VRTP://INTERPOL.GOV/EVIDENCE-CONTROL.VR
Once they were settled on the park bench, Anselmo hosted their dive into Sensorium, starting with a port to @Interpol’s vestibule. Rubi’s implants created a mirage of a tidy government cube farm: desks, shareboards, and a window view of greentowers and a river, nothing too unique or distracting. All it was missing, she thought, was a few bluebottle flies decaying on the sill, and maybe the scent of soured ink and musty paper. As this thought settled, her imagination (or, perhaps, a lingering trace of her preferred Sensorium buy-in med, Conviction) supplied that last aromatic blank.
The back wall of the office presented as an old-fashioned bank of three elevators, with brass doors and big dials. The design communicated civil authority with a touch of Art Deco sensibility. Institutional but not forbidding, it projected an air of competence.
As Rubi tooned in, her defaults coordinated with the environment, opting for one of her professional skins. She manifested wearing a navy blue suit: jacket, slacks, pumps, topped with a gold honeycomb necklace that echoed the hexagon of beads worn at her temple.
Anselmo’s toon wore jeans, a white shirt, and a leather jacket, with a shoulder holster under the coat. His dark hair was longer than IRL, and he had just enough five o’clock shadow to seem roguish.
He routed Rubi through a standard trigger-warning waiver before pressing the button on the leftmost portal, as if it were a solid elevator. Words impressed themselves into its brass doorplate: Witness statement/ reconstruction, case #ISA5773, Javier.
“Ten seconds,” the elevator said. “Nine, eight…”
“Hold on,” Anselmo said, retaking the seat beside her.
“Two, one, zero.”
His office walls ran like melted wax. They shrank inward, closing in to simulate the passenger cabin of a truck.
“What’s this?”
“Sensorium footage from the automated driver of the vehicle,” Anselmo said.
Rubi checked the time stamp on the shareboard. Three months ago. Same time Luce’s social cap began its nosedive.
“Your primary witness is…?”
“A farm truck, oui.”
It was a battery-powered two-ton, laden with crisp green beans, doodling through bucolic, hilly terrain. Its hood canted downhill, descending.
Rubi checked geotagging: the simulation had been captured as the truck headed to Rome.
Sheep pasture and vineyards, bounded by low rock walls, stretched to the horizon, where their edges pixeled into gray-green hash. A blurry school of uniformed kids wielding litter collection tools resolved in the distance. A tag showed they were one kilometer out; it counted down meters as the truck got closer.
The blur at the rough edge of the simulation tugged at Rubi’s consciousness. Since getting implants as a teen, she had accommodated to seamless Sensorium dives. But today she had planned to stay on the surface, fleshing around in Paris. Her blood levels of buy-in drugs were barely above maintenance.
“There’s a MethodAct patch in your satchel,” Crane said, as Rubi checked and closed her meds-management app.
“I don’t need the full experience of … whatever this is,” she subbed. Her fingers roamed the surface of her satchel all the same, shifting the weight of her gaming baton in the bottom of the bag.
The bean truck rattled around a curve. All normal, nothing to see here.
They swerved, violently.
Rubi gritted her teeth. She didn’t care for racing and air combat sims. Happy as she was to fight on the ground, she had never gone in for the jerk and tumble of vehicular warfare, the agonized soundscape of metal cages rolling and crashing.
A real accident will be less intense. Remember Anselmo’s police raid? That was no werewolf throwdown …
Nevertheless, her breath came short as the truck’s wheels ground on the edge of the crumbling road. It shuddered and tipped in what felt like slow motion.
“The driving app steered into the slide,” Anselmo said. “Textbook move. Everything to spec.”
Rubi mojied thumbs-up. “That wasn’t so—”
“Attends—”
The wheel jerked. Instead of stopping, they shot forward, over the edge. Metadata in her peripheral showed the driver reporting the accident in realtime. Beans spilled from crates in dull, thudding streams of green.
She gritted her teeth.
One hard jounce, then two. Would they roll?
No, not quite.
The truck plunged into the ditch, sideswiping a wind-powered carbon scrubber. A whirl of tags, as they passed, showed the scrubber sending out maintenance tickets and incident reports.
They plowed into a tree. Metal crunched. The truck bucked. Stopped.
Rubi let out a shaky laugh.
A bird scolded, somewhere nearby. The truck’s helix ran damage reports, requested drone flyover, and tried to pull supplemental witness footage from a far-off country traffic cam. It called its insurance provider, filed a compensation note for the bean farm, and added a gig request for a live crew in another truck, people who might sort the spilled produce, salvaging something for market.
A sound …
“What’s that hum?” Rubi asked.
“Wait for it.”
A tree branch angled like a giant’s elbow dropped onto the crash-jagged hood with an enormous, windshield-shattering crash. Rubi squeaked and raised her fists—even without any Conviction in her veins, it made a good jump scare. And there was more: a wasp’s nest the size of a beach ball had been crooked in the arm of the tree branch.
The nest shattered, exploding into winged fury.
“Pause,” Anselmo said. Infuriated insects hung in midair, shining in the sunlight, each set of wings a blurred halo of amber.
Wasps. Just outside Rome. Rubi swallowed. “This event … this case. Is it what I’m thinking? The epinephrine failure?”
Anselmo nodded.
Her hands clenched again, over the baton. Luce, how much trouble are you in?
“Slow reverse,” Rubi ordered. The bugs coalesced back into the branch, which rose off the hood of the truck as the windshield restored itself. They bump-bump-bumped up the hill, climbing backward to the moment of that first swerve.
