Authors: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
We did
, sent her contact.
We’ve run the search four times. Do you want us to use a fifth?
She squinted, tempted to bring the house lights up even farther than they already were. Instead, she used a combination of a heat sensor built into her visual security program and a map of the theater itself.
Two empty seats. One in the very far back left hand corner, and one square in the center of the room.
She sent images of those to the police using the facial recognition program.
Were there people in these seats earlier?
The affirmative came less than thirty seconds after she sent.
Check the restrooms, other theaters, back stage, and concessions
, she sent.
Someone knew we were coming
.
It’s illegal to use facial recognition in the restrooms
, sent the police.
I don’t care
, she sent.
We have a credible threat, and besides, I’m informed that the suspect is a clone. He’s not subject to the same rights as real humans. Run the scan. We’ll worry about the law later
.
She slipped out the door into the corridor between theaters. She kept her heat vision on, and flipped on a light night-vision program as well. That way she didn’t have to order the lights in the corridor to turn up. The doors to the other theaters were locked—or so the building’s environmental program told her.
Still, she saw the echo of a heat signature near the door of the children’s theater.
It was the smallest theater. It got its name not because children’s plays were performed there, but because Glenn Station’s school children used it for their own private performances, some run without any adult supervision at all.
Which meant that the theater itself had extra monitoring equipment plus high-level safety protocols, the kind that kids’ restaurants and playgrounds had.
Link me into the building’s protective systems
, she sent to her own network. Suddenly a flood of information flowed through her links. She shut it all down, focusing only on the Children’s Theater.
One small heat signature, fading slowly.
She didn’t like the fade.
Emergency medical programs on!
She sent into the building’s systems.
Lights went on along the Children’s Theater’s door, along with silent alarms. She heard the automated verbal command for an ambulance, as well as one for any medical personnel to attend the Children’s Theater. The Theater also informed her that the medical avatars had started work, but had no idea if they could save the patient because they “were not programmed for an emergency of this type.”
“Crap,” she said, and ordered the door to the Children’s Theater unlocked. She slipped inside, saw the floor had turned into something she called medical mush as the emergency programs turned on. The mush—a whitish foam kind of soft thing which she had never heard the name for — turned the entire theater into a kind of protective bubble, so that whomever was hurt would be stabilized while waiting for the emergency personnel to arrive.
The avatar floated above the center of the floor. The avatar surprised her. It was a busty cartoonish doctor with a classic beauty and a look of complete stupidity in its eyes.
This
was what the patient ordered? Or was this the standard avatar for the Children’s Theater?
Miyaki didn’t have time to guess. She strode through the mush to the middle of the floor, prepared to help.
But when she saw the patient, she stopped.
It was a man—and he might have been the man in the images that Chief DeRicci had sent her. But Miyaki couldn’t tell for sure. His face was dark gray, metal gray, his eyes closed, his posture rigid. He was sinking through the mush as if he was too heavy for it.
She knew the mush wouldn’t suffocate him—if, indeed, he was breathing at all.
But she also didn’t want to touch him.
She wasn’t sure if what happened to him was contagious.
If it was, she didn’t want to contract this horrible thing.
If she hadn’t already.
Lock down the entire area
, she sent.
We might have a pathogen
.
Nothing registers,
her second in command sent back to her.
We’d get some kind of reading
.
I’m none too trusting of technology right now
, she sent, deciding not to add that he wouldn’t trust technology either if he saw the man-thing she was looking at, and the avatar trying desperately to treat him.
Just do as I say
.
Yes, sir
, her second sent back.
She backed out of the theater, letting the door close behind her. She stopped in the corridor, her heart pounding.
She had seen a lot of things during her career. Memorable things. Horrible things. But this one was bad. It was the stuff of nightmares. She wouldn’t be able to sleep for weeks.
If she lived another few weeks.
She shoved off the thought and went to the front of the building to wait for the emergency squad. As she walked, she checked for other heat signatures.
Did you find anything?
she sent to the police scanners.
No, sir
, they sent.
The rest of the theater is empty
.
Or the occupants in the other parts of the building are already dead. But she didn’t send that either. She took a deep breath, wondered if the air was tainted, and then decided she didn’t care. She couldn’t do any more than she had already done.
She could only hope she would make it just a little bit longer.
Long enough to figure out what was going on, at any rate.
Long enough to figure out what, exactly, had gone wrong.
Thirty
Sixteen years on the force, and Isti Piaja had never been involved in an investigation like this one. Covering six square city blocks, dozens of businesses, hundreds of apartments, and he—like everyone else in the Armstrong Police Department—believed that they had already let their man get away.
Searching was make-work, but it was make-work they had to do.
Several squads got brought in on this case. Each squad got assigned a different area: interviewing witnesses, looking for escape routes, and the most important one—looking for the suspect.
Piaja lucked out: his squad was looking for the suspect. He hated interviewing witnesses, because the lead detective would always complain about the shoddy job the street cop did. The lead detective would see the witness after the witness had time to think about his story. The lead detective would actually know what questions to ask.
