Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

8 The Price of Attention ^{Karl Schroeder}

THE SPACE IS AN ABSTRACT GAME LEVEL, RENDERED IN LOW-RES CELL SHADING. Gray and beige; benign but not very informative. Remy slides his finger along the smooth arm of his glasses, and the scene becomes textured.

“—of interest is over here,” somebody is saying. Remy looks for his usual cues to understand who it is, and spots the worn sneakers that Inspector Kraft insists on wearing with any suit. Kraft isn’t looking his way, but Detective Sendak is frantically waving Remy over. He has no trouble recognizing her distinctive slouch. He turns around several times as he walks over, still taking in the overall shape of the location.

“—that the forensics consultant?” somebody else says. “He looks a little—?”

“Yes, this is Remy Reardon. Hsst, Remy, get over here! He’s not part of my regular team, he usually works with architects. We hire him sometimes.”

Despite his attempts to be inconspicuous, several heads turn Remy’s way, including the inspector’s, so he tweaks his detail levels. Appear normal, he tells himself. The blockiness of his surroundings dissolves, in its place brick and old wood beams, grimy industrial pebbled-glass windows. It’s cold in here; he had already noticed the smell.

He’s overtuned his glasses in his hurry, and they go flatly realist for a second, then color- and contrast-enhance everything. He can see every pore on Kraft’s face, and every scuff on the floorboards. “Good morning,” Remy says, walking over to the two ordinary chairs that sit facing each other in the center of the space. Bright pink ropes coil around the legs and back of one of them.

Kraft is standing behind that chair, and another man Remy recognizes as the medical examiner is kneeling in front.

Kraft is looking at him; does he expect something? Remy casts about for a helpful statement, and finally comes up with, “This placement is interesting.”

“What placement?” Kraft stares at him.

Remy feels like he’s made some kind of faux pas, and clears his throat. “The chairs are sitting in the acoustic center of the space.” He sweeps his hand in a circle. “It’s a fifty-foot cube, with a loft overhang fifteen feet wide on the entrance side.” His glasses gave him all these measurements; it’s so much easier to navigate using the numbers than to drown in the visual details of the actual place.

He walks past Sendak, who smiles at him, and over to one wall. There’s a radiator and above that a half-open window of heavy wired glass. “Somebody climbed out there?” Remy asks. “I saw blood stains in the parking lot.”

Sendak nods. “What about the placement?”

“A normal person would be more furtive. Whoever did this wasn’t ashamed. He wanted his victim to hear his own screams reflected back… It’s very deliberate.”

Kraft laughs humorlessly. “Well, an amateur wouldn’t have dissected this guy’s forearm while he was still alive.”

“Oh? And the victim still climbed out a window ten feet off the floor? Who is he?”

“Ralph Cawley,” says Kraft crisply. “Computer programmer, lives on the east side. He’s alive, and made it to a hospital before he collapsed. When he’s awake enough to talk, he’s refusing to do so. But the reason I called you is Cawley’s family, his wife and daughters, they’re missing. Looks like yesterday, just after he escaped. Seems to me whoever took him wants something, and didn’t get it from him on their first try. Now they’ve got his wife and girls. Finding them is the most important thing right now.” Kraft looks at Remy, who recognizes his frown.

“You called me because you’re grasping at straws.”

Kraft blows out a breath. “Sendak’s boys have already been all over this place and Cawley’s not cooperating. You’re a genius at noticing little details that other people miss. I thought you could help, is all.”

The examiner is on his feet now, dusting his hands. He eyes Remy. “Those smart glasses you wear. They have something to do with it?”

“I’m very sensitive to noise and light,” he tells the examiner. “Nikola Tesla was the same way. These help me narrow in on important details. Tune out the background.”

“A cousin of mine is on the spectrum. Maybe he could use a pair.”

“They need to be custom designed. I know a guy who does the programming.”

