11

Ghosts in the Wind ... as realAlbert does some modern footwork ...

There didn't seem to be much I could do about my missing duplicates. Gray number two was on autonomous mode; he couldn't legally contact me, and the maestra might prevent it even if he wanted to. The greenie had sent a weird declaration of independence, before going off on his own. And there was no sign at all of gray number one, who vanished at Kaolin Manor along with a ghost of Yosil Maharal. The Universal Kilns security staff had taken charge of that mystery, sifting the estate for any sign of both missing dittos. So far to no avail.

I didn't expect them to achieve much. It's easy to smuggle a rox in a box. Millions, cushioned mummylike in CeramWrap, get shunted all over the city each day by truck, courier, or pneumatic tube. And it's even easier getting rid of a dead one -- just flush the remains into a recycler. Without a pellet, one batch of golem slurry is no different than any other.

Anyway, I had investigations to take care of, including one for a client who was willing to pay top rates. Ritu Maharal wanted me to look into the mysterious death of her father. As legal heir, she could now access his records, from credit purchases to calls from his wrist phone. Maharal's movements during time spent working for UK were another matter. But when Ritu asked Vic Aeneas Kaolin for those chronicles, the tycoon assented, grudgingly, to keep her from going public with "wild stories" about her father being murdered.

The permissions came through soon after I finished making an ebony specialist, tuned for total focus on professional skill. That duplicate went right to work, waving its arms and chattering rapidly under the muffled folds of a virtual reality chador, immersed in a world of rapidfire data-globes and zooming images. All logic and focus, the ebony could handle the rest of my caseload for the time being, letting me concentrate on one task -- discovering where Yosil Maharal spent the last few weeks.

Never mind what cyber marketeers say about their fancy autonomous search programs. Data-sifting is an art. We may live in a "transparent" society, but the window glass is frosted and foggy in countless places. Peering through those patches can take skill.

I started by setting up a digital avatar -- a simple software representation of myself -- and launching it through the publicam network. Though less intelligent or flexible than a creature with a Standing Wave, it carried some of my expertise combined with a relentless drive to hunt down any images that Yosil may have left while traveling on city streets. Ritu gave me about sixty solid sightings to start with -- places he was confirmed to have been at exact times. The avatar zoomed in on those space-and-time coordinates, then tried to follow the scientist as he moved from one recorded scene to the next. Gradually, a map began to fill in, detailing his movements during the months before he died.

Often, that kind of search is enough, all by itself. Few people have a knack for evading the publicam mesh.

Alas, Maharal must have been one of them. Indeed, he proved wily at escaping from view, almost at will. My avatar's search left a chart with many gaping holes, some lasting a week or more!

Ritu's pockets were deep and she wanted answers fast. So I put out bids for sightings by privately owned lenses, which are far more numerous than public cameras. Restaurant security scanners, window-ledge lurkers, newsbugs, amateur sociologists, even nature lovers and urban sporting clubs -- anyone whose sensors might have spotted Yosil when he was out of publicam range. Since Ritu owned her father's copyright now, there wasn't even a voyeur tax. Low bids poured in. I let the avatar haggle and choose enough pix to fill in Yosil's trail.

Meanwhile, I focused on the scene of his death.

Outside the city, it's like another world. A primitive realm of immense areas where vision is blurry, even nonexistent ... unless you happen to be there in person, using your own eyes.

Adult: If a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

A modern child: It depends. Let me check if any of the local cams had sonic or vibrational pickups.

Cute. But in fact, most places on Earth still aren't covered by any close-in cams at all! It's a lot easier to disappear in the countryside, beyond any sign of habitation.

Unfortunately, that's where Maharal spent his last hours, and possibly days.

I started with police images of the crash site, offering stunning holographic detail out to a diameter of two hundred meters surrounding Maharal's wrecked vehicle -- a big Chevford Huntsman with an extravagant methane engine. It lay crumpled and half-burned at the bottom of a ravine. The river was dry this time of year, but giant granite boulders testified to the smoothing effects of a torrent that scoured the streambed during some winters.

The desert, I thought, glumly. Why did it have to be the damn desert?

Overhead, spanning the gully, stood the highway viaduct where Maharal's vehicle began its fatal plummet, the guardrail a twisted snake of shredded metal. I spent some time nosing around the scene, shifting and interpolating from one hovering copcam to the next. While emergency vehicles came and went, muscular dittos heaved at the wreck -- sometimes with fancy tools, but then dropping them to use raw strength -- striving to free the dead scientist's corpse.

The road made a sharp turn just before reaching this lonely site. Skid marks intersected the maimed guardrail ... as if the driver had realized his peril suddenly, though too late. This, combined with results from Maharal's autopsy, convinced authorities that he must have simply dozed off at the wheel.

The tragedy never would have happened if he used the car's auto-navigation system. Why would someone drive at night, in an unlit desert, with all safety features cut out?

Well, I answered my own question, robot-piloting leaves a trace. You don't use autonav when you're worried about being followed. Maharal's gray ditto had admitted that the good doctor spent his last days oscillating in and out of paranoia. This supported the story.

Reversing the flow of time, I watched emergency vehicles converge backward and then disperse again, one by one, till just a solitary camview was available ... a speckly image from the first sheriff's cruiser to arrive on the scene. When I tried ratcheting still earlier, the fatal patch of desert not only went dark, it vanished from memory, like a blind spot you couldn't even look at. It appeared only on maps. An abstraction. For all anyone knew for sure, it did not even exist during the time in question.

