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  Straightforward non-refugee domestic homicides were a rarity in Central, there being so few legal residences left in downtown. The other cases were more typical: a seemingly random refugee murder-suicide outside the Main Library; a social worker who’d stabbed one of his clients; the renegade heir to a pallet company fortune; a withered bag lady who’d turned out to be a long-ago corporate attorney. Terri took in the neatly arrayed stacks of information and sighed.

  Somewhere in the cases before her, she’d probably committed Overseer Oversight. This was the persistent misconception that somebody must have already made the obvious observation, or that the system itself would have connected the dots long before any person could have made any obvious observations. Although PanOpt had a top-notch backstop program, offering all sorts of after-the-fact analysis and perspective and research, it offered almost nothing in the way of intuitive analysis. Overseer Oversight was all the more irritating because so many other networks and systems within Los Angeles watched and listened for inputs and gestures, knowing when to pay attention, when to act, when to disregard. So why couldn’t the police do this?

  Seven hours later, an empty stomach finally pulled her out of her forensics maps. She’d missed dusk, and now a flawless symmetrical half moon sat over a stand of trees to her left, so perfectly centered it might as well have been an advertisement. Her stomach grumbled again.

  “Right.”

  She pulled up a web box—a seemingly physical cubby that appeared to hover above her lap—using the Overlay to call up the Internet, the two networks competing but connected. Terri was grateful that she could access both systems through her PanOpts, the cop’s extra network being a private system. Viewing the world ad-free was a colossal perk of the job. In the box now, she looked up supermarkets still open on New Year’s Day, finding the physical representation of one up in Burbank, already picturing all the forlorn shoppers on a Saturday night.

  So, no more overtime. So what? How bad could these weekend nights get without work? What, was she going to have a breakdown, start sobbing? She glanced up and saw something glitter under a nearby streetlight, unsure if it was a moth or part of the ecosystem of drones, one more roaming eye among millions.

  Terri lived in a three-story apartment block built straight into a steep slope on Marengo. It was actually four stories, if she counted the ground floor garage bay, a space where cars once parked and which was now used for mobile trash units that came and went on their own schedule. Across the street, a dirt decline held scrub that had grown from waist high to eye level in the three years she’d lived there. Beyond and below this was the freeway, and past that the tracks for the JoyRide commuter trains. She liked this noise. Her entire life, Terri had never lived more than a mile from train tracks.

  As soon as she entered the apartment, that weird exhaustion hit, a heaviness that crept into her limbs whenever she had downtime, or was alone by herself in her own space. In the bathroom, in the smart mirror she’d never bothered to set up, she caught glints from her scalp, as if her hair were slowly transforming into Christmas tinsel. A sprinkling of powdered cleanser on the edge of the windowsill offered proof that she had once half-heartedly attempted to clean the room, to ward off the ants that marched in for her blood every month.

  From the jute bag of groceries on the counter, she produced a sandwich and a bottle of Jim Beam, mixed the booze with the last of her soy nog, and plopped down on the living room couch. Her first night in the apartment, she’d fastened a flimsy television screen to the wall with blue painter’s tape, and it’d never seemed necessary to formally re-hang it. Despite the room’s heavy curtains, there was always a gap that let in sunshine at dawn, so that the smooth rectangle constantly caught the morning light, leaving little purple crescents in her peripheral vision as she made breakfast.

  Terri carefully perched the mug on the cloth arm of the couch, letting the ice tinkle and melt for a minute. Still wearing her PanOpts, she brought up a control box, then made a circle-point gesture with her index finger to link it to the TV. Opening a separate box, she went online, to a webroom cubby, selecting all six Thin Man movies from the 1930s and 40s, then dinging the Randomizer button.

