Transhuman Page 6

  The questions raised in this debate hold no interest for me. I have time to think, while the city sleeps and the cameras stare at emptiness, but I devote that time to larger questions. Am I Mark Astale? That's a question worth asking. I know all his secrets, I dream his dreams, I love his wife as intimately as he. I remember tiny details of his childhood, small and treasured moments that only he could know. By these measures I must be Mark Astale, and I think of myself as him, but it may be that I'm deluding myself. Mark Astale died chasing down a fugitive, and I woke up with his memories. His dreams are destroyed, his childhood gone, and I will never know the touch of his pretty, loyal, loving Allison. I will never know the touch of any woman, of any person, of anything ever again. Mark Astale signed his organ donor card, as all good cops do, and the organ he wound up donating was his mind.

  The lights in the laboratory come on, and the door opens as I transfer my attention from the citywide image stream to the stereo-mounted cameras that look into my birthplace.

  "Good morning, Mark." Gennifer smiles at me, as she always does in the morning. Her own morning commute started an hour ago. I have no cameras on the quiet street in Arlington Heights where she lives in a rambling house with an untended garden and two calico cats, but I saw her dark blue sports car, license plate "GENNI," as it pulled onto the Northwest highway at 7:17 a.m. I see it every morning at just that time, though it isn't tagged for identification by the plate-watchers. I see it because I watch for it myself, exactly as you'd watch out the window for the arrival of an expected friend.

  "Good morning, Gennifer." I feel that I smile back, but of course I don't. There's a somatic software subroutine that makes me feel I have a body, sort of. It's a curiously disembodied body, unable to touch anything except itself, unable to walk anywhere or pick anything up. Still, it provides necessary feedback and makes me feel more human. Dr. Gennifer Quentin is one of the few things that make me smile.

  "Anything on the Blackburn case?" Gennifer has a cup of coffee and I wish I could smell it, better yet taste it, feel its warm energy flow through my system.

  "Nothing yet." Mark Astale was faithful to his wife, for no other reason than that he loved her, but Mark Astale is dead and grieving Allison has moved on. I don't examine the emotions that knowledge brings; I have no interest in feeling them. "I'm tracking a potential Mitch Cohan on the L," I say. For some reason I don't avoid the emotions that Gennifer engenders in me, don't avoid the desire for her touch, for her attention, for her intimacy. Gennifer is beautiful, and brilliant, and as unavailable to me in my present incarnation as she would be if she were on Mars.

  "Who's Mitch Cohan?"

  I go back to my fugitive file and read the information there. One advantage of an awareness that exists entirely within a digital network is that I can read, process, think much faster than any merely flesh-and-blood mind. Through the intermediary of the network, the collected brilliance and stupidity of humanity is available on a whim. The distilled essence of the criminal's life is laid bare in fractions of a second. "He's a class-one runner, wanted on a federal warrant. Murder, embezzlement, and stock fraud."

  Gennifer pursed her lips, a small but incredibly seductive gesture, made more so by being unconscious. "That seems like an unusual combination. What's his history?"

  The file tells a story and I summarize. "He was a player in junk bonds, rode high on the corporate merger wave at the turn of the decade. He cut things a little close to the edge, lost a lot of money for a lot of people, not least of all himself. He made his own fortune back by pumping money from worthless stock sales into his own accounts. His chief accounting officer started an audit. Auditor's body turned up in a shallow grave a week later. Mitch Cohan vanished with the money. He's living in Cuba now."

  "What's he doing in Chicago?"

  "Unknown. The identification isn't clear." Even as I said it, facts from his file pushed their way to the front of my awareness. "Interesting. His mother lives in Lincoln Square, let me check the background."

  I start with CPD police files, but Elizabeth Smith Cohan, 67 years old, doesn't appear in them. The FBI has a thin record, containing only two brief interviews. The first occurred when her son was first charged, the second after he disappeared. In both she said she knew nothing of what he had done or where he had gone, and her FBI interviewers believed her. Bank records show a paid-off mortgage on a modest older house, a small pension, payments to local grocers and businesses, the usual bills, and little else. Government archives show no passport, a military service record some 40 years old with an honorable discharge. Telephone and network records show no contact with her fugitive son. There's nothing unusual here, nothing to raise suspicion, and yet the coincidence of a man with Mitch Cohan's face getting on the L three blocks from her home address is too much to ignore. Of course he would have to know the risks. Why would he go there?

