The Scotland Yard resided at a low but very huge building surrounded by an elementary school and a park. Ayer walked through one of its alleys, along with several first-graders which were on their way to class, and by eight o’clock he was already standing by the entrance. He was wearing jeans, a monochrome t-shirt, and a baseball cap. His looks resembled that of a celebrity going incognito - someone who does not want to be found. Still, an employee came for him almost immediately.
“Hello, Mr Cadman.” The man reached out to shake hands. “My name is Pankill Shah; I am one of Scotland Yard’s technical directors. Today I am here to provide you with some assistance for your work with our system. Come with me please, and we will proceed with the onboarding process.”
The man guided Ayer to the entrance - a big corridor with several revolving doors.
“Here is your entrance pass.” He said, “We will enter the building shortly, just before that we probably should go through the wardrobe so you can leave this…”
“It’s a sleeping bag,” Ayer said.
“Right, but you know you cannot use this here? Offices shut down at nine and no one is allowed to stay here after that.”
“Really?”
“Yes, you can discuss this with Mr Cooper if you want.”
“With Vince?”
”- but he specifically instructed me that for you there won’t be any exceptions. Which reminds me, you should also leave all your gadgets here. Specifically, those which can be used for capturing information - smartphones, audio recording devices, et cetera are forbidden. There are scanners for those at the entrance.
While his stuff was being searched, Ayer proceeded to scan Pankill’s appearance rather out of habit than for any other reason. He was wearing a rather plain-looking garment and overall his wardrobe looked like it consisted of whatever laid on the first stand of the local H&M. What caught Ayer’s attention was that he had high-class running shoes. Was he an athlete of some kind? That would be logical, but his whole physique screamed ‘No!’, with his weak muscles and hectic movement which made him look like he had no control over his own body. Rather, he was a person who only saw the practical side of things, a rather boring one at that, but it was refreshing for Ayer to see someone who had nothing to hide for once.
“This is the IT department.” Pankill’s voice directed Ayer’s attention to a hall the size of a football field, stuffed with desks and people. Most of them looked like copies of Pankill and of one another. The place reminded Ayer of a commune - there were a lot of computer desks, but also relax zones with ping-pong tables and game consoles. Even the canteen could be seen through several layers of glass. Everything was so revealing that Ayer even felt uncomfortable watching the people who work there, even though they didn’t seem to mind. “Ninety-nine per cent of our workforce is here,” Pankill continued.
“I suppose that includes me now?” Ayer said, trying to picture himself in this setting.
“No. You are not a regular employee of the Yard yet.” Pankill said. “You will be on the upper floor.” he took him to an older and a more traditional-looking hallway with a lot of doors and proceeded to guide Ayer through one of the many corridors. Most of them looked deserted.
“The system which we use is based on a project developed by IBM back in the ’90s,” Pankill started talking, right after they arrived at Ayer’s new office. “It allows you to inspect reports from all cases from the last five years, where a case contains information about what happened, clues, suspects, et cetera. So UI-wise, clicking on a suspect takes you to his profile, same goes for victims.”
“Victims also have profiles?” Ayer asked.
“We all do,” Pankill said.
“Even the people who work here?”
“Especially them. In fact, you should provide some information for your profile. A colleague of ours will probably contact you in a few days anyway.”
“I see,” Ayer said and immediately thought of several ways to escape from the situation.
“Anyway, your case is on your dashboard,” Pankill said, “That is Den Lee’s case. This is information about her purchase history, people whom she communicated with, et cetera.”
“And can I speak to any of them?” Ayer asked.
“Well, you are not supposed to need that to solve your case. Any information you need, you must request through our system.”
“From this program? That is a weird way to work.”
“How so?”
“And it’s a weird name too,” Ayer continued. “‘Detective’. Does this imply that it is meant to replace human detectives?”
“It does that, yes,” Pankill said, “among other things.”
“Well, why am I here, then?”
“To be honest, I really don’t know why you were hired.” Pankill looked through the window in order to avoid eye contact. “When it comes to Den, all indicators for her case point to a suicide.”
“What indicators?” Ayer asked.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Pankill said, trying to resume his presentation. “Currently in London, there are about thirty thousand cameras. Using facial recognition technology, as well as analysing appearance and continuity, we can identify all people captured by any of them. All this data gets accumulated in our database and if, for instance, we have your name - of course this isn’t that impressive as you were registered at the entrance, but still-“
On the screen, Ayer saw a map of the centre of the city in which the Scotland Yard building was marked with a red dot.
“of course, having access to all this information, it would be stupid of us not to aggregate it,” Pankill said and the dot started moving around the map, following the route which Ayer took on his way to the building, starting from the train station.
“And at the end, all this data is fed to a deep learning algorithm which finds patterns amongst the behaviours of the people being observed. From then on the algorithm does everything from solving crimes to predicting future tendencies. Questions?
“One,” Ayer said, “why didn’t all this work last week?”
“What do you mean by ‘last week’?” Pankill said.
“You know, the robbery which everyone is talking about.”
