by Victor Allen
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The overheard conversation might have given a lesser man a moment of reflection, but JB didn’t waver. His brow was smooth and dry, his eyes focused. Too much had been set in motion to turn back now.
He set the hot keys for ‘left control/delete’ to limit the possibility of an accidental execution. He loaded the macro, which, in days long gone, might have been called a batch file. It was only a few lines of code, its real magic hiding in the embedded instruction set sleeping in the cache of the target vehicle’s CPU. It was a simple tweak of the same instruction set that had been encoded in new vehicles at the request of lenders that allowed a vehicle to be disabled by a remote radio signal if payments were missed. All it would take to wake it up was a simple combination of keystrokes. The text box flashed on the screen, a flashing ‘Execute’ blinking calmly within its orderly rectangle.
The arrow shaped vector indicator approached its intersection with the circle of pixels that would trigger a tone for a ‘system event’, a rather doomy phrase that meant that the vector and the nexus had converged. JB took a sip of mineral water and a bite of his sandwich before setting them to the side, wanting no accidental spills or falling morsels to botch anything. His fingers hovered over the left control and delete keys. His heart ticked like a calm metronome, his hands did not tremble. The blinking, green vector steadily edged towards its fateful tryst with the blue nexus. Seconds passed and the two points converged, the green of the moving vector and the blue of the nexus now a single Bull’s Eye of static red. A high pitched tone beeped and JB pressed the left control and delete keys. The flashing ‘Execute’ changed to a sedate and anticlimactic ‘Done’. The tone went mute and JB sat back to wait. It wouldn’t be long.