Oversight (16 page)

Cayman pats Sam on the back. “If you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, we can talk business,” he says, setting off down the street. “Come.”

Sam follows, with Fossa and Civet bringing up the rear. He’s staring at Cayman’s impossibly white jacket when the words “Sport coat by Armani, $45,000” appear. He looks away and the characters disappear. The system is tracking his eye movements. Further testing reveals there’s a one-second threshold before any imposition appears.

Cayman turns right and heads through a crowd. He makes no effort to avoid those shopping at the market, but he does not collide with anyone either. They have no substance; they exist merely to augment the experience of shopping. Sam wonders if Cayman even sees them.

A moment later, it looks as if Cayman will walk into a wall. Instead, he disappears. Sam hesitates, extending his hand. He grasps at air.

“Disconnect Mr. Crane,” Cayman says to his agent.

The sky fades to a less appealing shade of blue. The village disappears. In its place, there’s parched earth and scrub brush. A single structure stands a stone’s throw ahead. Relatively narrow, it extends several hundred yards to the west. It looks like a hydroponics facility, the sort of place that grows square tomatoes. Perhaps a dozen dust-caked vehicles bake in the sun. On the southern side, three massive pipes bridge the gap between the main building and what appears to be a pumping station.

The four men enter and pass through a security checkpoint. They’re greeted by a Honda bot in marionette mode—the operator, wearing a motion-mirroring suit, is standing in an adjacent room behind bulletproof glass. Machine mimics man as both wave everyone onward.

“Why are we here?” Sam asks.

“We’re sightseeing,” Cayman answers.

They pass a pair clad for the clean room. Nods are exchanged, but no words. Ahead, a pair of steel doors bears a sign warning that only authorized personnel are permitted.

Just inside is a dressing room. Cayman, Fossa, and Civet slip into bio-containment suits. Sam does likewise. The group continues through the next set of doors into a decontamination chamber. Sprinklers erupt overhead, a sudden bloom of inverted flowers. Blowers dry everyone, and then the air is still. The final set of doors open.

A steel catwalk extends into the distance. To either side stretch lap pools, perhaps twenty feet wide and hundreds long. At first glance, the two pools appear to be tiled with turquoise and alabaster. It takes a moment before Sam realizes he’s looking at eyes in brine.

There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of them, staring into the air, expectant. This batch is blue. They glitter, even in the dim light. Disembodied, they might be pale sapphires, or rows of roe from some fantastical fish. It’s easier to see them so than as organs of sight.

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Cayman asks, muffled by his bio suit.

“And you don’t have to pay extra for surveillance,” Sam observes.

Cayman chuckles and continues walking at a leisurely pace. Sam follows absently, mesmerized by the sea of eyes. Fossa and Civet are never far behind.

“Why bother growing tissue when you could use chips?” Sam asks.

“You’re talking about retinal implants?”

“Yes. Isn’t that what doctors usually use for eye problems?”

“If cost were the only issue, then yes, silicon fabrication would be the answer. Or mere contact lenses. But there’s the issue of marketing. A chip in the eye is an artificial alteration. What we’re offering is a natural replacement. Our focus group was far more receptive to the latter.”

“So? You use chips too.”

“But they’re packaged in eyes. And that’s what we’re selling.”

Some distance ahead, where an intersecting catwalk leads to doors left and right, a handful of workers in clean suits operate a dredge attached to a track in the ceiling. They’re working quickly, packing the spherical harvest in coolers for transport. The floor grating glistens with the jelly of eyes crushed underfoot.

The four visitors pass them and exit through the door to the right, removing their bio suits in another decontamination chamber.

They step outside, into the shade of the building. Out in the sun, laborers are loading refrigerated trucks that bear the logo of the Safefood grocery chain—the import tax on edible goods is much lower that the tax on medical goods.

“Your ride back,” Cayman says, gesturing toward the nearest semi.

“All out of private planes?”

Cayman ignores the jibe. “I want you to go home and make discreet inquiries about selling Dr. Mako’s glasses,” he says. “Soon thereafter, expect Emil or one of his doubles to contact you—”

“One of his doubles?”

