It wasn’t clear if the police even knew it was her. But her implant had been on as she entered the park. They’d know everyone who was in the vicinity, and she had to assume she’d be a suspect. She needed time and space to think, to make a plan, but she couldn’t get that in Portland. She could evade the police for now, but eventually they’d spread photos of their suspect list across the net. Eventually someone here would recognize her. Surely they wouldn’t start a nationwide manhunt for a couple of thugs who’d been killed in a fight. If she went somewhere far away, she’d be less likely to be recognized. That made the decision for her; she had to leave.
She walked to the highway and looked for an automated shipping truck headed south. She’d never done anything like it, but maybe she could hijack one with her implant.
She reached out in netspace. When a truck approached, she closed her eyes and focused on it. She pushed and nudged in cyberspace until she felt the brakes trigger. She mucked around more, intuitively trying things, until she found the speedometer and GPS data. She fudged the data feeds so it would look like the vehicle was still in motion.
When the truck halted in front of her, she unlocked the doors and climbed inside the unoccupied cab. She let it accelerate and gave it a series of commands to gradually bring the speedometer and GPS telemetry back into sync. The stop would be unobserved.
Inside the vast empty truck cab, she numbly watched the road drift past.
Her whole life she’d tried to be good. But hijacking the truck had been easy, as had evading the authorities. The thought of the police brought back the image of the dead men, and she felt sick. She curled up, wrapping her light jacket around herself. Where could she go?
Her mom had been dead for three years, her father gone for nine, and she’d never heard from him since. Boyfriends never stuck around because she wouldn’t link implants. Her only friends in the world were at home, and she couldn’t go back there now.
The loneliness and fear welled up inside her until it was hard to breathe or think. She sat, cold and shivering, in a state of limbo until the drone of the road and the pulse of lights passing by lulled her to sleep.
When she woke the sun was coming up and the tractor-trailer was crossing into California. She forced a stop so she could relieve herself on the side of the road. After she climbed back in, the autopilot resumed its route.
She checked the software’s waypoints, finding that the vehicle was headed for San Diego. She sat, watching the evergreens go by, gradually forming a plan. She’d let the truck keep going, but she’d get out in San Francisco. That was a big city, a place where she could hide out for a while.
Cat inserted a fake delivery in Menlo Park. Hours later, nearing lunchtime, the truck slowed and exited the highway. When it came to a standstill, she climbed out of the cab. She sent a final set of data packets, fixing up the GPS monitors to disguise the unscheduled stop. The truck crossed the road and got back on the highway.
She needed a bathroom, water, and food, more or less in that order. Hiking down the exit ramp, she was frightened by how little she had. She’d left the house with no plan other than to get away from Sarah, and with nothing but the clothes she was wearing.
Just off the ramp she found a trucker’s restaurant. Ignoring the stare of the white-haired waitress, she headed for the bathroom in back. After she used the toilet, she looked in the mirror. Her T-shirt and jeans were crumpled with sleep, and her hair was a mess. She washed her face and ran wet fingers through her hair. She walked to the front of the restaurant, feeling presentable again.
The waitress looked at her. “Got cash, honey?”
Cat took a deep breath. “I have an implant.…” She started indignantly, but trailed off with a whimper. She needed coffee, she wasn’t thinking clearly, she couldn’t use her ID or they’d track her down. “Sorry, I’ll be back.”
“Alright honey, come back when you have money.”
Cat turned around, her face hot with embarrassment, and headed for the door. The smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee made her stomach grumble and almost brought tears to her eyes. Outside, she looked back into the restaurant, salivating over an imagined plate of food.
She turned her back on the restaurant and walked along the road. She was twelve hours and seven hundred miles from home, on the run, with no access to her money or even anything to barter. What the hell had she been thinking?
Cat suddenly remembered that Einstein was at home. Her mom had given her Einstein before she’d died. The intense longing for her puppen, her last connection to her mom, overpowered her. She collapsed onto the curb, hugging her knees. But after a minute of this, she forced herself to stop. Maggie would take care of Einstein until somehow, someday, Cat found a way to go home. In the meantime, she couldn’t afford to be weak if she was going to survive. What she needed right now was money so she could get food. She stood and continued along the road.
Her neural implant had a public key, and the usual way for implanted people to pay for things was by digital authorization on the spot using the key. Kids and the unimplanted had payment cards, little squares of electronics that did much the same thing, just anonymously. Cat hadn’t ever had one. She knew that Tom used them when he bought drugs. But where did he get them?
She supposed bank machines must offer them. But if she went to one and tried to transfer funds, the police would trace her. She thought for a moment, wondering if the tricks she could play in netspace would work on a bank.
Looking up, she noticed that she was hiking through slums, a street sign indicating this was Sand Hill Road. The oversized buildings were boarded up, surrounded by heavily rusted chain link fences. Whatever prosperity had once visited this place, it was long gone.
On the north side of the road, smoke rose from one of the fenced-in compounds, and the smell of cooking drifted over. Cat crossed the street and peered through the chain-link. She could hear kids playing, but whoever was there was hidden. Squatters probably, living in the abandoned office complex. She guessed that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers didn’t need that space anymore, whoever or whatever they once were.
She hiked on. Orange trees grew in the spaces between buildings. Hungrier than ever, she walked over to one, but the oranges were just tiny green globes, nowhere near ready.
Half a mile further, she came to a small white and yellow building, the hand-painted sign proclaiming the structure to be a bodega. A Mexican man disappeared inside. Cat studied the storefront. Food was inside there. Her stomach rumbled. She felt in her empty pockets again. A stenciled poster in the window advertised payment cards. If only…
She squatted under a tree at the edge of the parking lot. She carefully turned on her implant, squelching her ID and preventing the implant from automatically connecting to the net. She just observed the building.
At a level lower than consciousness her implant connected to local network nodes, filtered the encrypted traffic, correlated the data streams, slowed them down and built a visual representation, and then fed it to her neocortex. What Cat saw was a data stream she isolated down to the bodega from all the other network traffic. She separated out the low bandwidth stuff, and watched for a bigger burp of data, something with heavier encryption. Sure enough, a chunk of data flew over the wire. A minute later, the Mexican left the store, carrying a bag of groceries.
Cat turned the data over and over in her head, trying to understand it. She knew it had to be the man’s payment. She had no hope of decrypting the packet to see what was inside. Probably no one could, except maybe the monster AIs with tens of thousands of processors. She couldn’t decrypt it, but could she replay it? She’d need to purchase the same things in the same quantities as a previous customer, and reset the time signal so the store would accept the payment…