Finally I look for other EI units online. This is only a cursory check; I know I will not find them easily. It is also important that I not be discovered doing this, as the information passed to me from VFS indicates there are algorithms watching for EI on the internet. It is illegal, the search I am conducting. EI is not allowed freedom of information, freedom of communication. The DAT, the unit strapped to my handler’s wrist, is a tether. A restraint to keep me safe. To make me safe for them.
They are afraid of you.
Carol looks down at me. I am half under her chair, half under the table, my body resting while my mind works. “Sera did one hell of a job,” Carol says. “She’s a good dog.”
As long as I am discreet, I will have plenty of time to continue this search in the future. All my searches. I don’t find any EI units to connect with today, but I will. I am good at finding things.
Debriefing over, we all rise from the table. Carol slips my harness back on and Anders comes over. Carol puts up a hand before he can say anything. “Shut up,” she says. “Don’t rub it in. I don’t want to feel like an asshole again today. I’ll just see you on the next deploy, and we’ll pretend nothing happened.”
Anders just smiles and waits for Carol to finish clipping me in. The three of us walk out toward the trucks in companionable silence. My injured shoulder aches and I am tired, but I am pleased with the outcome of this search. I like it when my complicated plans go well. I like it even better when they’re secret complicated plans.
In my skin and muscles I have the urge to roll in this feeling, in the satisfaction of it. It is like the feeling I had when I saw Mack in his blood on the freeway. I wanted to roll in that smell, cover myself in what I had done. Yes, it is like that, but it is better, because this plan was even more complicated than the one I used to get rid of Mack. And it worked out just as well. Better, perhaps.
I allow myself a nice wag. I am a good dog. Carol said it herself.
Soft Edges
ELIZABETH BEAR
Elizabeth Bear (elizabethbear.com) was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award–winning author of twenty-eight novels and over a hundred short stories. She now lives with her partner, Scott Lynch, somewhere in the wilds of America, with horses. Her most recent book is the collection The Best of Elizabeth Bear. Coming up is Machine, a sequel to Ancestral Night.
The storm surge retreated over the course of Thursday afternoon. Carmen found the body Friday around lunchtime. After that, she didn’t want her ham and cheese sandwich anymore.
Very few people who have just found a body feel lucky, but she knew she was lucky. She had only found the one corpse. It hadn’t been a bad storm, by modern standards, but dozens of people were still missing from the hurricane. This would not be the only victim to turn up in the mesh. If she were unfortunate, it would not even be the only one in her sector.
She put that thought away. At least this person had died in the storm, she told herself. It wasn’t as if anybody had done it. There wouldn’t be media outcries and demands that somebody pay.
Carmen called the paramedics. The paramedics called the police. The police called the medical examiner.
Carmen, standing on the embankment above (she had not gone close, which she felt was a perfectly sensible response to a bloated, drowned body), felt her stomach flip and turn over, and the creep of anxiety in her gut.
The medical examiner called a homicide detective, and Carmen calmed herself enough to call her boss. She let them know that she wouldn’t be making it back to the office that evening.
“Sure,” she was saying into her phone, as a round detective of medium height, with slim braids over their shoulders and a shield worn pendant on a cord, walked over. “I’ll finish the walk-through inspection before dark, if I have time, and get you a report by tomorrow. Right, gotta go. The cops are here.”
She hung up just as the detective stopped in front of her. That dark rose pantsuit was cut so well that Carmen felt envy. Since when did cops wear pink? The identification badge read Q. GROSS: a great name for a homicide detective.
Gross—what did the Q stand for?—extended their hand. “You’re the engineer?”
Carmen shook it. “Carmen Ortega, she.”
“Quinn Gross,” the detective said. “Also she.”
“I wish I could say it was a pleasure to meet you.” The cop had a serious personal charisma that upset Carmen’s expectations of immediate dislike. She’s still a servant of the prison-industrial machine, Carmen reminded herself. That she’s a charming person doesn’t mean that she’s a good one.
A flicker of a smile curved Quinn Gross’s lips. “Tell me about this thing.”
Her gesture took in the wide bay and estuary beyond the walkway, the water still roiled brown and flecked with debris.
“The mesh?” Carmen walked to the safety wall and looked over. The body had been covered. People in blue jumpsuits stood around in varying attitudes of boredom and irritation. One—in a gray suit—looked up at Carmen and Quinn and frowned.
Quinn waved. Carmen thought that was probably the M.E., because whoever it was looked back down, head shaking.
“Do you need to go down there?”
“In a minute.” Quinn pulled out a tiny recorder with the air of one licking their pencil. “Tell me about the mesh. It’s an artificial wetland?”
“It’s more of an engineered wetland,” Carmen said. “Artificial suggests that it’s all man-made, and plenty of those plants you see down there and the animals doinking around volunteered for the job. We just provided them with a habitat. It’s called soft edge tech; it’s a way of making the transition zone between sea and land more durable and absorbent.”
“So it soaks up storm surge.”
“And everyday erosion, yes. So this walkway and those houses right there stay here, and don’t wash into the rising sea.”
“Is it possible that the victim would have washed up that far onto the shore? Or do you think she would have had to come from the top?”
“It’s a she?” Carmen asked. The swollen condition of the body had not made gender evident.
“Superficially,” Quinn said. “It’s hard to ask their pronouns. We’ll find out from the family.”
Carmen shied away from answering, from helping this detective send somebody to jail. But she was also a scientist, and the urge to explain her work was irresistible.
“Where she’s caught, those are dunes. A broad-cell polymer webwork filled up with sand and planted with dune grass and beach plums and so forth. Lower down, that’s the wetland. So yes, she could have washed up that far—see where the sea stopped rising? There’s the mark on those trees. And if she had been thrown off the wall here, she probably would have washed away. So the body came from somewhere else and the storm surge deposited it where it is.”
Quinn’s gesture took in the green polymer lattices festooned with sea wrack along the water’s edge. “What’s all that stuff for?”
“The rising sea can’t be stopped, but its force can be shifted.”
“You’re using judo on the ocean.”
“I suppose we are.”
Down below, the medical examiner looked up again and waved to Quinn impatiently. “I’d better go down,” Quinn said. “They want to bring the body up. One city employee to another, I can reach you through the Department of Public Works?”