Thursday, July 5—09:22:28
“But, sir, she said they were going to Eden.”
Captain Brooks stared at us. His smooth dark skin was marred by a thick keloid scar where his left eyebrow should have been. His old-school beard made him look like a baseball player from the teens or maybe one of the old hipsters, but without the good coffee or a baby on his shoulders.
09:22:41.
Jennifer swiped the back of her wrist across our forehead. “It’s going to be a hot one again, sir.” She smiled.
Captain Brooks did not smile back. He was third in the hierarchy of the MPD’s First District. Particularly since the district boundaries changed a decade ago, it is the most prestigious of them all.
A few months ago, Jennifer had told Les that she had heard a rumor that Captain Brooks had once laughed at a joke.
Les had said, “Not in my time.”
“Smiled?”
“Let me think.” Before he could take another breath, he added, “Nope. Not that either.”
“Act nice?”
Les said, “Forget it, Jen. He’s a badass hard ass.”
“I swear, he’s putting it on.”
“Yeah and I’m …”
“What?”
“Fuck if I know.” Les had looked around as if he was going to discover his missing metaphor, but shook his head and returned his gaze to her. “Listen, Jen. Just quit sucking up to him.”
“I’m not—”
“Jen, you’re my friend.”
“I hate when people start a sentence that way.”
“Your problem is you never stand up for yourself.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“I mean it. Don’t forget, you’re Cobalt Blue.”
He sometimes called her Cobalt. He said Jen was too pedestrian. As with any good nickname, it played on her name and physical features. Jen B. Lu, Chinese woman with extraordinary blue eyes, became Jen Blue. And at some point, Les decided she needed some playful ramping up and rechristened her Cobalt Blue. Superhero stuff. She said, “My eyes aren’t actually cobalt blue. And even if they were, that nickname is absurd.” But damn if she didn’t smile inside.
“Stop letting everyone push you around,” Les had said.
“Screw him. That better?”
“Much,” Les had replied.
Nevertheless, she did keep trying, or at least it seemed that way to me. Nothing too gushy. No boxes of chocolates. I couldn’t figure it out, though: both her oxytocin and cortisol levels spiked when she was around the Captain. Love and fear, comfort and anxiety, all mixed together in a voodoo stew. He’s a gruff sort of man, but every last one of the officers, Les included, trusts him and respects him, even if most of them don’t like him.
Jen is one of the few who likes him and wants him to like her. It’s one more human mystery that wasn’t programmed into my lines of code.
Anyway, I reminded her once again what Les had said. A fresh surge of cortisol gushed from her adrenal gland. But damn if it wasn’t aimed at me. Fuck off, she said to me, but I felt her vocal cords loosen to a lower register right before she spoke again.
“Sir,” she continued, this time more businesslike. Dropped the pleading tone and small talk about the weather. “This is the first outright confirmation I’ve had.”
“What kind of confirmation you got? She going to give you an address for Eden? Directions?”
“I told you, she died.”
He shot her a hard stare.
“Sir.” Defiance waning.
“Then I suppose, Jen, you still don’t have a thing. And you know—”
“I have a lead.”
“—why you don’t?” He stared her down in the way he must have done back when he was busting kids for shoplifting. “Because Eden’s all made up. A nutbar fantasy.”
“I don’t think so.” Weakly said.
“I don’t pay you to think.”
Jennifer thought, He’s watched too many tough-cop movies.
“Of course you pay me to think … sir.”
“What do you want?”
“To look into this Eden business.”
“No. And let me tell you again what I want.” He rubbed the knuckle of his thumb over the thick scar. “I want you to do your job and stop bothering me with this Eden crap.”
Even right then, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell the captain was going to get what he wanted.
Lunch break. Keep her mitochondria chugging. We met up with Zach. Jen told me to shut up.
I listen. I learn.
I wondered if he even knew about me.
No, I heard back.
You know, I’ll be living with him, too, in a few months.
Clam up.
She and I are part of a trial run. They’ve selected eighty cops in DC for a three-year trial. As secret as they can make it inside the police department, which is kind of like saying as clothed as they can keep a strip joint. Absolutely no publicity outside, though; some rumors, but that’s about it. No one is allowed to tell spouses or friends. Hence, Zach doesn’t have a clue I’m eavesdropping on every sweet thing he says when I’m turned on and we’re together.
