The beauty of it was awesome.
The starter’s gun fired, and the crowd surged. Chang ran with them, marveling at his ability to take it all in.
He looked at a runner fifty meters ahead — a man in a purple unitard that covered him from his knees to his neck, leaving his arms bare. Here was a man Chang would have never known was there before, for he was moving at a pace that Chang normally did not match. Once ahead, Chang would never catch him.
Chang sped up, fell in behind the man, matching his pace, staying two meters back. It was a bit of a strain, but he could manage it for a short time. Long enough to manage something he’d never managed before.
Who was he? Chang didn’t know, but he could deduce much from all those details he observed. The man was fit — his muscles lean and hard. He ran easily, denoting a serious amount of training. He was wealthy or he had a sponsor — the shoes were the latest Adidas SmartShoe, with a computer built in to adjust the foot cushion, and those cost four times what a normal pair of decent running shoes would run. The unitard was a Nike wind-cheater, custom-fitted, made from polypropyl and cloned silk, and cost nearly as much as the shoes. The man wore a Rolex watch or a well-made knockoff. He had a tiny Optar-plus pulse monitor strapped to the other wrist — another expensive toy — and even though it was nighttime, he sported top of the line Ferami photogray RunnerShades, and they didn’t give those away, either. A thousand, maybe twelve hundred U.S. dollars for his outfit, easy — not counting the Rolex.
So much knowledge from just being able to see somebody.
Before, in the dark, even if Chang had been within a few meters, he could not have gathered all that, not in such fine detail. And he would have never known where to look.
Chang’s game had just improved in a major way. Knowledge was power, and with the new software that Petrie had supplied him with, he was going to have options he’d never had before. He’d be able to see individual racers, notice patterns in the crowd, he’d know who was gaining and who was falling back. Runners ahead of him he’d never known were there? He could spot them, track them, maybe catch them.
This was going to make things a lot different in his job. Men who had counted on the fog and rain and darkness to cloak them were about to lose that protection.
Now, Chang was going to be able to find them, chase them down, and catch them. Soon, there were going to be some very surprised computer criminals in his homeland.
Allah be praised for such a gift.
Chang sat in his hotel room, staring at the program mini-disk he had just tried for the first time. It was tiny — the size of a U.S. quarter. He could slip it into his pocket and walk through a dozen airport security checkpoints and nobody would know he had it. He could stick it in an envelope and mail it to himself in a normal-size letter, and nobody would bother to worry over it. But — he did not have to do these things, because it was a legal purchase. It would vastly improve his ability to find miscreants in China, but it was not forbidden for him to own, to take home, because it was old-hat here, something anyone living here could get for his home computer if he had the money to buy it.
Amazing. Americans truly did not know how good they had things. What they took for granted that other societies would see as a miracle.
Chang looked at his watch. He had a few hours before he was supposed to see Gridley, at Net Force. Might as well use the time productively. He would go back into VR, log into his system at home, and do a little hunting. Now that he had this, who knew what manner of crook he might find?
Ah, how wonderful this was!
Abe Kent sat at his desk, staring at nothing. The meeting with Thorn couldn’t have gone better. The Commander had listened to his story, then shrugged it off. “This guy was a killer, Abe. You went out there and took him down. A man like that? He wasn’t going to give us anything if you’d brought him back alive. He was a bad man, and in a just society he would have paid for it with his life in court. You saved us all a lot of time and money to the same end.”
Kent had nodded, relieved some, but still troubled. It wasn’t a total personal failure, but it hadn’t been up to his standards. All he could do was try to do better in the future.
His secure line cheeped.
“Abe Kent.”
The voice on the other end was low, calm, and quiet. He hadn’t heard it in a while. He listened, made a comment, and listened some more. Finally, he said, “I’ll take care of it. I owe you one.”
“No,” the voice had said. “I’m paying back one I owe you. We’re even.”
Kent discommed. After a long moment he shook his head and tapped his intercom button. “Would you see if you could get Jay Gridley to drop by here?” he asked his assistant.
When Jay got the call to drop by Colonel Kent’s office, he was surprised. RW face time was mostly unnecessary, but Kent was the same generation as Jay’s parents, and they had never been as comfortable with VR as somebody who grew up in it as Jay had.
Kent’s secretary smiled and waved him in. Kent was in his chair, not doing anything Jay could tell but sitting there.
“Colonel.”
“Jay. Have a seat.”
“I heard you got Natadze,” Jay said. He plopped onto the couch facing the desk. Hard, not very comfortable. Perfect for a Marine guy. “Congratulations.”
“Not the way I wanted, but as the Commander has pointed out, at least he’s not still on the street.”
Jay nodded. “What can I do you for?” he asked.
Kent took a deep breath. “I got a call from an old friend of mine, used to be a spook in the Company. He’s, uh, moved to another agency. It was regarding your breathing.”
“My breathing?”
“Yes. Whether or not you are going to keep doing it.”
That got Jay’s attention. “What?”
“You went somewhere you weren’t supposed to, and you were noticed.”
“I left a footprint somewhere?”
“Not a footprint — you left an image detailed enough to show the size, shape, and number of your freckles. I don’t care that it was illegal — I suspect you stopped worrying about that a long time ago. But where you walked was in a black-ops system that isn’t supposed to exist. They don’t want anybody who isn’t supposed to know about them to even dream they are there.”
Jay was stunned. Probably looked it, too. Then he started to get just a little irritated.
Kent saw something in his face. He paused for a moment, then said, “Long ago and far away, when I was very young and stupid, there was a foolish game we used to play. On a Saturday night, a bunch of boys would pile into somebody’s car and go cruising. We’d hit all the local water holes — drive-in restaurants, bars that would let underage teenagers sneak in, empty stretches of road where they’d drag-race hot cars. And all the time looking for girls to try and impress. We smoked cigarettes because we thought it made us look older. Of course, what that made us look like was a bunch of sixteen-year-old boys trying to pass for eighteen. We thought we were so cool.”
Jay laughed politely. Where was this going?
“Anyway, the game was this: We’d head out into the suburbs away from town and look for a guy walking alone. If we spotted one, we’d go past a hundred yards or so, as if we hadn’t seen him. Whoever was driving would pull the car over, and a couple of us would hop out and lift one of the guys out of the car, as if he were dead. We’d haul him to the side of the road and put him down, just as if we were dumping a body. The guy would lie there not moving. We’d start back to the car, then one of us would look up, and pretend that we’d just noticed the pedestrian back there.