Transhuman (8 page)

I went back to looking at faces, comparing them, weighing their circumstances, considering where the system had seen them before. I found none suspicious enough to warrant follow-up, though a few earned the second glance that I had given Mitch Cohan. And then, with the predictable punctuality of a commuter train, I got a high-priority alert from a camera at the Lake L station. I switched to it and saw my quarry, walking briskly to transfer to the Blue Line. I immediately sent a message to the CPD

dispatcher, throwing up a split screen of Mitch Cohan's particulars, and the video from the station camera. My communication with the dispatcher is strictly one-way, I'm too big a secret for it to be otherwise, but I've found a way around that. I switch to a security camera in the dispatch center, pan and zoom it to the workstation that my message has arrived at. I watched while the dispatcher's eyes flicked over it, then pressed the button on her microphone. I can't read lips, but there is software that can, a very useful tool in a world where there are far more cameras than microphones. I watched her make the initial call to the foot patrols in the area, then let the software read me what she was saying while I switched my own video awareness back to the station. A pair of beat cops came in almost immediately, moving quickly, their eyes alert. They must've been close.

The dispatcher had called up the same cameras I was watching, and I heard her directing the cops onto their quarry. Cohan was standing on the platform for the northbound Blue train, unaware of how close he was to capture. The cops began to make their way down the crowded platform, and then the train slid into the station. The cops began to run, but the train doors slid open, spilling a herd of commuters into their path. Cohan boarded, the doors slid shut, and the train left, leaving the frustrated police standing trackside. I registered frustration myself, but the game wasn't over yet. One possibility was to dispatch officers to get on at the next station and arrest him on the train, but that would be a very obtrusive operation for the other passengers, and I had learned in my years on the force that this sort of thing is better kept out of the public eye. A wiser choice would be to take him on the platform or, better still on the street outside. That would require sending cops to all sixteen northbound Blue Line stations, and I also knew no sensible dispatcher would divert a platoon's worth of cops across several divisions when a single unit would do the job. Perhaps I shouldn't have cared, neither the department's public image nor the efficient use of its resources were my problem anymore. I cared anyway—I wore the badge with pride when I was alive, and in my heart I still wear it. The Blue Line went to O'Hare and I was certain that's where Mitch Cohan was going, on his way back out of the country again. We would intercept him there. I flashed a message up on the dispatcher's screen suggesting exactly that. My role within the police department is purely advisory, but the dispatchers have learned they should take my advice. Once I spot a runner, I never fail to bring him in. O'Hare airport L Terminus, thirty-seven minutes and 170,000 frames later. The train slides into the station. I watch through the cameras impatiently as the passengers disembark, and then a highlight appears over a face. Mitch Cohan. I follow him down the terminus, giving the dispatcher a text-line play-by-play of his movements. A pair of cops are waiting at the exit, eyes scanning the crowd, and I can tell by their expressions that they're listening to the dispatcher narrate my words. Cohan walks between them, to give him credit he doesn't miss a beat, shows no hesitation, no suspicion, nothing that might give him away if he had not already been given away. The cops fall in on either side, a firm hand on an elbow, the official words spilling out. There's no audio, but I don't need lip reading software to hear them in my mind. "Mitch Cohan, you are under arrest for the murder of citizen D'arcy Fullbright. You have the right . . ."

The cops take him out through a side door, and I switch cameras to follow their progress to the waiting cruiser. A second pair of cops leaves the station, the backup team in case Cohan ran. Another fugitive brought to justice, quietly, efficiently, and inevitably. I am the arm of the law, and my reach is long indeed. I return my awareness to the lab. "We have him, Gennifer."

"Mitch Cohan?"

"Yes."

"Good. Well done. Anything unusual?"

"Nothing. I could be more effective if I could send and receive on police voice channels." She nods, not looking up as she scans her console. "Once we've got a little more success on our side we can make a public announcement and get you some communication."

