The Last Firewall (12 page)

Their antique manual drive car now exceeded the speed of traffic. The other self-driving cars automatically gave way, so Mike barreled down the center of the road. The hovercraft followed them, driving a sloppy path, the dynamics of a vehicle relying on air rather than ground friction.

Leon, desperate to do something, researched evasive driving maneuvers online. “Do this!” he screamed, throwing up a learning diagram in front of Mike’s field of vision. The hover was less than a hundred feet behind them. The front bumper appeared impossibly wide, square and massive.

Mike nodded, peered at the diagram for a second, then stomped on the emergency brake, and twisted the wheel to the left a quarter of a turn. The Caddy’s rear wheels lost traction, and the car spun to the left. They turned 180 degrees and slid backwards into the center grassy median. Halfway through, Mike released the brake and fought the steering wheel to arrest their rotation.

The hovercraft followed them off the highway into the median, but turned too slow. Leon watched the hovercraft pass by, the Caddy going backwards at about eighty, the hovercraft forward at one-fifty. A flash of the driver and passenger of the hovercraft, and then the hover zoomed up the opposite embankment, its cushion of air sending it airborne, over the oncoming lanes and off the far side of the freeway.

Mike wrestled with the steering and brakes, bringing them to a halt in the middle of the sunken grassy median in a cloud of dust. His hands shook as he took shallow breaths.

“We have to keep going,” Leon said. “We can’t stop. The police will come. They took photos of us, and they could have uploaded them, and then more people will come looking for us.”

Mike nodded. “You’re right. Just give me a second.” He leaned back in the seat, still gripping the wheel, but took slower, deeper breaths. “I liked it better when ELOPe did the driving.”

Leon looked at the older man, and then down at his own shaking hands. “Want me to drive?”

“Yes, but no. You haven’t had enough practice. I’ll do it.” He put the transmission in drive and pulled back onto the highway.

They’d gone two thousand feet when they passed the spot where the hovercraft had flown off the road. A section of guardrail was torn away, and the hovercraft appeared to have gone into a marshy grove of trees. A small trickle of smoke gave away the location, but nothing else was visible.

Mike slowly brought the Caddy back up to one hundred and ten. “We can’t stay on this road. If they let anyone else know, they’ll be looking for us. You research alternate routes, OK?”

Leon got to work, then stared straight up. “They’ll find us with the OpenDrone network. If they have a picture of the car, even a description, the image recognition algorithms will pick us out.” He knew he’d never spot the autonomous vehicles flying at fifty thousand feet, but he couldn’t help scanning the sky.

The drone network’s data was open to anyone who contributed an autonomous flying observation platform to cover a patch of territory; a mix of hobbyists, commercial interests, and curious AI. Useful for anything from analyzing crop cover to traffic jams to crimes, the network could be used against them once trackers knew Mike and Leon’s vehicle. There couldn’t be that many ’71 Cadillac convertibles on the road.

Mike couldn’t help checking the atmosphere for the drones, too. “Duct tape,” Mike said. “We can cover the edges and corners of the car, and it will make the shape look different from the air.”

Leon nodded. Mike always had an answer.

20

O
N THE BUS
,
C
AT WENT THROUGH
her shopping bag and put everything that would fit into her backpack. The rest she put into a cheap supermarket bag to avoid advertising a new source of wealth. She couldn’t avoid the clothes she was wearing, but nothing she’d chosen was flashy. She’d bought new jeans and a few T-shirts to replace what she’d traded away and real hair dye to replace the temporary beet juice.

The most expensive thing she’d bought was a waist-length black jacket at the military surplus store. It was the real deal: shock-stiffening carbon nanotube mesh. She’d seen the jacket and only half wanted it because it was the hottest thing around. It was also bulletproof and knife proof, and given her current lifestyle she might just need that protection.

If it hadn’t been copied a thousand times over by every clothing designer, the jacket would have been too flashy. Instead, it looked like a cheap imitation of itself.

