Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (3 page)

Sometime after the students had shuffled home but before the sun came up, Santino admitted to savage jealousy. At the same time Rachel had a tiny chip implanted in her brain, Santino was finishing up his graduate degree at Cal Tech, developing manual solutions for problems she could now solve with a thought. If he had known what was truly possible, he would have banged on their door until they stuck him in the experiment just to shut him up.

She had very nearly told him then, about what had happened to them during those five years from when they received the implant to the day they went public, but he was still a stranger. He wasn’t OACET: he was different, other. Still, with the liquor guiding her, she took a chance. She turned off her implant and sat in the absolute dark. She listened to him talk about his family while the cars rumbled by, and felt comfortable around a normal human being for the first time since she had been one herself.

Anyone else in his position would have lashed out at her, would have taken out their frustrations on the reason they had become a pariah, but Santino had faith. OACET would change the future of law enforcement, he said. He wanted to be part of it, to be one of the first to define how the next generations of technology, law, and society intersected. Even before OACET broke the status quo, Santino had been moving towards that goal. He had left his comfortable Ivory Tower for the Metropolitan Police Department and slogged through four years as a beat cop to get some experience in how things worked, and to gain some perspective towards how things should work. He wrote papers too dense for Rachel to understand and had them published in journals with unpronounceable names. At cocktail parties, the academics peeled Santino off of her arm and rushed him off for questioning; her partner was far more interesting than the MPD’s pet cyborg. Sometimes he got mad enough to throw furniture, but he knew—just knew!—things would work out for them in the end.

Now, on their way to the bank, Rachel wondered if he might have been right. He certainly thought he was right; of all of the colors out there, she hadn’t expected that smug would come across as hot pink. 

“Don’t get too excited,” she said.

He cocked an eyebrow at her. 

“I’m just saying, suppose all of this goes perfectly.”

“Do tell.”

“We get in there, we find the out that Colonel Mustard did it with the candlestick in the library, and the city throws us a parade.”

“With bonuses?”

“Of course. Doubling annually.”

“I love me some exponential bonuses.”

“Even if all that were to happen…” Rachel said as she reclined her seat and leaned back, arms behind her head. “Plus they give us shiny medals with our names on them…”

“He waits for her to get to the punchline…”

“We still have to do passwords when we get back.”

Santino swore and threatened to drive into a passing truck.

When they arrived at the bank, they were directed to a lot cordoned off for the emergency vehicles. They parked beside Zockinski, but he and Hill had already started walking towards the building.  Rachel and Santino trailed behind, kid siblings warily dogging contentious older brothers.

When they turned the corner, the street was swarming.

“Why is the bank open?” Rachel asked.

Hill spoke without acknowledging her directly. “The lobby was cleared this morning. They roped off the ATM but the bank didn’t want to lose business.”

And what a day for business it was, with everyone and their sister overdue to talk to a real human being who, by pure coincidence, worked at the scene. You could share neighborhood gossip online but the thrills weren’t as intense. Status updates were poor fare for the ghoul within.

The vestibule was air-conditioned and the chill hit her like a polar blast. Rachel shivered at the smell and wondered if the customers in the bank proper were aware the recirculated air they were breathing was misted in blood. She wanted to reach out and trace the ventilation system back to its source with the hope of bumping into a HEPA filter, but one of the first things she had learned was to never scratch at the thin veneer of sanitation plastered over civilization.

(Poking around her main waterline had changed Rachel’s showering habits forever. She paid an outrageous monthly fee to a company who did something with salt and sand to scour each individual water molecule before it touched her body. A real bargain, in her opinion, considering the black tarrish gunk which lined the interior of the city’s pipes.)

The room was a classic murder scene, with the first layer of gore covered by a second layer of forensics. Based on the brownish pool and the handprint against the wall, Maria Griffin had fallen several feet away from the ATM. It was easy to read how her body had lain: an inept coroner had dragged the victim’s hair through her own still-damp blood when she was removed, leaving an effect across the white marble like brushstrokes through paint. 

Zockinski and Hill stood to the side, faces blank, watching them. Santino had put in his time on the force so he wasn’t cherry, but she was an unknown. Rachel was in uncharted mood-territory and had no idea what was going on in their heads (what translated to opalescent yellow-green?); she assumed they were waiting to see what she would do, but she couldn’t tell if they were impressed at her composure or waiting for her to vomit, swoon, or get the vapors.

“Don’t touch anything.
An-y-thing,”
Hill said. 

“I know. Didn’t you check up on me?” Rachel asked, following the blood. The woman had been wearing heels, as large and tiny spots chased each other in a clean pattern until a heavy blotch blurred the tracks. The blood told a story: Griffin had been attacked while she stood at the ATM, had tried to run, had lost her balance…

Hill didn’t answer so she took a moment to glance up at him. “I was a Warrant Officer with Army CID. Did three tours in Afghanistan before this,” she said, pointing to her head. He flashed an unusual shade of teal but didn’t respond.

“Seriously,” Rachel said as she returned her attention to the scene. “I used to be a real person and everything.”

She squatted on her heels, as far away from the blood as the small room would allow.

“You’re supposed to be looking for cameras.” Zockinski was getting angry, his surface hue going red again. 

“I am. I did,” she amended. “They were first on the list. But they aren’t the only things out there.” 

Or in here,
she thought. Her sixth sense swept down and out, moving into the marble to follow the utilities as they carved their way through stone. She poked and prodded from top to bottom, then started laughing when she hit the void.

