The following is an excerpt from my novel The Committers (available from Amazon). It tells the story of a dystopian world that bears an uncomfortable similarity to our own, in which the government has mandated that every citizen wear a device that records everything they do.
Charlie Kitts is an Inspector for the MJT/Addison corporation, which holds the contract for security services in the city of Denver. Like every Inspector, he prevents crime by carrying an override scanner that allows him to access the entire record of what any person has done in their life. But now someone may have hacked the tech that makes this system work. And if the system fails and people are free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, society faces a chaos that may be annihilation...or may be liberation. On top of this, Kitts has a secret or two of his own, as does everyone in his world.
The Committers is a dystopic noir about a world controlled by data, the criminals trying to break free from that control, the Inspectors who try to stop them, and Charlie Kitts, criminal and Inspector both.
Chapter One
The suicide lay on the bed with one arm thrown over his forehead, as if it had been covering his eyes but had slipped out of place. His chest board lay on an antique mahogany dresser across the room. It had been programmed to display several lines of script overlaying an old video clip of an ancient stone Buddha carved out of a cliff. The Buddha had been rigged with explosives; they went off, the screen was enveloped in rock dust, when it cleared there was only a huge blank wall. The sculpture reappeared, the clip started again.
The script read:
"Goodbye and good luck. I won't say I'm sorry, because that wouldn't make any sense. So instead I'll say it was nice while it lasted."
I looked away from the board, back at the dead man. He had a strangely blank face, a kind of plastic smoothness or indeterminacy in those features. Gertz was taking photos and uploading them to Forensic, dull-eyed, smoking one of the cigarettes he rolled at night on the antique machine he'd bought the year before in San Francisco. The screen of his chest board showed the same thing it had for six months: an endless series of hands, wrapping around each other one after one and crushing down into a tight fist, only to be enveloped in turn. Mine was blank. The repetitive snick of the photos was the only sound there was, until Gertz spoke.
"What a sorry douche. Just so darn full of despair he couldn't take it anymore, huh?"
"Rich people don't kill themselves out of despair," I told him.
"No? Give me your wisdom, Buddha."
"It's the boredom that gets them."
"Sure," he said, laughing his ugly laugh, "I'd kill someone to be this bored."
I went into the bathroom. White stone and gold fixtures, a shower the size of a carport. I turned it on. The water fell evenly from everywhere in the ceiling, like a warm rain. There was a pleasant whispering, splashing sound. The dead man's drug collection was extensive. The pills were organized on a large white slab of polished mica with little hollows scooped out of it, the superclean amphetamines and barbiturates that all the wealthy junkies could afford, the synthetic hallucinogens in their little capsules printed with the faces of historical figures, the signature green of the refined dope that wasn't even really a plant anymore, grown God knows how and engineered to have so much THC it would fry your brain if you broke open the pills and smoked it instead of ingesting it. Which some people did. I took the brass pill box out of my jacket and brushed a selection of pills into it. Then I snapped open a capsule of high-quality synthetic coke and dumped the powder into the cove of my thumb, felt it blow out the back of my head like a trail of golden rockets. On my chest the board recorded the actions and stored them away in its memory. As it had recorded every action since I'd started wearing it, on the day they became mandatory.
"Goddamn," was what I said. The dust cleared from my eyes and I could see again.
"What's that?" asked Gertz from the other room.
I turned off the shower. "Hell of lot of drugs here. They'll have to send up a chemical unit to see if it's traceable."
"Factory made, or boutique?"
"Boutique, most of it. High grade shit."
I went back into the other room. Gertz wasn't taking pictures of the body anymore but of an antique IBM tape-drive computer set into a wall nook and lit with a soft spot. I watched him work his way from side to side, finding the best angle.
"Look at this," he said. "Amazing piece. I wonder if I can get the guys in Evidence to give me a good price."
The room was perfectly delineated. Every object stood out with magical clarity. Gertz's voice shimmered and I could see the vibrating of his vocal cords when he spoke. His back bulged against the thin striped cloth of his suit like there was an animal in there struggling to escape.
