Dervish Is Digital Part 3

The DA sat back, ignoring the way Ogada's chair groaned as she did. "Weren't you investigating some kind of brainwashing complaint in lowdown Hong Kong today, or was I misinformed?"

Konstantin shifted position, wishing she, too, could make a chair groan, or at least this one. "Well.

How reliable do you think your informant is?"

Featherstonehaugh turned to look at Ogada as if he knew something and then turned back to Konstantin, her friendly smile cooling on her broad, dark brown face. "I only mention it because there was some talk on the grapevine about a j.a.panese law enforcement officer being somewhat put out about an American technocrime investigator barging into an ongoing operation in one of the lowdown casinos."

"I can't admit to anything like that," Konstantin said, smiling back at her, "because you can't admit to anything in AR."

The DA stood up, transferring the a copy of the footage into her briefcase office. "Well, be smart, detective, and don't admit to anything outside of AR, either."

Konstantin had been planning to ring Taliaferro so she could tell him about the interlude in Ogada's office and ask him what he thought the DA had meant by her parting remark, but a freshly decrypted message was waiting in the inbox on her desktop. Probably a transcript from Ogada of what had just transpired -- Ogada's insistence on backing up all forms of information made him a one-man data tsunami. But when she opened it, a mult.i.tude of calla lilies blossomed on the screen, turned into fireworks, and then into a shower of flower-petal confetti. Of course; her j.a.panese friend with the bad cigarette habit.

Greetings from Lowdown Hong Kong! If you can read this, you have been officially tagged by East/West Precinct! We don't know who you are yet, but we will the next time you enter our jurisdiction, so be sure to say h.e.l.lo!

"East/West tagged you?"

Konstantin jumped. Celestine was reading over her right shoulder while DiPietro was pretending not to read over her left. "You know them?"

"Only by reputation," Celestine said. "I'd probably know more if you didn't keep loaning us to auto theft. More time for research."

"Then go do some research right now," Konstantin snapped at her. Celestine marched offobediently.

"This here," said DiPietro, tapping the lower left-hand corner of the screen, where a series of ideograms were flashing through a sequence Konstantin was barely able to discern as repet.i.tive, "this here is a trawler."

"Wonderful," Konstantin said. "How do you turn it off?"

"You don't. Instead, we give it what it's asking for -- information. We fill it full of junk mail. Hits capacity in half the time it would take if it was getting real information. Blows up real good."

Konstantin was impressed. "How real good?"

"Chain reaction follows a line back to the source via the trawler return path, burns up like a fuse.

Hits the source like a thunderbolt from G.o.d. They'll be picking p.o.r.n out of every blank s.p.a.ce between bits from now till their next pay raise. I like to call it 't.i.ts for Bits.'"

"You sent p.o.r.n to a j.a.panese law enforcement agency?"

"Oh, not just p.o.r.n. Feature-length videos on the complete range of life insurance policies in the early twentieth century, cooking Italian for beginners, excerpts from The Communist Manifesto, plus any other ads we had lying around in the buffers. This time. We try to vary it so that they can't fingerprint us by our junk mail." DiPietro looked pleased with himself. "There's never a shortage of p.o.r.n to send out, but the Manifesto was my idea."

"You do this often?" Konstantin asked, looking from the screen to DiPietro and back again several times, wondering if she'd be able to tell when something blew up real good.

"Oh, yeah, all the time. People are always tagging each other, hoping they'll hit someone important or famous. Or maybe a cop. That'd be the Big Casino, tagging someone and having them turn out to be the cops. But I got the junk mail idea from my grandmother. She used to tell me stories about this guy she knew, worked for one of those old oil companies -- what was the name? Something like Shoal. The whole world was always trying to tag them and this guy's job was, I swear to G.o.d, just to make up messages, encrypt them, and send them out steadily, all the time without stopping. So if anyone keeping track of the traffic patterns of going in and coming out would only see there was this constant buzz, like ambient noise. Guy went quietly nuts sitting at his desk there in Shoal Oil, or whatever it was. Sent out his entire autobiography, wrote complete novels that disappeared into the air." DiPietro let out a breath, looking nostalgic. "In her later years, Grandma came to believe that it had all just been floating around in the atmosphere, waiting for the right kind of receiver, which she also believed was her artificial heart. But that's another story."

Konstantin nodded. "Is that how your grandmother knew about him in the first place?"

"Oh, no," DiPietro said cheerfully. "He was one of her ex-husbands before she married my grandfather."

"Oh. Well, just don't tell me about him right now, I'm busy."

DiPietro looked surprised. "Who, Grandpa? G.o.d, why would I?"

TechnoCrime: What It Is, Why It's Different From Ordinary Crime, and Who's Going to Do Something About It.

An Overview of Online Crime From the Beginning Metaphysics, Mindgames, and Multiverses Konstantin paged through the screens of dense text at what she hoped was a plausible speed. The info dump had come from Ogada -- research he thought she'd find useful in the good fight (unquote) -- and he always attached a page-rate meter to make sure she read the stuff rather than skimming it at the speed of light and flushing it. Most of the stuff seemed to have come from seminars held at conferences she'd never heard of, probably for lawyers rather than law enforcement. In which case, she figured she could be excused for not understanding more than two words in five.