“Pause.” She stepped out to the road, examining the pavement, the wheels. The gravel was pixelated, lacking verified footage. Could there have been something spiky there?
Like what? A wayward piece of antique barbed wire? An IED? French resistance booby traps?
She pushed that away: this wasn’t playtime.
“Tires were intact when mechanics arrived,” Anselmo said, crushing the unspoken hypothesis. “No blowout.”
“I don’t get it. Why’d we divert?” Rubi zoomed in on the hanging wasp nest on the rotten branch, ripe and waiting to fall.
Anselmo restarted the sim. They stood on the hill, watching as the truck rammed the tree. The nest fell, broke. The wasps swarmed the school. The children all bolted for a nearby irrigation ditch.
All, that was, but for two unlucky kids and a teacher who’d popped anaphylactic reactions to the stings.
Rubi remembered newscycle from the accident inquiry. Investigators had been unable to determine how the systems on their transport rebooted, locking both the bus door and its onboard first aid kit. They just knew that before anyone could break the latch and deploy the epi pens within, the teacher and one of the kids had died.
“I don’t need to see the rest,” she said, and everything froze again.
Beyond the paused sim, out on the surface, the breath of the Seine brought up chills on Rubi’s arms.
A dead child.
Could Luce be a suspect?
Was the Department of Preadolescent Affairs involved?
Anselmo said, “The truck claims it swerved to avoid goats.”
“There’s goats?” She turned a slow circle, seeing a few distant sheep.
“Non. No goats, fox, deer, or ravens. No shadows or specks on the cameras. All area livestock and the farm’s sheepdog are licensed, tagged, accounted for. But the truck ran its oncoming obstruction subroutine, tick tick tick like clockwork, as if the goat was … there.” He pointed. A spectral goat appeared, head down and charging the truck. “And again, where the driver almost regained control.”
This would amount to manslaughter. “You think my client made the truck hallucinate so it would crash?”
“Hacked the driving software, miss,” Crane corrected.
“Figure out how bad this is, in legal terms,” she subbed to the sidekick. “Does it qualify as terrorism?”
She almost missed Anselmo’s reply to her question: “Monsieur Pox was supposedly in the area, but we cannot verify him on camera.”
Two dead. Hacked locks.
If Luce had tampered with that first aid kit, no wonder they’d come for him with sniperbots.
Thinking of the tranq platform made her shudder. “Can we go?”
“Bien sûr.” Anselmo snapped his fingers. Italian farmland faded as her implants gave her back to the surface. The two of them were flesh, once again, seated on a bench near the Seine. His expression was, once more, schoolmaster-severe.
Around her, as the illusion of Italy faded, was the familiar, never-before-seen sight of present-day Paris. Her childhood playground, her dream destination, scene of her greatest triumph.
She had a client on the edge of manslaughter or possibly terrorism charges.
What to do?
She scanned for a blank building wall, finding their shareboard pinned there. Crane had helpfully added new infographic to the display: Anselmo’s bio, security career highlights, and gaming scores.
He’s a unicorn hunter?
Two weeks ago, Anselmo had requested a cradle-to-current transcript of all Rubi’s comms. He’d filed the request as soon as Luce accepted her bid to become his advocate.
“Your sidekick audited me?” His voice was a shade too casual.
Rubi pretended she’d missed the note of tension. “At any given time, there’s a couple thousand people reading my scripts. Picking up my footage, tuning in if I happen to pick my teeth or have sex. Even if I glance back at what’s in the toilet bowl—”
“Because of your father.”
“When those individuals turn up, in the flesh, Crane is authorized to counter-Whooz. In case they’re a threat.”
“Wise precaution.” Anselmo’s tone was neutral.
“Mutually assured disclosure. I show you mine, you show me yours.” It might not even be a lie. Crane could probably cover it—switch the defaults, fiddle the date on the settings change.
She rubbed at a knot in her shoulder. Had she pulled it, jerking around in the simulated truck crash?
Five gardeners walked by, honor guard for a self-driving wagon full of potted peonies and gardenias. They paused at a lamppost, swapping out the older flower arrangements, collecting pots that had dried out or died. One of the women wore a printed Queen of Hearts helm from a popular Shanghai game scenario. Tags marked it as a high-level quest item, limited license.
“It’s tragic, you know, that we’ve audited each other,” Anselmo said. “If we ever socialized, there’d be nothing for us to talk about.”
She chuckled. “We’ll run a game, then. There’s a Sarah Bernhardt sim…”
“Don’t you ever play outside of WestEuro?”
“Old France is my primary fandom. And you prefer guns to swordplay.” Now that she looked, she saw it wasn’t just his toon … a real shoulder holster was snugged under the protective vest. She wondered what he kept in it.
She turned back to the timeline. “So. Luce as a truck-hacker? That’s your theory?”
“It’s a possibility.” He shared research references.
“But … most attempted hacks are perpetrated by ration-breakers, right? Black marketeers?”
“And people associated with pushback movements, like @Freebreeders.”
“If the truck saw a goat,” she ventured, “would Luce have the skillset to do that?”
A pause. “He should not, no.”
RFID had Luce in the area but couldn’t say where. “Did you check whether he was in the truck, in the flesh, and fled through the vineyard?”
He gave her a roguish grin. “Are you going to help me chase down your client, Mer Whiting? If not, I think our share might have reached its limits…”
“I’ll help you meet,” Rubi said. Whatever mess Luce had landed in, she wasn’t about to let him walk unprotected into an @Interpol terrorist hunt. “Where do we start?”