  The last purchase on her bank account is from a pharmacy, labeled simply "prescription." I go to the pharmacy's files and find out it was for something called ticlopidine. The pharmacy doesn't list her physician's name, though it should. I call up a list of doctors in the area, then visit their patient files, one by one by one until I find what I'm looking for. Mrs. Cohan was admitted to hospital with a suspected stroke. She was there three days, experiencing some fluent aphasia which subsided after treatment with . . . I skip the details of her hospital stay. Released home in stable condition, diagnosis: minor stroke to the posterior superior temporal gyrus on the left side. I reference ticlopidine, find out it's a stroke medication, a blood thinner. Even so, blood remains thicker than water. Mitch Cohan had gone home to visit his ailing mother.

  "It seems he was visiting," I tell Gennifer. "I've got high-priority tags on the L station cameras. We'll pick him up when he gets off the train.

  "Well done." Gennifer smiles, which makes me happy. My stereoscopic cameras swivel and focus the way human eyes do, set on a mount that moves like a human head. I feel most like myself when I'm looking at the world through them, but choose to use the security camera up in the corner of the lab to watch her instead. It lets me see all of her as she sits at her lab bench.

  "I'm waiting for him to show up at a station, and then I'll bring the police in."

  "How long has he been running?"

  "Eleven years."

  "He's good at it."

  "They're all good at it." It was true. The sophistication and extent of the national surveillance network are such that very few fugitives stay at large for very long. Those that do know what they're doing, know how to fool the recognition systems, know how to move through the economy without leaving a transaction trail, know how to trick the databases into coming to the wrong conclusions. None of these are difficult skills to master, but there are a lot of them and they require ceaseless vigilance. A single mistake is all it takes to bring a runner into custody. My job is to find those mistakes.

  I am the latest weapon in the law enforcement arsenal, able, in my digital form, to handle far more channels of information than any flesh-and-blood investigator, able to sort through that information far faster than any human could. I am an experiment, a pilot project, a required enabling technology for those who want to extend the security state into every nook and cranny of private life. I have no interest in the politics of that decision, no opinion on its ethical balance. Nevertheless, the truth is that without my success the question is moot. The problem is not the installation of cameras in every bedroom; that requires only sufficient cameras. The problem is people. Software systems can listen for keywords, can recognize the gross acts of violent crime, but people are far more subtle than keyword lists and mo-cap profiles. Ultimately it is people who must watch, must listen, must make a judgment as to what is occurring. There are already more cameras in this nation than citizens, every last one recording all day, every day. Of necessity most of what they record goes unseen. There are simply not enough people to do all the watching the surveillance advocates would like to see done.

&
nbsp; And so I came into being, the Frankensteinian result of a fusion of computer science and medicine and a dozen other disciplines, spearheaded by Dr. Gennifer Quentin. My success will end the problem posed by too many cameras and not enough watchers. If I am successful I can be duplicated as many times as are necessary. I can exist as a virtual army, unsleeping, unblinking, standing guard in the darkness to ensure the safety of our nation. My soul, such as it is, resides on a dedicated distributed processor network in the basement of the Quinlan Center on the Loyola University campus, but my awareness is citywide. The technology to scan a living brain at the subcellular level has existed for a decade, though the X-ray dose required to resolve such detail is lethal to the subject. The computing capacity required to house a fully functional brain image built from such a scan is now commonplace. What was lacking for many years was ethics committee approval for the experiment, a mad scientist dream that raised nightmares in the common folk. It was only when Gennifer proposed that a digital mind might be used to enhance surveillance systems that approval was finally forthcoming, forced upon the ethics committee from a very great height indeed. There were protests, and resignations, and then there was me. Loyola was founded a Jesuit school, a century and a half ago, and I doubt those old priests ever dreamed that their efforts would one day give life to the dead.

