+J.M.J.+
The Eyes Have It
By "Matrix Refugee"
Author's Note:
Hoo! This one wants to steam roller its way to the end when before, I could barely get started with it. The two universes seem to be dovetailing excellently; I'm pleased to say; and, as Lady Neferankh hoped, there's more of Agatha in this: She winds up having as pivotal a role here as she did in the film, which is a vast improvement on the Philip K. Dick novella Minority Report was based on, where the Pre-Cogs are little better than part of the computer. Steve put a human face on them. Also…An "A.I." character I NEVER wanted to write about appears in this chapter. Read it and find out…
Disclaimer:
See the Prologue.
Chapter III: Eyes on the Shadow
"Lara, we have a guest coming today," Anderton told his wife next morning as they got dressed.
"A guest?" she asked, pulling he jersey over her head. "Who?"
It's Agatha Lively…the girl who used to be a Pre-Cog," he said. He wasn;t sure why, but he felt oddly guilty breaking this news to her.
"I thought she was in seclusion," Lara asked, confused, slipping one arm into the sleeve of her shirt.
"She is…but she needs to speak to me about something important. She wouldn't even tell me what it was, over the phone," he explained. "She didn't feel secure enough."
Lara nodded. "Well, that's understood, after the way they had her thoughts wire-tapped in Pre-Crime. When is she coming?"
"She's coming into Camden on a 5 p.m. flight from Kilarney. I'll pick her up; I got her a hotel room."
"There's the spare room. She can have that."
"No, I wouldn't want you to go to that trouble."
"John, she's better off with us."
"She's having visions again," he warned.
"I think I can handle it, and that's all the more reason she should be with people she knows and trusts."
"They're pretty bad: they kept her on natural sedatives, herbs and stuff to keep her calm,"
"Do you know what kind of herbs? I could get them at the drugstore."
"Chamomile was one. I'm not sure about the others."
"I'll ask her when she comes, or I could ask the pharmacist what herbs work that way."
First thing that morning, Anderton and Fletcher went to the medical examiner's office to get the final report on Ms. Bevins.
"If there's one thing I HATE about working homicide, it's going to the morgue," Fletcher grumbled as they went in.
"This is the easy part: stiffs can't hurt you," Anderton replied with a thin smile. "Making the arrest, that bugs me: that's the dangerous part."
Samantha Bevins's body lay on its back on a steel table, covered from the neck down with a sheet. The gash on her neck looked less ghastly now that the blood had been washed from it.
"What about time of death?" Anderton asked Ms. Hanford, the ME, who stood by the foot of the table.
"I placed it at around six thirty and six forty-five," she replied. "Oh, and the killer was left handed."
Fletcher stared at her "How can you tell that?"
"The track of the knife: the initial cut is on the left side of her neck, where a left-handed man would have started," Ms Hanford said. "That cut wasn't fatal. She has three stab wounds, two to the chest transfixing the heart, one in the abdomen. She was lying on her back as she hemorrhaged internally."
"How'd you find that out?" Fletcher asked.
"Bruising on her back: the blood collected in her torso."
"Did you find any DNA under her nails?" Anderton asked.
"No, the nails were cleaned. Found a couple soap particles, but that wasn't enough to say someone had washed her hands. Oh, and she was raped." Fletcher winced at this announcement.
"Semen traces in the vagina?" Anderton asked.
"No, bruising of the lining," the ME replied.
"So it must have been the Mecha," Fletcher said.
"Could have been a human wearing a condom, but most rapists are unlikely to do that," the ME said.
"Or it could have been a human who did that to make it look like a Mecha raped and-or killed her," Anderton suggested.
"You sound like you don't think the Mecha did it," Fletcher said as he and Anderton drove back to the station. "You got something about Mechas?"
"No, it's just that a lot of stuff isn't adding up," Anderton replied. "Besides, it's innocent until proven guilty. And Mechas have it worse when they're falsely accused."
"Yeah, but it's just a Mecha."
"When you've been falsely accused, the way I was, Fletch, you don't want to see anyone falsely accused."
Fletcher was silent for a long while. Then he spoke. "I bet you wish you had that Pre-Cog girl around to help you on this."
Anderton didn't reply. He couldn't tell Fletcher about the guest he had coming that day.
