Our path led up some carpeted stairs, drawing ever closer to a most familiar sound, the background music of my life: the tinkling jangle of slots.
Someone in casino security should lose his job, I pondered as we took shelter under a kiosk where addicts could tap their savings and max out their credit cards to refill their gambling accounts. Even at 4 a.m., there were players about, though none in this area right now. As if wee-hours slot junkies would pay us any notice.
It occurred to me that the tunnel-of-unobservance down which we had come might be a great path to rob this very kiosk. Could that even be the intention? Someone gets himself hired as a consultant for GP security, then sets up a route…. Hey, at minimum it could make a cool movie pitch.
Hold that thought, I noted, as Kilonova signaled for us both to slide along a narrow cleft and stand up, another entirely necessary quasi-erotic slither that pressed my body along hers. Again, it might have been enjoyable, but for her faintly audible sigh, that I easily translated.
Men.
OK, so now we were standing. And, according to plan, we then simply stepped into view, striding side by side like a couple on holiday, returning from a very late show…with the drone warning us to turn our faces just-by-coincidence away from any and all cams—all but one, which the drone conveniently caused to malfunction, using methods that were well beyond my security clearance.
Of course, if casino security ever cared to do so, they might backtrack images and discover that a certain couple had appeared in one area, without any record of them getting there. Hence, this all had to go smoothly, with no one ever suspicious enough to backtrack.
Time for the switcheroo. I caught sight of another couple seated together at a Simpsons-themed slot machine. They stood up and Maggie Simpson complained with a soft whimper—one of a hundred cues the mechanisms used to tweak human emotions, with one aim: to keep players in their seats. Seats containing sensors sent biodata to giant processors, helping adjust the slot experience—all the sights and sounds and payouts—in just the right way, so that humanity’s most susceptible members would find it nearly impossible to leave.
I’ll know civilization is growing up when the people behind all this are labeled psychopaths. Predation on the weak-willed will be gone when we get to Star Trek.
Still, I’ll miss the colors. The sound and flash of outrageous dreams. The smell of boundless—if groundless—hope.
This couple ignored the comeback cues as they got up and turned away from the machine. He complaining about back pain from bad posture. She griping about the size of tip he gave the pretty cocktail waitress—as she sloshed from too many complimentary beverages. They staggered a little, converging at an angle toward Kilonova and me, while I focused on memorizing the man’s voice, his walk.
Next blind spot, just ahead.
Outlined in the specs’ percept-overlay, it didn’t look like much of a blind spot. A fat pillar, supporting a tall, 4K screen advertising Golden Palace shows and events. There was at least one camera—from that unoccupied blackjack table, over there—staring right at us as we rounded the corner, on collision course with the drunken slot addicts, just as the display screen shifted to images of Penn & Teller, the casino’s featured magic and comedy act.
Sudden warmth and a faint electric prickle erupted along my left side as pixelated garments came to life, matching the screen duo perfectly as Kilonova and I did a rapid dance around the other couple, whose own garments flickered just so.
The man straightened up as I slouched. The woman’s step became serene as Kilonova slumped and seemed to slosh, now clothed in a completely different style…and we parted ways again, under Penn Jillette’s knowing grin.
The journey continued. None of our other evasions were quite as dramatic or high-tech as that fancy identity swap. Mostly we were just pretending to be a pair of prey animals—precisely how the casino owners viewed their slot herds—taking a bathroom break (where I fetched a spool of fiber-optic cable out of the trash bin), then strolling over the famed Golden Palace catwalk, and finally vanishing in a shadow behind the casino’s Sports and Events Betting Parlor, where I quickly pulled out a svelte packet of burglary tools and got to work, while Kilonova and the drone kept watch.
Some professions prepare you well for a job like this one. Those demanding utter hand and eye coordination. Brain surgeon, perhaps, snaking your laparoscope up a patient’s sinus to operate on an occlusion in the parietal lobe—yeah, I guess that would come in first place. But a master at sleight-of-hand magic would make a close second.
In a cranny behind one of the betting booths—where customers might pick a team and spread to bet on, or an election result, or the odds against a terrorist attack happening this week, whatever seemed worth laying down a wager for—I drilled through the wall, then used a waldo probe to fish around, till finally I found a fiber-optic cable encased in a triple-security conduit. One false move would release helium gas, revealing that someone had been tampering.
Nerves of steel? Yeah, that’s me. Fortunately, I only had to deliver Sophia’s nanos under that first, pressurized layer, using a special hypodermic flex-needle. The microscopic spy machines then did the rest, tying in a repeater tap so my employers could track and identify every photon.
And here’s the ultimate answer to all those fools who think they can protect their private secrets forever: Go ahead. Encrypt every bit and blip and bloop on your computer—or in the Cloud or even in the DarkNet, BlackHoleNet, and SingularityNet—under a maze of ciphers and steganography images and even quantum-entangled trip wires. All those tricks may thwart the corporations or even Big Brother, for now. But next year? When they have much bigger quantum processors? Or when they can listen to voice vibrations in your glass windows? Or fly in a drone that watches you type? Or that logs each letter electronically, on its way from keyboard to tablet? Or reads the nano-flashes emitted by your own brain?
Right. Preserve safety, freedom, and privacy…by hiding. Show me one time in history when that worked, with any consistency or for very long. Ever.
Better to prevent Big Brother in the first place! There are ways to do that. By keeping an eye on Sophia Van Took’s employers, for example. So that Sophia can keep an eye on bad guys on our behalf. Without becoming one herself.
Anyway, that’s the hope. And, sure, it felt ironic, thinking about all that while engaging in tech-wielding skulduggery. But just ask Kilonova about her exploding stars. Why do stars explode? Because irony sits at the bottom of all natural processes. Irony sucks the energy out of absolutely everything.
Get it? Neither do I. But it was the one time I heard her tell a real joke, guffawing at her own cleverness. And I swear, someday I’ll figure out the punch line.
Something flashed in the corner of my spec-percept. The drone, yelping for attention. But I had to concentrate.
Ludmilla whispered urgently. The casino’s AI must have noticed two customers passing out of sight here, taking too long to emerge. A security guard was coming. Getting closer.
“I’m almost done…almost…”
I could sense her nearby, scanning both VR space and reality for escape options. It wouldn’t do to knock out the guard if the whole reason for our mission was to raise no misgivings! Even if he suspected nothing but just escorted us to the security office, or even took our retinal scans, the game would be up. They’d know we weren’t the same couple. They would then scour all the cams, detect the switch, work their way back, back, back in time from image to image…