I went over to the dresser and took out the little override scanner every Inspector carries. The suicide's chest board was framed by an ornate scrollwork of imitation pig iron, complete with flaking patches of rust. It was foldable, and expensive, and made to be worn anywhere on the body, although no one ever seemed to wear them anywhere but on their chest; the iron gave it a retro look, baroque and pre-industrial, that was probably meant to signify something. Hipness, an ultra-contemporary vibe, ironic commentary, anti-conformity. I had no idea.
"Inspector Kitts," I said, and the override scanner beeped, confirming my voice, the biometrics of my hand. The working precautions of the scanners are extreme. They can only be operated by an Inspector. If someone else picks one of them up it detonates. A year before, a guy in a dark warehouse had knocked Gertz on the head and grabbed his scanner; the thing blew his hand off and he bled out, right there on the dirty concrete.
The screen went blank when I activated the scanner and then flashed its response.
CARRIER SYLVAN REYNOLDS. CARRIER DECEASED. CAUSE: SUICIDE. PROBABILITY: 99%
"Give me the last significant actions," I said.
The board hung for a moment and then displayed the message:
BOARD REMOVED BEYOND TEN FOOT RADIUS, 05:37. AT FOURTEEN FEET THREE INCHES MONITORING ACCURACY APPROX. 93%
"Hey Gertsie," I said over my shoulder, "did I.V. tell us the radius had been broken?"
"Not as far as I know."
CONSUMED UNREGULATED SUBSTANCE IN CAPSULE FORM [IDENTIFICATION: MIXED SYSTEMIC DEPRESSANTS; IDENTIFICATION CERTAINTY: 20%], APPROX. 5,000 mg., 06:09 – 06:10
CONSUMED LIQUID [IDENTIFICATION: BOURBON WHISKEY; IDENTIFICATION CERTAINTY: 70%], APPROX. 4 oz., 06:11 – 06:27
DICTATED SCREEN MESSAGE, SET SCREEN IMAGE, 06:22 – 06:26
PHYSICAL INDICATIONS OF LIFE CEASED, 06:59
"Yeah, we’re on the scene," Gertz said. I jumped at the sound of his voice. "Overdose suicide. Board substantiated. Booze and pills, took fifty minutes to plough him under. He left a note. Junky poetry. What can I say? Send a team with a chemical tracer over, too. There's enough contraband in the bathroom to power a city block. We're on our way back into the city."
He listened for a minute.
"Yeah," he said, "I know who he was."
He ended the call. He looked at me. He said: "Put your fucking glasses on."
He was a big man, big like the sides of beef you see hanging in refrigerated rooms in old movies. He had neatly combed, neatly parted black hair and a face like a drawer full of old tools. We'd been through a number of unpleasant experiences together. When they paired us, we had the best efficiency rating in the division. We got paired a lot. I laughed at him and took my old-school dark glasses out of my jacket pocket.
We went out through a corridor that had a row of big windows showing a view of a forest so perfect it was impossible to tell it was a projection. Light filtering through the trees, birds chirping, the whole bit. Expensive stuff. We walked down a set of stairs big enough for ten people to walk down. We went through a long room decorated with enormous black and white photographs and out a front door like the front door of a space ship. The estate was perfectly and extensively maintained. Green lawns watered with real water, big trees. There was a tall concrete wall around the whole thing. Past that, the hills stood brown and yellow and dry and the sky was blank, like the color had been burned out of it. There was an entry-level woman standing on the steps that led down from the front door, interviewing the last of the household staff. They looked nervous in their black and white uniforms. They had their boards shooting video, of course, and as soon as they were clear of the scene they'd all be broadcasting the event on their personal and news pages. Sylvan Reynolds' death would be plastered across the world before we were back in the city. He'd been rich and mysterious and people would be ravenous for details.
"Anything new?" Gertz asked the entry-level.
"Nope. None of them live on the property, none of them comes into work before seven. They all say they didn't even know he was here, and that he hasn't been up to this house in a couple months."
"We'll see. As soon as the movement records warrant goes through we'll have his whole history. Should be less than an hour. Don't touch anything until the chemical analysis team gets here. They'll do their thing, make it look like we're doing our best to combat the scourge of illegal drugs."
Entry-level was obviously a little in awe of Gertz. "You guys find anything interesting?" she asked.
