Vanadium Dark Read online

  The Pentagon

  Missing people. Violent crimes. Anonymous threats.

  Finding. Solving. Unmasking. Revealing.

  Then, nothing.

  Viktor reclined back in his chair, eyes looking at the ceiling.

  A remarkable thing had happened. He'd cleared his inbox. More than four hundred cases had been dealt with in the past three days, with another thirty pending on things beyond his control—mostly insufficient information. He'd prepared his ships for a storm, but now the rainclouds were gone.

  For a blessed moment, there was nothing to do.

  He had a headache. He took another Sycorax. It was the last capsule in the box. He'd have to find more.

  “So, my predecessor... ” he said to Joyce. “His name was Robertson, wasn't it?”

  “That's right.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Pleasant enough. A DARPA head of security looking to add something to his resume.”

  “Please tell me he couldn't handle it. My ego needs some stroking. Tell me he ended up staggering out of Project Elephant, blinking at the sunlight, aged twenty years and wondering why he couldn't zoom and enhance the walls of the Pentagon Metro.”

  Joyce laughed. “You'll get there. We had to cut off his ephedrine a few times before he damaged his heart, but he did pretty well... for the most part.”

  “Lucky I'm still at the stage where caffeine keeps me awake.” Viktor swiveled the chair around. “What do you mean, 'For the most part?'”

  She looked away, fingers dancing on the keyboard like a concert pianist's. “Well, it's a stressful job, and you know, things sometimes happen.”

  Another case chimed into her inbox. Although her monitor was turned away from him, Viktor was able to see the category she sorted it into when the color reflected off the marble column behind her changed. Blue. Cat-4.

  He went back to work, marshaling Vanadocams like a drill team several quadrillion strong.

  Joyce's little evasion annoyed him.

  The case seemed routine enough. It involved a missing person in Dubuque, Iowa.

  Viktor spent several tedious minutes rewinding and fast-forwarding outside an apartment complex, trying to find the magic moment when the 16 year-old girl ran from her stepdad's house.

  And there she was.

  Pause.

  Screenshot.

  Play.

  A fragile, Junoesque woman stepped outside, turned around to shout something back into the house, and set off down the street at a run. Viktor engaged motion tracking and followed her.

  He was well aware that this journey might end with her in several plastic garbage bags. It had happened before.

  Crime had been almost eradicated by Project Elephant's nationwide surveillance, but the crimes that still happened were often extremely vile ones.

  Desperate, insane people doing desperate, insane things. Those were the crimes committed in the post-Vanadocam world. No such thing as petty crime now.

  Once, these human-interest stories had torn at his heart. Now, he felt almost nothing.

  Watching the slight figure of the girl, he found himself only hoping that the mystery would be short and easily solved so he could get to work on other cases. This was the worst part of the job. Not the exhaustion and stress. It was watching yourself gradually become hard and distant, cooling like a dead star.

  Hurry up, he thought, watching her skinny frame sprinting through Dubuque at 20x speed. It was still taking forever. Christ, she must have run for hours.

  Finally, a flash of sudden action caused him to revert to regular speed.

  A man walked down the street, a self-driving sedan cruising alongside him. He stopped. The girl stopped. The car stopped.

  They started talking. A boyfriend? On the other side of town?

  Finally, the guy opened the sedan's rear door and gestured that she should get in. More talking. He gestured again, and she obeyed, climbing into the car and sitting down. Her rake-thin body seemed as insubstantial as the spokes of a spiderweb.

  Viktor cocked an eyebrow.

  These sorts of cases were always tricky. Had he bullied or threatened her into the car? Had she gone of her own free will? The coin could fall either way in court.

  Without audio, you could never tell.

  He screen-capped the car's license plates, and video-capped her getting into the car.

  Next came another tedious motion-tracked period as the car rolled through town. Viktor nibbled a ragged edge of a fingernail, a little anxious about the girl's fate in spite of it all.

  So who was this guy?

