Kill Process

by William Hertling

  “It’s delicious,” I say. “How can you eat tasteless salad?”

  “I eat salad so I feel light and ethereal. It gives me energy so I can kick butt.”

  Emily is strange sometimes.

  “Database queries can’t be written on rabbit food. I need protein.”

  “That explains the onion rings, then.”

  Looking at the mound of greasy batter, I resolve to eat only half of them.

  “Tell me what Freddie’s doing.”

  She launches into a long explanation of Freddie’s gastrointestinal system which somehow segues into his new vocabulary. Although my kidless coworkers would be bored to tears, I revel in the normalcy of it all.

  * * *

  That night I microwave a burrito when I get home. On occasion, I let myself have a night off between projects, but not often. The anxiety eats at me. On average, eleven women die each day at the hand of a husband or partner. Maybe I can save one.

  Gary is the top candidate for my next target. He’s a banker, barely on Tomo at all except to post the occasional picture of his new BMW or home entertainment system. Pictures come in floods only on vacations, when we receive a long sequence of Helen. Helen at dinner, Helen in the BMW, Helen in a bikini. At Gary’s forty-fifth birthday in London, Helen’s makeup is on thick. I enlarge the photo to see if there’s a bruise underneath. There’s a slight darkening, but I can’t be sure. I look at more photos, wondering if I’m really dying a little bit each time I see one, or if it only feels that way.

  All database queries return results in a particular order, such as alphabetical by name or sorted by age. When someone visits Tomo, they see a sequence of posts in reverse chronological order.

  My custom queries are ordered by potential threat and need for intervention: How likely is he to be abusing her? How likely is she to help herself or obtain help from someone else? There’s only one of me, and so many millions of women.

  The typical domestic violence victim will live with the abuse for two to three years before they seek help, and it usually takes five or more attempts before they finally extract themselves from the relationship. That is, if they can. Seventy-five percent of battered women who are killed by their abusers are murdered when they attempt to leave the relationship.

  This last statistic drives my extreme approach. No sane person wants to go around killing other people, but I explored all the other options. Try to get the woman out, and you might indirectly kill her. Use punitive measures against the abuser, such as ruining their finances or getting them fired, and they’ll take out their anger and frustration on their victim. Expose their abuses in the hopes of getting them arrested, and they might go free, in which case the repercussions fall on the partner. If I knew of anything else that guaranteed results, I’d use it, but I don’t. The outcome of my kill process is deterministic.

  And whatever excuses we might make for them, whatever their own pasts, abusers make a choice to hurt the very people they profess to love: at that point, they forfeit their right to mercy. The fact that our institutions are weak and ineffectual, that they don’t protect the victim, is something we’ve allowed to persist. I won’t.

  Right now, my algorithms tell me it’s very likely Gary’s abusing her, and very unlikely she’s going to self-rescue, at least not in time, not before the danger to her life grows critical.

  Helen doesn’t reply to her mother’s messages, even though they’re connected on Tomo. Helen’s Tomo activity has gone passive; she’s reading without posting. She’s clicked on links her friends shared for domestic abuse hotlines. Many times. Most of them weren’t actually posted by her friends. I inserted them in her stream, visible only to Helen.

  Thanks to the Tomo app permissions on her phone, I have access to her call history. Even with all those clicks on the abuse hotlines, she’s never actually placed the call, at least not from her personal phone. It’s almost certain Gary monitors her phone usage, so if she makes the call, she’d better be ready to go.

  Tomo’s search engine is predictive, like all searches these days. Before Helen ever hits enter, the browser sends up the partial string that’s been entered to see what might match, so we can suggest likely terms in a dropdown list. This data isn’t normally saved as it would overwhelm our logs, however I can turn it on for a given account as I did two weeks ago for Helen and Gary.

  Maybe the most damning piece of evidence is the time Helen typed into the search “how to kill yourself.” She never hit enter, never went on to see all the help the net has to offer on that particular topic. Later the same day, she looked up her mother’s profile eighteen times and her father’s profile twelve. She composed a message to her mom six times, and cancelled each time. She couldn’t send a simple “I miss you,” even though she stared at the text for twenty-three minutes.

  I rest my head on the cool metal case of my laptop, and let the sharp edge bite into my forehead. I focus on the pain and try to still the trembling in my hand.

  I know what it’s like when even suicide doesn’t seem like an escape. It’s possible to become so fucked in the head that you still love the person that does such terrible things to you. These assholes use warped logic and emotions as weapons even the most intelligent person can fall victim to, leaving you believing you’re responsible for the situation. All the while, they’re killing you from the inside, bit by fractured bit.

  Nobody deserves to have their love repaid like that.

  Helen and Gary live in Beaverton, a suburb twenty minutes outside of Portland. This vastly simplifies my ability to take care of Gary.

  * * *

  Finally the day arrives when my preparations are complete. I wake, go to work, put in a full day, then come home. I try to take a nap and fail. Later that night I pop a caffeine pill and get ready to leave.

