Lateral Shift Illumination

Lateral Shift Illumination

Christopher Howland. 2002

Incessant rain poured from a thick, overcast sky glowing pale neon from ambient city light, spattering on cheap, polymer cobbles, collecting in gutters and around a bloated cadaver. Uniformed police, draped in cheap ponchos, moved efficiently around the crime scene, arranging partition tape and minding a small gaggle of voyeurs. Brief flashes from spectrometer cameras caused eerie afterglows between feeble streetlights.

An unmarked detective vehicle set down at the end of the side alley, vector thrust delivering conical sprays of gutter water. Rivulets of rain running off slick, gun blue contours. From raised doors two men stepped onto the road, dark coats draped almost to ankles, fedora hats pressed firmly over their brows. For a moment they paused, as though to smell the ambiance.

‘Lieutenant, Sir, they’re here,’ someone called as they approached the partition, voice muted in the steady patter of rain.
‘Let ‘em in,’ came the reply. A nervous, junior cop, dark blue uniform soaked without a poncho, showed them to the lieutenant, and the body.
‘James,’ said the lieutenant, gesturing with a cigarette cupped in his hand.
‘Detectives Merchant and Lauder,’ said Merchant. “Temporal unit.” Lauder looked past the lieutenant, at the side street walls, poor lighting, uneven cobbles, then finally at the body.
‘How long?’ he asked.
‘Forensic med said about three hours,’ replied James. ‘Don’t worry, it hasn’t been tampered with.’ A note of caginess underlay his words.
‘I’m not worried about that.’

‘What have you got so far?’ Merchant asked.
‘Middle aged male, say fortyish. Two large calibre gun shot wounds to the belly. Done real close, powder burns. No exit wounds though.’ James stood back, smoking, as Lauder crouched beside the corpse. ‘If that matters with your… technique.’ Scepticism, of course.
‘It matters.’ Lauder said quietly.
‘A hold out gun, maybe,’ Merchant mused, ‘lady’s handbag pistol… Doesn’t look professional.’
‘Guy’s a fucking thug,’ James muttered with disdain, ‘could have been anything.’ Lauder looked further down the alley.
‘He stumbled before he fell. Several feet.’ Blood had poured, thick and dark, over his pants, mixing in gutter water, staining his shoes.
‘What do you think?’ Merchant asked. Lauder stood, walked a few careful steps deeper into the alley.
‘Set back to three point two five. Scan forward.’

Lifting his hat, sufficiently to reveal his shaven scalp, Lauder toggled sub-dermal switches within his temple.
‘Lieutenant, move your people out of here.’ He raised his voice just enough to be heard. With his internal chronometer set for three and one quarter hours past, he braced his feet and looked back.

Scanners, linked to his optic nerve, meshed with image sifters and processors, wet wired to his occipital lobe. Green haze, back-lit like low-resolution infrared, washed across the dark hues of normal vision. Hard points; walls, the road, lamplights glowing sickly in the altered hue, remained, as they were in that place three hours past. Turning slowly, scanning, detached almost, but somehow immersed, he saw the space where the corpse would lie. Nothing yet, so they were soon enough.

Someone moved at the end of the alley, someone who was not there three hours ago; an overlap, an imperfection in the technology. Not surprising. The techniques of Lateral Shift Illumination were in their infancy, the processes not yet fully understood. Scanning the past, ‘seeing,’ was a gift, a talent as it were, more so than a discipline. Persons able to interact with the fickle technologies were rare. Still, the image was strong. Three hours fresh. This time the next night it would have faded, the illumination dulled. A few more nights viewed more like twilight. After a week, nothing; just a memory held by anyone who may have witnessed.

Soon enough, the victim walked into the alley, hands in coat pockets, nonchalant, ignorant of where he would end the night. For a while he loitered, seen in mottled black and green, smoking in the partial shelter of one doorway, then another, unable to fully escape the rain. He seemed impatient, a scowl set in the wet sheen of his soft face. Heavy black stubble.