  Viktor zoomed in and spun the camera around to the front of the car.

  He tried to get a good look at the guy in the driver's seat. He had a truly odd face. A disproportionately huge Charlie Brown forehead. A receded chin that seemed to have been achieved with a wood planer. A small non-event of a nose—one that seemed to hint at former size, as if he'd had a normal nose at birth, and it had been artificially shortened.

  Dubuque had shitty Vanadocam coverage.

  Every few feet, the ground blurred and fractured, splinters of static cracking the world of grass, trees, and cement. Sometimes, the space between two points was clumsily extrapolated from surrounding areas, often with surreal results. Viktor saw two fire hydrants sitting side by side, each with an identical dent in the side. He saw a woman momentarily sprout two extra arms as she walked through a partially uncovered area, and the Project Elephant computer hastily grabbed limbs from bystanders. It was fucking weird.

  Once, most of the country had been like this. Now, the network only in a few low-coverage areas.

  If they're going outside town on a dirt path, I could lose them, Viktor thought. There are still parts of America with no Vanadocams at all.

  They stayed on a paved road, which was a good sign. Even as the landscape blurred and distorted around him, he was able to follow the sedan.

  He realized it might be an idea to bring up a GPS locator. He looked at it and saw that they were already about twenty miles out of Dubuque.

  They drove and drove and drove. Even at the fastest possible speed, Viktor found the minutes ticking by. He felt annoyed, imagining the cases piling up in his inbox.

  Where on earth are they going? What's their plan?

  Finally, he heard Joyce's voice. “Mister Kertesz, it's alright. The girl's been found. We just got a message from the Dubuque PD.”

  He was still watching the car. “Huh? What?”

  “She's okay. She walked out of her stepfather's house. He filed a missing person report. You're supposed to wait, but he lied about when she'd left. She came back after about two or three hours, and he never bothered to notify the police until about ten minutes ago. Hopefully, they gave him a serve over that. What a waste of time.”

  But his eyes were still fixed on the scene in front of his goggles.

  They were still driving.

  No sign of stopping, slowing, or turning.

  And Joyce thought this girl was now back with her father?

  “Er, Mister Kertesz?”

  “Thanks Joyce. I was listening. Hey, do the police know anything about what the girl did when she was missing?”

  “She said she stayed at a local church and weeded the front yard in exchange for a meal.”

  “So she didn't go joyriding with some strange guy?”

  “Not that I know of. Is that's what happening in your goggles?”

  “Are you an Elephant Handler now, Joyce? Otherwise, I can't tell you. Huge Op-sec violation. I will say that I think I've found a bug in the mainframe software. Either that or the girl's a liar.”

  “Well, no matter. There’re three new cases. Want to see them?”

  “Uh-uh. Just give me a minute.”

  The strange scene on the lenses compelled him.

  He had to know.

  They were a hundred and fifty miles out of Dubuque and still going.

  If he wasn't mistaken, they'd been driving for al
most three hours.

  They were two hundred miles out of Dubuque before Viktor killed the playback and pulled the goggles off his head, sighing. His headache was worse. And he had no more time to waste.

  “How do I leave a note for the tech people?”

  “There's a notepad in the top drawer.”

  “Well, isn't that great? I'm sitting in the Pentagon, monitoring the nation through a trillion-dollar surveillance system, yet I have to write things by hand like a fucking ape. Way to bring me down to earth.”

  “Apes don't write.”

  “Some of those new Ouranguchimp hybrids are pretty clever.” He rifled through the drawers. “I saw one play Brahms on a piano at the Baltimore zoo. It didn't understand the idea of timing, so it just played the part it knew over and over, even though it ended in the middle of a bar.”

  He sorted through papers. There were several spiral notebooks, but none of them were labeled.

  “Do I just write on any of them and leave it on the keyboard when I go to sleep?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He found a pen, opened one of the notebooks, and found that it had already been written on.

  Three words.

  THIS MACHINE KILLS

  * * *

  “Good morning, Wilson.”