Remy notices that he’s started tapping his belt in a repeating pattern, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. He searches himself for signs of agitation, finds faster breathing, that he’s swaying a bit on his feet. He starts turning down the detail in the room. “As I was saying, whoever tortured Cawley arranged this setting for maximum effect. Probably a man, who clearly wanted something from him. Cawley… the name sounds familiar. What kind of programming does he do?”

Kraft pulls out his phone and flips through his notes. “Sez here… homomorphic encryption systems. Secure voting. Didn’t you do some work on that?”

Remy nods once, has to do it three more times. He turns down the room’s detail some more. “There could be a motive. He may have wanted Cawley to tell him how to hack the quadratic polling system. Even torture didn’t work, though, so he decided to take the family hostage. For leverage. I say ‘he’ because if it was just one person, he had to leave Cawley alone to go after them. That’s how Cawley escaped.”

He turns up his glasses so he can see Kraft better. “You’re right, we need to find the kidnapper right away, before he decides that what Cawley told him is true.”

“Which would be…?”

“That hacking the vote is impossible.”

“I KNOW WHAT ‘DOWN THE HALL’ MEANS,” REMY SAYS IN THE CAR, FIFTEEN MINUTES later.

“What do you mean?” He’s memorized Sendak’s broad, indigenous face and noted that she has a ready smile. Her squad car isn’t one of the new self-driving models, but he’s developing a theory that she likes driving, from the way she attentively steers them through complex downtown traffic.

“I heard Kraft say to the examiner, ‘he’s the responsibility of the boys down the hall.’ I know what that means.”

She shifts in her seat. “Do you mean he thinks of me as your babysitter?”

“No. Major Crimes is one of the few departments left over from the old police force. Kraft resents the replacements, like the Mental Health Emergency Task Force, Short-Term Housing, Domestic Abuse. The targeted initiatives. They’re all down the hall from his office, along with your Forensics department.”

“Don’t rain all over Kraft. He’s watched his whole way of life turn into a dumpster fire. The pandemic, the defunding, then the economic reset—you should be grateful he hasn’t joined all the other old geezers in their bunkers, with their canned beans and ammunition.”

“Where are we going again?” Remy tunes his glasses down to the point where they’re gliding through a featureless blockworld.

“To the Cawley house. Kraft thought you might spot something there.”

“Something that your team missed.”

“Well I haven’t been there yet either. You want to make a bet who’ll find the first clue?”

Remy blinks at her.

He says, “Community Outreach is more likely to get you results. Maybe someone in the neighborhood saw something.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re gonna tell me it’s faster and more effective than looking under shoes. Everybody says that, lately.”

“Maybe we should bet. Where is the Cawley house?” She tells him and he nods. “That’s near where I live. I can make you lunch.”

“Remy, we have three missing people to find. No lunch.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Argh, they’re drowning us with those things!” She’s glaring at something above street level; he fumbles with his detail levels and looks up to see some billboard screens. One is screening a referendum ad: Vote Early, Vote Often! A little up the avenue another is saying Buy Votes for Citizens’ Panels. His glasses’ preferences highlight a more distant one that says Testing Centers Get No Traffic in Ten Days, but Sendak’s probably not talking about that one.

She says, “Back at the crime scene you said you thought they didn’t like what Cawley told them. Something about the vote.”

“It can’t be a coincidence that he helped program the system. There is the referendum coming up.”

“Yeah.” She returns her attention to the traffic. “Not sure what to think about that, myself. Not that I’m feeling murderous, but potentially changing how our municipal democracy works is a pretty big deal. There’s a lot of people just like Kraft, they want to keep the old city council even though it was totally corrupt. For them the referendum choices amount to another huge change after years of change—and nobody over fifty understands quadratic voting anyway. Five years ago I’d never heard of it.”

“I remember Cawley a little now, though I never met him in person,” says Remy. “Before I… moved into the city… I worked a bit with his team. That was at the tail end of the Third Wave. Even then he was getting huge push-back—people either wanted to crack his code so they could rig the vote, or they wanted to prove it could be hacked so they could derail the whole project.” He watches the signs dwindle behind them. “I vote whenever I can, but a lot of people resent not being allowed to vote every time.”

