Shit.
Dan tried to remember which data laws or shared reality conventions
he might have might technically infringed in the past month or so,
but through the throbbing headache he could only access not so much a
memory palace, more a memory hovel. Then, he looked them over more
closely and relaxed. These two – a rangy Sikh bloke and a smaller
bearded ferret of a man - had standard police issue tablets and
visors, which meant they were hip to the flow of crime data.
Conceptual art-crime, not so much.
***
As
a rule, the rank and file police didn't know what to make of
Festival. As with any display of public enjoyment and unorthodoxy,
they were torn between wanting to do some good old fashioned
repression and taking a low profile approach to policing the event
out of sheer incomprehension as much as anything else.
Typically,
the end result was somewhere in between the two – on the one hand a
couple of outrageous arrests of augmented LARPers or cosplayers for
illegal weaponry (“but it's rubber officer! And half of it doesn't
even exist in this reality”), on the other hand enjoying having
their photo taken with steampunk Sherlocks or slave Leias.
AR-masked
taser-happy drones assaulting superficially innocent citizens were
decidely out of their pay grade.
***
“We're
making enquries with anyone who was involved in the Malloy circle, Mr
May. Thankfully, for an apparently subversive movement you were
awfully keen on publicising who your artpunks were.”
“I
hate that term. Cyberpunk; Steampunk; Seapunk; Artpunk; ah Great
Dismal, so much to answer for. Anyway, we were inspired in so many
ways by the Surrealists, who were the most tribal, most
self-publicising moth- ah group you could possibly imagine. Issue 12
of La Revolution Surrealiste had photographs of all their members on
the front cover like a rogues gallery. We did exactly the same when
we wrote our first manifesto. Artpunk was a name the media gave us”
***
“Do
you … have any ideas who is doing this?”
“Well,
in the modern police force, Mr May, we have two main approaches. One,
we send in the forensics and data-gathering teams to the crime scenes
to search and scan everything with a fine tooth comb. We
cross-reference the information we have – drone vendors, drone
users, witness statements – and we hope the algorithms turn up
three bananas.”
“And
the second?”
“Why,
Mr May, while we wait for the backroom boys and girls to live out
their Grissom fantasies, we turn up in the wrong places and the wrong
times and ask difficult questions in an effort to find out what's
going on. And that” he added almost as an afterthought, “is where
you come in.”
***
Morris
pointed to the two of them. “You Virgil, me Dante. Right now my
best guess is that only another artist would threaten at least nine
other artists. It's not our only line of enquiry, but it's the one
I'm going to look into, with your help.”
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