  He was in the debriefing room, alone with the Secretary of Defense. A Pentagon Force Protection Agency officer had been standing guard, but Viktor had requested they talk alone.

  “Morning, Mister Kertesz. What's on your mind? Congratulations on your metrics, by the way. Four hundred and fifty cases in just five days. That is some phenomenally fast Handling.”

  “Thanks.” Viktor steepled his fingers. “I just wanted to ask a question, and I figured you'd be the person.”

  “Oh?”

  “The Handler before me, what was his name?”

  “Sean Robertson.”

  Viktor shifted from one foot to another. “Level with me. Why did he quit?”

  The Secretary of Defense just stared at him at the moment.

  “Uh, he didn't quit. Handlers are rotated in and out every six months. You know this.”

  Viktor smiled. “Yes, but nevertheless, he quit. He did not serve a full six months.”

  The Secretary didn't look friendly at the best of times, and now he was not even trying. A lip curled in annoyance. “May I ask how you know this?”

  “Because of the backlog. Normally, cases accrue at a rate of sixty or seventy a day, and an efficient Handler can more or less stay on top of them. I walked in at the start of this week, and there were more than two hundred cases. What's more, I looked at the dates on them, and some were more than three days old. Where was Robertson? Why wasn't he on top of things?”

  The Secretary was silent for a while. “Sometimes, Handlers fall behind.”

  “I say this with respect, Wilson: that's bullshit. Up until three days before my arrival, he was getting through his workload efficiently. Then, nothing. Not a single case was resolved from that point on—not even the make-work crap that takes two minutes to do. He wasn't falling behind. He wasn't here at all.”

  The Secretary had no expression on his face. A poker player without cards or chips.

  “Hell, even the fact that he wasn't here when I arrived should have tipped me off.” Viktor went on, suddenly aware that he might be walking the wrong side of boldness. “Normally, the old Handler greets the new Handler, just as a courtesy. And that should go double if you have to dump two hundred fucking cases on your successor's ass.”

  “I fail to see why this matter is of concern to you, Kertesz.”

  “I'm a Handler, sir. It's what I do. I pry. I can't stand mysteries.”

  “Be aware that you are to pry only as you are paid. For your information, Robertson had a mental breakdown.”

  “A mental breakdown, eh? What caused it?”

  “That's a personal matter between Robertson and his family. I do not know, and I would not tell you even if I did.”

  “He didn't leave any handwritten notes lying around, did he?”

  “Handwritten notes? What on Earth are you talking about, Kertesz?” The Secretary's voice was contemptuous. “Why are you wasting my time?”

  Viktor felt abashed. “Sorry. Never mind. That's all I wanted to discuss, I suppose.”

  “I find it hard it understand how either of us have benefited from this talk. Good day, Kertesz.”

  Viktor left the room, feeling the Secretary's stare drilling into his back.

  * * *

  By nine that morning, Kertesz was back to work. Caffeine pulsed through his system like an electrical current. It was no use. Not even a week in, and already he felt rode hard and put away wet.

  The digital Vanadocam world consumed all his hours like an idol that never tired of sacrifice. He found himself loathing it.

  It let him see everything from one coast to the other, yet he was still its prisoner.

  He began to remember all the little tricks he'd forgotten from past stints doing this job: how to shut his eyes when the Vanadocams zoomed or panned so that the rapid blurring/movement/unblurring sequence wouldn't irritate them. Little tricks to avoid a migraine headache—or delay one, to be more exact.

  All Handlers got them in the end.

  A veritable pharmacy of stimulants—from both above and under the counter—was available for his use. He only had to ask. But he would work without them for as long as possible.

  He liked having control of his senses, for one thing.

  For another, it would have been stupid.

  Yes, he could load up on ephedrine, Adderall, amphetamines, even methamphetamine. Wire himself up to his eyeballs. Smash his reuptake mechanism to pieces. But he'd still end up feeling exhausted, depleted, and ready do die. And then where would he go? Then what would he take?