“Oh, that? That was a-“
“This can happen again, right?” Ayer looked directly into his eyes.
Pankill did not respond.
“Look, if you want me to help, I need to-“
“My friend,” Pankill interrupted him, “there are over two million people under our jurisdiction, there are around two hundred of us, and the unsolved crimes are two or three per month. We no doubt have our imperfections, but believe me, we don’t need help, nor do we plan to alter our approach. Quite the opposite - you too, if you work at our scale, will have to follow it. So from now on just accept this thing here,” Pankill pointed to the PC, “as your partner.”
“I will try,” Ayer said, and shortly he found himself staring at his screen as well, trying to imagine he was in a place where the streets were more than just lines, and the people - more than just dots which were moving through them.
The first thing that he did after Pankill left was to try to access his own profile in the database:
ACCESS DENIED
The text that accompanied Den’s case was short and, for Ayer, nearly incomprehensible. It started with very basic information about the victim (“referring to her, as some sort of psychopath for not using social networks”, he noted) and the rest of it was a list of random trivia about her and her life. For Ayer, this stuff was irrelevant to what had happened. Worse, he couldn’t even see the logical connection between the individual sentences in the text. Still, he proceeded to go through it, swearing at his computer as he did. He remembered how Pankill had told him to view the computer as his partner and started addressing it as if they were partners in some cheesy 90’s American buddy-cop movie.
“Alright Oscar, I don’t like you and you don’t like me…or at least you wouldn’t like me if you were capable of understanding what I was saying. But let’s try to cope with one another, okay? I didn’t ask to be put with you, what I ask is to be professional about it.”
Ayer went a little earlier in time only to discover that there wasn’t any info about the victim from the period before she came to the city. Even her nationality wasn’t clearly confirmed.
“Now,” he continued while going through the items in one of the menus. “People say you are quite good. However, what you have for this case is unsatisfactory. So you should give me something else. Show me what’s happening in this city, for example.”
He entered some random search criteria and soon his screen was filled with a huge list of crimes committed around the same area as Den’s. He proceeded to go through all of them, but he quickly lost interest. Most of them were as trivial and rudimentary as the style in which they were described - they resembled badly written pulp fiction. Some of them were really based on old legendary stories that Ayer had read about in his books. That, in fact, was probably how the crime-fighting algorithm had solved them.
Click.
Click.
It did not take Ayer a great deal of time to figure out how the algorithm worked. What it did was to juxtapose each pending case with a large array of previously-solved ones and, provided it found a match, it basically closed the pending case using the match as a precedent. Many of the cases used as precedents were pretty old - so old that it was impossible for the people who committed the new crime to remember the original one. But the machine never forgot. And this, Ayer thought, was the brilliant part.
“And you know what else is brilliant, Oscar?” he continued. “That you made most people so stupid that this scheme of yours kinda works. However, in the human world, kinda works and works aren’t as close as you might think.”
Ayer went back to Den’s case and after he starred at the first sentence for three minutes without understanding a word. At first glance, it looked normal, but the words were arranged in such an unnatural way that he couldn’t capture the author’s intent, for the world. He felt that there was no human being capable of constructing such a sentence.
“Wait.”
No human being.
“Well, of course, they are automatically generated,” Pankill responded to him from the InterCall, after a few moments. “You think that someone would waste his time writing a description for each case individually?”
Ayer had spent a few minutes more with Oscar to confirm that the king was indeed naked and that although it was solving a lot of simple cases, the system was utterly unable to deal with those which were the fruits of even mildly elaborate planning.
Ayer took a printout of several case files and sat in the canteen to go through them. He decided to take a different approach - he analysed the simpler ones in order to gain some insight into the way in which the items in a file related to real-world objects, and then he proceeded to reverse-engineer the system’s text generation utilities. It took him a long time, but in the end, he succeeded. After ignoring the bullshit which was generated due to the fact that the system was trying to analyse a complex case using methods devised for solving a simpler one, he found out that some of the information that he thought he needed was there.
Click.
But even that did not help him much as he just did not know what to look for. He was missing a starting point, a clear route for his journey. He was missing something that he didn’t even realise that he needed in the first place - inspiration. He got up from his chair and left, unsure as to where he was going.
“What am I doing here?” he thought while strolling through one of the countless corridors which went by all parts of the building like the tunnels of an anthill. “Why did I say ‘Yes’ to those people.”
But he almost immediately remembered why, after being prompted by Jane, he had to say “Yes”. He remembered that one woman lied dead, possibly murdered and that he apparently was the only person who cared to understand what had happened to her.
This realisation made Ayer want to go back to his room immediately. But which one was his? He walked back, trying to follow his footsteps from when he exited it, but all he was seeing was a long stretch of doors. All of them looked alike, as did the lamps, and the decorative plants which were held in each window. The only things different were the numbers on the doors. For Ayer, this was equivalent to walking in complete darkness. He was close to despair when his glance stopped upon one door at the end of the corridor. It wasn’t his door, but still, it was interesting him, for instead of a number, on it was a hand-written label: “Lost and Found”. Ayer didn’t think too much before opening it.
