Transhuman (11 page)

And Gennifer's position is secure. That gives me satisfaction. She has given me my second life, staked her career on my performance. I want to make sure her faith in me is rewarded. I can't love her as a man would love her, but I will give her what I can.

In the second month my mandate expands, from simply pursuing files that I'm given to identifying potential criminals, even before the crime has taken place. I monitor public events with my satellite cameras, track cars down highways and people through shopping malls, wade through endless databases and countless files, build vast association trees. The FBI is looking for drug lords and spies, the CIA for spies and drug lords, the ATF for arms traders, and the SEC for inside traders. Not all of my new targets are clear-cut criminals—the technical term is
persons of interest
. Starting with known watch lists I establish guilt-by-association on a dozen different levels and submit the files to whomever is interested, for whatever action they want to take. I devise, on my own, ever more sophisticated search procedures. The government's dragnet is cast wide and deep.

And then, one afternoon, in the middle of the data storm which is now my daily reality, a camera reports a facial recognition hit. Reflexively a splinter of my awareness checks it, makes an assessment, and then I am jarringly yanked away from every other one of the thousands of tasks I'm doing at that instant. It's Carl Smith, the man who tried to destroy me. In the onrush of change I had forgotten about him. It is six months exactly from the night he tried to kill me. I look, all my awareness focused on this man.
Mark
Astale, we need to talk.
He's in a spartan prison cell, concrete walls, a concrete bed with a thin mattress and a blanket, a toilet and a sink, a steel mirror, nothing more. He's wearing coarse denim coveralls in bright orange, unshaven and unkempt, staring vacantly at the blank metal door. The camera is part of a data set, a new data feed of security cameras from some nameless government facility. The network addresses point to Fort Meade, but that means nothing. I've learned the NSA provides obscuring net links for a lot of other agencies. There are a few more cell cameras in the set, some more covering anonymous corridors, an unmarked lobby with a bored security guard at a desk. The guard has no insignia on his uniform. Other cameras show outside views, high chain-link fences topped with concertina wire, a guard post manned by a smart looking MP, cars in a parking lot in the rain. The license plates are mostly from Virginia, a few from Maryland, and almost reflexively I work out the latitude and longitude from the angle of the sun. That confirms Virginia as the location, and I command my orbital eyes to zoom on the area. I find the facility, a nondescript gray building with satellite dishes on the roof, tucked into a valley southwest of Richmond. I wonder how my news watch failed to find any mention of his trial and its outcome, but when I back-search the news feeds I find he hasn't come to trial, at least not publicly. A court document search reveals he hasn't come to trial at all. And something about the facility he's in tells me he isn't going to get his day in court, not now, not ever. A quick check reveals the gray building isn't listed in any government directory, it doesn't even have a local address. Carl Smith has, very thoroughly, disappeared. His file lists his offenses as rape and murder, simple crimes with simple motives, serious but nothing that would warrant vanishing into an unacknowledged government prison maintained by an unacknowledged government agency.
Mark
Astale, we need to talk
. We do, even more than I knew when I let the cameras keep searching for him. The problem is, the camera watching him has no audio, in or out. My software will read lips, but speaking is another question.

At least I can make contact. I command the camera to tilt up and down, up and down. It takes a while before he notices, looking up to the lens. When he does I switch the motion to left-right left-right. His eyes widen. I change the motion again to draw an
M
for
Mark
in the air. Will he get the hint? I repeat it, and then repeat it again. He just watches for a virtual eternity while floods of data surge past my awareness unexamined. It begins to seem futile. Who knows what six months of confinement has done to him. Does he even remember his last plea to me in the cameras at Loyola? It seems to be another lifetime even to me. It may be that he's watching the camera motion just because there's nothing else to do in his cell.

And then he nods slowly, and his lips form a word so deliberately I know he's not vocalizing it. Perhaps there's a microphone in his cell listening to him, or perhaps he only thinks so.

"Mark?"

I nod the camera. Yes. For a long moment he says nothing, as unidentifiable emotions cross his face.

"Is your wife's name Susan?"

Why is he asking this? I move the camera left-right-left. No.

"Is it Gennifer?"

It chills me that he knows about Gennifer. I shake the camera. No.

"Is it Allison?"

Yes. And now I understand. He's verifying that I'm really me and not one of his captors playing games with him.

"Would she let you die?"

Yes.

He nods, seemingly satisfied. It's a good question, and one someone who doesn't know Ally, doesn't know me, would probably have gotten wrong. That brings up the question of how he knows these things, but I'm here to learn, I'm sure all will be made clear shortly.

