Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) (2 page)

“Let me guess, they all have to be done by end of shift,” she said. Months could go by between password sessions, then suddenly dozens of machines would need to be opened and cleared as quickly as possible. Rachel suspected dickery.

“Actually, no,” he said, getting up to refill his soda. “I asked. We’ve got until Thursday.”

Rampant dickery, then. Someone was setting them up for failure, and at end of shift today they’d catch hell for not getting their work done.

Across the restaurant, Zockinski and his pack were huddled together, food forgotten. Rachel killed time by watching their colors pop and shift; their cores were consistent, but their surface hues were moving towards alignment. Someone, and it looked like Zockinski from the invading autumn orange, was making a persuasive argument.

Most Agents used their implants to interface with technology, but Rachel couldn’t care less about that particular ability. Outside of the office, she talked to tech so rarely that she wouldn’t give it a second thought if she woke up one morning and machines had gone back to being inert lumps of plastic which chittered and binged. She wouldn’t have traded the implant for anything, though. An unexpected side effect of connecting the implant to the audio and visual centers of the brain was the capacity to perceive an almost countless number of frequencies. Information from both force and matter was turned into a sixth sense which wrapped around and through objects, letting her know their qualities more clearly than her eyes ever could. Form, location, even texture and sound, all of these stood out in her mind, allowing her to move through an environment so rich and vivid that she had tried to describe it only once, and badly.

Rachel wasn’t sure what she perceived in other people, be it body temperature or energy emissions or the magical residue of unicorn kisses, but whatever it was translated into color. The space a person occupied in her consciousness was defined by a signature hue, overlayered by an ever-changing rainbow which reflected their mood. This rainbow was hard to read (Why would someone flash pink, brown, and green? What did it mean when these colors aligned to match? Did it matter if they clicked into alignment quickly, or if they swirled around in a mess like a child stirring fingerpaints?), but she was getting better at it. 

It fascinated her sometimes, those traditional relationships linking mood and color. She wondered whether she perceived someone as blue when they were calm because that was how they appeared to her expanded senses, or whether her mind interpreted something otherwise unknowable as blue because she had been conditioned to think of it as a calming color. Rachel would have loved to stick the implant in her grandmother’s head, a woman who kept to the old Chinese tradition of white as the color of death. Would she and
lăo lao
see white at the same time, or would Rachel see black where her grandmother saw white? She had no one to talk to about these things: honestly, she was usually frustrated as much as fascinated.

“You’re staring,” Santino said as he dropped back into
the booth.

She snickered. “Not exactly.” 

He dropped his voice to just above a whisper. “You’re listening in?”

“No. You’d be surprised at how fast the fun of hearing what other people really think about you wears off.”

They stood to leave, gathering up their cellophane carnage, when Zockinski and his partner came at them. 

“Ah crap. Round two, fight.” Santino said. “You better get out of here. They won’t bluff off this time.”

“Hang on,” she said, seeing some blues and greens among the orange. “Let’s see what they want.”

Jacob Zockinski was a homicide detective and Rachel supposed he fit the part. He wore off-the-rack for plainclothes and was in fair shape. Her frame of reference was different on such things, but she assumed he was decently attractive for a man some years her senior. Matt Hill, his partner, had that rare basketball player’s build of tall, whip-thin, and sturdily muscled. He also had the loudest body language of anyone Rachel had ever met. With his height, he might as well have paid for his opinions to be displayed on a billboard. He was there (arms crossed, torso slightly turned towards the door, and standing several steps behind Zockinski) for no other reason than to show support for his partner.

“We’d like your advice,” Zockinski said. His hands were deep in his pockets and he appeared casual, but he was flickering that same sickish purple-gray. 

“I really don’t think you do,” Rachel said. 

“We have a tech problem,” Zockinski spoke over her. 

“Somebody should have shown up on film, but didn’t. Think she can help us out?” Hill spoke to Santino. 

“Work a case with you?” Rachel laughed. “No thanks.”

“Look at a tape
for
us. That’s what you do,” Hill said, glaring at an invisible spot several feet above her head.

“Yup, that’s what your tax dollars buy, me sitting on my butt, watching TV. Go find yourself a housewife who kills her afternoons with her soaps. I’m sure there’s one or two of them left.”

“This would be a big favor to us,” Zockinski said through gritted teeth.

“You know what’s hard to prove, Raul?” Rachel asked her partner. 

“Where to draw the line between harassment and teasing?”

“Indeed! Wafer-thin, especially between colleagues.”

“And it’s not like someone who hates you would offer to work with you.” 

“So true. It seems I must be a fragile, overly sensitive woman who can’t take a joke.”

“I’ve always thought so.”

“I liked her better when she didn’t talk,” Zockinski said to Santino.

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Rachel said, maneuvering around Hill to dump her trash. “Tell you what, gentlemen, spread the word to leave me alone and all’s forgiven.”

Hill stepped away, almost dancing sideways to keep her from touching him. “Just come with us. Fifteen minutes.”

Rachel leaned towards Santino and stage-whispered: “What do you think? Are we about to be left for dead in a ditch?”

“Nah, but this is a beautiful opportunity. It’s not often you get to see an ass-covering unfold,” Santino said. He spread his hands, fingers fanning open. “It’s like taking the time to watch a flower bloom.”

“Almost poetic.”

“Quite.”

Hill left, utterly done with them. Zockinski, who had invested more of himself in this battle, waited for Rachel to buy her daily cookie and walked back to First District Station with them. Near them. Anyone driving by would have assumed, correctly, they just happened to be traveling in the same direction.

They ended up in a small conference room with a video setup. Hill was waiting with arms crossed, leaning against the painted cinderblock in the far corner. 

“This gets a little…” Zockinski paused as he searched for the right word. “Dark.”

