“Top drawer,” he offered.
Never pointed out his desk. Didn’t have to. Even outside The System, it was the details-those little things I mentioned-that made the difference. In this case, his chair. A nice form-fitting tilt model designed to hold you in a semi-reclined position. He didn’t have much privacy, not even so much as the closet-cubicle I was allowed for hosting my virtual office uptown, but he did go in for comfort and safety. No sense letting your body fall forward with an involuntary twitch, impaling your cell or a piece of your coffee mug into the middle of your forehead.
I eased myself into the hugging material, liking the velour touch. Then opened his top drawer and pulled out the datajack on its thin cable. Like most, it was covered in a thin latex sheath meant to keep things clean. Okay, it was a condom. Extra-small. The department wasn’t about to pay for a custom-designed sheath, but it could have been worse.
The upper brass could have made us pick up our own extra-smalls at a local drugstore.
Without a warning glance at Curtis, and avoiding Samantha’s gaze altogether, I stripped the condom away and set the jack into the socket behind my ear. Immediately, I began to relax. Muscles going slack, and a pleasant buzzing in my ears as the endorphins kicked in to lull me in to a… let’s call it a receptive state. In a dreamy haze, I settled my hands down onto the chair’s arm rests and reclined back into a comfortable pose.
Then rocked forward.
Standing up (in The System).
I was back in the office I’d just left, only without the clutter of desks and without the jewel-tone walls closing in around me. Instead, walls were painted a pleasant beige, illuminated by a soft glow that seemed to pool up from the floor, and hung with a few art masterpieces I might have recognized from museums. That is, from movies that had been shot inside museums.
So I wasn’t an art buff. But still quite soothing, all considered.
The room remained ten-by-ten, held only by the single chair I’d just stood from and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the mirror. Mirrors were such a common physical interface between The System and reality that it didn’t surprise me at all. My office in the uptown precinct had one as well, and I was well trained in not looking until I was ready to unplug. There’s something disconcerting in watching yourself lolling back, often with a sliver of drool trickling down your chin, giving those phantom twitching motions you see dogs do when they are asleep and “chasing rabbits.”
Worse when you realize that there were several people in the room watching you do it.
Me and an empty room. Chair and a mirror. Some art. And the door. Right. I remembered the case file, which laid out the normal architecture of the datavault. Back through the door (which we’d used to enter) and I would instead be in a small virtual library. Complete with an electronic “card catalog” for maintaining the depository’s inventory as well as VD’s final casework. A drone-an artificially programmed personality-mocked up as a reference-section librarian was available for help. And bringing a “book” back through the door downloaded a copy to the DataScanVI’s auxiliary port.
Small. Ordered. Convenient.
I opened the door.
I’ll say this… I had been warned. Warned in the case file as delivered by IAB. And still, I was overwhelmed. The subtlety with which the perp had sabotaged us was staggering, really. I didn’t doubt for a moment that all the data was still there-the DSVI’s safeguards did not allow for erasure, ever-but it was all cunningly “lost” against the new interface.
The library had become an underground warehouse that stretched away from the suddenly-very-small door I’d stepped through for several miles. Three stories high, by estimation. Stacked floor to ceiling with shelves crammed full of nondescript wooden crates. Aisle upon row upon section. I shuffled along the smooth concrete floor looking to my left and right at the endless collection. There were lift-trucks for retrieving items off the very top shelves; one of the vehicles up on a stand for maintenance, and another leaking a small, spreading puddle beneath it that smelled of brake fluid. Every step sounded hollowly and then died without an echo. Even sound got lost in this immense room.
I chose an aisle at random and walked along, checking out crates. They were solidly built in the old-fashioned way, with real, heavy wood and nailed shut. Each was stenciled with an arcane system of numbers and letters, though not necessarily shelved by any kind of system I could easily discern. I knocked on a few, kicked hard against a few others. Nothing wrong with the physics program, as my big toe throbbed from the effort. I dug behind one stack, pulling out a small box that left a sliver of my thumb and sent me to sneezing from the gray swirl in dust I stirred up. Smashing it against the floor, I nearly laughed when a few dozen gold detective shields spilled out over the concrete walk.
Millions. Maybe billions of possibilities. So stunning, it took me until I’d turned back for the door to place the image. When I realized that no programmer could have quickly produced all this detail from raw design.
No. I recognized it now. This was right out of the Indiana Jones section of The System’s Studio Tours. Even if they weren’t on wireless or plugged in, millions of people walked through this “warehouse” every year by pulling on a VR helmet. You run from the giant rolling boulder (which was probably crated and stored in here somewhere as well), ride along in the big car chase scene, and then walk through the government warehouse from the end of the movie.
This was that warehouse.
And lost in here somewhere, right behind the Ark of the Covenant, would be our master inventory list and the key to opening all our VD casework.
I think that may have been when the glimmer of hope, the one I’d carried with me through most of the day, finally died.
It’s just another part of the problem, working Virtual Division. When you get right down to it, the work is a lot of number crunching and sifting through data. There aren’t any high-speed chases or running a suspect down on foot. No gun fights (though I can’t say missing out on those bothers me too much). And very few high profile arrests. We chip away against “black ice” or battle cyber ninjas. We rarely found anything worse than some low-stakes money laundering. Occasionally, we helped on a RICO subpoena, but OCD grabbed whatever glory came with those arrests.
It wasn’t impossible to get in trouble on The System. People did it everyday. Quite easily, in fact. What was difficult was getting in so much trouble that it justified a program that probably cost the city millions. Not when a keyboard jockey could do most of what a chromed detective could do.
So, escorted by Detective Curtis back to the uptown station, I did what any good detective does. I drank some coffee and I sifted data. Curtis fed it into me, the data that is, through barely civil conversation. And I tried to ignore his suspicious glances, which filled every quiet moment.
“Simply put,” he said as we paused outside my closet office, “the DA’s trial schedule is falling to hell and she’s going to blame us. There are three high-profile cases on the docket, including the serial killer Brendon LaChance, any one of which might go belly up because we can’t track the damn evidence. Chain of custody issues aside, we can’t find it all!”
“Uh huh.”
There was that avalanche building again. Growing heavy on his brow and starting to tumble down his face. “Something you might want to remember is that IAB is pretty damn fireproof. We don’t burn as easily as other divisions. In fact, we often do the burning.” He glared at me, long and hard. “I can serve up VD as easily as the next guy.”
With straight lines like these, I might seriously think about asking for permanent assignment with Curtis once this case was closed. There was some potential here.