Greg Bear - Mariposa

"Right," Trace said, and rewarded her with a delighted grin. He backed up and did a swashbuckling sweep with one arm, bowing, clearing her path.

"Thanks." Rebecca stepped away before he could say more and walked swiftly on. Her face was red; she could feel it. She wanted to scratch the dattoo, scrub it off. Creepy.

Screw this. Now I'm down-almost.

She pushed by the signs with arrows that read, Exhibit Hall. All bags subject to inspection. One pump already squeaked; the new shoes were a bust.

Damn.

She made sure her badge was face out and veered left by the sparsely populated food court. Lifting her wrist, she brushed the dattoo along an ID post, faced the camera to have her picture taken-

Trace never made it this far. No picture, no record.

– then raced past the bored-looking security guards.

The exhibit hall filled an acre under a broad high roof. On the far side of the hall, windows to the next-level conference rooms looked out over the crowded expanse. Most of the windows were covered by vertical blinds: sessions in progress. But in one, a photographer, tiny at this distance, poked his camera through and was attempting to capture the whole scene from on high.

The scene was worth it. Hundreds of booths lined double-sided aisles, showcasing the latest in professional, business, and home protection. The aisles gradually funneled attendees to open spaces with larger displays.

A family-size bomb shelter offered level 4 filters, whatever that implied. In another open circle, an autonomous DHS/ICE Whisper Bird took center stage, broad wide rotors folded, guns and rocket pods red-capped and tagged, empty.

Nearby, LAPD Gross Threat Response had brought in two super-sophisticated bomb trucks, brutes big and shiny as city fire trucks but black all over. Each carried, in rear deck and side garages, three midsize tractor bots and twenty cat-size insect-carriage bots, all black with yellow stripes. Small boxes mounted within the garages were filled with roller bots, like little wheeled dumbbells with video cameras and other sensors, that could be tossed or rolled into almost any situation.

A large group of admiring men and a few women took in a demonstration of small bot prowess.

A public defense tech talking like a circus barker had the city's machines performing Fred Astaire dance routines to music. The midsize bots were light on their feet, but their real talent lay in chemical sensors that could detect any kind of explosive from ten feet away. Pulse-mike sonic arrays could read the internals of a suspect device with a single high-frequency chirp.

Smarter and lighter than ever, the new bots could approach a bomb quiet as a weasel and shut it down with old-fashioned lead shot, a high-powered slug of water, or quick-set polycarbonate.

Techs in bomb suits would soon be ancient history, along with their sniffer dogs.

Rebecca moved on to the crowded aisles.

The Total Team Safety booth boasted a 50K six-by-three meter flex display, bright and crisp-though the fabric rippled under a downdraft. The display revealed the schematic of a skyscraper, filled with glowing stars, showing how a tactical security show-runner could monitor up to three thousand personnel in any situation from inside, or from any point on the globe via dedicated satlink.

Much better than the old FBI Lynx system, though that was still in wide use.

Peacock Net Communications offered a whole new lifestyle for both cops and civilians. A skinny young man with a shiny face was extolling the company virtues: "A complete record of your life. Fifteen button cameras, front and rear-full circle, fish-eye if you switch on the shoulder cams. The CPU stitches it all together and stores up to twelve hours of 4K-def video. Best tool law enforcement ever had-but it's also available to citizens, so police departments need to keep their cops cool, well-trained, and polite. No more ticking time bombs on the street. And of course our prowler unit records all the basics, plus video and sound-GPS, speed, nearby vehicles, officer RFID, weather, even vitals if the individual department so desires-heart rate, cortisol, body temp, emotional state. Soon we'll be able to tie in and corroborate our video with brain-scan analysis. No secrets. Foolproof in court-it's all ten-twelve secure-coded to an inviolate chip. Congress is about to set FISA standards for Homeland Security taps into personal networks. It's a new age for law enforcement. Peacock Net. Open society, complete records, total protection."

Rebecca had been linked and recorded many times before, but never so thoroughly.

The Homeland Security Science and Technology booth featured a single-box, universal DNA/RNA identification system, tied in to international criminal and citizen database files. A moist swab of almost any surface within a scene of interest, indoors or outdoors, could yield a comprehensive list of the names and records of individuals who had walked through in the last few years, dropping sweat, skin flakes, fingerprints, whatever-as well as plants, animals, and potential pathogens. The system was known as eDNA, or Edna.

Practically in the shadow of DHS and Edna's bright lights, a tiny startup calling itself DYNA-Forensics was drawing an impressive crowd. Their little gray box promised to provide courtroom-quality certification that DNA evidence was not manufactured, forged, or planted-or, conversely, that it was. With polymerase chain reaction technology capable of creating huge volumes of DNA from even the tiniest source, and several high-profile cases of law enforcement databases being misused to manufacture counterfeit DNA evidence from scratch, this had become a big issue in recent years.

Soon, nobody would be getting away with anything, anywhere. She had to sniff in wonder. Brave new world-lousy old cliché.

Just two booths down, scanners from a company called Rainbow Life Forensics guaranteed to analyze and predict the intent of strangers through their Kirlian Auras.

Something old, something new, something weird.

"Rebecca!"

At the end of the leftmost aisle, Rebecca swiveled and saw Karl Oster leaning from a booth. "How's our favorite Rolodex expert?" he called. A big banner behind him proclaimed NCAP: National Council of Protection Agencies-an NGO trade group.

She swung left and shook his hand.

"Hey, Karl. Most of these youngsters don't even know what a Rolodex is." She pulled back her cuff to reveal the dattoo. "Want to mate?"

Oster smirked, pulled up his sleeve, unbuttoned his cuff, and showed his own dattoo. They crossed arms.

"Don't scratch it," he warned.

"They do itch," Rebecca said. "Congrats."

"Screw that," he said with a grin.

Oster had been portrayed by Johnny Depp in a movie about Waylon Parks, the Karaoke Butcher. Parks had kidnapped twenty-one children in two states, burying them with a backhoe in old shipping containers. Each container had a battery backup unit that powered a small Karaoke machine that ran videos of Parks singing David Bowie songs. Gary Oldman, of course, had portrayed Parks.

"It's bullshit," Oster said. "They should have made a movie about you."

"Fat chance," Rebecca said.

"What irritates the hell out of me is the way these bastards are portrayed by smart, charming actors. We know different. They're broken toys. When you finally catch 'em, they look dead inside."

Karl and Rebecca had gone out for dinner a few times in Washington and stayed friends thereafter, exchanging calls now and then. Karl, a perennial bachelor, had never pushed. She almost wished he had.

But now of course there was her captain. Odd that she was the one feeling fast and possessive.

"Agents love their movies, Karl. Yours wasn't too bad. How's San Francisco?"

"Office is trés chic," Oster said, the standing joke.