The Future We Wish We Had

INSIDE JOB by Loren L. Coleman

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You’d think by now I’d learn. The city’s top cop wasn’t going to do me, or anyone in the department’s Virtual Division, any favors. Still, when the case landed in my queue I felt a moment’s hope. Every career cop (and yeah, I’m one) is really waiting for the next Big One. The case that offers some major resources to play with. Gets you noticed. Maybe hauls you up to the next paygrade.

That gold folder jacket sitting on my virtual desk? The one pulsing with a soft, supernatural glow that could only mean its return address was Number One Police Square? It had “special assignment” written all over it.

Literally. In tiny red letters that marched around the folder’s edge like some kind of Times Square marquee. Not bad programming, either. I checked the corners-those ninety-degree turns can be tricky-and the letters held perfect form as they swung round the bend. Someone upstairs was still taking pride in their work.

Or they knew that some serious eyes were going to be looking at the data.

I swallowed hard. Purely an affectation, when you’re transformed into The System and really nothing more than a floating database wrapped up in a neurohistic signal. A standard avatar, in other words. But I’m really an old-fashioned kind of guy, and sometimes the moment calls for a hard swallow.

Striking a pose: hands splayed across the old-fashioned blotter that covered a large part of my antique desk, leaning heavily forward and head hung low. The lights in my virtual office dimmed until only a spotlight of dingy yellow fell across my shoulders and pooled on the desktop. I hadn’t taken the case yet, and already I felt the weight bearing down on me. One of those moments when you knew people’s lives were going to change. Maybe end. Maybe it would be mine, this time. Maybe.

Okay, maybe it was a little early for the Sam Spade act.

There wasn’t even a beautiful dame yet.

A shift of thought brought the lights back up, and I hooked my swivel chair over with one foot. A broken castor rattled in protest, and that made me smile. It was that kind of detail, the little things, that made for a convincing experience inside The System, and I’d spent enough of my working hours inside the past six years to want to do it right.

So, getting comfortable, I grabbed up a pencil to take notes right there on my blotter and then tapped the pink eraser end against the folder jacket’s tab. A pins-and-needles tingling sensation crept into my fingers. Looking deep into the No. 2 yellow-painted wood, I saw my security code streaming across the pencil’s bridge, dumping into the tab. Three-level security, I noticed. Someone had locked this up tight. Again, there was that shimmer of hope. Then the folder jacket fell open. Not like a book would fall open. The folder suddenly grew depth. As if I’d removed the cover from a box and revealed a stack of datapages about three inches deep. Officer’s reports. Crime scene photos. Notes from other detectives. They would all be in there. Anything and everything pertinent to the case. And the most pertinent page of all was sitting right on top, ready for me to thumb it out and toss it up into the air where it hung, centered above my desk and glowing like God’s holy writ. The damn cover page, with a large, no-nonsense black IAB stamp in the upper right corner.

Internal Affairs Bureau. The Rat Squad.

Ah, hell.

Chewing through the data forwarded by IAB didn’t take long. One of the (admittedly few) advantages to being plugged in was the ability to manipulate, digest, or expel data at a rate that nearly matched the clock speed of a good CPU. It took longer to requisition a vehicle, once I realized that I would have to unplug for an onsite visit to the downtown depository. Longer still to drive there.

Police depositories, where we log in and secure all evidence for trial, are like small warehouses. Or, really, U-Store-It places. A warren of separate rooms, filled with shelves, drawers, cupboards, and lockboxes. Everything we need to manage an inventory that ranges from the pair of shoes a suspect wore the night of his crime to a steamer trunk filled with fifty kilos of Colombian H. They are cold, musty, cramped little spaces, usually overseen by aging cops who are turning into cold, musty, cramped little people. Dead-end careers. Little hope for parole.

I could relate.

Each depository also housed a datavault, which managed the official and total inventory and offered a place for VD detectives (like me) to store their finished work until trial. But someone at the downtown station had apparently developed “happy fingers,” doing a little off-the-job programming to gum up the entire works. Which was how the problem ended up on my desk.

Agent Curtis of Internal Affairs met me just as I came off the elevator, coming up from the parking garage. Tall, and thick about the middle, with shadows under his eyes and a habit of glancing suspiciously at anyone who stood too close by. Serious frown lines drooping from the corners of his mouth. He had a gold wedding band on his left hand, but I doubted the hangdog expression came from his marriage. If I ever meet a happy IAB rat, it will be the first.

“VD?” he asked, too loudly. Like the chrome jack behind my right ear wasn’t obvious enough. Heads turned.

“I’d rather use protection,” I said. “But I appreciate the warning.”

