Enda had clients living in similar situations, but she always thought the lifestyle seemed too much like doomsday preparation, an admission that the poor would enact violence on you if they realized the truth about your wealth, about the reasons for the disparity.
She followed the road as it veered right, past the underground car park, leading to the maintenance access behind Building One. Three overflowing dumpsters sat against the building, and the scent of rot permeated the air.
Enda took the phone from her pocket. The first thing she did was put on Bitches Brew again. The sound quality was awful after listening to the vinyl, but she could listen to sixty-eight minutes of music without turning or changing discs. Next, she opened the virtual re-creation of the burglary and switched it to Augmented mode to strip the permanent features from the playback—the ground, the walls, the ceiling, and the porn that had been injected into the feed.
Her phone grew hot as it spent processor cycles to match her location to the recording. As soon as it found her, playback began.
Enda turned and watched a large white van drive toward her, disconcertingly real. She stepped back, moving out of the way, and the van parked beside the dumpsters.
Miles’s trumpet dominated the soundscape, then fell away. There was no audio on the recording, just Enda’s soundtrack of jazz over a man walking around to the rear of the van and unloading four round robots and a cleaning cart. He wore a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, but he looked familiar, with a distinctive black tribal tattoo around one eye. She stepped around him, hoping for a better look, but the face resisted—it rested awkwardly on the man’s head, out of place.
She paused the feed, and was confused for a half second when the music kept playing. The whole band crescendoed, beautiful, cacophonous. Enda held her hands out, made a frame around the man’s face, and took a snapshot. She flicked it to her phone, and called Natalya.
“Good to hear from you, Enda,” Natalya said. “I am sorry about earlier.”
“Forget about it. I just sent you a still image—could you run it through the facial recognition databases and tell me if there are any hits?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll send more through as I get them.”
“Of course, Enda. I have a match,” Natalya said.
“Already?”
“Your snapshot has a ninety-eight-point-three percent likeness to Mike Tyson.”
Enda squeezed her eyes shut in embarrassment. She opened them and looked at the man again, paused awkwardly in AR view. It was clear now—Mike Tyson, tattoo and all. “I thought he looked familiar.”
“It’s an AR projection,” Natalya continued, ever helpful.
“Yes, I didn’t think it was actually him.” Though he did have a similarly broad build. “Any chance of seeing through the mask?”
“Unlikely. Any digital recording will have captured the same faked face. To see past it you’d need to find analogue film.”
“Sorry for wasting your time, Natalya.”
“Not at all.”
“I’ll send you more momentarily.”
“I look forward to it.”
Enda brought up the police report on her phone. Cleaning services were contracted to an Omar Garang, who had been found at his home, beaten and restrained. Enda didn’t rule out the possibility of his involvement, but one guard was absolutely certain that it had not been the usual cleaner that night.
Enda leaned in to inspect the back of the van. There the re-creation lost fidelity. Untextured blocks of impossible geometry hung in abstract. Past these, a sea of darkness stretched beyond the walls, diffuse patches glowing with light from seams in the joints of reality. Tyson stood at the doors, and Enda wondered if an accomplice hid within those shadows, obscured by missing visual data.
She unpaused the playback and followed Tyson into the building.
Inside, the man in the coveralls was lit brighter, but he still wore Mike Tyson’s face like a mask. The reports from the other guards hadn’t been much help—none had noticed it was a different black man, except in retrospect. The usual guy was skinnier, one had said. The thief might have had a beard, or he might not have. They each claimed he had a limp, but Enda was waiting to see proof of that for herself.
Tyson trailed the four cylindrical robots’ slow path along the corridors, but Enda left them. She walked into the building’s foyer, where four security guards stood behind the desk. One of them made eye contact and Enda started. He was real, surrounded by three AR colleagues. He stood at his approximation of attention and nodded at Enda as she approached. She lowered the opacity on her playback and the other guards turned ghostly.
“The woman at the gate warn you I was coming?” Enda asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” the guard said.
Otherwise you’d still be playing on your phone.
“Were you working that night?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Anybody from that night still work here?”
“In light of our failures, the company has had to aggressively restructure.”
“ ‘Aggressively restructure,’ huh? That’s a new one.”
“Yes, ma’am. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No, I’ve already read the reports,” Enda said.
She walked out the building’s front door and into the courtyard that filled the space between buildings. The rain streaked cold down Enda’s face as she crossed to the grocer. The ceiling was burnt black in patches, and broken windows had been boarded up with plywood. Remnants of police tape littered the support struts, rustling gently in the breeze.
Enda watched Tyson and the robots proceed through the building as though she had X-ray vision. On the fourth floor skybridge Tyson stopped and looked down, as if he could see Enda standing there.
Enda took a few paces out from beneath the awning, trying to see what Tyson could see. A patch of the outer wall had been recently repaired but not yet painted. A car burst through the wall, front end already crumpled by the time it appeared inside the compound. Text labels hung from the car—make, model, year,
