Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (9 page)

“I’d pay good money to learn this place’s story,” Rachel said as their server brought another helping of enchiladas so good they could probably end wars.

“If you ask, they’d probably tell you for free,” he said. His core and conversational colors were still washed out, the reluctant khakis of dry riverbeds moving through them.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah. Well…” he paused. “It’s particle physics.”

“This’ll be good,” she said, and held up two fingers for refills on their whiskey. They were already working towards a good stiff tipsy but Santino was trending mawkish, a complete reversal of his usual jovial personality when drunk.

“There’s theory, there’s reality… Those almost never intersect. Particle physics is mostly theory because you can’t do much testing at the subatomic level. So you get all this training in theory, you know what will probably happen if the conditions line up perfectly, but there’s no way to prove it. But that’s okay, because you’re happy working in pure theory anyhow.

“Then someone builds a Hadron collider.”

“Or a guy pulls a gun in a crowded room and you have to put him down,” she said, finally catching on. Santino’s analogies ran heavy on the academia and she was usually a few steps behind his meaning. He wasn’t just in a funk about the penalties of tonight or the uncertainty of tomorrow, but that he had drawn a weapon for the first time in the line of duty.

He nodded, staring at his plate. 

“He’s not dead, Santino. He’s a perfectly healthy adult male who took a solid-mass hit from a Taser. He was walking around fifteen minutes after he was hit.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

She didn’t, actually. Back in the day when she had more youth than sense, her unit used to stun each other to see who’d be buying at the bar that night. Thanks to her almost comically fair skin, Rachel still had the faint scarring of scorch marks on her butt.

“He’ll be fine. He’s probably at the hospital right now, getting the best checkup of his life on the MPD’s nickel. And then he will probably go to jail, or, at the very least, he’ll have to sacrifice his trust fund to stay out of it, because he is a stupid man who did a stupid thing.” 

Her partner didn’t answer, swirling the whiskey around and around his tumbler. He shot back the liquor in a single go, then flipped the glass over and started pressing circular patterns into his napkin.

“What?” she asked. Santino tended to show his obsessive-compulsive side when he wasn’t sure how to broach a topic. 

“So,” he said heavily. “You’re psychic.”

She snorted mid-sip, a tragic mistake. Alcohol shot up her nose and she went into a coughing fit, sinuses burning. Santino reached over and pounded on her back until she managed to choke out a credible threat to punch him if he didn’t cut it out.

“Wait, I’m what now?” she said when she could breathe without her eyes watering. 

“Psychic. Or clairvoyant, or empathic, or whatever.

“C’mon Rachel, I’ve worked with you for months,” he said when she didn’t answer. “For a while I thought you were just good at reading people. That’s fine, that’s normal for a cop.

“But sometimes…  Sometimes you’re too quick, like you’ve read the person before they handed you the book.”

Damn.

She reached across the table and lifted an enchilada off of her partner’s plate to see if he’d flinch. He stabbed at her hand with his fork and whipped his food back onto his own plate, his colors losing that washed-out khaki. 

“Hey!” she complained, absolutely relieved.

“Mine,” he said. “It’s not my fault you’re a bottomless pit for calories. And don’t change the subject,” he added. “Psychic. Or clairvoyant,” he said, pointing his fork. “Talk.”

She sighed. “It was the Heckler & Koch guy, right?”

“Yeah. Forget about how you could watch him when he was standing behind you. I know how you did that. But you started moving before he did. It was close, and you could argue to anyone else that he went for his gun first, but I was right there. You had a split-second edge.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” she said, punishing herself in front of him. The whiskey was doing its work; she was too willing to talk about something so private. “He was going to draw in a crowded room… I should have jumped him instead of covering the woman and kid, made it look like I was picking a fight before he got his gun out.”

“It’s the implant, right?”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “You know how I perceive different frequencies, right? Apparently mood has a frequency. It’s not mind reading,” she added quickly. “I don’t pick up, you know, thoughts or anything. I see in color.”

“You and ninety-two percent of the population.”

“I see emotions in color.”

He blinked, dumbstruck, then started laughing. 

“I’m serious!”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. If someone’s sad, you can literally see they’re feeling blue?”

“Blues are mainly positive.” Rachel felt a little sulky. She had held this conversation a hundred different ways in her imagination, but in there he had never laughed at her. “I haven’t come across a bad blue. Sad is usually gray, but like a cloudy day gray, not a pavement gray. And you can always see the other colors under the clouds, wanting to get out.”

He stared at her. “You’re serious.”

“You’re the one who asked me if I was psychic.”

“Well, yeah. But being psychic would be cool,” he scoffed. “You’re just a mood ring.”

“I’m…?” she started to ask, then laughed. “I’m a mood ring!” she gasped as she fell into giggles.

She was a nervous giggler. It always hit after the fact, thank God, but once the stress had passed she buckled in half and hooted like a hyena. Tonight, thanks to the scene at the coffee house and sinuses already abraded from their whiskey bath, she rolled around the table and sputtered in wet, slobbery noise. Santino made a production of daintily eating an enchilada with a knife and fork, ignoring both her and the disdainful sideways glares of their fellow patrons. He waved away the concerns of their server who wondered if, perhaps, the lady might be more comfortable outside? and ordered himself a beer chaser while he waited for her to get herself back under control. 

“You could have told me,” he said when she was once again upright. “This is the type of thing I want to know.”

Rachel did something with her entire upper body that translated loosely to:
Are you kidding me? I’m already a freak.

He shrugged.
Yeah, and?

“I thought…” she sighed, “I guess I thought it’d be easier to get to know me if you didn’t think I was in your mind the entire time. I’m not,” she added, “but it’d still be a barrier.”

