Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (8 page)

I pulled out a phone—who still uses handheld phones?—and I told it to call Ramirez.

“I’m sorry,” my phone said. “I couldn’t understand your request.”

Fucking thing still didn’t like my accent.

“Ramirez,” I told it. “There’re only six numbers in my phone. Only one of them starts with R. Fucking call Ramirez, Siri.”

“Processing.”

It said it was processing but I think it just said that to be nice. I’m glad my phone is nice to me.

“I’m sorry,” it said. “I couldn’t understand your request.”

“Call R-A-M-I-R-E-Z.”

No processing delay. It rang and she answered.

“What do you want, Vasyl?”

I could never read her tone of voice. Maybe I’d caught her at a bad time. Maybe she was still mad at me about May Day. Maybe she was tired. People who aren’t me seem to just kind of pick up information like that when they talk to people. I don’t think they even second-guess themselves. It seems like magic to me.

“I’m looking for work,” I said.

“Of course you are,” she replied.

There’s some irony to that. Work was the last thing I wanted. But I was walking east, away from the water and the dead bastions of industry. I was walking towards work.

“I’ll meet you,” she told me, and hung up.

A random helicopter went overhead and my eyes grew wide and wild. There was a dumpster, I could throw the phone in there. Not secure enough. It was two blocks to the river, I could sprint, probably get the worst evidence into the water before I surrendered. But no searchlight lit me up from the dark heavens and the sounds of the rotors faded from the world before the adrenaline cleared my system.

I picked up the pace.

I got to the corner of Grand and Belmont, went under an awning. I took out my phone, called no one, and put it to my ear, started pacing. Fake phone call—you need a reason why you’re just standing around on a street corner or you’ll deal with cops. Cops and I didn’t get along, and I had the warrants to prove it.

Ramirez’s car rolled up, black and glossy in the rain, picking up the dull blue of the streetlights. I climbed in the passenger door. No Ramirez. No driver at all. Typical. It probably wasn’t a slight; it was just efficiency. I closed the door and the car took off up Grand, heading north up past Rosa Parks, then wove into a neighborhood and stopped in front of a house I’d never seen before.

Kids were playing on the block, chasing a glowie, laughing as the ball darted between them with a mind of its own. They laughed harder when one kid tackled the thing on the pavement and another three dog-piled up.

Most of the houses on the street were burned out, and not one of them had a light on in the window. Those kids weren’t from the block, or else they were squatters. Either way, they seemed happy enough.

The house in front of me was blacked out, I realized. The windows were too dark to just be unlit. It was three stories, painted the color of sand, and had an overgrown garden full of lavender and those creepy fucking passionflowers with their alien little stamen or whatever-the-fuck those antennae things are. The whole place was a paint-peeled reminder of the rise and fall of the Portland middle class.

A camera over the door saw my scowling mug and decided to let me in.

“You’ve got face-reg on your fucking door?” I called, when the door closed behind me.

“Good to see you too,” I heard her say.

The house was an empty shell, a dusty showroom. Ramirez was sitting lotus in the dining room, her yoga mat spread out on the hardwood floor.

In the corner, discreet against the moulding, was a matte black box no bigger than my fist. Hair-thin cabling ran out its top and into the ground of a three-prong outlet nearby. If it worked right, that little wire kept the modem from overheating its core and spitting fire-hot bullshit all over the room.

It didn’t even have an indicator light. The best tech doesn’t anymore. The best tech doesn’t want you to even know it’s there.

“Sit down,” she said, indicating the room as a whole. She made eye contact. Or maybe it’s better just to say she looked my direction. I couldn’t see her eyes behind those Readpro FOV contacts and their bright blue glow. And she probably hadn’t bothered to look past the screen that filled her vision.

I sat.

“What kind of work?” she asked.

“Anything,” I said. Then I thought it over. “Anything that’s not on Lightnet or Darknet. Anything I can do direct.”

“You’re still not over it?” she asked.

I could have hit her.

“No,” I told her instead. “I’m still not over it.”

“Maybe you should see somebody,” she told me. “If your anxiety’s so bad it’s keeping you offline, maybe you should do something about it.”