“He has several in his employ,” Cayman explains. “Now let me continue. You will say that the glasses can be found in a revolving escrow vault on the border of North and South Korea. The price is the return of my daughter. Regardless of what he says, that’s the only possible deal. I have arranged for you to work through a Saudi agency, International Hostage Brokers, Ltd. With Amy and the glasses both in the vault, the exchange will be made. After that, you and your daughter are free to do as you please. You will, of course, receive some consideration for services rendered.”

Sam doesn’t reply immediately. He’s pissed. But he can see no way out. And he’s still trying to fathom the magnitude of Cayman’s scheme. It must go beyond Cayman; one man doesn’t redraw the global media landscape without friends in high places. What was it Ursa said? “Direction of this investigation has been moved up the chain.” Could Cayman and the Feds be working together? Why? Do they just have a common enemy in Emil Caddis?

“Alright,” Sam says finally. “I happen to like Amy, so I’ll do what I can. But what makes you think Caddis will believe me?”

“He thought you had the glasses before,” says Cayman. “Convincing him that he was right all along should be easy. That’s why you must be the delivery boy.”

Sam nods.

“Your biometrics have been registered for Room 451 at the X Hotel. Inside, you’ll find an eyeglass case with a replica of Dr. Mako’s spectacles. You’re registered under the name Ryan Wolfe. Don’t go home.”

“What’d you do? Make a cast of my body while I slept?”

“Don’t use any standard network interfaces,” Cayman says, ignoring Sam’s question. “You can be located if you do. We’ve deactivated your earpiece and the inputs in your clothing. You can issue voice commands as if you had a dentonator; your cochlear audio module will transmit them. This one also has the advantage of being able to broadcast incorrect location data. It can mask you from anyone but us when you’re not using the network. Anyone searching for you can still get close when you do go online by checking router proximity and triangulating, even without the APS data, but we’ve got people on the ground in San Francisco with cloned chips to make that more difficult too.”

“Who’s going to be searching for me?”

“Caddis’ people, federal agents, Sinotech spies, to name a few. If they catch you, don’t mention your new eyes if you want to keep them.”

Sam manages a resigned laugh. “If they’re so valuable, why give them to me?”

“If you want to hide something, hide it in plain sight. And you may need those eyes if things don’t work out with Emil. Also, our visual presentation layer isn’t entirely functional yet, so you may experience anomalies.”

“Bugs in my head. That’s just what I need.”

In a semi full of eyes, Sam heads home. A Mexican named Angel is driving. He speaks English well, though not very often. That suits Sam fine; he’s got plenty to talk about with others. He spends the first hour interacting with Marilyn, dealing with a message queue that’s full of demands for his time or money or both. Then he checks the news.

The situation in San Francisco remains tense. Civil unrest has been fairly light, since blindness limits one’s ability to protest. Travel restrictions into or out of the Bay Area continue, though Angel insists that his semi will be allowed through; some ten hours ago, President Vaca directed FEMA and the CDC to establish eye-replacement units at hospitals, malls, and Jiffy-Tuck Health Centers. The big surprise in all the chaos: Content Corp and Entertainment Corp are setting aside differences and ordering out-of-town employees to volunteer as guides and personal shopping assistants (with, Sam suspects, a particular eye for the products of major ad buyers). A few suspiciously telegenic company executives have even gotten in on the act. By chance, cameras happened to be present and rolling at the time.

To bring his life-to-advertising ratio back into compliance with his network contract, Sam then sits through seventy minutes of commercials on the passenger-side heads-up display. At one point, bored by a testimonial for yet another recreational shopping drug—“I used to suffer from buyer’s remorse, but ever since I started taking Perchaset…”—Sam focuses on the scrolling landscape beyond the window projection, dull desert brown though it is. He’s startled when the luminous image of the now-happy shopper shifts back toward sharpness to match the focus of his eyes. Whether this is a function of his new eyes or an upgraded attention-monitoring system in the semi’s interface, he can’t say. But it’s really annoying.