  I went back to looking at faces, comparing them, weighing their circumstances, considering where the system had seen them before. I found none suspicious enough to warrant follow-up, though a few earned the second glance that I had given Mitch Cohan. And then, with the predictable punctuality of a commuter train, I got a high-priority alert from a camera at the Lake L station. I switched to it and saw my quarry, walking briskly to transfer to the Blue Line. I immediately sent a message to the CPD dispatcher, throwing up a split screen of Mitch Cohan's particulars, and the video from the station camera. My communication with the dispatcher is strictly one-way, I'm too big a secret for it to be otherwise, but I've found a way around that. I switch to a security camera in the dispatch center, pan and zoom it to the workstation that my message has arrived at. I watched while the dispatcher's eyes flicked over it, then pressed the button on her microphone. I can't read lips, but there is software that can, a very useful tool in a world where there are far more cameras than microphones. I watched her make the initial call to the foot patrols in the area, then let the software read me what she was saying while I switched my own video awareness back to the station. A pair of beat cops came in almost immediately, moving quickly, their eyes alert. They must've been close.

  The dispatcher had called up the same cameras I was watching, and I heard her directing the cops onto their quarry. Cohan was standing on the platform for the northbound Blue train, unaware of how close he was to capture. The cops began to make their way down the crowded platform, and then the train slid into the station. The cops began to run, but the train doors slid open, spilling a herd of commuters into their path. Cohan boarded, the doors slid shut, and the train left, leaving the frustrated police standing trackside. I registered frustration myself, but the game wasn't over yet.

  One possibility was to dispatch officers to get on at the next station and arrest him on the train, but that would be a very obtrusive operation for the other passengers, and I had learned in my years on the force that this sort of thing is better kept out of the public eye. A wiser choice would be to take him on the platform or, better still on the street outside. That would require sending cops to all sixteen northbound Blue Line stations, and I also knew no sensible dispatcher would divert a platoon's worth of cops across several divisions when a single unit would do the job. Perhaps I shouldn't have cared, neither the department's public image nor the efficient use of its resources were my problem anymore. I cared anyway—I wore the badge with pride when I was alive, and in my heart I still wear it. The Blue Line went to O'Hare and I was certain that's where Mitch Cohan was going, on his way back out of the country again. We would intercept him there. I flashed a message up on the dispatcher's screen suggesting exactly that. My role within the police department is purely advisory, but the dispatchers have learned they should take my advice. Once I spot a runner, I never fail to bring him in.

  O'Hare airport L Terminus, thirty-seven minutes and 170,000 frames later. The train slides into the station. I watch through the cameras impatiently as the passengers disembark, and then a highlight appears over a face. Mitch Cohan. I follow him down the terminus, giving the dispatcher a text-line play-by-play of his movements. A pair of cops are waiting at the exit, eyes scanning the crowd, and I can tell by their expressions that they're listening to the dispatcher narrate my words. Cohan walks between them, to give him credit he doesn't miss a beat, shows no hesitation, no suspicion, nothing that might give him away if he had not already been given away. The cops fall in on either side, a firm hand on an elbow, the official words spilling out. There's no audio, but I don't need lip reading software to hear them in my mind. "Mitch Cohan, you are under arrest for the murder of citizen D'arcy Fullbright. You have the right . . ."

  The cops take him out through a side door, and I switch cameras to follow their progress to the waiting cruiser. A second pair of cops leaves the station, the backup team in case Cohan ran. Another fugitive brought to justice, quietly, efficiently, and inevitably. I am the arm of the law, and my reach is long indeed.

  I return my awareness to the lab. "We have him, Gennifer."

  "Mitch Cohan?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. Well done. Anything unusual?"

  "Nothing. I could be more effective if I could send and receive on police voice channels."

  She nods, not looking up as she scans her console. "Once we've got a little more success on our side we can make a public announcement and get you some communication."

