by Kate Moretti
As an added irony, she notes there are no windows in this part of the spaceport. Being so much closer to the sun, she is curious about how it looks. But floor-to-ceiling displays and indirect overhead LEDs chaperone the passengers through the walkways. Most of them show advertisements for services or planetside entertainments. A local bungee adventure service proclaims, “Experience full Earth gravity! Come take the plunge!” Others cycle through info-graphics outlining local rules and regulations restricting what can be transported between worlds. The last display proclaims the local time and temperature with a warning that the outside temperature has just crested seventy degrees Celsius.
The hallway funnels travelers into a security checkpoint. An’s anxiety is triggered again. Dozens of uniformed guards, all of them armed, swarm around the room. Some stand by the perimeter, watching travelers, while others occupy plasteel desks with clear bullet shields. The history of Earth’s wars is well known to her, but seeing this in person is breathtaking.
How do they live like this? An wonders. Constant surveillance and total control. An is grateful, suddenly, for the freedom offered to her back home.
As An reaches the desk, the Earth Transworld Security officer requests that she disable her identity surrogate. Initially, she is surprised that he even knows, but she rationalizes that signal sweepers must be part of the surveillance. He tells her that surrogate technology is disallowed in the spaceport and in most Earth municipalities.
“No privacy is guaranteed on Earth,” he says. “Especially in America.”
She nods to the officer and removes the veil from her travel suit. This is one of many contingencies her research has prepared her for. It would be simple to disable the surrogate and show her birth face, but it would be recorded and transmitted across the globe in a microsecond. Every camera and system would then hold her likeness and index her location, her habits, her purchases. She would be categorized and filed. Alone, it doesn’t sound so bad, but the politics of this region are different than those on her home. The assumptions derived from that data could be dangerous to her. Instead, she taps the sequence that enables auxiliary mode for her surrogate. The system flickers, as though it is shutting down, and her surrogate replaces its square blank face with the face of a twentysomething woman of indeterminate ethnic background; in reality, An is only sixteen.
The auxiliary mod relies on different technology and should bypass the sweepers. She is tense for a moment while she waits, then the official points to the scanner. An nods and takes off her glove. Inside the meat of her palm is a forged identity chip that registers her as Wei Mina, a twenty-three-year-old medical sciences student with a provisional planetary pass for education and research. She waves her hand over the scanner, and it beeps in acknowledgement. The official looks at his screen and at her face then waves her toward a large gateway with several lines of people.
Through the gateway, another officer stands before a large battery of scanners. An recognizes the tech stealers from pictures she has seen in books. She fumbles around on her personal access device for a moment and presents the officer with her offworld citizenship waiver, exempting her from the scan. The ETS officer narrows his eyes at her, and her identity surrogate stares at him blankly.
Technology developed outside of the Earth commonwealth is protected, just as Earth’s technology is. After hours of memorizing regulations, An knows she can’t be forced into the tech stealers. She has her advocate’s information ready for quick access, just in case. But, in the end, the officer waves her to a line that circumvents the scanners and funnels her toward a line of doors where people enter one at a time.
As her turn arrives, she enters a small room, and the door closes behind her. Once she’s locked inside, a camera focuses on her, and a kiosk begins to ask her questions about her citizenship, her luggage, and her reasons for coming onworld. An answers them blandly, knowing that the facial recognition software and iris scans will flag biological evidence of deceit for manual examination.
“I am here for a business conference,” the voice on her identity surrogate supplies. “The Transworld Coalition for Medical Technologists.” This is a lie, but to say she was going to the hacker conference would flag her automatically.
The Medical Technologists summit does exist, however, and is being hosted in her hotel. She’s even registered for it. An has a nervous moment, wondering whether the money she paid for the identity surrogate software is worth it. The kiosk asks her the same questions again and again, forcing her to repeat some of her answers and clarify them, reminding her with pedantic attention that deceit is punishable by the laws of Earth and America, where the penalties include incarceration, involuntary data extraction, and exile.
In the end, there is no alarm from the kiosk. The surrogate has paid for itself. A second door opens, allowing her to exit into the Spaceport proper. As she steps out of the small room, the fist that has been clenching her heart loosens a tiny bit. But An’s frustration about the bureaucracy and the general injustice that people are treated this way remains.
This is their choice. Their rules, which they have agreed upon as a people. You cannot change this. Societies and people only change from within. It is not your fight, she repeats to herself as a mantra. Just follow and then go home.
Outside the booth, a conveyor belt presents her with her luggage. The travel lock tamper seal has been triggered, rendering all of her electronics suspect. An sighs, removing her drop kit and putting it in her bodystrapped carryall.
In the main terminal, signs above the walkways give directions and highlight local regulations. Periodic multilingual announcements force the issues audibly and set An’s teeth on edge. One announcement admonishes, “Set ident to transmit if veiled.” There are so many, she loses count of them. Pausing at a directory, she looks up the storefront she wants and sets herself a waypoint.