Abruptly, the text was replaced by the slightly sneering features of her recent j.a.panese acquaintance, making her jump. For a moment, she thought it was a real-time break-in but then the definition on the screen fuzzed in spots and she realized she was looking at a snip out of somesurveillance footage. And not a very long snip at that; perhaps five seconds of a sneer about to happen, looping over and over to the point of absurdity.

The frame shrank on the screen, then, and three stills appeared below it -- a very old man, a sulky youth who might have been the man's grandson, and a boy about nine, with the unmistakable grime and facial gang tattoos of a long-term street-rat. All of them were j.a.panese; no doubt they were all her j.a.panese friend as well.

"This is the guy that tagged you," DiPietro said from behind her. "The only name we can get on him is Goku, and only for the main face there. Any of him look familiar?"

"I'd say we'd met," Konstantin said, smiling grimly at the screen with half her mouth, "but I'm not supposed to admit to anything today."

"OK. Tomorrow, next week. No rush."

She flicked a finger at the street kid's image. "I don't like that."

DiPietro leaned in closer to the screen, frowning. "You don't like kids?"

"I don't like people who pretend to be kids. They're sneaky."

"Everybody's sneaky in AR," said DiPietro, sounding surprised.

Konstantin flicked the kid's picture again. "Yeah, but this is too sneaky. Shows a mind that's already too devious for its own good. Or anyone else's."

Now DiPietro was amused. "You know, not everyone who runs as a kid is looking to lure someone into a red-l.u.s.t lounge for blackmail."

"Prove it," Konstantin said flatly.

"What, now?"

"Tomorrow, next week. No rush."

"Keep me off auto theft and it could happen," DiPietro told her evenly and walked away.

She enlarged the kid face and studied it, trying to remember if she'd ever seen it, even just in pa.s.sing. Silly or not, she knew she'd never shake the feeling that there was something wrong with someone who affected a child's appearance in AR, even for purposes of undercover police work.

Maybe especially for that.

No, make that definitely, she thought, contemplating the cherry tattoo on the kid's left temple.

Three cherries attached at the stems, the old jackpot symbol supposedly the antique gambling machine symbol of a potential jackpot. If you got a certain number of them in a row, of course. How many had there been -- three? Five? More, even?

So could that have meant the street-gang would be arranged in cells of three? Or five, or however many. The number wasn't as important to Konstantin at the moment as simply knowing that at least one of the guy's aspects was literally networked up. She could send Celestine and DiPietro in to do the donkey-work of finding at least one of his faces.

She wrote up a duty memo for them and then buzzed Taliaferro.

"I'm surprised they let you get away with this," she said, looking around the empty expanse of rooftop. "I thought you had medication."

"I do," said the big man sitting on the overstuffed cushion under the large patio umbrella. "But it's one of those periods when the condition isn't paying attention." Konstantin found she couldn't shake the impression of Alice's caterpillar on the mushroom with a hookah, in spite of the fact that the cushion didn't look like a mushroom, Taliaferro didn't look like a caterpillar, and he wasn't smoking anything.

He moved over and patted the s.p.a.ce beside him. There was plenty of room; otherwise, she knew, her ex-partner wouldn't have made the gesture. Taliaferro's claustrophobia waxed and waned, responding well to medication at some times and almost not at all at others. Over the five years of their work partnership, Konstantin had become so accustomed to his headbugs that she hadn't noticed how much she'd been working around them until her rea.s.signment. Under the circ.u.mstances, she supposed she could have been excused for feeling nostalgic.

"So how did you persuade them to let you have a rooftop office?" she asked him. Taliaferro spread his hands over the souped-up archiver resting on his knees. "Don't ask, don't tell. Remember that one?"

"Not firsthand."

"Well, it's an uneasy truce. They don't ask me any questions, I don't volunteer any lies. They said be on the premises, I'm on the premises. Anyway, it's easier to think up here, even when my medication isn't c.r.a.pping out."

"I can believe that," Konstantin said, looking around at the jagged profile of the cityscape all around them. It was a profile that, outwardly, had changed very little in the last seventy years. The changes took place on the inside now, the s.p.a.ce rearranged, refitted, revised, having little if any effect on the exteriors. As if, Konstantin thought suddenly, there was some hostile, omniscient observer that humans were trying to fool into believing that absolutely nothing was happening, nothing at all, nothing going on here but the status quo, boss. Maybe this was the standard learned behavior of a society that had put itself under permanent surveillance. Disturbed, she shook the thought away.

"You're getting that unreal feeling again, aren't you?" Taliaferro said, watching her with an expression that wasn't quite amused.

"No, I think it might actually be hyper-real," she said honestly. "Or maybe I'm just getting agoraphobic."

Taliaferro actually paled with alarm. "I hope not. That would be some very serious warp in your woof."

Konstantin's other eyebrow went up. "Unlike claustrophobia, which is more normal?"

