Chicken-scratch Tally

A ludicrously high sum sat in a little credit chit, burning a hole in Bobby's pocket. He had a meeting to arrange soon, and reading to do. The man had put off the delivery for Mizumi but now he needed to square it away before the weekend. He rarely paid much mind to the news unless he needed a reason to scowl. He set a few notebooks aside and grabbed a pen, chainsmoking into a rabbit hole of news articles.

He dragged his virtual assistant up, a little woman with rabbit ears and a slick uniform. He didn't really remember why he picked that model, he just knew he liked her tone. She wasn't as grating to him as Siri or Cortana were, back in his younger days. He barked and told her to go over the notes he'd had her record for him, and the machine dutifully obeyed.

Twelve people died recently, all of them in Autocab accidents. The one Bobby drove past wasn't even the latest. Only a night later, a young couple slammed off an overpass into an apartment below. No survivors. His autocab pass already went unused: now it just burned a hole in his pocket every time he drove by the station. The crashes were mixed between personal and Department of Transportation cabs, which was odd in and of itself. The DOT had an older fleet that served folks who couldn't afford wheels, skimmer, or cabs of their own. The latest models of autocabs were safer- statistically- by a magnitude more than the state-owned cabs.

A fellow named Rory Smith set up a lawsuit, chasing after money from GM, Tesla, Mitsubishi- everyone under the sun that made a self-driving car. Bobby looked him up: he owned a big chain of east coast and Midwest restaurants. He had a big family and his fingers in a lot of pies, figuratively, and literally. From the articles Bobby read, Rory's son-in-law, a certain Sun Lee, passed away in one of the first few autocab crashes, when they'd just started becoming a problem. There was a local corporate office in an industrial sector of the city, and it was where Rory had set up a regional office. His daughter, Freyja Lee, was handling the lawsuit against those companies. She worked out of there, he surmised. Probably a very busy lady, he dug up her social media- nothing posted in the last six months.

Bobby checked the clock. On a Friday night, after finishing his errands with gunsmiths and brokers, he really wanted to crash into bed.  It wasn't so late, but in the waning daylight hours he realized he might as well ring up Sakuya. She knew everyone in the city, and besides, she owed him a favor. If there was anyone who could get him an in with Freyja, it was her. "Hey, Raisin, go call the old lady for me."

The rabbit saluted, and its little digital icon pulled up a rotary phone and grabbed the receiver. The dial tone clicked, clicked, clicked, eight-six-seven-five-something-or-other.  He heard the phone go ringing for a minute, and he worried that he'd have to call again in the morning. Usually she was faster to respond...

Click. The line went through. He grabbed his telephone and held it to his ear. "Hey-hey, Bobby here. You free for a minute?"

"Yes, Robert- sorry, Bobby?" Her husky voice came through clear over the phone. "What is it that you need?"

"I have a favor to ask" He dragged on a Newport and felt the menthol hit the back of his throat. "Think you can get me time with a certain Freya Lee? Daughter of Rory Smith? The ones with the restaurant." He looked out his window of his home on his empty street.  "It's for another client. "

"Tsk, tsk." She sounded so much like a disappointed teacher. "On my personal line?"

"It's for his charity foundation. There's a seven digit donation for him." He thumbed the credit chit through his jeans. "All above board, I promise you. High profile client. It's for a good cause. You know. Orphaned babies and such."

"That's quite the number!" She didn't sound as surprised as she could've. Bobby kept his clients anonymous unless they wanted others to know. He figured Mizumi had already made plans with Sakuya. Some stuff went better unspoken. He took it in stride. "I'll see what I can do."

He hummed. "Good to know. Thanks."

"You're very welcome, young man. Consider it a favor." She hung up.

Bobby slipped his phone back in his pocket. In this day and age there were plenty of ways to have a cellphone grafted to you: he saw tinboys with glittering silver augs and holograms blasting into their eyes all the time. There were sockets you could have sewn under your wrist to put display and computing modules that wired into transducers and nervous system taps for direct neural connection. It was a blast of technology that let more people than ever plug into the ever-broadening information superhighway.

Bobby never liked any of that, so he kept a glistening, old fashioned black slate in his pocket. It was considered old-fashioned. He laughed, because when he was a kid, old-fashioned meant a brick-like Nokia.

"Let's hope she gets back to me." He said to nobody, stepping over to the window. All of that research into who and what was involved in this lawsuit had set his mind on it. It was a morbid curiosity. Just why were self-driving cabs and flying skimmer-cars dropping from the sky?

A familiar skimmer came down the street: it had the name of Nguyen Realty emblazoned on the side in vinyl wrap. His business was selling small houses in the middle of Atlanta. For working professionals, the Afro-Asiatic man claimed. It was evidently a lucrative business, as he drove a late-model BMW. Another skimmer, this one he didn't recognize, followed it down and parked behind it. 