Only the beginning of the month and Jen’s lunch budget was already toast—burnt to a crisp because of the docked pay. She unwrapped a sandwich of pink tub-meat that tasted of seagull and a flap of lettuce with the consistency of wet toilet paper. We ate, then headed down an alley at 12:22:01.
Zach reached for her hand. “You allowed to hold hands on duty?”
“Lunch time.” Jen laughed.
“I can’t wait for you to see their store.”
“You sure these guys are legit?”
Zach said, “Hey, would I want to get you in trouble?”
“I’m already in trouble up to my ass.”
“Your gorgeous ass.”
“Bad guys spot us a mile away.”
“I told you—” But we’d already reached the door.
Old brick building, a tall one-story. Sunflower solar panels decked the roof—building permit was in order—but the rest of the place seemed to date from when Lincoln was president.
Jen said, “God, it looks like they made buggy whips here.”
I said to her, No, they made—
But she snapped at me, I told you to keep quiet.
Zach ushered us inside.
It was a high-ceilinged room. Except for a few windows way up and shelves at the back, three walls were totally covered by a display of tools and machines arrayed in amazing patterns and colors: typewriters of every vintage, sewing machines, transistor radios, hand-cranked adding machines, abacuses, electric mixers, toasters, a gizmo for milking cows, vibrators, electric drills and handsaws, wood-handled chisels, hammers, screwdrivers, clunky plastic telephones, colored pencils, paintbrushes, can openers, and wire whisks. As we watched, objects moved up or down, left or right, as if the walls were giant Rubik’s cubes. Shapes created patterns, patterns split apart and reshaped by object, color, or size, and then fell apart to form others linked by theme. Good times.
Never before had I felt Jen’s mind go completely still. We were gawking, drinking in the whole thing, but it was as if her mind was so flooded that she couldn’t register a thing.
She whispered to Zach, “You said this was a computer store.”
“Look,” said Zach, pointing straight up. Square Japanese paper lanterns, made of thin white rice paper mounted on balsa wood frames, covered the whole ceiling. Each glowed pastel shades from a light tucked inside: warm yellows, a robin’s-egg blue (not that we had many robins left this far south), a flamingo pink.
Right behind us, a woman’s voice said, “Repurposed OLED phone displays.”
We hadn’t even noticed any people, but now we looked around. Sitting at workbenches were maybe twelve or fourteen people assembling or repairing computers and phones.
A gray-haired woman came over to us, and Zach introduced Jen to Mary Sue. “Watch,” she said, and then, “Ceiling, do starry night for Zach and his friend.”
The windows turned opaque. What had been yellow and blue became a nighttime sky like I’d only seen pictures of: a quarter moon and the Milky Way sweeping across the heavens.
“Damn it, Mary Sue,” someone screamed in the half-dark. “I just about soldered my fingers.”
With a command, she returned the sky to those Degas shades of yellow, pink, and pale blue.
While Zach talked to Mary Sue about buying a used tablet, we gazed at the changing patterns of machinery and gadgets on the walls. Jen silently picked out objects and guessed which way they were going to shift. I was certain I detected a code that used the colors of the machinery and positions on the grid to signify letters of the alphabet. But it was gibberish in every language I knew, and I concluded my secret code was coincidence.
We wandered along the aisles of the workspaces. No one objected and some folks smiled and said hi. Except one woman over to the side, speaking softly on the phone. She had thick black hair pulled into a long braid that snaked down her back like a sleeping python. No emotion flickered on her face as she studied Jen, but she turned off the tablet she’d been scribbling on.
“What the hell was that?” Jen asked. We were back outside, standing against sun-warmed brick.
Odd vibes coming from Jen, as if she was suddenly off balance.
“Cool, huh?” Zach said.
“Maybe.”
“Just maybe?”
“It was all, I don’t know …”
“They’re smart, creative, and work incredibly hard.”
