Питер Уоттс - Gut Feelings

But Hancock says there’s a way out, so he takes a breath and plays along. “You steal our personal lives. You sell us to the highest bidder. You — ”

“Let me stop you right there.” She holds up her free hand. “We know the spiel. We’ve been dealing with a surge in anti-Google sentiment ever since Doctor Mayor started whipping up the base with her warmed-over Big Brother hysteria. You were probably too busy to notice, but at least three upstanding citizens of Toronto the Good stood by cheering today while you kicked Travis’ ribs in.”

This is news to Ghazali.

“But you— ” she fixes him with a hard green stare — “You’ve just taken it to a whole new level. So when I ask why you’ve started beating people half to death, I would like to hear something beyond the same old talking points out of City Hall.”

She knows. Of course she knows.

She’s Google. She knows everything.

Ghazali sighs. “I had a friend too, once. Deon Rizk.”

Her eyes flicker across some invisible datascape. “Our cops didn’t kill him.”

“Not your cops. Your apps . Google Fitness showed Dee running 15K four times a week. Google Fitness showed him doing 30 chin-ups at a stretch. Google fucking Fitness showed reflexes and fast-twitch muscle response consistent with a middleweight practitioner of Mixed Martial Arts. Oh, and apparently Google Assistant overheard him expressing anti-police sentiments, which was enough to disable his privacy settings under the ATA. So poor little Officer Neukamp feared for her life. Murdered Dee because he was — how’d she put it — assuming an aggressive posture . Didn’t even bother trotting out ‘thought he had a gun.’”

Hancock doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. If I were in your shoes, I’d be pissed too.”

Ghazali snorts.

“What I wouldn’t have done,” Hancock continues, “is wait three years, then beat some random stranger to a pulp.”

“He works for Google.”

“Which makes him personally responsible for — ”

“He knew what side he was choosing.”

That face. That stupid fucking Travis face. That stupid Google baseball cap. Oh, he chose sides all right. Guy signs up to work for the spooks and the suits and fucking ICE-9, you don’t let him walk because he’s only the janitor.

That rage.

“I see what you did there,” Hancock murmurs, and Ghazali almost responds before he realizes that she isn’t talking to him; she’s talking to her tablet, to the little coruscating false-color silhouette writhing there. Gamium data.

She’s talking to something in his brain.

But now she sets the tablet aside and meets his eyes. “And I’m sorry, but I still don’t buy it. That level of anger, that — fury — our algos are too good to have missed it. You’re not even a Quayside resident, you’re a third-order downstream variable and they still knew what you were going to order off that truck before you even thought about eating out.”

“They fucked up the satay,” Ghazali reminds her.

“ And they shouldn’t have . That’s exactly my point . Any more than they should have let a human pressure cooker walk up to one of our people on a public street and hammer him into a coma. If you were going to go berserker you would have done it three years ago, and you didn’t. These things do not come out of nowhere, Marius. They are predictable .” There’s an intensity behind the smartspec eyeshine, an anger, at any reality with the temerity to defy expectation…

Something thumps against the window. Ghazali turns, glimpses a small dark blur plastered for just an instant on the other side of the frosted glass.

“Bird.” Hancock says. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Bird?”

“The polarizing mesh messes with their magnetic sense or something. When we blank the windows.”

“Your ecofriendly miracle windows kill birds.”

She shrugs. “We’ve got half a dozen drones on collection duty. Send the bodies to FLAP for barcoding. Nothing gets wasted. If we could get back to— ”

Over on the conference table, the abandoned tablet flickers. Something in Marius Ghazali just snaps .

Maybe it’s the condescension she’s been radiating from the moment she stepped into the fucking room. Maybe it’s her entitlement, the casual power she waves in his face like a red flag: oh aren’t I the generous one, not calling the police just so long as you jump through my hoops like a good little lab rat. Maybe it’s this smug white cunt’s obvious default assumption that of course he’ll do what she says, she just has to say the word and he’ll jump on command and dance his black ass all over her database. Maybe maybe maybe.

All Marius Ghazali knows in this moment is: he’s going wipe the smirk off this bitch’s face until she doesn’t have a face left to smirk out of. She sees it, too; suddenly her eyes are wide as satellite dishes, her mouth gapes like some hilarious gasping carp as she stumbles back into the table and the tablet tips and falls and lands face-down on that oh-so-tasteful-and-expensive carpet and Ghazali brings up his fists and —

— and the rage passes through him like a wave, and dissipates.

He stops. Frowns. Tries to get the feeling back. Wonders why, in the next instant.

Hancock’s backed into a corner with one hand raised, palm out: No. Stay away. Stay back. But that palm isn’t raised against him; it’s aimed at a far corner of the ceiling, at a tiny black bead that glistens there like a bird’s eye. Ghazali never noticed it before.

He lowers his fists. “I’m — sorry. I don’t know what…”

She emerges from the corner. Takes a few shaky steps toward the desk.

“I just — something took me, there. It was like — ” He shakes his head, trying to clear it. “Maybe you better call the police after all.”

She bends down and retrieves the fallen tablet. Checks a setting. Looks back up at him.

“What? What is it?” Ghazali asks.

“Someone forked an image onto my screen.” She does some magic to bring it back: the Google logo on a featureless black background.

There it is. There’s the rage he’s been missing, there’s that welcome white-hot face-smashing —

Hancock swipes a finger across the display and the logo disappears. Ghazali’s fury evaporates a moment later.

He staggers, blinks. “That’s interesting.”

She nods. “Isn’t it, though.”

“What the fuck,” Ghazali whispers.

Hancock stares at the tablet. “Someone knew my pass — Marrano?” She raises her eyes and her voice. “This another one of your judgment calls ?”

I’m a weapon , he thinks. I’m a wrecking ball. The hammer falls and I just — lose control.

Hancock’s on her way out, tablet in hand. “Excuse me for a moment. I’ll be right back.” The door opens at her approach; in the open-concept office space beyond, two people are peeling off their shirts and another sweeps assorted bits of desktop detritus into a garbage pail.

Someone did this to me….

The door hisses shut.

Too late, he lunges for it. Tries the doorknob anyway, finds it locked. He can hear a burble of faint voices beyond, indecipherable but for their overtones: anger, accusation. Soothing calm. Defensiveness.

Another bird hits the window. Ghazali wanders over, cups hands around eyes, leans against the glass and squints. It’s like trying to see through wax paper. He puts one ear to the pane. Maybe he almost hears something like voices out there. Maybe a siren, thin as a thread.

Maybe it’s just his imagination. Maybe the whole damn city has fallen silent.