As she walks, she is struck by how small the stores are and by how few are manned by people instead of kiosks. Even the restaurants are mainly dispensaries with multiselect menus, credit swipers, and slots to dispense food. There is a vending machine that sells computers and another that rents cars and hotel accommodations. One kiosk is labeled, “Social counseling, 4500 credits per minute.”
After a bit, An reaches her waypoint and rolls her travel cases into the pawn shop. Inside, she’s surprised to find an attendant.
“Can I help you?” the young man asks. He has perfectly sculpted features, either genetically selected or surrogate enhanced; An can’t tell. To her, his features look plastic, like a mannequin’s. But the ads place his features in the center of idealized attractiveness. “I would like to sell my travel cases,” An says.
“Contents and cases, or cases only?”
“All of it. I need to cash in for American currency.”
“Place them on the scanner, please.” The clerk gestures to a conveyor belt, and An complies. After a moment, the clerk points to a display. “Is this inventory accurate for what you want to sell?”
An reviews the list for anything she wants to keep and decides there is little she can trust, other than the clothes in her drop kit. She looks at the amount at the bottom and nods. “That looks good.”
The clerk offers her the identity scanner plate, and once again, she waves her ungloved palm over it to authorize the transfer to her Earth account.
Now unencumbered, An travels to the basement, where the taxis wait. At the fringe of Outside, dozens of people in fullsuits stand in queue, waiting. Most of them are veiled, so An follows suit. The radiation isn’t of particular concern to her, but it is one justification for public privacy the governments can’t forbid. The reminder of continued surveillance feels eerie and unsettling. A sense of claustrophobia that has nothing to do with the proximity of the walls settles on her. Not my monkey, not my circus, An thinks to herself.
An watches a couple at the front of
the line choose Lower Vegas as their destination. The most expensive accommodations and entertainments are in Lower Vegas. The best way for rich and paranoid tourists to avoid the heat and the radiation is in the extensive underground compounds. An experiences a frisson of amusement as the taxi they enter flashes “Red Canyon” on the rear destination marquee as it departs from the port. It looks like the hackers are here.
An selects “manual destination” and approaches the cab. The door won’t open. An remembers that her veil is on and that her identity is not transmitting. She slides her hand out of her glove again and touches it to the handle. The door unlocks. Inside, she tells the car to take her to Upper Vegas in NewTown and forces map confirmation of the route.
While she waits, she searches her cached local maps for personal transit rentals near her hotel, knowing her searches will not be centrally logged. Once she has the route memorized, she sets up waypoints to visit that are within the range of a standard battery charge. The waypoints are data caches, off-net nodes storing free data. Each one has a protocol of access, she has carefully prepared herself for beforehand. An thinks about what she is planning to do, knowing that she could be denied access to leave the planet. Some types of caching are legal, and data tourism is well-known. But acquiring data that isn’t tainted or tracked is highly illegal. Scripting or accessing systems outside of public net requires a special license on Earth. The licenses are very expensive to forge and nearly impossible to get unless you work for a government or private employer. Even then, most of the licenses are limited to one or two organizational networks. And Earth governments are more likely to put aliens in prison indefinitely than to spend time on a trial.
She thought back on the last conversation she had with her friend Seven before leaving. “You should set up a deadman’s transmission,” Seven told her. “If you don’t check in once an hour or per day or whatever, it beacons.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” An asked. “I could fire something off if someone intercepts me.”
“Not with all the jammers. They intercept all transmissions on Earth.”
“So what’s stopping them from intercepting my deadman check-in and replaying it?”
“You send them to me, your dear old mother. Send me pictures of your trip, status updates, whatever.”
“So you’re my deadman switch?” An laughed.
“Don’t laugh. On never came back, and that was only for a vacation. You’re trying to sneak into the largest hacker conference on Earth.”
An looks out the window at the desert, takes a picture, and forwards it quickly to Seven. “Just got to Earth. It’s insanely hot here. I can’t believe the climate scientists haven’t done something about it.” An very carefully avoids mention of anything related to technology to avoid having her message flagged.
An directs the cab first to a grocery then to the hardware store, and she cashes in the credits from her luggage sale.
At the hotel, An manages to check in without removing her veil. The Medtech conference is in one of the nicer hotels left above ground, and apparently, those who can pay for it can still expect some degree of privacy. In her room, she constructs a basic sweeper and sweeps for surveillance. Satisfied, she sets up the rest of her personal security measures. Then she waits for sunset.
Once the sun sets, she takes a picture through her hotel room window, this time of the sun setting over the city, and sends another message to Seven. “The sunsets are yellower here. I don’t think I could ever get used to this. There’s so much space.”
She sets her identity surrogate to something she hopes will be neutral. It’s a composite generated from random footage of tourists over the last three weeks in the city. She exits her room veiled and changes in a busy public restroom before walking to the scooter rental booth and paying in cash. The first waypoint only requires a driveby. She has configured her personal access device to automatically find the signal, connect, and satisfy the connection protocols. The dump of all the data and the upload will take only a few moments.