Clever!
She began rolling through different frequencies to test for residue. Agents lacked an olfactory connection so chemicals were generally imperceptible unless they could be detected visually. Same with fingerprints, although those usually showed up when the source was sweaty or greasy, but she could almost always tell when disposable gloves had been used as those left a powder similar to that on moth wings.

Her tongue tapped at the roof of her mouth, ticking like the Predator on the hunt. She hadn’t realized she had adopted this little mannerism while she flipped through the spectra until Santino had called her on it a few months ago. It was crazy how quickly new habits were formed. 

Dust sparkled and she laughed again. Behind her, Zockinski and Hill were shifting like frightened rainbows, but Santino was gradually building in excitement.

Rachel gestured at her partner. Santino crossed the room and knelt beside her. “As a representative of OACET with no authority at the MPD,” she said quietly as his eyes widened, “I’m hands-off from now on.”

“No shit,” he whispered. They had never invoked this policy before; there had never been a reason. If this case went to trial, she’d be treated the same as a psychic hired by the department to give a grieving mother some hope. Her name would appear as a consultant who had assisted the MPD at their request, and the services she had rendered would be swept under the jargon. The Agents were so new that the judicial process hadn’t caught up with their abilities. It was safer to take herself out of an investigation than to risk having the case thrown out in court.

“If I were you,” she said, including Zockinski and Hill in the conversation, “I’d check for prints
here
and
here
.” She indicated two separate spots placed a few feet apart on a square marble block set on the lowest tier. “After that, I’d press them both at the same time.”

The homicide detectives didn’t move.

“If you won’t, I will,” Santino offered.

Hill went looking for Forensics, and Rachel whispered to Santino that there would be no prints since the guy had been wearing gloves, so she was mostly covering the bases, but was also sort of jerking Zockinski and Hill around. Santino approved; he preferred to multitask, too.

Forensics taped the surface and found nothing, but their team hung around to watch as Zockinski pushed on the two locations Rachel had indicated. As Zockinski removed his hands, there was a thin click and one side of the block popped out from the wall. Hill hissed through his teeth as a four-inch thick marble slab swung open on well-oiled hinges.

“Magnets. Big ones,” she explained. She looked at Santino, “I should have checked for magnets first. They’re easy to find, but they’re used in everything so they can throw me off when I’m searching.

“He set it up like the doors on a glass display cabinet,” she continued. “Apply a little pressure, and the clasp releases. I guess he stuck two in there to make sure no one kicked it open by accident.”

Zockinski hunched down, then dropped down to all fours so he could peer inside a goodly-sized hole. “You could hide in here for a couple of hours, easy…”

Rachel covered her mouth. It was another new habit, one she had picked up from Mulcahy who sometimes didn’t want to be caught smiling. 

“Whoa!” In his excitement, Zockinski nearly dove headfirst into the hole. Hill grabbed him by his jacket and pulled him back before he could contaminate the scene. Zockinski looked up at Rachel. “A tunnel?”

She nodded. “You guys might want to shut down the bank again. The other end comes out next to the first teller’s window on the other side of this wall.”

“Well, we’ll leave you to it,” Santino said, and gripped her shoulder. “Let us know if we have to sign anything.” Her partner steered them towards the door. She raised a curious eyebrow at him. “Just go,” he whispered.

“Let them have this,” he explained on their way back to the car. “They lose face if we stick around and take credit. But you just gave them their biggest lead, and they won’t forget it, and it really didn’t hurt that you performed freakin’ magic in front of the Forensics team!

“We are...” he said as he spun on a heel in a sleek Astaire pirouette, “Golden!”

Several hours later, buried under an avalanche of electronics, they had only unlocked eighteen passwords and she was on the verge of snapping an iPhone in half with her teeth. 

“Tarnished gold is still gold,” Santino said.

“Stop that.”

“I know what you were thinking.”

She snorted. “Obviously not. Gold doesn’t tarnish.”

“Yes, it does.”

“You need to stop buying your girlfriend jewelry at the same place you buy bananas.”

“They had a sale,” he muttered.

On the way back to First District Station, they had wondered why a bank had a secret tunnel. They thought about this for the space of a millisecond, then agreed it had been a remarkably stupid question. Rachel took a moment to search for robberies committed in old D.C. banks over the last century or so, and gave up when the number of results made it unlikely she’d find any information without some hard, targeted digging.

(The problem, as she had explained to Santino during one of their pub crawls, was that they couldn’t relate to the seemingly nonsensical nature of electronic data. The information might exist, but there was so much of it that the human mind, augmented or otherwise, would require an eternity to sift through it to find anything useful. Unless they knew how to interact with a specific hierarchical or relational database, the Agents were left to grope around aimlessly in mountains of meaningless code. Santino, who was a programmer in his spare time, had asked how on earth they managed, and Rachel had replied they generally used Google like everyone else.)

She tapped the stack of paperwork in front of her. Warrants, warrants, warrants; searches, seizures, and discoveries… Every item was documented before it reached them but she had to check each by hand a second time before she unlocked the equipment. Rachel certainly wasn’t making any friends among the judges’ clerks who had processed these warrants once already. When she called for confirmation, she was shunted to hold almost as soon as they recognized her voice. 

Oooh, the Bee Gees.
She was always grateful that Judge Richards’ office had an unwavering anti-Streisand policy. Rachel tapped her pen to the beat.

“‘Stayin’ Alive?’” Santino’s voice came from beneath the table where he was untangling wires.

“Yeah… Wait, how did you know that?” she asked.

There was a knock on the door, followed by the slow emergence of a Krispy Kreme bag and a legal folder through the philodendrons.