Finally they reach Nogales. Broken windows and broken pavement scar the city and its suburbs. The Free Trade Zone factories known as maquiladoras stand mostly abandoned now that the jobs flowing southward have dried up. Cheap structures of corrugated steel served well when leveraging cheap labor. But motion-mirroring and automation changed that equation. A thousand bots slaved to a single master craftsman make more for less than a human assembly line. Such systems require different infrastructure—uninterrupted power, temperature control, engineering support, and high security. All of which can be had north of the border, or anywhere else with wealth enough to afford the initial investment. Now only fences remain, dividing and subdividing without anything to protect.

Sam descends from the cab at a Titters truck stop just beyond the U.S. border crossing, leaving Angel to get approval for his freeway route plan with the Homeland Defense Office travel registrar on site. The family-friendly casino-diner-strip club has been built to echo the design of the Titters logo—two bulging orbs with detailing depicting either pupils or areolas atop a faint Cheshire-cat grin. Its two joined domes pose an anatomical Rorschach test for patrons and a conundrum for indignant litigants who’ve tried for years to bring obscenity charges against the owners.

As at all Titters franchises, the décor is an incongruous mix of lowbrow, low cut, and low country. The neo-Dutch diner’s proximity to Mexico is apparent only in the soccer games on the wall-mounted video screens and in a few Spanish-sounding menu options. Perhaps a dozen drivers mill about, some pumping one-armed bandits, others chatting at the bar or perusing the porn in the Titters gift shop. Hofbrau barmaids shout orders to the kitchen, flagrantly flouting dietary privacy regulations. However, the likelihood of being reported to one’s insurer is somewhat low, given that a snitch would face the stigma of having visited a Titters in the first place.

Famished, Sam orders a Titters Virgin Rookworst, which is twice the price of the unbranded alternative, but comes with a certification of genetic purity that also guarantees of the absence of lead, chromium, benzene, and other contaminants. Such toxins aren’t usually present in generic sausages either, but Titters puts its promise in writing.

He asks for a beer.

The waitress, sporting surgical cleavage that would require the guidance of a sherpa, asks, “What size? We have Sissy, Puny, and Massief.”

“Four Massiefs for Table Five,” bellows a nearby barmaid.

A glance at the other tables reveals that other diners have made the same choice. “Has anyone actually ever ordered a Sissy beer?” Sam asks.

The waitress smirks.

Sam logs into
the Zvista site to check on Fiona while he eats. She looks peaceful. Moments after he tells Marilyn he’s available for messaging, she alerts him to an incoming call from Luis. The dapper policeman’s face flickers into view.

“What the hell are you doing down in Arizona?” he demands.

“Following a lead. Things a bit crazy up there?”

Luis nods wearily. “You could say that. More than half my guys caught the bug. I got lucky.”

“Is there anyone left to admire your suits?”

“Seriously, Sam. This is bad.”

“Cheer up. I’m hitching home in a truckload of eyes.”

An eyebrow rises, furrowing Luis’ forehead.

“The FEMA folks will be able to tell you how they’ll be allocated,” Sam continues. “Have your people start lining up now.”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

“So what was it you wanted to say?”

Luis glances off-camera for a moment, as if the words he’s trying to find have taken to buzzing around his head.

“What?” Sam asks. “Lose your teleprompter?”

“You’re off the Mako case.”

“Tell me you’re joking, Luis.”

“Sorry, Sam.”

“You gave that case to me!”

“And now it belongs to the Solve-O-Matic.”

Sam slumps back in the banquet, sliding down the vinyl, and stares at the ceiling.

“We’ll work something out compensation-wise when things calm down,” Luis continues.

“You collar someone?” Sam asks, incredulous.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Come on, Luis. Who got fingered? I want to be blown away by the machine’s deductive powers.”

“A ‘gent named George Gannet. We picked him up this morning.”

“I want to look at the audit log.”

“Such hatred for our poor little machine,” Luis marvels.

“The Solve-O-Matic solves budget problems, not crimes,” Sam snaps. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Look at the stats, Sam. It has a sixty-five percent clearance rate. That’s better than eight out of ten of the specs I use regularly. That’s better than you did last year.”

“It’s been a bad year or two,” Sam admits, “but your stats are crap. You’ve been tossing the machine softballs and giving your people stone-cold whodunits.”

“It worked with the easy cases. Now it’s doing the same with the harder ones. What do you want me to say?”