I caught the pulses zapping back and forth as she formulated a joke in response, but these stopped. It was clear she was feeling uncomfortable, as if Zach was yanking her further into a world she was simultaneously fascinated by and suspicious of.
Boss, it’s 12:55:03.
“Got to run.”
We weren’t back on a scooter for even a minute before she asked me who those people were.
“Zombies,” I said.
“Oh, funny.”
“No, that’s what they named themselves. They love all that dead technology on their walls.”
“Why?”
“No idea.”
Zach had already explained and Jen had already bristled at the weirdness of it. It was a co-operative; members owned it together. They shared work, decision-making, and profits. They were linked up with other co-ops, each with a specialty. Korea and China: screens. Chicago: motherboards. One in the Basque region made nano fans and electrical connectors. Ones in Toronto, Stockholm, and Oakland focused on software. Some co-ops had hundreds of members; the Basque ones had thousands. Many were tiny. They shared and traded among themselves and then sold to the public. Their hardware was always a year behind the international giants, but they bragged their software was equal or superior. No advertising, no bloated salaries, no private jets, no payoffs to shareholders, no lobbying, so their machines sold for half the price.
“When you buy one,” Zach had said, “they quote you a range of prices for each computer or phone and let you decide how much to pay.”
“And?” Jen had said.
“Apparently most people opt for the higher end of the range.”
“Jesus.”
She hadn’t asked Zach how much he was going to pay for a reconditioned tablet. I didn’t think she wanted to find out.
We spent the rest of the day slogging through a ton of paperwork from the previous night’s shooting of Delmar and Odette Johnson. Funny that humans keep expressions like that. Paperwork. Maybe they are all nostalgic, like the Zombies. Or maybe stuck on words. Or maybe lazy, and hadn’t found time to come up with a new one. Anyway, Delmar Junior was downstairs in a cell, cooling his heels and complaining about his bandaged hand. It was fifty–fifty whether the charges would be dropped because of the elder abuse he’d suffered from his parents refusal to exit.
Right before she left for the day and switched me off, Jen opened the top right drawer of her shared desk. One of the entry cards to the Johnsons’ apartment was tucked inside a plastic bag—not evidence of anything, just kept in case we needed to go back in. I saw the word Eden float into her head before she could block me. She picked up the bag and slowly rubbed the slippery plastic over the card. I knew what she was thinking, and I didn’t like it one bit.
She didn’t seem to like it much either. A lifetime of obedience kicked in.
She dropped the plastic bag back into the drawer, pushed it shut with the side of her leg, and headed for the exit, where she turned me off for the night.
At 13:19:05 the next day, Captain Brooks appeared at the squad door and tossed nine words into the room: “Joint briefing with drug squad. Top of the hour.”
Our unit mate Amanda rolled her eyes at Jen and Les and popped a small bubble of pink gum. As Brooks turned to leave, Hammerhead called to him. “Why we’re meeting them again so soon?”
Jen tensed.
Brooks turned slowly around and glared at him. “Because I said we are.”
Lots of good opportunities for me to learn social graces when I work with these folks.
The drug squad—officially the Narcotics and Illegal Pharmaceuticals Enforcement Unit, but even Brooks isn’t a big enough dick to say that each time—focused on the usual illegals, plus street metaopioids and other meds. It was the latter two that led to meetings with us twice a year. The Elder Abuse Unit wouldn’t be mistaken for social workers, but busting people for possession of a heart medication wasn’t exactly our thing.
We settled back into work. My people here: Jen, Les, Hammerhead, Amanda, and their synths. Les, full of caution and a sprinkling of camp humor. Hammerhead on the thick side: big thick fingers and a big thick skull that left little room for intellectual wattage, but he’s as soft as a puppy with the old folks. Amanda had been a star in every high school sport ever invented, even if all that was left of those days was the bubblegum she incessantly smacked away on like a first baseman.
Oh, yeah, there was Brittany. That is, until she got her test results a month ago and took medical leave. She has rapid onset spongiform encephalitis, which is ripping through fifty-year-olds. No explanation of the cause, but heaps of speculation. The chemical soup humans are bathing in? Wi-Fi pumping from every device into every cell? God’s revenge for whatever God should be revenging? Regardless, ROSE is nasty, fast, and slicing away an astounding sixteen percent of fifty- and sixty-year-olds and three and a half percent of folks in their forties. The ones whose parents didn’t exit and so didn’t get the modified treatment, that is. I hope Brittany will make it back.
