The repetitive strikes gradually relaxed her, and it turned from an assault into a meditative punching practice. When she finally stopped, she was sweaty but calm, her muscles tingling, fully in the moment.
She went into the bathroom and showered. Standing in front of the mirror afterwards, she wiped the steam away and was surprised to see the gaunt expression staring back at her. She’d always been slender and well-muscled from her karate practice. But the girl who stared back at her in the mirror looked like someone from a war zone. Three weeks of too little food and sleep and the stress of living on the edge had carved something away from her.
She threw her towel over the mirror and focused on dressing, choosing her better pair of jeans and a black button down shirt with half sleeves. She wished she had better clothes to wear. She could do something with her hair though. Pulling the towel off the mirror, she rubbed her damp hands on the cheap bar of soap, working it into her palms where it made a rough paste. She used it to style her hair, modeling it after the women she’d seen in LA.
Outside, she used her implant to get a list of jewelry stores, filtering them by size and price range. She needed something moderately large, so there’d be more than one cashier. And it couldn’t be a boutique, because she needed them to have duplicate pieces for her replay hack to work.
When her filtering provided a list of fourteen jewelry stores, she chose one at random, using a net service to pick a number. She had to avoid even an unconscious pattern that might be anticipated by an AI.
Thirty minutes and a short bus ride later, she found herself in the jewelry district. In the back of her mind she juggled nearby security cameras, replaying previously captured snippets of footage as she passed into view, so there’d be no record of her.
She found the target store, a place called InterGems. White porcelain walls trimmed by stainless steel surrounded a set of double doors manned by a security bot just inside. Cat walked by once to glance over the interior. Through the window she saw three jewelers behind a U shaped counter that ran along the walls. Then she was past the store, and that was all she’d get.
She walked into a coffee shop on the next block and waited so she wouldn’t trigger the security bot’s suspicion. Her stomach flipped at the smell of coffee and pastries. She checked her pockets for money, even though it was a pointless exercise. It’d been thirty hours since she ate. Her mouth watered as a lemon scone floated by in front of her, carried by a fat woman who gave her a dirty look for eyeing her food. Cat ignored her and focused instead on the timer in the corner of her vision. When it hit nine minutes and ten seconds, she went back outside in the direction of InterGems.
At the entrance, she took a deep breath and turned in. She gripped the right hand door, remembering just in time to null out the fingerprint scanner. She stepped into the hushed interior, air smelling faintly of lavender. The robot guard stood just inside, a basic semi-humanoid bot, six feet tall. Its body was draped in porcelain white and stainless panels, obviously to match the storefront. The waist high glass counter top she’d noticed before ran around the perimeter of the store, while two square display cases filled in the middle. Cat took all this in as she nodded to the robot.
Three clerks stood behind the counter, two of them already busy. One customer was a mid-forties man shopping for what seemed to be women’s earrings, and the other, a woman trying on a necklace. The remaining cashier, an older Asian woman, maybe Vietnamese, approached. “How can I help?”
But Cat was suddenly distracted from answering by a huge chunk of data coming through the net. The hairs rose on the back of her neck and she felt time slow down. She started turning toward the security bot. She traced the data, tinged blue, back to its source, a feed for police bulletins. She continued swiveling toward the robot, which was absorbing the last of the data. Her right foot started moving toward the door, an infinite slowness compared to the speed of light movement of bits across the net. She felt a subtle distortion in cyberspace as the bot spun up more processing cores, pattern matching the police bulletins. There was only one reason for the sudden activity: her.
Her meatspace body, moving like molasses, continued its instinctive fight or flight response to the impending threat, still taking that first step toward the door. The bot hadn’t moved yet. Cat reached out into the net and cut off all the data streams to and from the robot. She felt it retry the connections dozens of times, but she squelched the attempts. The bot probed her implant, looking for her ID. She kept it masked, and probed the bot in return.
The security bot had three wireless connections. Cat found one of the probing links, and shoved random data down it, the first thing she could think to do. Her right foot came down, and her left foot started its involuntary trajectory toward the door. Her body wanted out of this space, but her mind knew there was no time. The robot tried to disconnect from the incoming data, but Cat forced the connection to stay open. She sent more data, pulling dozens, then hundreds of random other streams out of the net, and forcing them all down the pipe to the bot. It felt like forever, but less than a second of clock-time passed, and then suddenly the robot was dead. The connections faltered and dropped. She’d hit a buffer overrun and destroyed the bot’s main memory.
She found herself standing three steps from the counter. Her eyes slowly focused on the Vietnamese woman standing in front of her. “What do you want to see, please?” she asked.
Cat glanced at the bot. It hadn’t moved. In net space she could see that the bot was dead, but here in meatspace, it just looked like it had all along, a motionless sentry. Cat figured she had until the next patron entered the store. The employees would notice if the bot didn’t greet a customer. “I’d like to look at the necklaces please,” she said to the still waiting woman. In the back of her mind, Cat realized she just killed an AI. She hoped it was backed up, but didn’t have the time to think about it.
The clerk led her across the store with a gesture and polite words that Cat didn’t hear. Her heart was beating fast, the adrenaline rush coming on now, too late to be of any help in an encounter with AI.
The other woman customer had just picked something out, and a young male clerk was putting her necklace into a box. Damn, she’d missed what the woman picked. That was the whole point of this exercise. She pointed to a few necklaces, while she figured out what to do. The shopper paid for her purchase, and Cat, on impulse, captured and buffered the transaction.
“These are very beautiful,” the Vietnamese woman was saying, as she laid the necklaces out on a velvet display board. Cat feigned interest, and watched as the customer left.
“To be honest,” Cat said, leaning in closer. “I really wanted what she purchased. Do you have another?”
The woman raised her eyebrows. “Everything we do is custom, and that was a unique piece. Why don’t we look at one of these.” She bent down to show several necklaces. “See here, this is a blue diamond, very unusual.”
Cat raised her voice in a petulant whine. “But I really wanted that necklace. Not one of these.”