Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) (3 page)

When I woke up, tangled in blankets and empty liquor bottles, I didn’t feel rested. Unfortunately, I did feel sober, and I couldn’t indulge myself in more alcohol because I’d assigned myself this stupid crime-fighting job.

At least I knew exactly where my first stop would be. I fought traffic down to Arthur’s private investigations office, a clean and respectable hole-in-the-wall in a terrible part of town. I knew for a fact that Arthur and Checker could afford a better location for the business; Checker had let slip one night that he wished Arthur would move to Beverly Hills but the idiot insisted he preferred “fighting for people who needed it”—whatever that meant. Checker never came into the office himself, doing his information-gathering via telecommute, so Arthur had veto power on the location.

Today, however, something itched at my awareness the whole drive. I stood on the street for a minute after I got out of the car and let my surroundings seep into my senses, the inputs dropping through functions into outputs, cause and effect. Everything fell within error margins, mundane and safe.

I took one last look around before dismissing whatever vibe I’d had as a subliminal outlier and climbing the outside stairs to the heavy door stenciled with “Arthur Tresting, Private Investigations.” I pushed it open into a pleasant, professional office. At the front desk, a young woman in a bright ruffled blouse looked up and gave me a huge smile—a genuine one, as far as I could tell.

“Cas! Good to see you! Arthur’s not in yet; d’you want to hang out and wait?”

Pilar Velasquez was Arthur and Checker’s office manager. Almost as short as I was but quite a bit heavier, she was charming and cheerful and one of those people who basically personified the word “cute.” She’d cut her shiny dark hair into a sharp bob recently; it suited her.

“Actually, I came to see you,” I said, pulling up a chair across from her desk and dropping into it.

“Oh!” She placed the papers she’d been reading in a neat pile on her desk so she could give me her full attention. “What’s up?”

“You still have all the hacked Arkacite files, don’t you?”

“Yup. Arthur and Checker never believe in throwing anything out, you know. Thank goodness for computers! Do you know how many file cabinets I’d need if—”

“You mentioned something,” I said. “A couple years ago. That Arkacite was working on technology to help law enforcement.”

Pilar’s eyebrows turned to squiggles; I could practically see her rewinding her memory. Pilar had been an administrative assistant at Arkacite Technologies before I’d accidentally gotten her fired in the midst of a huge battle with the company over their AI. Since Arkacite had been an evil tech conglomerate out to eat the world, and since Arthur and Checker paid her better and didn’t sexually harass her, I was pretty sure she didn’t hold it against me.

“It was something about frequency generation that would break up mob violence,” I said. “You mentioned it when—”

“Oh! Right. I know what you’re talking about. The Signet Devices.”

“The what?”

“Signet. That was the project name—code name, maybe; I don’t know what they would’ve called it if it’d ever gone into development.”

“Can you give me all the records on it?”

“I’m not sure we have them all?” she said. “That project was pretty secret, and we didn’t grab the stuff behind the military firewalls, because it wasn’t, you know, necessary at the time. But it might be easier for me just to tell you anyway—I was in on that one. I mean, not
in on
in on, but they needed someone to keep records through the whole fiasco so they had me sign a bunch of NDAs and take minutes at all the meetings. What do you want to know?” She gave me another big smile, as if she lived to violate Arkacite nondisclosure agreements.

“Okay,” I said. I’d still have to get the specs somehow, but at least Pilar could give me a rundown. “So what did it do? Calm people down or something? Make them less aggressive?”

She cocked her head to the side and thought for a minute. “Not quite. I mean, that’s the result, sure—that’s what they were going for as an end, I think. But what it really did was break down the, the—I’m not remembering all the names now; they had a lot of social psychologists come in who used a lot of academic language about it; I’ll send you the files we’ve got, but—oh! ‘Deindividuation,’ that was the term. It breaks people out of deindividuation. Which in practice meant—”

“They were looking to disrupt mob mentalities,” I guessed.

