Timecaster Read online

  “Sometimes I think that’s the only reason you married me, Talon. Because you knew how much I wanted to kiss you.”

  “That, and it was cheaper to marry you than keep hiring you.”

  We kissed, and it tasted just as fresh and new as it did that very first time, at our wedding ceremony. Victoria had been extremely rigid on that no-kissing policy.

  I nibbled her lower lip, dropping my mouth to her neck, and she leaned slightly back.

  “I’ve got another client coming in twenty minutes. I doubled up today so I could have tomorrow off. I got us space elevator tickets. How does a day in low-earth orbit sound?”

  Unfortunately, my alpha-male mind didn’t zero in on the extra day I’d have her to myself.

  “Who’s the client?”

  “Barney. The dentist.”

  “I hate that guy.”

  “He’s a harmless old man.”

  I knew I shouldn’t go there, but there I went. “Quit,” I told her.

  She pushed me away. “Don’t start. We have bills, Talon.”

  “We can move someplace cheaper.”

  “I like Chicago. I like our big house.”

  “You’re not the one who does the gardening for a property this big.”

  “I thought Neil was doing it.”

  “For two months. Then it’s back to me.”

  Her eyes flashed challenge. “If you hate it so much, we can hire someone. I’ll take on an extra client to pay for it.”

  “Boise, Idaho, is nice,” I managed to say through clenched teeth. “Let’s move to Boise. We could each get normal jobs. Maybe we could farm. There’s still affordable land out there. Buy four acres and raise blue-green algae. There’s a new strain that’s almost sixty-five percent lipid.”

  “You hate gardening. You think you’d like farming?”

  “I would if it meant having you to myself.”

  She rolled her eyes. “If I thought you were serious, I’d do it, Talon. But I know you. I know you’re a city guy. If you moved out to the country, you’d go crazy within two weeks.”

  She was right, but I wasn’t going to back down.

  “If you loved me, you’d quit.”

  Vicki folded her arms. Just like she was able to project warmth, she was now projecting anger.

  “I shouldn’t have brought anyone here while you were home.”

  “You could have gone to his place.”

  “You don’t let me go to my clients’ homes. You don’t trust any of them.”

  “And why would that be? Maybe because they’re nailing my wife?”

  If freeze-vision were possible, Vicki would have turned me into an iceberg right there.

  “It’s my job, Talon. Nothing more. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. You promised you’d stop doing this.”

  The hurt in her face made me want to take her in my arms again, but I was on a roll.

  “How would you like it if I slept around?”

  Her temperature dropped even further. “I’m not sleeping around. I’m earning a living. A very good living that lets us have a big house in a nice city. Sex is a natural, wholesome, biological need, and you know the only person I make it personal with is you.”

  Now I folded my arms, too. “But what if I did? What if I slept with someone else?”

  Victoria’s green eyes narrowed to slits. “Our prenup doesn’t have a monogamy clause. You go right ahead. Just make sure the next time you’re in my bed you have a full medical exam in your hand, and you sure as hell better not kiss her.”

  She stormed past me. I shook my head. SLPs. Sex with strangers was okay, but I’d better not kiss anyone else.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t want to kiss, or have sex with, anyone but her.

  “Sergeant?”

  Neil again, standing in the kitchen doorway. He was wearing a rumpled suit that made him look even thinner and wimpier. I might have even felt sorry for him, but he got laid today, and I hadn’t.

  “Let’s go,” I told him.

  We walked through my admittedly large and beautiful house, each step representing several square feet of very expensive real estate. My background check on Neil showed he didn’t own a vehicle, so I lead him to the garage. Like everyone else who sees my ride, his eyes bugged out when I turned on the overhead lights.

  “You have a . . . car?”

  “A 2024 Corvette Stingray, retrofitted for biofuel.”

  “It must have cost a fortune,” Neil said.

  “A gift from my wife.” I stared at him pointedly, letting him know his visits helped pay for this baby. But he apparently didn’t need a reminder.