“Yeah, and why can’t we? I keep hearing explanations, but they never add up. My cousin swears it’s totally to control the electorate.”

“No, it’s the opposite.” Remy remembers the fine-tuning that went into the system. In the quadratic system your first vote is free, but you can buy more. Each vote after the first one costs the square of its number times 10. So the second one costs $40, the third costs $90, the fourth $160, and if you want to buy a thousand you’ll be paying $10 million. The system’s designed so that people literally invest in the issues that matter the most to them. People with a lot of money might sway the vote, but only by putting a lot of cash into the public purse.

Early on some developers had tried paying off large swathes of the city’s poorest to vote their way. The random lottery solves that problem, by making sure that most, possibly all of your vote-fixing money goes to people who won’t end up being able to vote. Instead, a representative minority casts the actual ballots.

“Yeah, it probably feels wrong to people who are used to the old system. But a random lottery to select voters makes it way more expensive to buy votes. People just don’t get the math.”

“What?” says Sendak. “You think that somebody who doesn’t get the math went after Cawley, thinking he could do something he couldn’t to the voting system? What a waste.”

Remy blinks. “Or maybe Cawley just had gambling debts. We’ll see.”

BUT IT WASN’T GAMBLING DEBTS. “THE BANK SAYS CAWLEY WAS GETTING SOME pretty big payouts from offshore accounts,” Kraft tells Remy an hour later. “He wasn’t losing money, he was making it. Tons of it.”

Remy’s taking the call outside the Cawley house, which is in one of the reconstructed neighborhoods near Downtown. This side street has been given over to bikeways and parkland, probably after the Second Wave. Many of the eyesore buildings and empty lots in the area, fought over for decades by developers, are now green space. After the contraction of the fossil fuel industries, the air is clean.

Sendak strolls up. After a cursory look through the house, which has already been thoroughly combed by her team, she’s decided to speak to the neighbors. Community Outreach, like Remy suggested. She’s wearing a mask, which she carefully stows as she comes up the walk. “Lot of locals still won’t talk to you at the door unless you’re wearing one,” she explains.

“That’s ridiculous. There hasn’t been a case in the city in months.”

“Once bitten, twice shy. Thrice bitten, thoroughly paranoid. Find anything?”

He shakes his head. “I’m sure your people saw that their suitcases are still here. Just to follow up, I compared the trash to what they had in the pantry. When people are getting ready to travel—or run—they tend to use up their perishables. That’s not the case here. I don’t think they left of their own accord.”

She waits, then when he just stands there, she says, “This is the part where you say, ‘What about you, Maureen? Did you find anything?’ And where I say, ‘Yes, why yes, I did.’”

Agreeably, he says, “What about you, Maureen? Did you find anything?”

She takes out her phone. “A couple of people saw a black SUV parked in front of the Cawley place two days ago. It wasn’t there long.”

“Did they get a license plate? Because there must be thousands of black SUVs in town.”

“A lot of people ’round here have porch cams. So I asked around, just to see if anybody had footage that showed the street. Got a couple of hits.”

She shows him the videos on her phone. There are three, none of which are good enough to read the license plate. One, though, shows a vague, pixelated profile of the driver through the side window.

“That might be a tattoo on his neck,” says Remy, “but it’s too dark to see the face. Maybe they can do signal processing on it. Wait, what’s that?” He points.

“Hmm—wrist watch?”

“Mm, more like a tracker.” After the first vaccines proved to be insufficient on their own, social isolation and contact tracing were rolled out nationwide. Companies making fitness trackers were happy to add the functionality to their devices, and suddenly they were no longer just for exercise buffs and ‘quantified self’ people. At one point he remembers every single person he met wearing a tracker of some kind—mostly on the wrist.

