Taking the Highway

THE MORNING AFTER HIS interrupted tryst with Sofia, Andre wove his way through the technical department’s maze of cubicles. He kicked aside a fast-food wrapper that a careless tech had left, wrinkling his nose as a sour whiff hit him. It smelled like the twisting streets of the zone. He concentrated on finding his way to Jordan Elway’s office.

They called it The Labyrinth. He walked the maze of sound-absorbing poly-board walls, glowing screens, and tech experts lost in the world of the unreal, consulting his pad and counting lefts and rights, ignoring expressions that changed instantly from recognition to hostility. He hoped his geek shield would hold long enough for him to find Elway.

Jordan Elway rated a tiny cubicle near the center of the labyrinth. It was basically all holostage, leaving room for a float chair and a single flatscreen. The flatscreen was running three programs, all of them so cryptic and bizarre that Elway had no need for a privacy shield, since nobody would understand what he was doing anyway. The tech reclined in the chair, like an astronaut or an embryo, headphones over his ears, datashades over his eyes, leaving his body vulnerable while his mind disappeared into the electronic universe.

Andre had the urge to kick the younger man, or soak his pants with coffee, or shave half his head—anything to show Elway that he couldn’t just check out like that. Instead he tapped Elway’s outstretched foot until Elway found his way back to the tangible. He sat up in his chair and offered a hand which Andre shook. “Thanks for coming on a Sunday, Sergeant.”

“You said you had something.” Andre glanced around the open office. “Something you didn’t want to say over the phone.”

“Right. Let me make sure we can’t be disturbed.” He called out commands and a baffle of white noise filled the cubicle.

Elway reached into a pocket, produced Andre’s fourthing badge, and pressed it into his hand. The badge looked fine, holographic seal in place, name and badge number still legible on the face.

“You were right,” Elway said.

“It’s being tracked?”

“Also wrong,” Elway continued. “See, that was the difficult part. Once we knew it was transmitting, we had to reverse-engineer the receiver. It was harder than you probably imagine.”

“I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Imagine that kind of thing.” Andre turned the badge over and over in his hand. It seemed lighter somehow, as if signals emanating from it carried away part of the badge itself. He focused on Elway. “Go on.”

Elway spoke to the air. “Give me dogtag one.”

A holostage lit and a ghostly image of a badge hovered in the air and solidified until it was visibly identical to the one in Andre’s hand. “This—” Elway’s hand brushed the interface and a barcode pattern of blue lines rose out of the card. “—is the encoded signature, the information the state encodes on a fourthing badge when it is issued. The buried tech is just microns, as are the transmission bursts. The nanotech is brilliant.”

“Why does the state want to track fourths?”

“They don’t. Or, it doesn’t appear that way.” Elway tried, and failed, to look humble. “Once I had the receiver, it was easy to trace the microburst emissions to Ann Arbor.” He nodded at Andre’s confused expression. “To Honeywell, to be exact.”

Andre leaned against the cubicle doorjamb and pressed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Elway, can you turn off the fireworks? They’re giving me a headache.”

“Sure, sure.” The holographic display disappeared and Elway’s lights returned to office normal.

“What’s Honeywell? Some kind of tech company?”

“It’s a person. Dr. Brenda Honeywell.”

“That’s a name?”

“She’s a professor of economics at the University of Michigan. Doing a study on the intersection of technology, movement, and commerce in Detroit. Specifically, she’s studying the fourths. She even has tacit government permission—I’ve read her prospectus—although I’m almost certain the university didn’t share the details of the study’s methods.”

Andre had already made the next jump. “Can she tell us where individual fourths were at certain times?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. We have an appointment with Professor Honeywell.”

Professor Brenda Honeywell. The kind of name that conjured up images of long blond hair and even longer legs, high heels and low-cut blouses, too much eye make-up and bright red lipstick. Brenda Honeywell was every gorgeous but slightly slutty girl on the daytime telenovelas. Andre stood straight and put his fantasies on hold. Economics professor? She’d be fifty if she was a day.



HE WAS WRONG. BRENDA HONEYWELL wasn’t fifty. She was at least sixty-five. Overweight, with gray hair lopped off at the chin, a drooping butt, and tits to match. She stood in front of her office door on the University of Michigan campus, her arms crossed and shoulders sagging, as if six decades of gravity were pressing down on her all at once. “You’re the cops, huh? Let’s see some ID.”

Andre produced his police shield.

She studied it then turned her watery gaze on Elway. “What about you? Where’s your credentials?”

