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Data Ghosts
By Jimmy Jacobson
Chapter 1: Predictability
Frank stepped onto the grimy pavement and his eyes were instantly bombarded with information from the world around him. Scanning the sidewalk to the left and right before merging with the flow of human traffic, he ignored the fashion ads being targeted to him by the boutique across the street and the menu items from several competing delis nearby. Melting into the foot traffic bordering the busy street, Frank reached one hand up to the strap crossing his chest from shoulder to hip. The strap held a shapeless tan bag secured against his lower back. The bag held his only real possession. This same possession had allowed him to relieve the bank he was exiting of a modest sum of money despite not being a registered user of said bank, and without anyone noticing for at least another 45 minutes. Frank's hand flipped across a small keypad fitted into the strap and immediately the flow of information being fed through his ocular nerve by his display glasses changed and became more filtered. Instead of the constant advertising of consumer services, Frank was now able to read information from the global network of citizen tracking satellites, cross referenced with various local and federal databases displayed in the real time of his heads up display. Rendered in a green font the data dangled like the sword of Damocles over the head of each person on the street.
Running a hand through his short hair, Frank scanned the crowd for the telltale blue highlight that would indicate a police officer. Seeing none, he made his way to the street and crossed mid-block to the other side, ready to slip into a waiting alley. Something made him stop short of the side street that was his intended destination. There in front of him hung the names Holden Crane and Sally Wentwall, along with the numbers that marked them as individuals to the government: social security numbers, birth dates, phone numbers, etc. Conspicuously missing were Holden and Sally themselves. Being one of only several people on the planet able to access the information illegally that he was now viewing, Frank had been witness to this anomaly only a handful of times before, and had named them data ghosts.
Due to the massive job of tracking citizens via the locater chips mandated in their phones and mobile consoles, the government had employed computer programs capable of creating models for tracking individuals. When a person's activities could be fitted to a high probability then the model updated locations and checked against actual data at varying time periods. When an individual was not where the system expected them to be it was several minutes to hours before the system was back into a synchronized state, depending on the predictability of the citizen. This caused anyone with the ability to plot the individual's information on a heads up display to see the information hanging in the ether above the assumed location of the person.
Frank stopped in his tracks, Sally was his girlfriend of several years and Holden was his brother and they traveled this back alley often enough for ghosts to be modeled. Intrigued and irritated, Frank's fingers flipped up to his chest again and after a few short, typed commands, the two data ghosts began to retreat before him. He followed, having switched his view to run in reverse until he could find from where the two ghosts had come. Following them backwards in time, he came to a fire escape that led up to a 3rd floor apartment.
Recklessly, Frank rushed up the iron stairs until he was at an open window. One hand on the window ledge and the other securing his tan computer bag, Frank vaulted through the window. The smell in the apartment told Frank what he would find before lunging around the corner and his emotions changed from fury to fear. Lying on an old, dirty mattress in the middle of the room were the lifeless bodies of his girlfriend and brother. Their hands were bound behind their backs with tape and their mouths were bound with gags, and their bodies had been slashed with a knife multiple times. Frank would not forget the look of terror frozen on their faces until the day he died.
When he got a hold of himself, Frank increased the time lapse of the backward progression of data. He hoped to find the name of a witness or the murderer. If he would have been running his display in the normal tracking mode now, he would have seen two blue highlighted names approaching and crouching beside the outer door of the apartment as a 3rd green name paused in front of the door. Absorbed in what he was watching, Frank even missed the slight jingle of keys from outside the apartment. Instead, running the information in reverse, all he saw was his own data ghost, Frank Crane, entering the apartment by the front door an hour earlier and murdering his girlfriend and his brother.
Frank heard the quiet curse of the landlord as the key he tried in the lock failed to open the door. The foot of the first police officer had a better effect and the door frame came loose from the wall under his forceful kick while a second push with his shoulder swung the door wide. The first officer was spilled to the ground and the second officer swept into the room, fire arm drawn.
The police sensors had already shown the peacekeepers through the wall what they would find in the room, Frank Crane with two stiffs. But before they could fire their side arms, Frank jumped out of the window typing madly at the keypad strapped across his chest and dropping something behind him. A small EMP explosion went off and all of the officer's sensors went dark. And Frank disappeared for a very long time.
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