"Is that you being your usual strong, silent self, or are you thinking what I think you're thinking?" Fletcher asked
"The jury is out on that one," Anderton admitted.
Another missing Mecha report had come in, but this one was different: Cybertronics of New Jersey, in the north end of town was reporting that one of its prototypes for a new line of child Mecha had been lost in a forest by one of their field testers.
"I didn't think they made kids," Stuyvesant grumbled. "Real ones are hard enough to deal with, why make fake ones?"
"Think there's much chance at finding the strays?" Fletcher asked Anderton over lunch.
"Not with the Flesh Fair over in Barn Creek," Anderton said, glancing up from the maintenance and performance file on the lover-Mecha.
"'S pose we could put the bite on the Johnson? Make 'um keep an eye out for two Mechas, an eleven year old kid with light brown hair and a twenty-something year old guy with blonde hair?"
"Black hair," Anderton corrected.
"I thought Bevins said it was blonde."
"Default color on this guy, this Belladerma J-01229 is black," Anderton said. "It's got SmartDermis: it can change its hair color, eye color, even skin color."
"Bet you wished you had that when you were in D.C. trying to dodge You Know What."
"That wouldn't have mattered: I'd still have to change pattern of the backs of my retinas," Anderton said, turning back to the file. The backs of his eyes ached a little at the memory.
Date of last inspection: May 7, 2058.
Malfunctions, Processor: None
Malfunctions, Neural system: None
Malfunctions, Mechanical: None
Anderton shook his head, read over the document again. He clicked to another page.
"Something up?" Fletcher asked around a mouthful of soy pastrami.
"No, nothing's up, that's what's the problem," Anderton replied.
"Huh?"
"Our boy doesn't have any recent problems: no bugs, viruses, glitches, system hiccups. Nothing. He's as clean as a whistle." He didn't say it, but he found that the Mecha was ambidextrous, but predominantly right-handed.
"Wasn't there a Mecha of the same line that strangled a bunch of people in a casino in Nova Vegas?"
"Yeah, but that was three years ago. That particular unit had a faulty chip, which had been removed from our boy following a recall on that particular chip," Anderton said, closing the file and removing the disk from the data pad.
"So you're saying our boy didn't have any malfunctions, so he could have done this willfully?"
"Not willfully: his volition parameters are limited. He doesn't have it in him to assault anyone, much less a woman, much less rape a woman, slash her throat and stab her three times. And his last maintenance was only a week ago."
"So that rules out the Mecha."
"It just makes it more unlikely," Anderton said, turning to the desktop computer. He ran a 'Net search on the ARM and "7 to 1", another anti-Mecha group.
He ran a search in the documents on the ARM homepage, searching the back issues of the Fleshly Clarion, looking for the name Frazer Bevins.
"Oh…my…god," he muttered, scrolling down the list of articles and external links to other documents by the same writer.
"What?" Fletcher asked.
"I got a feeling we're gonna be interviewing Frazer Bevins again very soon."
"Why?"
Anderton turned the flat screen around to face Fletcher. The younger man stared at the screen; the remains of his sandwich nearly fell from his slack hand.
"Yikes! What's Bevins doing, running a one-man anti-Mecha propaganda machine?"
"It looks that way."
"So what are you thinking?"
"Based on the evidence we've gathered, it looks to me that Bevins may have hired someone to kill Samantha and make our boy look like the killer, just to prove his point that Mecha are dangerous."
"But sacrifice his own daughter?"
"People with a fanaticism as strong as this will do anything to prove their point. Add to this that his own daughter was defying him…he might stoop to anything."
A man will kill a young woman in a hotel room 102 and he will confront a young man as if to accuse him…
"You okay, Anderton?" Fletcher asked. "Your face just went a little pale."
"I'm all right," Anderton replied. He closed the 'Net browser and logged onto the criminal records database, running a search on Frazer Bevins.
"More threads just got pulled from Bevins's cover," he said.
"Why, he got a record?" Fletcher asked.
"Destruction of sentient property, sabotaging sentient property…disorderly conduct at a roboticists' convention."
"So there's more to this goon than just a bereaved father."
"We'll have to find that Mecha and scan it's cube first," Anderton said.
"But first you gotta find it," Stuyvesant said, coming by their desks. "Don't tell me you're planning on fishing it out of the Flesh Fair."