For a few seconds the image buzzed with static, freezing one moment, rushing to resynchronise the next. Not an uncommon fault. Unrefined technology, like early radiation research… but apparently good enough to install in his skull.

She seemed to step out of a doorway, or perhaps just a shadow, obscured in the momentary haze. Nervous, somehow small in her sharp suit that was completely inappropriate for the rain. Lauder fixed on her, his breath shallow. She walked right up to him, a handbag grasped in both hands at her waist, held between them. Her eyes, somehow familiar, seemed afraid, imploring… a look of recognition. He looked down, seeing her hands again, and now she held a compact black carbon pistol, at her waist, beside the bag. Both gripped in fingers gone white. Her lips moved…

Again the static, a slip in time, in replay. When it cleared, the gun fired. A brief flash of muzzle flare. Sideways mushroom cloud of escaping gas, heat and chemical residue. Quick shimmer of brass shell casing spat to one side. And the projectile; an ounce of carbon, weighted like a cestus, plunging fist deep into his belly.

A second shot and he looked down at his midriff, overlayed now by the broader girth of the victim, the recent cadaver, lying somewhere behind him in the flooded gutter. Blood splattered, thick and rich, washing over foreign, tobacco yellowed fingers, and reeled away. Lauder turned to see the man walk out of him, away from him, until he fell, writhed, then rested. Overlaid perfectly with the ghost image of present decay.

She was gone, having fled in the moment of distraction. Lauder scanned the alley, for a trace or fleeting glance. But she had taken herself and her haunted stare away, leaving only the encrypted file in his cranial processor.
‘End scan.’ He pressed two fingers into the augmented flesh of his temple and watched the illusion subsume.

‘That was a rough scan,’ said Merchant.
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you get a clean view of her?’ Nothing, for a moment. ‘Lauder?’
‘She… looked at me,’ he said.
‘Yeah. Fucking shot you too,’ said Merchant. ‘Good location.’ Lauder ran his fingers over the flesh of his torso; flatter, harder than the punctured flesh. But the gunshots didn’t bother him.
‘Are you done here?’ James asked, projecting his voice from the scene perimeter. ‘Can we get back to work,’ he might have said. ‘The real work.’
‘Yeah,’ said Merchant. ‘We’re done.’

At the station, in the awkward office space, annexed from the main department, they inserted high yield transfer cables into sub-dermal sockets. Output jacks were lodged in reinforced skull hard points. Their mates were set in computer interface processors; strange technology housed in dull steel boxes, resting on scuffed furniture. The image, as data encoded through a neural interface, took time to re-sequence into the computers. Dead time waiting for a low-resolution image, in green and black.
‘Yeah. There she is.’ Merchant muttered, as the first hard copy slid clean from their printer, a glossy sheen on crisp paper. At a distance, standing close, through the haze of gun smoke. None of the images seemed to hold her gaze. Not the way he remembered it.

Hours later, in the small apartment that would be home if he spent enough time there, he stared at the printouts. A microwave package meal, half eaten, lay on the floor by his couch. He toyed with a glass of bourbon, mixed with half melted ice. Closing his eyes, he meditated in his own way, going through the mental exercise of recalling the images, trying to reconcile the hard copy to what he remembered. His temples ached, a dull throb focused around the hardware, as they sometimes did after punching through so many gigabytes.

The whole scan seemed compromised, something pressing a wrong slant into playback. The interference, perhaps. No one knew exactly what caused interruption. Still, he should have been able to work through, or around it. His capacity for… clarity, that was his gift. To see at the right moment, from the right angle, to somehow escape, or intuitively filter out static.

He opened his eyes to brown wallpapered walls, congealed food in plastic containers, soft light from shaded lamps seeming less warm than sickly. There were no answers here. No answers in the bourbon, or melancholy of brain fatigue. He grabbed a cell phone and called Merchant.

