Crowe and Coyote

Crowe and Coyote VIII

Before anybody says anything--yes, their names are Hardship and Hurtwin. Don't judge me, I can't help myself.

Love,

EFR

*****

Sunrise PDHQ was one of the tallest buildings in the Clearbrook district of Sunrise City, and that was saying quite a lot. It extended nearly two miles upwards, through the Upper Levels and the soup-thick cloud cover directly above them, into a realm of sky and sunshine and vibrant cerulean undreamt of by the general populace for hundreds of years. Officers who worked in the highest stories were told, in the congenial way of Surise PD, that telling their friends and families about this view was more than their jobs were worth.

It was then mentioned, again in friendly tones, that the dirt-showers seen occasionally in the lower levels were not always, as widely believed, runoff from the Upper Level fields of Soyful Noise. Some of them were, in fact, the minced ashes of PD officers who had not taken this suggestion too much to heart. Some of them were the minced ashes of families who had been told the truth, and who were--always regretfully--afterward somewhat counterproductive to the mental health of Sunrise City.

Needless to say, nobody talked.

Officer 84, known to his friends and family as Cyrus Hurtwin, was the surveillance officer assigned to the Moll Greer case. More accurately, he was the surveillance officer in charge of the home cameras and the cameras up to a block around the home. He was slightly higher in rank than the bar surveillance guy, the surveillance guys assigned to Bobbit and Elaine, and the surveillance guy (part time) who kept cameras on the public transit bullets. He was not as highly ranked as Gerold Hardship, Officer 32, who masqueraded as the woman's parole officer and took care of percomm visuals. Hurtwin was not certain what Hardship's actual rank was, but it was high, high--high enough that he had no doubt Hardship was not the man's actual name.

In total, some 4,856 microcameras, 12,523 audibits, and six salaries had been expended on Moll Greer, as well as 3.7 million credits spent on compulsory erasure proceedures. She was, Hurtwin thought wryly, the most expensive gov-funded drunk in Sunrise.

And she was boring.

Not that Hurtwin trusted her to stay that way. Hell, he'd taken Criminal Justice 203, When Erasure Victims Snap, with the rest of the Academy. He knew it could be less than pretty.

He had once known what she had done. He had been given the option to have this information scrubbed and had taken it, and all that he knew now was that it had been bad, bad, bad, and that this drunken heap of a woman had once topped the Most Wanted lists for Sunrise, Moonrise, and even distant Starfall, farthest west of the USU megacities. He assumed it had been bad, if he had been given the voluntary erasure option. He assumed it had been downright sickening.

Today, Hurtwin was releasing another batch of microcameras out into the Lower Levels. He could control them via percomm, and was planning on sending them into the bathroom, which had somewhat minimal coverage. He was a little nervous; they were all a little nervous. Tomorrow was a Blackout Day.

Hurtwin cursed the spirit of goodwill and love of freedom that guided the USU gov, and had, some twenty years in the past, inspired it to make a law stating that citizens could not, even if they were Erased felons, be continuously surveilled. The law had been a cause of rejoicing when it was made--citizens still pointed to it frequently as a marker of how friendly USU gov was, how in touch with its people.

The law was obeyed to the letter, of course. All USU govlaw was obeyed to the letter.

The letter, however, did not stipulate precisely how long surveillance blackout periods had to be, or when they happened. In a case like Moll's, where microcam coverage numbered in the high thousands, it made very little difference at all. Hurtwin had worked out a system, after a while--shut off the cams in one room for an hour, preferably a room the subject was not in. Switch to the next room for an hour. Continue until all the cameras had been off for at least an hour apiece. Only when a felon's lot was drawn in the Liberty Lottery--once a month, and never the same felon twice in a row--did complete blackout ever actually occur. Even then, PD tried to have physical watchers in place--nowhere in the law, after all, did it say you couldn't stand around someone's front door.