Upgrade(81)

Rodney Viana was happily married and in his tenth year of law enforcement with the Columbus, Ohio, PD.

Madeline Ortega drove trucks for Freightliner.

I ripped as many photos as I could find of Ortega, Viana, Kegan, and Brown, and labeled this data group “Block B.”

Reaching into my backpack, I pulled out the photo-realistic pencil sketch I’d made of Kara yesterday. This was exactly how she’d looked at our mother’s house in Colorado, with her updated facial modifications. Kara was “Block C.”

To finalize her transmissible upgrade, Kara would have to design a synthetic viral vector and transfect it into helper cells, which would then produce a packaged and potentially infectious virus, purified by column. She would then need to test it to make sure it performed as intended, with a high level of virulence and transmissibility in humans. Arguably, this was the hardest step, and one that would require a willing test group.

“Block D” comprised return targets on former scientists in our system who had contributing factors (terminal illness, debt, markers for radicalization, hard-line environmentalist leanings) that might lead them to risk their lives by becoming Kara’s guinea pigs. Or her super-spreaders—her frontline fighters she would send to the ends of the earth. I got a ranked list of 291 candidates and uploaded their most recent photos.

I wrote my master query: Return target = any surveillance camera that has captured images of any element of Block A + any element of Block B + Block C + any element of Block D, within time range T—twelve months.

I also wanted to know if a ticket had been purchased for anyone in Block D (the potential test group and super-spreaders).

I wrote a subquery: Return target = airline; hyperloop; bus; train tickets purchased by or on behalf of Block D, within time range T—twelve months.

The left screen flashed up my master query results. It was a list of CCTV cameras’ serial numbers. I called up a satellite map of America and overlaid the serial numbers on their corresponding locations.

While there were a few returns sprinkled around the country, an inordinate number were clustered around the edges of New York City. There were none in Miami.

I stripped all fields except for my virologists in Block A. Out of twenty-four possible virologist candidates, two had been captured on multiple cameras and occasions in and around New York City.

I did the same for Kara’s special forces crew in Block B and got multiple hits for Madeline Ortega, Deshawn Brown, and Rodney Viana, in and around New York City.

Now for my sketch of Kara. Five days ago, her face had been captured in Durango, Colorado. After that, nothing. There was a regional hyperloop station there. She had probably stayed in a motel and augmented her features before hopping a pod out of Colorado. And the face I’d seen in our mother’s lodge had probably been modified there, which would explain why there were no hits on that image prior to Colorado.

For Block D, the viral test group and super-spreaders, out of 291 possible candidates, I saw multiple camera hits in and around New York City on 38 people. The number seemed low. Was this because the super-spreaders had yet to arrive in New York to receive their transmissible upgrades? Maybe those 38 were her test group.

I opened the results from my subquery—financial transactions related to travel. There was a list of flight and hyperloop ticket numbers for Block D.

Relief flooded through me.

Out of 291 AI-collated candidates, 94 people from Block D had international airline tickets purchased in their names, with destinations to all of the major cities I’d listed off for Edwin, and many, many more. And they were all flying out of Newark, La Guardia, JFK, Philadelphia, and Boston Logan International, over a period of two days, beginning in seventy-two hours.

I zoomed in on New York City and requested returns on the surveillance cameras that had the highest frequency of image capture for Blocks A, B, and D.

Three hits came back.

A camera at the intersection of Furman Street and Doughty Street, near a waterfront park in Brooklyn Heights.

A camera at the intersection of Richmond Terrace and Nicholas Street, near North Shore Waterfront Esplanade Park at the northern tip of Staten Island.

And a camera at the intersection of Washington Street and Dudley Street, near Morris Canal Park in Jersey City.

Okay. Before this moment, I’d been operating on a mix of mental models of Kara’s thought process and sheer speculation. But that last query felt solid. It built a foundation under my theory of how Kara was building her upgrade in secret.

I suspected those parks—all on waterfronts—were points of departure and arrival, for when Kara and her team traveled back and forth from her lab.

They were boating across New York Harbor, the East River, and the Hudson, into the flooded no-man’s-land of Lower Manhattan—the perfect place to finalize her upgrade.

Lower Manhattan checked multiple boxes for Kara. A blackout zone with no CCTVs. Existing infrastructure in the form of abandoned mol-bio labs for Kara to plug into. Proximity to numerous international airports. And the densest population center in America, which would provide ample cover for watch-list scientists traveling to NYC to become beta-testers and super-spreaders, thus avoiding any suspicion from the GPA.

Simply by conjuring a satellite image of New York, I knew there were approximately eleven thousand buildings in the new ghost town of Lower Manhattan. Before it flooded, Lower Manhattan was home to more than four hundred life-science companies—far fewer than before the Gene Protection Act. Only some of those companies would have labs on site. Only some of those labs would be appropriate for Kara’s needs. Only some of those appropriate labs would still be intact and accessible.