Gertz ignored the question. "Some guys from Mortuary will show up after that. They're an MJT/Addison subsidiary, so they're cleared to take charge of the site. You're on duty until then. Stand here and make sure the house doesn't fall down. Get that smile in shape too – you're going to come up on the feed of anyone who searches for Reynolds' death. We're going for a sandwich."
I watched them talk. Tough-guy old Inspector, face to face with a young kid imagining herself someday climbing to the top of that same heap. Good luck, kid. Your hero there is a bleak, brooding son of a bitch, with a streak of terrific violence and the ethics of a trash compacter; his wife's a bitter elementary school principal who pops sedatives all day long, and he's so desperate that his two teenage daughters go to a great college and then on to fabulous suit and tie careers that he almost can't talk about them without going into a rage; and beneath all that, he's got a strange, subterranean dream of celebrity, spends most of the three or four free hours he has a week in the back room of his house in his gated suburb with all his collected mechanical curiosities, shooting videos, trying to make himself into a famous antiquer.
I went back to looking at the big brown hills. They struck me as beautiful.
We drove back down towards the city. Gertz steered the car; I dictated our preliminary report. The creek bed was almost entirely dry. There were a few green bushes along the bank, and I saw a striking old ponderosa, but most of the trees up here were long dead. The canyon ended and the city appeared below us, and then around us, like some insurmountable force, roaring, inevitable, frantic; I thought about the dead man. Sylvan Reynolds. He had designed a lot of the components that went into the boards. He had been brilliant, enigmatic, wealthy, the epitome of a reclusive genius. He believed in data and information and the ability of the boards to tell the truth about the world; now he'd offed himself, and no matter how many algorithms we brought to bear, no matter how much computational power we applied, no matter how much minutia about his actions we pulled out of his board record, we'd never know why. There was something amusing in the thought. Or maybe that was just the high-wire feeling of the coke.
Gertz said something I didn't catch. The electronic ocean of the city was around us. Block after block of five story apartment buildings, built in that repetitive cube pattern that was so in vogue five years ago. The big hospital campuses with their stately glass buildings. Ads playing on the sides of them for air-drop retailers and solar panels and air conditioning. Ads playing on the cars around us for tech education, get you out of that minimum plus a dollar job, out of that cheap apartment cube. Personal profile builders, get you noticed by someone who mattered. Video billboards, strip clubs, plumbers, movie trailers, respiratory specialists.
"What's that?" I asked.
"I said you're an asshole. You got this strange belief that forensics isn't ever going to figure out that some part of someone's stash is missing. You think they're never going to run your board data and find all the INGESTING UNREGULATED SUBSTANCES messages."
"I'd call it a certainty, not a belief."
"It's almost going be sad when you get clipped. I'm going to have to treat you like a regular committer."
"Gertsie, I didn't think you'd be so concerned. If you want me to return the favor, I'll tell you how worried I am about some of that shit you collect. That one with the swami where you press the button and it tells your fortune? Ugliest goddamn thing in the world, but it's got to be expensive."
"It is."
"And the deal with the guys at Evidence that you swung to get it – that was all above board?"
"I don't mess around with that goddamn shit you do. I don't rot my brain. And I don't fuck with anything that might affect our chances of getting a conviction."
"Our bosses are the people making the drugs, 'ol buddy. I thought you knew that."
Gertz sighed. I could always get to him with this kind of bullshit. I pushed him a little more.
"You know as well as I do that the pharmaceutical plants that pump out all this super-refined shit are big money operations. You know they're probably in Africa or the Middle East, and you know they're probably operated by the same companies that make the prescription pills we all love so much, the pills we eat when our boards tell us our carcinogen intake is too high or our body fat's inching up or whatever the hell they tell us. And you're naïve if you don't think that MJT/Addison, our bosses, or our bosses' bosses, I should say, don't have a whole shitload of fingers in that pie. Why do you think our sleep-minimization drugs are so much more effective than the over the counter shit? They get it coming and going – they set up relationships with the big companies that are producing pharmaceuticals in unregulated parts of the world, and then get paid to enforce the law on all the people who are taking the illegal drugs those same companies push out."
"Conspiracy bullshit."
"No, it's just the simplest explanation for what we do in our job."
"So if it's so disgusting, why don't you quit?"
"I thrive on respect."
He snorted and shook his head.
