Timecaster

ELEVEN

Area 4 Peace Headquarters was located in the Loop, on Wabash. Ever since the El train was updated to carry three times as many passengers back in the fifties, Wabash had been off-limits to civilian traffic. But city officials and peace officers were exempt from the ban.

Though I had to steer around the massive support pylons for the El, Wabash was still my favorite street to drive on. No glut of biofuel bikes. No traffic signals. If pedestrian traffic was light, I could even get the Vette up to fifty mph.

But today the ride to the office was perfunctory. I had a lot on my mind, and my arm was giving me some serious trouble. Adding to my woes was the fact that Vicki refused to answer her headphone. I wondered if she had blocked me. I wondered if I could blame her if she had. So I let my DT compile a list of potential enemies, and cruised at a comfortable thirty-five until I reached A4.

I parked in the underground garage, in a reserved spot next to Teague’s vintage Porsche 911. Ours were the only two cars in a lot crammed with bikes, and his was worth more than mine. Back when we were rookies, we spent a lot of our spare time hanging out in P amp;P bars, getting wasted, discussing what kind of cars we’d buy if we could ever afford them. The Porsche was his way of thumbing his nose at my Vette, and our prior friendship. To pay for it, he lived in a shithole apartment the size of my right shoe.

I took the elevator to the forty-ninth floor. A4 was the largest area in Chicago, so it had the largest main building, home base to more than twelve thousand cops. The majority of them worked Traffic and Pedestrian Control, and the rest were vice regulators, making sure everyone played nice. No more Homicide Division. No more Violent Crimes. Fewer than a thousand cops still wore sidearm Tasers.

On one hand, living in a green utopia had a lot of perks. With the serial violent offenders all locked up, and average citizens obeying the major laws, the city was safer than it had ever been.

On the other hand, it was pretty boring. Which was why, for the first time in years, I came to work energized. I actually had a case. An important case. And even though it was my neck on the line, it was almost worth it just to feel useful again.

Even that asshole Teague couldn’t ruin my buzz.

Since the Timecaster Division was down to just two people, we shared an office. It was a big office, but we still managed to get in each other’s way. I’d rather do demos at a dozen third-grade classrooms than have to talk to Teague for more than five minutes.

He had his feet up on his desk and was watching a projection of CNP-Cable Network Pr0n. He muted the action-which from my limited observation seemed to involve bondage, midgets, and a very fat goat-when I came in.

“Well, if it ain’t the second-best Van Damme in the state.”

There were only two full-time timecasters still in Illinois, me and him, and he’d graduated Sata’s class two points ahead of me. Van Damme was a slang term, going way back to a classic 2D movie called Timecop.

I ignored him, heading to my desk. I had a terminal link there, which would allow me hook into the Internet.

“Well, don’t we look determined today?” Teague swiveled his chair in my direction. “What’s on your mind, bro? Marital problems?”

I shouldn’t have let him bait me, but I still said, “You wish.”

“How is your dee-liscious whore of a wife? She miss me? Or does she have more than enough cock to satisfy her?”

“She sends her love.”

“And she charges out the ass for it. Maybe I’ll stop by, give her a tap for old times’ sake.”

“That won’t work. She’s got a new policy. No clients with a penis under three inches.” I stared at him, hard. “But I heard your mother doesn’t have standards. Maybe you should give her a call.”

His eyebrows creased in anger, and I wondered if he was actually going to get up and make a try for me. Teague was taller, but we weighed about the same. The one time we did scuffle, years ago, it had been a draw.

But the moment passed, and he snorted and flashed his teeth. “FU, Talon. FU and your whore.”

He popped a nicotine pill, and went back to his pr0n. I checked the program compiling my enemies list-82.656 percent complete and already up over two thousand names. Then I punched in some passwords and wirelessly connected my DT to the Internet.

I hadn’t been online in a while, and in my absence the World Wide Web had gotten worse. Even though the CPD had the latest blockers and antimalware programs, I was immediately assaulted with pop-ups. For shits and grins, I kept a window open of the programs and sites my blocker assassinated while I surfed. In the eighteen seconds it took for me to get to WikiWorld, I’d been attacked three hundred and seventeen times. That didn’t include the forty-two hijack attempts and eight attempted trojan-bot hacks.

The Internet sucked.

WikiWorld, which had a decent reputation back when I was a kid, was now a cesspool of unsupported and imaginary garbage that any n00b and b00b could edit at will. Most of the time it was useless. But there was a chance Aunt Zelda could be in there somewhere.

I projected a keyboard onto my desktop, preferring typing to voice commands Teague could hear, and punched in Zelda’s name. WikiWorld gave me a hit and a brief definition, but some prankster had replaced every noun in the entry with “hairy weasel dick,” making it pretty much unreadable. I tried to access the edit history, but his hack had encompassed that as well.

I heard bleating, and looked around. Teague had turned up the volume on his pr0n, just to annoy me.

“Check out that flexibility, bro. Vicki ever get freaky with dumb animals? Other than you?”

I pressed the remote on my belt, switching the projector to the Homeschooling Network and putting a jam on the button. Now no matter what Teague tried to watch, it would be stuck on six-year-olds perfecting their recyclable macaroni art.

“WTF?”

As he tried in vain to change the channel, I went from WikiWorld to an old search engine I used to use. All it came up with were ads, pr0n, and ads for pr0n. I tried a pirated version of uffsee, but UFSE didn’t work well on the Internet, and it crashed before the Boolean results could be compiled.

Then my browser did get hijacked, by a 3D ad program that flashed some very fake holographic breasts in my face. I had to kill my connection and start over.

This time, I injected my search parameters into a CPD metaspider and crawled WikiWorld, trying to find an untampered entry in the script. The spider got caught in an adware loop, pop-ups coming faster than my antivirus program could kill them.

I disconnected again, and used a brunt force attack with a hundred metaspiders.

“The projector is fuct. Did you do something to it, ass-munch?”

The pop-ups came again, and I set my DT to open each one in its own browser, trying to slow them down.

Incredibly, it worked, and I got the unaltered Zelda page. I captured the screen before some malware could eat it up, and went from elation to confusion to outright shock when I learned who Aunt Zelda used to be before her gender transformation.

Zelda Peterson was born Franklin Debont, the multibillionaire who invented UFSE.

“Live! Murder in Chicago!”

I looked up at the projector. The macaroni art had been replaced with an emergency news bulletin. Some seriouslooking anchor said, “We interrupt your regularly scheduled program for this late-breaking report. Warning. What you are about to see is shocking.”

It shocked me more than anyone. There, on Teague’s projector screen, was Zelda Peterson in her kitchen, next to the sink, as a man snuck up behind her.