“I’m not an officer. I don’t have a shield.” Elway held up the laminated card that dangled from his neck lanyard. “I have a glorified hall pass.”

She ushered them into her office, which made Elway’s cubicle look like a monk’s cell. Everything was shiny metal or matte black, with enough glowing red LED’s to stop traffic on Woodward. She ignored Andre and held out a gnarled hand to Elway. Honeywell’s eyes flicked left, then right, gazing into the middle distance, then away. Was something wrong with her vision? She didn’t wear glasses and her eyes were bright and focused, just not on them. “Only three years out of school, which makes you, what, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six next month.” Elway stared at Honeywell like a little-leaguer meeting a starting pitcher for the Tigers. He actually sighed a bit.

Honeywell crossed her arms. “You got a boss I can talk to?”

“Well,” Elway said. “I report to a task force that—”

“No,” Andre interrupted. “We’re not here to question your methods or shut down your study. We just need some answers. Your work is crucial to an ongoing police investigation.”

“That’s vague.”

“Your work in tracking fourths around the city.”

“Ah.” She seemed to be looking around them instead of at them.

Elway asked, “Did you fabricate the tracking tech?”

“I had nothing to do with that. The embedded nano is part of the manufacturing. Baked right in at the outset. Contracted with a grant from my funding.” The set of her jaw was self-righteous. “When they redesigned the badges thirty months ago? That’s when the chips went in.”

Andre nodded, remembering that he’d liked the more professional-looking badges. “So your study is federally-funded.”

Honeywell did not say, “Of course.” She didn’t need to. “Every city in the US wants to know how Detroit renewed its urban core, how the boom keeps on booming.”

“Which is why the econ summit is being held here.”

“Don’t interrupt me, Sergeant.” She looked off again, her expression remote. “My grant is from the NTSB. They are curious about fourths.”

“And, it just so happens, so are we.”

“It’s pure data,” Honeywell said. “You won’t be able to touch it or feel it or lick it or whatever you kids do with your real. Nothing leaves this room.”

“Agreed.”

Again with the eye flick, this time slightly above their heads, as if she were examining their auras or seeing something just beyond them. Andre turned to look over his shoulder.

Elway continued to stare at Honeywell, wide-eyed and awestruck. His hand crept to the spot just behind his right ear. “How long have you had it?”

“The chip?” Honeywell asked. “Longer than you’ve been alive, young man.”

Elway sighed again, this one tinged with envy. Andre understood. Honeywell had something Elway would never have. Head chips had been outlawed for years. Too many failures, too hard to update. But you still found people with fully-functioning processors in their heads, most of them senior citizens with superhuman recall and an arrogance that bordered on nasty.

“My data isn’t going to do you any good.” Honeywell turned her back and called out commands. The blank wall at the back of the room bloomed to life, showing a satellite-assisted map, not only of Detroit proper, but the entire sprawling immensity of all of southeastern Michigan. The main highways—94 and 96—crossed the city like a giant X, with 75 running north and south through the center. Cityheart and New Center were twin black holes that swallowed workers every weekday. Around the city was the dark gray oh-zone—wider on the western and northern edges, with the eastern edge disappearing into a thin slice as city and suburb bumped against each other. She’d labeled it disincorporated zone. The lighter gray suburbs and the Downriver area were called commutable. Beyond that was pure white, labeled edge city. Andre realized that the regions on the wall exactly matched the map in his head. Honeywell had codified what every fourth instinctively knew.

Overlapping multi-colored lines crosshatched the city in a pronounced pattern, flowing along the spiderweb of highways.

“I don’t study fourths,” Honeywell said. “I study fourthing. I track fourths only in aggregate over long periods. I don’t violate privacy laws, nor do I breach the ethics standards of U of M.”

Andre approached the map and she blinked it away. She folded her arms and glared. “Anything else I can help you with?”

Andre found the screen he wanted on his datapad—the murdered men and their badge numbers. He held it out to Honeywell. “These are the fourths I’m interested in. So if you can just plug them into your system, or whatever, I’d like to see where they went.”

Honeywell either rolled her eyes or consulted information at the top of her vision. Hard to tell with a chip-head, although he supposed the effect was the same. “Even if I could track individual fourths—which I can’t—what good would that do me? The data from a single source doesn’t tell me about the movement of fourths in general.”

“Um, professor?” Elway broke in. “Isn’t your receiver set up in an intersticing spiral configuration?”

“So?”

