Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) (8 page)

“Ain’t gotta like it.”

“Didn’t say you did,” I said. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist at me, Tresting. I’m not the one trying to kill us.”

He sighed. “What’s the plan? Seems Pourdry’s gone on offense.”

Well, that was obvious. “You think?”

“He might not be the only one, neither. We been pissing off a fair number of disreputable folk the past few months. If they start talking to each other—”

“I’ll try to get some intel,” I said. “Meanwhile, Checker’s doing some research into Pourdry’s business. Once he does, we’ll offense right back.”

“Your MO, always so elegant,” Arthur said.

“When did you get so sarcastic?” Jesus, I wished it were more elegant. I was all about elegant solutions. “Elegance would be fighting back at the root. Going after each bad guy one at a time is ass-backward.”

Arthur was a smart guy. “That what you was up to with all the maps?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I studied the road.

There was no particular reason I should tell Arthur what I was working on. In fact, there were plenty of good reasons not to, the first and foremost of which was that there was a better than even chance he’d side with Checker and try to stop me.

Arthur had tried to stop me from doing things a couple of times in the past, and I’d always plowed right through his moral stance with a nice fuck-you and done them anyway. One of those times I’d gotten someone killed. The other time I hadn’t, but I only managed to avoid it by causing myself to be tortured with a car battery.

Arthur hadn’t been happy. He was a hard man to read, but I was pretty sure I was still on probation with him. I’d promised to try to stop doing that shit.

I licked my lips. “I think I have a way to clothesline the crime rate.”

“Yeah?”

I explained.

Arthur let me talk without interruption as I outlined the plan: Arkacite technology, my math, and metropolitan Los Angeles as a testing ground. I kept my eyes on the road, steadily framing out his reaction.

“And I think Pilar’s right. The technology, they had it functioning. It was just a matter of the mathematics,” I finished out my summary.

“How does it work?” I couldn’t tell yet from his tone what he thought.

“Well, I don’t have the technical specs yet, but I can give you the report summaries.” I put on my best reasonable voice. “First, they discovered the unique brain pattern that comes from the deindividuation state. You know about brain waves?”

“Know they exist.”

“We’ve been able to categorize brain waves for a while—what they look like in the normal waking state, what they look like in deep sleep, that kind of thing. But their researchers figured out the unique Fourier series—or, I should say, the narrow range of Fourier series—”

“English, Russell.”

“What I’m saying is, they managed to pick up what the brain is doing when you hit that deindividuated state. The mathematical characteristics of the brain waves.”

“And then what?”

“It turns out brain entrainment has been around for a long time,” I said. “It’s fascinating, really. People have discovered all sorts of ways to sort of, um, get a subject’s brain frequencies to align with an imposed frequency. Like, they’ll play beats in the subject’s ears and get their brain frequencies to slow down to a more meditative state.”

“Subject,” said Arthur. “You mean a human being.”

“Yeah,” I said. “People. We’re all math inside.”

He shifted in his seat. “Go on.”

“It’s only recently that the social psychologists and the neuroscientists started to cross over and talk to each other more. They did heavier research into the neuroscience of different psychological states, and somewhere along the way someone with funding got wind of it.”

“Arkacite.”

“Yeah, or the military grants, or some combination. Anyway, the important part is, they figured out how, when someone is in that deindividuated place—they figured out how to use a combination of audio and electromagnetic frequencies to realign the brain out of it.”

“Side effects?” Arthur asked. “Is it dangerous?”

“No more dangerous than listening to music.” That wasn’t strictly true. After all, as Pilar had said, when it hadn’t worked properly it had caused some…unexpected behavior. I sighed. “As long as it’s working the way it’s intended, it’s not dangerous. All it’s doing is realigning brain frequencies to a more normal level, taking them out of that state. It’s returning people to normal.”

“What about people who ain’t doing no mob thing? What kind of effects does it have then?”

“None.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. It’s mathematically impossible for it to take people out of a normal brain state.”

“Thought you said we got more than one normal brain state. Like when people sleep or meditate.”

