The Last Firewall

by Hertling, William

  “What do you want, kid?” She stood with her arms crossed, legs squared.

  “You buy jewelry?” Cat asked.

  “If it’s not stolen. Put it on the counter.”

  Cat pulled a matched pair of the smaller diamonds out of her pocket. “These were my grandmother’s.”

  “Of course they were.” She unfolded her arms and picked one up. She looked at it for a second, then grunted. “If you want me to give you an estimate, I got to put it in the machine.” She gestured with her head at grey metal box on the back counter. “It does the estimating for jewelry. I don’t know nothing about it.”

  Cat squinted at the machine in net space. She didn’t see anything sentient. Would it match the diamonds against a database of stolen jewelry? She had no idea how these things worked, but she had to take the chance. “Go ahead.”

  The woman put the two diamonds on clear plastic tray, and slid it into the machine. She turned back to Cat. “I’m Jo.”

  “I’m Catty.” What the fuck. It was the best she could come up with. Her own name had come out of her mouth before she was ready. She needed to be thinking ahead about this stuff.

  “It takes a couple minutes. Look, I can only offer you street price.” She looked genuinely sad at the thought of buying them.

  “It’s OK.”

  The machine hummed behind her. “If they really are your grandmother’s, I can do it as a loan. You come back in a month with the money plus twenty percent, you can have them back.”

  “That’s OK. I’m not gonna have the money. I’ll just sell them.”

  The woman grunted. “I had a daughter about your age, you know. If she took off for some reason, I’d want to know. I’d want to find her.”

  Oh Jesus, could the woman just stop talking? “I’m not a runaway. I just need the money.”

  The machine finally beeped. She turned around and checked it. “I can give you $2,200. That’s if you give me your ID, which I see you’ve got masked. If you want it in payment cards, I can give you $1,750.”

  Cat figured the diamonds were probably worth tens of thousands. But $1,750 was a lot of food. “I’ll take the payment cards.”

  Ten minutes later, after a bunch of meaningless paper work and a shakily signed paper legal agreement, she walked out with a thick clutch of payment cards in her hand.

  She hoofed it ten blocks east, hopped on a bus for four stops and got off at a street market, mouth watering and stomach groaning at the smell of food. She turned in at the first vendor and ordered half the things on the menu, impatiently waiting as they filled her plates. Grabbing the loaded tray, she found the nearest table and shoved steaming yakisoba noodles into her watering mouth, and smiled. Food at last.

  19

  * * *

  THE TROUBLE STARTED outside of Memphis.

  Leon and Mike were on I-40 headed west, having passed the halfway point of their trip several hours before. Mike drove, one hand on the wheel, lost in his thoughts. Leon huddled down low in the passenger seat, avoiding the worst of the air turbulence. The convertible Caddy had been fun for the first few hours, but thirteen hours in, Leon was exhausted from the non-stop buffeting and roar in his ears.

  They came around a long slow curve onto I-240, with short scrub trees off to the right, and a large clover-leaf off to the left. The Caddy hummed along at a steady seventy-five in the right lane while modern cars zoomed by at speeds around a hundred in the two left lanes.

  A hover approached on their left, given away by the thunderous current of air it blew beneath its skirts to keep it afloat. Leon, watching the trees whiz by, grew curious when the thunderous sidewash didn’t go away. He turned to watch the vehicle pacing them.

  From the squared off angles of the body, Leon guessed the hover might be eight or nine years old, one of the first commercial models. It had a four-passenger compartment up front and a utility bed in the back. On the right side, a blond man stared out the window, then pulled out a handheld to take a photo of them. He excitedly pointed them out to the driver of the hover.

  Leon stretched up to look over the higher windowsill of the hover and saw the driver of the hover doing the same thing in reverse. The other man’s eyes went wide, and his face turned angry. Leon saw the hover start to move away from them, and he shouted a warning to Mike. “Brake! Brake!”

  Mike, oblivious to all this, tapped the brakes, and turned to Leon with a puzzled look. But Leon was glued to the hover as it turned into their lane, engines howling, and tried to ram them off the road. With just inches to spare, the hover spun in front of them, exactly where they would have been if Mike hadn’t decelerated.

  Lacking any traction with the ground, the hover was slow to turn and slow to stop. It rotated hopelessly in front of them, and slid off the side of the road in a cloud of dust.

  Mike hit the brakes harder, still confused by all that happened.

  Leon shook his head. “No, speed up. They were trying to run us off the road.”

  “What?”

  “They saw us, they took a picture, and the driver was pissed as all hell. Look, it’s like Rebecca said, the People’s Party is watching for us. Just hit the accelerator.”

  Mike looked doubtful. “Are you sure?” He glanced back over his shoulder.

  “Yes, now go!”

  Mike hit the pedal, the Caddy accelerating smoothly up to ninety miles per hour, the electric whine of the motor barely audible over the increasing roar of wind noise. Leon turned to look out the back. “If those guys are the extremists, we’re going to be in a shitload of trouble.”

  “I think you’re overreacting. No one is going to randomly recognize us on the road.”

  Leon pulled up a half dozen web sites he’d been browsing while Mike drove. He displayed them in net space, guiding them to the periphery of Mike’s vision so as not to obscure the road. Every page shared one thing in common: large photos of Leon and Mike.

  Mike’s eyes went wide. “Rebecca wasn’t kidding when she said they thought we were public enemy number one.”

  “Yeah.” Leon looked in the rearview mirror. “That hovercraft is back on the road, and catching up to us. How fast can we go?”

  Mike jammed the accelerator to the floor and the Caddy leaped forward. The speedometer hit a hundred, then kept going. They passed one-ten and still the hover gained rapidly on them. “It’s got to be doing one-fifty or more.”

  The Caddy shuddered as the speedometer hovered around one-twenty. Mike’s face was ashen, his knuckles whiter. The hovercraft was behind them now, the roar of its turbine vastly louder than even the wind noise of the open-topped convertible. The vehicle seemed set to ram them.

  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, br
inging 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

  * * *

  ON THE BUS, CAT 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

  * * *

  FROM MEMPHIS, MIKE AND LEON 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.”