Transhuman (10 page)

As I watch, Carl Smith runs the fire hose into the network room. He goes into the corridor a second time, goes to the firefighting cabinet to turn the valve on. Hope surges momentarily as I see him struggle with the valve handle. It's stiff and awkwardly placed within the cabinet. I dare to imagine that it may be permanently stuck. I doubt the university is so lax in maintaining its firefighting gear, but at least I have a few more minutes left than I had thought. Quickly I check the traffic cameras around the campus for the telltale blue and red flicker of cruisers responding to a code-three emergency call. I pick up a pair screaming down Sheridan, scattering the sparse traffic from their path as they careen through red lights. The cavalry is on the way, but it's going to arrive too late. In the hall camera view Carl Smith has retrieved a yardstick from beneath a classroom whiteboard and is using it as a lever on the recalcitrant fire hose valve. The valve turns and the hose fattens with water. Smith looks up, his face distant for a second. Perhaps he hears the approaching sirens. He moves more quickly as he returns to the network room. I check the traffic cameras again. The police are pulling onto the campus, no more than a minute away. They're going to be a minute too late. I return to the camera in the network room, in time to see my adversary pick up the fire hose and put his hand on the lever that will send high-pressure water crashing and splashing through the delicate electronic web that holds my awareness. I want to scream, I want to leap at him in rage, seize him by the neck and throttle him, beat his brains out against the cold tile floor for the crime of snuffing out my existence. I can do none of these things, I can only watch helplessly as my executioner proceeds with my execution.

And then something surprising happens. Carl Smith stiffens, then drops the hose nozzle to the floor. Very slowly he raises his arms. The network room camera shows no reason that he should do this, but when I check the hall camera I see two campus police officers there with guns drawn. I have been saved. Of course the dispatcher sent CPD response units to the scene when I called in my emergency, but also of course they would have notified the campus police. It never occurred to me, perhaps because when I was Mark Astale I saw campus police as little more than glorified security guards. I disdained them as institutional cops, wannabes who couldn't get a position with a real police force. I have no direct communications with them, and so didn't even consider them as potential saviors. It was a foolish mistake, but someone wiser than me has forestalled its consequences. I watch now as they order Carl Smith to his knees, and then to his belly. His expression is unreadable as they handcuff him, my relief is palpable. My virtual heartbeat slows, its pounding in my ears no less real for being simulated. Somatic feedback was found to be essential to preserve the sanity of a mind imprisoned in silicon. Gennifer learned that with Oswald Beinn, and so my virtual body responds as my real one did. Mostly. Once Smith is secure they pick him up and lead him out of the room. CPD are already in the parking lot, guided there by the campus cops. In the hall they roughly frisk him for weapons, but he's ignoring that indignity, his eyes locked on the security camera high in the corner. He is looking directly into the lens, as though he were looking into my eyes, as though he knew I were here behind the circuitry, watching him. He was saying something, repeating it over and over. I can tell from the reaction of the police that he isn't saying it out loud. There is no audio, but my lip-reading software supplies it. "Mark Astale, we need to talk." He knows my name.

The cops usher him into the back of a waiting cruiser. A few more minutes and he's gone. The campus police lock up the building, and a new image presents itself for my attention, a camera in a downtown bar. I dismiss it unexamined. "Mark Astale, we need to talk." I buffer the video and replay it over and over. "Mark Astale, we need to talk." He knows my name. He knows I'm watching through the video cameras. The secret of my resurrection is known only to a few. Of course he had to have known, he didn't come to Loyola to commit a random act of vandalism, he came to destroy me and for that he had to have known about me. It isn't the first time someone's tried to kill Mark Astale. He was shot at, stabbed, beaten, run over and pricked with a dirty needle. His life ended when a desperate fugitive slammed on the brakes in a high-speed chase, triggering a collision that ended with flesh meeting concrete. He was no stranger to violence.

But that was Mark Astale, this is the first time anyone has tried to kill
me
. The question is, how did he know? The question is, why did he try? It's 5:30 a.m., and the stream of tagged images from the cameras is picking up as the city starts to wake itself. I ignore them all, instead rebuffering the footage of Carl Smith saying those words over and over and over again. "Mark Astale, we need to talk." I don't know if I want to talk to him, but something tells me that he's right. I need to. That's a problem, because he has just disappeared from the world of cameras. I follow the cruiser carrying him to the station, but the parking garage is underground and so I don't see him get out of the car. There are more cameras in the cell blocks, but I have no access to them. If he's convicted of all he's charged with I may never see him again.

