The Future We Wish We Had

***

“Donna, you’ve never looked more radiant!” Lucien, the company director, gushed as he gathered me in a hug tight enough to disrupt the layers of blue chiffon that constituted my costume.

“It’s all that time I spent in bed recuperating from surgery,” I lied by way of explanation. He’d never understand the sentient nanobots in my system that kept my body looking and performing like a twenty-year-old.

“I watched the rehearsal this afternoon. ‘Rhapsody’ was positively poignant. You’ve added new dimension to your work.” He held me at arm’s length, inspecting my new costume, complete with a crown of flowers, wisps of green leaves about the chiffon, and fluttery wings on a flexible wire. My fairy costume.

“Your knees working okay?” Lucien had known me to dance through excruciating pain without admitting it.

“Better than new. The procedure worked miracles.”

“How long will it last? This company needs you dancing. Our receipts were way down during your absence. Audiences just do not react to your understudy the same way they love you.”

He’d recommended conventional surgical techniques when the tendonitis first hit me three years ago. Those procedures were really only temporary pain relief. Joints never were the same afterward.

“My knees will outlive you.” I smiled graciously at the white-haired gentleman of a certain age. He’d been around so long no one dared ask how old he was, and yet he had more energy and stamina than a dozen dancers put together.

In fact he’d pointed me toward Dr. Bertrand and his controversial techniques when my pain became so acute I could not walk.

I wondered…

“But will your knees outlive you? That is the important part.”

I smiled enigmatically.

“Time for you to go on, Donna.” He kissed my cheek. “Merde. He whispered the universal “Good luck” of all dancers. Though why we said “shit” to each other in French, I’ll never know.

“I have to go easy on the jumps,” I apologized.

No jumps, the nanos nearly screamed in my ear.

“There are no jumps in this dance.” Lucien looked puzzled.

“I’ve added a small tourjete and pas de chat.” Next week I’d make those little jumps bigger. Then we’d go for the truly magnificent grand jete leaps I had once been famous for.

We won’t let you undo all our repairs with jumps and leaps and such.

“That’s what you think,” I told the nanos sotto voce.

“Did you say something?” Lucien asked.

“Just a little mantra to psyche myself up for my premiere.”

No jumps.

“We’ll see about that.” I could out-argue stubborn, mad ballet masters, cranky conductors, and insistent bean counters like Lucien. What were a few nanobots to a true dancer? “If I don’t jump, leap, and turn, the dance is not complete.”

We must complete the dance. To dance is to live.

Exactly!

INSIDE JOB by Loren L. Coleman

… loading…

You’d think by now I’d learn. The city’s top cop wasn’t going to do me, or anyone in the department’s Virtual Division, any favors. Still, when the case landed in my queue I felt a moment’s hope. Every career cop (and yeah, I’m one) is really waiting for the next Big One. The case that offers some major resources to play with. Gets you noticed. Maybe hauls you up to the next paygrade.

That gold folder jacket sitting on my virtual desk? The one pulsing with a soft, supernatural glow that could only mean its return address was Number One Police Square? It had “special assignment” written all over it.

Literally. In tiny red letters that marched around the folder’s edge like some kind of Times Square marquee. Not bad programming, either. I checked the corners- those ninety-degree turns can be tricky-and the letters held perfect form as they swung round the bend. Someone upstairs was still taking pride in their work.

Or they knew that some serious eyes were going to be looking at the data.

I swallowed hard. Purely an affectation, when you’re transformed into The System and really nothing more than a floating database wrapped up in a neurohistic signal. A standard avatar, in other words. But I’m really an old-fashioned kind of guy, and sometimes the moment calls for a hard swallow.

Striking a pose: hands splayed across the old-fashioned blotter that covered a large part of my antique desk, leaning heavily forward and head hung low. The lights in my virtual office dimmed until only a spotlight of dingy yellow fell across my shoulders and pooled on the desktop. I hadn’t taken the case yet, and already I felt the weight bearing down on me. One of those moments when you knew people’s lives were going to change. Maybe end. Maybe it would be mine, this time. Maybe.

