City of Sensors Read online

  At the front door of the Indigo Palace, I ascended the marble steps behind a group of well-dressed guests. The doorman held the doors for them, and they tossed him wet coats all at once, spraying him with water. Two jackets wound up on the floor.

  I helped the doorman pick up the coats. “Never mind those assholes,” I said.

  “Thanks, Frank,” the doorman said. He paused, eyeing my uniform. “You sure it’s safe wearing that around at night? You don’t see that much lately. With all the privacy fanatics out there.”

  “I know, but I can’t help it—I love this thing.”

  I swiped the credit scanner on the wall to give the doorman a tip.

  The casino writhed with bodies. Lots of suits high on Sentrac credit, drenched in digital money, dirty with it. As I made my way towards a Gemini table, it was already starting—the effect this casino had on me. The world outside faded, erasing thoughts of Maclean, of Celeste, of the empty apartment I’d come to hate without her. Even the crowds here didn’t bother me. Open twenty-four hours a day, the Indigo Palace had offered me an ideal place to avoid my apartment lately. Time stopped moving at the Palace. Flashing screens turned its interior into a permanent neon dawn. All night, the air vibrated with adrenaline, a buzz that fused each customer into the currents of digital dollars. It swept you away. It was bigger than you.

  Stay focused. I was here to watch Donaldson and set my money problems right one last time. I gave my hands a quick coat of sanitizer to stay sharp, but the habit felt out of place here, unnecessary in the neon euphoria.

  “Add me, next round. Five thousand,” I told a Gemini interface. On the Palace doors, rain-streaked glass dulled the casino lights into smudges of reflected neon, shielding us from outside, from the rest of my life. Damn, this place made me feel good. I asked a waitress for a double gin and tonic with two limes. Mixing alcohol with Acetropen wasn’t wise, but I would just have one.

  My Gemini interface paused while it attempted its usual facial scan. A voice chimed from the screen. “For security ­reasons, you must be visible to scanners and sensors in our establishment.”

  “Fine,” I said, faintly annoyed even though I’d expected it. A data cop gets used to his invisibility.

  I pulled up my sleeve and tapped the device on my wrist. My name flashed onto the screen, the corners of the interface suddenly alive with personalized ads for Mabelle’s vegan lattes, grid-patterned ties, search engine data. One swipe of my fingerprint unlocked my credit.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Southwood,” the screen said, “there aren’t enough funds—”

  “I talked to your boss, alright? He’s extending my credit for one more night, understand me? Check your fucking files.” I glanced around to see if anyone had heard the screen. A few feet away, a woman smiled at her friend; were they laughing at me?

  The machine processed in silence, then said, “My apologies, sir. Game begins in five minutes.”

  My drink was already empty. I ordered another one.

  Stay focused. I scanned the room for Donaldson. There, across the room near the doors, a familiar man stood with his back to me. As I watched him, my vision began to sharpen. That was the first sign of an Acetropen high. My eye twitched, sweat condensing on my back. Soon my concentration would double, then triple—just in time for the Gemini game. I adjusted my position so that my back faced the entry where the ­doorman stood with three armed guards. A month ago I’d seen the Indigo staff catch an Acetropen user. He’d disappeared through a door at the back, where the guards dragged him. He didn’t come back out.

  The man across the room turned his head. August Donaldson. He’d seen me and he was crossing the floor in my direction. He emerged slowly from of the throng, a gray clump detaching from the watery mass, his figure taking shape with every step. A man in a cloud-coloured suit, about fifty, massive glasses. Reflected numbers from the casino screens scrolled across his lenses and disappeared when they passed his oversized pupils.

  “Playing Gemini again, Southwood?” he said. “You ever at home lately? Got a cockroach infestation on your hands or what?”

  I laughed, my chemical confidence surging. “Sure, Donaldson. Got an infestation to deal with. Tried the poison—it did nothing. Called the exterminator—nothing. Now I’m back to basics: crunching them under my shoe, one at a time.”