“Is it something every Agent can do?” he asked.

“Yes. But they don’t,” she added quickly. “I’m the only one who’s developed this skill.”

“Why? It seems pretty useful. If you can predict when you’re about to have a gun pulled on you, that seems like something you’d want to know.”

“There’s a…” she hesitated and chose her words around the liquor. “There’s a steep learning curve. The others don’t think it’s worth the time. Honestly, most people don’t like us but that doesn’t mean they’re going to start gunning for us. What happened tonight will probably never happen again.”

Santino the scholar stepped up and picked her brain for specifics. (Him: Since you’ve got an auditory interface, does that mean you could hear emotions, too?  Her: No, that’s just dumb.) The food and whiskey kept coming, and eventually they reached a level of comfortable saturation where he could ask her the big question: What is it like? and she, for once, could answer.

“The implant… It’s different for each of us,” she said, deep in her cups. “I think it’s based on our personalities. We make it personal. Personalized. Individualized.”

“Traits.”

“Traits,” she agreed. “Me, since I’m…” she caught herself in time. “Since I like to know my environment, I’ve done nothing but work on perception. You’ve seen it; I’ve figured out all kinds of ways to use the implant as an extra sense. One of my friends, Mako? You know Mako. You can’t miss Mako! He’s this gigantic weightlifter. He’s good at blocking. When he gets in your mind and holds you in place, you can’t go out-of-body or connect with machines. No one else can do that. I’ve got another friend who writes and runs hundreds of automation scripts at once, so he’s basically a walking complex logic calculator. The guy has so many active scenarios going that he can practically see the future. Mare, she’s our organizational specialist…”

“The one with the hair?”

“Mmm, that hair…! She says she inventories her environment. Makes a mental list of everything around her, makes patterns with them… It’s like having a photographic memory that can be aligned and processed like a spreadsheet.”

“What about Mulcahy?”

She shivered theatrically. “You ever hear how James Garfield could write in Greek with one hand and Latin with the other? Mulcahy does out-of-body better than anyone. He’s freaky as shit.”

“You are all freaky as shit,” he said, and smiled to blunt that edge. Tonight, she found she didn’t mind.

Rachel waved the business end of a cocktail sword at him. “Mulcahy has conversations, plural. He can be talking to you in person about, I don’t know, carbon trading regulations, and be out-of-body with someone else discussing the proper care and feeding of piranhas.

“I don’t like going out-of-body. Splitting yourself in two is… I don’t know. There’s a wrongness to it. It’s really convenient sometimes and I’ve gone to some amazing places,” she said, breaking the plastic sword into small gold bits and plunking them on the ice melting at the bottom of a dead tumbler, “like Paris, and my mom’s hometown, but…”

“You went to China?”

“Yeah. I didn’t stay too long, just popped in and out. Mom’s always on about how quaint and rural it is but there’re no farms and they’ve got a Wal-Mart. I was disappointed to learn I didn’t really come from folksy peasant stock.”

“You probably did. Wal-Mart hasn’t been in China for long.”

She nodded as she studied the old photograph of the pagoda hanging across from them. Two women stood in the foreground, posing in unbearably tight dresses and holding fans with limp wrists. Rachel never knew what to make of change. 

“So…” he prompted.

“Yeah, okay. So, the implant. We all got the same chip, but we don’t use it in the same way. Each of us, we’re adapting the implant to our own lives instead of letting it lead us. I guess we’re all… We’re building it into ourselves and not the other way around.” 

“Gotta say,” he said, green with envy. “All of that sounds incredibly cool.”

“Well...” Rachel looked around the bar, at the endless variations in mood and color and motion that formed the living canvas of crowds. These were a spectrum of inebriation, of lifelong friends and casual acquaintances, of shared futures between sheets or, in the case of one couple blazing fire-red in the corner, the closest bathroom.

“It ain’t half bad,” she admitted.

SIX

The family who owned the house before her had gotten the newspaper. Rachel had never paid a bill and had called to have the subscription cancelled more times than she could remember, but the hated things were still delivered to the end of her driveway like clockwork. She despised them, the wrapped papers in their clean plastic bags, yet another minor problem that didn’t need to be.

She tried to think of it as a form of daily meditation. Every morning Rachel would snatch up that day’s edition while muttering profanities so hot and vehement she wouldn’t be surprised if it all fell to dust. She channeled every ounce of her repressed anger and frustration into those loathsome little bags, tried to convince herself it was cathartic when the paper smacked against the bottom of the bin. She wanted to make this one small chore empowering, wanted to brush off her hands and walk away, clean and refreshed. Sadly, no amount of magical thinking could change how this routine just ensured she was good and pissed off for the rest of the day, with the added insult of knowing that the entire process would repeat itself the following morning.

The Sunday edition caused her to contemplate murder.

Rachel stood over that day’s paper, a hot cup of Earl Grey in her hand, and wondered if she should just leave it where it lay. She imagined what would happen if she allowed them to accumulate. Each morning a new layer would be added to the old, the ones on the bottom yellowing and turned to soggy pulp in their bags…

She would let the delivery service build her a wall, she decided. It would be taller than her house and would bring down property values for miles around, and the stink of mildew would rise to heaven.

“You saved that boy.”

Rachel spun, tea sloshing. She hissed and switched the mug to her other hand, shaking the burned one to take the sting out. First Santino, now Mrs. Wagner; Rachel couldn’t remember the last time someone had surprised her but she’d been jumped twice in the past twenty-four hours.

“What?”

On occasions calling for liquor and gossip, Rachel had described her next-door neighbor as Dumbledore’s evil twin sister. Mrs. Wagner peered at her over with ruddy eyes over half-moon lenses and held up her own newspaper. “You saved that boy.”