Asimov's Science Fiction (6 page)

They played a scene from Jersey's favorite movie, and after another drink he suggested they get more comfortable at his place, which was just down the street.

She gave a bright smile and let her hand trail across the inside of his thigh as she slid off her stool and grabbed her purse. The night had promised to be so much more than remarkable before she quite literally jumped the shark.

Definitely not what he had wanted to happen.

He stood in his apartment as the morning wore on, drinking coffee and watching as children gathered at the corner across the street.

He caught the woman's glance as she peered into the remaining pane of his window. She was attractive, with dark skin and full eyes. Her cheekbones caught the morning sun. For a moment he thought she saw him, but he was too deep in shadow to be seen. He imagined her on the couch with him and he felt himself stir down inside. He touched himself, and he smiled at his feed, which rolled steadily past, filled with the events of the day, stock market suggestions, and an ad for a coffee shop that was on his way to work. The blocker he had developed and loaded into his own interface was stable—he was running dark. Nothing cluttered his thoughts. No ads for condoms, or singles, or the various toys that he had gotten used to seeing at moments like these.

It gave him an almost staggering sense of freedom.

He could do whatever he wanted and it wouldn't register. He drank coffee and felt its heat warm his belly.

Glorious.

The bus came and went, then the woman left and the street corner was empty.

George filed his daily log, listing each of his calls, his assessments, and his justifications for the actions he had taken. It was 9:04 A.M. as he clocked out. He played head games with those numbers. Nine was three-squared and four was two-squared. Both roots were primes. Those games made him happy, but not as happy as the extra dough three hours of overtime would bring.

He stopped for dinner on the way home.

Among the prices of being a midnight hero was that, at this time of day, it was hard to find places that weren't serving egg muff ins and sausage biscuits. But George knew a few. He stopped at Luigi's, a twenty-four-hour restaurant that served their full menu all day. He drank iced tea and ate a plate of spaghetti. The carbs weren't good for him, and he was considerably past the point where it showed, but screw it. He deserved something special for putting in the extra hours. The meatballs were good, but not spiced right. Needed more oregano.

The number 877 kept coming to his mind. 877 East 17th Street—the address of the man who called about his girlfriend. He tried to remember the full conversation, but the only things that stuck were the address, the tone of the man's voice, and the name Jersey Jones.

He couldn't shake that call.

After he disconnected, his feed had been filled with an image of a bulletproof vest. It made him feel big inside. He imagined himself in that vest, gripping his gun and stepping into a dark alley with a crook down the other way. He stared out the window, watching cars and buses drive by while voices echoed in the restaurant behind him. The cops couldn't respond to any warning he might give. That was the frustration of being a cop—you knew who the bad guys were but you couldn't do shit about it until they fucked up. But, as the assholes were constantly reminding him, George Manning was not a cop. He did not have to play by cop rules. This was his chance.

By the time his mind returned to his spaghetti, it was cold. He got up, left a good tip in cash, and went back to his car.

877 East 17th Street.

He had to drive by.

"Anything on the feed?" Detective Stone said as he walked into the tech lab.

Kelsey Tang, a second year analyst, rolled back from her monitor and shook her head. "I'm not done, but it looks normal."

Stone peered at the screen. "Show me," he said.

She went to the start of Jersey Jones's data-feed.

In the old days you needed a warrant to pull a feed, but a string of credit card shootings and a gang war in Chicago had created one of those moments when the public craved security, so now he acquired it with nothing more than a phone call— which meant Tang had spent her morning digging into the logged readouts of both Jersey Jones and the jumper, looking at their body chemistries and optical feeds to confirm events of the night.

Jones's feed filled the monitor. It was dark, but Stone could see the woman dance as they disrobed. She ran her hands through her hair. Things progressed. Physical readings on Jones's feed wobbled. The two drew together, both playing hard and aggressive. Suddenly she stood, glanced toward the kitchen, then ran and threw herself against the window. The glass shattered as she fell. Then she was gone.

"Jesus," Stone said as he rubbed his hand over his face.