The bar they frequented was not a great leap in décor; brown wood panelling around small booths, thick, yellow glass around retro chandeliers that were never really fashionable. Even the vinyl cushioned bench seats reminded him of his couch. But the bar was alive, in its own muted way. Merchant sat across from him, placing two bright amber drinks on the table.
‘Any thoughts?’ Merchant asked.
‘Not really. Maybe… what are the odds of standing in exactly the same place?’ said Lauder.
‘Not good, but it happens.’ To have stood where the victim stood, a witness occupying the same space as victim in shadowy recall.
‘It happens…’ Not to him, despite his clarity. ‘It seemed like she was looking at me, not the victim.’
‘Yeah, you get that sense. Maybe she figured she’d get caught, by one of us. Usually at least one of us stands near where the victim stood.’ A good angle there. A clear view of the kill. And determining the kill point usually wasn’t difficult.
‘No. It was something else.’ Something between the static. Something in the stare, recalled but not processed; too subtle for the machines.
‘You ever had someone try to convey something, you know, like they want you to somehow…’
‘It’s not voice mail, Lauder.’
‘Yeah, well… I got the impression she was doing it for a reason. Gotta wonder what the J-D had done… Maybe we’re just adding to it.’
‘Look, forget it,’ Merchant said, ‘keep to the case.’ He dumped his leather satchel on the table, city street moisture still evaporating, and pulled out a file.

Forensics had produced a transcript of 578 names and civilian ID photos, each close in age and basic features to the green and black print out. Computer matched. Not bad, they thought, for a city of twenty eight million. The task then became a subjective process, matching bland, white background portraits to memories. They each took felt tip pens and foolscap printouts, six photos to a page. Merchant muttered while he worked,
‘No. No. No,’ crossing through each false match in red.

They were down to forty-five maybes sometime around three in the morning. Merchant confessed a lack of focus; curiosity out weighed by fatigue, and hailed a taxi home. Lauder waited a while. Home lacked appeal sufficient to motivate. Nothing to do at home but sleep, or wait for the next day, and he rarely needed sleep. None the less, once back in the apartment he shut out the gritty, muted light for a while, and he dreamed.

She came to him again, unbidden recollection. Static filtered out now into crisp, smooth green and black. The scene played out; her white knuckled grip, the gun, and her gaze. Her gaze, the look she had delivered him, into him, unrealised by the machines, but so vivid in memory. The look of recognition, imploring, held this time, devoid of static, and the carbon black gun levelled at his stomach.

Awake. Why did she seem so familiar? Recollection lay at the edge of consciousness. He’d seen her before, seen her at a crime scene, on the other side of the tape, and another scene before that. Lost in the inevitable crowd of gaping witnesses and voyeurs, but looking elsewhere; not at the bodies and blood, looking at him. The eyes, the familiar eyes. She had been following him. She knew his district, knew him. Fumbling, discarding the lingering dregs of sleep, he grabbed a coat and stumbled to the door.

Nearly a full day since the kill and the crime scene was now cleared. The tape remained; a hollow reminder of some misconduct, now concealed from common consciousness. He stepped past, seeing the alley like the ghost of some childhood place. He found where he’d stood before, where the dead man had stood, and resumed his place. Fingers pressing into temples, he scanned back.

Thus it all washed over him again, faded now, but the same mottled green and black. The same static, its intensity dulled. The gun, the kill, and the same eyes staring into him. This time he understood. It was more, more than recognition. It was contact.

He shut off the scan. She stood before him, the pistol gripped in both hands, fingers white, gripping stock and trigger, her eyes bright with fear and excitement. Slowly, she lowered the gun. For a moment he thought she spoke…
‘Seeing the past is the beginning… to those of us who must see the future.’ But it was actually a memory; recollection of something she would say to him some later day, in another part of the world, away from the killings, the police, on the day he began to see.