  “With biofuel prices these days, it must cost a fortune to run. How many clients does Victoria have?”

  I shot him with my eyes, and he cowed. He was right, though. Funny how history repeats itself. During the energy crisis of the early-twenty-first century, desert sheiks artificially inflated the price of oil. Western countries decided they’d had enough, and half the world switched to a renewable energy source. Biofuels, made from cheap and plentiful vegetation. Extract the oil, then compost the rest for methane. But the population kept growing, and soon the foliage grown specifically for biofuel began to compete for space with the foliage grown for human and livestock consumption. That jacked up the prices of both fuel and food, and now everyone in the civilized world used every square inch of land they could spare to grow plants to make more fuel.

  I’ve seen pictures, movies on the intranet. Chicago, and the world, once looked industrial. Now every apartment had a garden, every roof a farm, every building covered top to bottom in vines. The urban jungle was, truly, a jungle.

  I hit the security button on my keys—this thing was so classic it still used keys—and we climbed into the front seat. The garage door, however, was chip operated. I waved my wrist over the remote box on the dashboard, and the door automatically levered open.

  I started the engine, listening to it purr and enjoying the look of wonder on Neil’s face. Chances were high he’d never been in a car before. I hadn’t, until Vicki bought me one.

  “Address?” I asked.

  “Thirteen twenty-two Wacker.”

  I squeezed my earlobe, turning on my headphone implant. The familiar dial tone came on in my head.

  “Car nav,” I said. “Thirteen twenty-two Wacker.”

  The message was sent to my car’s navigation system, and the semitransparent map flickered and then superimposed over my windshield. Another addition that wasn’t available back in 2024.

  The garage let out into the alley. I tapped the accelerator, eased out of the garage, and fishtailed. The greentop road was spongy, and needed to be harvested and replanted. Normally I did that myself, but this week Neil would get to enjoy that particular task.

  The alley let out onto the main street, Troy, and the city kept the greentop well maintained with regular uprooting and reseeding. If I’d been able to really floor it, my tires would have had no problem sticking to the road.

  Of course, with four million biofuel bikes on the street, I’d be lucky to hit thirty miles an hour anywhere within the city limits. It was like driving through a gaggle of geese. Fast geese, who enjoyed cutting you off. Even more annoying were the kermits, who were so green they rejected even biodiesel. They powerbocked; bipedding around on frog legs, which were flexible leg extensions that added thirty inches to their height. You could run forty miles an hour in a pair, perform a fifteen-foot vertical jump, and still manage to look like an idiot with that awkward, hopping gait.

  We weaved our way through the green skyscrapers, avoided injuring any utopeons, and even managed to cut off a few city buses, their roofs sprouting flowers arranged in a Cubs logo, to celebrate their eighth consecutive World Series win.

  “So why do you think someone murdered your aunt, Neil? Does she have enemies?”

  “Not that I know of. But she does have credits. Quite a bit. Came into it late in life. She’s a tech-head.”

 
; “You can’t murder someone for their credits. Credits don’t exist IRL. To make a transfer, both people would need their biochips. There would be a record of the transaction.”

  Neil lowered his voice. “Some people don’t use credits.”

  “Who? The dissys? Did your aunt associate with any dissys?”

  “One of her nephews is a dissy. And he’s a bit . . . unstable.”

  I filed that away.

  It took ten minutes to drive the twenty-four blocks. Parking in Chicago was even more competitive than driving, and the car didn’t fit into the pay carousels. But being a cop had its privileges. I parked up on the clover-covered sidewalk, flipped down my sun visor with my badge number on it, and climbed out of the Vette.

  Aunt Zelda’s apartment building, predictably, was green. But the wall ivy had tiny red flowers on it, making the building appear orangish. I popped the trunk and grabbed my utility belt and holster, mostly out of habit. I didn’t expect any trouble, but it never hurts to be prepared. After cinching on the buckle and adjusting my holster, I reached for the TEV, winding the carry strap over my shoulder. Next to it was my digital tablet, and when the sun hit the solar panels it powered up, beginning a slide show of crudely drawn stick-figure pictures. Neil was nearby, so I quickly pocketed it before he noticed.