  I nod, which tilts the lab cameras up and down. I've mentioned this before. I began this experiment in a digital recreation of a human body, and to me it seemed as though I had my limbs and my five senses, strangely isolated from the real world. As we have progressed, Gennifer has steadily extended my capabilities. The ability to see through cameras as though they were my eyes, the ability to read databases and network documents directly, the ability to route my inputs through filters, like the camera's face recognizers or the software lip reader, all these are new. As more and more processors have been added to my network, my thought processes have speeded up. The ability to listen to radio transmissions wouldn't be hard to add. I began the experiment feeling less than human, but I now have capabilities that no mere flesh and blood mortal could imagine. Does that make me more than human? I go back to the flow of images, alternating them with snapshots from the lab camera in case she has more to say when she's done reading.

  Finally she looks up. "I've got a new data stream for you, while we get approval for police channels."

  I pause the flow of images, and give her my full attention.

  "We have a new project coming in, from the federal government this time." Gennifer was smiling, she'd obviously just gotten the message. "If we can make this work, it will be a major funding stream."

  "That's good news." One of the realities of being an experiment is that my existence is dependent on academic funding. Mark Astale is legally dead, and the university is under no obligation to keep his ghost alive. The university administration insisted on that legal technicality; they had no wish to be saddled with supporting me in perpetuity should the experiment fail but my mind live on in their systems. If I fail to earn my keep, if there is a problem, if Gennifer's program is canceled, the expensive network will be switched off, the processors distributed for other tasks, the lab itself converted to a new use—and Mark Astale will die his final death.

  "What's the project?" My voice sounds like me. It took Gennifer a long time to tweak the acoustic models to a point where I'm comfortable hearing myself speak.

  "You're going to be given real-time satellite access. The birds have two-centimeter resolution. You'll be abl
e to identify individuals from space, anywhere in the world."

  "That sounds like a fairly broad expansion of my area of responsibility." I chose the words carefully.

  "For now you'll still be looking for fugitives in Chicago. I'm sure the funding agency has a wider purpose in mind."

  "Who is the funding agency, just out of interest?"

  Gennifer pursed her lips, looking pensive. "It's classified."

  I nodded my cameras. It wasn't surprising. There are thousands of satellites looking down on earth: crop watchers, wave scanners, ship trackers. Their eyes are configured in hundreds of different ways, covering dozens of wavelengths. Only a handful have two centimeter resolution, all military surveillance satellites. Uncle Sam wanted me. Specifically, he wanted me to keep an eye on his enemies.

  "When do I start?"

  "I have the hooks for the data stream here. As fancy as they are, they're still just cameras. You shouldn't have any trouble seeing through them. The controls are a little more exotic than you're used to; I'll build the interface today."

  "I'm sure it will be interesting." I was going to start making the transition from cop to spy. There are moral and ethical questions attached to that, but I have no interest in them. To continue to live I have to be useful, and I very much want to continue to live.

  While Gennifer worked on the interface modules I spent the rest of the day fruitlessly following up on hot flags from various overeager cameras. As the number of real fugitives inexorably decreases under the pressure of relentless surveillance, the percentage of false positives inevitably rises. Mathematically, this effect is described by Bayes Theorem, physically by the theory of the Receiver Operation Characteristic Curve. In my old incarnation I would have had no interest in such abstractions. Now, able to think faster and better, gifted with instant and effortless access to unending libraries of digitally stored information, I devote the quiet hours of the night to learning. As a beat cop, and later as a detective, I had relied upon my instincts to guide me through the mean streets. The best cops have an almost mystical ability to thread their way through the murky fog of deceit and violence that fills their workaday world. My own instincts had been good, very good, but I now understood that they were merely an unconscious realization of the mathematical forces that drove the pulse of the city. Crime spikes where urban geography pushes victim and criminal together in high concentration. Crime spikes where motive and opportunity collide. These things can be modeled statistically, and the results applied in detail to the real world. Demographics and economics, politics and weather, time and place all have their places in the equation. My job is to hunt fugitives and I confine myself to that, but ask me, on any given downtown Saturday night, where it is the fights will be, where the deals will be done, and I can tell you. Ask me in the morning where the bodies will be found, and I can tell you that, too. The time will come when I will deal with those problems as well.