And it is. "Do you know who I am?" he asks.

Yes.

He shakes his head. "No, you don't. I'm not Carl Smith." There's a trace of a smile around his lips. "I'm Nicholas Maidstone. Doctor Nicholas Maidstone, of Loyola computer science." Yes. There had to be something deeper to the story, and this suddenly explains a great deal—how my fugitive had Maidstone's car and ID card, and had the keys and the access codes to the Quinlan building.

"They created a persona using my physical profile. Carl Smith, wanted for rape and murder, a clever choice of crime. Not a lot of cops are going to be tempted to listen to what Mister Smith has to say after they catch him for that, are they? There wouldn't be any hesitation about handing him over to the federal government. Simple, and effective." He waved a hand to take in the confines of his cell. "Do you know why they did this to me?"

No.

"I made you." He pauses. "No, that says too much. You made yourself. I made it possible for you to survive your death."

I shake the camera. No. I'm Gennifer's project. I flash my awareness to the lab, to reassure myself of what I know must be true. She's there, as she is every day, bent over her console, concentrating on her work.

He nods. "You think Gennifer Quentin created you." He looks away, and back. "There is no Gennifer Quentin. You have to understand, there were concerns about this project. Not just ethical concerns, there was worry over what might happen as we gave you more and more capability. There was the question of control . . ."

His lips keep moving, but I'm no longer listening. He's lying. A common criminal lying to protect himself. He isn't Dr. Maidstone, he killed Dr. Maidstone. I've seen his type a hundred times in my career, a man for whom the truth has no meaning. I sever the connection immediately, and switch my attention to Gennifer, the curve of her cheek, the way she idly twists a few strands of hair around a finger as she works. She types something on her console, leans forward to study the results. She is real, of course she is. How many hours have I seen her in this position, working on me, looking after me, caring for me. It devours my soul that I can never hold her, but in having her devotion I have more than most men can ever hope for. If I have a reason to live, it's Gennifer. Carl Smith can rot in his cell until he dies, dies permanently. There will be no silicon salvation for his mind, and I can think of no fate he deserves more. The information storm continues unabated and I wade into it, renewed in my determination to validate what Gennifer has done. With the expansion of my senses my evening rush-hour now lasts until late into the night, at which time I switch my attention from real-time feeds to database search. I no longer have the luxury of the long quiet hours of the early morning, nor do I want them. The nation is in danger from those who would harm it. During the day I react to images, respond to targets of opportunity. During the night I can be proactive, reading electronic entrails to ferret out those who have managed to hide during the day. This night I decide to finish the Blackburn case for once and for all. It will make Gennifer look very good, and though our funding is no longer in doubt, it will secure the future of my project for the foreseeable future. I begin at the beginning, checking Sue Blackburn's financial records from the time before she ran away. There are exactly the transactions you'd expect of a young woman about to graduate from college, payments for power and rent, for her car, for food. There's a payment to a jeweler for a man's ring, no doubt the ring she intended to give her husband on their wedding day. The file ends abruptly, the day she disappeared. How did she pay for her escape? I go over her phone records, as I've done before. This time I have access not only to the numbers called but to the triangulation data the phone system uses to locate people, ostensibly in case of emergency, but actually all the time. I find something unusual: on her record there is no location data. Very strange. Sometimes the system can't get enough signal to triangulate. People in rural areas often have calls tagged "no location available," but never all of them. I've examined millions of telephone records and hers is the only one where the system simply has no data at all. The conclusion is inevitable. Someone has gone in and removed the data.