  “Were those pictures of you?”

  Apparently he’d noticed.

  “Mrs. Simpson’s third grade class. I, uh, do a lot of school demonstrations. Community relations stuff. I tell kids to stay out of trouble, only take recreational drugs in moderation, that kind of thing.”

  “Sounds important,” Neil said.

  But I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: it wasn’t nearly as important as working Homicide. I’d become a cop to save lives, to make a difference, and now I was basically just a walking public service announcement. Not that I longed for violent crime to come back. That would be monstrous.

  And yet, there was a spring in my step as we walked to the apartment door.

  The lobby had UV grow lights in the ceiling, artificial sun for the bamboo lining the walls. As expected, the elevator also sported UV, the railing lined with hemp seedlings. Along with the vine kudzu, hemp and bamboo were among the fastest-growing plants, but most people favored hemp. If Chicago caught fire, everyone within three hundred miles would be stoned for a week.

  Aunt Zelda lived on the thirty-second floor. Whether it was habit or nervous tension, Neil picked and pruned the tiny plants as we took the ride up. Like a good little citizen he palmed the tiny bits he’d pinched off, then dropped them in a biorecycle container when we reached our floor.

  We walked past more plant life, found the correct door.

  “I’m programmed with her key code,” Neil said. “I check up on her a lot.”

  He waved his wrist chip in front of the doorknob, and it opened automatically.

  When I walked into the apartment I whistled in awe.

  Aunt Zelda’s home was completely packed with contraband.

  THREE

  “Oh, I . . . uh . . . I forgot about those,” Neil said.

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Just the biorecycle price alone would be worth a bunch of credits. But on the black market, we’re talking some major duckets.”

  Neil shrugged. “My aunt, she’s from an older generation. She grew up with paper. I told her to give these up, but she can’t.”

  There was a fortune around us. A fortune in books. Thousands of books. All of them illegal.

  Not that their content was illegal. Their content was public domain. It was the paper that was illegal.

  Sometime back around when I was born, thirty years ago, the biofuel shortage began, quickly followed by the food shortage. To stem off the inevitable, plants were no longer used to make anything but fuel or food. So natural cloth, wood furniture, and paper, among many other plantderived products, were banned. Those that already existed were gathered up and recycled for fuel.

  Not that anything was actually lost. Even back then synthetics could imitate, or improve upon, most natural products. And digital memory had become so cheap and plentiful, every word ever written had been digitized and could be stored on something called a hard drive, which was about the size of many of these smaller books.

  Those were dark ages, compared to today. Now you could fit 300 petabytes on a memory card the size of my fingernail. Enough to store every piece of media ever created by human beings. This base of information was given away freely when you bought a digital tablet. It also came with an intranet operating system, so you could access and search the vast volumes of knowledge and entertainment, accurately updated IRT by a team of experts and technicians. If you wanted a recent bit of media, like a new book or movie or magazine, you could download it at a news kiosk for credits with a flash of your wrist, and it would transfer directly to your digital tablet.

  Years ago, when DTs needed separate monitors and processors and were called computers, people used the Internet to communicate and exchange information with other people. These days, the Internet was an underground thing for bored hobbyists and fanboyz, saturated with untruths Wikied by the uninformed, conspiracy flakes, and pr0n. Basically just a big mess of nut jobs jerking off and shouting lies at one another. And don’t even get me started on the malware.

  That was why, when Web 4.0 became a wasteland, the tech geniuses took everything off the Internet that was worthwhile—basically every bit of knowledge, media, and art in human history—and created the intranet. Now everyone owned everything, and no one missed the flame wars and inaccurate half-truths of the Internet. It was much easier to communicate using headphone implants and digital tablets. And why waste time looking for unverified information when you could spend fifteen lifetimes sorting through the accurate information on your personal intranet and not even come close to viewing it all?

