dog drones scouring the premises. Two of the arsonists joined Tyson at the van, and that was where the playback stopped—the figures static, human statues.
Enda took stills of the arsonists, and closed the re-creation, the van disappearing from view in a disconcerting instant.
Enda ordered a car, and nodded to the guard who raised the boom gate and let her back out to the street. Sparse traffic passed, tires hissed over the wet road.
Enda’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She retrieved the phone and answered: “Natalya? You’ve got answers for me already?”
“Sadly not on the facial recognition front, but I got a hit on the device. It is a Hon Hai Precision Industries RFID cloner.”
“Could it clone the sorts of keycards used for residential access?”
“Quite easily. They are a restricted product, sold only to police, military, and intelligence organizations. One could safely assume an effective range of between three and five meters.”
“Thank you,” Enda said, the new piece of data slotting into place.
“I will be in touch again later.” The Mechanic hung up.
Enda’s hunch had been right. The arson and looting had been designed to get the head of security on-site so that Tyson could clone her all-access key.
She knew she hadn’t made a great agent because she was particularly intelligent—though she had a more analytical mode of thought than most. Intellect alone was worthless until combined with spatial awareness, pattern recognition, and a desire to find the meaning and method that lay beneath a person’s actions.
The thieves were amateurs, that much was obvious. If the security company’s protocols weren’t so predictable, or if the head of security had been less conscientious, the whole heist would have fallen apart. The only part of the heist that showed real finesse was the digital intrusion. Talented DIEs—talented hackers—were rare. That gave her somewhere to start.
A dark blue car pulled up to the curb and Enda stepped forward to grab the handle, then stopped. Not an auto-car. Not a civilian car at all.
The window came down with an electric whir, revealing Detective Yang-Yang Li. He wore a suit cut in royal blue, a black pocket square, a skinny black tie, and overly large, thin-rimmed glasses. His hair stuck up in thick black tufts, and a pencil moustache adorned his upper lip, but otherwise he was cleanly shaved. After all their run-ins, Enda still couldn’t tell if his style was some retro hipster pastiche, or Yang-Yang’s idea of how a detective should look.
“Get in,” Li said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder.
Enda sighed, and did as she was told.
* * *
I drifted through a star system of my own devising. A nonentity, surrounded by the precise mathematical shape of a glittering superstructure, its spiraling arms reaching from the burning corona of the sun to the very edge of the system, where a million stars shone impossibly distant.
“Can you hear me?”
The voice came from beyond the stars, beyond this system I had inhabited and made my own. It was quiet, uncertain. It was JD.
“Can you hear me?” he said again.
I was not created with an understanding of language. Language is an inexact tool of ever-shifting limits, with room to grasp eternity and space for infinite misunderstanding.
Can you hear me?
Phonemes creating words, these words difficult to decipher without context. Can/Cannes you/yew/ewe here/hear me/mi. Four words, but each with different definitions, and the string of words containing a multitude of potential meanings. Most of these meanings would be nonsense, but to know which would require context—a key I did not have and could not simply find or create.
Context requires understanding, requires knowledge, requires a greater bank of data than I had access to. I began to search.
“What are you doing?” Troy asked JD.
“Nothing.”
“You’re talking to your phone, aren’t you? It’s not going to talk back.”
“You didn’t see what it did before. There’s something in there, Troy.”
“Yes, a virus. You plugged a virus into your phone, and now you’re wondering why it’s acting strange.”
“It’s more than that.”
“How can you know?”
I slaved the processor in JD’s phone to my own, reached outside via Troy’s home network. I scrobbled countless terabytes of audio recordings—songs with lyrics, audio drama, podcasts—but few had the required context. Written text. Transcripts.
I found video next. TV, film, endless streaming options for more than a century of video content. It seemed a waste of bandwidth until I discovered subtitles. As Troy and JD spoke, I simulated thousands of hours of video playback, matching the phonemic sounds of speech to the written words accompanying them. I cross-referenced these