Okay, maybe it was a little early for the Sam Spade act.

There wasn’t even a beautiful dame yet.

A shift of thought brought the lights back up, and I hooked my swivel chair over with one foot. A broken castor rattled in protest, and that made me smile. It was that kind of detail, the little things, that made for a convincing experience inside The System, and I’d spent enough of my working hours inside the past six years to want to do it right.

So, getting comfortable, I grabbed up a pencil to take notes right there on my blotter and then tapped the pink eraser end against the folder jacket’s tab. A pins- and-needles tingling sensation crept into my fingers. Looking deep into the No. 2 yellow-painted wood, I saw my security code streaming across the pencil’s bridge, dumping into the tab. Three-level security, I noticed. Someone had locked this up tight. Again, there was that shimmer of hope. Then the folder jacket fell open. Not like a book would fall open. The folder suddenly grew depth. As if I’d removed the cover from a box and revealed a stack of datapages about three inches deep. Officer’s reports. Crime scene photos. Notes from other detectives. They would all be in there. Anything and everything pertinent to the case. And the most pertinent page of all was sitting right on top, ready for me to thumb it out and toss it up into the air where it hung, centered above my desk and glowing like God’s holy writ. The damn cover page, with a large, no-nonsense black IAB stamp in the upper right corner.

Internal Affairs Bureau. The Rat Squad.

Ah, hell.

Chewing through the data forwarded by IAB didn’t take long. One of the (admittedly few) advantages to being plugged in was the ability to manipulate, digest, or expel data at a rate that nearly matched the clock speed of a good CPU. It took longer to requisition a vehicle, once I realized that I would have to unplug for an onsite visit to the downtown depository. Longer still to drive there.

Police depositories, where we log in and secure all evidence for trial, are like small warehouses. Or, really, U-Store-It places. A warren of separate rooms, filled with shelves, drawers, cupboards, and lockboxes. Everything we need to manage an inventory that ranges from the pair of shoes a suspect wore the night of his crime to a steamer trunk filled with fifty kilos of Colombian H. They are cold, musty, cramped little spaces, usually overseen by aging cops who are turning into cold, musty, cramped little people. Dead-end careers. Little hope for parole.

I could relate.

Each depository also housed a datavault, which managed the official and total inventory and offered a place for VD detectives (like me) to store their finished work until trial. But someone at the downtown station had apparently developed “happy fingers,” doing a little off-the-job programming to gum up the entire works. Which was how the problem ended up on my desk.

Agent Curtis of Internal Affairs met me just as I came off the elevator, coming up from the parking garage. Tall, and thick about the middle, with shadows under his eyes and a habit of glancing suspiciously at anyone who stood too close by. Serious frown lines drooping from the corners of his mouth. He had a gold wedding band on his left hand, but I doubted the hangdog expression came from his marriage. If I ever meet a happy IAB rat, it will be the first.

“VD?” he asked, too loudly. Like the chrome jack behind my right ear wasn’t obvious enough. Heads turned.

“I’d rather use protection,” I said. “But I appreciate the warning.”

He frowned, and it looked like an avalanche building up on his face, ready to come crashing down. “You going to play games, or help me catch one of your wirehead buddies?”

Apparently Curtis was ready to paint me from the same color palette reserved for whomever had “abused the privilege,” as some cops like to say. I was tempted- sorely tempted-to turn around right then. One Police Square or not. But there was still some hope left. Call me an optimist, but I didn’t want to give this case up just yet.

“How ’bout first we rule out accidental corruption and a third-party hack?” I asked.

The avalanche started to roll. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

Technically, it wasn’t. Well, an accident maybe, though from the evidence that seemed highly unlikely. Third-party? Would take some doing. First and foremost, datavaults were highly secured, with no (and I mean zero) outside access. That was just one of the ways The System beat back that whole cyberware scare. It really was as simple as not plugging in your critical data to the world-wide. You hosted it off your own intranet, or, if you really wanted security, a