The street cop was just poking around in the dark, trying to find one useful piece of information in a lot of junk that always started with,
I dunno. I was just sitting there, and then everyone rushed forward, and I heard he was dead
…
Looking for escape routes was just as useless. They’d figure out the escape route when they caught the bad guy, not before. And the bad guy would have done something creative to get out, or someone on some squad really and truly was stupid, missing all the clues or just letting the bad guy walk past.
Searching for the suspect, though. Searching for the suspect was organized, and no one blamed you if you didn’t find him. Only one guy could find the suspect and that guy would get all the glory.
But if Piaja wanted glory, he wouldn’t have stayed on the street. He actually liked it here, talking to citizens, stopping petty crime, every day different. He used to think he had seen everything, and then he saw even more.
Now his job was mostly as referee. He had to deal with humans and aliens, people who belonged, people who didn’t, people who didn’t understand Earth Alliance laws, and people who didn’t want to. He understood all of it—he’d actually thought of becoming a lawyer once—but he didn’t have to do much more than the frontline work.
He wasn’t the guy who sent some kid off to pay for her mom’s crime because the idiot mother violated the law of some species that insisted on punishing the firstborn. He wasn’t the guy who had to explain to some refugee that he had to be sent back to his place of origin because of some new Earth Alliance treaty.
Piaja got to find these people, and then he got to pass them off to the various departments, and if he was really lucky, he never had to think of them again.
About two years into the work on his law degree, he realized his street job was the best of all worlds. If he got the law degree, those people really would haunt him, no matter what side of the law he decided to live on.
Piaja was working a grid set up by his squad leader. Each squad got a different section of the six-block radius. Some brilliant squad leader decided to expand the radius, so an additional block was added on either side, on the theory that the bad guy would sit just outside the radius and watch the bumbling cops try to find him.
But the crime scene lasers marked off an entire neighborhood—no one in or out—which the businesses were already complaining about. They worried about the business they were losing, instead of the business they’d gained because their customers were trapped inside.
Piaja was at the eastern edge of the crime scene, four blocks over and two blocks up. No one had come this far. He and his partner Julie Hu got this block to themselves. Twelve buildings, none smaller than eight stories, and all with various tenants, businesses and offices.
This part of the search radius was a bit more upscale than the other parts. The neighborhood was gentrifying. Buildings he remembered as rundown, now had new facades or clean walls or a fresh coat of paint. Expensive cars actually filled the parking lots, which had real attendants and some high-end security systems.
No high-end jewelry or clothing stores here however. Just mid-level restaurants, a few trendy bars, a dance club that was beginning to get some notice, and some mid-range offices for business that had just started branching out.
He and Julie stayed together because that was regulation on a suspect search. Too many cops got killed confronting someone. Better to have backup on hand—real live human back up, not some bot, not some emergency computer program.
Julie Hu didn’t look like much, but she was the toughest partner he’d ever had. She was tiny, barely reaching his shoulder, and probably weighed no more than a ten-year-old kid. She had dark hair and even darker eyes, a killer smile that she only used with the people she liked, and a wicked tongue.
She had taken martial arts training to an advanced level, and more often felled a suspect with her bare hands. She rarely used her weapon, and when she did, it was often under orders.
She was under orders today to use that weapon. No one was supposed to touch this guy. For all anyone knew every single part of him could kill them if they so much as brushed against him.
That was the only part of searching for the suspect that Piaja hated. The surprise factor. And these kinds of searches always had a surprise.
The store Piaja had just left was a store specializing in custom-made baby clothes. The clothes didn’t just fit the baby perfectly, they also acted like a tiny environmental suit, controlling his temperature, taking readouts of all of the bodily fluids, and even seeing if the kid was hungry. A few of the clothes could be tied into people’s links.
It was illegal to link up children before they were teenagers, so Piaja sent a note about the place to the net squad. They could see if these clothes were legal. He couldn’t do it. He was searching for a suspect.
But it was amazing the crap he was finding as he did so.
Julie stood outside the door, waiting for him. He had had to train himself to call her by her first name, but she insisted. There were dozens of Hus in the department, and she was the only Julie. Using the first name minimized confusion.
As he stepped beside her, she caught his arm. “The coffee shop’s empty,” she said softly.
He hadn’t even realized there was a coffee shop. Apparently it was the storefront in the next building he was supposed to investigate.
“So?” he said, just as softly.
“I’ve been here before,” she said. “There should be staff.”
Some coffee shops had only serving trays and automated drink preparation. Piaja moved just a little closer, saw the sign, and the advertising that flared through his links. This place advertised its personal touch. The ads claimed that coffee made by machine wasn’t the same as coffee made with human hands.
Human hands
. There were code and law violations all over this street. No one could limit employment in the City of Armstrong to humans only.
He made another note, then squinted. “Is it closed?”
She shook her head.