He frowned, and it looked like an avalanche building up on his face, ready to come crashing down. “You going to play games, or help me catch one of your wirehead buddies?”

Apparently Curtis was ready to paint me from the same color palette reserved for whomever had “abused the privilege,” as some cops like to say. I was tempted-sorely tempted-to turn around right then. One Police Square or not. But there was still some hope left. Call me an optimist, but I didn’t want to give this case up just yet.

“How ’bout first we rule out accidental corruption and a third-party hack?” I asked.

The avalanche started to roll. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

Technically, it wasn’t. Well, an accident maybe, though from the evidence that seemed highly unlikely. Third-party? Would take some doing. First and foremost, datavaults were highly secured, with no (and I mean zero) outside access. That was just one of the ways The System beat back that whole cyberware scare. It really was as simple as not plugging in your critical data to the world-wide. You hosted it off your own intranet, or, if you really wanted security, a dedicated machine.

Banks and big corporations figured that out pretty quickly. Hell, most mom-and-pop businesses had enough smarts not to install a System interface unless they wanted vandals messing with their inventory and bookkeeping. Porn was one of the few big businesses still tied in, and with so many holes (no pun intended) in their frontline security it was easy to hack. They wanted you in, after all. Eventually they made a customer out of you.

So The System had become a glorified chat room, used primarily for communication and some semi-secure data management, and was big on the world-wide primarily with the entertainment industry. Not to mention it took a hardcore fan to bother getting jacked in the first place.

Or a cop bucking for an easy promotion to detective. One which, by most cops’ standards, had never earned his gold shield.

“Let me take a walk through the system, at least. Get a feel for our perp.”

Our perp. On the same team, me and him. Curtis hesitated, studied me like something he wasn’t quite sure about.

Strike a pose: feet spread apart, confident, relaxed, thumbs hooked into the front pockets of my slacks (because I didn’t have a trenchcoat). If he’s there, we’ll find him. That’s what you do when your business is being a cop. A man crosses the line, any man, and you bring him in. No matter what.

“All right,” Curtis finally said. And nodded me down the hall.

Score one for the wirehead.

It was just a short trip to the property clerk’s office. Past the men’s room and a janitorial closet with a small puddle of water leaking out under the door. Isolation was always a good first line of security, but screen freeze me if it didn’t feel like these officers had been exiled to this far corner because they rated below mop buckets and dusting cloths.

There was a metal security door protecting their lair, with an access port that refused my badge number. Curtis swiped us through on his.

Tell me to take a square room ten feet on a side and fit in four desks and a DataScanVI the size of a small filing cabinet, and I’d have great game of mental Tetris playing in my head. Apparently, so had the officers in charge here. Two desks pushed back-to-back, the third shoved up against a wall with the DSVI crouched in the kickspace beneath it, and the fourth desk set on end in one corner as the piece-which- would-not-fit. Plus, the walls were painted in a bright, too-cheerful jewel-tone yellow.

All that was missing was the jaunty little background tune. Instead, the chief property clerk had a CD player spinning out some classical piano.

“Franklin Torres,” he introduced himself. Willowy would be the best word to describe him. Tall and extremely lean, with stooped shoulders and rail thin arms. A good breeze would probably bend the man in half. No wonder he’d been filed down in the property clerk’s office-sure wasn’t built for the streets. He did have a chrome jack behind his right ear-another of the chrome detectives squad, then-and he made sure I got a good look at it by turning his head overfar to introduce the others. Nothing to hide? Asking for some professional courtesy?

Samantha Blake and David O’Rourke were his two assistants. Samantha was a freshly made officer who starched her blues and I’m sure had an academy stencil still visible below her shirt collar. How she had pulled drudge duty I could only guess. Luck of the draw, maybe. Her file, as it had been given to me in the package, was clean. Top marks in programming and rated for an eventual job with the Electronics Division.

O’Rourke was sour-faced and carried an obvious chip on his shoulder. No doubting why he was here. His file had mentioned two trips to rehab in his first three years.

Both officers barely acknowledged Torrres when he introduced them. Me they glanced down at like a particularly loathsome bug trying to crawl into their food. I’d like to think it was the IAB detective looming behind me. Maybe it was the chrome.

“You have logs on the door for the last week.” I said. Meaning, to let them know, that I had the logs and knew there was nothing out of place.

Torres nodded. “I’ve made runs on them in System,” he said. “Sam has mast-fingered them for two days. We’ve got nothing new to add.”

Fingered them. On keyboard. Torres was definitely old school cybercrime. He’d been about to call it “masturbating.” By the light flush coloring Samantha Blake’s cheeks, she knew it too.