At 13:55:48, I reminded Jen we needed to hoof it downstairs to the meeting room. She told the others. Hammerhead said, “Thanks, Mom.”
Boyden, Gendra, Murph, and the Card were already there when we showed up. Gendra—whom we all call the Starlet—said, “This your idea to waste our time?” She flicked her head to toss a stream of blonde hair away from her face. The Starlet was always flicking her blonde hair this way and then glancing around to see if a casting director had caught her Hollywood moment.
Les said, “Nah, I just wanted to score some coke from you for the weekend.”
The Card cleaned his nails with an evil-looking, black-bladed knife and said, “And what? Pay for it with contraband Depends?”
Amanda blew a pink bubble that expanded until it popped like a firecracker.
Murph said to Jen, “How’re you enjoying probation?”
Jen said, “How’re you enjoying being an asshole?”
Murph said, “Make nice, Jenny. You wouldn’t want any of us complaining about you, would you now?”
There’s this thing humans do that reminds me of dogs baring their big yellow teeth at each other to show how fearless they are, and then sniffing each other’s asses to show they’re cool with whatever goes down. Mainly men, but women in places like this are in the game too.
Brooks came in, tailed by a uniformed woman with lieutenant stripes and hair so flaming red I thought Brooks had set her on fire. Next came two men decked out in suits, one seersucker blue, one gray—the suits, not the men. Gray Suit must have been in his fifties, Seersucker younger.
Catch that, Jen said. These days, few men seemed ready to sweat it out in a suit jacket, although Seersucker’s had the more ordinary short-sleeve jacket. And ties. Just about never see that.
They sat down without introducing themselves.
Captain Brooks tried to sound at the top of his game. He gestured toward the woman. “Lieutenant McNair is from headquarters. Our colleagues here are from the DEA. They want to—”
Seersucker Suit cut him off. “I wouldn’t quite put it that way.”
Brooks hadn’t yet put it any way.
“We’re hoping to have an informal chat,” Seersucker continued. “We’re doing the same with key people like you in all the stations. Uh, I wonder if you folks wouldn’t mind turning off your phones.”
I’d once met a synth who worked with a guy like this. He was the type who wore fluffy blue mittens with a couple of steel-gray crowbars tucked inside. It never took long before the mittens came off. Seersucker’s aw-shucks request was delivered with a certainty that this wasn’t negotiable. Everyone took out their phones and switched them off.
“And I understand all of you here have AI.”
How does this guy know? Jen said to me.
We all looked at once to Brooks, who seemed equally surprised.
Brooks said, “Can’t do. They’re punched in. On the job.”
Lieutenant McNair spoke for the first time. “Then turn off their comm function. Think your boys and girls can handle that, Captain?”
I’ve never heard a lieutenant put down a captain. A new damn thing every day around here.
She turned to us and said, “That’s an order from my inspector.” And she shot her gaze back at Captain Brooks. Boss dog had barked.
Captain Brooks looked away. He ran his thumb over his scar.
Then Seersucker Suit got all warm and fuzzy again and uttered a few more hush-hush words about what’s said in this room stays in this room—“That sound alright with you?”—and turned to Gray Suit.
Gray Suit was rather extraordinary. Where Seersucker had the regulation clipped hair and McNair’s had edges that could slice your hand off, Gray’s hair—the same color as the matte-gray gun we’d snatched off this Italian guy thirty-four days ago—was fashioned into a short, intricate braid that reached his suit jacket. His face was completely tattooed with black geometric patterns. He seemed completely at ease. He was a big man, not particularly tall, but about as wide as an industrial refrigerator. He had surprisingly well-kept hands, manicured nails and all. They rested on the table, folded like he was a mortician at a Thanksgiving dinner and ready to lead us in prayer.
How old? Jen asked me.
Hard to tell with the tattoos. I studied his eyes, but his irises were so dark and deep it was like trying to spot a black rattlesnake on a moonless night.