"Here's the woman's feed."

She switched views, and the new header read—Name: Doering, Canada, Race: Caucasian, Gender: Female, Age: 41.

Jones let her into the apartment. Doering's body chemistry did flip-flops as she entered. Her feed was loaded with the essence of wine and an undercurrent of Belgian chocolate. By the time she got to the couch, those quaint allusions to romance were gone, however, replaced with things dark and carnal. They kissed and her numbers spiked. Jones touched her shoulder and grabbed her hair, pulling her face up to receive a hard kiss. Her feed was filled with handcuffs and rope and devices curved and ridged. Her mind ran with knives and needles and other objects of macabre intention. Her frontal cortex f lared. Then she was racing through the apartment and jumping into the glass. The window shattered into a thousand sparkling pieces.

The analyst froze the frame with Doering in mid-air, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "Look at her brain activity."

It was lit up like it was on fire.

"I see it. Any ideas?"

"I don't know," the girl said with a shrug. "Maybe she's just got a kink on?"

Stone nodded. "Helluva kink. Let's look at her past feeds and favorite joints. Same for him. See if we can find a pattern."

He left her to her work, rubbing his hand over his head and dreading the reports he had to file.

George knew he was breaking every rule in his employment handbook but sometimes a hero has to go with his gut, and with a gut as ample as his, he figured he ought to listen to it. He was the Gut Man, after all.

He got out of his Ford and went to the apartment building. It was brick, twelve stories high, with the look of having been built in the fifties though he knew it was only a few years old. He scanned mailboxes, but they didn't have names—just numbers and key-slots. The call had come from the seventh floor. He ran his thumb over numbers on that row, feeling anxiety behind every one of them. The cold edge of the man's voice seemed to whisper to him.

He was tired, but George wanted to set eyes on Jersey Jones.

He returned to his car and hunched down, keeping the building door in his sight. His feed sent him a string of links to bad detective films and an ad for an energy drink.

Jersey Jones decided on lunch at Pancho's Deli. He rode down the same elevator Detective Stone had. It was a blessedly silent trip. Perhaps, when he was done eating, he would take a walk downtown, maybe take in the art museum. He had lived in Denver for eight years, and never done that—never felt the need, he guessed. He wasn't particularly keen on art, but being free of his feed gave him a fresh sense of discovery and he found himself wanting to get outside.

He left the building and turned down Emerson, passing by a man asleep in his car.

Detective Stone had been up all night—so, after a late lunch (or early dinner), he went to his house in the suburbs, put his gun down, and removed his coat and shirt and his creased pants, replacing them with sweats, a Broncos T shirt, and a single cold beer. One beer—any more and the nightmares came, and one doesn't give himself to the force for twenty-five years without having a pile of nightmares stored away. Those nightmares and the more-than-one-beer he used to allow himself had chased Dinah away.

He saw the note from his daughter. She would be out for the evening. Even when she was home, she wasn't home, he thought. She was due to go back to Fort Collins in two weeks. Time moves too damned fast.

He sat back on his recliner, and for the first time today, let his feed loose, hoping it would find him a show.

It suggested a nighttime sleep aid and an interview with Cam Knight, the team's new outside linebacker. He linked to it while he turned the TV on. It would look better on the big screen and he was still old-school enough to be uncomfortable with the noise of another voice in his head. Images of Knight hitting a running back filled the screen. He wore number 53, which, as the story would have it, is a prime number— not that Detective Stone would have recognized it as such. He was not a man of numbers in that way.

Stone couldn't concentrate on the show.

Something was bad with this case, something that went beyond the idea of a middle-aged woman meeting a younger man for a night of fun gone horribly wrong. He kept thinking about Canada Doering's data feed, kept seeing it spike and twist, remembering the image of her leaping into the glass, her shoulder tucked in to protect her face. He thought of the way her mind spiked as she flew through the air, hanging suspended in that split-second of zero-gravity before beginning her descent. He remembered ads for an orthopedic surgeon that came to her node just before the whole thing went dark.

