Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (4 page)

“You guys in?”

“Hey, Charley,” Rachel said, and went to help the clerk navigate the jungle. The only perk of Santino’s new position was a massive private office with southern exposure, and he had covered the walls in plants. She had never seen him tend to them, but they grew at the speed of a tropical rainforest. He adored them and added to the collection almost every other day: she thought the room stunk of ozone, and was nursing a small phobia of falling asleep long enough to be converted to fertilizer.

“Hey, Peng. We heard you were doing passwords today,” Charley Brazee said, handing her the folder. She bent her head and shoulder to keep the phone against her ear and flipped the folder open.

“Hah! Confirmation letters,” she said to Santino, thumbing through a baker’s dozen of notarized documents from Judge Edward’s office. “Charley, this is whole hours of time right here. Thank you!”

The small man smiled. “Time-saver for us, too. We’re making copies of these when the warrants are issued so we don’t have to drop everything when you call.”

Rachel shrugged and nearly lost the phone. “Sorry.”

“It’s not really a big thing. Ah…” People either avoided her or shotgunned her with questions, there was no middle ground. Charley was a friendly man in his late forties who bribed them with favors for answers. “Why are you on the phone?”

She feigned ignorance and waved the folder at him. “Because not everyone is as amazing as you are, of course.”

“No, I mean, why are
you
on a
phone?
” 

“I asked her to use it.” Santino’s head popped up from under the desk, then vanished again. “If I can’t hear at least one side of a conversation, I don’t know what’s on our schedule and I fall behind.”

“What he means is he’s a shameless eavesdropper.”

“I thought I just said that.”

Charley leaned against Santino’s overstocked bookcase, the only horizontal surface not completely lost under foliage. “So…”

“We can’t talk about it,” said the underside of the table.

“There might have…” Rachel stopped talking long enough to hear the music change to a different song.
Nope, still on hold.
“There might have been a bank.”

“Rachel!”

“What? Charley already knows about the bank.”

The clerk nodded. “And the tunnel, and that Peng found it. Edwards is frothing.”

“Oh.” Rachel winced. “Yeah, he would be.”

Judge Edwards was a mainstay on the D.C. judiciary and a fierce opponent of OACET. Several news organizations kept him on retainer as a counterpoint for stories which framed the Agents in a positive light. In his early fifties and with the combination of telegenic features that would inevitably enter politics, Edwards got a lot of airtime. His big thing was attacking what he called “the Forensics God” (and you could hear those capital letters when he spoke), or the idolatry of DNA and other forensic evidence over personal character. He argued in broad strokes that evidence had become so glorified in popular culture that it had become the only thing which mattered to a jury; he claimed that the disposition of the defendant and the testimony of eyewitnesses were now vilified in the courts; he cited case law to prove that the human element of the legal system played a more substantial role in determining guilt than bloodstains or errant hairs. Santino would rage about lies, damned lies, and statistics when the pundits played an Edwards clip. 

Rachel, who had served in the Army’s version of Internal Affairs, thought the truth was probably somewhere in the middle.

Charley was a newcomer to Edwards’ staff. As lowest dog in the pack, Charley had caught the job of managing their warrant clearance.  Rachel had made Charley laugh during their first phone conversation, and he had started dropping by Santino’s office whenever business took him to First District Station. His core was a smooth bluish-gray which reminded her in turns of the default color at the edges of software windows, or of a little cartoon seal she had loved as a child.

“Well, he’s pissed at you but, you know, he’s still got those other two cases to keep him busy,” Charley said, thumbing through Santino’s books. 

Santino scooted out from under the table and booted up an ancient personal computer. “No idea why they’d stick encryption on this piece of junk,” he complained. “What other cases?”

“You know, the mugging in Ward Six, they got it on tape but there were glitches… Uh, and… And the other one. The guy who got beat all to hell but, on video, he’s just drinking coffee…” Charley’s voice trailed away as he signed off on the conversation. His surface colors had been tinted with Santino’s ultramarine, but those had been immersed by his core of blue-gray and the professional blues of business suits as he found something of interest in Santino’s collection.

“Can I borrow these?” he asked, showing Santino the spines of some old college textbooks. Charley seemed to be a habitual Borrower, but it was not yet known if he was also a Returner. Rachel was still waiting for him to drop off a pack of playing cards he had snaked after poker a month ago.

“What glitches?” Rachel prompted, but as Charley started to answer she was abruptly moved from hold into a very loud conversation with the intern manning the phones at Judge Richards’ office. Charley and Santino tried their best to ignore her and carry on, but she and this intern shared a seething mutual dislike and spent their off time honing their material. Charley waved to them and bowed out, taking the books and leaving the doughnuts. 

FOUR

It wasn’t until she was teaching Patrick Mulcahy how to shoot that she realized Charley had told her something important. Mulcahy, towering over her and holding a ridiculously tiny gun, wore a blindfold while she poked him with a stick. (They both suspected the stick served no real purpose, but a sensible person simply did not turn down an opportunity to torment her boss.) Back when she had first realized she could perceive human emotion, she tried her best to explain her world to him. Mulcahy had seized on the possible tactical advantages and asked how difficult it would be for her to teach him how to see as she did.

“Easy! Blind yourself,” she had said.

Guilt swept over him. His conversational surface colors had blanched, and even his core hue of cerulean blue went pale. Rachel closed her eyes, embarrassed, but pretended she had meant that he wear a blindfold for several months. Mulcahy thought about it and said while he appreciated the irony of showing up to Senate hearings with his head in a sack, this was also something he couldn’t do. But maybe she could teach him how to shoot?