  No, better not to break the childproof seals on any of the hard stuff just yet.

  So far, he was coping.

  All day long, he interacted with the goggles. They became an extension of him.

  Or perhaps he was an extension of them.

  Sometimes, he heard Joyce's voice. She almost seemed part of the computer. So did he when he answered her.

  Sometimes, he could almost believe that there was no him or her, that there was anything else other than computer, computer, computer.

  Don't they say we all have a couple thousand Vanadocams inside us? He rubbed the corner of a dry eye. Little floating cameras that landed on our food, that got sucked into our lungs, that just plain drifted through our cell walls?

  His heartbeat raced. He'd just dry-swallowed a couple of caffeine tablets. He was already cheating on the recommended dosages. He had the cover story that the incident with the Secretary had stressed him, had thrown him off his game. Therefore, he needed extra stimulants.

  What he really needed was more Sycorax. He liked the way the drug dulled his senses, scraping away all the rough edges of light and noise that otherwise drove him crazy.

  The day went on and on, cases blurring until the world reduced to just the one in front of him.

  An ugly hit and run accident in Orlando, Florida. Burst guts over the highway. Totally forgotten in five minutes.

  A difficult case involving identity theft and mail fraud. He sat there for at least five minutes, wondering how to approach it, and then he realized that his fingers had unconsciously kept on typing, entering commands, and the case already halfway to solved.

  His disassociation from himself was frightening.

  God, he was here for another six months.

  Goggles wrapped around his head, he explored and investigated, riding a carriage made of trillions of tiny cameras.

  He still didn't know what had happened to Robertson.

  He wondered if the message written on the notepad was from him.

  Colophon 1

  The Vanadocam is the defining invention of the Twenty-first Century so far, on equal footing with the Internet of the Twentieth and the automobil
e of the Nineteenth. They've changed everything the eye can see while being smaller than the eye can see. The ancient dream of a crime-free society has been realized without a single extra guard or wall.

  But how do they work?

  The idea seems straightforward. Quadrillions of nano-scale cameras float in the air, catching light and beaming it to tens of thousands of pylons. From there, the data is aggregated and built into a digital world by Project Elephant's mainframes, which can then be viewed by a lawman colloquially known as the Elephant Handler.

  Laypeople often refer to Vanadocams as “eyes,” a metaphor which blurs lines with the actual truth.

  Vanadocams are more similar to eyes than cameras. A camera is a tool engineered from the top down, using an array of tools and machining techniques. Vanadocams, like eyes, emerge from the bottom up through sophisticated self-assembly.

  They are tiny circuits, made up of a countable number of atoms that form a primitive light-sensitive transducer. This is similar to how biologists think the eye developed. In the early days, eyes couldn't see colors and shapes. They were simple light-sensitive organs that couldn't do much more than answer “is light touching me – yes or no?” In time, mutations produced the modern eyeball, and the Vanadocam network represents a high-tech re-emergence of evolution's basic principles, this time with nanotechnology as a base instead of DNA.

  The problem is this: for a Project Elephant to be effective, we need a lot of Vanadocams. Project Elephant's best guess for the minimum number of Vanadocams needed for adequate coverage is a thousand per square meter. If we want to cover all 3,796,742 square miles of the United States a mere three yards deep, we'd need an astonishing thirty quadrillion Vanadocams! No current mass production model has produced this many copies of anything.

  And the tiny size of the Vanadocams presents its own problems. Working with things on a nanometer scale is a nightmare. Even a tooltip one atom across is too big. Metaphors like “building a Lego House while wearing catcher mitts” and “performing open heart surgery with a broadsword” are often used to describe attempts to engineer things at an atomic level, and Vanadocams are not just rough shapes like bonded polymers. They are circuits that have to be utterly precise, or they will not work. “Good enough” is not good enough. A misplaced atom means that the circuit will not complete, and the transducer won't lower its resistance when it touches light.