“The only way to isolate individual signals is to tag them with an identifying marker, and they’re already coded with a badge number. Even if that information is stripped out before the signals enter your lab—”

Honeywell snatched the datapad out of Andre’s hands and waved it in Elway’s face. “And I want a lawsuit from these people? Unless you have a court order—”

“I don’t need a court order.”

“You do if you want my data. If these people don’t sue me, the university will.”

“They can’t sue you,” Andre said. “They’re dead.”

“Dear dog.” Honeywell blinked and the map was back, minus the colorful webwork. “Does it always take you this long to get to the point? What do you want, a week’s worth? Two?”

“Six?” Andre glanced at Elway, who nodded. “Yes, six.”

“Here you go. Matthew Davis Shepler.” A blue line retraced itself in a right-angle over the roadways, rarely in the same place twice. It glowed and faded. “Arthur Yalna.” A purple line this time, performing the same dance around the city, branching and re-branching; fading. “Homer Carcassi.” Yellow. “Douglas Ming.” Red. “Russell van Slater.” Orange. She put her hand on her forehead, plastering gray bangs over her eyes. “What does that tell you? Fourths get around.”

Andre frowned. He’d only glanced at the original map, but something about the movements of these fourths didn’t ring true. “That isn’t . . . it’s not how . . .”

“Look, Sergeant LaCroix. I’m very busy, and I’ve given you what you’ve come for so if you don’t mind, I believe we’re through.”

“Put me on that graph.”

“What? No. I’m not going to let you put in names willy-nilly. I agreed on those others only because—”

Andre moved a step, putting himself in Honeywell’s line of vision. “I’m standing right here, giving you permission. What do you want, a signed privacy waiver? Or would you prefer a court order? You can help me now when I’m happy or help me later, when I come back cranky.”

“This is happy?”

“You’d make me happier if you put me on that graph.”

Honeywell sighed. “Badge number?”

Andre read it off his license. A few blinks later, lines of green began sketching over the city. His line tracked back and forth, tracing and retracing the same patterns day by day. Downtown from home and back. Downtown and out to Oliver’s house. Out and back, out and back, occasionally a little scribble off to the side while he was still wearing his badge. There and back. There and back.

Andre raised his eyebrows. “The fourths again?”

The multicolored web appeared, so different from Andre’s line that Elway gasped. “They’re not on the highways. Your badge followed the highways almost every time.” His finger moved through the projected lines like he wanted to pick them up. “They were close to the highway. See? Here and here and here. But they aren’t on them, hardly ever.”

“They weren’t fourths at all.” Andre felt relieved and cheated at the same time, like he’d wasted sympathy on strangers.

Honeywell stuck out her chin. “If they had legal badges, they were fourths.”

“They weren’t fourthing.”

“Outliers,” Honeywell said. “Every data set has some.”

“If they weren’t fourthing, what were they doing?” He paced in front of the map, seeing how the pattern moved along the side of the highways, focused in one place, but not in others. “These places where the patterns merge, anything special about these?”

“Damn right there is.” Honeywell had already leapt ahead of them, thanks to the processor in her head. “It’s Overdrive, isn’t it?”

“The Overdrive failure—” “The crash—” Both men spoke at once, but she’d gotten it.

“Not a malfunction, was it?”

Andre stared at Honeywell. Who would she tell? He’d found it almost amusing when Madison Zuchek had insisted on keeping things covert. Now he saw the necessity of it.

Elway consulted his datapad, then marched to the map and pointed. “Here. Here. And here.” He highlighted a measured series of locations, seventy or so of them around the highways, the arteries of the city. “Each of these is a processing node, a dedicated AI. They each have a territory. There’s some overlap so they have to cooperate and communicate. Intelligence X has to hand off a car going out of her region and into Intelligence Y’s jurisdiction. It has to be precisely controlled. There is a hardened network of communication lines between them, fiber optics and superconductive backups.”

“So our dead guys were following that network.”

“It certainly looks that way. It wouldn’t be difficult, but it would take some time to be sure you were following the right set of signals.”

“And you can’t just wander along the highways all day or someone might notice.” Andre was a little startled by the savage tone of his own voice. “You need a cover. So you apply for a fourthing badge.”

“No,” Honeywell said. “No, no, no. You two, you have to leave right now.” She hooked Elway’s arm and pushed on Andre’s back, propelling them toward the door. “I don’t care how you do it, but you were never here. I never saw you, I never spoke to you. Erase your logs, your car’s travel record, delete my name from every police database it’s in.”