“So we got nothing,” she admits. He stares out at the little urban gardens for a minute, and when he glances at Sendak he sees a pinched expression on her face. That must be what frustration looks like.

“Look, Remy, I’m on the clock,” she says. “I’ve gotta get back to the lab, is there anything more you can do?”

Remy literally has no idea. He doesn’t like this feeling of helplessness. “I live a few minutes from here. Could you drop me off before you go back?”

She sighs. “Okay. Maybe Kraft’s got a new plan.”

They drive into one of the former business areas, now converted into low-cost housing like much of Downtown. Sendak parks next to a glass-walled building that used to be part of an office park. It’s across from a real park, with trees and grass and open space. This is Remy’s essential source of peace and quiet if he’s outside, but today it’s overrun with people. Somebody’s holding a political rally.

He starts to tune it out as he gets out of the car, then notices something. “There’s a friend of mine,” he says to Sendak.

She blinks. “How can you tell?” The nearest person is a hundred feet away.

“He’s got a flag up in my glasses.” Remy crosses the road and heads for the gates to the park. This is only possible because he tunes the detail levels right down to the minimum; even so he can feel the chaotic pressure of the crowd in his mind as he approaches it.

He expected Sendak would drive away but she gets out of the car and follows him up to a table by the entrance. Here, volunteers are handing out wrist bands. One jumps up, laughing, as Remy approaches. “Remy Reardon! How you doing, man? And who’s your friend?” Remy belatedly remembers to introduce Sendak.

“Xander Reese, nice to meet you. So you know the great Remy Reardon.”

“Yeah, we work together, sometimes. How do you know him?”

“I was the contact tracing expert at St. Mary’s Hospital.” There’s just the faintest pause then, as he and Sendak exchange a look; St. Mary’s is a psychiatric hospital. This shared look is one of those episodes of invisible communication that intensely frustrate Remy. When it happens, it’s like the other people are talking behind an invisible pane of glass. “I also programmed his glasses,” Xander finishes.

Sendak crosses her arms and stares into the crowded park. “Look at it! A mob. Who’d have thought ordinary folk would get that close again?”

“That’s why we’re here.” Reese holds up one of the wrist bands. “Some people have been tossing their trackers. Privacy, you know? I get it. But if there’s an outbreak, we need to trace each and every contact to squash it. So you gotta wear one to get in.”

The sound of the crowd is creeping around the edges of Remy’s mind, increasingly distracting. He stands still, head tilted, vaguely aware that Reese is telling Sendak about the contact tracing app, about the cryptography it uses to perfectly preserve anonymity.

“Crypto!” Her voice rises in a way that means Remy should pay attention. “Like these clowns and their quadratic vote! It’s all game theory and math. You can’t turn something as sloppy as human nature into math.”

Reese shrugs. “I guess you’re in favor of citizens’ panels?”

“Damn straight. Grab a bunch of people at random, just like you do for jury trials. Give ’em a minimal test to make sure they understand the issue they’re gonna be dealing with, and then let ’em work the problem. But no, ‘the quadratic way is the best!’ Bend over backward to prevent voter fraud by draining away all the human elements, until all that’s left is an algorithm. It solves your problem, but only by sucking the life out of politics.” She takes a calming breath. “Okay,” she says, “so here’s a question: What could you do if you could hack ballot software?”

“Well… you’d be able to influence the vote, obviously.”

“Influence? Not outright ballot-stuff?”

“It’s pretty obvious when a hundred percent of the voters choose one candidate. Yeah, you can stuff digital ballot boxes, but man you gotta be subtle. Anyway, the whole point is that it is hack-proof. You can’t cheat. Nobody can. I mean—you’ve been using it every day for years,” Reese adds.

“When?” says Sendak. “I don’t vote every day.”

“You don’t use it only for voting. Like I was saying, the first place they used it was for contact tracing, in the middle of the pandemic. So you could be part of the tracing network without ever giving away your personal details. You’re being tracked anonymously every time you spend more than fifteen minutes near someone. So, weirdly enough, a lot of the same tech went into both the ballot system and the contact tracing software.”

