private investigator license.
The woman took it, and held it up to inspect Enda’s face and photo. The license was authentic—the forms of identification she’d used to get it were fakes. Expensive fakes too—though the real cost was always the database manipulation rather than the forged paperwork.
After a few seconds the guard handed the license back to Enda and said: “You’re clear.” Must have gotten permission via the glasses. She took a step closer and lowered her voice. “Please do not speak with any of the residents. It is best if they do not concern themselves with an isolated incident.”
Enda nodded. “I understand.”
“Good.” The woman returned to her booth and raised the boom gate. She silently watched as Enda walked beneath it and into the compound.
Enda had clients living in similar situations, but she always thought the lifestyle seemed too much like doomsday preparation, an admission that the poor would enact violence on you if they realized the truth about your wealth, about the reasons for the disparity.
She followed the road as it veered right, past the underground car park, leading to the maintenance access behind Building One. Three overflowing dumpsters sat against the building, and the scent of rot permeated the air.
Enda took the phone from her pocket. The first thing she did was put on Bitches Brew again. The sound quality was awful after listening to the vinyl, but she could listen to sixty-eight minutes of music without turning or changing discs. Next, she opened the virtual re-creation of the burglary and switched it to Augmented mode to strip the permanent features from the playback—the ground, the walls, the ceiling, and the porn that had been injected into the feed.
Her phone grew hot as it spent processor cycles to match her location to the recording. As soon as it found her, playback began.
Enda turned and watched a large white van drive toward her, disconcertingly real. She stepped back, moving out of the way, and the van parked beside the dumpsters.
Miles’s trumpet dominated the soundscape, then fell away. There was no audio on the recording, just Enda’s soundtrack of jazz over a man walking around to the rear of the van and unloading four round robots and a cleaning cart. He wore a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, but he looked familiar, with a distinctive black tribal tattoo around one eye. She stepped around him, hoping for a better look, but the face resisted—it rested awkwardly on the man’s head, out of place.
She paused the feed, and was confused for a half second when the music kept playing. The whole band crescendoed, beautiful, cacophonous. Enda held her hands out, made a frame around the man’s face, and took a snapshot. She flicked it to her phone, and called Natalya.
“Good to hear from you, Enda,” Natalya said. “I am sorry about earlier.”
“Forget about it. I just sent you a still image—could you run it through the facial recognition databases and tell me if there are any hits?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll send more through as I get them.”
“Of course, Enda. I have a match,” Natalya said.
“Already?”
“Your snapshot has a ninety-eight-point-three percent likeness to Mike Tyson.”
Enda squeezed her eyes shut in embarrassment. She opened them and looked at the man again, paused awkwardly in AR view. It was clear now—Mike Tyson, tattoo and all. “I thought he looked familiar.”
“It’s an AR projection,” Natalya continued, ever helpful.
“Yes, I didn’t think it was actually him.” Though he did have a similarly broad build. “Any chance of seeing through the mask?”
“Unlikely. Any digital recording will have captured the same faked face. To see past it you’d need to find analogue film.”
“Sorry for wasting your time, Natalya.”
“Not at all.”
“I’ll send you more momentarily.”
“I look forward to it.”
Enda brought up the police report on her phone. Cleaning services were contracted to an Omar Garang, who had been found at his home, beaten and restrained. Enda didn’t rule out the possibility of his involvement, but one guard was absolutely certain that it had not been the usual cleaner that night.
Enda leaned in to inspect the back of the van. There the re-creation lost fidelity. Untextured blocks of impossible geometry hung in abstract. Past these, a sea of darkness stretched beyond the walls, diffuse patches glowing with light from seams in the joints of reality. Tyson stood at the doors, and Enda wondered if an accomplice hid within those shadows, obscured by missing visual data.
She unpaused the playback and followed Tyson into the building.
Inside, the man in the coveralls