  The chosen moment came up as a still photo of Nick and Nora Charles in formal attire, seated at a nightclub on a boat, one delightful cowl-head ventilator poking up behind them like a giant musical instrument. One wag of her pinkie started the movie. Nick and Nora were mid-discussion, attending some sort of gala social function with armed cops disguised as ship stewards. The Charleses were a rich couple—a socialite and her never-quite-retired detective husband—but their world was also safe enough that they could leave their young child at home, guarded only by a tiny dog.

  “Now all we have to do is sit quiet and keep our fingers crossed,” Nick said.

  “So many fingers crossed now I can’t lift my drink.” Nora said.

  “Uh-oh.” Nick lifted his own drink and looked off into the crowd. “Some shiny eyes in the jungle.”

  Terri watched across the expanse of a century. Men in tuxedos escorted women in furs. In the distance, a cartoony skyline showed the outlines of apartment buildings and skyscrapers, each lit window a tiny, inviting square of light. It was a nation in love with itself, in love with jazz, and electricity, and the night; a world where the darkness was still inviting and romantic. As some caper unfolded within the story, Nora said, “Nick, if you saw something you knew wasn’t there, what would you do?”

  She loved Nick and Nora. She’d seen one of their films when she was very young, and for years the mysterious memory had stayed with her. When she rediscovered these films as an adult, it was one of the few bits of culture she’d brought to her marriage, and one of their few common joys that still carried over into single life.

  Part of the mystery had involved her first pre-sexual crush. Terri remembered sitting on the couch at her parents’ house, watching one of the films on a flat screen in their old living room, luminous snow outside somehow heightening the enigma of her new stirrings. She’d been captivated by Nora Charles; those almondine eyes, that scrunched nose, the reserved bemusement. As an adult, she’d commanded Nora to strip naked in front of her, but each time it hadn’t seemed quite right, something always inauthentic with the gestures of compliant undressing, the different renderings of a bare body. Nora Charles was sensual in her remoteness. The slinky outline of her true form—meaning the body of Myrna Loy, the actress—was back in the past, remote and inaccessible.

  She loved Nick Charles with equal force, loved his chipper buoyancy, his snappy jackets and effortless alcoholism; tough like Cagney, suave like Astaire. Nick was a detective able to rise above the grit of the world, dispatching the horrors of crime with patrician enunciation. Terri was a fellow detective, even if she was public and he’d been private, and she identified with him, with his entire smooth worldview.

  In the movie, a layer of intrigue played out one level above her comprehension. A jazz band performed on a rotating stage. Men in the audience tapped at cigarette cases. Nick Charles took the floor and made his denouement in front of everyone, elevating the craft of detecting to theater. It fascinated her how much respect police used to command. Even Nick, not police himself, could direct an entire room simply by his air of authority.

  A man was shot to death in front of the crowd. A few women raised hands in shock, but no one seemed that disturbed. In most old crime films, someone was always pulling a gun on someone else with no psychological consequences for either party. Had this been a real thing? Were people simply tougher a hundred years ago? She thought of World War II, a conflict that had required actual fighting. She’d never known anyone who’d fought in her generation’s war.

  She made a fresh drink, steadying herself on the kitchenette counter. Returning to the couch, she remembered to set her Dupe, lest someone call her work phone after hours. Opening a Duplicado Box in the space before her, Terri saw herself smiling. Her Dupe looked like what it was: an oblivious idiot
awaiting commands. The effect was unnerving, like glimpsing a mirror in a dream.

  “Hey, uh, if anyone calls, I’m out of commission until tomorrow at noon.”

  “Okay,” Terri heard herself say.

  “Unless it’s an emergency. So, if it is an emergency, make sure they use that word. ‘Emergency.’”

  “You got it,” the Dupe said. In the lower right corner of the box, a small red letter D hovered in space.

  “And then, if it is an emergency, but only then, set off the emergency call alarm in the speakers.”

  “Will do.”

  What else? “Hey … you’re set to respond in third person, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Good, good.” This conversation was threatening to derail the night’s good cheer. “Because first person Dupes are creepy.”

  “Got it.”