“I like quadratic voting,” Remy tries to say, but the world’s receding down a tunnel of sound and light. The glasses are only so good at blocking things out.

He vaguely hears Sendak say, “Um, Remy? Yeah, I think I’d better run you home.”

“Yeah, he’s gettin’ overloaded, isn’t he? Take it easy, Remy! Talk to you soon.”

Remy doesn’t answer as Sendak leads him away.

REMY PUSHES INTO HIS APARTMENT, SENDAK RIGHT BEHIND HIM. HE PAUSES TO lean on the kitchen counter and after a while, notices that she’s stopped in the doorway, staring.

“Yeah, I painted everything black,” he admits. Not just the walls, but the appliances, the chairs, the cutlery. “That way I can skin things however I want, you know, with the glasses.” To him it’s all its usual neutral shades of beige and mauve, with callout labels attached to various things that are out of sight—like in drawers or under other objects. All very convenient to him, but Sendak doesn’t use Mixed Reality. To her his home must look like a vortex of darkness.

“Aw, Remy—”

“Go.” He waves at her weakly. “Go. You have to win our bet. There’s not much time.”

“You’re sure you’ll be okay?”

“Yeah. I just get overwhelmed sometimes.”

“Then why do you live here?”

“This place?”

“No. This city.”

“Oh. I kind of… ended up here. After we sold the farm.”

“We? You’ve got family?”

“My mother. She raised me in the country. Nice little farmhouse, been ours for generations. But she had to sell when the pandemic deepened and they reformed the property laws to try to kickstart the economy.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It was the right thing to do. Me and Mom argued. She said she had every right to hold onto the place.” Almost the first thing the Liberal Radicals did when they got control of the state legislature was institute a new property regime. Under it you can put any value you want on your place, but you pay the tax at that rate, and you also have to sell to any buyer who makes an offer at the asking price. “Mom set the price higher than she thought anybody would buy at, but then she couldn’t afford the taxes. And somebody bought. I told her it was logical; it got money and assets moving through the economy, which was what we needed right then. She didn’t see it that way. We haven’t spoken in a couple of years.”

“Oh, Remy, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He straightens up. “Thanks for dropping me off. I’ll review my glasses’ footage from today.”

She nods curtly. “I’ll check in later. If you want me, here’s my number.” She borrows his phone to enter it, then leaves.

He makes himself lunch. Normally he would nap after, but he’s restless. A woman and her two daughters are missing, every second counts, yet here he is sitting in his black cave, helpless to do anything about it. It feels like a billion-fold amplification of all those times he’s disappointed others who expected some normal human response from him. He wants to help, wants to say the right thing, think the right thing. He just doesn’t know how.

Mother had been so angry. “You’re helping them do this!” she’d kept saying, as the sheriffs threw them out of their generational home.

“Mom, it’s just a different property algorithm. You don’t fight the System. You fight the Algorithm.” She didn’t understand it, that algorithms were how you voted, how money got allocated; they weren’t some nebulous Deep State that you could rail against but never change. They were the concrete steps you took to get things done. And they could be improved.

He ends up standing at the window, gazing down at the mass of people in the park. No way he can ever be part of that. He remembers when he first came here, the roar and tumult of the streets where he’d panhandled. There had been no escaping the noise, until the doctors at St. Mary’s, and people like Xander Reese, helped him organize it all.

He needs his algorithms. Still, he touches the glass, marveling at the people bouncing around like atoms in a jar, impervious to being bruised by the Brownian motion of random social life.

They were so irrational. Like, who would expect people to wantonly tear off their contact tracing bracelets? If you were rational about it, if you organized your life properly, you wouldn’t do that.

He thinks of the placement of the chairs where Cawley had been held: in the mathematical and acoustic center of the space. Not where a normal person would place them, but logically…

Remy almost fumbles the phone in his haste to get it out. Can he go to Kraft with this? Sendak? What he’s proposing isn’t exactly legal. He does know Reese, who knows people in the right department. Remy’s done work for the City, for Public Health. But this algorithm is clear: you can bend some rules to save lives.