  Since these books were old, I could guarantee Aunt Zelda, and everyone else on the planet, already had copies of them on their intranet cards, so there was no real reason for her to keep them, other than sentiment. Especially since digital books were interactive and versatile and just plain better. I pulled a volume off the shelf, and peered at a random page. It was medieval. You couldn’t adjust the font size, couldn’t change the contrast, and it didn’t even have a button that made it read to you.

  Still, if Zelda had met with foul play, here was a monetary motive.

  “She, um, gave up everything else,” Neil continued. “Cotton clothing. A real particleboard desk. Some cherrywood frames. But she couldn’t part with her books.”

  “How about these bookcases?” I asked, pointing to the wood grain on them as I replaced the book. Truth was, I didn’t care at all about an old lady’s book collection. But I did enjoy freaking Neil out.

  “Synthetic,” he quickly said. “All fake.”

  I frowned, pretending to think things over. “Is there any other contraband I need to be aware of?”

  Neil got even paler. “She, uh, also has a still.”

  I raised an eyebrow. As the twenty-first century marched onward, liquor also joined the ranks of illegal products. Again, not for its effects—the Libertarian Act of 2028 made all recreational substances legal. But alcohol was made from plants, and plants could be used only for food and fuel. While the synthetic forms of drugs were cheap, plentiful, and popular, synthetic alcohol supposedly didn’t taste right. It was eventually made into pills like all other drugs, and I sometimes liked to kick back with a few whiskey tablets when I was off duty. I’d never tasted the real thing, and I was curious.

  “You’ll show that to me later,” I told him, my voice stern. “But first, show me the blood you found.”

  Neil nodded quickly, then led me into the kitchen. I lugged the TEV after him, setting it down next to the sink.

  “There,” Neil said, pointing.

  I squinted at some brown splotches on the stainless steel. It was blood. If I went back to my car for my crimescene kit, I could have analyzed the
sample on the spot, compared it to a hair sample from Aunt Zelda’s brush, and instantly matched the DNA, proving this blood was hers.

  But why bother with that when I could actually see what happened here instead?

  I took the tachyon emission visualizer off my shoulder and set it on the floor. The TEV sort of looked like an antique film projector. It was box-shaped, with a lens on the front, and two large spinning disks on the side. The top contained the control panel, recording software, and input pad. On the other side were the contrast dials. It had a handle on top, and a shoulder strap.

  “Do you know your aunt’s Tesla ID number?” I asked. I could have used my own, but preferred to save the credits when I could.

  “I have it written down. Hold on.” He dug a digital tablet out of his pocket and powered it on. “B-D-R-five-two-nine.”

  I punched the code onto the keypad, and the TEV accessed the airborne electricity and powered on. Just ten years ago, electronic devices still needed to be plugged into wall outlets, fed by generators that used enormous power lines.

  Now Tesla generators threw electrons into the atmosphere, which were zone-coded so customers paid for only what they used in their prezoned area, using specific serial ID numbers. It got rid of all the wires, making room for more plants. But the generators ran on biofuel, so I wondered exactly what we gained in the transition.

  The TEV hummed. I picked it up by the handle and moved it onto the kitchen table, using the monitor to aim the lens at a wide-angle view of the sink. That was the rudimentary part. The next part was all finesse.

  From what I understood, out of everyone who took TEV training, only .001 percent became a timecaster. It wasn’t that the controls were difficult to use. But the average person couldn’t use them well enough. My instructor likened it to playing a musical instrument. A lot of people could play the notes, but only a few could make those notes really come alive.

  Tuning a TEV required a fair bit of skill, but a lot of intuition. The basic premise was kid stuff, taught in first grade science tablet texts. Until their actual discovery, tachyons were only theoretical particles. Their claim to fame was they moved faster than light. According to classic Einsteinian physics, anything that moved faster than light could go back in time. Einstein was proven correct, but time machines never materialized. Apparently it’s possible to send particles back in time, but not anything larger.