"We have to cover all bases," Anderton said.
"Well, don't forget, you ast me if you could leave early today, since your wife's sister coming in on that flight into Camden," Stuyvesant growled, rubbing it in.
"Guess if we're gonna pay Johnson a call, we better do it now," Fletcher said, as Anderton got up and reached for his jacket.
"You ever been to one, a Flesh Fair, I mean?" Fletcher asked, as they drove down Route 28, heading southeast toward Barn Creek.
"No, can't say that I want to, either," Anderton admitted.
"You didn't miss anything…I went to one once just 'cause my cousins in Trenton were going to one when I stayed with them one summer," Fletcher said, shuddering. "It's bad enough, seeing things that look human on the outside getting burnt with acid and shot through flaming hoops into a fan, but then they got this one guy onto this bag toss thing with a bucket of acid over his head. I didn't throw anything; I was just there for the ride. Glad I didn't. The acid fell and hit the guy and we all found out what he really was." Fletcher looked away to the window on his right. Anderton snuck a look at him. The younger man's face was almost as green as the foliage of the trees around them. "He was Orga. A flesh and blood guy. Must have been drunk or drugged or something: he didn't put up a fight or anything when the goons chained him up. But when the acid hit him…ugh! He started writhing and screaming. It looked like something out of a damned horror movie."
"That's sick. That should have shut the bloody operation down," Anderton said.
"No such luck: Johnson's got plenty of friends. His cousin is the Irish ambassador or something, plus he's got connections to the Irish mob out in what's left of Hoboken. His late wife was the daughter of some mob boss, I think."
"Figures. The crooks always take care of each other."
They followed a series of day-glo signs advertising the Flesh Fair to the Barn Creek Fairgrounds, current home of the "Celebration of Life."
Security grudgingly let them into the enclosure. Anderton and Fletcher roved the grounds. Anderton took careful note of the pen, the iron cage at the head of the arena, where the captive Mechas were held until their moment in the spotlight. There were no Mechas in it that early, but looked as if it could hold several dozen.
He spotted a girl behind it, a blowsy red-head with splotches of scarlet and orange in her hair, clad in frayed denim cut-offs and a sleeveless blouse with the front knotted, smoking a cigarette.
"Excuse me, miss, could you tell us where we can find Kevin Lord Johnson-Johnson?" Anderton asked.
The girl looked up at them. She stuffed her cigarettes into her shorts.
"You coppers?" she asked.
"Yes. We're just here to ask him a few questions," Anderton asked.
"We won't bitecha," Fletcher promised.
She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb, to a knot of trailers beyond the cage. "The biggest trailer," she said.
"Thanks," Anderton said.
They reached the largest trailer, climbed the shaky wooden steps to it and rapped on the door.
"Who's thar?" asked a guttural voice behind the door.
"Haddonfield police, we just need you to answer a few questions," Anderton said. "Is Kevin Lord Johnson-Johnson in there?"
The door opened and a bulky man in his early fifties emerged, clad in a dingy collarless button-down shirt over frayed corduroy pants. He looked at them with small, piggish gray eyes set in a meaty but pallid face. "Oi'm he," he said gruffly and stepped aside, letting them enter.
The interior was a smoky snarl of rickety furniture, overflowing wastebaskets, and papers. A meticulously dressed little man with a rat-like olive-skinned face looked up from what appeared to be account ledgers spread out on the table.
"Phillip, we'll finish the accouynthing layther," Johnson told him. Rat face bundled the ledgers together and stepped outside.
Johnson turned back to Anderton. "Now, what may Oi ask, can Oi do far you genthlemen?"
"There's been a strange murder in the area a few days ago, and it seems to involve a male lover-Mecha. It isn't a suspect, but we want it for questioning." Anderton took a photo of Joe from his breast pocket and handed it to Johnson. "We wondered if, should you come across a Mecha matching this photo, could you set it aside and turn it over to us?"
"We arren't in the hahbit o' settin' Mechs asoide fahr annything less th'n especial playce in th' show," Johnson said. "If you've seen wun Mech, you've seen 'em awl. And if this wun is what you saye it is, perhahps ware doin' you a fayvur boy puttin' 'um whar it b'lawngs: in the scrahp heap."