"I know you do too. Big ol' Gene Gertz, best Inspector in the city, swinging dick, Oh Jeez Mr. Gertz, did you put down another case already? You're so amazing!"
Gertz laughed and took his ivory cigarette case and a little plastic bottle of anti-cancer pills out of the pocket of his coat. He toasted me with the bottle, swallowed one of the pills. He lit the cigarette. The car's air filters clicked on.
"I'm just trying to say that it's going to be sad when you get clipped," he said.
"I'll never get clipped. Not like that."
"You sure?"
"Metrics, Gertz. I make my numbers and then some. They don't care what I do on the side, same as they don't care if you're buying shit cheap from Evidence and selling it on the internet. Our quantifiable effect on the safety of the world is what it's about."
"Keep telling yourself that."
"I do. Every day."
Gertz jerked the car into the next lane. An exit ramp dumped us in front of a strip mall with a food court under a big dome. The dome was plastered with music videos, commercials, baseball games. The sidewalk was awash with people, and they moved around us uneasily. We made them nervous. Even without the markings on the car they would have known who we were. They'd always known, just by looking at us, and we'd always known about them in the same way.
In the food court, people were milling around in front of the Hmong food cart Gertz liked. He pushed his way through without seeing them. The smell of the food made me sick. The lights of the mall, the videos overhead, the music blaring out of the stores. Ads playing from scratched-up screens beneath my feet, ads projected onto the sides of the buildings. I took out my pill box and ate a little fuchsia-colored guy to get myself leveled out a bit. A big screen over the cart was showing the most popular current clips from citizen news channels. One was about three kids in New York who'd been rescued from a closet where their father had been keeping them for a year and a half. The father had been killed in the rescue operation; the kids would be alright. The woman reporting the story was stunningly beautiful. Her chest board, sleek and form-fitting, showed a peace symbol made of flowing green vines. Who knew if that was the way she really looked, or what kind of truth there was in the story – for not all that much money, anyone could buy video editing programs that were so good that even corporate security had a hard time telling real from fake. But she was enthusiastic, and there was something wonderful and comforting in her persona. The tickers at the top and bottom of the screen broadcast rapturous comments by her followers. Another bit came on, narrated by a kid who looked like he was fourteen or fifteen. He was on the edge of tears about the amazing story he was bringing to us. The noise was deafening, the screens were blinding. I took out my pill box and dropped another.
There were some teenagers sitting on a concrete table. Rich kids, well-dressed, casual, laughing. Up here from downtown, slumming. Some were using their boards to shoot video of the people around them, some were tracking area searches of the clothes and glasses they wore,
using the data to build up envy scores. One of them had programmed his board to display the amount of money in his trust fund, broken down into its various investment group accounts, the total at the bottom ticking upwards in real time. The girl next to him had set hers to show a series of films of herself – in a string bikini, in the shower rocking gently in the water and looking back over her shoulder, in a sheer black dress walking down a catwalk. Next to her stood a boy whose screen showed the number of girls he'd slept with, and the things he had done to them, all arrayed in a complex numerical table. He had shaggy black hair and wore a pair of sunglasses similar to mine.
I sauntered over and pointed at him. I dangled my override scanner next to my face.
"Come on over here," I said.
He climbed down off the table, lazy and half-amused.
"What are you doing up in this neighborhood?" I asked, activating my override scanner and identifying myself. His board flashed into happy blank harmony. I felt the in-drawing of attention. People watching, turning on their boards to film us. The kid grinned at me.
"I asked you a question," I said. "Take off those glasses."
"Just hanging around."
"You up here to buy drugs, find a hooker, what?"
He kept that grin on his face. "Do you have a warrant to override me?"
"I have probable cause. You look stoned. I can certainly call in a team and ask for a blood test if you want. Take off those glasses before I break your nose."
He did. His eyes were sad and young.
He said: "You know, everyone's recording you. If you touch me it's going to be all over the internet."
I wasn’t particularly worried. MJT/Addison had whole working groups devoted to pulling those videos down off the internet, threatening legal action, exposing them as hoaxes. Uploading videos of exemplary conduct in their place. I smiled. I said: "If everybody in the whole world is watching, I'll really have to play it by the book, won't I? So let's get down to it. You look stoned, as I said, which is enough to establish probable cause about all the illicit substances you've got in your system. How about your pockets – you carrying anything you shouldn't be?"