  I leave my cellphone at home, in front of the television, set to stream Star Wars episodes 4 and 5. The mobile phone runs code to act as a remote control. It will pause and resume the movies at pseudo-random periods to simulate bathroom and snack breaks, at which point it will report accelerator data consistent with those activities. It took two weeks to patch the core OS to make it do what I wanted. It’s an alibi if I need it, but more importantly, it keeps my data profile normalized, so I don’t ever pop up on anyone’s radar in the first place.

  I drive what I think of as my project car, an old Honda Accord, a model I chose because it’s the best-selling car, and therefore as anonymous as a vehicle gets. I take Highway 26, stop for a restroom at a place with no security cameras, and then park in a grocery store lot across the street from a bar, a suitably ambiguous spot to leave a car. I hoof it the last mile to my destination.

  My nylon gym bag hangs from my right shoulder, obscuring my missing arm. I walk through a quiet residential neighborhood, the only real danger encountering a late-night dog walker. I’ve checked all the neighbors ahead of time, know who has dogs and who doesn’t, and what time they usually walk them, and I’ve plotted a path that minimizes the chance of discovery.

  Gary’s and Helen’s next-door neighbors are visiting their daughter in New Mexico right now, according to the geolocation tags in the photos they’re uploading, making their yard a safe harbor. I was tempted to check the property on Street View, but they’ve got logs too, and I don’t want the authorities to find out someone’s been researching that address. I settled for high-level satellite photos. From the abundance of greenery, I figured there’d be enough shrubbery and trees to provide plenty of hiding spots.

  Sure enough, I’m in suburbia. I’m in place by eleven. It’s Thursday night and Gary’s planning a big party for the following night.

  I settle in to wait between a butterfly bush and a small tree. It’s cool out tonight, and the windows are closed, yet I hear their raised voices from time to time. They must be working on last minute preparations for tomorrow’s party, because they’re up far later than the median time of Helen’s last evening Tomo visit.

  My legs grow crampe
d. I resist fidgeting because moving, even a little, would work dirt into the treads of my sneakers and increase the marks I’d leave here in the garden. In much of the world, squatting is a normal resting position, so I stay calm and meditate, and hope my knees hold out.

  Gary and Helen eventually finish their work, and the house grows dark and quiet.

  My stomach jumps into my throat as the last light goes out, my mind replaying the utter dread of my husband climbing into bed next to me. The sound of a man brushing his teeth still makes me sweat. It’s why I make Thomas use the little half bath next to the kitchen before bed. He accepted the demand as another of my many little oddities.

  It takes the average person seven minutes to fall asleep, so I wait thirty, and then carefully rise, one painful inch at a time, my knees screaming all the way. Taking a step backwards, I use a stick in my gloved hand to break up the dirt where I was squatting. It’s not perfect, though my goal is for no one to suspect what has taken place, so they shouldn’t be looking for my footprints. The ground is not wet, so brushing my feet at their doormat should be sufficient to remove the dirt from my shoes.

  At their back door, I reach into a pocket on my bag. Although my Teflon-coated lock picks reduce the amount of forensic evidence left behind, I won’t be needing them tonight. Gary snapped photos of Helen last month at their golf club, and Helen’s keys were clearly visible on the table. Using the digital photographs at their native resolutions, I had enough detail to recreate a three-dimensional model of their house key, which I reproduced on a 3D printer. The height of the rearmost tooth was hard to distinguish in the photo, a problem I solved by printing out multiple keys, one for each possible height of the rear tooth.

  The plain white plastic key gleams faintly in the moonlight. I try the first. It doesn’t want to turn, and I’m afraid to use too much pressure, since the plastic doesn’t possess nearly the strength of a metal key. The second key turns easily enough, and I’m through the door.

  I have half a minute to enter the security code, which Helen helpfully sent to her mother via a Tomo message six months ago. Cursing the audible beeps of the security panel, I enter the code, Gary’s birthday.

  The panel turns green. I’ll need to lock it again on the way out. For the moment I stand motionless by the back door, waiting to see if anyone’s heard anything. My eyes gradually acclimate to the murky darkness, a hallway nightlight providing all the illumination in this part of the house. I wait three minutes, running off the seconds in my mind, suddenly recalling a childhood memory of counting to a hundred on my grandfather’s lap, despite his protests I could never count that high. I remember his strong, safe hands, calloused with years of construction work.

  I memorized the layout as best I could glean from the photos in their Tomo albums. With everything quiet, I head for the kitchen, balancing cautious movement against speed. Although I’m in control of what I do, the longer I take, the greater the impact of a random occurrence screwing up my plans: someone waking, a phone ringing, a loud horn of a passerby.

  I need access to Gary’s car. Such a simple thing, you’d think I could’ve done it at his office or when he was parked on the street; yet a week of tracking his location didn’t turn up anything I could use. He pays for parking at his office, and the lot is busy and covered with surveillance cameras. Breaking the wireless code for the home garage opener is trivial, except that the sound of the door rising in the middle of the night would wake everyone.

  I take the keys off the kitchen counter with my gloved hand and enter the garage. The door closes behind me, weather-trim making a snug fit. The garage has windows in the outside door, so I keep the lights off and hope nothing gives me away as I wait for my eyes to adjust to the glow from the street filtering in.