At home, Cat put her clothes away. She carefully set up her new toiletries in the bathroom and left the hair dye out on the sink. She was done selling diamonds for now, having sold eight over the course of two days. She was ready for another identity change.

She pulled on the cheap plastic gloves from the black hair dye kit, then mixed the dye and fixer. Her short bob took only a minute to color, and then she sat on the edge of the tub while it set. She pulled out the nail kit and pressed fake black nails over her real ones. The nanites waited until she had fixed the nail in place and hit the ultrasonic fob and then with a faint pop, they permanently adhered to her nail.

The world was in a heap of trouble if the first wide-scale, commercially successful, and legal application of nanotechnology was for fake nails. She held her fingers out. They looked good, right down to the fake blemishes and chips.

Her implant timer went off, so she hopped into the shower and rinsed out the dye. Afterwards she dressed in new clothes from underwear to outerwear, feeling rich and pampered. She looked at the T-shirt writing in the mirror: Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script. She wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but she liked the sound of it. For a moment she flashed back a few weeks to normal life at home, when her biggest problem had been Sarah sleeping with whatever guy she brought home. The thought made her realize how lonely she was. She should be modeling her new clothes to Maggie and Sarah, not by herself in a crappy room.

She couldn’t see her friends, but she’d had enough with hiding in her apartment. She needed to get out and go hit a club now that she could afford a drink. She looked at the bright side: if she met a guy tonight, there’d be no Sarah to worry about. She grabbed her new jacket and left her room, heading upstairs to the third floor. Ms. Garcia cut hair out of her apartment. Cat knocked on the door, and a small boy opened the door and then ran away. “Hello?” Cat called out.

Ms. Garcia came to the door, ushered Cat into her kitchen, and set her down in a chair in the middle of the tile floor. For the next twenty minutes Cat listened to the snip, snip of the scissors and watched her hair fall in small locks down to the floor, while Ms. Garcia chatted amicably in Spanish. Cat understood less than one word in ten, but she smiled and nodded agreeably. When Ms. Garcia was done, Cat’s newly black hair lay flat against her head in a short, punk pixie style, changing the shape of her head. Cat smiled at her reflection in the mirror and handed Ms. Garcia $100 in shrink wrapped payment cards. On the fringe of society, where there could be no electronic trail, the payment cards had to remain in their original EMF-proof wrappers to guarantee their face value.

Cat strode out of the building, feeling happy and carefree for the first time in weeks. It was time for a celebration.

Two hours later she found herself in the third club of the evening on Sunset Boulevard. The first two clubs she’d tried had been too trendy, the people trying too hard for her to enjoy them. Growing up in Portland, it was hard to come to terms with the level of pretentiousness she found in Los Angeles.

Now she was enjoying a whiskey and absinthe on the upper floor of the club while a neo-goth band downstairs played old covers. The sweaty faces that came up the double wide staircase from the dance floor for drinks at the bar brought a smile to Cat’s face. They were conformists just as much as the people in the other clubs, just with a different standard of beauty.

The guy who’d bought her a drink, still standing there talking about himself, interpreted the smile as directed to him. He smiled back and moved in closer.

“There was a girl down there that was waving to you,” Cat yelled over the music. He glanced back doubtfully. “She was right there. Blue hair.” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the staircase, and as quick as that, the guy was gone.

It was less than a minute before another guy stepped up to the bar. Dressed in a T-shirt and black fatigue pants, he had dark hair and muscled arms. He looked her up and down, then his eyes fell on her glass. “What are you drinking?”

“Absinthe and whiskey.” She liked his arms. He looked like he did construction work.

He ordered her another from the bartender by simply pointing at her drink, and held up two fingers. She tossed back the rest of her drink and slid the glass across to the bartender.

“You trying to get away already?” he said.

“Just making room.” She smiled at him.

“The first cocktail was absinthe, whiskey, bitters, and sugar. In New Orleans. Two hundred years ago.” He looked pleased with his knowledge.

“Cool.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Picking up guys. You?”

“I guessed that. Otherwise you’d be downstairs. I meant, what are you doing here, at this place? Neo-goths don’t seem your type. I like the jacket and the haircut, but it seems like you’re just slumming.”

