Make Shift Page 14

  He turns up his glasses so he can see Kraft better. “You’re right, we need to find the kidnapper right away, before he decides that what Cawley told him is true.”

  “Which would be . . . ?”

  “That hacking the vote is impossible.”

  “I KNOW WHAT ‘DOWN THE HALL’ MEANS,” REMY SAYS IN THE CAR, FIFTEEN MINUTES later.

  “What do you mean?” He’s memorized Sendak’s broad, indigenous face and noted that she has a ready smile. Her squad car isn’t one of the new self-driving models, but he’s developing a theory that she likes driving, from the way she attentively steers them through complex downtown traffic.

  “I heard Kraft say to the examiner, ‘he’s the responsibility of the boys down the hall.’ I know what that means.”

  She shifts in her seat. “Do you mean he thinks of me as your babysitter?”

  “No. Major Crimes is one of the few departments left over from the old police force. Kraft resents the replacements, like the Mental Health Emergency Task Force, Short-Term Housing, Domestic Abuse. The targeted initiatives. They’re all down the hall from his office, along with your Forensics department.”

  “Don’t rain all over Kraft. He’s watched his whole way of life turn into a dumpster fire. The pandemic, the defunding, then the economic reset—you should be grateful he hasn’t joined all the other old geezers in their bunkers, with their canned beans and ammunition.”

  “Where are we going again?” Remy tunes his glasses down to the point where they’re gliding through a featureless blockworld.

  “To the Cawley house. Kraft thought you might spot something there.”

  “Something that your team missed.”

  “Well I haven’t been there yet either. You want to make a bet who’ll find the first clue?”

  Remy blinks at her.

  He says, “Community Outreach is more likely to get you results. Maybe someone in the neighborhood saw something.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re gonna tell me it’s faster and more effective than looking under shoes. Everybody says that, lately.”

  “Maybe we should bet. Where is the Cawley house?” She tells him and he nods. “That’s near where I live. I can make you lunch.”

  “Remy, we have three missing people to find. No lunch.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “Argh, they’re drowning us with those things!” She’s glaring at something above street level; he fumbles with his detail levels and looks up to see some billboard screens. One is screening a referendum ad: Vote Early, Vote Often! A little up the avenue another is saying Buy Votes for Citizens’ Panels. His glasses’ preferences highlight a more distant one that says Testing Centers Get No Traffic in Ten Days, but Sendak’s probably not talking about that one.

  She says, “Back at the crime scene you said you thought they didn’t like what Cawley told them. Something about the vote.”

  “It can’t be a coincidence that he helped program the system. There is the referendum coming up.”

  “Yeah.” She returns her attention to the traffic. “Not sure what to think about that, myself. Not that I’m feeling murderous, but potentially changing how our municipal democracy works is a pretty big deal. There’s a lot of people just like Kraft, they want to keep the old city council even though it was totally corrupt. For them the referendum choices amount to another huge change after years of change—and nobody over fifty understands quadratic voting anyway. Five years ago I’d never heard of it.”

  “I remember Cawley a little now, though I never met him in person,” says Remy. “Before I . . . moved into the city . . . I worked a bit with his team. That was at the tail end of the Third Wave. Even then he was getting huge push-back—people either wanted to crack his code so they could rig the vote, or they wanted to prove it could be hacked so they could derail the whole project.” He watches the signs dwindle behind them. “I vote whenever I can, but a lot of people resent not being allowed to vote every time.”

  “Yeah, and why can’t we? I keep hearing explanations, but they never add up. My cousin swears it’s totally to control the electorate.”

  “No, it’s the opposite.” Remy remembers the fine-tuning that went into the system. In the quadratic system your first vote is free, but you can buy more. Each vote after the first one costs the square of its number times 10. So the second one costs $40, the third costs $90, the fourth $160, and if you want to buy a thousand you’ll be paying $10 million. The system’s designed so that people literally invest in the issues that matter the most to them. People with a lot of money might sway the vote, but only by putting a lot of cash into the public purse.

