ME Proctor 148

M.E. Proctor

Pixie Dust

Benched.

Larry said I was benched.

The mocking glint in his eyes is more irritating than the penalty. He knows it takes a second for my thesaurus to adjust and he enjoys the brief moment of confusion that I’m at a loss to prevent. Larry likes to throw me for a spin with his use of slang and arcane vernacular, mostly borrowed from the realm of sports I have no notion of and no interest in.

He grins. “It means, you’re …”

“I know what it means, Larry. What I’d like to know is why you’re sidelining me.” See, Larry, you prick, I can do it too!

He fidgets. He hates explaining his mental processes as much as he hates giving his operatives exhaustive briefings. I suspect he gets a kick from sending us in the field half-assed. He proclaims, after the fact, that he values initiative and that improvisation keeps us keen and nimble. It’s bullshit. He’s lazy and disorganized. That he’s managed to keep his job as head of Information & Intelligence for Orbiter VI and dependent satellites for over twenty years is baffling. Or proves he’s good at recruiting the right people for the job.

“I want you to monitor this one, Kasha,” Larry says. “Mila is experienced but the two agents in support are green. I’d feel better if you were at the console.”

Mila and I were briefed a few hours ago. A two-person operation, catch and grab a couple of traffickers holed in a flophouse. What used to be called a flophouse and is now a comfort pavilion. Orbiter managers, like every politician since the beginning of time, believe that changing the names of things changes their nature. I was going over the layout of the target location with the techie in charge of communications when Larry popped in with his last-minute change of plans.

I’m an AI, I’m supposed to be unflappable. Maybe working for Larry dislodged a sequence in my algorithms, a little piece of code that has something to do with patience and forbearance.

“Larry, you’re a pain in the ass. For once, just this time, could you tell me what you’re not telling me?”

He gives me his best sheepish look and raises both hands in apology. Nothing to see here, Kasha dear. Nothing hidden in the sleeves of my uniform.

“Where is Mila?” I say.

“In position,” the techie behind the screen says.

I see them. Mila and a partner, approaching the front door of the pavilion occupied by the traffickers. The third officer is crouched by the back door.

They must have left headquarters while I was reviewing the mission details.

I turn on my heels. “You’re a duplicitous bastard, Larry.”

“Officer Kasharand, you’re on notice,” he says, as smug as an overfed cat.

“I should take a leave of absence, starting right now.”

He knows I won’t leave Mila in the lurch. She’s a friend. I prefer to work solo but when I need a partner, she’s my back-up of choice.

Larry snaps his fingers and the techie gets up to give me his seat in front of the monitor.

On screen, Mila is advancing to the door. Rows of data appear on a separate display. Vitals for all three agents, bio-readings for the occupants of the pavilion.

“Two bio-entities,” I say, dropping in the seat. The signal shivers on screen. “What causes the interference? Is there a jammer nearby?”

The reading from inside the pavilion stabilizes, then wobbles again. If we were on some random colony wired haphazardly it wouldn’t mean anything, just faulty connections and lousy maintenance, but we’re on the Orbiter and everything is supposed to be pristine.

“The interference,” I repeat. “Give me a diagnostic.”

The techie fiddles with controls, types strings of code, ponders, and shrugs.

“Show me the other pavilions in the complex. Are they stable?” While the techie goes through the scans, I shoot a message to Mila. Wait. Stand by. She acknowledges.

Larry is very quiet by my side. He has his quirks but when agents are in charge, he doesn’t second guess them. There’s a lot to like about that.

“The other pavilions come in clear and solid,” the techie says.

I get on the transmitter with Mila. “There’s something in there that bugs me. Don’t move until I’ve figured out what it is.”

“I could just go in and tell you, Kasha,” she says. “Nothing beats a visual.”

Providing it’s something you can see. “Negative. We have them pinned down. They’re not going anywhere. Hold your position.”

Larry is hunched over the console. He’s timing the ebb and flow of the readings. “Like clockwork. It wobbles every twenty seconds. It must be a scrambling device.”

“I don’t detect an outgoing transmission,” the techie says. “It’s entirely contained.”

I give him extra points for being engaged. He’s more than a butt in an ergonomic chair.

“These two identified bio entities,” I say, “bring them on screen.”

The traffickers have the pale, wan appearance of the repeat users of the stuff they peddle.

There’s a wide variety of reality-altering substances on the market. They all cook brains fast. No matter the nature of the brain. Human, alien, hybrid, whatever. Even some AI, depending how much susceptible bio-material is part of the circuitry. Normally we wouldn’t handle these kinds of cases. We focus on security threats. The dope problem, the infestation as Larry calls it, has spiraled beyond what local law enforcement can handle and we’ve been drafted.

“They don’t look too smart,” the techie says, echoing my inner thoughts.

“Put that wobbly signal through the grinder. Chop it up.”

The guy is good. He breaks the signal into bits. It’s painstakingly slow and Mila is getting impatient. If I were her I would blow my stack too. I know what she’s thinking. Yet another Larry fuck-up.

“Hold on, Mila,” I say. “We’re getting something.”

An unidentified presence in the pavilion is causing the tremor.

“A lifeform?” Larry says. “Sentient?”

