Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (12 page)

Twelve Seconds

E
ddie and I process memory siphons. I clean and sort. Eddie approves for archival. We are cogs, endlessly pinching, prodding, and polishing homicide victims' last memories on aging holodesks in a dark room. My desk lines up against a wall, so I don't see people's faces when they walk in the door. While the computer renders the siphons, I like to stare at the tranquil beige ceiling paint, or trace the perfect symmetry of police station floor tiles.

I busy my hands by sharpening individual frames and tracing potential patterns. Most of the files can't be used as evidence because the images can't be sharpened and no useful patterns emerge.

I clean up what I can, tag and sequence the patterns, boost the contrast. Sometimes I find a clear pattern, like a face. Old man like me catching the bad guy—makes me feel important.

The next-case icon cube floats above my desk and blinks red, luring me like a siren's song. “Stop blinking, stop blinking, stop blinking,” I say under my breath so Eddie doesn't hear me.

I grab the case icon on the holodesk, hold it gently in my hand, and unfold it into the first frame of the siphon. It's a soft image of what looks like a living room. There is a sofa and a chair at odd angles that make me uncomfortable. It shows a chair on the floor and a cushion is missing. I pull the metadata from the dock. It reads: SIPHON
25
-AF
87
(SERA TURNER).

I render the first pass of the raw siphon and it finishes too quickly. Something's wrong. I run it again. Nine seconds. The siphon is only nine seconds and there's no halo at the end. Victims' siphons need to be twelve seconds and end with a halo.

I flap my hands to shake off the tingle fluttering in my stomach. I hum to calm my rocking so Eddie won't make me wear the goggles. The goggles help calm people with issues like me, but they make my eyes itch and give me a headache.

Eddie pauses the siphon he's reviewing. A render of a pit bull poised for attack flickers over his holodesk. The dog's face overlaps Eddie's—same fierce grimace, bulky muscle, haunting eyes. He gives me his cop stare before he notices I'm not wearing the goggles.

Eddie sighs, calls the main office. “It's me, Eddie. Yeah, Howard's freaking again.” He shifts in his chair and dismisses the pit bull render with a wave of his free hand. “No. I got it.” He hangs up the phone, but before he looks at me, he massages his jaw with his fists. I told him yesterday that he should wear the goggles and learn about emotions like I did. He laughed, but it wasn't a joke. He's been a jerk since his wife died. He hates it when I say that to him, but it's true.

“I don't need the goggles,” I say.

“Howard, we've talked about this—”

“No. Look at the siphon. Look.” Sera Turner's living room flickers to life between us. A curtain moves in a subtle flutter and I resist the urge to tag the pattern. Eddie backs up because I forgot he doesn't like the renders to play so close to him.

He shakes his head—which usually means he doesn't see what I see. “The siphons
can
be less than twelve seconds,” he says. “It depends on how much adrenaline was released. The coroner can't always siphon a complete memory.”

“But the halo?” I say. There's always,
always
a halo. The renders are choppy, sometimes blurry or dark. But when they end, they go black and a halo forms like a smoke ring.

Doctor Ennis thinks that the halo comes from a retina burn or neural entropy after death has started. Father Solomon says it's the spiritual doorway to heaven. I like the heaven theory, and so do seventy-six percent of people surveyed in the Vatican instapoll on siphons.

Eddie thinks with his thumb and finger between his eyes. He says I give him a headache when I talk about statistics, so I don't remind him about the poll.

The door buzzes, clicks open, and Eddie reaches for his gun. Only it isn't on his hip. It's in Sergeant Quinten's office with Eddie's badge.

The clatter of opening shades startles me. I crouch, covering my eyes from the blinding light that streams through the window. Eddie opens it and the room floods with high-pitched electric engines, flashing ads, and vibrating beat street music. The December New York air cuts to my bones.

I turn away from the overpowering sensory information from outside. Focused on my render, I trace more patterns.

“Howard? Did you hear me?”

