Coming Soon Enough: Six Tales of Technology’s Future

by Nancy Kress

  By midnight she was exhausted, but she had the mission either succeeding completely or aborting undetected in 98.7 percent of the simulations. That would have to be good enough. The other targets were going to be more difficult; she needed to move on.

  6

  With every day that passed Natalie worked longer, but her short bouts of sleep came fast and ran deep, as if her brain had started concentrating some endogenous narcotic brew and would dispense the thick black distillate the moment she closed her eyes.

  In the early hours of Monday morning, she dreamed that she was taking her final exam in machine vision. Sam was seated three rows behind her, throwing wads of chewing gum that stuck in her hair, but she knew that if she turned around to whisper an angry reprimand he’d only ignore it, and it wasn’t worth the risk of being accused of cheating.

  She glanced up at the clock to check the time; just seconds remained, but she felt satisfied with her answers. But when she looked down at the exam paper she realized that she’d misread the questions and filled the booklet with useless non sequiturs.

  She woke and marched to the shower to clear her head, trying to convince herself that she hadn’t merely dreamed all the progress she’d made. With the psychological momentum from target A, she had powered through the challenges related to target B’s spectacularly ostentatious beach house and the guests it attracted, and now target C was almost done. The ordeal was nearly over.

  It was still early, but Sam had grown used to her schedule. Natalie confined herself to jokes and small talk; the more matter-of-fact they kept the conversations, the easier it was on both of them. Until he was actually free, she couldn’t afford to let her emotions take over.

  Target C had a husband and two school-age children, but if their domestic routine followed its usual pattern they would be out of the house well before the trigger—expected at 11:00 a.m. in C’s East Coast time zone. The most worrying thing about C was not her family but the way she kept changing the decorative skins she’d bought for her wallet: The surveillance, going back twelve months, revealed no fewer than four different designs. Natalie could accept that anyone might have personal esthetic whims, even when it came to this most utilitarian of items. But it was hard to believe it had never once crossed target C’s mind that those unpredictable embellishments would make it much harder for her to mistake another wallet for her own.

  Still, the last surveillance imagery was only ten days old, and it showed a skin that was no different from that on the planted fake. The odds weren’t bad that it would remain in place, and the changes in style on the previous occasions had been so clear that the drones would have no difficulty noticing if the fake had gone out of fashion.

  Natalie started the simulations running. Target C had a strong aversion to insects, and every room was fitted with an eliminator, but even those low-powered pinprick lasers could not be unleashed on a human-occupied space without the rigorous certification that ensured their compliance with published standards. Insects followed characteristic, species-specific flight patterns, and the eliminators were required to give any ambiguous object the benefit of the doubt, lest some poor child flicking an apple seed off her plate or brushing glitter from her homemade fairy wand summon unfriendly fire from the ceiling. The drones didn’t need to imitate any particular benign airborne debris; they merely had to exhibit an acceleration profile a few standard deviations away from anything seen in the official laboratory studies of Musca, Culex or Aedes. Unlike target B’s cat, the necessary strictures were completely predictable.

  With the count of trials rising into seven digits and still no atonal squawk of failure, Natalie let herself relax a little and close her eyes. The midnight deadline was still fourteen hours away. She’d sent versions of her work for the other two targets to her “Team Leader”—as the collaboration software would have it—and received no complaints. Let these clowns run off to the Bahamas with their billions, and let the victims learn to use banks like normal people. She’d done the only honorable thing under the circumstances, and she had nothing to be ashamed of. Whatever the authorities decided, she could still look herself—and any juror—in the eye.

  She opened her eyes. Why, exactly, did she believe that Lewis’s people would let her live to confess her crimes? Because she’d been a good girl and done as she was told?

  Lewis had met her in a public place, making her feel safer about the encounter and seeming to offer a degree of insurance: If she vanished, or turned up dead, the authorities would scour the surveillance records and reconstruct her movements. A judge was much less likely to sign a warrant for a trawling expedition if a living, breathing woman and her merely mildly mutilated brother went to the police with an attention-seeking story that positioned them in starring roles in the heist—and in any case, a shared meal proved nothing about her dinner companion.

  But all of that presupposed that there really were records of the meeting, that the flock of benign surveillance drones that watched over downtown New Orleans had been as vigilant as ever that night—even in the places her adversaries had chosen to send her. Who was to say that they hadn’t infiltrated the flock, corrupted the software in existing drones, or found a way to substitute their own impostors?

  If there was nothing at all to tie Lewis to her—save for the microscopic chance that some diner in the food court that night remembered the two of them—why would the thieves leave any loose ends?

  Natalie tried to keep her face locked in the same expression of exhaustion and grim resolve that she’d felt being etched into it over the past five days; the whole apartment was probably full of the same kind of microcameras that had documented the targets’ lives in such detail. And for all she knew there could be hidden drones too, far more dangerous than anything the targets were facing: robot wasps with fatal stings. A week ago that would have sounded like florid paranoia, but now it was the most reasonable thing she could imagine, and the only thoughts that seemed truly delusional were those of walking away from this unscathed.