“We can’t just—”

“I was an uncooperative witness. I missed our appointment. We never spoke. Figure it out.” She ushered them through the door and slammed it behind them.

They both stared at the closed door.

“Isn’t she something? Just like that.” Elway snapped his fingers three times. “Bing, bing, bing. She processes so fast.”

“She’s creepy,” Andre said. “Why did she throw us out?”

“Maybe because we ruined her entire study.” Elway rolled one shoulder and started toward the stairs. “If these guys were false fourths, how many others are? It calls all of her research into question.”

“I was trying to figure out how to stop her from contacting every spinner in Michigan.”

“That’s the last thing she’ll do. She’ll whitewash her whole paper. Deny she ever heard of those dead fourths.”

They burst through the building’s doors into sunlight, all the more harsh after the dim hallways of academia. They walked toward the pay lot that held Andre’s car, passing a few bleary-eyed students. Yesterday’s after-game parties must have been bigger than the football victory.

Andre kicked an empty beer can out of his way and contemplated how to get around Dr. Honeywell. “I need her data. Madison Zuchek won’t want a court order, but maybe if we put some higher pressure on Honeywell, she’ll fork it over.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Elway pulled a mini stick out of his pocket. “It’s right here. Three cubes worth.”

“Elway, you . . .” Andre whipped his head around to glance at the towering research building they just left. “There’s no way you hacked her head.”

“Can’t be done. Her chip is twenty years out of date. So is her encryption method. Honeywell was so busy talking down to me, she didn’t even notice the data slurp.”

“Take it to Mother Mad.” Andre wondered if he dared get on the highway. Either way, he was going to break some speed records getting back to Detroit. He rushed around the corner, pulling his datapad out of his pocket.

“Not Sergeant Gao?”

“I’ll call her on the way.” Sofia needed to know that the fourthing badges really could be tracked. It could break open their whole case. He dodged around two more students and swore under his breath. “Why did it have to be fourths? How quietly do you think we can contain this with everyone already half panicked about Overdrive, and spinners tagging us every other day? Next thing you know, it isn’t just a few fourths who did it. We all did.”

“But they weren’t fourths. It was just their cover so they could sabotage Overdrive.”

“Doesn’t matter. Once word gets out, all of us will be blamed. It will be open season on fourths.” Andre’s next thought made him stop dead.

Elway continued on for a few steps before shuffling back. “What is it?”

“Maybe it already is. Shit!” He took off toward the car. “Whoever killed these men, these saboteurs, already knows what they were doing. Whoever killed them is trying to stop them.”





THE DEPARTMENT OF TECHNICAL Services was never actually quiet. Too many automated systems hummed to themselves and the constant influx of cooled air whirred around, keeping the hardware happy and the techs fully clothed. It was never quiet, but there was a low tide between two and four in the morning when it was all but deserted.

Elway emerged from his virtual world, flipped up his datashades and pulled out one earbud. He rose, his scrawny shadow birdlike against the projected image as he pointed to the cubicle wall. “What about this guy?”

Andre looked, pulling at his lower lip. A faint blue line traced itself over a city map, stopping at several points along the way, but always ending up either in the city or in the Downriver suburbs. He sighed. “Normal.”

A red line. “How about this one?”

“Normal.”

“This one?”

Andre looked at the pattern, his heart pounding. A few trips there and back, a few decidedly not. He pointed to a line near an Overdrive node. “Anyone with him at this point?”

“No other fourths.”

He dropped his arm. “Then it’s not who we’re looking for.”

“Right.” Elway rearranged his datashades and ear pieces. He was gone again, as good as asleep to the casual observer. The rolling eyelids and twitching fingers might be no more than active dreaming, but Andre saw the regularity of the tiny movements and knew that in some interior world Elway was sifting through the huge influx of data.

Andre stood in front of the wall screen, which now showed an empty map. They’d been combing through Honeywell’s data all night, looking for patterns, trying to figure out which fourths were simply doing their jobs and which were not. The university had gathered the information, but hadn’t sorted it in any way that would be useful to the police. Where did fourths gather? For how long? Who didn’t fit the pattern? Elway had restructured the entire database, each iteration narrowing down possibilities. So far, no one fit the pattern. Were their saboteurs even out there, or was it another dead end?

Andre fidgeted in place, feeling less than useless as Elway disappeared into the e-verse. He stepped out of the cubicle so he could pace the short corridor in front of it. Sounds of keyboards and some faint music came from other offices, but most of the tech department was away. He checked the time. Four fifteen.

