Ted said, “So we’re looking at the town and the valley. Pretty much every square foot of real estate inside the boundary of the electrified fence. We can push in anywhere we want.” The image zoomed down onto the school—the playground equipment crystallizing into sharp focus.
“Is this real time?” Ethan asked.
“No. This photo was taken years ago. But it’s the grid upon which all of our tracking relies.”
Ted tapped the screen at his fingertips.
A DayGlo overlay appeared.
Most of the town was covered.
Ted pointed at the screens.
“Everywhere you see this overlay, we have a current, real-time, microchip-triggered camera feed. But you’ll notice black spots, even within the coverage.” He tapped his controls and a single house filled the screen. The overhead perspective changed to a three-dimensional street-level view. With a swipe of his finger, the Victorian’s windows and wood siding stripped away and the image became an interactive blueprint.
“You’ll note there are three blind spots in this residence. However…” The DayGlo overlay was replaced with solid red. “There are no what we call ‘deaf spots.’ This house, like every other residence in town, is sufficiently miked to capture anything above thirty decibels.”
“How loud is thirty decibels?”
Ted whispered, “A library conversation.” He returned the screens to the aerial image of Pines with the DayGlo overlay. “So aside from a few blind spots in each house, most of indoor Pines is thoroughly wired. But once you get outside, even in town, the system begins to show cracks in its veneer. Look at all the black areas. There’s a backyard with no visual surveillance whatsoever. The cemetery is a disaster—just a few cameras here and there. And as you move away from the center of Pines and toward the cliffs, it only gets worse. Look at these blind spots on the south side. Twenty-acre stretches of completely unmonitored terrain. Now, in theory, we have a way to handle that.”
Ted punched in something on a keyboard.
A new overlay meshed with the DayGlo.
Hundreds of red blips appeared.
The vast majority clustered in a six-block radius near the center of town.
Some were moving.
“Recognize those?” Ted asked.
“The microchips.”
“We’re reading four hundred sixty signals. One short.”
“That’s because I’m sitting here with you?”
“Correct.”
Ted moved the cursor over a stationary blip in a building on Main Street. He tapped the touchscreen. A text bubble blossomed.
Ethan read, “Brad Fisher.”
“I believe you had dinner with Brad and his wife last night. It’s 10:11 a.m., and Mr. Fisher is in his law office. Right where he’s supposed to be. Of course, all this data can be massaged any number of ways.”
Every blip disappeared except for Fisher’s.
The time stamp at the bottom of the screen began to run backward.
His blip moved out of the building, north up Main Street, and into his house.
“How far back can you go?” Ethan asked.
“All the way to Mr. Fisher’s integration.”
The red dot raced all over town.
Months rewinding.
Years.
“And I can give him a trail,” Ted said.
A trail appeared and scribbled everywhere, like someone pushing a stylus across the screen.
“Impressive,” Ethan said.
“Of course, you understand our problem.”
“System works until people cut out their microchips.”
“It’s not an easy or painless procedure. Of course, you know that.”
“So what exactly do you do all day?” Ethan asked.
“You mean how does one go about monitoring an entire town?”
“Yeah.”
“Put on that headset.”
Ethan grabbed it off the console.
“Can you hear me?” Ted’s voice came loud and clear through the speakers.
“Yep.”
Ted’s fingers worked the touchscreens and the image of Wayward Pines and Brad Fisher’s lifelong trajectory switched back to twenty-five separate images.
“I’m one of three real-time surveillance techs,” Ted said. “Through that door over there, we have four more surveillance techs reviewing flagged footage and audio round-the-clock. Tracking persons of interest. Generating reports. Communicating with our in-town team. With you. Do you understand how the system gathers and sorts data?”
“No.”
“I’m not saying video isn’t crucial, but it’s really the audio that we lean most heavily on. Our system runs state-of-the-art voice recognition software, which pings off certain words, tones of voice. We’re not looking as closely at the actual words as the emotion behind them. We also have body-language recognition, but it’s less effective.”
“Care to demonstrate?”
“Sure. Bear with me. It’ll be disorienting at first.”
The screens began to change.
Ethan saw—
—a woman washing dishes—
—a schoolroom, with Megan Fisher pointing at a blackboard—
—the riverside park, empty—
—a man sitting in a chair in a house staring into nothing—
—a man and woman f**king in a shower—
It went on like this.
Images coming faster and faster.
Snippets of audio.
Pieces of conversation meaningless and out of context, like a child turning through stations on a radio dial.
“You catch that?” Ted asked.
“No, what?”
The images froze. One of them filled the screens.
The view looked down from a ceiling at a woman leaning against a refrigerator, her crossed arms outlined in DayGlo.
“There,” Ted said. “That’s a defensive posture. See the recognition overlay?”
A man stood in front of her, his face out of view.
“Let’s see if we can’t capture a better angle.”
Three different camera views of the kitchen streamed past too quickly for Ethan to process any of it.
“Nope, that’s as good as it gets.”
Ethan watched Ted’s right hand raise a digital volume bar.
The eavesdropped-upon conversation became prominent in his headset.
The woman said, “But I saw you with her.”