I nod, which tilts the lab cameras up and down. I've mentioned this before. I began this experiment in a digital recreation of a human body, and to me it seemed as though I had my limbs and my five senses, strangely isolated from the real world. As we have progressed, Gennifer has steadily extended my capabilities. The ability to see through cameras as though they were my eyes, the ability to read databases and network documents directly, the ability to route my inputs through filters, like the camera's face recognizers or the software lip reader, all these are new. As more and more processors have been added to my network, my thought processes have speeded up. The ability to listen to radio transmissions wouldn't be hard to add. I began the experiment feeling less than human, but I now have capabilities that no mere flesh and blood mortal could imagine. Does that make me more than human? I go back to the flow of images, alternating them with snapshots from the lab camera in case she has more to say when she's done reading.

Finally she looks up. "I've got a new data stream for you, while we get approval for police channels." I pause the flow of images, and give her my full attention.

"We have a new project coming in, from the federal government this time." Gennifer was smiling, she'd obviously just gotten the message. "If we can make this work, it will be a major funding stream."

"That's good news." One of the realities of being an experiment is that my existence is dependent on academic funding. Mark Astale is legally dead, and the university is under no obligation to keep his ghost alive. The university administration insisted on that legal technicality; they had no wish to be saddled with supporting me in perpetuity should the experiment fail but my mind live on in their systems. If I fail to earn my keep, if there is a problem, if Gennifer's program is canceled, the expensive network will be switched off, the processors distributed for other tasks, the lab itself converted to a new use—and Mark Astale will die his final death.

"What's the project?" My voice sounds like me. It took Gennifer a long time to tweak the acoustic models to a point where I'm comfortable hearing myself speak.

"You're going to be given real-time satellite access. The birds have two-centimeter resolution. You'll be able to identify individuals from space, anywhere in the world."

"That sounds like a fairly broad expansion of my area of responsibility." I chose the words carefully.

"For now you'll still be looking for fugitives in Chicago. I'm sure the funding agency has a wider purpose in mind."

"Who is the funding agency, just out of interest?"

Gennifer pursed her lips, looking pensive. "It's classified." I nodded my cameras. It wasn't surprising. There are thousands of satellites looking down on earth: crop watchers, wave scanners, ship trackers. Their eyes are configured in hundreds of different ways, covering dozens of wavelengths. Only a handful have two centimeter resolution, all military surveillance satellites. Uncle Sam wanted me. Specifically, he wanted me to keep an eye on his enemies.

"When do I start?"

"I have the hooks for the data stream here. As fancy as they are, they're still just cameras. You shouldn't have any trouble seeing through them. The controls are a little more exotic than you're used to; I'll build the interface today."

"I'm sure it will be interesting." I was going to start making the transition from cop to spy. There are moral and ethical questions attached to that, but I have no interest in them. To continue to live I have to be useful, and I very much want to continue to live.

While Gennifer worked on the interface modules I spent the rest of the day fruitlessly following up on hot flags from various overeager cameras. As the number of real fugitives inexorably decreases under the pressure of relentless surveillance, the percentage of false positives inevitably rises. Mathematically, this effect is described by Bayes Theorem, physically by the theory of the Receiver Operation Characteristic Curve. In my old incarnation I would have had no interest in such abstractions. Now, able to think faster and better, gifted with instant and effortless access to unending libraries of digitally stored information, I devote the quiet hours of the night to learning. As a beat cop, and later as a detective, I had relied upon my instincts to guide me through the mean streets. The best cops have an almost mystical ability to thread their way through the murky fog of deceit and violence that fills their workaday world. My own instincts had been good, very good, but I now understood that they were merely an unconscious realization of the mathematical forces that drove the pulse of the city. Crime spikes where urban geography pushes victim and criminal together in high concentration. Crime spikes where motive and opportunity collide. These things can be modeled statistically, and the results applied in detail to the real world. Demographics and economics, politics and weather, time and place all have their places in the equation. My job is to hunt fugitives and I confine myself to that, but ask me, on any given downtown Saturday night, where it is the fights will be, where the deals will be done, and I can tell you. Ask me in the morning where the bodies will be found, and I can tell you that, too. The time will come when I will deal with those problems as well.