  Mind clouded, Terri struggled to remember anything else she might be forgetting. In the paused silence, she heard her upstairs neighbor tromping across the ceiling, the footsteps headed toward Terri’s bedroom. There was another pause, and then she heard the distinctive sound of urination. For some unfathomable reason, the upstairs bathroom had been built over her bedroom.

  She hit the randomizer again. Although this brought her to an entirely different movie, she’d landed on a very similar scene. Nick Charles had again gathered a motley troupe of suspects, this time in an apartment, sniffing out the one true villain in a crowd of rascals. Irish cops broke up scuffles and intimidated anyone who cracked wise, no one questioning the lack of legal council.

  Terri pinged the TV control box, opening a second box for Soft Content as Nick Charles confronted a young Jimmy Stewart, asking, “But where did you expect to get cash on New Year’s Day?”

  Terri chuckled: the question made no sense. She tapped the Soft Content box and said, “Nick, punch Jimmy Stewart.”

  Nick Charles executed a perfect left jab. Jimmy Stewart stumbled backward, clutching his face.

  “My nose!”

  “With cussing,” Terri said.

  “You … you broke my goddamn nose!”

  “More cussing.”

  Jimmy Stewart straightened up, eyes wide with righteous indignation. “You broke my fucking nose, you fucking ass cock!”

  “That,” Nick Charles said with defiant good cheer, “was for being a piece of shit little rat fuck.”

  This was enjoyable. “Dance party.”

  A burst of big band music sounded and the crowd gyrated in place. Jimmy Stewart dropped both hands to his knees and did the Charleston, blood dribbling from his busted nose.

  “Increase the party.” A cascade of brightly colored balloons and streamers fell from the ceiling. Terri realized she should’ve done this before having her first drink, the creative part of her mind now muddy. If she were industrious and sober, she could recreate the story as she saw fit, using the template of the film as a canvas, reordering this world with nothing more than skill and voice commands. Not that she’d ever been great at remixes. It required a certain perversity. Her ex had excelled at this; a pleasant memory ringed with hostile, jagged edges.

  “Um. Zero gravity.”

  The entire group rose up off the floorboards, still dancing, arms and legs getting tangled up with the party decorations, the entire scene a little too visually chaotic to follow.

  “Okay. Reset to where I started. And pause it.” The players dropped back to the floor and took up their original positions, a theater company awaiting direction. In the TV controls, she brought up a Views box, selecting a position and then clicking Immersive. The real room around her dissolved, and she saw herself standing in a corner of the apartment, inside the world—monochromatic but photorealistic—of Nick and Nora Charles. The scene reminded her of one of those murder-mystery plays where the actors roamed from room to room.

  “Everybody out. Go on.” The characters hurriedly exited through several doors, leaving her alone in the apartment.

  She glanced down at the little R icon in her lower left field of vision, amused with herself for always forgetting to look at the precise moment this changed. Right now the R was a hollow red, indicating altered fictional footage. When she’d started the film, it had shown as a solid red letter. If she’d been watching non-fictional footage—news or otherwise—the R would have come up solid black. If she’d then altered that news story, the R would appear as a hollow letter, outlined in black. This was by far the most important symbol on PanOpt’s desktop, the only guarantee that a given scene was an actual representation of objective events in the physical world, and not some gradation of simulacra below that.

  Terri floated through the rooms of the abandoned apartment. When she’d been a kid, one could “lose” themselves in a film only emotionally. Now it happened literally. Even ten years earlier, it had still been possible to occasionally stump the little red R, to think up a scenario or visual that confounded the boundaries of Soft Content. These days, there was nothing that couldn’t be shown in real time, the networked shades of humanity able to rummage through the collected filmic works of humanity, culling and extrapolating any detail or plot point imaginable.

