The Future Is Japanese (26 page)

“You can ask.” Suddenly a little of the old twinkle was back in those unequivocally green eyes.

“Is this the first time you’ve been the v—ah, on the receiving end of a criminal act?”

“Nice save.” She twinkled some more. He started to wonder if it was a special effect in her lenses. “And to answer your question, no, but it’s been a very,
very
long time since my last brush with the underworld. All I usually have to worry about are drive-bys and snipers. No matter how much ’proofing you’ve got, something always gets through.”

Goku frowned. “But this is a residential building.”

“But not a completely residential
area
. Lots of stores means lots of shopping and lots of shopping means lots of advertising—
active
advertising that lots of people engage with. There’s enough activity to reveal the local market segments. It’s
almost
spam but not quite.” Emmy Eto shrugged. “My filters update every other day. Whatever gets through, I trash without really seeing it.”

“Any ill effects—headaches, mood swings, increase in episodes of déjà-vu?”

Emmy Eto shook her head. “Get to be my age, you’re inured to a lot. It takes more to make an impression than when you’re thirty. Or even sixty.” She laughed suddenly. “Listen to me. What was I saying about ageism?”

Goku chuckled. “It’s not ageism to understand your own characteristics, is it?”

“I dunno, dude. Maybe. Stranger things have happened.”

The words echoed in his head, but in Konstantin’s voice.
Stranger things have happened. If I had a family crest, that would be on it. Stranger things have happened
—
they’ll carve it on my tombstone.

Emmy Eto was staring at him. “Is something wrong, Agent Mura?”

“My calendar’s just reminding me of an appointment.” He stared off to one side for a moment, hoping he looked like he’d just had a pop-up from his to-do list, then pretended to blink it away. “Now, where were we?”

“In the middle of your very busy day,” Emmy Eto said. “Sorry, I know I’m just one of a gazillion cases. Tell me what else you want to know, I’ll try not to ramble. More tea?” Without waiting for an answer, she took his cup into the tiny kitchenette, rinsed it out and brought it back with a fresh blossom in the bottom.

“You mentioned feeling sorry for Howitzer,” Goku prompted as she flipped the kettle’s on switch. “In what way?”

Emmy Eto laughed. “That name, for one thing. What kind of person could look at their newborn baby and think,
Pretty Howitzer
? Either her parents hated her or had a cruel sense of humor, or both.”

“You never thought it was a made-up name?”

“Sure, at first. But it isn’t.”

“You’re pretty—ah, very certain. What ID did she show you?”

Emmy Eto chuckled. “A card of origin, but even I know those can be stolen or forged. What convinced me was—” She took a pair of oversized sunglasses out of a case lying on the coffee table and put them on. “Goku Mura?”

Then she hooked a finger over the frames, pulling them down her nose to stare at him over the tops of the lenses. He kept his expression neutral.

“Well,
that’s
a surprise,” she said, her gaze even sharper than her tone. “I had no idea Interpol 3 allowed an agent to work under an assumed name.”

“More like a
nom de plume
, actually,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound sheepish. “Or
nom de guerre
might be more like it. For the protection of family members as well as ourselves. It keeps the professional completely separate from the personal. Tell me, how did you come by that particular bit of software?”

She folded the sunglasses and put them back on the table, well out of his reach. “Oh, I know a dude who knows a dude who knows a dude. It’s not one hundred percent accurate. If you’d been on your guard, I wouldn’t have caught you. And in answer to your question—” Suddenly her face was sad. “My daughter cooked it up. She was very bright, my girl, a prodigy. Eccentric—she straddled the border between Asperger’s and autism. She was fascinated by the physical characteristics of human emotion. She created the program to measure the response when you called someone by name. Well, by
a
name. You know there are people in this world who believe on a gut level that their name is Lover or Darling. Or—” She gave a short, soundless laugh. “—I’m sorry to say, Asshole. Fortunately, there aren’t many of those.” She laughed again, more heartily. “Well, actually, there are plenty of those, but only a teeny-tiny minority would answer to the name, at least in here.” She put one hand to her chest and covered the glasses possessively with the other. “You aren’t going to confiscate them, are you?”

“Not unless you’ve used them to commit a crime,” he said, shifting uneasily on the couch. “Not invading people’s privacy, are you? Stealing their life savings?”

Emmy Eto smiled demurely. “I’ve been a good girl, Agent Mura.”

“I’m sure. Now, about your relationship with Pretty Howitzer—”

“Believe it or not, I’m not a total mark, Agent Mura.” The sadness returned to Emmy Eto’s face. “Like I said, I only talked to her in the first place because I felt sorry for her. I could see she was lonely.” A corner of her mouth twitched in a brief half smile. “But I suppose being a con artist is a lonely way to make a living. Anyway, I always enjoyed a good Easter Egg and I really thought it was all she had. I’d have overpaid for it—not as much as she ended up getting out of me but still, too much. Just because I thought it would make her happy and I can’t take it with me.”

“Then she disappeared and reappeared?” Goku prompted. This was usually the trick that scammers like Pretty Howitzer used to seal the deal.

