Asimov's Science Fiction (5 page)

He thought about his job sometimes when he read his own feed. Who was feeding him? Did they know what he was doing? How would he go about tailoring code to analyze his own activities? Making coffee was a step to the refrigerator matched with scooping motions at the counter, followed by running water. The algorithm could learn that quickly enough. Tea would be the same, but without the scooping. That was too simple, of course. The scooping could be cereal, or sugar, or just about anything. But it was where he would start.

He wondered what they knew about him.

Some people didn't like that Jersey's job existed at all. They argued InterTel could not be trusted, that allowing companies access to people's interfaces destroyed personal liberty. They were wrong, of course. A company like InterTel could exist only if people trusted them, and if one Push company went renegade the whole industry would crash. So the collective became self-policing, burying the process of development under layers of procedure so thick that creating anything truly new seemed nearly impossible.

This is what annoyed Jersey about his job. It wasn't that InterTel went too far; it was the fact that the company
didn't go far enough
—that they actually complied with interface laws. The industry merely provided people what they needed when they needed it. No harm, no foul.

There was so much more he could do if they would just let him do it.

Andrelline Smith would be thirty-two years old in less than a month.

If she were a prime number, she would be 313. Her parents had split when she was two, embarking on a custody battle that lasted several years and left her in the middle of two warring factions consisting of separate sets of parent and grandparents on each side. She married her college sweetheart when she was twenty-three. She asked her parents to come together for her special day, but they declined. This is why she had married the same man three times within the span of a single week, holding three separate ceremonies—one for each of her parents, and the real one just for her and Harol. It had been the easiest thing to do. At least she got her money's worth out of the dress.

Now, Andrelline lived in an apartment with her husband and two kids. She loved them each and wouldn't trade a minute, but at one point she'd had bigger dreams. Sometimes, when she was sitting in her favorite chair, or when she was out at the grocery store, or sitting on the bus as it shuttled her to the shops at Larimer Square, sometimes during those moments of quiet thought, she fantasized about what her life might have been if she had run for office or agreed to join the staff at Freedom Rights—a coalition for the disenfranchised that had offered her an unpaid internship before Jade had been born. Sometimes it would get so far that her feed would send her news clips and links to blogs. Then she would get up and make herself lunch, or would pick out the bottle of milk with the latest "use by" date.

Life is like this. It moves on, with you or without you.

Canada Doering was born on January 1st. One-one. She actually considered herself to be a prime, though she wouldn't know a prime from any other number. She called herself 4-9-9 at parties, and at a bar she once wrote a poem with 499 as the title, which she read out loud for Open Mike night. It was more of a limerick, really, but it got people's attention and that's what mattered. She had that number, 499, tattooed on her left hip in ink as red as her hair. She called herself 499 because four hundred ninety-nine was nearly five hundred, and five hundred was how long she was going to live. She knew this because Madame Fortuna had told her so when she was a little girl, and it made sense because scientists said they were very near to extending life into something that would make humans nearly immortal.

She planned to have "500" tattooed on her other hip when she turned her dying age.

She hadn't done the math, though, and was surprised to find herself falling to her death on the first day of August, which as luck would have it, meant she had entered the five-hundredth month of her life.

George Manning worked the emergency line in Denver, Colorado. It was no surprise to George that 9-1-1 was a prime number. The emergency code deserved to be special. Its prime-ness made sense. George assumed the fact that 911 was a prime was among the reasons it was selected as the emergency number in the first place.

George had voted Republican in every election he could find, with the rare exception of when a Libertarian might have a hair's breadth chance of actually winning. He considered himself a practical man, a man of logic. His friends said he was reliable to a fault. If George Manning said he would do something, he did it.

Though George was a very big man in every way, he thought of himself as Batman, sitting in his soft chair with his ear bud in place, his microphone strapped to his head, and the special government band appended to his neural feed. He fucking-A
was
9-1-1. That was what he told his cop friends as they watched the Broncos and drank beer during the season. He was just as responsible for lives as they were. He handled mothers who had lost their children, and wives who were going crazy because Frank had just keeled over with a heart attack, and sometimes he even handled the chilling calls from cold, cold voices who told him things that would freeze the heart of a normal person.

His friends didn't agree with him, of course. Assholes. They were
real
cops, and he wasn't even a rent-a-dude, even if he did buy them beer in his turn and even if he did shoot with them on the weekends. They would not let him into their sanctum. They called him Gut Man, a play on his love of the comics. Gut Man, they said, able to eat hoagies at the speed of light. He took their ribbing in good nature on the outside, but (while he actually enjoyed the nickname Gut Man) being laughed at ripped holes in places they couldn't see. He wanted to be a cop. He wanted to be a superhero. He wanted to be something more than an invisible voice on the phone.

George answered this time in the same confident voice he answered with every time.

"9-1-1. What's your emergency?"

"I think my girlfriend just killed herself," the voice replied.

"I see," George said, switching to questioning mode. It was his job to keep the man calm and get his information as quickly as possible. "Can you tell me where you are?"

He typed as the man responded, clicking the police button and feeding them information. The call lasted just over three minutes. When it was done, he typed in the man's name—Jersey Jones—which is eleven letters. He did not think of this as a prime, though of course it was.

Tevin Stone was a senior inspector with the Denver Police Department. If he were a prime number he would be thirteen because he was someone for whom nothing seemed to work out. He was always so close—good, but not good enough. Behavioral scientists claim that constantly being so near a person's goals, yet never reaching them, can shave years off a person's life. If this is true, Tevin Stone was a strong candidate to die soon. He was 47 years old the night he arrived—bubble on and siren off—to investigate a jumper at 877 East 17th Street.

Three CPD were already on the scene.