  Early on some developers had tried paying off large swathes of the city’s poorest to vote their way. The random lottery solves that problem, by making sure that most, possibly all of your vote-fixing money goes to people who won’t end up being able to vote. Instead, a representative minority casts the actual ballots.

  “Yeah, it probably feels wrong to people who are used to the old system. But a random lottery to select voters makes it way more expensive to buy votes. People just don’t get the math.”

  “What?” says Sendak. “You think that somebody who doesn’t get the math went after Cawley, thinking he could do something he couldn’t to the voting system? What a waste.”

  Remy blinks. “Or maybe Cawley just had gambling debts. We’ll see.”

  BUT IT WASN’T GAMBLING DEBTS. “THE BANK SAYS CAWLEY WAS GETTING SOME pretty big payouts from offshore accounts,” Kraft tells Remy an hour later. “He wasn’t losing money, he was making it. Tons of it.”

  Remy’s taking the call outside the Cawley house, which is in one of the reconstructed neighborhoods near Downtown. This side street has been given over to bikeways and parkland, probably after the Second Wave. Many of the eyesore buildings and empty lots in the area, fought over for decades by developers, are now green space. After the contraction of the fossil fuel industries, the air is clean.

  Sendak strolls up. After a cursory look through the house, which has already been thoroughly combed by her team, she’s decided to speak to the neighbors. Community Outreach, like Remy suggested. She’s wearing a mask, which she carefully stows as she comes up the walk. “Lot of locals still won’t talk to you at the door unless you’re wearing one,” she explains.

  “That’s ridiculous. There hasn’t been a case in the city in months.”

  “Once bitten, twice shy. Thrice bitten, thoroughly paranoid. Find anything?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m sure your people saw that their suitcases are still here. Just to follow up, I compared the trash to what they had in the pantry. When people are getting ready to travel—or run—they tend to use up their perishables. That’s not the case here. I don’t think they left of their own accord.”

  She waits, then when he just stands there, she says, “This is the part where you say, ‘What about you, Maureen? Did you find anything?’ And where I say, ‘Yes, why yes, I did.’”

  Agreeably, he says, “What about you, Maureen? Did you find anything?”

  She takes out her phone. “A couple of people saw a black SUV parked in front of the Cawley place two days ago. It wasn’t there long.”

  “Did they get a license plate? Because there must be thousands of black SUVs in town.”

  “A lot of people ’round here have porch cams. So I asked around, just to see if anybody had footage that showed the street. Got a couple of hits.”

  She shows him the videos on her phone. There are three, none of which are good enough to read the license plate. One, though, shows a vague, pixelated profile of the driver through the side window.

  “That might be a tattoo on his neck,” says Remy, “but it’s too dark to see the face. Maybe they can do signal processing on it. Wait, what’s that?” He points.

  “Hmm—wrist watch?”

  “Mm, more like a tracker.” After the first vaccines proved to be insufficient on their own, social isolation and contact tracing w
ere rolled out nationwide. Companies making fitness trackers were happy to add the functionality to their devices, and suddenly they were no longer just for exercise buffs and ‘quantified self’ people. At one point he remembers every single person he met wearing a tracker of some kind—mostly on the wrist.

  “So we got nothing,” she admits. He stares out at the little urban gardens for a minute, and when he glances at Sendak he sees a pinched expression on her face. That must be what frustration looks like.

  “Look, Remy, I’m on the clock,” she says. “I’ve gotta get back to the lab, is there anything more you can do?”

  Remy literally has no idea. He doesn’t like this feeling of helplessness. “I live a few minutes from here. Could you drop me off before you go back?”

  She sighs. “Okay. Maybe Kraft’s got a new plan.”

  They drive into one of the former business areas, now converted into low-cost housing like much of Downtown. Sendak parks next to a glass-walled building that used to be part of an office park. It’s across from a real park, with trees and grass and open space. This is Remy’s essential source of peace and quiet if he’s outside, but today it’s overrun with people. Somebody’s holding a political rally.