Evening comes, darkness falls, and Gennifer bids me good night and goes home. Gennifer. How could I not love her? With Allison I could only see the past, with Gennifer I can only see the future. Gennifer, the youngest person to make full professor at Loyola by over a decade. Gennifer, heartbreakingly beautiful, her attractiveness only enhanced by the fact she seems unaware of it. Gennifer, who gave me life after death. She loves me too. How could she not? She created me, a labor of love nine years in the making. She has no husband, no stable relationship beyond her cats, no casual relations that might distract her from her work. The men in her department find her cold, but I know that she is simply dedicated, unwilling to invite those who might be interested in her to waste her time with their approaches. Camera hits surge from the downtown core as the city's nightlife kicks into gear. The night is always a harder environment for the cameras, and more of my image hits are unusable, too blurred to allow a positive identification, though the full moon helps. The full moon also brings out the stranger side of human nature, and CPD has its hands full. Sirens rise a few times around the campus, and downtown is a zoo. The night wears on, and closing time sends the club crowd into the streets for one last chance to get themselves in trouble. Eventually the partyers get tired and go home, leaving the darkness to sleepy-eyed shift workers, and to me. The flow of images slows to a trickle, and I have time at last to myself. I use it to experiment with my new satellite cameras. The imaging interface works exactly as I expected it to, but aiming at a target from space takes practice. There's a couple of seconds of delay between the time I ask a satellite to look at something and the time it actually responds, and then another second before the imagery makes it back to me. I'm not used to signal delay that long and the first few times I over-control. The interface includes a readout for the amount of maneuvering fuel left in the high-flying birds, and they wince at how much I waste in learning how to use the system. It would have been cheaper to let me get up to speed using a simulator first, but Gennifer's new patron isn't concerned with expense. The images move as the satellites slide across the sky, each one is over Chicago just twenty minutes at a time, so I have to keep switching from bird to bird. I find I can't access them when they aren't above the continental USA. Other agencies have priority on targeting them then, more important things to look for than fleeing criminals in the homeland. If I'm successful in using them over Chicago, I'll be given eyes around the world. Eventually I'm comfortable enough with my new vision channels that I can see what I want to see, when I want to see it.

And now, with a godlike perspective on the planet below, and the city's cameras staring into the predawn quiet, my questions return. Was I ever Mark Astale? If I was, am I still? Do all these enhancements make me somehow more than human? Perhaps they do. Gennifer would say so, but I'm not so sure. Humanity is not defined by the reach of our senses or the speed of our thought. Humanity comes from something deeper, and far more subtle. Federal law requires that the doctors record the interview when they ask grieving kin to make the life support decision. It's meant to ensure that undue pressure is never brought against people in their moment of infinite vulnerability. I've seen the interview where Gennifer explained to my Ally that I had no hope. My body was so damaged that, even if I were saved, I would spend the rest of my life dependent on machines. My Ally knew the choice to make, the right choice, the only choice for a man like me. She asked only to be with me, to be the one to turn the switches off herself. I saw in her face there the resolve to do this one last thing for me, this final act of love and devotion. Looking at her face at that moment I can feel her hand on mine, as she would hold it in my final moments, feel her kiss me one last time, softly, tenderly the way only she could. I can hear her whispered words in my ear, the things she would say that held meaning only for the two of us. Had I died at that moment I would have died as a man who was loved by a woman, who loved her in turn. I would have died a hero, a cop killed in the line of duty. I would have died human. It didn't happen, not quite that way. The law requires the organ donation decision be videorecorded as well. Having asked her to consent to my death, Gennifer went on to ask Ally to consent to my life, told her that I might, in a fashion, live on without a body. I saw the hope enter my wife's tearstained eyes, heard her ask the necessary questions, saw her expression change from amazement to awe as she realized the implications of what she was being told.