“It won’t affect those either. It’s, um—” I thought about how to explain. “It’s too far off. Have you ever seen the thing where people break glass with a resonant frequency?”

“Like opera singers? That happens for real?”

“Sure,” I said. “But it’s not like any frequency does it. It has to be resonant with the glass. This isn’t quite the same thing, but—mathematically, what they put together, it’s too far off anything else to affect states other than the particular range of waves they wanted it to.”

“Then what’s the catch?”

I told him about how they hadn’t been able to figure out a way to blanket a large area evenly. “Basically, they could do it if the experiment subject was one person standing still—they tested it on people playing video games and such, for instance—but in real-world mob scenarios, that’s never going to be the case. It’s always going to be a lot of people over a big area, and they couldn’t get the right combination of frequencies to stay constant enough over a large field.” When people had moved out of the sweet spot and into the places where the frequency bands weren’t correct anymore—that was where any trouble had sparked. “And for what we want, well, we want an even bigger scale. We want a consistent impact and we want it everywhere; we don’t want people to wander in and out of the effects.”

“We don’t?” said Arthur dryly.

“For two reasons,” I argued. “This isn’t going to have a large-scale impact if the people who are in vulnerable situations—kids in gang neighborhoods, for instance—” I leaned on that, thinking of Katrina and Justin—“are just going to get indoctrinated once they wander over to the next city block. And second, we want to be able to see if there’s actually a statistically significant effect, and for that we need to test it out over a large area.”

“So, what, you suggesting all of LA? That’s a hell of a lot of ground to cover.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is. But I did a back-of-the-envelope. As long as we can build the things and adjust the calibration the way I need to, setting enough of them will take some time, but it’ll be doable. Especially if Checker and Pilar will help.”

“And you say the math, it works out.” He spoke like he was feeling through things. Digesting them.

“Yeah. I’m getting closer and closer. I think I’m going to be able to adjust these things and position them around the city in a way that’ll work. I’ll be able to blanket the whole metropolitan area evenly, more or less—at least, everywhere will be within the frequency band necessary for this.”

“So a racket like Pourdry’s, or the kids in South LA who get sucked into the life…”

“I’m going to get Checker to run some simulations, but it should have a nontrivial impact.” My heart beat faster. Was Arthur actually agreeing with me?

“Right. Okay. Russell, I realize you ain’t asking my permission, but…I worry, you know? About what we ain’t thought of.” He cleared his throat. “But if this got even a chance of helping…you say it only gonna affect people who are caught up already, right? No one else?”

“No one else.”

“That be the case, then—I don’t think we got no right not to do it, just ’cause we scared of what might happen. But I want us to think this through every step, right? Nothing hasty. Anybody sees anything concerning, we call it off.”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, hardly daring to believe it.

“And I want you to explain it to me in more detail. Want to see their studies and the like.”

“Sure.”

“After that, if it seem like this gonna do what you say, I want to help.”

Holy shit. Excellent.

“Don’t know I’d be much help right now, of course…”

“Oh, bullshit,” I said. “I don’t need you for a gun hand; I’ve got that covered. You’re useful for the things I’m bad at.” Namely, any investigative or undercover work. “Hey. Um. In the spirit of cooperation, there’s…there’s something else you should know.” I drove faster. “I haven’t told Checker yet.”

“What happened?” Somehow, Arthur was always capable of that open, nonjudgmental tone that made you want to confide in him. Which was ridiculous, because he was one of the most morally self-righteous people I knew.

I swallowed and told him about Simon.

Chapter 8

Arthur was
more worried than I was.

“We need to find out more about this guy,” he said, as I helped him up the walk and into a ground-floor apartment. “Stat.”

“I’m not too concerned. He seemed harmless.” I ran the algorithm for the flat’s key location with barely a second thought and stabilized Arthur for a minute to pry the key out from beneath a slat of the building’s warped siding. “Annoying, and creepy, but a wet noodle.”

“Russell.” Arthur gusted out a sigh and put his hand back on my shoulder to limp inside. “Think it through.”

I shut the door behind us. What…? Oh.