I shuffled around the two back-to-back desks and crouched down before the DataScanVI. There was an Electronics Division sticker on the case, logging it as “evidence in place.” So ED had already looked it over for tampering, to see if someone had installed a wireless bridge on the sly. No joy on the third-party hack.

Samantha, keyboarded and neither she nor O’Rourke had visible jacks, but I had to double check. “Wireless?” I asked them, and they shook their heads.

Not surprising. Not on a cop’s pay, and the department would never spring for the new tech when the old stuff still hadn’t paid for itself. Not in the eyes of the upper brass. I’d have them scanned again, but I doubted I’d turn up anything.

Mind if I plug in?” I asked Torres.

A courtesy only, as the equipment was owned by the department. But you didn’t go plugging another man’s jack into your chrome without asking. And don’t go there.

“Top drawer,” he offered.

Never pointed out his desk. Didn’t have to. Even outside The System, it was the details-those little things I mentioned-that made the difference. In this case, his chair. A nice form-fitting tilt model designed to hold you in a semi-reclined position. He didn’t have much privacy, not even so much as the closet-cubicle I was allowed for hosting my virtual office uptown, but he did go in for comfort and safety. No sense letting your body fall forward with an involuntary twitch, impaling your cell or a piece of your coffee mug into the middle of your forehead.

I eased myself into the hugging material, liking the velour touch. Then opened his top drawer and pulled out the datajack on its thin cable. Like most, it was covered in a thin latex sheath meant to keep things clean. Okay, it was a condom. Extra-small. The department wasn’t about to pay for a custom-designed sheath, but it could have been worse.

The upper brass could have made us pick up our own extra-smalls at a local drugstore.

Without a warning glance at Curtis, and avoiding Samantha’s gaze altogether, I stripped the condom away and set the jack into the socket behind my ear. Immediately, I began to relax. Muscles going slack, and a pleasant buzzing in my ears as the endorphins kicked in to lull me in to a… let’s call it a receptive state. In a dreamy haze, I settled my hands down onto the chair’s arm rests and reclined back into a comfortable pose.

Then rocked forward.

Standing up (in The System).

I was back in the office I’d just left, only without the clutter of desks and without the jewel-tone walls closing in around me. Instead, walls were painted a pleasant beige, illuminated by a soft glow that seemed to pool up from the floor, and hung with a few art masterpieces I might have recognized from museums. That is, from movies that had been shot inside museums.

So I wasn’t an art buff. But still quite soothing, all considered.

The room remained ten-by-ten, held only by the single chair I’d just stood from and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the mirror. Mirrors were such a common physical interface between The System and reality that it didn’t surprise me at all. My office in the uptown precinct had one as well, and I was well trained in not looking until I was ready to unplug. There’s something disconcerting in watching yourself lolling back, often with a sliver of drool trickling down your chin, giving those phantom twitching motions you see dogs do when they are asleep and “chasing rabbits.”

Worse when you realize that there were several people in the room watching you do it.

Me and an empty room. Chair and a mirror. Some art. And the door. Right. I remembered the case file, which laid out the normal architecture of the datavault. Back through the door (which we’d used to enter) and I would instead be in a small virtual library. Complete with an electronic “card catalog” for maintaining the depository’s inventory as well as VD’s final casework. A drone-an artificially programmed personality-mocked up as a reference-section librarian was available for help. And bringing a “book” back through the door downloaded a copy to the DataScanVI’s auxiliary port.

Small. Ordered. Convenient.

I opened the door.

I’ll say this… I had been warned. Warned in the case file as delivered by IAB. And still, I was overwhelmed. The subtlety with which the perp had sabotaged us was staggering, really. I didn’t doubt for a moment that all the data was still there-the DSVI’s safeguards did not allow for erasure, ever-but it was all cunningly “lost” against the new interface.

The library had become an underground warehouse that stretched away from the suddenly-very-small door I’d stepped through for several miles. Three stories high, by estimation. Stacked floor to ceiling with shelves crammed full of nondescript wooden crates. Aisle upon row upon section. I shuffled along the smooth concrete floor looking to my left and right at the endless collection. There were lift-trucks for retrieving items off the very top shelves; one of the vehicles up on a stand for maintenance, and another leaking a small, spreading puddle beneath it that smelled of brake fluid. Every step sounded hollowly and then died without an echo. Even sound got lost in this immense room.

