and ran it again in slo-mo, just to make sure she’d seen it right. She had. It wasn’t a fast fade or the twinkling deliquescence so favored by beginning cinematography students but a genuine popper, which usually happened by way of a real-time equipment failure or power-out. Common wisdom had it that the jump from AR to real-time in such an event was so abrupt as to produce extreme reactions of an undesirable nature – vertigo, projectile vomiting, fainting, or all three.
Or a slashed throat? That was about as undesirable as you could ask for, Konstantin thought. Of course, that was assuming that anyone did ask for something undesirable. She tried to rub her forehead smooth.
She reran the sequence once more and then again in detestable slo-mo, watching the blood disappear right along with the creature, leaving Shantih Love behind. Konstantin called up the record of the kid’s vitals and found that, as she had expected, they had quit registering at the moment the blood had disappeared.