She drives her scooter to the old neon sign museum plaza and rides around looking at each of the signs, all within connection range of the device. But in the plaza and along each of the streets, she is struck by the hundreds, if not thousands, of homeless people. An makes it into a game to find a stretch of wall that is unoccupied by squatters, and she cannot find many. As the sun has set, they have all come out, all of them too poor to afford fullsuits, all of them sick. Their moans and groans are disconcerting. Some have great oozing sores. Others twitch with the involuntary tic of fried nerves.
An wants to ask them why they don’t go to doctors, but she sees the answer in the doorway of a shelter: “Know the symptoms and get help! Symptoms to watch for: tremors, excessive clumsiness, blurred vision, sores that do not heal, difficulty with memory or confusion accompanied by chills and stomach pains. If you or anyone you know has experienced these symptoms, you may be suffering from Halen’s Syndrome. There is no cure for Halen’s Syndrome, but there is help! Clinic hours on Monday through Thursday at these locations…”
As she travels to the second waypoint, An accesses her local database for information about the disease, hoping it is not contagious. “Also called Earth Radiation Syndrome, Halen’s Syndrome or simply ‘the Syndrome.’ Sufferers have a variety of symptoms. No uniform combination of symptoms exists, although most report gastrointestinal distress, sores that do not heal, and some form of neurological impairment. In most cases, the Syndrome is progressive, causing death due to secondary ailments caused by damaged immunological response.
“Therapies such as blood, plasma, and marrow transplants have been successful in mitigating the effects. However, it returns over time and is worsened by age. There is no cure for the Syndrome. Onset for most occurs by the age of thirty, although cases as young as five and as old as sixty have been reported. Physicians remain unclear about the underlying cause, but the condition is not considered to be transferred from person to person. The prevailing theory is that the Syndrome is the result of a genetic mutation due to increased radiation exposure, especially among poorer populations, that has resulted in endocrine failure, causing general malfunction of the immune system.”
I wish I could help these people, An thinks. But if thousands of doctors haven’t… The thought leaves her pensive as she goes.
The second waypoint is a physical drop. She goes to a hotdog seller in front of the husk of Caesar’s Palace and buys a hotdog. As she cruises along, she pauses near a juggler and a costumed anime character. She tips the juggler, slipping a microdrive into his bucket. Then she takes a photo with the anime girl and gives the hotdog to a homeless woman with her child nearby. Farther along, An stops by the rail of a fountain and waits with others for the next show to begin. As she waits, she feels the brush pass and only barely remembers not to react.
After the show, she continues to the final waypoint near the hacker conference hotel. This cache is inside the parking deck connecting two hotels. An parks her scooter, locks it, and enters the southwest elevator. Most of the cars are selfdriving ones, with the deck being simple storage for the taxi services that rent the cars, but here and there are private vehicles. On the third floor, where the entrances to the casinos are, An spots the small, handsized box attached to a beam over the security camera near the doorway. Ballsy, An thinks.
She forces her phone to ring with the specific ringtone that will trigger the sonic download and pretends to take a call while payloads transfer between the cache and her PAD. Then she hangs up, enters the casino, and gambles for a few hours.
After she turns in the scooter, she walks to the mall underneath her hotel and uses a forged credit chip to rent a coffin for the night. She climbs in, middles the camera feed, and pretends to sleep. She loops the feed, changes back to her fullsuit, and postdates the timestamp on her exit for the morning. The facility came
ras are on the same network, so it’s easy for her to do the same with her exit from the facility.
Back in her room, she examines her room for compromise then breaks out the data caches. On the first one, An finds several dozen academic papers and queues a digital currency transfer to their accounts. It’s getting rarer to find academicians willing to circumvent the public publishing requirements, and she knows their crippling debt makes anonymous donations the only motivation for them to continue doing so. There are also some system schematics for building climate controls and elevator code, one paper about exploiting identity transmissions, and several gigs of poetry, prose, and novels. Most of it is pirated and available elsewhere; some of it’s original.
The second drop is in the micro-drive. This one has a cookbook containing recipes from every Earth ethnic group, a guide for constructing weapons and survival tools from common items available at transport stations, a security analysis of six industrial-grade locking systems, and hundreds of general-purpose scripts, including backdoors, trojans, and ordinary data parsers.
The third drop An originally thinks is corrupted, but the pattern is not random enough, and there is so much data it is plausible she can recover most of it if it is corrupted. The data is not a format she has seen before, and none of her parsers understand it. She works with it for a few hours, but ultimately decides it’s a puzzle she cannot solve alone. Before she goes to bed, she sends Seven another message with pictures of the museum.
“Bedtime here. I love you, Mom.”
The next day, she registers for the MedTech conference and attends the reception and the first day of talks. She sends Seven a couple of messages about how dull the doctors are and how the food is indulgently fatty, and she sends out a small program to seed her identity surrogate’s likeness and her badge registration in the various conference monitoring systems for the next several days of the conference.