But Emmy Eto shook her head. “Oh, please. I know how camouflage and encryption works in Augmented Reality, how it’s just the surroundings prerecorded and interpolated. Even the cheapest AR+ cover-ups work fine as long as whoever or whatever you’re covering doesn’t make any sudden moves. Or if
you
don’t, because you’ll get that lag with the perspective.

“Personally, I don’t bother with anything cheap—my mother always said cheap was dear in the long run—but some people aren’t fussy. They don’t care if the perspective doesn’t shift perfectly or the resolution gets a little chunky. One lady I know says she likes it that way. She says it reminds her that there’s less than meets the eye. But I say if you’re going to use AR+, then use it. Go big or go home. That’s another of my mother’s sayings.”

She stared silently down at the cup in her hands before she set it on the coffee table. “The disappearing act was pretty good. She even managed to fix the log so it looked like there was missing time. Maybe that might have convinced me, I don’t know.”

“If that didn’t,” Goku asked gently, “what did?”

“I saw my girl.” Emmy Eto gazed at him for a long moment as if expecting some reaction. “I saw my girl and I called her by name and it was her. I didn’t have the software from those sunglasses, of course, but I’d seen her through them often enough that I could tell. She knew her name. And she knew me.”

He nodded. “I see.”

“And I certainly did. That’s how they get us, isn’t it? Not by what they show us but by what they can get us to see. Because we see what we want to see. You’d think we’d live and learn, but we never do. I remember hearing all about the Virtual Homeland scams. People fooled into believing they could actually inhabit a whole new world or a whole new universe. Or an old one, lost to earthquakes and radiation. I never understood how people could fall for that. Not until there was something I wanted to see.”

His conscience pounced on him the moment he left Emmy Eto’s apartment building (the brushed metal plaque over the main entrance declared it was a retirement community in emphatically no-nonsense letters). No surprise—as soon as he’d known he wasn’t going to confiscate Emmy Eto’s sunglasses, he’d felt it getting ready. Simply tagging the glasses for collection after Emmy Eto’s eventual death wasn’t enough to satisfy what Konstantin called his inner Boy Scout.

I could go back inside and see if Auntie Emmy would be open to sparking a bowl of medicinal. Just as a favor to a stressed-out free-range cop. They only use top-grade stuff for medicinal
—

Some part of him—a surprisingly big part—thought that was the best idea he’d had all day. But he knew that if he did go back to Emmy Eto’s apartment, it wouldn’t be to get high but to take her dodgy sunglasses, the way he should have if he’d been going by the book. He’d be very apologetic and explain that while the software was not
exactly
against the law, it was in a gray area that almost always resulted in expensive legal problems for the average citizen, who of course didn’t mean any harm, but still. She would argue that lots of people had lenses with add-ons that were just as sketchy, not to mention stuff that actually
was
illegal, and he’d tell her, yes, that was true, but he didn’t know about anyone else, only her. She had used the software not just in his presence but as part of their interaction, while he was on duty and without his consent. And then—

And then nothing. He was spinning his wheels imagining a conversation he’d decided not to have. He cleared his mind and focused his attention on his surroundings—the line of flowering shrubs that went the length—width?—of the building on either side, the recently repaved sidewalk parallel to it, the convenience shop—no, they called it a store here—on the corner. Diagonally opposite was another convenience store from a competing chain. The two stores seemed to be having a price war, but he wasn’t sure on what; maybe everything. The four-lane traffic-way that ran past the building was restricted to local and electric, except for emergency vehicles. It was so empty he wondered if it had been closed off for some reason before five two-seaters appeared several blocks in the distance. Scan-vees, he saw as they approached, from the World Within project. He turned his back as they passed him, although he didn’t actually care. He had walked through so many World Within scans, his mannequin was probably one of their standard placeholders. Facial features scrambled so he was unrecognizable, of course.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps someone who knew him well enough would recognize him anyway. Emmy Eto’s semilegal sunglasses.

He was waiting to cross the street in front of the convenience store when he finally noticed a message light in the lower left-hand corner of his vision blinking. It was a short note from Ogada, saying he might as well use Konstantin’s office while he was here.

The offer took him by surprise. It hadn’t even occurred to him to ask because he hadn’t thought about staying any longer than it would take to arrange Pretty Howitzer’s transfer to London. He hadn’t given any thought to that either, but it didn’t really require any—all he’d have to do was fill out a form, then go home and wait for a couple of prisoner transport marshals to arrive with her a day or two later.

He didn’t have to be in such a hurry. Ogada had thought being handed over to I3 would make Pretty Howitzer more cooperative, though she had been more rattled by the prospect of hard time underwater. If he gave her more time to think about it, let her sleep on it, she might be only too happy to work out a deal with the local authorities. In which case, he could sign it back to Ogada or Celestine or whoever had caught it to begin with and save I3 the expense of airfare plus accommodations for two prisoner transport marshals. No, he definitely didn’t have to be in such a hurry.

Something moved in his peripheral vision and he automatically focused on it, thinking it was another message. But there was no blinking light. The movement came again, something moving just out of his visual range. He turned his head. Across the street, two people were coming out of a café and holding the door for two other people going in. Again, motion fluttered on the far side of his vision. This time, he relaxed his focus and let himself see rather than actively looking.

It was the barest flicker, over almost before it registered on him. There had been an image of some kind, he was sure of it, but the only thing that came to him was Konstantin’s face.