A million answers poured into my head unheeded. I took a few breaths, then picked the only one that hurt to say: “I am.”

Even squatters needed therapy, and mine came from a woman named Helga. She’d worked as a cognitive therapist for three decades before she got laid off and her husband took her savings on a one-way trip to Florida. Motherfucker had got his comeuppance, though, in one of those nightmare storms, and her cash and his corpse had washed out to sea. She moved into a squat a few months later, and we all did what we could to help one another out. Me, I fixed things. Helga, she fixed people.

“Well,” Ramirez said, from her tech-zen holier-than-thou fucking yoga mat on the floor of a stolen house, “let’s get to work.”

She meant well. She was probably even my friend. But people don’t open up in person anymore. Were we really friends if I never read her status updates? If our profiles weren’t linked?

I took out my laptop. It was encrypted to nine hells with layered volumes, but I think what kept it safe is that no one even used the fucking things anymore. No one under thirty remembered how they worked and sure as hell no one of any age spent their time trying to figure out how to break into them—the damn thing still had a CD drive. I couldn’t just move my eyes across the screen to shift its focus, I had to drag a little icon of an arrow around the screen and I had to press buttons on the keyboard. It was tactile. It did non-tactile things, but I could still touch it. I could close it. I could look away from it.

“There’s an exec in Rackman Ltd who’s been leaving a trail of meta that leads right offshore,” Ramirez told me.

Ramirez was a fixer, not a hacker. She kept track of information, things like who needed robbing and where they kept their shit. But she couldn’t get in the proverbial door.

“How much?” I asked.

She answered. Not an insubstantial sum.

It was a simple job. Break into Jonathan Albrecht’s files and then his offshore bank account. Take out two percent. Any more than that and he might decide hiring a hit squad was worth the financial and legal liabilities. If we were lucky, we’d find some blackmail while we were in there, wire it up on a deadman switch so if I stopped breathing, his wife would find out about his affair or, if nothing else, the IRS would find out about his tax dodge. And I’d walk away with $5k for a night’s work. Simple.

Took me all night.

Ramirez did yoga for awhile, murmuring instructions to her contact lens computer while in downward dog and a thousand other poses. She said the names aloud—revolved triangle, pigeon, camel—and presumably got some kind of biofeedback telling her if she was doing them right. The rest of her jabbering was pure business though—checking up on clients and projects and whatever the hell it was she did besides find me yuppies to rob.

I live in a world where some people feel it’s more efficient if they multitask their relaxation with their work.

Ramirez was a squatter because it was cool. She was a criminal because it was fun. Honestly, with her skills and drive and education and upbringing—but minus her criminal record, perhaps—she could have
been
the mark we were about to rob. She could have had his job and his life and his underlings and his investments. But as she told me once, stealing felt a lot more honest when it was illegal.

I was still going hard at Albrecht’s vapor drive when she checked in with me at 2am. Simple jobs aren’t always simple. Ramirez stretched out on the yoga mat and fell asleep.

By 3am I’d gotten his biometrics from the pizza delivery system and was leveraging them against his drive’s encryption. The privacy arms race is amusing. Lock things up with your biometrics, sure. It’s a bad idea, but you’ll do it anyway. Make it so your thumbprint opens your phone. But then one day you want to get into your phone when it’s in the other room, and all you’ve got’s your friend’s computer. So keep your thumbprint online somewhere. What do you lock
that
up with? Another thirty-character passcode? Or maybe your retinal scan? Great. Now where do you keep
that?
For a hacker, it’s a logic puzzle—once you get one clue, you leverage it against the rest.

By 4am I had everything I needed to convince his bank I was him. I set his account to make a series of payments to thirty different bank accounts, each transaction pre-approved. Random timed intervals between the transactions kept them from tripping the bank’s security. Work isn’t so bad.

It was 4:30am when the battering ram slammed against the front door, a bass thud that dropped me into my body from where I’d been lost in the screen.

“Pigs!” Ramirez shouted, going from sleeping to standing as fast as I’d managed to look up from my computer.

