Free Transhuman by T. K. F. Weisskopf Mark L. Van Name

it."
    "They're all good at it." It was true. The sophistication and extent of the national surveillance network are such that very few fugitives stay at large for very long. Those that do know what they're doing, know how to fool the recognition systems, know how to move through the economy without leaving a transaction trail, know how to trick the databases into coming to the wrong conclusions. None of these are difficult skills to master, but there are a lot of them and they require ceaseless vigilance. A single mistake is all it takes to bring a runner into custody. My job is to find those mistakes. I am the latest weapon in the law enforcement arsenal, able, in my digital form, to handle far more channels of information than any flesh-and-blood investigator, able to sort through that information far faster than any human could. I am an experiment, a pilot project, a required enabling technology for those who want to extend the security state into every nook and cranny of private life. I have no interest in the politics of that decision, no opinion on its ethical balance. Nevertheless, the truth is that without my success the question is moot. The problem is not the installation of cameras in every bedroom; that requires only sufficient cameras. The problem is people. Software systems can listen for keywords, can recognize the gross acts of violent crime, but people are far more subtle than keyword lists and mo-cap profiles. Ultimately it is people who must watch, must listen, must make a judgment as to what is occurring. There are already more cameras in this nation than citizens, every last one recording all day, every day. Of necessity most of what they record goes unseen. There are simply not enough people to do all the watching the surveillance advocates would like to see done.
    And so I came into being, the Frankensteinian result of a fusion of computer science and medicine and a dozen other disciplines, spearheaded by Dr. Gennifer Quentin. My success will end the problem posed by too many cameras and not enough watchers. If I am successful I can be duplicated as many times as are necessary. I can exist as a virtual army, unsleeping, unblinking, standing guard in the darkness to ensure the safety of our nation. My soul, such as it is, resides on a dedicated distributed processor network in the basement of the Quinlan Center on the Loyola University campus, but my awareness is citywide. The technology to scan a living brain at the subcellular level has existed for a decade, though the X-ray dose required to resolve such detail is lethal to the subject. The computing capacity required to house a fully functional brain image built from such a scan is now commonplace. What was lacking for many years was ethics committee approval for the experiment, a mad scientist dream that raised nightmares in the common folk. It was only when Gennifer proposed that a digital mind might be used to enhance surveillance systems that approval was finally forthcoming, forced upon the ethics committee from a very great height indeed. There were protests, and resignations, and then there was me. Loyola was founded a Jesuit school, a century and a half ago, and I doubt those old priests ever dreamed that their efforts would one day give life to the dead.
    I went back to looking at faces, comparing them, weighing their circumstances, considering where the system had seen them before. I found none suspicious enough to warrant follow-up, though a few earned the second glance that I had given Mitch Cohan. And then, with the predictable punctuality of a commuter train, I got a high-priority alert from a camera at the Lake L station. I switched to it and saw my quarry, walking briskly to transfer to the Blue Line. I immediately sent a message to the CPD
    dispatcher, throwing up a split screen of Mitch Cohan's particulars, and the video from the station camera. My communication with the dispatcher is strictly one-way, I'm too big a secret for it to