  The BMW will chirp if I unlock the doors. I’ve spent days researching this problem. I can’t kill the power, because the door lock is electronic and won’t unlock without electricity. The solution is ugly but functional. I hit the trunk unlock, and the lid pops open without a chirp. The thunk of the lock releasing is relatively quiet, although I still hide behind the car and wait until two minutes pass without a sound. Nobody comes.

  I climb into the trunk. One-armed crawling in a trunk is not elegant, but gets me where I need to be. The fold-down seat has a release mechanism in the trunk on this model, so I pull the lever and crawl into the back seat. I try not to think about DNA evidence, because crawling about is not great. Yes, I’m wearing a blue glove pulled over my stump for this. No point in leaving a stump print, since that would narrow things down pretty damn quickly. Of course, if I do things right, no one will suspect anything other than an accident.

  I finally get into the front seat and plug my handheld computer into the car’s diagnostic computer port. I insert the car key, and now the BMW car unlocks silently. The real meat of the matter is so anti-climatic, it barely merits mentioning, but I upload my computer program to the vehicle’s firmware. It’s a small change, not much different from factory firmware, and the odds of it being detected are tiny.

  I exit through the driver’s side door, which now opens silently, then wipe down the seats and return everything to its original configuration. I close up the car, and the only thing I’ve left behind are changed bytes in the car’s computer program.

  * * *

  Gary Broadhurst, Oregon Banker, Killed on Daily Commute

  Portland—Gary Broadhurst, 47, was pronounced dead at the scene when his car ran off the road in the Terwilliger curves section of I-5 on Friday morning. Police blame the fatal accident on driver distraction as phone records show Broadhurst received a phone call seconds prior to the accident during his morning commute to work.

  According to eyewitnesses, Broadhurst veered right as the road curved left, sending him down an embankment into a grove of trees. His vehicle struck a tree head-on.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  MODERN VEHICLES are drive-by-wire. When the driver depresses the brake, the pedal isn’t connected physically to the brake system. It hasn’t worked like that since computers took an active role in cars, modulating brake pressure for ABS, applying differential torque for traction control.

  Instead, a potentiometer measures pressure on the pedal, transmits this measurement to the car’s computer system, which decides how best to apply the brakes given the vehicle speed, traction, and driver intention.

  The software program I copied to Gary’s vehicle computer last night triggered when Gary’s phone rang. It didn’t matter who called, although it was the party caterer in this case, the standard prerecorded reminder they send to all customers on the day of their event. I tweaked their autodialer to call Gary at the exact moment he was on that section of the highway.

  Activating only the right-side brakes was easy. The tricky part was getting the airbag to deploy a quarter of a second after impact. The bruises will puzzle the coroner, yet they’ll still conclude it was an accident. People die when they hit a tree at seventy. It just happens.

  I’m at work when the event occurs, and of course I’m not going to click on the news article when it appears. That would leave a trail. It would take the NSA or better to track an isolated click on a news articles back to me given my defenses, yet I’m still not willing to take that chance. I could find me if I clicked on the article, even if run-of-the-mill police couldn’t.

  Instead I do a few database queries here inside the firewall where I control the logs, find people who shared the article on Tomo, and read the article excepts that are part of their posts. I’ve done the job, and that’s what matters. Helen is free to seek help and rebuild her life now.

  The window I’m reading fades to black and I look up. My manager, Daniel, approaches.

  There’s a fascinating and useful application called ItsPersonal, which uses the webcam to monitor people-shaped blobs approaching, and automatically hides sensitive windows the user designates with a keyboard shortcut.

  Running the original ItsPersonal would
be foolish. The embedded neural network is trained to recognize patterns every time a window is marked sensitive, so that over time it can automatically determine what you want protected. My guess is a future software update will upload that sensitive data to their corporate servers, and the firm will blackmail its twenty million users.

  That’s why I borrowed only their image recognition code, and threw away the rest. Then I cobbled together my own version.

  If you think that’s paranoid, you should see how I route my data connections.

  “Angie,” Daniel says, rapping on my desk for no reason, considering that I’m looking straight at him. “We have a meeting at eleven. I need you there.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Marketing came up with a new privacy-related product, and they’re socializing the idea around the organization.”

  I could puke at the idea of another marketing meeting. Bullshit dished out verbally and by slides. Oh, joy. “You sure you need me there?”

  “You said to include you in any meetings involving data and profiling. You complained about being left out of the data re-architecture meeting.”

  “That was a technical meeting, Daniel. Deciding the structure of the data we store, a fundamental aspect of how we analyze and profile our users. Not a bunch of marketing flacks discussing possible plans for the future.”

  “So you don’t want to give any input on our privacy policy?”

  Oh, jeez. If I say no, it virtually guarantees they’ll make a major decision in my absence I’ll disagree with and will suffer the consequences for months to come.

  “Fine, I’ll go.”

  “Thanks, Angie. Oh, and one other thing.” He leans forward and lowers his voice as though we’re being spied on. “Maggie’s going out on maternity leave in a few weeks.”