I chose an aisle at random and walked along, checking out crates. They were solidly built in the old-fashioned way, with real, heavy wood and nailed shut. Each was stenciled with an arcane system of numbers and letters, though not necessarily shelved by any kind of system I could easily discern. I knocked on a few, kicked hard against a few others. Nothing wrong with the physics program, as my big toe throbbed from the effort. I dug behind one stack, pulling out a small box that left a sliver of my thumb and sent me to sneezing from the gray swirl in dust I stirred up. Smashing it against the floor, I nearly laughed when a few dozen gold detective shields spilled out over the concrete walk.

Millions. Maybe billions of possibilities. So stunning, it took me until I’d turned back for the door to place the image. When I realized that no programmer could have quickly produced all this detail from raw design.

No. I recognized it now. This was right out of the Indiana Jones section of The System’s Studio Tours. Even if they weren’t on wireless or plugged in, millions of people walked through this “warehouse” every year by pulling on a VR helmet. You run from the giant rolling boulder (which was probably crated and stored in here somewhere as well), ride along in the big car chase scene, and then walk through the government warehouse from the end of the movie.

This was that warehouse.

And lost in here somewhere, right behind the Ark of the Covenant, would be our master inventory list and the key to opening all our VD casework.

I think that may have been when the glimmer of hope, the one I’d carried with me through most of the day, finally died.

It’s just another part of the problem, working Virtual Division. When you get right down to it, the work is a lot of number crunching and sifting through data. There aren’t any high-speed chases or running a suspect down on foot. No gun fights (though I can’t say missing out on those bothers me too much). And very few high profile arrests. We chip away against “black ice” or battle cyber ninjas. We rarely found anything worse than some low-stakes money laundering. Occasionally, we helped on a RICO subpoena, but OCD grabbed whatever glory came with those arrests.

It wasn’t impossible to get in trouble on The System. People did it everyday. Quite easily, in fact. What was difficult was getting in so much trouble that it justified a program that probably cost the city millions. Not when a keyboard jockey could do most of what a chromed detective could do.

So, escorted by Detective Curtis back to the uptown station, I did what any good detective does. I drank some coffee and I sifted data. Curtis fed it into me, the data that is, through barely civil conversation. And I tried to ignore his suspicious glances, which filled every quiet moment.

“Simply put,” he said as we paused outside my closet office, “the DA’s trial schedule is falling to hell and she’s going to blame us. There are three high-profile cases on the docket, including the serial killer Brendon LaChance, any one of which might go belly up because we can’t track the damn evidence. Chain of custody issues aside, we can’t find it all!”

“Uh huh.”

There was that avalanche building again. Growing heavy on his brow and starting to tumble down his face. “Something you might want to remember is that IAB is pretty damn fireproof. We don’t burn as easily as other divisions. In fact, we often do the burning.” He glared at me, long and hard. “I can serve up VD as easily as the next guy.”

With straight lines like these, I might seriously think about asking for permanent assignment with Curtis once this case was closed. There was some potential here.

“Have you come up with any new conclusions?” he asked.

“It must be Wednesday,” I said. Took another sip of my coffee. “Yep, there’s a hint of chocolate in there. Which means Claire at Espresso-Daily served me a double shot extra-light mocha. That’s my usual Wednesday poison. Fascinating, don’t you think? I hated coffee for so long. But chocolate, that I could handle. And I needed the caffeine buzz on Wednesdays to help get me through the week. A personal choice becomes so routine that now I take evidence of that routine as fact.”

“I meant about the case,” Curtis said. Tone, dark.

I shrugged. Opened the door to my closet. Inside was my own support chair and a condom-wrapped datajack. “Have you found any connection between LaChance or a defendant from any pending case and one of the suspects?” I asked. He shook his head. “Any financial incentive? Someone get a new car, or pay down their mortgage, or suddenly win big at the track?”

I knew the answers, of course. And he knew I knew them. Another glower. Another shake.

“So there is no high profile tap. No third-party hack. It’s not financial. And there’s no way this was accidental.”

“So what’s left?” Curtis asked.

Strike a pose: roll the lower lip back against the teeth, one finger tracing along the line of my jaw. The Detective. About to say something profound. So it wasn’t murder. There wouldn’t be any headlines in the morning. But it was still a crime, and we still had a job to do.

“Personal,” I told him.

Then I shut my closet door.

Plugging into my virtual office, I dialed up some atmosphere. Overcast and heavy showers. The street lamps outside penetrated the gray rain just enough to wash me out of the shadows. A great noir moment.

Minus the trench coast and beautiful dame.

I paced in front of those too-large windows, the kind of office I’d never have on the force except inside The System, and thought. Something I was missing…

Well, my coffee, for one. I’d left that on a utility shelf inside my closet. If I wanted to check the mirror on the back wall, I could see it. And myself, sitting easy in my chair, twitching. Not Bogey-style twitching-that purposeful tic that made him such a character. Chasing rabbits.

