Zendahl finishes his mug and studies its inside, as if reading the leaves. “There have been other robberies?”
From his body language, Annie concludes this information is both surprising and important. “Several. Running southwest to northeast across the country. They’re related, aren’t they? The disruptions to the satellites, the strange apparition in Chicago, and the thefts at Bergtholm Electronics?”
Zendahl grows visibly cautious. “Too soon to say. It may just be coincidence. I wonder where the burglar will strike next…”
“Passaic.”
Zendahl is visibly startled. “Eh? Because…?”
“It’s the next Bergtholm warehouse lying under the projected path.”
“Maybe we can set up an ambush…” Zendahl muses. He is talking to himself. Annie does not ask him who “we” are. He looks up and meets her eyes. “I don’t have to tell you to say nothing about this.”
“I never ask questions, colonel,” she says; but then belies that statement by adding, “What was that thing, anyway?”
“That thing.”
“That seven-foot spider.”
“It’s not a spider.”
“I know. Five legs. But then, what?”
“You watched the surveillance footage?”
“I had to create a realistic cover story. I can tell you two things it’s not. A weather balloon and an imperial walker.”
A troubled look comes over the colonel and he looks down and to the right. “Sorry, Annie. You don’t have need-to-know.”
But Annie does have a need to know. Knowing is her singular need. So after the colonel has left, she traces his Friday evening call and finds it had originated in a private club in Philadelphia, and that leads to a search on the club’s name, and that leads not to a bogus American Indian tribe, as the club’s website claims, but to ancient gods who, with the heads of beasts and scaled like fish, had strode out of the water and taught the Sumerians the arts of civilization. That strikes her as a rather curious legend.
She works late, as usual. The others in CYBERCOM call her a grind, but there is another routine crisis developing and she must babysit until it is no longer urgent. Strictly speaking, CYBERCOM defends only against attacks on military targets, but it is a fine point whether or not attacks on civilian targets also compromise the military, or if a pre-emptive strike might not be the best kind of defense; so where the line gets drawn is not always clear. Government databases are the honeypot of the Internet and foreign agents and their useful idiots, the buzzing flies. She need not be within the secure zone to work, but it eases access to vast swathes of data and she is much too aware of the sandstorm of cyberattacks to be sanguine of taking government work home like a bumbling bureaucrat.
But she can and does mull over various tidbits as she rides the Yellow Line back to her apartment. The “spider.” The Apkallu League. The Chinese man on the edge of the frame. (She had loosed a worm to look for additional images of his face on the Net.) The oddly specific and at the same time petty nature of the thefts from Bergtholm Electronics. It is quite enough to keep one occupied during an otherwise boring trip.
The Yellow Line ends at Fort Totten and she crosses the lower platform to await the Green Line toward College Park. A few others exit with her, but they wander off to the escalators. It is nearly midnight and those traveling into Deeper Maryland have already come and gone.
The platform is partly in the tunnel and partly in an open cut, and she positions herself under the stars. As she waits patiently for the Greenbelt train, a hooded member of the 44th Street Crew steps up behind her and hits her on the head with a hammer.
No, really. An actual, no-fooling hammer. Well, technically, a sheet-forming mallet, the kind with a hard-rubber head. It is not supposed to leave a mark, but is quite hard enough for the purpose, which is to knock her senseless, perhaps kill her, and grab her purse, cell phone, and other fungible accessories.
But the micro-electro-mechanical implants that form her shell stiffen at the impact and absorb the energy. She is a thixotropic babe, a hard woman to know, in more ways than one.
The same is true of her fist when she strikes back. It leaves his skull a ruin on the platform. Dead, she supposes. It is the least hypothesis, given the forces and vectors involved. When the Green train arrives, disembarking passengers step around the body and make disgusted comments about drunks and street people, but they do not examine too closely. Annie steps aboard the train and does not look back. She neither regrets nor exults in her action. The idea that all lives matter is as alien to her as the idea that any lives matter.
You want alien? Jim-7 is your jolly Uncle Bob next to Annie Troy. She not only sits on the cutting edge; she is the cutting edge: from the compact quantum computer that conducts her cognitive processes, and the MEMS that constitute her shell to the titanium infraskeletal linkages that play the role of bones.
Not that Annie feels any satisfaction at any of this. Strictly speaking, she cannot feel anything. The receptors in her pseudo-skin register pressure, temperature, and the like, but no such things as sympathy or antipathy. She knows from her information harvest that in fiction, all androids are supposed to desire emotions; but Annie experiences no such longing. As far as she can tell, the only role emotions play is to cloud human judgment. She misses them no more than humans yearn for the sonar sense of bats.
Her apartment is conventionally stocked, in case she has visitors, but she neither eats nor sleeps in the conventional sense. She occasionally idles for self-diagnostics, which might be called “sleep” by analogy; but her water-based beta-voltaic batteries run off strontium-90, and will not need replenishment for a great long time, so except for the periodic lube job, there is not even an analogous sense in which she eats or drinks. Consequently, she is a 24/7 kind of gal, which means she has entire gigaseconds of time on her hands. If there is anything in her that can be called an appetite, it is a hunger for information, even if much found on the internet does not, strictly speaking, qualify as such.
Later that evening, her worm returns with additional images of the Chinese man that the pentapede chased in Chicago. Several pictures on a site for a New York City news organ show him helping a woman who has escaped a fire. The main difficulty is that he could not have been in New York at that time and in Chicago scant hours later. And a closer examination of the image reveals an anomaly.
In a brief fight with some gangbangers caught by a bar’s surveillance camera, the Chinese man picks up a grease smudge on his lower right trouser leg. Yet this same smudge is evident in the image taken at the fire, hours earlier. There is something seriously wrong in the sequence of events, and Annie feels perhaps the first emotion in her existence as she processes the anachronism. If an interference fringe in the back-propagations in her neural net can be called an emotion.
You can learn a great deal about a person by examining his purposes; and purposes, being final causes, can be discerned from the directions in which he moves. The pentapede had chased the Chinese man, and the Chinese man had earlier sought out the woman in New York. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras and social media have pinned him to the internet like a butterfly to a board, so once the videos taken by sundry spectators have been loaded into her processor, Annie can view the scene from multiple, simultaneous points of view. Unlike human memory, which recalls the past precisely as past, Annie’s memories upload into an eternal present. She does not so much watch the videos as experience them.
The woman runs from the building with a babe in arms; the mother comes and retrieves it; the Chinese man takes her by the wrist and leads her out of the crowd. One amateur vlogger even follows them a short distance, perhaps astonished that anyone would shun the chance for self-celebration. In this manner, and making use of traffic cameras and storefront security cameras, Annie can track their progress through the cloud into the Meatpacking District.