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.
The law was obeyed to the letter. Technically, it always was.
The subject, Moll Greer, was currently bending over the toilet--probably vomiting, something she did frequently. He only had about thirty microcams in the bathroom--hence the pouch of them, dustlike, in his hand, waiting to be released out the window--and the tiny things had a very limited visual field and range.
For the hell of it, he brought them up on the large screen that made up the facing wall of his office. The dull grey leapt into life with thousands of tiny images, most of them motionless in the stillness of the house. He focused on the bathroom images, brought them up with a desultory flick of his hand.
It was dark in there--was the woman too drunk to turn on a fucking light?--but he could see the dim outline of her, red hair like the flame on top of a candle, bending over the john. The image was mute--but then again, it was 14:00, and that was the hour audibits were down in the bathroom and kitchen.
All as it should be. He saw the bottle, empty, sitting on the edge of the sink beside her. He gave her about four more minutes of vomiting, then she would accidentally knock the bottle over. He watched her hand wave, saw the toilet flush. She remained crouched, probably waiting for the second wave to hit.
"Hello, Cyrus," said a voice behind him. "How's it going?"
Cyrus stiffened, recognizing the voice. "SIR," he said, saluting. He accessed the images through percomm, made to take them down--
"No, no," said Officer Hardship. "You're doing your job. I just wanted to pop in for a minute."
"Sir," Hurtwin said, slightly less formally.
"Just wanted to let you know, Greer's turn has come up for Full Blackout. 13:15 tomorrow evening. Shouldn't be for very long, just an hour or so. But her lot came up, so we have to do it."
"Shit," Hurtwin muttered.
"No swearing in PDHQ, officer," Hardship reminded him gently. "But off the books, yes. Very much shit."
"And there's nothing we can do to, you know. Circumvent--"
"There's a command code that can, yes. But honestly, the woman's done nothing but drink for a decade. Pulling that code involves annoying top brass, and I'd rather not do it if I don't have to. More'n my job's worth. Let it ride, it'll be fine."
"Probably," said Hurtwin darkly.
"Hurtwin," Harship said. "The woman's been erased. Fully erased. What's the worst that could possibly happen? Not that I don't appreciate your dedication to duty, but Christus, man. Take the hour, futz around. Watch some football. Call your wife. You have one of those, don't you?"
"Yes, sir," Hurtwin muttered. He hadn't left the office for a day and a half.
"Then go out. Take a lunch date. The rest of us are still here. It'll be fine." Hardship sighed, scrubbed a hand over his buzzed head. "I've been doing this a long time, Hurtwin. The woman's not going to go anywhere. Where could she go?"
It was a reassuring thought, for Hurtwin. Hardship was right--fully erased, drunk most of the day, what the hell could she do? It was the purpose of erasure, after all, to neutralize her personality, scrub her mind clean. The Moll Greer still crouched over the toilet was not the same person who had done--well, whatever she had done.
"You're right," he said at last. "Of course you're right. Hey, would you mind watching this stuff for a few minutes? I need to pee, and I need to let these cameras go."
"I only have a minute or two," Hardship said. "Make it snappy. But sure."
Hurtwin left the room, happy to be pissing in an actual toilet for once and not into the absorbable confines of his duty chair, which was designed to discreetly and efficiently recycle the waste into drinkable water. He did not notice, on his way out, that the figure on the screen was standing suspiciously straight. Or that the empty bottle on the sink's edge was currently, very soberly, being tossed into a recycling bin.
As soon as he was gone, Hardship turned to the screen.
"Command override," Hardship said to it. "Show me day before yesterday, afternoon. 15:30 through 15:50."
The sequence appeared. He watched Moll lurch through the streets from four different angles, watched her plop down on the bench beside a man with long dark hair.
"Stop," Hardship said. "Go back ten seconds."
She was sitting there, slumped, frozen. The man next to her was indistinct, looking off into the distance. It would do.
"Loop sequence," Hardship said. "Cover the next thirty seconds."
It wasn't entirely seamless--the transition from sitting in despair to running full-tilt was a little sudden. But Hardship was willing to bet that, with all this footage, no one would notice such a minor blip. Equipment malfunctioned. The little cameras, hardy though they were, sometimes met accidental ends.
"Save," Hardship told it.
And with that, the only surviving footage of Thelonius Crowe was erased.
When Hurtwin returned, his superior officer was sitting sprawled in his duty chair, fiddling with a pen. Onscreen Moll Greer was on the couch, peacefully asleep.