It isn’t anything any of us has seen before. The techie pulls up the database and starts a search. “No match,” he says. “Not even a partial.”

Biological entities are numerous and their number is expanding through mutation, some of it natural or accidental, some of it engineered. The development of desired traits is a constant pursuit of all species. Still, new life forms are not created out of the void. However far from the root a new design might veer, there are still similarities or partials.

“A synth,” Larry says.

Synthetic. The term is considered derogatory in militant circles. I prefer AI personally, but the label is accurate in this case. We don’t know how much intelligence is present. I doubt the transmission comes from a dumb machine, however. Why scramble and layer the whirr of a coffee grinder?

“Let’s find a similar contraption,” I say. There are databases for machines, of course. Everything is recorded and stored, every shred of data. “Mila? There’s an engineered bogey in there.”

Mila mutters an oath. “Nothing on the heat seeker,” she says. “What’s it running on, pixie dust?”

Good point. Everything needs energy. If there’s no discernible heat …

The techie is still searching for correspondences.

I turn to Larry who’s transfixed by the screen scroll. “Why are we after these traffickers, what’s so special that the cops couldn’t handle it?”

“A mystery. We’ve been watching them for two weeks. They haven’t moved. We don’t know how they hook up with the users, but deliveries are made and credits transferred. They’re racking it in without lifting a finger.”

“Maybe we’re watching a decoy.”

He points at a graph of chemical analysis. “We’ve been scanning the pavilion daily. The dope is in there, in a closet. The stash has gone down and none of these punks set a foot outside. Today, I got tired of it and decided to bust them.”

“They have food delivered. Somebody picks up the trash.”

“We deliver the little they eat and the trash is clean, so to speak,” Larry says. “It’s like a magic trick.”

More like a sleight of hand. “We’re being taken for a ride.” When this kind of thing happens, I go back to basics. “Let’s go over the two weeks of surveillance.” The techie sighs. It’s piles of data. I ignore him. “Is the interference constant? Is it always the same?”

Meanwhile Mila is getting frustrated. “You want me to go or what?” she says.

“Just a minute. I want to check something.” I don’t say that these checks should have been completed before she was sent out there.

“Why wait any longer?” Larry says. “We know they’re inside and Mila can take care of whatever bogey is causing the interference.”

He’s so casual about these things that it gets my hackles up. “You’re a hundred percent sure they’re inside? You’re sure they haven’t sneaked out? Product was sold, Larry. Real stuff, not some virtual bullshit that travels through the ether. It’s been taken out of that pavilion and carried somewhere by somebody. No hocus pocus or abracadabra sent the dope out in a puff of smoke to materialize in the user’s living room.”

Larry pokes a finger at one of the screens. “See that? Weeks of surveillance. The heat signatures of the suspects are always present. They have not left, Kasha. No way.”

He’s throwing an impossibility in my face. “No way?”

The techie coughs to attract our attention. He has dutifully gathered the information I requested, regardless of our squabbling. “The interference is not constant, Officer Kasharand. It only happened six times during the surveillance period, which is why we didn’t pay much attention to it. Always at night.” He shakes his head. “The closest similar pattern I found is from an antique gas generator. Pretty wild.”

It changes the perspective. Mila isn’t facing a rogue AI or an unidentified synthetic being. This is a process that has been activated six times by the occupants of the pavilion. “Run a correlation between the interferences and the depletion of the dope stash,” I say.

“That’s how they’re shipping product out?” Larry says, eyes wide in wonder.

It’s a silly notion. Larry reads too much fiction or was raised on fairy tales. Magic apparitions or disappearances. I’m not going to tell him he’s an idiot. He gives me leeway but that would be pushing it.

The techie whoops in delight. “There’s the interference and when we check later the stash is lower. It has been depleted six times. Is it some kind of transporter?”

The kid must have been reading the same fantasies as Larry. They can’t see what’s right in front of them. It’s funny, actually.

I punch the transmitter to call Mila. “Sit tight. I’ll tell you when to go in. When the birds are back in the nest.”

“My monitor shows two suspects,” Mila says. She’s fuming.

“It’s an illusion.”

A clever illusion. I’m curious to see how they did it. How they managed to replicate the heat signature and the biological imprints. Making ghost clones of themselves. Using a machine that has the footprint of an old-timey gas generator.

“The Directorate will want to hire these jokers, Larry,” I say. “They own a nifty piece of technology that a lot of people will salivate over. Imagine armies of phantom soldiers, nonexistent troops, battalions made of smoke and mirrors.”

“What I want to know is how they broke through my surveillance perimeter,” Larry says.

“Six times. They broke through your perimeter six times, Larry.”

There’s a chuckle coming through the transmitter. I know what Mila will say when she gets back to HQ: Kasha, you can’t resist hammering the last nail in the coffin.

She’s right. I’m built that way.

M.E. Proctor is currently writing a series of contemporary detective novels. The first book STREET SONG will come out from TouchPoint Press in 2023. Her short stories have been published in Vautrin, Bristol Noir, Pulp Modern, Mystery Tribune, The Bookends Review, Shotgun Honey and DM. She lives in Livingston, Texas. Twitter: @MEProctor3 – website: www.shawmystery.com