"Hey, you don't know who you're talking to," Fletcher snapped. He jabbed a thumb at Anderton. "Anderton here took down Pre-Crime single-handed
Anderton ignored Fletcher's faux pas for the moment. Looking out the window for a moment, he noticed a man approaching the trailer; even at that distance, and even through the grimy window, the stranger looked an awful lot like Frazer Bevins.
"If nothing else, perhaps you could speed up your naturalization process by helping protect the society you adopted," Anderton said.
Johnson chuckled humorlessly. "Oi b'lieve Oi'm ahlready doin' moy pahrrt in moy own waye." He looked to the door. "And if you will exchuse me, perhahps you lads should take yer questions elsewhahr
"You wouldn't happen to know a Frazer Bevins, would you?" Anderton asked even as he started toward the door, Fletcher at his heels.
"Oi'm awhar awv 'm, but no, naht parsonally," Johnson replied, impatient.
"Thanks," Anderton said.
They went out. Anderton scanned the crowd of crewmembers and techs preparing the arena for the next show. He sought out Bevins, but he didn't spot him anywhere.
Then he spotted Bevins's stocky form heading straight for Johnson's trailer, as the accountant returned. So much for not knowing Bevins personally…
Back in the car, Anderton turned to Fletcher. "Whatever you do, never but never ever mention anything I've done in the past," he warned. "Especially to crooks like Johnson."
"I was just trying to give you a little leverage," Fletcher fumbled.
"You did it the wrong way," Anderton said. "Pre-Crime is almost a bad word, and it should be. No one should be prosecuted for what they might do, but for what they did. People can change their minds at the last second."
Anderton pulled the car over, pulled out his wallet, and took out twenty Newbucks. "Here," he handed it to Fletcher. "This is a retainer fee; if you need more, I'll pay you back."
"Retainer for what?"
"I want you to go to the Flesh Fair tonight. Get a seat as close to the pen as you can. If you see anything that looks even remotely like our boy, you call me. Got it?"
"I got it."
The car phone rang at that moment. Anderton punched the switch for it.
"Anderton, you and Fletcher get down here to the station: we've got some new evidence," Stuyvesant said.
"We're on the way," Anderton said.
When they came into the station, Stuyvesant held up a clear plastic evidence bag under Anderton's nose. Inside the bag was a thin plastic-looking fiber with a bit of green plastic attached to one end.
"We picked this up in an alleyway a block from the Shangri-La," Stuyvesant said. "The fiber is a microconductor typical of what you find in Mechas and the plastic is the kind they use for Mecha license implants. So our guess is that Mecha-boy removed his tag. And tell me, just why would he do that?"
"We don't know if he removed it. We don't even know if he removed it," Anderton said.
"Yeah, I suppose the same person you seem to think murdered Samantha Bevins also removed the suspect's license tag," Stuyvesant snapped. "Just because you worked Pre-Crime doesn't make you Sherlock Holmes." With that Stuyvesant stomped to his office.
Anderton calmed himself by drawing in a long breath and letting it out. "On that note, I'd better get going if I'm gonna make it to Camden," he said.
"Are you all right?" Lara asked her husband as they drove to Camden, she driving, he trying to relax beside her in the front seat, watching the tunnels of green broken only by small shops and driveways, so alien compared to the urban jungle of D.C.
"The Bevins case is harder than it seemed, and Stuyvesant is really riding my rear about it," he admitted.
"He's jealous: he knows he's not half as good as you are," she said.
"He's good in his own way: that's why he's a supervisor," he said.
He'd been concerned that Lara would be annoyed by the suddenness of the news that Agatha would be staying with them for a few days, but it didn't faze her. Agatha was the sort who wouldn't notice if the house was a little untidy. In the brief time the young girl had spent hiding out with them in the cottage Lara's parents had left to her, Agatha had actually found the light clutter interesting.
They found her in the concourse of a smaller terminal off the main terminal. They almost missed her, but Anderton spotted her: a middle-sized girl in a plain, cream-colored blouse over a long black skirt, a small carry-on back next to her, reading a book—an actual bound volume—of what turned out to be a one-volume condensation of James Frazer's The Golden Bough. She looked up at them even before they came close, her blue eyes calm but distant, their gaze a little fixed, the way they had always been.
