“It’s okay. We’re safe here. Tell me what it does.”
“It’s for a display,” he finally said. “But not for like a readout, or an LED, or a dot matrix. There are algorithms in here I recognize. Anyone would . . .”
He paused.
“Sixty-four-bit color,” he whispered, staring at her. “Sixty-four bit. Why would anyone need that much color?”
“Dumb it down for me,” Juliette said. Scottie seemed on the verge of going mad.
“You’ve seen it, right? The view up top?”
She dipped her head. “You know where I work.”
“Well, I’ve seen it too, back before I started eating every meal in here, working my fingers to the bone.” He rubbed his hands up through his shaggy, sandy-brown hair. “This program, Jules—what you’ve got, it could make something like that wallscreen look real.”
Juliette digested this, then laughed. “But wait, isn’t that what it does? Scottie, there are sensors out there. They just take the images they see, and then the screen has to display the view, right? I mean, you’ve got me confused, here.” She shook the printed scroll of gibberish. “Doesn’t this just do what I think it does? Put that image on the display?”
Scottie wrung his hands together. “You wouldn’t need anything like this. You’re talking about passing an image through. I could write a dozen lines of code to do that. No, this, this is about making images. It’s more complex.”
He grabbed Juliette’s arm.
“Jules, this thing can make brand-new views. It can show you anything you like.”
He sucked in his breath, and a slice of time hung in the air between them, a pause where hearts did not beat and eyes did not blink.
Juliette sat back on her haunches, balancing on the toes of her old boots. She finally settled her butt on the floor and leaned back against the metal paneling of his office wall.
“So now you see—” Scottie started to say, but Juliette held up her hand, hushing him. It had never occurred to her that the view could be fabricated. But why not? And what would be the point?
She imagined Holston’s wife discovering this. She must’ve been at least as smart as Scottie—she was the one who came up with the technique he had used to find this in the first place, right? What would she have done with this discovery? Say something out loud and cause a riot? Tell her husband, the sheriff? What?
Juliette could know only what she herself would do in that position, if she were almost convinced. She was by nature too curious a person to doubt what she might do. It would gnaw at her, like the rattling innards of a sealed machine or the secret workings of an unopened device. She would have to grab a screwdriver and a wrench and have a peek . . .
“Jules—”
She waved him off. Details from Holston’s folder flooded back. Notes about Allison, how she suddenly went crazy, almost out of nowhere. Her curiosity must have driven her there. Unless—unless Holston didn’t know. Unless it was all an act. Unless Allison had been shielding her husband from some horror with a mock veil of insanity.
But would it have taken Holston three years to piece together what she had figured out in a week? Or did he already know and it just took three years to summon the courage to go after her? Or did Juliette have an advantage he didn’t? She had Scottie. And she was, after all, following the bread crumbs of someone else following more bread crumbs, a much easier and more obvious trail.
She looked up at her young friend, who was peering worriedly down at her.
“You have to get those out of here,” he said, glancing at the printouts.
Juliette nodded. She pushed up from the floor and tucked the scroll into the breast of her overalls. It would have to be destroyed; she just wasn’t sure how.
“I deleted my copies of everything I got for you,” he said. “I’m done looking at them. And you should do the same.”
Juliette tapped her chest pocket, felt the hard bulge of the flash drive there.
“And Jules, can you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“See if there’s any way I can transfer back to Mechanical, will you? I don’t want to be up here anymore.”
She nodded and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do,” she promised, feeling a knot in her gut for getting the poor kid involved at all.
25
The next morning, exhausted, Juliette arrived late at her desk, her legs and back sore from the climb down to IT and from not getting an ounce of sleep. She had spent the entire night tossing and turning, wondering if she’d discovered a box that was better left unopened, worried she might be raising questions that promised nothing but bad answers. If she went out into the cafeteria and looked in a direction she normally avoided, she would be able to see the last two cleaners lying in the crook of a hill, almost as if in one another’s arms. Did those two lovers throw themselves into the rotting wind over the very thing Juliette was now chasing? The fear she’d seen in Scottie’s eyes made her wonder if she wasn’t being careful enough. She looked across her desk at her new deputy, greener even at this job than she, as he transcribed data from one of the folders.
“Hey, Peter?”
He looked up from his keyboard. “Yeah?”
“You were in Justice before this, right? Shadowing a judge?”
He tilted his head to the side. “No, I was a court assistant. I actually shadowed in the mids’ deputy office until a few years ago. I wanted that job, but none came up.”
“Did you grow up there? Or the up top?”
“The mids.” His hands fell away from his keyboard to his lap. He smiled. “My dad was a plumber in the hydroponics. He passed away a few years ago. My mom, she works in the nursery.”
“Really? What’s her name?”
“Rebecca. She’s one of the—”
“I know her. She was shadowing when I was a kid. My father—”
“He works in the upper nursery, I know. I didn’t want to say anything—”
“Why not? Hey, if you’re worried about me playing favorites, I’m guilty. You’re my deputy now, and I’ll have your back.”
“No, it’s not that. I just didn’t want you to hold anything against me. I know you and your father don’t—”
Juliette waved him off. “He’s still my father. We just grew apart. Tell your mom I said hi.”
“I will.” Peter smiled and bent over his keyboard.
“Hey. I’ve got a question for you. Something I can’t figure.”
“Sure,” he said, looking up. “Go ahead.”
“Can you think of why it’s cheaper to porter a paper note to someone than it is to just wire them from a computer?”
“Oh, sure.” He nodded. “It’s a quarter chit per character to wire someone. That adds up!”
Juliette laughed. “No, I know what it costs. But paper isn’t cheap, either. And neither is porting. But it seems like sending a wire would be practically free, you know? It’s just information. It weighs nothing.”
He shrugged. “It’s been a quarter chit a character since I’ve been alive. I dunno. Besides, we’ve got a fifty-chit-per-day allowance from here, plus unlimited emergencies. I wouldn’t stress.”
“I’m not stressed, just confused. I mean, I understand why everyone can’t have radios like we carry, because only one person can transmit at a time, so we need the air open for emergencies, but you’d think we could all send and receive as many wires as we wanted.”
Peter propped his elbows up and rested his chin on his fists. “Well, think about the cost of the servers, the electricity. That means oil to burn and all the maintenance of the wires and cooling and whatnot. Especially if you have a ton of traffic. Factor that against pressing pulp on a rack, letting it dry, scratching some ink on it, and then having a person who’s already heading that way walk it up or down for you. No wonder it’s cheaper!”