Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (24 page)

“And Jason?” Rachel pointed up to where the security camera tracked them from its chickenwire nest. “You don’t pull a Woodward in a police station parking garage.”

He handed her his lighter. 

They watched Charley’s note, now forever unread, burn down to a slurry of plastic and ash beneath the watchful glass eye of First MPD.

As they walked back towards the station, they were joined by two very confused officers who were sent to learn why the cyborgs were setting fires in the parking garage. Phil told them he had lost a bar bet with a local law clerk, and offered to treat them to vending machine cuisine to make up for their inconvenience. 

“The bank account. Do you think that was real?”
Jason said to her as they ripped into stale cupcakes. Across the table, Phil was entertaining the officers with the saga of the bomb scare at Glazer’s apartment. Like every good fish story, the bombs had grown in size and threat; they were lucky the city was still standing.

The calories hit her bloodstream and her body twitched itself awake.
“Yeah, I do,”
she replied. The cupcakes were gone in two bites each and she tossed the wrappers in the bin to keep herself from licking the frosting off of them.
“And probably at least one large cash transaction went through it. Deposit or payment, doesn’t matter. It’ll lead straight back to Edwards in some way.”

“Is the judge involved?

She shrugged across the link before she realized it.
“Sorry,”
she said as he flinched.
“I don’t know. If you asked me that an hour ago, I’d have said yes.” 

“And now?”
Phil asked. He had been relieved of storytelling duties and was nodding in the right places as an officer told one of her own.

“My gut says Edwards is being set up as a sacrifice. He could be innocent, he could be complicit, but I don’t think he’s the brains behind this. He’s too…”
Rachel thought back to Edwards during that morning’s press conference, how he had shimmered with energy on the podium. She leaned forward and rested her chin on the lid of Charley’s shoebox.
“He’s too eager. He’s a little kid who wants to be famous, but I don’t think he’d set up a murder.”

“Hanlon would,”
Jason said, and started to pick up reds.
“We already know that for a fact. If Hanlon was the one getting his hands dirty, would Edwards help him?”

“If Hanlon lied to him to bring him on his team? Yes, Edwards would definitely help him. Edwards would get to run for office with the support of a beloved Senator. It’d be his dream come true.”

Rachel paused, then added:
“But if Hanlon was honest with him? I just don’t know.”

Phil bid goodnight to the officers and got up to leave, and Rachel and Jason followed him out of the room.
“Why be honest with someone if you’re setting him up? Rachel…”
Phil paused and looked at her.
“Your friend, Charley? What if he wasn’t lying, and Hanlon and Edwards are working together?”

She said, very quietly so they wouldn’t feel her anger:
“Then we put another name on the list.”

TWELVE

The sun wasn’t up but Mulcahy was waiting for her just outside of her front door. She looked around for a classic muscle car and came up empty.

“I’m walking you to work,” he said.

Rachel assumed he meant First District Station. OACET headquarters was twenty miles away, and they both had busy days ahead of them. “Okie-dokie.”

She went back inside and taped a note to the coffee pot to let Santino know she had left early but would be running late. Sometime after two in the morning, her partner had shown up on her doorstep with a hockey duffle stuffed with clothes. He had gone straight to the inflatable air mattress she had set up in one of the empty rooms without saying a word. Rachel saw that he had come back downstairs and used the kitchen countertop as his dumping ground for his workday debris: his badge, belt, wallet, and Taser were strewn out between the sink and the fridge, and when she took a quick peek in the freezer she found his gun hidden behind the ice tray. 

Buy a gun safe,
she added to her mental list of things to do. She kept hers in the nightstand beside her bed, but the guest room didn’t have a stick of furniture. A few nights in the freezer wouldn’t corrode Santino’s service weapon, but it looked as though her partner might be staying with her for longer than that.

It stopped her cold, realizing this would be the first time in years she would share her private space with anyone for longer than a night. Rachel looked towards the staircase and caught herself before she scanned her own house to see if Santino was up and moving. She rubbed the stress from her hands and made herself walk away from the imprint he had already left on her kitchen, the jacket he had tossed over the newel post on his way up to bed, his shoes on the mat by the door.

She darted outside to find Mrs. Wagner stalking across their conjoined front lawns towards Rachel’s front porch, golf club held parallel to the ground like a samurai sword.

Mulcahy, bemused in golds and purples, asked:
“Does she do nothing but watch your house?”

“I think she sleeps when I’m at work. Come on.”
Rachel took off in the other direction, the morning dew on the grass soaking her pant cuffs as the large man followed in her wake. Behind them, Mrs. Wagner went red with rage as her targets escaped at the speed of a brisk walk.

She and Mulcahy passed the first few blocks in small talk. She needled him with questions about his upcoming nuptials to see if she could get his colors to shift, but he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about his starring role in a wedding that would rival any held at Westminster Abbey. He was not, however, familiar with organza; with a perfectly straight face, she told him he should call the flower shop as quickly as possible to set up the order while it was still in season.

They detoured through a small public park which catered to soccer moms by day and junkies by night; with dawn barely touching the bottom of the clouds, they had the place to themselves. Mulcahy steered them towards a footbridge which passed over a puddle and a clump of weeds, the rain from yesterday’s storms already drained from the channel. He stopped in the middle of the bridge and leaned on the railing.

“How many surveillance devices are on us?” he asked.

“Right now? Is this a test?”

He shook his head. “This is a meeting.”

She flipped to frequencies which let her pick out audio, then video, and mostly for giggles she ran a few to cover some of the less common spectra (she didn’t expect to find anything in those but Mulcahy loved to throw ringers).