“Yes! Or at least, that was a big part of it. The frequency that gets emitted—or something—it stops the brain feeling, well, you know how people can get in crowds? They lose control, they get all overwhelmed and sucked into the group, they get some kind of feedback loop from it…uh, ‘crowd psychology,’ that’s another thing they kept saying; I remember now. But it wasn’t just about angry mobs—anything where people feel swallowed into the masses and lose any sense of personal responsibility or, um,
personhood,
I guess. They found a frequency or something that stops that from happening. The idea was that when they get swept up in those situations, people do all sorts of awful things they wouldn’t ordinarily if they’d just been able to think about it.”

I thought about the riots LA had suffered. A lot of people who weren’t ordinarily violent, escalating into layer upon layer of savage destruction. From what Pilar was saying, the Signet Devices could stop such chaos before it ever sparked.

They might be able to calm war zones. Or take down cults. Or, heck, even undercut the power of schoolyard bullies.

“The police and military were all sorts of interested in it,” Pilar continued. “
Really
interested. Like, Arkacite had a bajillion meetings with important government people; those guys were throwing money at them.”

“So why isn’t it out there?” This sounded like exactly what I wanted. But she’d called the project a fiasco…“What went wrong?”

“They couldn’t calibrate it right,” explained Pilar. “No matter how much money the Defense Department piled in. It turns out people’s brains are real sensitive to it. Real sensitive. Either it was too low to work, or too high and—well, apparently it made the test subjects
too
individual, if that makes sense. Made ’em distrust each other and start fighting because of
that,
instead of mobbing together. So the point was to stamp out aggression, and it ended up causing aggression for a different reason. And there was a sweet spot where it worked, but they could never maintain it reliably, and they especially couldn’t do it evenly over a large area.”

Hmm. “Do we at least have any of their testing data?”

“You know, I think we might,” Pilar said. “Or, well, we should? When I was keeping records for them, I didn’t have clearance for the technical details or anything, but I could see all the data and reports, so that probably
is
buried in the stuff we have. Checker copied over the whole Arkacite mainframe; he’s a ridiculous packrat that way.” She smiled fondly. “It’ll take me a while to look through, but if we’ve got it I’ll send it your way. What do you want it for?”

“Calibration’s just math,” I said. “I bet I can figure it out.”

“Wait, you want to
build
one?” she squeaked.

“No,” I said. “I want to build a lot of them. Why do you think I was asking you all this?”

“What
for?”

“The crime in the city lately,” I said. “I’m looking for a way to axe it, and this sounds like more than a good start.” The possibilities kept expanding in my head. Combating deindividuation would potentially be a sweeping blow against gangs and organized crime, at the very least. I thought of Pourdry’s goons and their blind loyalty and was angry all over again. Devices like these might not be able to stop someone like Pourdry himself, but if they gutted his organization, how powerful would he be then? “Let’s see how brave these assholes are without their armies to hide behind.”

“You mean you want to put these things around LA?” Pilar’s face stretched itself into a bizarre combination of incredulity and horror. “Cas, don’t take this the wrong way, but that is a terrible idea!”

“Why? I’m not going to do it unless I can get the calibration right, which I bet I can.”

“They barely did any human testing!” she protested. “I don’t even know if it’s something people could take long-term. You could make things way worse—”

“And I could make ’em way better,” I said.

She leaned away from me, shaking her head over and over. “It’s too risky. This is so dangerous. You’re talking about—”

“This could save a lot of lives.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to make LA safer, too, I do, I
do,
more than anyone. But if this went wrong—think how bad it could go. If you didn’t get it right, people would start tearing each other apart. Normal people. I saw the test results.”

I crossed my arms. “Does that mean you’re not going to give me the files?”

Pilar wavered, her facial muscles pulling in all different directions. “I know you know what you’re doing,” she said. “I do. I don’t mean to say you don’t.”

Since
I
wasn’t sure I knew what I was doing this time, her confidence outstripped mine, but it served my cause so I didn’t argue. “I’m very good,” I said instead, which was true. “A calibration problem is a cakewalk.”

“I know,” she said, heaving a sigh. “You do seem to do the impossible on a regular basis. Checker and I have conversations about it, you know. Did you really lasso the wing of a fighter jet a few months ago and—”

“I’m good at math,” I interrupted. “That’s all.”