A woman appears beyond my holodesk. A heart shaped face, green eyes, and symmetrical features—until she frowns—one corner of her mouth is lower than the other. It looks wrong. If I had to trace her render, her smile would be a hard pattern to trace. It's Ava from upstairs. I'm surprised that she's here, and then remember she was the one who walked through the door. She and Eddie were talking while I worked with the render.

A strand of black hair is loose around Ava's face. It bothers me to see it out of place.

I look away so I don't have to see the hair while I motion to her head. “Hair, your hair. Place. No halo.” I bang my head against my hand to get the words unstuck. It doesn't work. I need the goggles.

“Howard?” She touches my cheek and this brings me back to the room.

Ava will listen to me. “The Turner halo is missing. Only nine seconds.”

Siphons must be twelve seconds unless the coroner notes the cause of a shorter visual. And there is always,
always
a halo.

“I tried to explain to him…” Eddie says under his breath.

“Shh.” Ava wrinkles her forehead. “Show me.”

I project the render between us. She doesn't say anything so I replay it again and again. They have to see what I see. I slow it down. It's out of place; the render is like two mislaid puzzle pieces smashed together. I open my mouth to explain but Eddie finally sees it.

“The movie in the background. I saw it last year…” He cuts off. He was about to say he saw it with his wife. I've heard the catch in his voice when he talks about
her
. We wait for him to continue while the air filter click, click, clicks and the fan fills the silence.

“The fight scene is out of order,” Ava says.

Eddie scrapes his hand across his stubble, his eyes glassy. “The victim was watching the movie when she was shot in the chest. She had to have seen or heard something to get a shot of adrenaline for such a clear siphon.”

Ava walks up to the paused render, squats down to the victim's eye level. “Run it again.”

I keep running it until she tells me to stop.

Eddie plucks the render from our viewing station; it copies—leaving mine for Ava to review. He reorients his render, turning it in a three-sixty loop. “There's a skip in the render. I don't think they got the full siphon. Can you get the case file?”

Ava shrugs. “I'll recheck the source siphon. It could just be that the extraction was flawed; some are shorter. It's rare, but some are longer—” She stops herself before she says the next words.

I remember the longer siphon she's talking about and Eddie clenches his teeth because he knows too. It was his wife. More adrenaline, more fear, more terror creates a clearer, longer siphon.

Ava backs out of the room without looking at Eddie. She glances at me, her mouth turned down in a frown, the edges quivering. I think about his wife's sixty-second siphon and watch him out of the corner of my eye. I start to hum and Eddie doesn't stop me; he sits in his chair watching the render spin.

I reach for the goggles.

T
he goggles give me a mild headache for the first few hours. Through the goggles the room shrinks, colors dim, sounds diminish. Each pair is custom designed to make the world bearable for people like me.

I reexamine the render, and if I hadn't already known what to look for I would have missed the skip. I work on the peripheral vision until my goggles remind me that it's time for a break.

In the break room, Ava smiles and scoots the tea canister to me. I examine my cup for dust; measure exactly two teaspoons of honey.

“How's the problem siphon coming along?” she asks.

Marty Jenkins is looming nearby, one hand wrapped around a coffee mug and the other possessively placed on the wall above Ava's shoulder. “What siphon?” he asks, and he takes a sip from his drink. He doesn't look at me; he only looks at Ava.

“Howard found a siphon without a halo at the end.”

Marty snorts. “Maybe that one went to hell.” He chuckles, but it's not funny. What's funny about people going to hell?

I ignore the goggles' retinal display analyzing Marty's body language, his facial expression, and explaining his response. “Sixty-two percent of people surveyed in the greater New York area believe in the Christian-based heaven you're referring to. That leaves exactly thirty-eight percent. Following your logic, we should be seeing thirty-eight percent of siphons without a halo.”

My goggles alert me to my social mistake. Marty's lips flatten and his jaw flexes, and then protrudes. My goggles interpret the information for me: I've angered my co-worker. Heat pricks my cheeks. Before the goggles, I hadn't known shame.

I look down and notice a stain on the carpet; there could be billions of germs in the room. “The carpet is dirty; someone should make a call to cleaning.” My eyes stay on the stain, but I see Ava's shoulders lower and the goggles tell me she is disappointed. My heart dips into my stomach, bobbing and flopping like a fish struggling at the end of a hook.