  He beamed at me. A red flash from a nearby screen turned his teeth and glasses into a jack-o’-lantern smile.

  “How’s your wife?” I asked.

  “Wonderful.”

  I nodded and slapped him on the shoulder. He’d be behind bars in no time.

  Grinning behind his glasses, Donaldson crossed the floor to the video poker, a recessed area below the platform I stood on, giving me an ideal view. My heartbeat thundered. Steady twitching as the Acetropen surged through my bloodstream. My sight sharpened and expanded, while my thoughts screeched on overdrive and euphoria unfurled fast when patterns jumped, screamed from everything I saw. Colours and shapes sprang into being. Eighty-three bodies in the crowd. Twenty-five women. Fifty-eight men. Six blue dresses made an L-shape flung across the room, the shapes strong and defined.

  “Game begins in three minutes,” the Gemini interface announced. Soon, my screen would be flooded by numbers, raw information waiting to be moulded into comprehensible form.

  One more drink. I felt amazing.

  Back to Donaldson. My hawk’s vision soaked up the forensic data, saw every fibre in his suit, a scratch on his watch, the cuticles of his fingernails—but then a change, his posture alert and his back straighter when a figure took shape: a woman, emerging from the crowd to pass by him. Donaldson’s eyes flicked over to me, then back to her. He ignored the woman, allowing her to pass by without speaking. But when he’d first seen her, he hadn’t been able to hide the look in his eyes, not from my enhanced sight. His eyes had been unmistakeable: bright, lascivious, ­hungry.

  The woman found a gambling interface and her account appeared on the screen as she checked her balance. With the eyes of Acetropen, even from across the room I saw her name, typed in tiny letters in the corner. I made a mental note.

  “Game is beginning now,” my screen said. Cascades of ­numbers spilled onto my interface, and I began calculating probabilities. Chaos. My chemically enhanced brain struggled, strained, fought with the Babel nonsense. The screen wavered. Shook. Roaring in my ears, the backdrop of human voices became white noise cranked to a deafening volume.

  I won the first game and doubled my money. Maybe it was time to quit. But a second game could make a deeper dent in my money problems.

  One more game, this time for ten thousand. One more drink. Numbers flooded my screen again, and I whirled through the calculations. Soon I had the them, drawn and ironclad. My chance to win was seventy-eight percent. I’d never felt so confident. I bet everything. White noise thundered and the casino writhed with bodies, electric glows sliding along satin blazers, neon clinging to silk and skin like static. It felt like all these people, everyone in this crowd was here for me.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Southwood,” a smooth mechanical voice said. “Better luck next time.”

  My account balance appeared on the screen: -$1,024,100.64 in credit dues. Time moved slowly as I struggled to process what had just happened, the world around me blurred. I shifted my position to make sure my body hid the number on my screen from other guests. A sudden staleness hung in the air, a reek of plastic and sweat, and the laughter of the crowd sounded sinister, like mockery.

  Even with my salary, it would take years to save up the million I owed to the casino. The Palace had given me three months to pay my debts before I faced bankruptcy and possible jail time. Stingsby could see my gambling losses if he bothered to look into my data, but if I paid them within the timeframe the Palace had allotted me, there would be no grounds for a charge of unbecoming conduct.

  When I looked up again, Donaldson and the woman were gone. I shoved my way through the throng and left.

  The doorman called after me, “Jesus, Frank, at least change out of that uniform before you walk home.”

  I didn’t turn my head. A man didn’t make small talk with the staff when high on a drug banned in every casino in town.

  Outside on Twelfth Street, traffic flowed with streamlined precision, and Donaldson and the woman were nowhere in sight. I’d lost them. I began the cold walk home. On my right, I passed the road towards the river where I’d found all Celeste’s belongings, the last traces I’d seen of her before she disappeared. Instinctively, I crossed the street to avoid that road. My head still thundering with Acetropen, I passed a dimly lit side-street. Layers of thick, hanging exhaust masked a road to the Border, the most common gathering place for privacy fanatics, and also the city’s centre for violent crime. My feet stopped moving, my eyes lingering on that road. Around me, the rain slowed, then stopped. The street I stood on led back to my apartment, a massive empty box, the hardwood floors freezing underfoot.