Santino pulled a chair in front of the monitor. “We assumed. You guys work homicide.”

“Yeah,” Hill said. “It’s almost always boyfriend, husband, ex-husband, or junkie, but this one is bad.”

Zockinski went through his pockets and came out with a mechanical pencil. “We weren’t kidding when we said we couldn’t find someone who should have been on this tape. Okay, so…

He roughed out a diagram on the tabletop. His scratchy gray lines barely stood out against the utilitarian metal. “The bank should have gotten this on three different cameras. There’s the usual one inside of the ATM,” he said, circling the reference point. “There’s one inside the vestibule hallway.” Another circle. “And the last one is outside of the building and is pointed at the door.” One final circle, off to the side and up.

“It’s an old bank, so the vestibule used to be a storage area or something,” Hill said. He still kept himself as far away from Rachel as possible but as he spoke, Zockinski drew lines with his finger across the diagram. “It’s at the end of a little hallway. There’s a window to the street in the hall, but there’re none in the room itself. The camera in the vestibule points at the hall, so anyone coming or going? They’re caught.

“This is the ATM footage,” Hill continued, pointing at the television in the conference room. “It’s the angle with the cleanest version of the attack. You can see a glove and part of his mask before he drops back off-screen, but that’s all we ever see of him.”

Hill picked up the remote and the monitor woke up. A small room with pale walls, pens and deposit slips on a tall slab desk off to the side, a heavily-patterned area rug in the hall to soak up rainy-day liquids. The film quality was excellent. Digital storage was so cheap that security footage had transitioned from still images taken every three seconds to a continuous stream filmed in high resolution.

“Black and white?” Rachel asked. Security systems had evolved ages ago, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a monochrome version. This setup was designed for low light scenarios and whoever had purchased it was either cheap or careless, since almost all bank robberies took place during the day. 

“Some banks still use it,” Hill said, and shrugged. He didn’t know why, either. Cops worked with what they were given.

The camera was pointed towards the door. A woman in her late twenties entered the vestibule. She was smiling.

“She looks happy,” Santino said.

“She was about to finish paying off ninety grand in loans. She was checking her balance to make sure the payment would go through.”

“Oh man. Breaks the heart.”

Maria Griffin came towards the camera. Great skin, longish curling hair, some freckles. Certainly not a beauty but still pretty by way of youth and attitude. Nothing about her posture communicated she was aware of another person in the room. Rachel wished she could have read Griffin’s mood (if, for no other reason, to see what color was associated with conquering a mountain of debt), but even if it hadn’t been in black and white, emotions weren’t captured on film. 

Then the arm went around her throat, with a fast glimpse of the killer’s gloves and his lower jaw under a ski mask. The edge of a knife appeared and Griffin fell towards the camera, holding her throat. Griffin vanished, followed by a cascade of hair and, at the end, one delicate hand low on the marble wall. The hand slid down, leaving a slow wake of black blood against the white marble.

Hill hit pause and the screen froze. It said something about Zockinski and Hill, how they must have seen this tape a couple dozen times but didn’t play it down with humor. 

“The camera in the hall got this from the knees down,” Hill said. “She’s alone, and then there’s another set of feet, and then you can see her on the ground but she’s alone again.”

Santino exhaled heavily. “So what can we help you with?”

“Can the cyborg tell anything from the video?”

“The cyborg can tell a woman was murdered,” Rachel snapped. Santino flashed an irritated red and Rachel sat on her temper. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“It’s just…” Zockinski hesitated, “the room’s empty. We have two clear shots of the door, and everyone who used the ATM before her is accounted for. She’s the only person there, and nobody followed her in. This guy came out of nowhere. She might as well have been killed by a ghost.”

“Is there one of those little access doors for service?” Santino asked, leaning towards the monitor. He was a lifelong fan of the locked room murder mystery, but the reality of that handprint scrubbed the romance from it. “Some of those cover a space big enough to hide a person.”

Zockinski shook his head. “It’s a newer machine. The entire face pops open. Insurance companies want banks to get rid of the ones with service doors because of, well…” He pointed at the monitor, the smeared handprint.

“And there’s no line-of-sight into the room itself?”

“Nope.”

Rachel thought aloud. “Business district… There’s probably dozens of cameras on that street, right?”

Hill nodded. “We got them in the canvas. They all show Griffin going into the bank, and then nothing until she’s found, fourteen minutes later. We went back three hours and everyone going in, went out. We even asked the maintenance guy who restocked the machine around noon, and he said the room was empty when he left.”

“There’s probably a few other cameras on the street you don’t know about, private ones. Nanny cams, mostly, maybe some security systems that wouldn’t show up in your records. I’ll have to be at the bank to find them.”

“Can’t you do that from here?” Zockinski asked. Rachel didn’t have to check his mood to tell he wanted to kick them to the curb.

“It is just so cute how you people think we’re omniscient,” Rachel said. 

THREE

When they had first been paired as partners, Rachel and Santino had seen no other option than to go out and get completely hammered on straight whiskey. Rum, they agreed, was too popular to be interesting, tequila suffered from delusions of grandeur, and vodka had lost its hearty Russian heritage to peer pressure from vanilla and fruit. But whiskey, good old-fashioned whiskey, still had roots running deep in Tennessee and remembered its sole purpose was to help make awkward social situations bearable.

As it happened, they had more in common than whiskey. Professionally, they couldn’t have been more different but they clicked on the important things (him: “Sophia Loren in
Houseboat.
” her: “Yes, yes, a million times yes!”). They lurched from bar to bar, finally coming to rest on the front stoop of a local bookstore with a handful of Georgetown students. The students were elated to hear she was with OACET, and they traded her opinions on how cyborgs fit into the U.S. Justice System for bottles of warm beer.