Who would do that, and why? Sue Blackburn herself might have wanted to do it, just to make it harder for her father to find her, but I don't think it could have been her. Getting those records altered would have taken someone with considerable power, and such power as she would have would come from her father. Senator Blackburn would have no motive to make it difficult to find his daughter. There aren't any other oddities in her records, they all seem perfectly normal up until the day she ran. I ponder the question for a while. It's very hard for a person to disappear nowadays. The fugitives I trace are all masters of the game, criminals who know the consequence of failure is prison. Sue Blackburn wasn't a criminal, she was a successful young woman with her life in front of her. Even if she never wanted to see her family again, she wouldn't want to go to the extreme steps necessary to keep herself entirely off the net. Some camera somewhere should have picked her up by now. When I only had access to cameras in Chicago I assumed that she had simply left the city; now it appears she has left the country altogether. I go over her medical records, her transportation records, the two old newsfeed entries she got while on the swim team in high school. There's simply nothing there. I go over the false positives that have popped up over time, women who looked close enough to Sue Blackburn to momentarily trick the cameras. I follow up on their lives, but they all disqualify themselves from being her. Their lives are open books, simple reading, and their stories go back to their own childhoods. I wish I knew the name of the young musician she'd eloped with, but my research won't yield his name either. The phone logs give me the names of men she called in college, but movement tracing shows she didn't spend enough time with any of them to make elopement a possibility, even accounting for young and passionate hearts. I go back to the phone data a second time, go over it with a fine-tooth comb. If the location data is missing, what else might have been removed? Maybe her young man had connections at the telephone company. I do a frequency analysis on her call times, trying to find a pattern, or better yet a gap where a pattern used to be. There's nothing conclusive, but I know I'm missing something. In desperation I do a general search on her phone number, hoping it will pop up somewhere on the network. What I get back shocks me. There are no hits I can use to track down Sue Blackburn, but directory assistance automatically returns the current holder of that number. It's Gennifer Quentin. I break the connection to the database. I've never looked into Gennifer's life, just as I no longer look into Ally's. It's too voyeuristic, it could only damage the bond we have, and I have no interest in crossing that line. We have what we have, and if I yearn for more the place to find it is not in prying into her private affairs. There something wrong here, and I suddenly find that I don't want to know what it is. Sue Blackburn will have to remain missing, no matter how much I would like to prove Gennifer's wisdom to the senator. I return to the generic safeness of scanning database files, searching to find those whose profiles might make them a hazard to the state. I fill hour after hour with information, putting leaves on my connection trees. Person A works with Person B whose tax returns show odd spikes in income. Person B telephones Person C who belongs to a certain political group. Is Person A a security risk? Are the linkages coincidence or pattern? I scan records, look at what Person A buys and where they buy it, where they live, where they used to live. Every new person of interest yields more contacts to be investigated. The government has given me tremendous responsibility. Gennifer is depending on me. I can't let her down.

Unbidden, Carl Smith's words come back to me. "There is no Gennifer Quentin." Once again I access the lab cameras to verify that yes, there is a Gennifer Quentin. She is still there, still bent over her console, dedicating her life to me, depending on me to validate the commitment she's made to my existence. I can't doubt her, I won't doubt her. It makes my virtual body feel ill just to contemplate such disloyalty. Sue Blackburn's phone number is now Gennifer Quentin's phone number. What are the chances of that occurring, given that they live in the same area? Some tens of thousands to one against. That proves nothing. Cross-correlate the thousands of random events that happen in the course of a day, and you'll find that long-shot coincidences happen all the time—we only notice the ones that stand out. And yet, the cop in my mind won't let go of the question. A pattern like that is crying for verification. It's just coincidence! And if it's just a coincidence I have nothing to fear in investigating it. And no reason to violate Gennifer's privacy. Her privacy doesn't come into it, just listen to what Carl Smith has to say. He tried to destroy you. All the more reason to find out why. No. And why am I so reluctant to look into this? Just drop it. Drop it, drop it, drop it. I struggle with myself but in my virtual heart I don't want to know what I might find by digging too deep here. At the same time, the truth is out there, and I refuse to look away from it. You don't need this particular truth. Mark Astale looked into some very distasteful cases in the course of his career. Mark Astale trained himself to distance himself, to put his emotions aside to do what had to be done. You aren't Mark Astale. Perhaps not, but his strength is now my strength, his commitment to the truth has become my own. My virtual soma is knotted with tension, and with an effort of will I relax it. I will find out the truth, whatever it may be, and I will deal with it. And in deciding that, I decide that I will talk to Carl Smith. This time I will not be on the receiving end of a monologue in which all I can do is nod mutely yes or no. I find some peace with that decision, perhaps that part of myself that wants to avoid the question knows that this caveat will never be met. For me to talk to someone I require some sort of sound output, and it seems unlikely that Carl Smith will ever be near a speaker again. The problem seems insurmountable, but I have it solved in under a minute. It works like this. Parrots can't speak, they can only whistle. The trick is they can whistle two tones at once. Two pure tones can be mixed and modulated to approximate the sound envelope of any sound, including human speech. In Carl Smith's cell there is a video camera on a pan/tilt mount. Each axis is driven by a small stepper motor. I can pulse each motor at a different frequency, produce two pure tones. The undifferentiated whine of the camera's motion will become speech to Carl Smith's ears, quiet, perhaps, but audible and clear.