The door led to a small dark hallway, which at first sight seemed abandoned.
Click.
“Hey, who’s there?” the voice was coming from the other end.
Ayer moved so his face below one of the lamps.
“Cadman!” he heard the voice of Jane. “What was that sound?”
“I haven’t got the slightest clue,” Ayer said.
“Okay, and why are you here?”
“I was taking a walk,” Ayer said, “and I saw the sign. What does it mean?”
“It used to be a joke,” Jane said. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Alright. And pardon me for asking, but what are you doing here?”
“I work here.”
“I see,” Ayer said. “You probably used to work here from the beginning of your career when it was much busier than before. Then things changed but you refused to go downstairs.
“False. I moved here when the first floor was being redecorated into an open space and decided to stay after. I simply hate open spaces.”
“Had anyone else expressed his or her frustration with the quality of your reports?” Ayer continued.
“Do tell me all about it,” Jane said. “But if you want to tackle something more productive, what you need is probably back here.”
She led him into a dark room which resembled a warehouse. All walls were covered with huge shelves, filled with all kinds of peculiar objects. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he was in the Yard’s evidence storage facilities. There were guns, lock pickers, all kinds of confiscated objects. All of them, thrown indiscriminately on the shelves, like in a-.
“Now you know where that joke about ‘Lost and Found’ came from,” Jane said. “Go check what’s there.”
She was pointing at a big crate, labelled with the number of Den Lee’s case. The crate contained various items from her apartment, ranging from notebooks to drawing materials.
“Interested?”
When he saw it, Ayer apologised to Jane and then, with one swift movement, he tore the crate apart allowing for all stuff inside to roll on the floor.
“I trust you will be okay here yes?” Jane asked while Ayer was arranging the contents of the crate in several small piles.
Standing on the floor of the dark room, Ayer concentrated with all his mind at Den Lee and, in the end, he saw her. In his mind, she was standing on her desk, chopping a piece of wood. Her movements were slow, her face showed indifference towards what she was doing as if she was occupied by something else. Still, the piece of wood in her hand slowly took on the silhouette of a stylised human body. She proceeded to paint it. First, she laid the base colour and then, with a few quick strokes, the decorations. She then left the doll at her desk and-
Ayer opened his eyes to take a quick glance at Den’s belongings, but as soon as he did, her image disappeared and a single thought occupied its place.
“Hey Jane,” he called to her when she was just about to leave the office. “Is this all?”
“Is what all”?
“Den’s belongings. Are all of them here?”
“As a matter of fact they are - the landlord wanted the apartment free by the next day, so everything which wasn’t his property, we took. Found anything interesting?
“I fancy that the things I didn’t find are interesting.”
“You are a weird kid,” she answered but didn’t ask him anything else. “See you tomorrow, I hope.”
Ayer said one quick “Goodbye” and returned to his thoughts. Apparently, none of the dolls that Den Lee created were found in her apartment. So, provided that the murderer existed, their disappearance was the only trace that they had left so far.
Ayer glanced at Jane’s desk. After realising she had left her computer unattended, he went to it.
“Oh Oscar, long time no see.”
For a second time, he typed his own name in the Detective’s search field. This time he had access. And surprisingly, the information there was much more detailed than he had anticipated. It was the biggest file he had seen so far. And the date of the last update was today.
“It can’t be that bad,” Ayer thought, but then he saw the list of people who viewed it. All Yard employees to whom he had spoken were there, and some of them were even contributing to it.
He closed the door, looked around for a minute or two - just to get rid of the feeling that he is being watched - and when he felt calm, he went back to the room and started traversing it.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click…
As soon as he got back to his house, Ayer reached in his bag and took out his trusty Polaroid. It was an analogue instant camera which he had always found very useful. And which, apparently, none of the Yard’s scanners for information-carrying devices could detect. His bag was full of pictures he had taken with it, mostly of Den’s belongings. They were accompanied by the printout he used, and a large data dump from the Yard’s system. He knew that downloading stuff from their computers most probably meant that he would not be permitted to visit the Yard again, but he didn’t intend on visiting it soon anyway. He started examining the pictures and files one by one and, with a black marker pen, he coloured all of the space which he thought was irrelevant to him black. When he was finished processing a given item, he would place it somewhere in his room, depending on how important it felt for him.
A central place in this composition was saved for pictures of Den’s dolls, which he took from the website where she was selling them. Ayer thought of them as the first piece of the puzzle, so he decided to begin by studying them in depth. At first, they seemed too similar to one another to be interesting. They looked cheap, and they were cheap, as he could confirm by their sales history. Then why would someone steal them? The question was obviously central, but maybe it was too early for it.
A few hours later, Ayer had given names to most of the dolls and had pretty solid mental images to their appearance. He knew them all, except a selection of eight dolls which still seemed pretty similar to one another. All of them were painted almost completely black, which made their features almost indistinguishable from one another. But after concentrating for a full hour at each of them, he thought that he found a difference - it seemed that one of them was winking at him.
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