He couldn't see well through his blinds, but a bundled up woman with a shock of red hair stepped out. Nguyen rushed from his skimmer, the lanky man beckoning her to one of the neighboring houses. He wondered why the two were out late at night, must've been a rushed home viewing. Bobby remembered twenty years ago when he first bought his house, and Nguyen hadn't a single strand of grey hair on his head. 

The man watched the red-headed little woman practically bounce up the sidewalk to one of the houses for sale. She looked around, taking stock of the neighborhood. It wasn't light enough to have good visibility, but then again it wasn't dark enough for street lights to kick on. She looked at his window for a scant moment, then followed the realtor up the steps. She clutched her purse tight.

Bobby pulled the curtains. He wished Nguyen well, he was an honest businessman in a dishonest city. But it wasn't his business keeping an eye on the man's affairs, he mused, another cigarette on his lips.

He slipped back behind his desk and snuffed his smoke out. "Raisin, any word from my friends in the morgue?"

"No sir!" The rabbit chirped, bouncing up and down. He grabbed a pen, marked down the date, and checked his phone. 

"Check my other notifications." He pointed to a television he had hung up from the wall. His email client rolled up on the screen, along with a few chat programs. He flicked through a few messages, mostly they were memes and slow-moving discussions. Then he turned towards his emails, grimacing. Well over ten thousand emails greeted him.

"Can you delete all of that crap in my junk mail that's taking up space? I pay for a terabyte of email storage and it gets full of spam." He sighed in frustration, feeling a vein pop in his forehead. He slammed his fist down and cussed, the whole table shaking. "How many wars does a man have to fight before we get rid of spam? Y'know I fought hajis, pirates, "

"Affirmative, sir! Deleting 'all of that shit in your junk mail that's taking up space', right this instant!" The rabbit-AI emptied a garbage bin, hips shaking side to side. It made her skirt ruffle. Then she looked at him again and pondered his other query. "Would you like to know more about spam mail?"

"For the love of- no, I do not. Do me a favor. Search 'Autocab Crashes on I-285,' filter all results older than two weeks. I want the search results cross-referenced." He rubbed his brow.

The AI complied. CNN, FOX, MSNBC- even Breitbart and, of all things, OANN had articles on it. Must've been someone young and pretty that died in that crash. Most of the headlines said the same thing- 'Rising Hip-Hop Star victim of fatal Autocab accident, " Breitbart was a little more sensational, "...TRAGIC: Death of rising countercultural icon Deanna Carver in self-driving car!" Bobby twiddled a cigarette between his fingers and figured she must have said something milquetoast for that bunch to latch on to her.

He skimmed the articles, taking his notebook. He started making a list of names. One on each page. After the names he wrote down locations, vehicles, details. Bobby thought there might be a link between them, and so he scratched away with his pen and paper. He made short notes of them, going back from the most recent one. He called his assistant up to dig through social media, video channels and pull from the ether any information it could.

Deanna Carver, I-285, Cadillac personal cab, dead at 29. Black American. Rising indie vocalist with a message. Sketchy past, run-ins with police, 'cleaned up' image and advocate for restructuring your life. Family members alternating between military, prison, small business owners and pastors. Quite a nice young lady he reckoned, very beautiful. 

Vicente d'Angelo, Dallas Highway, Tesla personal cab, dead at 38. Mediterranean fellow. Manager for a repair shop specializing in oddball fixes for skimmers, autocabs and diesel motors. No outspoken views, ran a small vlog for his business, extremely low-key. Flew two flags, one American, one Sicilian. Left behind his eldest son of fifteen and a grieving church community.

Alex Ivanov, East-West Connector, Lincoln company cab, dead at 55. East European, from some small satellite of the USSR between the Urals and the Caucasus. Mother of three. Ran a social media account with all the boilerplate one would expect. High level C-suite job for a luxury VR headset company. Bobby noted her down, he would have to ask Sakuya about her.

Nick Reese, Cumberland Parkway, rental Mitsubishi, dead at 21. Mixed race, claims "Chinese-Peruvian" but momma was a redneck- father out of the picture. Notorious, infamous online entertainer. Seemed to have a cult following of political outcasts and avant-garde enthusiasts. Certified weirdo. 

And finally... the oldest accident. Sun Lee, Peachtree Street, personal Mercedes, dead at 40. Second-generation Manchurian immigrant and Rory Smith's son-in-law. B-list actor, married to one Freyja Smith- Rory's youngest daughter. Left behind two kids and an unfinished production. Strangely, Bobby noted, staunchly pro-American. He spied a link between Mr. Lee and a few fringe groups, but nothing solid. He couldn't imagine the polite, staid man to wear tinfoil hats and scream about the devilry of politicians.

With that he set his pen down and reviewed his notes...