The woman lay under a sheet on the sidewalk of an apartment building.

Stone knelt to lift the covering and saw she was naked except for the number 499 tattooed on her hip. Per protocol, the officers had not touched her. She was no longer a pretty sight.

"What's her story?" Stone asked a paramedic standing nearby.

"Seventh floor," the paramedic replied.

He looked up. The streetlights limited visibility beyond the third floor.

"Drugs?"

The paramedic glanced at 499 and shrugged. "Not enough."

The detective dropped the cloth, went inside. While the elevator rose, Detective Stone thought about his daughter. His feed brought him a notice about college tuition and another about mace units, which he did his very best to ignore—imagining the feed getting stuck in the upper folds of his temporal lobe. Focus and compartmentalization were skills he had perfected long ago.

Charlane, his little girl, was nineteen years old and a sophomore-to-be at Colorado State. He wanted her to study law, but she'd chosen criminal justice, just like he had. He sighed, thinking about the corpse's red hair. Charlane had dyed hers that very color a month ago. He didn't think much of it, but she liked it and that was what mattered. A few years ago, Tevin thought he might rise further in the department, but that was before the failed tests, the booze, and the steady stream of cases that wore his knees down and stole his capacity to dream. All he really wanted out of life anymore was that his little girl be happy.

The elevator stopped, the tone rang, and two doors slid open.

Jersey Jones sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by cops and other people who were not uniformed but who Jersey still figured for cops. He knew he didn't like the detective the minute he stepped through the front doorway. The man was black, with a receding hairline. He could stand to lose a few pounds.

Jones was still trying to decide exactly what had happened, and he didn't like the detective because he seemed sure of himself. Jersey Jones didn't need someone who actually knew what they were doing asking him a bunch of questions right now. The female uniform had tried to grill him earlier, but it wasn't really her thing, and she quickly returned to rolling yellow tape. Jones sipped coffee that had grown cold, and thought about the wireless push unit he had stashed in his closet. Even if they found it, the cops wouldn't know what it was. And the handheld device was packaged in an old phone. He should be safe if he played it well.

The detective had quiet words with two uniformed officers, then came toward the kitchenette table. They introduced themselves, and Stone slouched onto a three-legged stool.

"Can you tell me what happened here?"

Jones licked his lips. "I don't really know. One minute we were on the couch having fun, then she got up and jumped." He motioned at the broken window, through which the skyline glowed with lines of stark light.

"No fight between you?"

"Not a thing."

"You know we'll be able to get a playback, right? If your story doesn't match the basics it won't look good for you."

"Nothing," Jones replied. "I swear."

Stone didn't believe him, but something about Jersey Jones told him they wouldn't find anything on his feed. Still, there was something more here. It was a tone of voice, the way Jones's words came out almost scripted and his eyes slid away from contact just enough to avoid pressure.

"All right," he said, sitting higher on the stool. "Let's get to business, then."

The interrogation took fifty-three minutes. By the time he left, Stone had learned that Jones had met the deceased in a bar, and that she had come up to the apartment for rough stuff. He knew the tox report would show S-Blast. He knew snippets of conversation, the fact that the two had not known each other before, and that they had taken a taxi here. And he knew that Jersey Jones was still not telling him everything. Beyond that, Detective Stone knew his stomach was burning with acid, his back ached, and that he was in for another long and sleepless night.

Andrelline woke that morning and got Jade and Maria ready for their summer program. They were eight and six. Jade was worried Maria was going to slow them down, and Maria was worried that the blue bow she had pasted into her hair was going to fall off. Andrelline got them into their shoes while Harol made his breakfast, scanned the newsfeeds, and drank his coffee. It was a big day for him. The candidates for chief engineer were being announced and, if his boss got it, Harol was next in line to move up. He wouldn't seem nervous to anyone else, but Andrelline saw it in the way he cleared his throat before sipping coffee and the way his eyes kept going unfocused as he read the feed.

It would mean more money and another week's vacation.

She thought about the beach and an advertisement for sunscreen rolled on her feed. She scolded herself for her daydream. The ad and the sensation of warmth it contained made her feel selfish and needy. Harol had enough to worry about.

Jade complained, then, and Maria rolled her eyes.

Andrelline walked them down the stairs and waited at the corner until the bus came. She noticed the area across the street, penned-off with yellow tape that marked it as a crime scene. Curiosity made her scan the wall, stopping at a seventh-floor window, half of which was boarded with plywood. A chill crossed her spine, a mix of fear and worry that made her shiver. An ad for a dopamine inhibitor scrolled on her feed.

The bus arrived in a cloud of dust. She hugged the girls and watched them step onto the vehicle. She returned to the apartment in time to give Harol a goodbye kiss and watch as he grabbed his jacket and went to the office. She wished he would work at home more often, but that was not going to happen. Andrelline went about her chores then, doing the things that needed to be done to keep the house running. But all morning she found herself coming back to that moment on the street corner, and wondering what was behind the broken window.

Jersey Jones did not sleep that night, but the S-Blast was still running so he was not particularly tired. The police informed him he was a person of interest—which was different from a suspect, but which still prevented him from leaving the city.

It pissed him off.

This wasn't his fault. He didn't want her to jump, he hadn't told her to.

It was probably some fundamental problem with her rather than anything in his code, or at worst just some strange interaction, like a penicillin allergy or lactose intolerance. The woman was a thrill-seeker, a bimbette with that air of desperation older women could get. Jersey did not pretend to understand women. But she had been an easy sway. His handheld transmitter had linked into the net around her, and she had responded to each of his messages—she asked for a Dark Horse when he offered to buy her a drink, she said she didn't smoke, but after he sent the command she bummed a cigarette from the blonde woman who sat beside her.