We’d lose it all if Albrecht—which is to say, I—didn’t authorize the bizarre series of transactions at the end. I hate it the fucking worst when I want to fucking panic but I can’t. I wanted to cut and run, but if I cut I lost it all and if I ran, well, there wasn’t really anywhere to go.

“Time left?” Ramirez asked.

“Twelve minutes thirty-four,” I said.

The ram hit the door again, and the frame cracked but didn’t buckle. Ramirez must have done more for security than the face-reg camera.

Fuck, the camera.

“What’s the face-reg hooked up to?” I asked.

“Kind of busy right now,” she answered. She was typing away on the bare kitchen counter, pressing keys on an illusory keyboard only she could see.

“Is it fucking hooked up to Lightnet?” I asked.

“Yeah it’s fucking hooked up to Lightnet. You think I got a face-reg database in my pocket?”

The battering ram slammed again, and this time I heard cussing from other side. They’d move to breaching rounds soon, and me without my gas mask.

“You know I’m tagged!” I shouted. 11:36 left.

“There’re here for
you?
” she answered, still typing away.

“There’re from the bank,” I said. “Not the bank we’re robbing, the bank that owns the house. I’m tagged for B&E.”

A shotgun racked outside and I lost it, triggered into memory.

It was May Day, five years back, and we were all lined up, arm-in-arm—undocumented migrants and squatters’ rights activists, all of us riffraff who just refused to disappear or die. I felt powerful, more powerful than I’d ever felt in my life. I felt more powerful in that company than I’d ever been while digging through the personal files of the most powerful men in the world, because that day I was part of something greater than myself.

The police weren’t having it, and they did their best to corral us. But there we were, in unvanquishable number, flooding the downtown streets of Portland, disrupting the easy flow of capital. At least that day, the invisible were visible.

But the police attacked a few hundred of us at the base of the Burnside bridge.

I know what their plan had been, at least from up high, at least officially. I leaked it a few days later. They were supposed to leave us an exit, disperse us with gas and force as necessary.

But they didn’t leave us an exit. The news crews dutifully departed rather than face arrest, and the cops came in with bludgeons and pepperspray. They’d tried a few new toys out on us that day, dazzlers and sticky guns and a goddam make-you-puke cannon, but at the end of it all, nothing beats the raw force of sticks and airborne poison.

And we had our arms linked together, us brave people, and we were nonviolent back then, most of us. A lot can change in five years. People can learn a lot about the nature of power.

Ramirez had been next to me, our elbows locked. On my other side, a woman I’d never met. Fifty years old I’d say. We stared the police down.

A cop came out from the police wall in front of us, took three steps towards me, looked me in the eyes, and raised the barrel of a shotgun, racking it. And I let go. I unlocked my arms and turned my face in fear.

They took the old woman off in handcuffs, and they took me off in handcuffs, and I’ve forgotten that cop’s face but I’ll never forget the barrel of his gun. And maybe I’m lucky Ramirez still works with me, still trusts me at all. I know I don’t trust myself.

The shotgun blast brought me back to the present day, but the door held. Ramirez had done her homework.

Ten minutes, forty-three seconds left on the clock. I went into child pose. I’d never needed child pose as a child. Panic came over me in waves like fever, burning everything from my brain except the thought “I am not okay.”

“I’m sorry about the camera,” Ramirez said, in the bizarre quiet. Whatever she’d been doing, she’d done it, and we didn’t have much to do but wait to see what the fates had in store.

“It happens,” I said.

We waited out the clock in silence. I needed to quit, I decided, during short bouts of lucidity. No more hacking and no more breaking and entering. If I got out of there, I’d never be back. I’d just keep my head down.

I wasn’t okay.

Better to just eat trash—trash was free. Sure, there were too many squatters around Southeast Portland, so I’d have to leave town. Go somewhere where I couldn’t have a community. Maybe Marcellus would come with me. He said he loved me, and he might even mean it, and that might even be enough.

I’d never be okay.

Or the forest. The fires were worse every year, but I wasn’t afraid of death and I wasn’t afraid of fire. I was afraid of police and I was afraid of cages. Trapped in a barricaded house with bank cops outside, I kept myself as calm as I could by thinking about pleasant things, like burning alive in a forest fire.