No common race, politics, gender, or occupation. Even mix of people above and below the line. A wide variety of vehicles, state, private, or personally owned. No details released from the black boxes or trip computers of each model. Mixed skimmer and wheelie models. No real through-line for any of the cases. Obviously, they all died in car crashes, but what else was there to go off of? Bobby would have to dig through technical documents to see if any of those automobiles shared important software or electronics. Maybe that was it- a bad navigation ship, or buggy code.

He pursed his lips and set his notebook down. There was also the frequency of it all. A lot of people died in car crashes every day, yet, none of them died in as specific and violent manner as all of these. Twelve people over three months in highly visible wrecks. Those were simply the most recent. "Set a search alert. Notify me of any new articles with these keywords, inside the perimeter, fatalities reported, autocab." He flicked his eyes to the list of names, the AI following him and understanding the gesture, "-and any new names that appear. That's all high-priority stuff. Wire it straight to my phone."

"Will that be all, sir?" The little bunny perked her ears up.

"Eh." He thought for a moment. "I'm going to search social media. Every time I tell you to archive, queue up your scraper and get me an archive of whatever page I'm looking at. Save it to, uh, a folder... and give it the title of 'Dead People Socials,' that's a placeholder."

"Understood, sir!" The rabbit bounced again, eager to please. "Making a folder titled 'Dead People Socials That's A Placeholder!"

He pinched his nose and manually corrected the folder title. "There. Put the archives in there, please?"

He sat there in silence, feeling a headache coming on. He almost felt tempted to call Sakuya again, to see how she was doing. But his own curiosity was getting the better of him. He started digging up social media on his own. There were lists of names, but most were siloed to each individual. Data analysis wasn't his forte, but he figured he could hand the spreadsheet off to one of his buddies and see what they could come up with. The boilerplate- of funerals, police statements, and all the tragic accoutrements of untimely death- it didn't faze him. They were long passed, and really, it was more of a curiosity for him to look into it.

After all, it was just buggy software, right? Bobby reckoned it must have been that. He felt his eyes start to droop. He checked the clock again, it was nearly 10:00pm, the sun had long since set. Only the light from his devices illuminated his room. It was past time for him to turn in for the night.

He was just about to call it for the night when his assistant dashed back into view, holding the end of a receiver. Simultaneously, his phone clattered and vibrated. It played a patriotic tune. "A call from Sakuya, sir. What would you like to do?"

The cigarette he was about to light ended up back in the pack. "Put her on speaker phone."

"Understood." The rabbit picked up the phone, then puffed away again. The line broke into a bit of background noise, Sakuya's soft breathing on the other end. 

A pregnant pause elapsed.

 "Ah, are you there, Bobby?"

"Hey hey, Miss Watanabe. I got caught up doing some reading." He tapped his lighter on the dark wood desk. "These are some weird accidents going on with these cabs. No common manufacturer, victims, or circumstance. How odd is that?"

"It sounds very strange. I can't get you time with Rory, unfortunately. He's in Ohio, of all places." Sakuya paused. "But his daughter is available. I have her details for you. She says she has plenty of time for a meeting in person tomorrow."

"Makes sense, her husband was killed by one of these things," Bobby responded. A notification popped up, a short text with a phone number and a name: Freyja Smith. "That's it? Thanks, Sakuya. Go ahead and send it over. So I suppose that makes us even for this month, right?"

Her laugh rang inside his head. "I'm not the one keeping score! Don't worry about it." His phone gave a beep for receiving a text message. "There. You should have it. Let me know how things go, alright?"

"Confidentiality, ma'am." He had to remind her. "You have a good night- wait, actually, one las thing."

"You- hm?" She waited for him to respond.

Bobby racked his brain for the name of the young elevator attendant. Harakiri, Harris, Harvey... "What's the kid's name, what's his name, I forgot, you uh, how's those wedding plans coming along for that fella in your company? Hika, his name was Hika-something."

"Hikaru? Oh, I'm flying out soon to get his wife a gift! How did you know about that?"

He snickered. "I asked the kid. Hey, can you bring me back some souvenirs?" Bobby smirked. "I didn't get anything too nice last time I was in Okinawa, something like fifty years ago."

"I'll think about it! If that's all, Bobby, good night!"

"Night!" He reached for his phone to hang up, but the line cut short. He shrugged and dialed the next number he saw. Almost immediately she picked up.

"Hi, is this-" she sounded quite tired, long day at work most likely "-is this Mister Blackbird? The man that Sakuya said would be calling?"

"Yes ma'am. You can just call me Blackbird. If you're free tomorrow, I'd like to speak with you on behalf of another client of mine." He cleared his throat. "It's about the lawsuit you're filing. I hear you're looking for help anywhere you can get it."

"You can say that. What did you have in mind?"

"Well let's just say I have a little offer I want to make to you, on behalf of one of my clients. You got the call from Miss Watanabe, right? Think you and I can set up an appointment soon?"

"I... think so."