It was tricky, teaching someone how to use a gun when he was already terrifyingly proficient in firearms. Mulcahy had been recruited into OACET from a different kind of agency, one that lacked cybernetics but made up for it in firefights and explosions. After tying a bandanna across his eyes and telling him what they were about to do was mind-bogglingly stupid and potentially lethal, she had put a child’s BB pistol in his hand. The colors that flashed across him had gone directly into her ontology; it began with confused oranges and greens, with plenty of good-humored purple as he laughed, the purple growing stronger as he realized she had set him up. 

They could have used an adult version but she kept him on the toy gun to push him out of his comfort zone. He was an enormous man with hands the size of dinner plates, and he had to consciously think of how he was holding the gun to use it. Rachel didn’t want him to fall back on his training until he had learned to work with his implant to predict a logical path for a bullet.

“So,” she had asked on that first day, “why can’t real people hit targets on a ricochet, like they do in the movies?”

“Unpredictability,” Mulcahy had replied.

Bullets bounced, and they bounced hard. They also deformed spectacularly, especially those designed to go through a person. Only a true idiot would fire at a chunk of metal and expect an intact bullet to change direction on a reliable path. The implant, however, turned them into a new type of idiot, one who was aware that a ricochet would never be as dependable as a straight shot but maybe they could plot a course which minimized the risk.

Hence the BB gun with its steel pellets.

“It’s not just about the surface,” Rachel had told him. “You want to start by looking into objects. Think of yourself as a universal MRI.  You’re checking for contrasts. Soft spots, hard spots…  If you want to shoot through something, aim for flat soft spots. If you want to plan for a ricochet, pick hard ones with an angled surface.

“And it’s all physics,” she said. “You’re trying to predict inelastic collisions. Some of that energy is lost on contact, but there will always be enough left to keep it moving. So for God’s sake, do not fire anything other than a lead bullet directly at something flat and hard, since there are some very good odds that bullet will come right back at you.”

The capitol was practically built on a foundation of underground firing ranges. OACET had acquired the lease on an abandoned rifle club for target practice. Rachel had set up peculiarly twisted pieces of industrial scrap around the room, and they took turns pinging them with the BB pistol. Ricochets from the toy gun didn’t pack enough punch to knock a fly out of the air, but they were each stung a few times before Mulcahy got the hang of picking surfaces.

“How did you figure this out?” he had asked her after their first lesson.

She had grinned. “I was having a bad day.”

It was great fun and they were both fast learners. Early on, their implants had performed most of the calculations needed to knock a bullet off of one course and put it on another. Along with mass, the implant allowed them to process information on the distance to, and the angle of, different objects. Four classes later and in spite of the embarrassingly tiny gun, even Mulcahy had outgrown its help. Practice and slow cultivation of instinct had brought them to a point where they could scan the room and select surfaces without relying on its math.

The trouble was that they now felt as though they had gone as far as they could without upping the stakes. They needed to start using live rounds. As she jabbed him with the stick (too much fun), they weighed out the pros and cons of using their service weapons instead of the pistol. Simulation was fine and all, but Rachel had picked up a box of solid ammunition and they were sure it would unleash a completely different beast. 

Sadly, they had more sense.

Mulcahy sat down, still wearing the bandanna over his eyes. He took out his own gun and started idly breaking it down, each piece familiar in his hands. “How’d you find the tunnel?”

She slumped down beside him, the stick flat across her lap. “Scan the north wall. Go deep.” 

The bandanna turned. Good shooting ranges had thick pine walls layered over concrete to suck up strays. When Rachel looked through her implant, the room lit up with dense metal scattered within the softer wood. Mulcahy, who seldom used his implant to see past the surface, moved into the wood, through the concrete, and recoiled when his mind fell into a nest of rats snug between the cinder blocks. 

He bumped her with his shoulder. “Not nice.”

She chuckled. “I ran the bank like that. There was a huge void, way too big to be anything other than a service tunnel.” 

“Fun little mystery.”

“Not really. Santino and I talked it over. We thought it had something to do with theft, but as secret passageways go, this one is pretty useless. It just sort of hangs there. Someone added it after the ATM was built, maybe to run ventilation or some extra storage between the two rooms, and it fell off of the blueprints. If it had gone anywhere near the money, that bank would have been robbed like clockwork.”

“Still, you were the one who found it. Thanks for that. It might help our reputation on the Hill.” Mulcahy rubbed his jaw, a bruise fading from where a popular congressman from Massachusetts had taken a swing at him. Mulcahy had let it land; the media had been there.

“Are we doing okay?” she asked.

Depression and stress, gray as a worn asphalt road, flickered across him so quickly she almost missed it. “It’s rough,” he admitted. “But we knew going into this the first few years would be the worst.”

They sat in silence for a moment. The worst—the absolute worst of the worst—was that they had volunteered for this. Going public had been a choice, and the alternative was so much easier. They could have vanished, with new Social Security numbers and limitless credit in false accounts, drifting at whim and leisure across the planet. Oh, a few of them probably would have been discovered and burned alive as witches, but chances were very good that in some parallel timeline, Rachel’s next-door neighbors were a pod of whales off the port side of her yacht instead of an old woman who took a golf club to Rachel’s mailbox whenever her cable went out.

Stubborn, vicious Mrs. Wagner, who didn’t quite understand what the implant was or did, but still believed Rachel to be the source of every problem she had with technology…

“Scapegoating,” she said aloud.

“Hm?”

“I was just thinking. We just got lucky. A decade ago, a locked room murder meant the problem was the room. Today, they assumed the problem was the camera. If I hadn’t found that tunnel, they could have dumped this on us. Killer cyborgs from Middle America or whatever, tampering with technology to get away with murder. The press would go ape.”