Farm country would've been better. Agriculturalists use a lot of cameras to monitor crops. Anything irregular, like a stranger, might show up. But the hectare in question featured just a simple EPA toxicity detector, vigilant against illegal dumping. The nearest real lens was more than five klicks away -- a habitat scanner programmed to count migrating desert tortoises and such.

Still, I didn't give up. There are ten thousand commercial and private spy-sats orbiting this planet, and even more robot aircraft cruising the high stratosphere, serving as phone relays and newscams. One of them might have been focused on this obscure place when the accident happened, recording a handy image of Maharal's headlights, swerving and then spinning as the car plunged to its doom.

I checked ... and there was no such luck. All the high-resolution lenses were busy elsewhere that night, zooming onto busier sites. Tech-pundits keep promising we'll have WorldOmniscient viewing in a few years, with close-ups of the whole Earth available to everyone, all the time. But right now, that's just sci-fi stuff.

My best bet was to try a little trick of my own, using the coarse data from a micro-climate orbiter. Not a true camera, the weathersat is assigned to track wind gusts across the southwest, using Doppler radar.

Traffic stirs the air, especially in open countryside. Long ago I figured out that you can trace the passage of a single vehicle, if conditions are right. And if you're lucky.

Using special processing software, I massaged the weathersat's recorded scan of the area near the viaduct, moments before the crash. Looking for very small patterns, I prodded and palped the Doppler elements till they were grainy, fluctuating at the edge of chaos.

At first, it looked like nothing more than a storm of multicolored noise. Then I began picking out patterns.

There!

It looked like a trail of mini-cyclones, spinning along both sides of the desert road -- a ghostly wake, barely perceptible against a background of noise-washed pixels. Pushing the clock slowly backward from the time of the crash, I followed that spectral trace as it writhed southward along the road, vanishing and then reappearing like a phantom snake, moving at the pace of a speeding car.

This might work, I thought, so long as Maharal didn't pass any other traffic ... and assuming the air stayed quiet all that lonely night.

Almost any outside disturbance could erase the wraithlike spoor.

Comparing distance and time scales, I could tell one thing about Maharal's condition that night as he sped toward his tryst with death -- the Universal Kilns scientist sure must have had a bee up his shorts! He topped over a hundred and twenty klicks along most of that curvy road. The guy was just asking for trouble.

Could someone have been following him? Chasing? The trail of cyclonic disturbance was too ragged and smeared to tell if it was made by one vehicle or two.

I asked Nell to keep following the faint pattern as far back in time as she could.

"Acknowledged," my house computer answered, almost sounding human. "If you aren't too busy, there are some other matters that have come up while you were immersed in work. Your colleague Malachai Montmorillin called several more times. I put him off, per your instructions."

I felt a little guilty. Poor Pal. "I'll make it up to him tonight. Orders stand."

"Very well. I have also received a pneumatic shipment from Universal Kilns. Five new ditto blanks."

"Put them away. And please stop bothering me with trivia."

Nell went silent. I could see on one monitor that she was concentrating on following Maharal's desert track. So I turned away to check on the cyber-avatar that I had unleashed in the city cam-web.

The results looked gratifying!

Purchased images and camera-posse reports were pouring in, providing a picture of where Yosil Maharal had spent much of the last few months, at least when he was in town. I skim-sampled the resulting movie at high speed, tailing the late researcher as he moved from one eyeview to the next ... shopping in a fashionable arcade, for instance, or visiting his hygienist for a routine oral-symbiont upgrade. The mesh of spottings still amounted to only a couple of hours a day, on average. But after all, Maharal spent most of his time working in the lab at Universal Kilns, or at home.

Except for those mysterious trips to the countryside, that is. It was essential to forge a link between his city trail and those cryptic sojourns out of town.

Still, I felt content with progress so far. If the city mesh kept filling in at this rate, I should have something worthwhile to report to Ritu.

A sharp twinge brought my hand to my right temple. One byproduct of all this work was a growing headache. Real neurons can only take so much holovideo input. Anyway, it was time I got up to relieve my bladder.

Stopping at the chemsynth unit on my way back, I ordered a tension potion -- something to ease the knot in my neck, but without any thought-dulling endorphins. I took the frothy concoction back to the study ... only to find someone in my place! Somebody built like me, but with longer fingers and a disdainful expression that I seldom wear. At least I hope I don't.

The glossy, emulated skin was the color of deep space. Agile hands danced over my controller-array.

"What are you doing?" I demanded. The ditto had its own cubbyhole.

"Tidying up this mess while waiting for you to come out of the john. Your search avatar thinks that it's tracked down most of Maharal's missing in-town movements."

I glanced at the screen. "Yeah? Eighty-seven percent coverage ain't bad ... for the time Maharal wasn't at home or the lab. What are you getting at?"

Again, a sardonic smile.

"Oh, nothing, maybe. Except that some of these so-called sightings may not be Dr. Yosil Maharal at all."

I gave the ditto a hollow look, which only invited more disdain.

"Care to make a wager, Boss-me? I'll bet my inload that Maharal's got you fooled. In fact, he's been tricking everybody for a very long time."