I thought about programming up some cigarettes. Or dressing the part in a beige trench coat and a felt fedora. Then logged in my drone instead. He entered through the door behind me, keeping far back in the shadows. Probably slouched. Against the wall or standing alone in the middle of the room, Sam Spade had a great slouch.

“It’s got you tied in knots, don’t it?” the drone asked. The click of an old-fashioned Zippo cover. The strike of the wheel and a hiss-crackle as he pulled a cigarette to life. “You wanted into this business. Never forget that.”

“It has to be an inside job,” I said, ignoring the banter. Counting raindrops as they splashed against the window glass. “Three good suspects. If there was a body, we’d have a great locked room mystery.”

“You still got one of those,” the drone said. “A locked room, I mean.”

Check. The warehouse was large. Impressively so. But it was still a closed box and only three people had access. Score one for the drone, with extra points for style. It was programmed to run the same probability matrices as standard software and to check my facts. But to do so in a conversational manner. It helped me think.

“The thing about it is this,” I said. “The trace evidence I need to prove who did it will be hidden against that same background programming. If I can find a unique programming signature, it will be as good as any fingerprint.”

The drone made a tchk sound. My guess it was accompanied by that twitching smirk I’d never perfected. Not even in The System. “Fingerprints will get you so far,” Sam agreed. “Me, I usually followed the money. Or the dame.”

“I don’t have either.” I tried not to sound petty. I could have cast Samantha Blake in the role, I suppose, but she really didn’t fit the part. The dame always came from outside.

“Then use what you do have. Look for what doesn’t belong, and you’ll have them.”

There was a sharp exhale and the smell of cigarette smoke blowing in from over my shoulder. I hate that smell, and could have filtered it out. But, like I said, it was the little things which made a difference in The System.

The little things…

Strike a pose: leaning into the windowsill, letting the whole world fall away behind me until it is lost on the blur of the camera’s eye. The filtered light from outside pools in my eyes. There is a soft patter against the window, as fat raindrops splash into droplets and leave silver-gray trails down the glass pane. It was raining in The City. A steady rain. Strong enough to wash the trash out of the gutters.

If I had thought to program some trash into the gutters to begin with.

The little things!

Ah, hell.

He was waiting for us, Detective Curtis and me, in the datavault office. Even though it was after hours. Even though he could have lit out and made a good run of it in the hours since we’d first come by.

Franklin Torres sat in his plush wraparound chair. Turned to face the door. The lights were dimmed, which I appreciated given the loud color on the walls. He raised a hand in casual salute as we entered.

“What gave me away?” he asked. No preamble. Not even a pretense of innocence. He knew we were back to make an arrest, and had never doubted, apparently, that we wouldn’t come for him.

I decided to let him keep his pride. As much as I could. “The artistry.” I told him the truth. “The little touches you left behind, because you couldn’t help yourself. The dust and splintering wood. The sound effects. They were all just a little bit better than a keyboard jockey would bother fingering in.

“But the unique trait which I’m sure will match up against samples of your previous work, our providence, will be the fluid slick building up beneath that lift truck. It’s what doesn’t belong. It’ll have your signature on it.”

“Yes,” he said. “That will do it.”

And he sounded a little surprised that I had keyed on it.

“Actually, when I realized you had smashed open that small box, I thought you’d have jumped at the gold detective shields. That was what got me exiled here, after all. The chrome detective squad. When System cops didn’t pan out as the next big thing, we were all but thrown away.” He reached up to tap the chrome jack hiding behind his right ear. “I was tired of being forgotten.”

Which was when Curtis stepped forward. Of course.

“But you will be,” he promised, the avalanche rolling down his hangdog face. “You and all the wire-heads. Eventually the entire department will be free of VD.”

I’m telling you. He’s a goldmine.

Strike a pose: leaning back in my swivel chair, feet up on the desk and hands clasped behind my head. Staring up at the ceiling to watch the ceiling fan push the thick, muggy air around the room. And that’s the way it went down. One man tired of being forgotten. Another resigned to it. Two side of the same coin.

Agent Curtis and IAB grabbed what little kudos there were to claim for the arrest. No one was going to thank Virtual Division, especially when it had been one of our own who had “abused the privilege.” You’d think I’d have learned by now. No one does us any favors.

But maybe I’m okay with that. Not learning, I mean. Because it’s that little glimmer of hope that comes with every case that still separated me from Franklin Torres.

And like I said, it’s the little things that matter.

Especially when you don’t get the beautiful dame.