“Hi, Xander? It’s Remy. No, I’m fine.—Listen, I need a favor, and I need it, like, today.

REMY’S STANDING IN THE DARKNESS NEXT TO A POTTED SPRUCE, ACROSS THE STREET from the downtown coronavirus testing center. The center is attached to a hospital, and is almost the last one open in the city. As he expected, traffic has been regular but light since he got here. He’s exhausted from watching the hypochondriacs come and go but he can’t tune down his glasses, because he needs to see their faces or, preferably, their necks.

It’s almost eight o’clock; the place will be closing soon. He’ll have to come back in the morning, and anyway he’s hungry and his whole nervous system is jangling. Coming here was a long shot in several ways; there are other places you can go to get tested, it’s just that they’re on the edge of town. And however logical and methodical the killer may be, there’s no way to know whether he’s taken Remy’s bait.

Just as he’s turning away in disappointment, a large black SUV pulls into the parking lot next to the center. A jolt of adrenaline sends Remy into the street before he thinks to look both ways; luckily traffic is light. He makes it across okay but with his attention divided, he doesn’t see the driver get out. There he is, silhouetted by the center’s automatic doors. He’s going in as another man comes out. The other guy’s suit looks familiar, but not like Kraft’s, because it’s too expensive.

The two exchange a look, then stop in the doorway; the doors try to hiss close and back up, then hesitantly try again. The two men say a few words, probably about how annoying it is to be tested for the millionth time; then they part ways.

Remy waits until the other visitor drives off, then walks around the SUV, trying to find an angle where his phone can catch enough light. When he’s gotten the best shot he can of the license plate, he messages it to Sendak’s phone number. Above the photo attachment, he types “Run this plate. May be our kidnapper.”

Then he phones her. It rings once, twice, three times, and he’s hearing sirens somewhere and the streetlights are popping on up and down the boulevard. It’s distracting.

“You’ve reached Maureen Sendak. Leave a message.”

“Ah, uh, Maureen, I mean Detective Sendak, sorry, Remy here. I, uh, I did a thing, you won’t like it I think.” With an effort he focuses. First, turn down his detail levels; second, take a deep breath.

“Okay. Remember that porch-cam photo of the guy in the SUV? It looked like he was wearing a tracker, and if he is it’ll have a contact tracing app on it. They run in the background and they’re anonymous, so why would he turn it off? He’s cautious, methodical, if you go by what we saw at the crime scene.

“Except here’s the thing. There’s been no coronavirus cases in the city for weeks. So I know somebody who knows somebody and, I, uh, I had them enter Cawley’s wife and daughters into the system. As having tested positive.

“Because most people are still wearing their trackers, right? And even if he took it off at some point, he was around the Cawleys long enough that when we registered them, he’d receive a notification. And so—”

“Hey you!”

Remy spins around to find himself facing a gray, blocky human shape. “Get away from my car!,” it says.

Remy fumbles with his detail levels and the blocks are replaced by a stocky, thick-necked man with short-cropped black hair. He has some kind of tattoo on his neck. Remy stares at him for a long moment. Then he blurts, “Where are you keeping them?”

The man’s eyes widen and then Remy’s on the ground, stinging rings of pain around his left eye. Something knocks the breath out of him; he’s getting kicked. He tries to curl into a ball but suddenly there’s shouting and the man above him curses. A car door slams; he hears the SUV’s engine start and rolls out of the way just in time as it screeches out of its parking spot.

As he’s getting to his knees people run over from the testing center—three, four of them? They’re all talking at once but he can’t understand them. He scrabbles on the ground for his phone. Cracked and dead. He spots his glasses and lunges for them.

They’re crumpled splinters, the lenses popped out.

“Are you okay? Come on, we’ll help you inside!”

