vivid. She undresses and makes her way to the bathroom, starts the shower and steps in once the water’s warm, lathering herself. I tell Timothy that I watched the cycle several times that afternoon, and that’s how I realize the loop is without variation.
“Whoever’s erasing Albion uses the entity Zhou as a place holder,” I tell him, “a forgery inserted into Albion’s deletions so the code doesn’t fold in on itself and generate anything traceable. The work is seamless, absolutely beautiful—”
“Waverly may be interested in that bit about the red hair in the mirror,” says Timothy.
“Sure,” I say.
“And the hair in the bathtub,” says Timothy. “I think, especially—”
He asks whether I’m craving drugs and I tell him I haven’t thought of drugs since being cleaned out, certainly not since receiving iLux. I just don’t need them anymore. He asks about Theresa, if I’ve seen Theresa. Yes, I tell him. Yes. He tells me I look fine, that I’m progressing nicely.
12, 27—
Grid the Archive like a crime scene and walk it, checking each grid square for changes through time. I clocked my fair share of this type of tedium when I first worked for Kucenic, when the firm assigned me all the shit cases—sometimes spreadsheets help. Grid Albion’s apartment building and scan the months before her lease and the few years she lived here, pausing in each grid square to watch time flow past in fast-forward, a miasma of daylight and night. Albion’s apartment building is a story of decay—windows break, replaced by plywood, the plywood rots, is covered by graffiti. A cornice breaks from the roof, shatters on the sidewalk—the roof is never patched or repaired. Bricks deteriorate, the mortar receding. Detritus gathers on the sidewalk and is swept up against the building but never cleared away until fire consumes everything and the landscape turns to ash.
Rewind. Grid the Archive a second time, check the grid perpendicular to my first search—I notice an accumulation of graffiti concomitant with where I’ve bookmarked the start date of Albion’s lease, a quick spray of color covering the plywood windows of her building. So, someone started tagging the apartment once Albion moved in. Zoom on the graffiti: a pig’s head appears amid the scrawl of illegible signatures and obscenities and tags—a grinning swine with razor blade teeth.
Fast-forward and the tag becomes elaborate: a skull-faced doyenne walks two swine-faced women on leashes like they’re dogs. Cross-reference my copies of Kucenic’s “handwriting samples”—detailed records he’s kept of vandals we’ve encountered over the years, sample images of graffiti styles, bits of telltale code—but there aren’t any documented instances of pigs’ heads like these. Lasso and copy the image and run a Facecrawler in the universal image cache—the results pour in, near matches of women holding prize-winning pigs at state fairs and young mothers encouraging little girls to touch pigs at petting zoos, of the Arkansas cheer squad huddling around their razorback mascot. Thousands of images of women and the faces of pigs.
1% finished . . . 2% . . .
Albion drove a ’46 Honda Accelerant, forest green—but a search for the make/model, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, yields zero hits, a
No results found
message suggesting I should ease the parameters of my search.
Zero
doesn’t make much sense—even if Albion parked off-site or if the dossier’s incorrect and she never actually owned a Honda, the Accelerant was popular enough that someone’s Accelerant should have appeared in the search results. Impossible to believe zero Accelerants were archived in Polish Hill for that year set—even someone just cutting through the neighborhood should have appeared, zipping down the hill from Oakland to the Strip.
I ease the parameters—search for the Accelerant but not the specific make, still limiting to “Polish
“Whoever’s erasing Albion uses the entity Zhou as a place holder,” I tell him, “a forgery inserted into Albion’s deletions so the code doesn’t fold in on itself and generate anything traceable. The work is seamless, absolutely beautiful—”
“Waverly may be interested in that bit about the red hair in the mirror,” says Timothy.
“Sure,” I say.
“And the hair in the bathtub,” says Timothy. “I think, especially—”
He asks whether I’m craving drugs and I tell him I haven’t thought of drugs since being cleaned out, certainly not since receiving iLux. I just don’t need them anymore. He asks about Theresa, if I’ve seen Theresa. Yes, I tell him. Yes. He tells me I look fine, that I’m progressing nicely.
12, 27—
Grid the Archive like a crime scene and walk it, checking each grid square for changes through time. I clocked my fair share of this type of tedium when I first worked for Kucenic, when the firm assigned me all the shit cases—sometimes spreadsheets help. Grid Albion’s apartment building and scan the months before her lease and the few years she lived here, pausing in each grid square to watch time flow past in fast-forward, a miasma of daylight and night. Albion’s apartment building is a story of decay—windows break, replaced by plywood, the plywood rots, is covered by graffiti. A cornice breaks from the roof, shatters on the sidewalk—the roof is never patched or repaired. Bricks deteriorate, the mortar receding. Detritus gathers on the sidewalk and is swept up against the building but never cleared away until fire consumes everything and the landscape turns to ash.
Rewind. Grid the Archive a second time, check the grid perpendicular to my first search—I notice an accumulation of graffiti concomitant with where I’ve bookmarked the start date of Albion’s lease, a quick spray of color covering the plywood windows of her building. So, someone started tagging the apartment once Albion moved in. Zoom on the graffiti: a pig’s head appears amid the scrawl of illegible signatures and obscenities and tags—a grinning swine with razor blade teeth.
Fast-forward and the tag becomes elaborate: a skull-faced doyenne walks two swine-faced women on leashes like they’re dogs. Cross-reference my copies of Kucenic’s “handwriting samples”—detailed records he’s kept of vandals we’ve encountered over the years, sample images of graffiti styles, bits of telltale code—but there aren’t any documented instances of pigs’ heads like these. Lasso and copy the image and run a Facecrawler in the universal image cache—the results pour in, near matches of women holding prize-winning pigs at state fairs and young mothers encouraging little girls to touch pigs at petting zoos, of the Arkansas cheer squad huddling around their razorback mascot. Thousands of images of women and the faces of pigs.
1% finished . . . 2% . . .
Albion drove a ’46 Honda Accelerant, forest green—but a search for the make/model, limiting to “Polish Hill” and the years of Albion’s lease, yields zero hits, a
No results found
message suggesting I should ease the parameters of my search.
Zero
doesn’t make much sense—even if Albion parked off-site or if the dossier’s incorrect and she never actually owned a Honda, the Accelerant was popular enough that someone’s Accelerant should have appeared in the search results. Impossible to believe zero Accelerants were archived in Polish Hill for that year set—even someone just cutting through the neighborhood should have appeared, zipping down the hill from Oakland to the Strip.
I ease the parameters—search for the Accelerant but not the specific make, still limiting to “Polish
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