  A scream came from the street. She didn’t take the bait, instead watching the breeze slowly suck the curtains in and out of the window frame. This was the story asserting itself, wanting to get on with it, to pull her back into a narrative. The Story was still king because of that one universal asymmetry in all viewing experiences: the human addiction to storytelling. Most people just wanted to be steered back to a good tale. Terri was a rarity, content to stand in an empty black-and-white apartment and just listen to all the obsolete traffic noises of a lost era.

  The drink needed freshening, although by now the thought of navigating the refrigerator was clearly too complicated, seeming potentially dangerous. Pulling off the PanOpts, she saw the bottle of Jim Beam resting on the kitchenette counter, and she rose and gleefully toddled over to snatch it with both hands. Then she was back on the couch, in a different movie, making everyone fight, dispatching huge wild boars to tear into whoever happened to have the misfortune of being onscreen, exploding people’s heads, howling and howling with laughter.

  She woke with a snort in the utility alcove, near the bathroom door, huddled on a pile of dirty clothes. The sad laundry unit, the one luxury of the apartment, loomed above her. Seen from eye level, its circular door and two childlike knobs resembled a huge face perpetually shocked to see her back here again. From this angle, the machine appeared ominous and industrial, its thin gray wiring, normally hidden by the molding of the bathroom door, snaking up through the ceiling to the solar array on the roof, as if an old-timey spy had snuck into the place and bugged her.

  Terri rose to a crouch, squinting and groaning from the harsh sunlight of the exposed living room windows, realizing she’d made a nest on the floor with the curtains. She stumbled up, stiff legged, one hand shielding her eyes, finding her PanOpts on the Chinese table, slipping these on with another groan. She called up the Preferences box, found Display, then Variables, then Creations, ordering the system to overlay reality with the appearance of rehung curtains. The living room seemed to magically restore itself. She crossed past the couch, to the small bedroom, not caring if someone zipping by on the freeway got a split-second peek of her in her underwear, feeling the incongruous warmth of sunlight on bare skin where her eyes told her there was none.

  In the fridge, one of the three legs of her anti-hangover trifecta was absent. At her old house, she’d always kept a rasher of bacon for just such emergencies. Now she had only eggs and coffee, and as she turned on the scratched kettle, a wave of nausea passed through her with such intensity that she had to pivot over to the sink and stand with arms locked on the countertop, willing herself to not puke all over the dishes that had sat unwashed for the last week. Her body produced one long, quivering belch, but nothing else. Where were all those barf bags she was always taking from cop cars?

  As the eggs
sizzled, she heard a peep, a blinking telephone icon in the upper-right corner of her vision drawing attention to itself. Terri preferred PanOpt’s bone-conduction audio, but she’d never bothered to figure out how to disable the temple speakers. After her breakfast plate had been arranged, there was another wobbly crossing to the couch, the entire apartment building seemingly riding the crest of an ocean swell, then she was down on the edge of the cushions, propping up her elbow, bringing up the TV on the wall.

  Nick and Nora had just woken up as well. The television showed them paused in their bathrobes, her seated at a small vanity, him standing, posing suave, frozen in a backward glance. Terri restarted the movie, having no idea which film she’d stopped on last night.

  Inside the film, a butler entered their bedroom and stooped to deliver a silver tray of food and newspapers, informing them that they’d slept through the entire day.

  “The morning papers aren’t out yet, madam. These are the evening papers.”

  “That doesn’t seem right, the evening papers with breakfast,” Nora said with a darling poutiness. Terri opened another Soft Content command box while the butler, still stooped, pointed toward the bedroom door, explaining that a policeman just outside wanted to speak with Nick.

  “Ah, show him in. He probably wants to question Mrs. Charles again,” Nick said.

  “Don’t do that,” Terri said.

  “You know what? Don’t show him in. Me and the wifey will just have a nice breakfast,” Nick told the butler, doing a quick double-take. “Excuse me, dinner.”

  “Very good, Mr. Charles,” the butler said, exiting the bedroom still stooped.

  Terri cleared her throat and said, “Nick.”