Grantville Gazette 38

like the sharing program. I have books in my library filled with other people’s yellow highlight marks, and I often stop when I see one, trying to figure out why someone would highlight that particular sentence.

If I saw a sentence highlighted on my Kindle, I could ask the Kindle itself why the sentence got highlighted. I’m sure in that Grisham book, on that one sentence, there are 85 different reasons for the highlights. And I could spend an hour tracking them all down.

Science fiction from the past assumed that we as a culture would always want the same level of privacy, that folks who told you unnecessary things like what they ate for breakfast bordered on rude. Reporters felt that the sexual affairs of politicians were none of our business. Now we see people’s business (and their junk) on various social networks (and regular networks) whether we want to or not.

I know some of this is cultural. I also know it’s generational. I still believe there’s such a thing as sharing too much. I actually shut a guy down the other day with shouts of “TMI! TMI!” because I didn’t want to know half of what he was telling me. (I will never be able to scrub my brain of those images.)

But the sharing isn’t always sexual or about bodily fluids. It’s often as mundane as a sentence, taken out of context from a book I haven’t read. I really don’t care that 85 people liked that sentence in that John Grisham book. All I care about is the story, and whether or not I get propelled from page to page, losing myself in a different world.

The cacophony of voices appeared in Neuromancer, but they weren’t “liking” and “friending” and “sharing” things. Maybe the science fictional imagination is by definition a dark one. Or maybe that’s just the function of a good storyteller.

Whatever it is, I don’t think any of us saw this level of minutiae inundating us like it has. Nor do I think we (the sf writers) saw the advent of data mining to cull out opinions, like a recent study did. The study, done using a key word data mine on Twitter, tried to see whether people in different cultures had the same moods at the same times of day.

The study found that humans are generally happier when they wake up and when they find time to relax. Gosh. Data mining and Twitter told us that, because we overshare.

Or maybe, because it’s just plain common sense.

Well, I’m done sharing for the day. Now I’m toddling off to the couch in my analog office to read a pristine book just waiting for my underlines. Which I will share-with no one.

For the Love of Sin

Gary Cuba

I rose, utterly befuddled, from my kneeling position beside the corpse. 'This guy is completely free of sins, Henderson. I've never seen anything like it.'

The coroner arrived, and I backed off to let him do his thing. He didn't even acknowledge my presence. Most people considered me a freak and treated me like a pariah. That was difficult for me, but I'd learned to live with it.

No doubt these guys had seen many crime scenes gorier than this one, but it was way too gruesome for my taste. The deader's throat had been slit open. Jeez, so much blood . . .

Detective Henderson grunted from behind me. 'That's mighty curious, Pete. This sleazeball-Manny Greer, street alias Manny The Snake-spent more of his life in jail, than out. How do you figure it? You losing your touch or something?'

There was no way to figure it. No one was without sin. Everyone had the evidence of their prior misdeeds riding their bodies. Only a few sensitive people, those with special acuity like me, could spot those manifestations.

And that was the way I made my living, as a police consultant: Pete Conklin, sin-seer par excellence.

But here was the conundrum: the sins were always there. I could see them clearly, clinging and crawling like tiny glassine worms on everyone. On me, on Detective Henderson, on everybody, living or dead. We were all human beings, after all, and sin naturally went along with that condition. Some folks had more of them, some less-but they were always there.

'No, Henderson, I haven't lost it,' I said. 'You want me to tell you about your latest sins? One of them is sitting on your left shoulder as we speak.' I watched him shiver and start to raise his hand, then abruptly catch himself.

'Don't do that to me, Pete. Just don't do it. I believe you.'

Isolating and extracting the sins of dead people could never, of course, provide names and places. Sins were mute. But sometimes, simply identifying and cataloguing them by their phenotype could lead to motives, and once in a rare while that would crack a crime like this one, when there was little else to go on.

I stripped off my latex gloves and tucked them into a plastic bag inside the satchel containing the tools of my trade: collecting vials and chemical fixatives, a few customized extraction tools, and a thick field identification guidebook. 'I can only conclude that he's been intentionally wiped clean. It might be that the killer didn't want us to know about one or more of the dead guy's sins. And that implies the perp had sin-sensing capabilities. Or that an accomplice did.'

'That's interesting, but it doesn't do us a whole lot of good,' Henderson said. 'It's not like we have a list of all you cootie-spotters back at the office.' He frowned and added, 'Unless, of course, you'd care to provide us with one.'

I looked Henderson in the eye and shook my head. 'You know I won't do that. You also know better than to ask me.'

'Can't fault me for trying. I know you've got lots of contacts within that . . . whatcha call it, that marshal-filly crowd.'

'Hamartiaphily.' I'd corrected him at least a dozen times before about the craft name, derived from the Greek, meaning 'love of sin.' 'Yes, I personally know quite a few sin collectors out there. But I can vouch that none of them are murderers.'

Henderson only huffed in response. He knew the legal line as well as I did.

'There's just one thing I don't understand,' I said, waving an arm toward the corpse on the floor. 'It would have taken a lot of time to do a full wipe. Especially if the victim was so heavily riddled with sins, as you claimed. Why go to all that effort, if only one target sin was the prey?'

Henderson shrugged his shoulders. 'Maybe the cootie-snatcher could see 'em, but wasn't experienced enough to type 'em. So he just grabbed 'em all, figuring that the target one was in the bunch. I dunno. Just guessing.' He scratched his forehead. 'And going along with that, I suppose he didn't want to take the easier route, which would have been to remove the body as it was and dispose of it where we couldn't find it. Too much risk of discovery in that. But sitting here in this dive, he had all the time in the world.'

'Makes as much sense as anything else,' I said. 'Look, Henderson, I have to get out of this place before I blow my breakfast all over your shoes. The stink of blood is really getting to me. Are you done with me?'

Henderson tilted his head toward the door, and I wasted no time leaving the murder scene.

****

I hate it when things don't add up right-and they certainly didn't in this case.

Another scenario had entered my mind at the crime scene, one which I hadn't floated to Henderson. What if the murder had been committed by an overzealous sin collector, for no other reason than to glom onto a harvest of goodies that he could then sell to other hamartiaphiles on the open market? In other words, some sort of sick, psychopathic sin reaper?

But that didn't ring right. The victim may have had a lot of resident sins, true-and they were all worth something. But not much. The sins you'd get off any typical two-bit hoodlum like Manny simply weren't that much in demand in this limited market. They wouldn't appeal to any discriminating collector. It wouldn't have been worth murder to obtain the small amount they'd bring.