“Hong-Sung Enterprises.”
Shaw explained about the goggles and how the game turned your house and backyard into imaginary battlegrounds. “Most companies data-mine information from things you do actively: fill out forms, answer questionnaires, click on products to buy. Hong-Sung collects data without your knowing it. The goggles have cameras. They upload everything you look at when you play.”
Standish was interested. “Products in your house, the clothes you wear, how many kids you’ve got, a sick or elderly relative, if you’ve got pets — they sell that to data-mining companies? Smart. And Henry Thompson was going to write about it... Is that really a reason to kill somebody, Shaw? Conspiracy to mail me coupons for diapers for Gem? Or oil changes for that fancy camper of yours?”
“I think it’s more than that. Maddie told me the company was giving the game and the goggles away to the U.S. military. When the soldiers or sailors play, they might look at something classified — maybe a weapon, an order for deployment, information about troop movements — and the goggles could capture and upload it.”
“Maybe audio recordings too?”
Shaw nodded. He replaced phone with laptop and looked up Hong-Sung. “They’ve got links to the Chinese government. Anything the goggles scanned could go directly to the Chinese Ministry of Defense. Or whatever their military operation’s called.”
Standish’s phone pinged with a text. She sent one in reply. Shaw wondered if it had to do with the case. She put the phone away. “Karen. We got good news. The last hurdle. We’re adopting. Always wanted two.”
“Boy, girl?”
“Girl again. Sefina. She’s four. I took her out of a hostage sit in EPA and got her into foster about eighteen months ago. Mother was brain-damaged from all the drugs and her boyfriend was warranted up his ass.”
“Sefina,” Shaw said. “Pretty name.”
“Samoan.”
Shaw asked, “We tell Prescott about Hong-Sung?”
“What would they do with it? Nothing. Remember, Shaw: simple. That’s what they like. Ransom demands, bullets and drugs and lovers running amuck.” She frowned. “Is there such a thing as ‘running muck’? Is that what you run when everything’s calm and good?”
Shaw was taking quite the liking to Detective LaDonna Standish. He powered down his laptop and slipped it and his notebook back into the bag. “I’ll try to find a way into Hong-Sung.”
“Could your friend Maddie help?”
“That’s not going to happen. I’ll see Marty Avon myself.”
Standish’s tongue tsked. “What happened to the we?”
“Got a question,” Shaw said.
“Which is?”
“Who’s going to stay home with Sefina and Gem?”
“Karen. She writes her cooking blog from home. Why?”
“So you can’t afford to lose this job, right? That doesn’t require an answer.”
Her lips pursed. “Shaw, you—”
“I’ve been shot at, I’ve abseiled off a burning tree. I’ve decapitated a rattler halfway into his strike—”
“You did not.”
“Truth. And we can all agree that I can face down a mountain lion.”
“I’ll give you that.”
“I can handle myself. If that’s what you were going to say.”
“I was.”
“Anything I find pans out, I’ll call you. You call SWAT.”
56
“The Astro Base.”
Marty Avon was speaking to Shaw but was gazing at an eighteen-inch toy on his desk. A red-and-white globe atop landing legs. His beloved gaze reminded Shaw of how his sister, Dorie, and her husband would look adoringly at their daughters.
“Nineteen sixty-one. Plastic, motors. See the astronaut.” A little blue guy, dangling from a crane, about to be lowered to the surface of Avon’s desk. “We didn’t have space stations then. No matter. The toy companies were always a generation ahead. You could fire a ray gun. You could explore. Batteries required. Lasted about two weeks before the rush wore off. That’s the nature of toys. And chewing gum. And cocaine. You just have to make sure there’s a new supply available.
“I don’t have much time,” Avon added, focusing on Shaw. “I’m meeting with some people about Siliconville. We’re getting some resistance from traditional real estate developers. Imagine that!” He gave a wink. “Affordable housing, subsidized by employers — not popular!”
Like the company towns of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which Shaw knew about from his father’s reading to the children about the Old West. Railroads and mines often built villages for their workers — who paid exorbitant prices for rent, food and necessities, often running up huge debts, which bound them forever to their employers.
He suspected Avon’s apparent socialist bent would lead him to run Siliconville in a very different way.
“There’s been another kidnapping. We think it’s related. We need your help again.”
“Oh, no. Who?”
“A woman, thirty-two. Pregnant.”
“My God, no.”
Shaw had to give Avon credit that the first words out of his mouth weren’t something to the effect of: more bad publicity for me and my game.
“We’re doing everything we can with the proxies to find you a suspect. But it’s taking more time than I’d hoped. We’ve cracked eleven. None of them are in the area.”
“Only eleven?”
A grimace. “I know. It’s slow. We don’t have supercomputers. And some proxies are just so righteous you can’t trace them back. That’s why they exist in the first place, of course.”
Shaw said, “Add these times too, when he wouldn’t have been online.” He displayed his notebook and pointed to the hour Chabelle disappeared.
Avon typed fast and, with a flourish, hit RETURN. “It’s on its way.”
“I need something else. We have another hypothesis. Hong-Sung Entertainment.”
The CEO corrected, “No, it’s ‘Enterprises.’ Hong Wei sets his sights high. Gaming’s just a part of his businesses. Small part, actually.”
“You familiar with Immersion?”
Avon laughed, his expression saying, Who isn’t?
“So you know how it works?”
The lanky man’s fidget fingers maneuvered the cerulean astronaut back into the Astro Base. “Here’s where you might ask: Do I wish I’d thought the game up? No. Virtual reality and motion-based game engines sound good. The fact is, of the billion-plus gamers in the world, the vast majority sit on their asses in dark rooms and pound away on a keyboard or squeeze their console controller. Because they want to sit on their asses in dark rooms and pound away on keyboards. Immersion’s a novelty. Hong-Sung’s poured hundreds of millions into Immersion. Hong’s less of a prick than some in Silicon Valley but he’s still a prick. I don’t have any problem with the game taking him to the cleaners when people get tired of hopping around like bunnies in their backyards. Which is going to happen. Why? Because it’s not...” His eyebrow rose.
“Fun?” Shaw said.
“Exactement!” Offered in a curious French accent.
And this grinning, goofy fellow had created one of the creepiest video games in history.
“What if Immersion’s more than a game?”
Avon’s squinting eyes moved from the space station back to Shaw, who explained his idea about the cameras on the goggles sucking up images from players’ houses or apartments as they roamed their homes and uploading the data to Hong-Sung’s servers for later sale.
Avon’s eyes widened. “Jesus. That is solid gold brilliant. Okay, now ask if I wish I’d thought that one up.”