  He starts to tune it out as he gets out of the car, then notices something. “There’s a friend of mine,” he says to Sendak.

  She blinks. “How can you tell?” The nearest person is a hundred feet away.

  “He’s got a flag up in my glasses.” Remy crosses the road and heads for the gates to the park. This is only possible because he tunes the detail levels right down to the minimum; even so he can feel the chaotic pressure of the crowd in his mind as he approaches it.

  He expected Sendak would drive away but she gets out of the car and follows him up to a table by the entrance. Here, volunteers are handing out wrist bands. One jumps up, laughing, as Remy approaches. “Remy Reardon! How you doing, man? And who’s your friend?” Remy belatedly remembers to introduce Sendak.

  “Xander Reese, nice to meet you. So you know the great Remy Reardon.”

  “Yeah, we work together, sometimes. How do you know him?”

  “I was the contact tracing expert at St. Mary’s Hospital.” There’s just the faintest pause then, as he and Sendak exchange a look; St. Mary’s is a psychiatric hospital. This shared look is one of those episodes of invisible communication that intensely frustrate Remy. When it happens, it’s like the other people are talking behind an invisible pane of glass. “I also programmed his glasses,” Xander finishes.

  Sendak crosses her arms and stares into the crowded park. “Look at it! A mob. Who’d have thought ordinary folk would get that close again?”

  “That’s why we’re here.” Reese holds up one of the wrist bands. “Some people have been tossing their trackers. Privacy, you know? I get it. But if there’s an outbreak, we need to trace each and every contact to squash it. So you gotta wear one to get in.”

  The sound of the crowd is creeping around the edges of Remy’s mind, increasingly distracting. He stands still, head tilted, vaguely aware that Reese is telling Sendak about the contact tracing app, about the cryptography it uses to perfectly preserve anonymity.

  “Crypto!” Her voice rises in a way that means Remy should pay attention. “Like these clowns and their quadratic vote! It’s all game theory and math. You can’t turn something as sloppy as human nature into math.”

  Reese shrugs. “I guess you’re in favor of citizens’ panels?”

  “Damn straight. Grab a bunch of people at random, just like you do for jury trials. Give ’em a minimal test to make sure they understand the issue they’re gonna be dealing with, and then let ’em work the problem. But no, ‘the quadratic way is the best!’ Bend over backward to prevent voter fraud by draining away all the human elements, until all that’s left is an algorithm. It solves your problem, but only by sucking the life out of politics.” She takes a calming breath. “Okay,” she says, “so here’s a question: What could you do if you could hack ballot software?”

  “Well . . . you’d be able to influence the vote, obviously.”

  “Influence? Not outright ballot-stuff?”

  “It’s pretty obvious when a hundred percent of the voters choose one candidate. Yeah, you can stuff digital ballot boxes, but man you gotta be subtle. Anyway, the whole point is that it is hack-proof. You can’t cheat. Nobody can. I mean—you’ve been using it every day for years,” Reese adds.

  “When?” says Sendak. “I don’t vote every day.”

  “You don’t use it only for voting. Like I was saying, the first place they used it was for contact tracing, in the middle of the pandemic. So you could be part of the tracing network without ever giving away your personal details. You’re being tracked anonymously every time you spend more than fifteen minutes near someone. So, weirdly enough, a lot of the same tech went into both the ballot system and the contact tracing software.”

  “I like quadratic voting,” Remy tries to say, but the world’s receding down a tunnel of sound and light. The glasses are only so good at blocking things out.

  He vaguely hears Sendak say, “Um, Remy? Yeah, I think I’d better run you home.”

  “Yeah, he’s gettin’ overloaded, isn’t he? Take it easy, Remy! Talk to you soon.”

  Remy doesn’t answer as Sendak leads him away.

  REMY PUSHES INTO HIS APARTMENT, SENDAK RIGHT BEHIND HIM. HE PAUSES TO lean on the kitchen counter and after a while, notices that she’s stopped in the doorway, staring.

