"Kiln People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

14 Under False Colors

What are you saying?” I asked the jetto. “That my web sightings may not be Maharal?”

With finger flicks and winked signals, my ebony duplicate fetched data and put moving pictures onscreen. I watched a collage of recordings made weeks ago as Yosil Maharal strolled down an avenue filled with pedestrians and gyrocyclists. One of those fashionable display arcades where you can sample a myriad products, select features you like, and have made-to-order items delivered by courier-ditto before you get home.

From a distance, Maharal appeared to enjoy a window-shopping stroll, sauntering through one boutique after another. A district like this one has more cameras than a typical street, letting Nell’s software avatar sew an almost gap-free retrospective mosaic as our target moved from one lens view to another, with time stamps glowing in a low corner.

“Did you notice anything happen, just now?” the ebony asked.

“What’s to notice?” I twitched, feeling awkward under that unblinking gaze, knowing what contempt I tend to feel toward my real self, whenever I’m black.

He clicked his tongue. The onscreen image froze and raster-scanned. Enhancing cells zoomed toward where Maharal had joined a small crowd, watching a street performer weave sculptures out of smoke-gel. The fragile artifacts grew and blossomed like delicate apparitions, lifted and shaped by the puffs of air exhaled from the virtuoso’s pursed lips. When a child clapped her hands, reverberations made the creation shudder and bow toward her, before rising again as the artist breathed new layers.

Working with similar skill, my golem specialist swiftly crafted a composite image from three cameras, scattered around the plaza. Maharal’s picture grew more grainy as we zoomed in on his face. The UK scientist was smiling. All seemed normal, till I felt a creepy suspicion.

“Zoom closer,” I said, with misgivings. “The skin texture … by God, it’s not real!”

“I see it now,” Nell commented. “Note the subject’s forehead. The pellet dimple has been concealed under makeup.”

I slumped. We were looking at a ditto.

“Hm,” the ebony commented. “It appears that our good doctor committed a nine-point misdemeanor. Those flesh tones are human-brown. Shade ninety-four X, to be exact. Definitely illegal for duplicates to wear in public.”

This was unlike Kaolin’s weak ploy, when he phoned me earlier. His archetype guise had been amateurish and quasi-legal since he was at home at the time. But Maharal, in his developing paranoia, must have felt it worth risking a stiff fine in order to drop out of the city-village without a trace.

I glanced at the time stamp. Twelve minutes since the last time Maharal passed near a hi-res publicam, allowing a good reality check. He must have made the switch during that interval. But exactly when? The collage was awfully tight. “Please backtrack, Nell. Show the most biggest coverage gap since fourteen-thirty-six.”

From the plaza, Maharal’s ghost image began scurrying in reverse till he vanished into a shop offering fine utility coats for men. My avatar did a quick negotiation with the store’s internal security system … which refused to share any images because of a quaint privacy policy. Nothing would budge the stubborn program, not even Maharal’s death certificate and Ritu’s permission slip. I might have to go talk to the manager in person.

“How long was he in there?” I asked.

“A little over two minutes.”

More than enough time for Maharal to trade places with a waiting ditto. But it was a risky move. Despite the lens-detecting scanners they sell nowadays, you can never absolutely guarantee you’re not being watched. Even inside a buried oil drum. (I know, from personal experience.) Still, Maharal must have felt pretty confident.

Now I must assign a new software avatar to do a careful backscan and find out when the ditto entered the store. It must have come in disguise, then spent hours in there, crouched behind coatracks or something. After the switch, realMaharal would have waited a while, changing carefully into another disguise before reemerging, positive that his decoy had derailed any normal search routines.

I’ve pulled the same ruse myself, many times.

“He may have the shopowner’s complicity,” my ebony specialist pointed out. “The ditto could arrive in a shipping crate and realMaharal might depart the same way.”

I sighed over the drudgery ahead, inspecting and analyzing countless images.

“Don’t sweat it. I’ll handle the sift from my cubicle,” the specialist assured me. “I’ve already got our other cases under control. Besides, I think you’ll want to look at what your other search uncovered at the crash site.”

He got up and moved toward the little niche where I recall spending many happy hours — a cramped cubbyhole that I find comfortably cozy whenever I’m ebony, tuned to want nothing more than the pure joy of professional skill. Watching my copy go, I felt a little envious … and grateful to both Maharal and Kaolin for helping invent dittotech.

It’s a terrific boon, if you have a marketable skill.

The ebony was right. Investigation of the crash site had reached a new plateau.

Onscreen, my display depicted a vast swathe of desert southeast of town — a strange realm where trustworthy realtime images were as sparse as drinkable water and where it took sophisticated trickery to sift the trail of a moving car. Following my instructions, Nell had traced a ghostly spoor of whirling cyclones back through the night, moving earlier and ever farther from Maharal’s death rendezvous. The overlay showed a dotted line weaving toward a range of low mountains near the Mexican border, not far from the International Combat Arena. Once inside those hills, I knew the trail of mini-tornados must vanish amid a whirl of canyon turbulence.

But I’d seen enough to feel an eerie chill. I knew this country.

“Urraca Mesa,” I whispered.

Nell spoke up.

“What did you say?”

I shook my head.

“Dial up Ritu Maharal,” I ordered. “We need to talk.”