“That’s what you always say! If this were anyone else asking, and I mean
anyone
else…” She pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “Promise you’re not going to do anything unless you’re sure it’s going to work?”

“Cross my heart,” I said.

She played with the edges of her neat stack of papers, and said softly, “I’ve got a lot of family here, you know.”

“I know,” I said, confused by the non sequitur. Pilar mentioned her family a lot.

“One of my cousins joined a gang a couple months ago,” she said. “My aunt is devastated. There was no reason, you know? He’s a good kid, good family, really nice boy—and my baby brother’s still in high school, and you know what an LA public school is like. It was a jungle when I went through and now…” She trailed off and cleared her throat. “My mom tells me he comes home with black eyes sometimes. From high school. Can you believe it? It’s not fair. My folks don’t even live in a bad part of town. That’s just how it is now. And the cities are all getting bad; my sister’s at UPenn and she and her friends are afraid to go out at night. I’m hoping my brother will apply to college in some small town in the middle of nowhere.”

As much as Pilar talked about her family, I tended to forget they actually existed as people. But hey, if they were going to help my cause, I was okay with that. “That’s why I want to do this,” I said.

“I know,” she said, the earnest trust in her voice assigning me more goodheartedness than I probably deserved. “I’ll look for those files for you. As long as you promise you won’t do anything unless you can make it work right, that this won’t hurt anybody. Promise?”

“I promise,” I said again.

“If you have any doubt it won’t work, then you’ll give it up? You won’t go ahead with it?”

“I said I wouldn’t.”

She took a deep breath. “All right. All right, I’ll send you whatever I can.”

“Good,” I said, and got up.

“Hey, Cas?”

“Yeah?”

She shifted in her chair and fiddled with her papers again. “Checker really misses you, you know,” she said very fast, not looking at me. “He didn’t tell me why you guys are fighting; he hasn’t told me anything—but he’s getting really depressed about it, I can tell. I don’t mean to be—I know it isn’t my business, but—I just, I, I thought you should know.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “We’re talking again.” Guilt crept through the back of my brain, like a rash on my conscience.

“Really?” Pilar’s face lit up with one of her huge smiles. “That’s great! That’s—that’s really, really great. I’m glad. Okay, forget I said anything. Except—that’s good. That’s just really good.” She flapped her hands as if looking for something to do with them. “Okay, I’m just going to—I’m going to go work now.” Still grinning, she spun back to her computer.

I headed for the door, feeling grumpy. As I dragged it open, I ran into two kids about sixteen years old heading up the iron stairway. They were both a bit scruffy and not particularly well-dressed, and when they saw me they froze and stared like startled deer.

“You’ve got visitors,” I called.

“Is that Katrina and Justin?” Pilar’s voice came from behind me. “Cas! Stop being all menacing; they’re here to see Arthur. Come on in, guys.”

Justin was a light-skinned black kid, Katrina an unsmiling Asian girl with bangs and freckles. They squeezed past me, keeping their heads down. I pressed back to let them by. I hadn’t meant to be intimidating.

Pilar gave Justin a hug—Katrina hung back—and then gestured both kids to visitors’ chairs. Feeling distinctly like a fifth wheel, I slunk out and down the steps.

The sensation of being watched still tugged at me. I glanced back up at Arthur’s office, then around the street. The sidewalk was empty save for one pedestrian, a dark-haired man who shuffled by without taking any notice of me. This was starting to bother me—not the idea that someone might be following me, but the
feeling
of it. I didn’t get
feelings.
I saw quantifiable data that translated into probabilities.

Maybe I was jumpy. I wasn’t one to get jumpy without numerical reason—but then, everything had gone sideways and fucked lately. I sighed, headed back to my car, and drove to Van Nuys.

I found Checker in the Hole this time. The converted garage behind his house gave the impression of being modeled after a hacker cave in a comic book; monitors tiled the walls and a city of computer towers surrounded his nest of keyboards in the middle. Usually he didn’t stop typing as I walked in, but today when I opened the door his fingers stuttered to a halt and he turned to face me. “Hi,” he said.