She thought she could do it; now she just needed some customers. She waited. The traffic was light and no one came. Her stomach grumbled. Then, all at once, two people approached on foot and another in a beat-up electric pickup. She stood and walked into the store in the middle of the pack. She pretended to browse while keeping an eye on the other customers. The owner stood behind the counter watching her, but she ignored him. One woman went to the back of the store, picking up beer and other groceries. A man poured himself coffee. The last customer, a woman, was near the front register. She picked up two $50 payment cards and presented them to the owner.
At the sight of the payment cards, Cat stopped, motionless, and focused on the transaction. The owner swiped the cards in the register. Data streamed white in Cat’s vision and she grabbed the digital packets as she synchronized the stream with the precise time of the transaction.
The woman left, and Cat went up to the register. She picked up two of the same payment cards, and handed them to the owner. He looked at her suspiciously. She didn’t say a thing, but concentrated on keeping the integrity of the data in her head. He swiped the cards, then nodded at the ID reader.
She focused on the net, tweaked the register to send out a request for payment, overrode the time signal, and replayed the encrypted packets. The register beeped an alarm.
“No es bueno. ¿Tienes dinero?” the storekeeper said, shaking his head.
“Try again,” Cat said, nodding toward the register, her hands sweating below the counter.
The storekeeper grumbled under his breath, and pressed a button on the register. The ID reader lit up again, and Cat tried a second time, keeping the time signal and data stream perfectly synchronized.
The register beeped a happy tone and the owner slid the cards to her. “Gracias. Buen día.” His gaze slid onto the next person in line.
Cat took the cards with shaking hands and forced herself to walk slowly outside. She continued away from the store, trembling and half crying. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she blurted out, when there was no one to hear her. She stumbled down the dirt road, clutching the payment cards in a tight fist. She’d promised her mother in the hospital, the day before she died, that’d she’d be good. She tried so hard in this world where nobody knew what to do, and still she strived to honor her mom. Yet in twenty-four hours, somehow, her entire life had become derailed. She’d killed three men and now she was robbing convenience stores. She fought the urge to vomit, her reptilian brain driving her to get further away from the store. She got a quarter mile down the road and then collapsed against the side of a building, sobbing.
She lay there in the dirt, curled up in a ball, feeling like her future was being torn away from her. She would have stayed there forever but her stomach growled painfully, again and again, a reminder that present needs trumped the future. The hunger pains brought a grim smile to her face. She would find food. That at least she could do. She picked herself up, put the hard-won payment cards in her jeans pocket, and walked down the road to find another store.
11
Leon swayed with the motion of the subway on the way to meet Mike. He tried to review what he knew of the murders, but was too distracted by the protesters crowding the car, who were amped up, holding signs and banners with a palpable tension. A man in a business suit stood in front of Leon, gesturing off into space, but he too was one of them, and wearing a button that said, “Jobs are for people.”
Leon stared at the wall, trying to do nothing to attract their attention. He recalled President Smith’s words a few days earlier: “The anti-AI movement sees you and Mike as the inventors of AI, and therefore as the cause of their unemployment and every social problem from drug use to reckless behavior. To them, you are public enemies number one and two.”
When the train slowed at his stop, the demonstrators pushed hard toward the door and exited first. Leon slowly followed, nervous that they were getting off at the same station.
He climbed the stairs, emerging into an even bigger crowd at street level. A girl in a hooded sweatshirt bumped into him, nearly beaning him with her sign. An army veteran in uniform stomped by yelling. The stream of protesters from the train grew louder and unruly as they met others already on the street, joining their chants and shouting new ones.
It was six blocks to the Institute, and by the time Leon had walked three, the crowd had grown so dense that he could hardly move. He worked his way past a group of older women his mom’s age; could even have been her friends for all he knew.
Many of them were obviously from out of town, carrying backpacks and sleeping bags. He shook his head in frustration. This was bigger than a local protest, and it wasn’t going to go away overnight if people were coming from outside the city.
Amid the chanting and press of the crowd, he hopped up on the bumper of a car and looked toward the Institute. A line of police, human and robotic, surrounded the building.
Leon jumped down and brought up a live video stream on his implant from bloggers covering the rally. He watched this superimposed over part of his vision as he cut across a small side street, heading to the next corner. The Institute shared a city block with another university building housing International Studies. A common courtyard, hidden from the street, connected the two.
On the next block, the crowds were sparser, but there was a steady influx of new supporters. The video stream in the corner of his vision showed protesters pushing up against the police. In the video, he could see Institute security behind the glass front of the building. The two thin lines of defense seemed insufficient against the rapidly growing crowd.
Leon had serious doubts that he should head into work. He pinged Mike for a location check but didn’t get a response. He tried the local network nodes, but they were sluggish, under assault from the crowd. Even the live video stream was degrading now. He paused for a moment and decided it was crazy to go further. He would go home and try Mike from there. He turned around, then suddenly halted, fighting the urge to run or hide as he confronted hundreds of people streaming toward him. Would these people recognize him? Rebecca seemed to think so. He couldn’t walk face-forward through this crowd. If just one person spotted him, they’d all attack.
Leon reluctantly changed his mind and decided to keep going to the Institute. It seemed the less risky option. He worked his way forward, keeping his face in the same direction as everyone else. At least the photo they were sharing of him online was a three-year-old social media shot. He looked different now, he hoped. He finally reached the International Studies building and made his way to the entrance. Security was doubled, and police stood ready to back them up.
He showed his ID and let them scan his neural implant, then the guard checked his bag. “It’s not going to take long before this crowd figures out there’s a pass through.” He handed the bag back. “You might not want to spend all the day in there.”
Leon nodded and hurried through the building toward the enclosed courtyard. He crossed the plaza, a simple concrete pad with a few trees in planters. He could still hear the chanting of the crowd outside.
He came up to the rear door, mentally provided his ID, and passed into the quiet interior of the Institute. At least here, near the back of the building, he could hardly hear the protests.
Two security guards and a police officer waited by the door. They repeated the ID scan and bag check.