He saw the night janitor approaching and lifted a hand in greeting. “Kiya, you up here now? I thought you cleaned the first floor.”

Kiya touched her cleaning wand, turning off the suction. “Traded with Lou. He got a big hassle for throwing away someone’s candy wrapper. Turned out, it had important notes on it.”

“Techs know how to use pens?” Andre asked. Kiya smiled and the whisper of a dimple appeared on one cheek. Andre liked her smile, liked it even more that he’d put it there. He leaned against the doorframe. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll make the same mistake?”

Kiya spread her strong arms. “You see a waste barrel anywhere? Honey, I don’t throw away nothing. A tech’s got a mountain of garbage in his cube, I don’t touch it.”

“Well, that explains a lot.”

“Easiest job I ever had. I sweep, clear a little dust, I’m done for the night.”

“Well, I’d best let you get back to it so you can get out on time.”

“You know it, hon. Take it slow—if that’s the way you like it.” Kiya sketched a wave and moved down the corridor, turning on the wand’s suction and aiming it at the floor. She turned one of the many corners and was gone.

“She never cleans in here.” Elway was sitting up in his chair, datashades in his hand, earbuds dangling.

“Have you asked her to?”

“No. She’s very—” He dipped his head. “No. I didn’t even know her name.”

“Kiya.”

“I know it now.”

“How’s the job going?” He pointed to Elway’s datapad. “Anything?”

“Waiting for the next data set. I’m trying to match pairs of fourths. People’s paths intersect all the time, so . . .” Elway levered himself out of the chair and reached for his sweating glass of sweet tea. He’d gone through liters of the stuff, but never seemed to need a bathroom break. He stood at the entrance to his cubicle, still looking down the corridor where Kiya had gone.

“You should to talk to her,” Andre said. “She’d like you. You have things in common.”

“Me? Her?”

“Do you know why she cleans at night? She goes to school during the day. Studying engineering.”

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

Elway sighed. “I see you with your fourthing badge sometimes, you forget to take it off when you come to work. You get in a different car every day and you talk to strangers and in three seconds they’re already your best friends.” He swallowed some tea. “You make it look easy.” Elway seemed to hunch further than usual, embarrassed to have said anything.

Andre remembered having this conversation with Oliver. From the other end. When he was in middle school. “I don’t know, Elway. I just talk to people. It’s not a big deal. You can talk to anyone. Talk to the person in the next cubicle.”

Elway lowered his voice. “The entire tech department hates me.”

“You’re in good company.”

Elway made a sound halfway between a grunt and throat-clearing. “I know why they hate you, but I never did anything to them.”

“Except be better than they are. They’re jealous because—”

Elway’s datapad beeped and he reached for it, sliding into his chair and flipping down his datashades in one fluid motion. “Yes! I’ve got it. Three of them, staking out an Overdrive node at Vernier and 94 three days ago.”

“There wasn’t any crash there.”

“Yet. They have to be onsite to set the virus, because a wholesale incursion is too easy to detect. So they hit one node at a time, from close range. We’ll still see it, but by then it’s too late.”

“Show me.”

A flick of Elway’s gauntlets brought the data onto the wallscreen. Bright red circles, marking their targets with bull’s eyes.

“You’re sure?” Andre asked.

“Positive. The men staking out this node are new fourths, badges acquired in the last month. See that? They cluster at the processing nodes two to three days before the Overdrive crash, and then again the morning of.”

“You said that. Once to set up the bomb, once to deliver it.”

“Virus, not bomb.”

“Might as well be a bomb.”

Andre thought of Nikhil, how he didn’t even know where to stand for a ride. Could this trio just be inexperienced? But his gut was screaming yes, these were the men they were looking for. The Overdrive node was nowhere near a residential area. Fourths would never be picked up—or dropped off—there.

He stared at the map, wishing for the thousandth time that Honeywell, Elway, someone would let him track individual badges. Just once, he’d like to see a privacy law that benefited someone other than a criminal. He’d tie himself up trying to get a court order while the saboteurs did whatever they wanted.

Unless he caught them in the act. He already knew where they’d be. If he staked out the Overdrive node, he could arrest whoever showed up and be done with it. He’d close the case, give the saboteurs to the DA, and flip Talic the bird on the way out.

“Vernier and 94,” he said. “When?”

Elway peered inside his datashades for answers. “They were there three days ago, between seven and eight in the morning.” He cleared his shades and looked at Andre through them, blinking wide, horrified eyes. “Which means they’re going to crash Overdrive—”

“Today.”