7:17 a.m. and the commuter rush is swelling steadily towards its peak, and the image stream with it. In Arlington Heights a dark blue convertible with license plate GENNI pulls onto the on-ramp. Gennifer is on her way to work. I don't know what I'll say to her. My time for introspection is over, there's work to be done. Still, the echoes of the night's encounter reverberate in the back of my awareness. An hour later she comes into the lab, exactly as she always does. The normalcy of the routine seems somehow surreal, as though the world should have stopped with the attack.

"Good morning, Mark." She gives me her morning smile.

"Good morning, Gennifer."

"I got a call this morning from the campus police." The smile is replaced by concern. "Something about a break-in?"

"A fugitive named Carl Smith showed up in the cameras downtown. I tracked him here. He got into the network room, he was about to flood it with a fire hose when the campus police arrested him. He's in CPD custody now." The words seem inadequate to describe what happened. "I have the relevant video footage stored if you'd like to see it."

"I would, but not now. How are you?" The worry is clear in her voice.

"I'm fine, though I very nearly wasn't." I pause. Like most police I'm hesitant to show vulnerability. "It was frightening."

"I have you backed up, you know. Every day we take a snapshot of your brain." She gives me her megawatt smile again. "You're too important to me to risk losing." I could love Gennifer so easily, I want to love her so much.

"Me-as-of-yesterday would live. Me-as-of-now would die. I didn't realize how important that difference was until now."

"Do you know why he came after you?"

"No. I can only imagine he knew I was watching him, knew I was the biggest threat to his freedom."

"Are you okay?" Her concern is genuine.

"It's not the first time someone's tried to kill me." My answer isn't genuine. I've worried her, and I don't want that. The truth is I'm still shaken, not so much by the incident itself as by Carl Smith's obviously detailed knowledge of me.
Mark Astale, we need to talk.

Gennifer pursed her lips, looking beautiful. "Perhaps we need some kind of dynamic backup system, a running duplicate of your brain state held off-site so this kind of thing can't happen." I nod my cameras. "If you want I can put some effort into learning how to distribute my processes out on the network."

Gennifer shook her head. "No, I need you to keep finding fugitives. I don't mind telling you, our new funding source is looking at a major boost to your cognitive abilities. They want to be able to do association tree searches in large crowds using satellite imagery, and that's just be first capability, there's going to be a lot more. When that starts to come online there'll be lots of money to make sure you're safe."

I've used association trees before; they're basically a map of who knows who, and how, and why. They are powerful tools against organized crime, where the mob bosses rarely get their hands dirty with actual criminal acts. Their guilt is mostly by association, and a well-supported association tree can go a long way to convince a jury that they are neck deep in a criminal web. Their applicability to overseas intelligence work is immediately obvious, though I'm not sure I understand where the large crowd angle comes in.

"I need you to keep bringing in successes," Gennifer went on. "Anything on the Blackburn case?"

"Nothing." Unlike most of my targets, Sue Blackburn isn't a wanted criminal, or even a kidnap victim. She's the daughter of Senator Blackburn, who abandoned college to marry a young musician the senator strongly disapproved of, then abandoned her father to avoid his disapproval. I don't normally do missing persons—there are so many of them the false positive rate would be unmanageable—but Senator Blackburn is a key, no,
the
key supporter of Gennifer's research. Finding his daughter0000000000000000 would give us a major boost, and so her image is in my search files. I want very much to find Sue Blackburn, simply because her father's gratitude would secure our future forever. Gennifer has staked her career on me, and I want to prove her decision was a good one.

"Not to worry, we knew that was a long shot when we took it on. Did you get a chance to experiment with the satellite cameras?"

"Yes. There's a noticeable lag between when I target a camera and when I get the image back."

"Is that a problem?"

"Not an insurmountable one. I wasted a lot of fuel getting used to it."

"Don't worry about the fuel. The important thing is to get the capability online as fast as possible. We've got some big changes coming up, you're going to be getting a lot more capacity, and a lot more feeds. Very soon. I'm going to make some improvements to the satellite interface today." Gennifer starts to work at her console. The cameras are queuing images for me to look at even as we speak but I find myself less driven than usual to follow up on them.
Mark Astale, we need to talk
. I should tell Gennifer about that last strange aspect of the night's events, but I decide not to. Not until I've gained some understanding about what it means.

A camera hit comes in from the bus station, a young man with a beard and a tie-dyed shirt, guitar case over his shoulder. The cameras think he's a wanted con artist. He's a good match, but I dismiss the image without further consideration. Another one replaces it, a woman on the street, well-dressed, early middle age, a potential black widow, a serial poisoner of husbands whose obvious wealth stems from multiple insurance settlements. I dismiss that one too. I can't get Carl Smith out of my brain. I go over his police file again. It's thin enough, and it holds no clue as to how he came to know of my existence, or why he tried so hard to kill me. Police records show him booked into CPD custody for under an hour before being handed over to federal authority. Where he went from there isn't immediately clear. I spend some time reviewing the camera buffers in the area of the police station, but I see nothing to indicate where he was taken. It's possible he's still in CPD cells, with the transfer of custody being a simple paper formality and the physical transfer of the prisoner to happen later. I could do an exhaustive movement trace of the seven vehicles which moved through the station's underground parking area in that hour, but that would take up too much of my own time. Normally when I catch a fugitive I take his name off the watch list to spare myself the false positives. This time I don't. The cameras will keep watching for Carl Smith. I want to see where he turns up again.

