I settle in a rear seat, several rows behind Hannah but where I can still see her—I’ve sat through this lecture with her before, have already studied Hannah diligently taking notes, have already seen her checking her phone for messages, suppressing yawns but generally paying attention. The lecturer enters a few minutes late, swirling into the room in a charcoal overcoat and tartan scarf, dropping his leather satchel on the lecture hall’s front table—I’ve seen him enter several times before, have seen the students snap to attention at his presence… but this time when the professor enters, my stomach feels like it slides down through my bowels. The professor for this class, who I’d seen in the background of Hannah Massey’s life before but never recognized until now, is Waverly.
He looks different from the man I know—his hair here is a salt-and-pepper black and left longer than the silver hair Waverly has now. I didn’t know who Waverly was when I was researching Hannah for Kucenic, he didn’t mean anything to me then—but now I notice his ravenous blue eyes fall on Hannah while he speaks, I notice his eyes linger over her a few moments longer than he looks at the other students, an older professor noticing the prettiest girl in his class, nothing more sinister than that, I must have thought. He’s lecturing about artificial intelligence, about how Focal Networks sims human cognition, how they’ve created algorithms that can replicate human thought and how they can make predictions about human behavior based on his models.
“Our choices aren’t really our own,” says Waverly. “We are putty hardwired with biological imperatives. A very few number of us will gain the wisdom needed to overcome our material limitations, but the number is very small—my business depends on that number being extraordinarily small. You know, when I started out, when I was just your age, an undergrad, I pursued my research hoping that one day hospitals would adopt technology so that impersonal diagnostic kiosks could be replaced with a truly interactive, almost-human bedside experience that could be used for the First World and Third World alike, but my first million came in my senior year when I was approached by the Real Doll industry. The Creator modeled us using materials prone to lust and hunger. Do we have individual souls capable of overcoming the base nature of our being? Perhaps… but my paychecks depend on very few of us overcoming our impulses, and I’m a very rich man—”
The class ends, early afternoon. I’ve watched Hannah after this class before—as she mills around for several minutes to see the professor but becomes resigned as other students cluster around him first, asking clarifying questions. I’d always simply assumed Hannah waited after class because she also had some question about the lecture, but now I wonder at a prior relationship between the two, some other reason she may have waited to see him. No matter—Hannah gives up the wait, leaves the lecture hall. This is the last known hour of Hannah’s life.
The ground will be frozen through much of April of that year, maybe why she was buried shallow enough that the spring rains could wash away her grave. Snowing, now—a swirling powder. I don’t know why Hannah cuts across campus toward the athletic fields rather than heading up Morewood to her dorm in Morewood Gardens, or to the library or another class, or even to the University Center for a late lunch. Rather, she skirts around the front end of campus to the parking garage on Forbes. She enters the parking garage and disappears—the archival deletion yawning enough that even State Farm picked it up on their cursory analysis of her extended family’s insurance claim. Hannah will miss a three o’clock class that day, and will miss a rehearsal for Spamalot that evening, her friends trying to contact her but failing, her friends reporting her missing to campus security, initiating a search that will burn intensely for weeks but peter out over the summer months, when everyone will leave Pittsburgh for home. By late summer, when everyone returns to campus for their own October death sentence, Hannah will already have become just a specter, mostly forgotten.
I scan the exception report again, the listing riddled with ContinuityExceptions, time-consuming to track, tedious. It took me months to find her body, but could take as many months more to track exactly what’s happened here—
But I don’t have to work like this—
I can work backward now—like solving an equation by working from the known solution. Hannah’s with Timothy, or will be—I reset the City, run a Facecrawler on Timothy, including older images I’d found of him as reference points for the search, limiting to this parking garage. Facecrawler hits on security cam footage of the driver of a Ford Mustang SUV leaving the lot shortly after Hannah disappears—tinted windows, but he’d rolled down the window to swipe his debit card at the gate. I zoom in on the face: Timothy—got him. The gate raises, the SUV leaves the lot.
I follow—
He drives through Squirrel Hill, cuts through Schenley Park, Greenfield Avenue sloping downhill until a sharp switchback called Saline brings us beneath the interstate. We’re in the Run. He parallel parks on a side street that runs behind Big Jim’s—a neighborhood bar only a short half block away from the house whitewashed with the words of Christ. Timothy’s recognizable when he steps from the car, despite his beard and thinner frame, but Hannah’s been altered with a simple face swap—an easy enough trick to throw off basic Facecrawlers. Grace Kelly’s face, but the body is still Hannah’s, the clothes. Timothy takes her to Big Jim’s, and I follow.
Big Jim’s is sculpted from security cam footage—no sound, a monochrome environment. Timothy and Hannah in a corner booth, eating spaghetti. I wait for them outside, pacing, agitated by the adrenal rush of ferreting information from the Archive. By the time they leave the restaurant it’s already dusk. The neighborhood’s quiet, cones of streetlamp light illuminate the snow. Andy Warhol worshipped here in the Run, down the street at the Saint John Chrysostom Byzantine Church, metallic onion domes shimmering in the lights from the overpass. Row houses here, or houses separated by the slimmest gaps, shot-and-beer bars still sooty from the mill days almost a century gone. Timothy stays parked where he is. He and Hannah step through a gap in a chain-link fence and cross a field strewn with broken bottles and beer cans, overgrown with stubby grass and weeds. A floodlight shines on the side of the Christ House so the white cross and the whitewash-slathered quote are always visible, day or night. The lawn’s mud, the front steps long since rotted and replaced by ascending cinder blocks. The front porch moans with wet rot. The door hangs open.
Timothy stands aside, lets Hannah enter the house first. He follows her, closes the door behind them. I try to follow inside but there’s a barrier in the simulation. Private Account hangs in the doorway in green Helvetica.
“Override,” I say and a keypad appears in the continuity of the doorway. I enter my access code, press Enter. Log-in Failed.
I think I remember Kucenic’s code, so I type in his number string and the barrier disappears like a discarded veil, but as I cross the threshold I hear a rapid series of mechanical ticks. I’m not certain where the flame originates, but I see it expanding from the front door, a spreading orange light like liquid roiling midair. The concussion a heartbeat later, like a mule kick. Weightlessness before the earth swings upward to meet me. Fuck. I try to stand. Fuck. Fuck. Can’t quite. Ears ringing. My breath’s knocked from me, a scalding cramping in my lungs gasping the winter-frozen air. A bomb? I’ve bit my tongue and blood pours from my mouth, snapping me briefly from the Archive, bleeding onto my shirt and bedsheets, but I force myself to stay immersed, to focus on the City, focus on the City. iLux keeps me here. The Christ House, burning. Fire streams from the windows and sweeps up through the gaps in the siding. Fire belches from the front door, swathing the house, casting stark shadows the color of char.