The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue (20 page)

Outstanding.

Francine gave Gene a look.

“
I’m not suggesting
anything. Not yet. But that robot looked damned strong.”

Gene considered it. He sipped his
coffee.

Parsons spoke.

“
She’s very resourceful.
She didn’t kill the muggers in the park.”

Francine inclined her head.

Hardly conclusive, but it was an
indicator.

Gene’s mind rolled it around and
around.

"If she surprised a thief in the act,
and took the car off him, there's no incentive for him to report
it." Parsons pointed at the screen, needing to do something with
his nervous hands. "If he's alive, he can be found. Possibly, he
might talk, to somebody. He might get picked up somewhere along the
way."

Filed for future reference, in other
words. Parsons had a thorough mind.

She’d certainly had the opportunity to
kill. Nettles wasn’t holding anything back either in that little
shindig. Nettles was almost lucky he hadn’t killed anyone.
Self-defense, yes. But even so—he was in possession of stolen
property, or at least missing property. The commission of a crime
vitiated self-defense to a certain degree. Gene’s mind went over it
quickly, and not being a legal specialist, he’d have to inquire a
little more deeply. A long list of old cases went through Gene's
mind. It wasn’t unprecedented, but in his line of work that was
somebody else’s problem.

The general principles were clear
enough.

Parsons settled into his chair a
little deeper. Now that he was on the scene, actually working, he
could relax some. He’d been a bit nervy since getting the call. He
went on.

“
Also. The car was stolen
about four kilometres due west of the rave party.” That part of
town was still within borough limits.

Gene nodded. The computer had picked
it up as anomalous, a set of indicators that didn’t add
up.

“
Okay.” It was certainly
interesting.

“
Connect the dots.”
Parsons reached over and activated a map onscreen. “They’ve escaped
the city. They’ve abandoned the car upstate.”

It was still very much
hypothetical.

Francine cleared her
throat.

“
Okay. Not going south,
then.” There were better ways to travel if they were going south.
They would maybe use the highways, or they could hop a freight
train, or simply ditch the vehicle and walk south on the
Appalachian Trail.

Francine’s eyebrows rose, but you
couldn’t exactly shrug it off. Stranger things had been attempted.
With proper ID, they could fly, but so far no signs of that. The
thoughts of going through the stringent airport security, with no
avenue of escape if the wrong questions were asked, would be a
daunting prospect.

Parsons smiled.

“
Ah. But we have another
stolen car.” And his hand went to his pocket and he pulled a
data-stick from his side jacket pocket. “It was stolen a good
twenty kilometres away from where the station wagon was abandoned,
but.”

Rising, he looked at Gene.

“
May I?” Glanced up. “The
lady may be foraging on her own, so to speak, while Mister Nettles
simply sits on a park bench somewhere.”

Gene nodded and looked at
Francine.

“
Be my guest.” His eyes
came back. “Are the local cops getting any fingerprints, anything
like that?”

Prints from a known crim would tend to
rule out Betty and Scott as the thieves.

“
Not really. But they’re
assuming a competent thief would wear gloves anyway.” Parsons
nodded on that thought. “We can ask them to have a look—but Betty
Blue would be wiping anything down, steering wheel, door handles,
anything she or Scott came in contact with.”

‘
Of course.”

Parsons located the socket on the side
of the screen as Gene touched the virtual buttons to bring it up
and open the file. A new box appeared on the time-line.

He quickly read off the
details.

“
Interesting.”

This time it was a family vehicle, a
six-wheel drive all-terrain monster. It must have been eight feet
tall to the the light rack on top. Gene saw it as a passing phase,
but people were really nuts these days and the advertising was even
madder. Here was a family man, who honestly believed that it might
be someday necessary to winch his vehicle (with the wife and kids
in it?) up a six-hundred metre cliff judging by the highly-chromed
front bumper accessory. They probably used the lights for
tanning.

Francine got up, stepped in close and
read it.

“
So they ended up in
Pennsylvania. That’s where the car was dumped, anyways.”

Parsons nodded.

“
And not chopped, not
flogged off anywhere. It’s a long way from the point of origin for
a joy-ride.”

She looked at Parsons, sinking back
into her seat.

“
So where do you think
they’re going?”

He pursed up his lips to speak but
Gene beat him to it.

“
Canada—the only question
is where. How do they plan on doing it?”

He met Parsons’ eyes.

Parsons gave him an intensely earnest
look.

“
It’s either that, or
west. The top tier states are still pretty sparsely inhabited. If
they try that, they will have to change their appearance and
identity. All the roads up there do have cameras, and they have a
better record of keeping them operating. But Canada is so much
closer. There are places where they could cross by land—New
Brunswick, southern Quebec. There are lots of hills and forests.
The prairies are less likely. It’s all open country out there.
They’re going the wrong way for anything east. But a river
crossing, at night. Maybe.”

Gene made him go back through the
slides. On the U.S. side, the islands in the delta of the St. Clair
River were all developed, but the Canadian side was a wall of
bull-rushes with a screen of low trees in the
background.

“
Not the Niagara River?”
Francine had seen it. “Or the St. Lawrence?”

Parsons looked thoughtful.

“
No. There are much better
places. More remote, with maybe less of a current.” Parsons
pointed, streaming a few slides. “Walpole Island. Shit, that’s a
couple of hundred metres in a rubber boat. They could almost do it
on an air mattress. Or the Detroit River. Ah. Farther upstream,
maybe.”