"Agatha, how have you been?" Lara said, holding out an arm to hug the girl. Agatha eyed her a little quizzically at first, but she reached out and returned the hug.
"Lara, it's you…I have been better," she said. She looked around, a little furtive. "I cannot tell you here."
"Hello, Agatha," Anderton said, offering his hand. Agatha eyed him then clasped it.
"Hello, Anderton," she said. She'd never been much for social skills, but neither was he.
All the way back to the car and on the way home, Agatha listened as Lara and he filled her in on what had happened to them in the last four years. Anderton knew she wouldn't let much out until they got back to the house, and Lara knew better than to press Agatha about anything.
Almost home, they picked Agnes up from Krista's house. Agatha's eyes brightened when she saw the little one.
"Agnes, this is Agatha, a friend of ours from Ireland, the lady I told you about this morning," Anderton told his daughter as he strapped her into her booster seat in the back seat, beside Agatha.
Agnes looked up at her, smiling. "Hi, Agatha," she said.
"Hello, Agnes," Agatha replied, with a shy smile. Agnes's smile got bigger and she reached up to touch Agatha's face. Agatha looked up at Anderton, a nervous light in her eyes.
"She likes you," Anderton explained.
"You have pretty eyes," Agnes said.
"Thank you," Agatha replied, the nervousness leaving her face.
Lara helped Agatha settle into the guest room, then left the newcomer to adjust to her new surroundings while she (Lara) went to start supper.
"I'd almost forgotten how odd she is," Anderton said, as Agnes curled up with one of her picture books under the table.
"She's unique," Lara said. "It's her gifts that make her seem odd…but she does have her quirks."
"I think she's nice," Agnes piped up. "She's strange, but she's nice."
Anderton smiled, peering under the table at his girl. "Yes, she's a nice person."
At that moment, Agatha appeared in the doorway, peering at them. "May I watch?" she asked.
"Of course," Lara said.
Agatha was accustomed to a strict vegetarian diet from her days in Pre-Crime and even before that, in the state facility she had been raised in. Lara had found some recipes to accommodate this. After dinner, as Lara started the dishes, Agatha "got down to business".
"I told you that my visions have come back," Agatha told Anderton as they sat in the living room, facing each other across the coffee table. "But I could not say much. The information could reach the wrong ears."
"You're perfectly safe here," Anderton said. "Tell me what you saw."
"It is all in fragments…a hotel room, number 102…there is some ugly-colored furniture, unpleasant colors…there are lights outside the windows, colored lights shaped like words…neon signs…a girl is in the room, on the bed…a man comes in, an older man…they start to fight, words, shouting…he pushes her down on the bed, sitting on her…he hits her across the neck, she bleeds…he cuts her chest…he washes his hands after she is dead…another man comes in, light hair, light eyes, a gentle face…the older man approaches him, as if to accuse her…then he kisses the girl and goes out. But there is more…
She paused a long time. "I cannot remember. I am sorry."
"It's all right, give it time. I'll find a way to help you," he said. "What did the first man look like?"
She shook her head. "Ugly, older than you, thinning hair, yellow eyes."
Frazer Bevins, he realized.
"Agatha, I'll have to ask you for your permission to download your vision…I think you may have seen a case I'm investigating right now. Can you tell me about the young man? Do you know where he is?"
She dropped her gaze, her eyes unblinking in a way that made him think oddly of a Mecha.
"He is all alone, he is in a forest. Then there are others, other people, but they are not like other people. They are all of metal and plastic…like he is," she said at length. "He has a gash in his chest, a tag has been removed. He removed it." she stopped, looking up, concern, even worry in her eyes.
"It's all right," he said, reassuring her. He leaned across and put his hand on her shoulder in a brotherly way. "My boss won't like it, but I think you can help us."
To be continued…
Literary Easter Eggs:
"I bet you wish you had that Pre-Cog girl…"—I was listening to the soundtrack CD of Minority Report (of course!) as I drafted this, in particular, the cut entitled "Greenhouse Effect". Towards the very end of the cut, Agatha's somewhat eerie motif, scored for solo female voice and Uileann bagpipes, appears, slightly understated. It was at this exact moment that I wrote this scene, and I was having a hard time giving an extra little clincher before I moved on to the next scene…but the soundtrack helped me cap it off.
Joe's serial number—"1229" is Jude Law's birth date.