But I’ll be more quiet if it’ll make them feel better.”
“Thank you,” is all Colin says. He knows what I used to do and I’m sure that he intentionally forgot it all. “Alright then,” Colin says goodbye, in his own way, and starts to leave.
But Maggie stops him by probing, “It’s probably not my place to ask, but I was wondering who your partner was talking to. It seems pretty intense.”
The three of us glance at Franko through the window of my office. He’s waiting, impatiently, at the far end of the space near the teleporter. And he doesn’t appear to be talking to anybody. Which Colin confirms, “He’s not talking to anyone. Our comm’s in the watch unit.” He holds up his left wrist and points with his right index finger at his BlackGlass standard issue comm-portal. The BlackGlass unit has everything that a cop needs. It’s the access point to Civil’s servers for every officer in the field. It’s a cop’s link to good faith judges for when warrants need to be issued on the fly. It continuously monitors vital signs and signals when an officer is in distress. It’s really just an advanced smart computer with holographic visual capability. And does a lot more. I never needed it because I developed CIBL.
Maggie shakes her head, “That’s not what I’m talking about.” Pointing to her head, she continues, “He has Nero-net, right? He has to. When I went to get the detector from storage, I saw how his face was twitching and moving a little. It’s just like when someone has Nero-net, when they talk to someone. Even though the conversation’s only in their heads, it shows through visual reflexes as if someone is talking out loud.” Maggie throws up her hands as she says, “Like I said, it’s not really my place. You would know if your partner had Nero-net, anyway. So maybe he’s just really constipated. By the way, not that you can see them in that cavern my boss calls an office, by the restrooms are over there.” Maggie points them out to Colin.
“Hehe, thanks. I’ll be sure to pass that on to my partner.”
I watch as Colin starts to cross the expanse, toward his partner. Maggie collects the detector and the bug. She places the bug in the box and follows Colin toward the front of the office space. I move to the glass windows of my office. When I’m sure no one can see, I close my eyes.
When I open them, my normally dark brown eyes emit a brilliant blue light. It’s an old trick that I haven’t needed to use in a while. When they’re like this, I can use my eyes to see through walls, or in this case people. If I focus, I can actually zoom in; zeroing in on my target. Concentrating, my mental image of Franko Sillas strips away the flesh and hair and bone and grey matter. What’s left are neuro pathways that show signs of recent activity.
Colin didn’t believe that Franko had Nero-net, because he doesn’t know that Franko has Nero-net. But Maggie was right. Well, her gut usually is, which is why I even bothered to scan Franko. Plus, Maggie knows a lot about Nero-net.
Before deciding to opt for inSight instead, she considered Nero-net. Maggie decided that Nero-net would be too invasive to install and believes that people who talk with Nero-net just look weird. And I bet the invasiveness of the procedure really had nothing to do with her decision. But with inSight, a nanite-saline solution is simply applied to the user’s eyes. Originally developed to restore one’s sight after injury or macular degeneration, the solution was recently found to have the potential to act as a visual interface for external devices. Because it was less invasive, inSight gained in popularity over Nero-net rather quickly.
But back to the matter at hand, after a year of being Colin’s partner, it seems odd that Franko would have kept something like Nero-net a secret. And being that Colin is a former colleague and still a friend, in a way, I would be remiss if I didn’t look into it further. Or I'll have CIBL look into it, since I’m busy with this case and it doesn’t present a life or death situation that needs dire attention.
I close my eyes and reopen them. They go back to normal. I see Colin asking if Franko is constipated and point out the restrooms. And I see Franko get offended and storm out. Turning back to my desk I call upon my AI. “CIBL.”
+ + + + + +
I give CIBL my new instructions and request to be notified when the results of my previous instructions to trace Caterine's device are ready. I know it’s a long shot. I said so last night. I’m not going to be able to find her. But I know there are people out there that are looking for her as well. Trying to find her may lead to finding them, so it’s a shot I gotta take.
