In the next apartment she hacked, the owner had left his digital calendar up on the refrigerator, so Cat had known exactly when he’d come back.
But she couldn’t find it in herself to steal money from these people. So she’d stuck to stealing payment cards from dozens of different bodegas. She’d showed up at a store on Lombard yesterday, planning to steal more cards. But two men had been casing the location, their encrypted data streams visible to her from half a block away. So she’d gone eight blocks south to the next grocery store she planned to hit, only to find a security bot patrolling that one.
That’s when it hit her: for all the sophistication of Cat’s theft, it was still going to show up on corporate ledgers. She’d been using her human brain to pick which grocery stores to rob, and unconsciously she had conformed to a pattern. AIs loved patterns. They had obviously figured out hers.
After that, she panicked at every bystander, bot, and camera. She abandoned the stuff she’d left in the current apartment, comforted that she at least had the backpack, and headed instead for the train station. She took the southbound train, part of a vague plan in the back of her mind to work her way to Mexico. Now here she was in Los Angeles.
The tram squealed to a halt, and she boarded following a woman lugging a baby and a stroller with three quiet kids in tow. When it was her turn to pay, Cat kept her implant ID in anonymous mode and used a payment card. She went for the rear, having a better understanding after a few weeks on the run of what it meant to keep your back to the wall.
Hugging her backpack on her lap, she forced herself to be calm. She had an hour until they reached downtown, then she’d find herself a flea-bit hotel and get a job. She’d spent the last two weeks in some never-never land, with no thought of the future. She couldn’t steal payment cards forever.
The tram was quiet, the other passengers silent, wispy data streams showing them reading, watching video, playing games, or communicating. She closed her eyes, shut down her implant, and started qigong forms in her head. She might not be able to do the physical movements, but she could still visualize them. The more perfect the visualization, the more perfect the practice.
She started with Liu He’s Jade Woman form, followed with Ba Duan Jin, and finished with Hu Lu Gong. She checked her implant and saw she had thirty minutes left. She moved onto karate, starting with the Nihaichi kata, then mentally rehearsed knife fighting.
The mental practice abruptly brought back memories of the fight in the park. All the loss and pain and loneliness surfaced, but she pushed aside the thoughts. She’d had enough of them during the long nights in San Francisco.
The tram finally lurched to a stop downtown. She shaded her eyes from the brilliant sun, more used to Portland’s persistent clouds. She slung her backpack over both shoulders and started the search for a hotel. She wanted something cheap, near high bandwidth net access, and preferably off the main strip.
She felt safe in the crowd, once more anonymous and untraceable. She glanced at the time — mid-afternoon on a weekday. People would be at work. She trudged along, watching people’s clothing. She ignored anyone in business attire, the hip, and the casual. She looked for the poorly dressed, the hookers, the homeless. When she saw someone who fit the description, she headed in their direction. She wanted a crowd where anonymity and secrecy were the norm. The density of what she was looking for gradually increased until she found herself off First Street. Once an upscale Asian neighborhood, now boarded windows spotted the storefronts, druggies huddled in doorways, and a long line marked a rice kitchen.
A hooker in a nonexistent skirt and impossibly tall heels called out to her. “Coming to slum, honey? I got what you want.”
Cat shrugged further into her hooded sweatshirt and kept going. The hooker was right. She wanted to disappear among these people, but even after two weeks she still looked too clean for the street.
At the corner of Rose, she stopped beside a sign advertising rooms by the week. Underneath the peeling paint and barred first floor windows, it looked like it had once been an upscale condo. Now rooms went for less than the price of dinner. Cat did some quick math and realized that with the payment cards in her boot, she could stay here for a week, even counting food expenses. She could look for a job and have a real place to stay instead of squatting in other people’s vacant apartments.
Cat followed hand painted wooden signs to what passed for an office. A toothless man with a few hairs poking out of his otherwise bald head squinted at her behind an old-fashioned e-paper sheet. No implant then.
“You want it for an hour?” he asked.
Cat didn’t want to think about what he assumed she’d do with a room for an hour. “I’ll take one for a week.” She paused. “Something with a fire escape.”
He made choking sounds, which she gradually realized was a laugh. “It’s two hundred extra for a fire escape. You want it?”
She slowly shook her head. That’d leave her nothing for food.
“I give you the third floor, and if there is a fire, you just jump.” He cackled some more.
Cat handed over the bulk of her payment cards. Her boot felt empty.
The old man handed her a digital key on a chain.
“No ID locks?” she asked.
He laughed again. “Room 317c.” He pointed down the hall toward an elevator.
On the third floor, she tried to find 317c, getting lost in a maze of mismatched doors. The original apartments had been broken up into smaller rooms. She finally found it, entering to find a small bedroom with a microscopic bathroom. She walked over to the window. She tried opening it, but it wouldn’t budge. Four screws told her why. She looked out toward the street. She didn’t think she’d be jumping three floors anyway.
Domicile secured, it was time to look for a job. She stared at her backpack, self-conscious. She’d look less like a vagrant without it. To most people, the bag held almost nothing: clothes, toothbrush, some energy bars. But it was everything she had, and her stomach lurched even at the thought of leaving it behind. She caressed the bag with one hand, swallowing hard. She turned to the door, leaving it on the bed.
13
“I’m tired of this,” Tony said. “It’s not right.”
“Shut up and help me,” said Slim. He carried the woman, his slight frame struggling with her weight.
Tony reluctantly took one arm and dragged her across the room. Her head drooped and her mouth hung open, still unconscious from the neural stun.
The solid wooden chair faced the window. They left it that way as they wrestled her limp body into the seat. She was heavier than she looked at first glance, heavily muscled under her now rumpled clothes. When they had her positioned, Slim got out a roll of duct tape.
Tony looked on, depressed about the whole situation. “None of the others told us anything.” He glanced over at the memory extraction machine on the table, just a little aluminum box with a couple of positionable antennas protruding from the rear. “They can block us somehow.” The neural stunner had worked fine, but the memory extraction failed to function against their hardened, military grade implants.