Snapshot

“My plan—”

“Was clever, but you were too far from Warsaw. Maria found Chavez’s death suspicious. You confessed under pressure, but then recanted, and a judge threw out the testimony. Now we need to catch you doing it, but we failed. Why?”

“Help you incriminate me?”

She shrugged.

“You really don’t know how this works.” He paused. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

“Newly promoted. You weren’t deemed important enough for the other two teams. They thought we could learn from this. And the classes say—”

“The classes won’t replace living it,” Davis said, numb. “You shouldn’t have given me your number.”

“So that was it,” the man said, stepping up to them, leaving Chaz dead in the street. “I told you.”

“I had to do something,” the woman said. “He spotted me paying attention to him! It would have been weirder if I hadn’t responded at all.”

“No,” Davis said. “You gave me something physical—that slip of paper. That created a persistent Deviation, and it changed me.” He raised his hand to his head. “It changed what I did. I didn’t choose. You made me choose. . . .”

The two nodded to each other. Then they started to walk off.

“Wait!” Davis said. “The Photographer! Did they get him?”

The man frowned. “Well, that case really is above your clearance—”

“Hell with that!” Davis said. “You’re going to turn this all off in a moment. Tell me. Did they get him?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “The information you sent from inside the Snapshot proved accurate. They caught him trying to contaminate food supplies at the school.”

Davis closed his eyes and sighed. So he had done something. But not him. The other him.

He opened his eyes. “I’m the Deviation,” he said. “But I’m the one who didn’t kill my partner. I’m a better man than the one you have in custody, but I’m the one you’re going to kill.”

The woman looked apologetic. How could you apologize for destroying a whole city? For murdering a man, for murdering him?

“At least show me,” he said.

“Show you?”

“The badge,” Davis said. “Mine looks just like a metal shield. Prove it to me.”

The woman reluctantly got out her wallet. “Yours looks like a shield to you because, in the day we’re copying, that’s what you saw. It has to be re-created exactly—”

“I know the mechanics of it. Show me.”

She held up the badge.

In it, Davis saw his life. A child. A young man. An adult. He saw Molly, good times and bad. He saw Hal’s birth, and saw himself holding the boy. He saw tears, rage, love, and panic. He saw himself huddled in a shopping mall, in the middle of a nervous breakdown, and he saw himself standing firm, gun pointed at Chaz’s head. He saw a hero and a fool. He saw everything.

And he knew. He knew he was fake. Up until that moment, he hadn’t really believed.

He blinked, and it faded. The other two were already walking away. They’d leave through a doorway that dupes couldn’t see.

Davis walked over and sank down beside Chaz’s dead body. “I guess you got it one way or another, partner.”

The two detectives suddenly vanished ahead. No need for stealth in leaving—not when they were about to turn the Snapshot off.

“I pulled the trigger,” Davis said. “When I needed to. So I guess the Snapshot did change me, eh, partner?” He sighed a long, deep sigh. “I wonder what it feels like when—”





POSTSCRIPT





It’s probably easy to guess that I’m fond of detective stories. Legion and Dreamer both have their roots in this genre, and you can find hints of it in my epic fantasy as well—whether it be Vasher searching for clues in Warbreaker, or Gawyn trying to track down a killer in the Wheel of Time.

At the same time, this is a genre that’s been around since Poe—so a lot has been done with it already. I always want to find something that I can add to the conversation, rather than just copying things that have come before.

I’d say that the core of Snapshot was the desire to tell a multi-layered story, with different layers of reality matching different layers of crimes being planned. The first and coolest idea for me was that of a detective planning to kill his partner while at the same time investigating a different murder.

This story didn’t start with a superhero/villain as the (magical) origin of the Snapshot technology. Originally, it was just a far-future story where the technology had been developed. I really loved the idea of going into a replication of a day in the past to investigate crimes. It felt very classic cyberpunk to me, with some nice Philip K. Dick vibes as well.

Unfortunately, the story ended up having a huge problem. I needed this fantastic, amazing technology—but at the same time, couldn’t progress the society too far. I couldn’t let this story be diverted by bizarre, far-future worldbuilding or cultures. That would draw it too far away from the personal story between two detectives that I wanted to tell. (Beyond that, the Snapshot idea was already strange enough. If the world they investigated in was too weird, then I felt the story wouldn’t have any grounding.)

Early readers, Peter and Moshe (my editors) included, identified this issue as their main hang-up in the story. Why did most of the technology seem like this was only a few years in the future? Surely if they had the technology to create a city from raw matter, they’re post-scarcity, even post-singularity. It just didn’t gibe. There were too many potential extrapolations of the science presented. If you can do things like create a Snapshot, why waste it on solving crimes? Why not create fantastical worlds to live in?