  “Yeah, I painted everything black,” he admits. Not just the walls, but the appliances, the chairs, the cutlery. “That way I can skin things however I want, you know, with the glasses.” To him it’s all its usual neutral shades of beige and mauve, with callout labels attached to various things that are out of sight—like in drawers or under other objects. All very convenient to him, but Sendak doesn’t use Mixed Reality. To her his home must look like a vortex of darkness.

  “Aw, Remy—”

  “Go.” He waves at her weakly. “Go. You have to win our bet. There’s not much time.”

  “You’re sure you’ll be okay?”

  “Yeah. I just get overwhelmed sometimes.”

  “Then why do you live here?”

  “This place?”

  “No. This city.”

  “Oh. I kind of . . . ended up here. After we sold the farm.”

  “We? You’ve got family?”

  “My mother. She raised me in the country. Nice little farmhouse, been ours for generations. But she had to sell when the pandemic deepened and they reformed the property laws to try to kickstart the economy.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It was the right thing to do. Me and Mom argued. She said she had every right to hold onto the place.” Almost the first thing the Liberal Radicals did when they got control of the state legislature was institute a new property regime. Under it you can put any value you want on your place, but you pay the tax at that rate, and you also have to sell to any buyer who makes an offer at the asking price. “Mom set the price higher than she thought anybody would buy at, but then she couldn’t afford the taxes. And somebody bought. I told her it was logical; it got money and assets moving through the economy, which was what we needed right then. She didn’t see it that way. We haven’t spoken in a couple of years.”

  “Oh, Remy, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” He straightens up. “Thanks for dropping me off. I’ll review my glasses’ footage from today.”

  She nods curtly. “I’ll check in later. If you want me, here’s my number.” She borrows his phone to enter it, then leaves.

  He makes himself lunch. Normally he would nap after, but he’s restless. A woman and her two daughters are missing, every second counts, yet here he is sitting in his black cave, helpless to do anything about it. It feels like a billion-fold amplification of all those times he’s disappointed others who expected some normal human response from him. He wants to help, wants to say
the right thing, think the right thing. He just doesn’t know how.

  Mother had been so angry. “You’re helping them do this!” she’d kept saying, as the sheriffs threw them out of their generational home.

  “Mom, it’s just a different property algorithm. You don’t fight the System. You fight the Algorithm.” She didn’t understand it, that algorithms were how you voted, how money got allocated; they weren’t some nebulous Deep State that you could rail against but never change. They were the concrete steps you took to get things done. And they could be improved.

  He ends up standing at the window, gazing down at the mass of people in the park. No way he can ever be part of that. He remembers when he first came here, the roar and tumult of the streets where he’d panhandled. There had been no escaping the noise, until the doctors at St. Mary’s, and people like Xander Reese, helped him organize it all.

  He needs his algorithms. Still, he touches the glass, marveling at the people bouncing around like atoms in a jar, impervious to being bruised by the Brownian motion of random social life.

  They were so irrational. Like, who would expect people to wantonly tear off their contact tracing bracelets? If you were rational about it, if you organized your life properly, you wouldn’t do that.

  He thinks of the placement of the chairs where Cawley had been held: in the mathematical and acoustic center of the space. Not where a normal person would place them, but logically . . .

  Remy almost fumbles the phone in his haste to get it out. Can he go to Kraft with this? Sendak? What he’s proposing isn’t exactly legal. He does know Reese, who knows people in the right department. Remy’s done work for the City, for Public Health. But this algorithm is clear: you can bend some rules to save lives.

  “Hi, Xander? It’s Remy. No, I’m fine. —Listen, I need a favor, and I need it, like, today.

  REMY’S STANDING IN THE DARKNESS NEXT TO A POTTED SPRUCE, ACROSS THE STREET from the downtown coronavirus testing center. The center is attached to a hospital, and is almost the last one open in the city. As he expected, traffic has been regular but light since he got here. He’s exhausted from watching the hypochondriacs come and go but he can’t tune down his glasses, because he needs to see their faces or, preferably, their necks.