Oh.

“You’re saying he might’ve made me think he was harmless,” I said.

“Even if he done what he said and ain’t reading you—if he made us not notice him without trying, he can probably do some kind of, I dunno. A positive impression.”

Or at least a reasonably unsuspicious one. I was a suspicious person by nature, but when it came to someone who could manipulate minds…Arthur was right. If I took Simon’s “not an exact science” comment on good faith, every gut feeling I had about him was probably manufactured.

I sank down on the threadbare futon that was the studio’s only furniture. “I hate psychics.”

“Least it sounds like he ain’t aggressing,” Arthur said, stretching out the leg on his injured side to sink down next to me. “Unless he just ain’t as strong as Dawna. Or unless he got some larger plan.”

“Aren’t you pleasant.”

“We gotta find him again.”

That was the last thing I wanted to do. “He’ll probably find me. I got the sense he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.” And who knew, the impression he wasn’t going to give up may even have been a bleed-through thought he’d accidentally projected, which meant I was definitely right. “But even if I see him again, it’s not exactly going to do us much good. He’s not going to tell me anything he doesn’t want to.”

“Hmm. Like to look into him, and not to his face. You get a last name?”

“I’m not sure ‘Simon’ is even his real first name,” I said.

“What about how he found you?”

“Well, he knows me. Apparently.”

Arthur scoffed. “Russell, you switch phones every few weeks and don’t even keep a driver’s license. Knowing you ain’t the same as finding you.”

That was a good point.

“What are your points of contact with the grid?”

“I have a permanent voicemail box for clients, and an email address. But nothing came through there unless he erased my memory of it.”

“What about clients? Regular haunts?”

“Any of my regular clients know how to reach me, but I’ve only been feeling like someone’s watching the past few days,” I said. “And the only people I see on the regular are you and…”

I studied the floor.

“Could be one of us, to be fair,” Arthur said. “It’s not like loyalty means a damn thing when it comes to these guys. But you said he keeps calling you by your full name, and seemed surprised at you being different from he remembered. If he talked to one of us, asked twenty questions, he’d already have the lowdown.” Arthur snapped his fingers. “I got it. The cemetery. Checker gave me your note story, asked me to call and run forensics—”

So they were actually going to go through with that. I felt faintly embarrassed. “My prints are the only ones you’re going to find.”

“Point is, you don’t remember leaving that message. It’s a connection to a different time. Now, say someone was calling in, checking up, playing a grieving relative or something. You break that stone last year, then next time he calls, the cemetery tells him something happened. Maybe that means something to him, that you went to find it, so he comes running back to LA and tries to figure a way of locating you.”

“But you were just pointing out that there’s still no way he could’ve tracked me down just from—”

“You don’t remember, huh. You stole my car.”

I blinked. Oh. Right. I had. Clearly I needed to be more paranoid about switching cars.

“Maybe this guy gets on the scent of what you drove when you broke in there, either from their security or somewhere nearby,” Arthur went on. “He stakes out my office, he finds you.”

It hung together. Barely.

“Other ways it could’ve gone down, too,” Arthur added. “Could be Checker tipped his hand looking into you, and this guy tracked him back. But I wouldn’t put money on that one.”

This was starting to hurt my head.

“I’m gonna look into the cemetery,” Arthur said. “See who paid for your little tomb, find out any other info I can.”

“Track down Pourdry first,” I said. “He’s the more dangerous one.”

“Russell,
you don’t know that.”

Fucking psychics. “All right, then we put Checker on Pourdry, you on Simon, and I get Pilar.”

“What are you gonna do?” Arthur asked.

“Me? I’m going to break into an old Arkacite warehouse and steal a bunch of top-secret prototypes.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Arkacite Technologies
might have died a fiery death as a company after the events of a couple years ago had bankrupted them—events I’d been rather heavily involved in, unfortunately for me—but the detritus of their empire was still everywhere. Large chunks of their technology had been bought out by other corporate behemoths, all of their old brands now carrying a subtitle marking them with whoever the new overlord was, from their operating systems to their smartphones.