My goggles instruct me to apologize, but Marty steps forward. He's taller than me by four point seven inches.

Ava clears her throat. “You didn't account for the fact that all the siphons we get in this department are homicides. So a larger majority will be involved in shady business, more chances of going to hell.”

Marty pokes his finger into my shoulder. “Yeah.”

He snakes his arm around Ava's waist and she moves out of his way before they touch. He shuffles around awkwardly before leaving the room.

Ava sips her coffee, careful not to make eye contact. “Howard, have you ever considered looking into something more than the SAT goggles? To help you?”

I stir my tea, the steam escaping. “I've tried some things…” My parents took me to all the appropriate therapies—until the SAT goggles. Sensory Augmentation Technology works better than therapy and surgery. Surgery has a forty-seven percent chance of complications.

“I wear the SAT contacts for post-traumatic stress disorder. But I've been looking into something more…permanent.” She lowers her voice. “The contacts don't help with the nightmares. Dr. Ennis and his partner, Dr. Reg, are working on a new therapy, but it hasn't been approved.”

Dr. Ennis is the head of the Mind Transfer Project. His research led to the last-memory siphon technology. The coroner reanimates the visual cortex with a solution that tracks the last twelve seconds of blood flow. They're working on ways to extend the siphons.

But Ava is not telling me about mind transfer or siphons. She's talking about something else.

I sip my tea. My finger strokes the warm circle my cup left behind. “I feel like two different people.”

“It's the same for me. The war ruined a part of me. I feel like I'm not really Ava anymore.”

“You seem like Ava to me.”

She waves off my comment. “I've got an appointment with Dr. Ennis and Dr. Reg tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes.”

“Okay,” I say and grip my teacup harder.

She scoots closer to me. “Maybe I could ask about the procedure for you? Imagine not having to wear the goggles.”

I lean away from her and sip my tea. Sip again. And again.

A new procedure means no safety statistics. No available statistics doesn't mean it's safe. My heart thumps against my rib cage each beat tripping over the last.

Ava empties her cup in the sink. “I'll get you a brochure. I know how you like to have all the information before you make a decision.”

I nod as I inch away to sneak back to the archive room. I can't stop thinking about the missing-halo siphon. Eddie is gone for the day, even though he still has thirty minutes on his shift.

I run a search of all US archives, looking for other siphons without halos. I come up with three. The one I found this morning, and two more in Chicago. My requests instantly return metadata. The other two siphons are shorter too: eight seconds and eleven seconds. I download and play the renders, but don't see anything out of the ordinary. It's hard to see patterns with the goggles. Later tonight, when I take the goggles off, I'll watch them again.

As I leave for the day, Mary from Accounting blows me a kiss. She usually does this when I wear the goggles. Ava claims Mary likes me and I pause to contemplate asking for a date. I vow to heed the social feature's suggestions this time.

She asks me about my day and I tell her it was normal. I don't mention the absent halo problem. I definitely don't mention my run-in with Marty. When I ask her if she wants to grab coffee tomorrow, I'm rewarded with a yes.

I walk with a little more confidence to the maglev station headed for Chicago. Home can wait. The itch isn't so bad after several hours and the headache is finally starting to ebb.

If I wore the goggles more often, I could make more friends. Maybe people would forget I'm that “autistic guy” who works in Digital Forensics. Maybe I could be Howie instead of Howard. Howard sounds like an awkward, short, balding old man. Howie has dates on the weekend, friends who meet him at the bar after work. Howie solves cases.

I
stand on the maglev platform and wait for the train to Chicago. The icy air cuts deep into my face and neck. I pull the collar over my ears to cut the chill, but the stubborn New York wind is unrelenting, like thousands of tiny bugs biting at my skin.

The scent advertisements at the station attempt to sell me hot dogs and roasted chestnuts. They compete for my olfactory attention along with hundreds of other smells that make the acid in my stomach churn. I use the corner of my coat to cover my nose.