She was talking to him through these memories, telling him a story he couldn't understand, but the harder he tried to focus the less he saw.

His feed sent him a jingle about coffee and its ability to focus mental activities, and if that didn't go far enough, try Ziple, a new cerebral enhancer on the market since May. The stream of information was too much for him. He tried to push it away but after a full day of fighting, he was too tired. So he drank his beer and he let the feed play until it became just so much noise in the background that he could fall asleep.

Which he did, snoring gently on his recliner as images of football players crashed into each other on the screen.

The bus came at 4:15, right on schedule. Andrelline sat on the bench and waited for Jade and Maria to step off.

Jersey Jones was walking toward the intersection, returning from the Art Center, when he saw the bus arrive. He watched children disembark.

He had enjoyed every minute of the center. He didn't like the artwork as much as he enjoyed the stories behind them, the people and their histories and their thoughts as they created their pieces. Much of the work was not of interest without this background—which made sense to Jones. It was while he was staring at the modern work of Gar Haver, earlier this afternoon (a piece titled
457 Pieces of Eve
), that he decided he would adjust the push routine to tone down its self-mutilation element. That might have been the problem. He also wanted to strengthen his ability to provide muscular control.

He was walking down East 17th Street, thinking about fixing his code and about that touch to the thigh, when he saw the bus unload its children and he caught the glorious brown eyes of Andrelline Smith. He smiled as he passed her, and he reached into his pocket to run his thumb along the handheld transmission unit, adjusting content parameters he thought might work with her.

Andrelline was reaching for Jade's hand when she saw a man stride past. He was tall and white, almost WASPy, with thin black hair, attractive in a lanky sort of way. His cheeks were gaunt and angular. His eyes were piercing blue. He walked with a stride that felt dangerous somehow, the stride of a secret agent or a government spy, but nervous like maybe he was new to the job.

The man held her stare, then glanced at the boarded window across the street.

She felt a power then—pure, something almost sexual. She smelled jungle. He kept striding past her, and she saw him as a panther with fur black and sleek, and fangs as white as pain. She could tame him, though, she felt it. The idea froze her. An ad for soap stopped in mid-flow, replaced with something in leather.

Jersey Jones smiled, but kept walking. It was the woman from this morning. The longing in her eyes told him her story. She was locked into a life by her happen-stance, a victim of her own timidity. She had probably never made a decision for herself in her whole life. Women were all like that—they pushed and shoved, but at their hearts they were all built for the government feed. They wanted a man to tell them what to do.

He glanced at her over his shoulder as he crossed the street and saw he had called it right.

This woman would be different from Canada Doering, though. This woman was normal, a family girl, a housewife. She might despise herself forever, but she wasn't broken. She wouldn't go crazy and throw herself out the window.

He slid the handheld unit back into his pocket and entered his apartment building, thinking about the changes he would make to his push device, and wondering if he could find this woman from across the street. He stepped into the elevator, already seeing code structures he needed to modify.

George woke with a start. The car's compartment was stale and warm, as if its oxygen had gone flat. He saw the glance exchanged between the woman and the man, the man's eyes turning toward the plywood window. His brain came to instant alert. He saw the woman's expression, and the way she smoothed her hands down her pant legs after the man crossed the street, before she took her daughters' hands in hers. The man slipped a device into his pocket, and smiled with such wickedness that George nearly pissed his goddamned pants.

It had to be Jersey Jones. It had to be.

The woman led her kids into her apartment building, hesitating for one last glance at the boarded window. George ground his teeth together and felt the sudden urge to hold his gun.

The code blocks were all there, optical, aural, auditory. He couldn't do full touch now because it was too complex, but he had bits of taste coded and he could send some sensation. Muscular control seemed workable. He needed to know more about her, though. The more he knew, the better the mapping would be. Maybe that was the problem last night. He thought he had learned enough about Canada Doering to make it all fine. It wasn't like she hid much. But maybe he needed more. Or maybe the bitch lied. They did that.