There’s more pitiless light in there, and more people and loud voices. Remy backs away. “No, I’m fine, I’ll be… I’ll be fine.” He turns and staggers up the pitching deck of the driveway, hunching away from the hissing streetlights and shocked-eyed office towers. Not going anywhere. Just going.

REMY IS A LEAF IN A WHIRLWIND. NOTHING TOUCHES HIM BUT EVERYTHING IS ON him, geometries and noises leaping like panthers. A car’s brakes squeal and his vision flashes white; he turns his head and a streetlight’s stabbing light sends prickles down his arms. He knows he needs to get home, or at least somewhere safe, but the roads terrify him and every building’s doorway is white-hot with glare and detail. By instinct he steers to darker and quieter places.

He’s not mindless—in fact, he’s thinking furiously. He recognizes familiar signs of shock in himself, he’s aware of how he’s reacting. But he seems to have split in two. One half is a wailing child, looking for his mother’s arms yet terrified of the sandpaper rasp of her hand stroking his hair. The other is a man who got himself off the streets, found a job and even respectability; that man knows that he can get the better of this moment. He just needs to regroup.

Up ahead is a bridge, and underneath is dark. Remy staggers down the grassy embankment and onto a broad slab of pavement, then stops dead, blinking at orange and green lozenges, like glowing turtles under the vast leaning slab of the bridge. It’s a homeless encampment; the turtles are dome tents with little lights in them, and people are in them lying down, or sitting and talking. There’s a campfire with a few people seated around it.

Several heads turn in his direction. He grins weakly. “Does… does anybody have a phone?”

“Man, phones get stolen. You need help?” The man is tall and incredibly thin, his features buried in a parka that shouldn’t be necessary on a summer night.

“I just need to grab my breath.” He must look rough, so he adds, “I got overstimulated. Too much, well of everything. I need somewhere quiet.”

“Know all about that,” says the man. “Come on down. You can wait your turn at the fire.”

Remy gratefully takes a seat on an overturned crate. He rubs his eyes. The man who spoke to him goes away but after a while comes back to lean on the graffiti-layered bridge pillar. “You got anything?” he says.

“I don’t carry cash.” He pats his pockets. “No weed. I took my meds before I left home.”

“No problem. You’re still welcome, ’long as you follow the rules.”

“Rules?” The fog of noise is starting to lift. Remy looks around, and now it’s clear how the tents are laid out in, well, not exactly a grid, but a pattern you can walk between. Tables and chairs are set in specific spaces, mostly where the street light comes in.

“You want the fire, you wait in line,” says the man. “There’s the fire rule, the water rule, the lookout rule.”

Remy nods. “Who makes these rules? Do you vote on them?”

“Naw. We just talk ’em out.” He goes away again and Remy sits there, watching the cooperation and order of the encampment unfold in little interactions and in where things are placed.

Near the end of his time at St. Mary’s, Remy used to go for long walks. “A tendency to wander,” his chart probably said. One day he’d been deep in thought and only looked up when a security guard shouted at him. He blinked and looked around, only to discover that somehow, he’d made his way into the heart of a building site.

“How’d you get in here?” the guard demanded.

“I, uh, just came through the atrium and took a left at the electronics store—”

“Wait!” Another man ran up. “How did you know there’d be a computer store there?” Remy looked, and realized that the buildings were just sketches—concrete slabs, pillars, and some HVAC ducts, all open to the outside air. He hadn’t seen that; he’d seen the marble, the seating and lights, and the store. He understood what it would be from its shape and from the kind of power lines and interior walls that had been roughed out.

The architect was impressed, and they’d got to talking. Talking had led to work, inside virtual reality at first, then at unfinished sites where the firm was working to visualize future buildings. Remy discovered design, and coding, and met Xander, and eventually, Kraft.

He had done these things. Therefore, he can find his way home tonight.

A deep calm settles over him, slowly, like snow descending. After a while he turns to look at the skyline.