The day is filled with the usual parade of faces, but I identify none of them as fugitives. In the quiet hours of the following night I do the vehicle trace I had no time for during the day. It takes me two hours, but the seventh time is the charm. It's a white sedan, registered to the federal government. At first it doesn't seem like a high-probability candidate. The camera footage taken as it exited the parking garage shows just two people in the front seat, not a likely configuration for a prisoner transfer. I tracked it through the city from camera to camera. The last camera to see it is on the interstate, where the sedan is traveling south in the fast lane. There's a blurred figure in the backseat now. The image isn't clear enough to know if it's Carl Smith, but my instinct tells me this is him. He was lying down in the back when they left CPD, subdued, sedated, or simply exhausted from the stress of crime and capture. Whatever it was, I've found him.

And lost him. The interstate camera is the last time I see the car. It exits Chicago and my sphere of influence. I try to bring my newfound orbital eyes to bear, but they weren't watching the highway when the sedan was on it, and scattered overcast frustrates my attempts to track it using distance/speed/time calculations to narrow down its current location. As an afterthought I set up a recurring news search for his name. He'll come to trial sometime, and if the trial is in Chicago I'll see him again. 7:17 a.m. comes quickly, and I smile my virtual smile as I spot Gennifer on her way to work. An hour later later, she comes into the lab bearing gifts. Our federal funding has been approved in full. My capabilities and responsibilities are to be tremendously extended. To my surprise, it is not the Pentagon that is paying, but the Justice Department, but it isn't for me to question the source of the funds I need to survive. The next few weeks are a blur as more and more processors and more and more input streams come online in my awareness. The new hardware isn't installed at Loyola, it's out there at a series of nebulous network addresses. My speed of thought goes up an order of magnitude in the first week, another order two weeks later, a third at the end of the month. I can process images a thousand times faster, and I have to, because I'm now getting feeds from nationwide. At first they are mostly image feeds, but as time goes on I get access to medical files, government records, telecommunications logs, licensing databases. The information has come available under the new federal criminal intelligence bill, which gives unrestricted government access to any and every electronic information source in the nation. The FBI, having gotten what it wished for, promptly found itself drowned in an endless flood of information. I'm their solution to the processing problem. Politics holds little interest for me, but the newsfeeds tell me there are protests against the program as a violation of personal privacy. The protesters have no idea how little privacy truly remains. Name an individual, and I can track them almost minute by minute through the day. Fugitive apprehensions spike, and my new masters are very pleased. Perhaps they would be less pleased if they knew how much of their own secrecy they have given away. The FBI aren't the only ones who see me as an answer to the problem of domestic surveillance. Some of the files I'm given have certainly come from the CIA. The old me might not have known the difference, but the new me can pick up their fingerprints in the way their cases are presented. I learn it is they, and not the Pentagon, who have arranged to give me access to the satellites. Nor is the CIA the only secret agency using my newfound capabilities; almost every arm of the government is plugging into the data torrent. Some of the units are so classified there isn't even a public record of their existence. I only know because they've made me smart enough to see patterns they themselves aren't aware they're making. What is a day like when you think a thousand times faster? Subjectively it's a thousand times longer. I learn to split my attention into finer and finer fractions. A significant part of my time is spent learning to navigate the networks on my own. Gennifer can't build interfaces for me anymore. There are too many new feeds, each with its own format and control functions, and she's fully occupied with the technical details of upgrading my brain functions. I discover a newfound interest in software systems, and I start to learn how my own mind actually works. Am I Mark Astale? I was once, but I'm less sure now. Mark Astale was a hands-on cop who disdained academics as dreamers. Now, in the quiet, dark hours of the night, I devour research papers on neural modeling and distributed computing and reconfigure my own mind to make my thinking more efficient. My efforts let me track down my employers, despite the layers of digital camouflage they use to mask their identities. A big chunk of my upgraded processing power lives at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A bigger chunk resides at Fort Meade in Maryland, with the National Security Agency. They aren't supposed to be watching citizens like this, but it seems they are. The legalities don't interest me any more than the politics. I'm given files, I find fugitives. That's my reason for existence, and I'm now very good at it. Nationwide, runners who've been in hiding for years or decades start getting pulled in.