  She went to the kitchen and made fresh coffee, standing by the pot with her eyes half-closed. Apart from any cameras on the walls, her computer was sure to be infested with spyware. They would have done the same to the one in her office at the university—and in any case, she doubted that her criminal overseers would be happy if she suddenly decided to show up at work.

  When the coffee was ready she stirred in three spoonfuls of sugar; before the crisis she’d gone without, but now she’d been escalating the dose day by day in the hope of shoring up her flagging powers of concentration. She carried the mug back toward her desk, squinting wearily at the screen as she approached, hoping that she wasn’t overplaying her frazzled sleepwalker’s demeanor.

  She tripped and staggered, spilling the sticky, scalding brew straight down the air vent at the top of her workstation. The fans within blew out a geyser of mud-colored liquid for a second or two, with specks reaching as high as the ceiling, then the whole machine shut down, plunging the room into silence.

  Natalie spent half a minute swearing and sobbing, and then she picked up her phone. She made five calls to local outlets that might—just conceivably—have supplied a replacement, but none of them had a suitably powerful model in stock, and the ones they could offer her would have slowed the simulations to a crawl. She pushed the last salesperson hard, for effect, but not even a premium delivery charge could summon what she needed by drone from the Atlanta warehouse in time.

  Finally, as if in desperation, she gritted her teeth and availed herself of the only remaining solution.

  “I’d like to rent an office for twelve hours.”

  “Any secretarial services?” the booking bot asked.

  “No.”

  “Any IT requirements?”

  “You bet.” She reeled them off, but the bot was unfazed. The firm she’d chosen was accustomed to catering to archit
ects and engineers caught out with some processor-intensive emergency that was too commercially sensitive to be run in the cloud or simply too awkward to refactor for a change of platform. It was the most logical place for her to go, given that the university was out of bounds—but it would have taken extraordinary prescience for Lewis’s gang to have bugged the place.

  Natalie caught a bus into the city. A fly with an odd bluish tint to its body crawled over the windowpane beside her; she watched it for a while, then reached out and squashed it with the side of her fist and inspected its soft remains.

  At the office complex, the demands of security and climate control had her pass through half a dozen close-fitting doors. Between these welcome barriers she ran fingers through her hair, brushed her arms and legs, and flattened her back against the nearest wall. The security guards watching on closed circuit could think what they liked, so long as she didn’t look quite crazy enough to be thrown out.

  On the eleventh floor, she entered the tiny office assigned to her, closed the door, and started loading the most recent hourly backup of her project from the flash drive she’d brought. This version wasn’t quite the one that had been doing so well in the simulations, but she remembered exactly what changes she’d need to make to bring it up to that level.

  The gang’s roboticists would run tests of their own, but if she held off delivering the software until just before midnight they would be under enormous pressure. In a finite time there was only so much checking her fellow humans could do, and not a lot of point in them trying to wade manually through every line of code and every neural-net template included in the package. Like her, in the end they would be forced to put their trust in the simulations.

  As instructed, Natalie had programmed her drones to wake and commence their mission, not at any predetermined time, but on receipt of an external infrasound cue. It made sense to allow that much flexibility, in case the news that was meant to prompt people to reach for their wallets came later than expected.

  One side effect of this decision was that for targets whose schedules were different for every day of the week, simulations had to be run separately for each day. But where there was no difference except for weekdays versus weekends, the simulated drones were fed no finer distinction, and the millions of permutations to be tested could play out much faster by limiting them to that simple dichotomy.

  Target C stuck to a single routine from Monday to Friday, so as far as the simulations for her were concerned, they were taking place only on a generic weekday. Anything in the software that relied on it being a specific day of the week wouldn’t come into play, in the simulations.

  In the real world, though, Thursday would still announce itself as Thursday in the drones’ internal clocks. And that very fact would be enough to tell the drones’ software that they were out of VR and moving through the land of flesh and blood.

  Natalie couldn’t be sure that D-day would arrive on schedule, but she had no choice but to trust the swindlers to accomplish their first, enabling feat exactly as they’d planned it all along.

  7

  “This should be our last call,” Natalie told Sam.

  “There are two ways I could take that,” he joked.

  “Take it the good way.”

  “So they’re happy with your work?” Sam tried to make that sound like a joke, too, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “I’ve had no complaints.”

  “I always knew you’d end up as a mob accountant.”

  “Ha!” She’d had a summer job once that included bookkeeping for a small construction firm with a shady reputation, but every transaction that had crossed her desk had appeared entirely legitimate.

  “Stay strong,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Sam just nodded and lowered his eyes. She cut the link.