The city has its own rules, of course. Some are written down. A lot of them support privilege and power and, up until the pandemic hit, they were immovable. The coronavirus overturned everything, but not everybody is happy with the new world.

Something’s been nagging at him since he left the testing center. It’s like a distant alarm ringing in the back of his mind—something important that he should have told Sendak, but didn’t get to. He stares at the towers, idly wonders how much money one of them costs—and remembers.

He seeks out the man who helped him and says, “Thanks. I’m good now, I’ll go home.”

“All right man. Stay safe.”

Remy stalks up the embankment and without flinching turns his face to the lights and the traffic.

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, A POLICE CAR APPROACHES AND HE WAVES URGENTLY AT IT. It brakes and veers over to the curb. A figure bursts out of the passenger door. That collection of jittery movements and the headlong walk all add up to Sendak.

“Remy! See, I knew he’d still be in the area. Call it in.” She comes up to him. “Are you okay?”

“Hi, Sendak. Can I borrow your phone?”

She laughs crazily. “Remy, we’ve been hunting high and low for you! They told us what happened at the center. We thought you were hurt… Wow, that’s quite the black eye.”

“Is it?”

She grabs him by the arm as he probes delicately at his cheek bone, and leads him to the cruiser. “Listen, we got him! His name’s Orelko. You were right, Cawley’s wife and daughters were still wearing their tracing bracelets when he snatched them. After you called we put out a BOLO and had his car followed, and he led us right to them.”

“Good,” he says as they get in the back seat. “I was just coming to see you because there’s something else.”

He waits because it’s dark under the shadow of the bridge and he wants to see her expression when he tells her this part. Remy decides he’s going to learn more about expressions. “When the kidnapper went into the testing center, he encountered someone coming out. A man in a suit. I recognized it—I recognized him. But I couldn’t place him until… later… when I was looking at the city lights. I thought about the architects I’d worked with, and the developers.

“Sendak, his name is Langdon, and he’s one of the biggest commercial property developers in town. He’s been influencing City Hall for years, everything from handing out brown paper bags full of cash in parking garages to threatening city planners. The architects I worked for hated him, but he hasn’t been able to do that kind of thing in years. At least, nothing they could prove. But now a pivotal referendum on city governance is coming up.

“So why would a property developer with a huge stake in how the city is budgeted, be coming out of the same coronavirus testing center that I set up to trap the kidnapper?”

Her eyes widen. “Oh…” He thinks he likes this expression. A second later, though, she’s frowning. “It’s purely circumstantial. It’ll never hold up in court.”

“But you caught this Orelko person. When you tell him you know Langdon hired him, he’ll want to cut a deal.”

“Hell, yeah!” says the cop who’s driving.

Sendak slumps back in her seat. “Maybe. Either way, you did good.”

“One other thing. You’ll want to delay the referendum until we can talk to Cawley. Because maybe he really did code a back door into the voting software. Maybe Langdon knows about it; where were those mysterious payments to Cawley’s accounts coming from? Maybe Cawley got cold feet. He refused to play anymore, so Langdon had him snatched to learn the passwords, or whatever it is he’s using.”

“Well,” Sendak is smiling again. “Whatever happened to ‘it’s impossible to hack the vote?’”

“If there’s a back door, it wouldn’t be.”

“So you’re still a radical liberal?”

“I don’t know, actually. I might just go for the citizens’ panels this time,” Remy says.

“What? Why?”

“Just something I saw.”

“Hey, I hate to burst your bubble,” says the driver, “but where are we going?”

“You must be tired,” says Sendak. “We’ll take you home.” But Remy shakes his head.

“I don’t want to go home yet.”

“Why not?”

Remy thinks about it. He’s found his algorithm, and it’s not about tuning down the bewildering, maddening howl of the world. It’s not about simplifying. It’s about letting all that complexity and chaos knock him into the orbit of the right people.

“It would just be nice,” he says, “to come to the station. To see Kraft, and you and your office.

“To meet the people I work with, and the rest of the boys down the hall.”