“Fourteen,” she answered. It was a pittance; fourteen signals aimed directly at the park was practically nothing. They were within spitting distance of Pennsylvania Avenue, and there was so much electronic chatter the hairs on her arms twitched.

“You’re tracking them?” Mulcahy asked. When she nodded, he grinned. “Watch this.”

He lifted his chin and closed his eyes. Rachel had no idea what he was doing until the signals started to fade and a gray fog rose up around them. The signals waved in and out, like losing a favorite radio station as your car drove out of range, then vanished entirely.

“Here,” Mulcahy said, and she looked up to see him kneeling beside her and holding a pack of tissues. She didn’t remember sitting down. Or crying; her face was wet.

“Shit,” she said, wiping her eyes with the flat of her hand, careful to avoid smearing her makeup. “Sorry. I thought I was done with the blackouts.”

“It’s my fault,” he shook his head. “I should have let you know what was coming. It hit me hard the first time, too.”

She took one of his hands with both of hers, and he lifted her up like a kitten. “Look,” he said, smiling.

They stood at the center of an opaque silvery-gray bubble, the edges of which sealed away the pervasive digital world. Rachel could still perceive those same fourteen signals if she went looking for them, but their pressure was blocked from this sanctuary of Mulcahy’s making. Nor could she feel the timers on the traffic lights, the Wi-Fi blanketing the park, the chatter of cell phones in the cars driving by... The digital ecosystem was silent.

The sphere around them was centered on Mulcahy, whose conversational colors nearly matched his cerulean core. This was probably as close as he came to being at peace.

She understood. It felt as though she had stepped from the water and could move without its weight.

In their secret selves, every Agent wondered when they would end up like Shawn. It seemed inevitable; they could never escape from the pervasive presence of mechanical things. It was possible to narrow the scope of what was perceived to the immediate area, but even that left dozens
—
sometimes hundreds, sometimes
thousands!—
of devices. These formed an unrelenting pressure on the mind which could be ignored but never avoided. The only real relief was to turn off the implant. For Rachel, for the others, this was not an option; they might go insane as quickly without the implant as with it. There was no going back.

Then, suddenly, sanctuary. Control without the clamor. Little wonder she had fainted.

Things were… fuzzy in the sphere. She was having difficulty seeing Mulcahy as anything but his colors, and when she looked down, her torso and legs were fit together like a jagged jigsaw. Their feet, the ground beneath them, these were barely visible at all.

She reached out, halfway expecting to feel the edges of the bubble as her fingers vanished into the gray, but they fell through empty air. Rachel pushed her arm forward and found the more of her body that extended past the edge, the greater the pressure of the oppressive chattering things. She stopped before she moved her face beyond the barrier, sure that they would surge over her in force when her head and its blended circuitry were exposed.

“Is this yours?” she asked. It seemed the sort of thing he would discover.

“No,” he said, his eyes closed. He let the railing do the work of holding him upright as he drank in the silence. “Danny in Accounting figured this out, can you believe it?”

Danny in Accounting… Danny in Accounting…
There were several Dannys in OACET, and she tried to place his face among those Agents in other departments before she realized her mind had gone out through the collective to locate him. She backpedaled quickly before the many Dannys felt her and thought she was trying to call. “The link is still active?”

Mulcahy nodded, and the railing gave a slight creak in protest as he shifted his weight. “We can’t even keep ourselves out,” he said with a trace of fierce red pride.

He pushed himself off of the railing. “I have to drop the barrier. Ready?”

Rachel took a deep breath and nodded, steadying herself for the rush of the shrieking things. Instead, as the gray slowly faded and the details of the park returned, they crept back like beaten dogs and slunk around the edges of sense. She closed her eyes and exhaled in relief.

“Danny found it when he was looking for a way to block the paparazzi.”

Oh. That Danny in Accounting.
Josh and Mulcahy were merely movie-star handsome. Danny in Accounting had stepped straight off of the pedestal of a Renaissance sculptor. The man couldn’t take out the trash without ending up on the cover of a magazine, and Mulcahy’s standing agreement with the press to leave OACET alone was ignored by those bottom-feeders who thought that holding a camera gave them the right to use it. Someday there would be an object lesson so profound it would pass into press corps legend.

“I can’t maintain it for long,” he said. “I’m still training the autoscript. But in a few weeks, it’ll be an independent program. I still have to test if it blocks traditional film photography, but streaming digital is cut off at the barrier.”

“Nice.” Rachel flipped off her visuals and felt her way through the digital ecosystem. It was muffled, as though she had slammed the window shut to block out the summer screech of the cicadas. She wondered what her implant had learned while the sphere was active. “Can you do anything about the gray?”

Mulcahy’s blue took on a streak of yellow. “Gray?”

“Yeah. The bubble…” and she trailed off as she realized Mulcahy’s field of vision didn’t stop at the barrier. 

“Listen,” she said, and cocked her head as if checking the time. “Today’s going to be a bear and I need to get to First District Station.”

“Rachel.”

She waited. She was not about to lie to him, and she definitely didn’t want to deal with his guilt when she told him that since his new program blocked digital frequencies, it also blocked some of the media she used to see.

He must have guessed; his colors went pale. 

“I need some time to play around with it,”
she said through the link.
“I was able to see, just not as well as usual. It’s just a matter of finding the right spectrum. Don’t worry about it.”

She started walking, and he fell in a few steps behind her.

“Rachel.”

“Hey, look. Geese.”