How old? Jen asked again.
Not sure. Mid-fifties.
He spoke.
Where’s he from?
Maori. New Zealand. South Island. With a whisper of a Swiss-German accent.
As he talked, his calm gaze rested on each man and woman for one short sentence before moving on to the next, like he was an automatic shooga-shooga-shooga lawn sprinkler that dispensed quiet authority instead of mere water.
“Thank you for taking time to meet with us.” His eyes moved to the next person. “Something new is hitting the streets.” Next person. “We need to stop it before it gets a foothold. In fact, we need to stop it before any more people hear about it.”
There was no drama in his delivery. His very presence assured you he was expressing an undebatable truth.
“It appears that someone is producing a highly restricted pharmaceutical.”
His calm eyes met those of each woman and each man.
We waited.
“We’ve had reports that someone is manufacturing and distributing a counterfeit version of the treatment,” he said.
Even his calm authority couldn’t stop the room from blowing up. For the Big Pharma consortium that produced it, the longevity treatment in both its original and stripped-down forms was a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It was also enormously complex to produce. This wasn’t a drug you fried up in your basement—a hundred university chemistry labs couldn’t come anywhere close. Knowledge and expertise were compartmentalized among the companies, giants like GPRA and Xeno/Roberts/Chu. Each was responsible for separate compounds and parts of the process. Technical secrets were also compartmentalized, and closely guarded. The steps carried out in the United States or France, China or England, India or Switzerland, were a complete mystery to the other partners. Each batch had an individual protein marker and could be traced. Raw materials, machinery, compounds, and the finished product were handled by a secret and frequently rotated fleet of planes and trucks. Only three clinics in all of the US dispensed the full treatment, and even the modified treatment was administered in heavily guarded clinics. To imagine someone having the knowledge or ability to replicate the treatment was impossible. Even imagining someone busting into the distribution process in anything but a one-off seemed impossible.
Gray Suit listened to the volley of questions. He didn’t interrupt anyone even as everyone interrupted each other. But when he said, “Let me try to answer,” a hush blanketed the room.
“No, we have no samples. The rumors point to an abbreviated version of the treatment, like the one that goes with exit, but we cannot be certain. The first report came from Richmond three weeks ago. The second report was from here two weeks ago.
“We have no leads. So far, nothing has popped up on social media. No telephone echoes. Nothing but rumors.
“We’re moving quickly. As of last Wednesday, we’ve had an interagency task force. As you can see, I’ve been liaising with DEA—”
He’s not drug enforcement.
“—and many others. We mean to stop this.”
Jen raised her hand like she was a school kid.
“Yes?”
“I’ve heard stories not really about this, but someplace called Eden. Is there any chance this is connected?” Jen forced herself not to look at the captain, certain he’d be glaring at her.
Gray Suit said, “We’ve heard those stories too. Anything is possible, but those are fairy tales. This just might be real.”
He looked around the room, his eyes targeting each person in turn.
“And please remember, we don’t want you mentioning this to anyone. Not your mother, husband, wife, fellow officer, barber, or priest.”
The Starlet said, “Why not?” She didn’t even bother flicking her blonde hair away.
He smiled slyly. “Because I don’t ask questions like that to the person who gave me the order.”
The Starlet persisted. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot. How will we hear anything?”
Lieutenant McNair spoke. “You will listen. You will watch. You on the drug squad will ask your snitches if they’re hearing about anything new. You abuse people will watch for unusual behavior.”
She turned to Gray Suit.
He looked at his watch.
Meeting over.
Ten minutes later, Jen and I went upstairs to Captain Brooks’s office, didn’t find him there, and returned to the meeting room. We were just around the corner when we heard the door open. She stopped.
We heard Gray Suit speaking, his voice not loud, as if he’d turned back into the room. But it was distinct enough to hear.
“Do we have to worry about the woman?”
Captain Brooks’s response was louder, as if he was facing the door. “Which one?”
We couldn’t clearly make out Gray Suit’s reply, but it seemed to be, “Who asked about Eden.”
Captain Brooks dropped his voice. “Jen Lu? She’s nothing. Absolutely fucking zero.”
My boss tumbled into a black hole.