In the meantime, I have a recently cleared crime scene to check out. The alley scene was recently reopened to the public, which means I can check it out. I set up notifications for stuff like that from the blotter, through a backdoor I installed while still on the force. I haven’t had a case where I needed to use it until now, but it comes in handy.
Even though the scene is reopened, it will still be between twelve and forty-eight hours before the clean-up crew comes in to completely sanitize the area. That doesn’t mean that Civil just leaves blood and other nasty bits everywhere. No. After the crime scene techs get all the evidence they need, there’s a wash up of the scene before it’s reopened to the public. But the cleanup is quick. That means there might be trace amounts of something, anything, that may lead me to the killers of both Mr. Payne and Mr. Burges. I had to force myself to stop referring to these men as ‘the prick’ and ‘the bum,’ for Maggie’s sake. She’d get pissed and hit me again if she knew.
As I head out of the office, I stop by Maggie’s desk. It’s weird when she accesses the net, and I really can’t tell a difference between inSight and Nero-net, myself. She looks every bit as ridiculous using her inSight as she claims Nero-net users look. The inSight interface covers the user’s eyes in layers of nanites, making the user’s eyes anywhere from a light shade of grey to pitch black depending on the opacity rating. When Maggie uses her inSight, her eyes always turn a dull, lifeless shade of grey. And when she moves her head about, as she’s doing right now in looking at me approach, it’s as if she’s blind. And no one’s blind anymore. “Don’t say it,” she commands, pointing at me with the right index finger of her black and hot pink gloved hands. Where the inSight interface only provides a visual display, the specially designed gloves allow a user to interact with what they are seeing. There are sensors in the gloves that act in much the same way as the thousands, if not millions, of sensors arrayed in most rooms that connect a user to the lite-screens or three dimensional models. And despite the dead look in my assistant’s eyes, it’s not as much of a nuisance as older bud or glass projection devices that project everything the user is looking at around their head. Life hits a new low when you’re on the subway and have to watch the porn that an old woman is watching, because she’s using a glass projection system. When was that, last week?
What was my point, other than the fact that old ladies can watch some weird stuff? Yea, that’s right, I didn’t have one.
“Fine,” I surrender, showing my hands. “Just contact me when you find anything promising.”
“Will do, boss,” she replies.
“Have you seen my umbrella?”
“In storage by the detector. But you don’t need it, you know.”
“Did you see what I was wearing this morning?”
Maggie throws up her hands at me in a stopping gesture, “Please, never bring that up again. Your ghostly legs should be forever lost to someone else’s imagination, and not burned forever into my memory.”
“Point taken. But I did get caught in the rain last night, and the news said it would rain today.”
Maggie shakes her head, as she turns back to her desk. “Just get the World Weather App, like the rest of us.” It’s a good point, except for the fact that I don’t want to. And the news and the app are supposed get their information from the same World Government sources. So how can the news always be wrong?
Doesn’t matter.
“Before you go,” Maggie says at me, wi
thout turning in my direction. “Civil found a secondary site. They think it might be connected with the murders of Mr. Burges and Mr. Payne, but it doesn’t say in the report,” she says while indicating with her hand something that I cannot see, because Maggie doesn’t like to use lite-screens, “what may have happened there. It’s something funny though. But so far, only the location is mentioned in Civil’s reports. I’ll send it to your comm.”
+ + + + + +
It’s noon now, and the sun is beating down. The world forgot about the world, during the Great Wars. And although things have stabilized with the climate in the century since, temperatures have reached a normal high year round. It’s not so bad, unless it’s the noon hour. For some reason the Earth Magnetic Field Generator can’t stop the full force of the sun’s rays. So between eleven thirty and twelve thirty every day, the temperature shoots up twenty degrees above that day’s norm. The World Government is continuously working on the problem, but the magnetic field isn’t as strong since it switched to magnetic south. It was a miracle that the world wasn’t destroyed when that happened, between the second and third Great War. Especially when humanity was too busy destroying itself to even care.
Luckily for me