"As a matter of fact, it is," Taliaferro told her seriously. She gave him a look. "Well, it is. We come from a small, tight s.p.a.ce out into a world larger by a gazillion magnitudes. It's the natural progression of human life. But agoraphobia -- that's backwards. Agoraphobia is regressing, wanting to go from the large place back to the small one. Except that place will always be too small for a functioning human being. Definitely unnatural, if you see what I mean."

Konstantin found herself at a loss for words. "You know," she said after a bit, "that puts a whole new stripe on it that I find, frankly, unsavory. And disgusting. The world dodged a bullet the size of a cannonball when you pa.s.sed up psychiatry for police work."

Taliaferro was unoffended. "Told you, I'm a big Italian mama's boy. Nothing new there. What's new with you?"

"If you look in your inbox, you'll see," she said.

"Oh, you mean him?" The j.a.panese guy's faces appeared on the archiver's screen.

"Goku Somebody, or Somebody Goku."

"Goku Mura, of the infamous East/West Precinct," Taliaferro said smoothly. "He's what I believe is known in the trade as a 'barefaced liar.'"

"No s.h.i.t," Konstantin said admiringly. "How'd you turn that up?"

"Well, much as I would like to promote this as a work of intuitive genius on my part, the I Ching warned against ma.s.saging the truth this week. So I have to admit that this is apparently a common practice among the East/West gang. Or more specifically, among the j.a.panese members. Which, when you think about it, only makes sense."

Konstantin frowned at the screen, saying nothing. "Is this practice getting more widespread?"

"Among the j.a.panese, or in general?"

"Either."

"Representations of real people have been on the increase," Taliaferro told her, dividing the archiver screen so he could put some kind of chart next to Goku Mura's face. "At present, the dumb-brute bookkeeping data indicates that within most formally organized metropolitan areas, real-person representations run from a low of thirty percent to a high of fifty percent."

"Where do they get that kind of information?" Konstantin asked.

"Dumb-brute," said Taliaferro. "Hotsuit survey software. It doesn't match the real-person to the real person in any traceable way, it just sends a yes-or-no."

"Sends it where?" "City census. They use the demographics to place advertising more effectively."

Konstantin burst out laughing. "I keep forgetting about advertising. Product placement. I swear. If we knew half of what advertising knows about people--" she sobered suddenly. "Jesus."

"Yeah, even a lot of cops wouldn't want to live in that kind of police state," Taliaferro said.

The solemn tone in his voice made Konstantin wince. "That's why it's giving me a good old-fashioned case of the creeps to ask you what I'm about to ask you."

Taliaferro lifted an eyebrow at her. "And that would be?"

"Tag me, in real-time. Can you do that?"

He stared at her for a moment and then laughed. "Can I tag her, she wants to know. Pal, when I tag you, you'll be so tagged that even death will not release you."

Konstantin wasn't smiling. "I'll be holding you to that."

"You do realize, though," Taliaferro said, sobering, "that I can't go in and pull you out if you get into trouble or anything like that."

"Where I'll actually be is in a little room in a hotsuit."

"I know. And I'm not going in any little rooms to get you out."

"Fine. Pull a fire alarm, then, I don't care. I just want an independent back-up monitoring everything I do online."

"Any particular reason?"

"One of this Goku Mura's online faces is a child. You know how I feel about that. And why."

Taliaferro nodded. "Yeah. I guess there are some things that make it worth the invasion of privacy."

"'Privacy.'" Konstantin frowned more deeply and made a show of scratching her head in exaggerated confusion. "What's 'privacy'?"

Taliaferro lifted the other eyebrow. "You're soaking in it."

By the time she would have been finishing up the lunch she had forgotten to eat, Konstantin was 'suited up and watching the TV wall in her virtual office.

Konstantin thought the virtual office was probably the best feature of the whole technocrime-fighter-in-AR thing. Its television wall could show many different small flatscreens, or one very large, very detailed, high-res scene. She could switch it from one mode to another with a shrug while keeping an eye on the dataline and sorting her inbox.

This afternoon she was rotating the one hundred most popular ARs on the wall, more for the company of the sound than for any useful purpose. Noisy wallpaper, Taliaferro called it, resorted to by the inept, the alienated, and the doomed. But then, Konstantin reasoned, Taliaferro hated walls to begin with, so there was no use trying to sell him on wallpaper. On the other hand, she thought, scanning the screens with a little bit of a lost feeling, it might have been more constructive to try to articulate, at least to herself exactly what she thought she was doing in trying to watch so many different ARs at once.

Maybe nothing more than appear busy in case Ogada ever decided to look in on her.

She was about to open her inbox when she heard a soft chime. It took her a moment to remember it was a request for access. Ogada, already? Taliaferro, letting her know he was on the job via a puppet?

Or maybe her j.a.panese friend, the one who part-timed as a kid for no good reason?

"Anybody home?" came Celestine's voice after a few moments.

"Sorry, access granted. Or come in, whatever works." Konstantin was amused to find she was slightly disappointed that it wasn't the j.a.panese guy. She'd been waiting for a chance to tell him what she thought of fake children.