“I like their standard of beauty.” She took a sip of her just-arrived drink. She looked at his eyes then followed the line of his face down to his lips. Dark hair, darker clothes, and insightful. Her skin tingled. “Come with me.” She stood up and carried her glass with her. He followed her out the fire exit, onto a metal balcony. It was thirty degrees cooler and half as loud outside.

“What do you do?” she asked him.

“I pick up girls in bars who don’t belong there.”

She smiled and waited.

“Does it matter?” he asked. “I don’t know what you do, and I don’t need to.”

She shook her head. No, she didn’t want to know, and she didn’t want him to ask, and she couldn’t tell if she did.

She leaned in and kissed him. His face was pleasantly rough, and he smelled slightly of machine oil. A mechanic then, for cars or robots. He might have been Mexican, then again, maybe not. He kissed her back, his arms strong where he held her. Cat felt a flutter inside, and traced his collarbone with one finger.

He said, “Let’s go to your place.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have a place,” she lied. “What about you?”

“I can’t use my place.”

Cat remembered she had money now. “I can get us a room.” She smiled at him, hot despite the cool night air.

“OK,” he said, “but I want to tie you up.”

She laughed and grabbed his hand. “Bring it on, baby.”

21

F
ROM MEMPHIS
, M
IKE AND
L
EON
took I-55 south, obsessively watching the rearview mirror and the cars around them. Fearful after the encounter with the hovercraft, they couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone was watching them. Self-driving cars traveled in packs for fuel efficiency, so they carefully checked out anyone traveling alone.

A tense but uneventful hour passed until they turned off the Interstate at US-82, to head west across Mississippi toward Arkansas. Leon breathed in relief at the blissfully empty two-lane highway. Mike pulled onto the shoulder and rubbed his eyes. “Time for you to drive.”

They got out of the car and took a minute to stretch. To the right, a lone farmhouse stood, the only structure as far as they could see on the open grassland. To the left, the landscape alternated between stands of short trees and more grass.

“Do you think we lost them?” Leon asked. He couldn’t stop thinking about the hovercraft and the angry, eager expression on the driver’s face

“We haven’t seen anyone following us,” Mike said. “We’re off the main route, there’s nothing to track on our car, and we’re keeping our IDs anonymous. I think we’ll be OK.”

“We still have ten hours to go.” Leon studied the road they’d just come down.

“Less if we keep up this speed.”

Leon climbed into the car and clenched the wheel. He had a total of six hours driving experience, all of them on this trip. He looked over at Mike, who was already leaning back with his eyes closed. He hesitantly put the big car in drive. The motor whined until they hit forty, then wind noise drowned out everything else. He stepped harder on the accelerator until the big car reached seventy. Jaw clenched and muscles taught with nerves, he wondered how Mike had been able to drive as fast as he did.

An hour later, Leon passed through Greenville, then crossed the Mississippi, flowing brown and muddy. When they cleared the city and the road opened up again, he gradually accelerated to eighty and then ninety. The wind roar increased, if such a thing was possible, but the convertible just floated down the road. Once in a while a car would pass in the opposite direction, a blur of color that rocked the Caddy sideways with the rush of displaced air. Slowly he relaxed.

He drove west through El Dorado, then south toward Junction City. By the time he crossed into Louisiana, he had one hand on the wheel while he switched stations on the antique radio, picking up pirate broadcasts on the disused frequencies. Leon glanced over and saw Mike had woken up.

“It’s amazing what they could do without electronics.” Leon yelled over the clamor of wind and stereo. “How do these buttons change the station?”

“When I was a kid,” Mike said, “my mom would leave me in the car when she went into a store. Every time she’d say, ‘don’t play with the radio’. As soon as she left, naturally I’d start pulling the buttons in and out, and then—”

Mike had his head craned around. Leon checked the rearview mirror, spotting a ground car in the distance. As he watched, the car grew larger. He looked down at the speedometer. He pushed down on the accelerator, bringing the car up to ninety-five.