  The Border would probably be full of privacy fanatics, staunch opponents of the very idea of data detectives, and taking a short-cut through there while wearing my uniform would put me in danger. But the Acetropen still raced through my circuits, and I felt invincible. As the adrenaline from the Gemini faded, a void was taking its place, and I was craving just a bit more risk, another peak in my high. I was craving some three-dimensional gambling.

  I turned onto the side-street.

  Sagging rectangles lining the sides of Fifty-Seventh Avenue slid through the edges of my enhanced sight, the world a heavenly combination of speed and slowness, a paradise of contrasts. Light fell from the electric signs of dying businesses. A stop-sign droope
d into the street, crooked. The danger made everything more vivid, more alive than it had been in months.

  On the sidewalk ahead, a cluster of five men grew larger in my vision. I was moving fast. Faces swivelled towards me one by one, and the men expanded into a circle fanned out around the sidewalk. “Data cop? How much fucking nerve you got, coming here like this?”

  Their ring tightened until I saw their faces, adrenaline turning the specks of light on their clothes into crystals. Their eyes scanned me—under my jacket near the waist and on the forearm, looking for the scars from firing a D72—then they hesitated, wavered with fury, and pulled back.

  “Gonna turn us into data now?” a man called out as they melted into the streets.

  I rounded a corner and one of the men was following me. Light poured from the doorways of late-night stores. I was running. Staring clerks, used phones, brick, chemical scents of bleach. The shops bled into a blur but their mobile storefronts followed me, small robots floating around me waving their products in their hands.

  “Soap!” their mechanical voices cried. “Frank, we have soap on sale! You love soap!” Robotic arms waved a hysterical greeting.

  The man’s presence pounded in my head. Clicking trailed me as I ran down the alley to my left, a jungle of hanging laundry and heavy breathing; no light penetrated the narrow path crowded with boxes, crates, trash, metal stairwells zig-zagging up the walls, my lungs shuddering as the sounds got closer and I spun around.

  Nothing behind me but a dog streaking by a wall with green letters screaming out: FUCK DATA. My chest heaved, head spinning.

  Another side-street. Rows of low rises sheltered the narrow road from the wind. Two persistent storefronts hovered by my side. “Soap!” one cried.

  “Fuck off,” I said.

  They did. With a soft whirring sound, their neon bodies vanished into the dark, leaving me alone.

  I remembered that it was cold. My rush faded into a downwards sweep, a slow dying-out. The dawn of an Acetropen crash. Soon I’d be spaced out and exhausted. As the Acetropen faded, my vision was already transforming. Weakening. I could almost see the patterns dissolve and drain into the ground, a different, uglier world emerging. The grime around me became noticeable again, the garbage bags strewn on the ground with holes ripped in them, their contents seeping out. I pulled out my sanitizer and gave my hands and face a quick clean.

  At the end of the road, a light shone on a human silhouette.

  “Officer,” a female voice called.

  A woman’s face flickered in the blue light of the transfer scanner she’d just bought off a street vendor. A thin, willowy figure with the top of her head at my chin, she held the device in one hand, black hair falling on narrow shoulders. Red polish shone on her fingernails. Those red nails brought back memories. This woman was beautiful, but somehow the sight of her made me broken. She was a stranger, I reminded myself. Celeste had disappeared.

  “Officer,” she said again, “I think someone’s following me.”

  I glanced around the alley. “Who?”

  “Not sure who he is. Just saw the fucker trailing me back on Fifty-Seventh. Skinny guy. Looked high. Dangerous.”

  “I can’t see him. Are you alright?” Being with this woman made me uneasy, like there was something out there in the darkness I needed to fix, but I didn’t know what.

  The woman fidgeted with anxious energy, fiddling with the transfer scanner she held. “But still, Officer, will you walk with me? Just back to my work?”