Other than that; there was Mackinac,
but Lake Michigan and Lake Superior seemed to offer some pretty big
hurdles, not least of which was getting there undetected. Going
around Chicago involved a long detour.

Dystroit. And why not? They might even
go to ground there. There was all kinds of liberal underground
activity up in that neck of the woods.

“
Hmn.” Gene
considered.

He looked at the time of the theft,
and when the discovery had been reported in the local police
records. It was barely a day ago, and Parsons had been using his
contacts well.

“
Okay.” His lips pursed.
“It’s still a small area. I’ll call the Pennsylvania State
Troopers, and the feds.”

It was like a breath of fresh
air.

“
Let’s see how many drones
and other passive systems we can get on that.”

Parsons pointed at Ohio, Indiana,
northern Kentucky, and upstate New York as Gene nodded in
comprehension. He nodded again when Parsons pointed at Vermont and
the fellow’s hand dropped to his lap.

Parsons sat up straighter, leaning
forward to study the screen.

“
All righty,
then.”

Gene spun around, leaned back, and his
chair was angled perfectly to put his feet up on the end. Francine
shifted away and Parsons rolled his chair to the left to give
himself more room. Not unexpectedly, Parsons pulled out his own
device and began flipping through pages and contacts. Gene noted
the beginnings of sweat patches under his arms. Clearly, this meant
a lot to him. He had the motivation, as the saying went.

He seemed like a pretty useful guy.
First impressions are lasting ones. Especially if borne out by
subsequent events. Gene’s left hand reached for his desk-top
multi-phone and after few seconds with the list, he was dialing his
first number.

***

Letitia’s personal hatchet man and a
few trusted souls had built a replica classroom in a very short
period of time. A dozen of their newest employees sat straight,
fresh-faced and optimistic. They had their hands in their lap,
knees close together, and their feet flat on the floor. Their eyes
followed her around the room.

She bit back any sign of
approval.

“
All right. Today’s
session involves the simulation of an unknown threat. Suffice it to
say that we are cooperating with authorities, and we are on
nationwide lookout for a small number of unidentified persons,
working with minimal inputs so far.”

Each student, still in their
probationary period of a full year here at SimTech, had been
cleared on moral grounds, although some of them were a bit skimpy
on their technical qualifications.

Sometimes this was a good thing. It
made them expendable.

All of them had talent, and all of them
were the cheerful, optimistic sort that had no trouble seeing the
good in everyone. More than anything, they had a foot in the door
at SimTech, and must have had high hopes for the
future. 

They were looking for jobs for life and
that was good.

They might even succeed.

Across the front of the room, behind a
rollaway three-metre blackboard, the big screen took up the entire
upper half of the front wall, and each student had a console of
three screens. On the sides were a half dozen more screens on the
left, while the right wall was blackboard near the front, and
corkboard back to the rear corner and the doorway. They had a few
memos up on there already. Closets and a small coffee nook
completed the layout. In this part of the SimTech campus, the
ceiling was an impressive honeycomb of reinforced concrete, ducts,
tubes and light fixtures which emitted a pleasant and reassuring
buzz.

Boyd came in with long rolls of cable
dangling from one hand and a tool belt on his waist.

“
Can it wait until
later?”

“
Uh, I suppose. But it’s
just the TV, the news feed. I’ll keep it quiet.”

Letitia nodded. It was part of the act
as much as anything. Everything was all very new here.

Twenty-four eyes followed her every
move as she picked up chalk and a long maple pointer.

If the universe really was a hologram,
then life was just a game-space and nothing really mattered
anymore. There were no unchanging truths and hence no morality. All
of that was just a way of keeping the dummies in line and
docile.

It was a kind of
justification.

She smiled brightly and then let it
drop.

“
Okay. Our job here is to
filter data. There’s a lot of it, as you can imagine. We’re taking
inputs, theoretically, from the entire United States, as well as a
broad swath of our neighbours’ surveillance uptake, both in Canada
and in Mexico.”

There was a collective squirm and some
muttering when the implications of this set in.

“
Ma’am?”

“
Call me Chief.
Yes?”

“
That’s a lot of
data.”

“
Ah, yes, in fact it’s
very consumptive of machine-time, which is why this is only a
simulation. All of our data is simply generated by random human
algorithms, and it merely provides us with the environment in which
to conduct our exercise. Even so, we are sucking up to
one-third of system resources during this exercise, so pay
attention.’

This was greeted by a nervous chuckle
from the young man in question. His name tag read Ned.

The end of her pointer touched the
blackboard and her first images popped up.

“
Subject one. Caucasian
male, approximately thirty-eight years old, quite tall, thinning
brown hair, brown eyes. He’s also blind.”

She engaged their eyes for a
second.

Boyd was down on hands and knees,
working inside the rear closet which took up two-thirds of the back
wall.

“
Subject two. Female
robot—”

There were gasps and
giggles.

“
Don’t laugh. It could
happen. They are traveling together. We’re looking for anomalies,
as they have disappeared right off the radar.”

A young woman in the front row nodded
sagely.

“
Marnie. What sort of
anomalies are we looking for?”

Marnie sat up.

“
Well, we could look for
anomalous hits. That would be IDs with no point of origin, in the
case of newly-created citizen profiles.”

Letitia nodded, beaming at the girl.
She had this one all picked out for some nascent leadership
qualities. As long as no crime had been committed recently in that
area, these kinds of hits were merely anomalous. No one went
looking when there was no real reason.