"No."
"If you don't come up here to get your shit, how do you get it? I mean, don't tell anyone, but I'm not above taking a little pop sometimes myself. Just between friends, you know. So give me your story."
He paused, and I wondered if he'd ever met one of us before. Probably not, in the life he led. I watched a little fantasy cross his mind about trying to fuck with me. Then he said: "Delivery. We send a message and they deliver. They change the RTV every day."
"So you've just admitted to committing a felony, is that right?"
He hesitated.
"It's funny, isn't it," I said, "all that shit about how everyone's recording us? Let me ask you again. Have you committed a drug-related felony in the past forty-eight hours, yes or no?"
All the options occurred to him. The hatred came visible in his eyes, narrowing them. I said: "Has the carrier, in the past forty-eight–"
But before I could finish my question for the board, the answer popped out of the kid's mouth: "Yes."
"A full confession! Just what I was hoping for." His friends were gathered, watching. I grinned at them. "That shit on your chest about your girlfriends, that all real?"
"What?"
I moved my gaze back to him.
"You know it is," he said. "The boards can't lie."
"You're sure about that, huh?" I asked. I looked at his board. "You didn't program it very well, you know. There's a distinct lack of clarity in the layout. It could have been your sister or your mother doing all those things to you."
He wanted to say something so badly that he couldn't stop his tongue from working over his teeth, but he stayed quiet.
"Let's see what we've got here. How old was the carrier when he lost his virginity?"
14 YEARS, 0 MONTHS, 0 DAYS
"Birthday boy, huh? Did the carrier exchange money for that encounter?"
ELECTRONIC FUNDS TRANSFER TO APHRODITE ESCORT SERVICES PRECEDED ENCOUNTER BY 20 HOURS. $2,000. PROBABILITY OF FUNDS TRANSFERRED IN EXCHANGE FOR SEX 96%.
"Hooboy, what a guess. Would you look at that. Gotta buy it, huh? But it was the carrier's dad that paid for it, wasn't it?"
CONFIRMED.
The kid had fury in his eyes now. He was still young.
"Starting to like the board a little less now, aren't you. Lots of fun when you're trying to impress your friends by how many times you've gotten your dick sucked while you're standing on you head, but less fun now. Definitely less fun now. But here's the clincher, the question that all the world wants to know. The carrier cried after he lost his virginity, didn't he?"
My phone beeped.
"Hey Kitts," said Gertz. "Get over here."
He was standing in front of the Hmong place with a plastic carton forgotten in one hand, staring up at a screen. The beautiful woman was back again. This clip had over a million endorsements already, and was in fourth place for the day. Graphics next to her head informed us that she had two stories in the top ten and was a Newsmaker to Follow.
"Software mogul – and inventor of the DreamReal Boards – Sylvan Reynolds was found dead today," she said, and then paused melodramatically. "The tributes have already begun to appear, and many of them are just really exceptional, but I'm going to show you something that most people don't have. An authentic picture of Reynolds, who famously managed to keep his face out of the public eye. He flooded the internet with so many different images of himself that there's a lot of confusion as to what he really looked like. As we mourn his death, I think it's important to honor his wish not to be seen, which is why I'm only going to show this picture once, and only for a minute or so. If you want to see it, you have to tune in now. It is authentic, perhaps the only one that we're a hundred percent certain about."
She paused again, waiting while the number of people following her feed shot up. Then a photograph took up most of the screen, showing a man with dark hair and surgically perfect features. "The death has been ruled a suicide by the MJT/Addison Security West, which operates policing services for the city of Denver. But as one of my most wonderful subscribers wrote, 'It's not Reynolds' death that matters, it's his life, and the amazing things he did with it.'"
Gertz's put his hand up to touch his ear – an MJT dispatcher had opened his phone line and was giving instructions. She was talking into my head as well. They wanted us back up at the estate. Immediately.
Another clip came on, something about a human interest story from India. The picture of Sylvan Reynolds disappeared. If that had been a real picture of him and not one of the fakes he was famous for, he'd been a good looking man, with strong, serious features. He also hadn't looked anything like the guy we'd found on the bed.
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