  There was no way she should have to walk home alone in this part of town. I glanced at the street vendor, a drooping mass of flesh encircled by gadgets beaming out multi-coloured rays in all directions. One of the devices he was selling: AX-lenses, ­illegal binoculars with upgrades that could see through certain materials. He was leering at the woman, openly staring at the curves of her breasts underneath her clothes. I couldn’t tolerate these fucking creeps.

  “Of course I’ll walk with you,” I said.

  The Sentrac scanner became an indigo torch leading us through a dark street with more garbage on the ground. “Thanks,” she said, her teeth blue. “I know this is more a job for a regular cop.”

  “Listen, are you sure you’re okay? It’s a strange time to buy a transfer scanner out here in the middle of the night.”

  “I’m fine. Now that you’re here no one will come near us.” She glanced at my waist for the handle and my forearm for scars, but if there were any marks there, she wouldn’t be able to see underneath my coat. “Are you carrying one?”

  “No. I got nothing.”

  A dull ache pulsed in my temples, a remnant of my fading high. I couldn’t take my eyes off this woman, even if being with her made me uneasy. We reached a road with more regular streetlamps, the odd car limping by. People avoided us and crossed the street when we approached. I adjusted my pace to keep time with the cautious plodding of her ancient red sneakers as she avoided blackened patches of gum on the sidewalk. A blind man stumbled into our path, his hands out in that posture I saw sometimes: like he was praying but with the palms open and turned up. It was sad to see him doing that when no one would ever be able to help him. What could I do, rip off a chunk of digital money and hand it to him? There was no option on a Sentrac transfer scanner for giving money to somebody in the street. That posture was a reflex, a remnant from before cash became illegal.

  No aerial storefronts followed the woman—guess she didn’t make enough money to be worth their time—but six of them rushed to cluster around me, chattering incessantly as they trailed us like a crowd of children clamouring for my attention. I didn’t like the way they treated her like a second-class citizen.

  “Even the traffic lights change faster for us, with you here,” she said.

  Images of my typical purchases flashed across the hovering storefronts: vitamins, hand sanitizer, women’s gloves. Apparently the personalization algorithms were too stupid to realize that I would never be able to buy Celeste a gift ever again. Still, my eyes lingered on the that last image, the red gloves. When I had given them to Celeste, those tiny lines had appeared around her eyes—the sign of her real smile, not the phony one she gave her customers. That uncomfortable feeling still shadowed me, the sense that we weren’t safe, that there was something I had to fix. But the images on the ads softened that unease.

  I looked at the woman’s bare hands. “Are you warm enough? You don’t have gloves, even though it’s freezing out. Here.” I swiped my fingerprint on the storefront with the gloves, and it raced away for a minute, then returned with my purchase. “Put these on.”

  She looked bewildered. “Thanks?”

  She probably thought I was strange now, but I didn’t care. The purchase warmed the air around us, and it felt good, like I was helping in some way. I still had about two hundred dollars left on my credit card, just enough to live on for the next few days.

  “Really, I’m fine,” she said. “I just need to get back to work.”

  Reluctantly, I touched my wrist and turned my sensor-invisibility back on. As if wrenched from a dream, the aerial storefronts stopped in their tracks and zipped back the way we came, bumping into us as they passed. But when they left, their warm neon glow vanishing into the distance, the darkness came back.

  We stopped at an intersection. I was startled by the touch of her hand on my shoulder, her fingers fanned out, then withdrawn. “Hey,” she said, “you come into my diner with me, I’ll give you a free meal. You know, for helping me.”

  She paused, anxiously studying my face, again shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Nervousness seemed to come off her in waves. She was standing close enough for me to notice the warmth of her presence. I remembered what Stingsby had told me about Maclean’s eye, gouged out by a glass shard—the calling card of privacy fanatics, violent opponents of the data police. They congregated in this neighbourhood, and lately they were growing in number, murdering officers to send a message. But none of that mattered to me right now.