  Natalie waited five more minutes, for six o’clock sharp. If a market-moving trigger was coming, Lewis’s people would have recognized the early signs of its onset hours ago, but she’d had no idea what to look for, and she hadn’t wanted to attract suspicion by trawling the financial news. It would be impossible to load an entirely new copy of the drones’ software via infrasound in less than two days—but in less than an hour, an experienced team might be able to write and deliver a small patch that neutralized the effects of her sabotage.

  There would be no moment of perfect safety. Natalie used the collaboration software to send a message: Flaw in the code for target C. Need to discuss urgently.

  Twenty seconds later, her phone rang.

  “What are you talking about?” Lewis demanded angrily.

  “It hasn’t started executing yet, has it?” Natalie did her best to sound businesslike: She was acknowledging her screwup, but she was still the voice of authority when it came to these drones, and she was asking for the state of play in order to salvage the situation as rapidly as possible.

  “Of course it’s executing!” Lewis snapped.

  Natalie couldn’t hold back a smile of relief. The software would be impossible to patch now.

  “Why did you think it wouldn’t start?” Lewis was baffled. “We got the confirmation hum. The drones are wide awake and running what we loaded. What’s this about?”

  Natalie said, “If the drones in target C’s house don’t catch sight of me and my brother—fully ambulatory, with our usual gaits—alone in a room with that woman before 11:00 a.m., things are going to play out a little differently than they did in the simulations.”

  Lewis understood immediately. “You stupid bitch—”

  “No,” Natalie cut him off. “Stupid would have been trusting you.”

  “We’ll kill you both,” he said coldly. “We can live without the yield from one target.”

  “Can you live without the yield from all the targets who’ll be warned off when this woman raises the alarm? When the drones fly up to her and drop the fake wallet right in front of her face?”

  To his credit, Lewis only took a few seconds to give up on the idea of more threats and bravado. “Be on the street outside your building in five minutes.” He cut off the call.

  Natalie put the phone down. Her whole body was trembling. She went to the bathroom and splashed water on her face, then left her apartment and sprinted down the stairs.

  The black car that came for her had tinted passenger windows. Lewis opened the rear door and motioned for her to join him. Sam was sitting by the left-side window; he glanced across at her anxiously.

  “This is what will happen,” Lewis told Natalie as they sped away. “You’re going to drive a car toward the target’s house. Another driver will rear-end you in a hit-and-run: plenty of noise and crumpled panels, but you won’t be hurt. You and your brother will walk from the wreckage, knock on the target’s door, and ask her to call an ambulance. We’ll spoof the 911 connection, so no ambulance will come until we put in the call ourselves. You’ll play a wilting Southern flower, and at some point you’ll be invited in to wait.”

  Natalie was incredulous. “She won’t invite us in straight away?”

  Lewis clenched his teeth, then spoke. “Have you ever been to Nassau County, Long Island?”

  “Can we fly business class?” Sam wondered.

  Lewis reached into a sports bag on his lap and drew out a pair of blindfolds.

  Minutes later, the traffic sounds around them receded. They were bundled out of the car and led across the tarmac and up a set of stairs into what must have been a private jet. Natalie felt the plane taxiing before she’d been guided to her seat, and ascending before she’d fumbled the belt into place. It would take almost three hours to reach New York; if they hit so much as an unexpected headwind, Lewis might decide to cut his losses and drop them from the plane.

  “I should have told them earlier,” she whispered to Sam. “I’m sorry.” S
he’d been fixated on the risk that she’d spring the revelation too early.

  “Why do we have to visit this woman?” he asked.

  Natalie talked him through the whole thing, from the heist itself to the dead-man switch she’d installed at the last moment.

  “You couldn’t have found a way to get us to Paris instead?” Sam joked.

  “They set you up,” Natalie stressed. “They only lent you the money so they could rope me in if they had to.”

  “I know,” he said. “I get it.”

  “So whatever happens now, it’s not on you.”

  Sam laughed. “Seriously? You thought I was going to blame myself?”

  As soon as the wheels hit the ground, someone grabbed Natalie’s elbow. “How’s the time?” she enquired.

  “Local time’s 10:27,” Lewis replied.

  The blindfolds stayed on as they got into a second car. When it screeched to a halt and Lewis tugged the dark band up from Natalie’s eyes, she squinted out into a fluorescent-lit mechanics’ workshop. Half a dozen men in overalls were standing beside a hydraulic jack, watching the new arrivals.

  Lewis motioned to her to leave the car. “This is what you’ll be driving.” He gestured at a white sedan a few meters away. “You rented this at the airport; there are used boarding passes in the glove compartment and some luggage with clothes and toiletries in the trunk. I don’t care what your cover story is—why you’re in New York, where you were heading—but you should give your real names. And make sure you don’t distract the target from the trigger, or do anything else stupid. Don’t even think about driving away; we can immobilize the vehicle remotely, and the crash that follows would be a whole lot worse than the one we’ve discussed.”