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…
Even if Mazella didn’t seek to make an example of me, I’d be through in this town.
“There! I’m closing up now…criminy!”
I left the self-sealing wall patch to dry, grabbing my tools and hopping back—
—as Ludmilla Kilonova knelt and barfed all over the floor, including my left shoe—
—just before a giant person wearing Golden Palace livery turned the corner and stopped short, staring in ill-concealed disgust.
“Uh, we need an auto-mop in section forty-seven,” he murmured into a shoulder mike. “Yeah, third one tonight. Better tell food services.”
I folded away my tool kit behind my back—one-handed as the other hand stroked my “wife’s” head.
“I guess she had too much,” I started to explain, slurring to disguise my voice. “We’ll clean it up. Sorry. So sorry.”
The guard shook his head and made shooing motions.
“Don’t worry, sir. It happens. Maybe you should head up to your room now. Get some sleep.”
Solicitous guard. I busied myself helping Ludmilla stand and then shuffle on, giving us both an excuse to divert our faces from every camera as we followed a path chosen by the drone, supporting each other, moaning and grumbling.
Only when we were finally ensconced in room 1245 on the second floor, where the other couple had checked in yesterday—and when the flitting drone confirmed there were no bugs—did we both straighten up.
“Smooth move,” I commented while peeling off the pixelated suit. “But did you have to throw up on my shoe? I like this pair.”
“Oh, quit bellyaching,” she replied from the bathroom, between gargles. “You try doing that on command.”
I shrugged and refrained from commenting that I’ve given tougher performances. Still, she ranked several notches higher in my esteem. Especially now that, for the very first time, I could see her eyes, uncovered by specs, glittering with adrenaline rush.
“So,” she commented, wiping her mouth with a washcloth. “What’ll we do until checkout time?”
Feigning fatigue and nonchalance—though I knew she could read me, too—I faked a yawn.
“I wonder what’s on pay-per-view.”
The Mazellas were on to something with their betting system. Word spread among bookies—Vegas and online—not to try nibbling at the Golden Palace oddsmakers.
Thanks to the tap that Ludmilla and I planted, Sophia Van Took’s team quickly zeroed in on the GP secret sauce—an improved algorithm for weighting wagers from a crowd. An incremental improvement, then. No transcendent or magical leap. Not this time. I could read relief on Sophia’s face, plus disappointment.
That was the holy grail, of course—the combined hope and dread that propelled interest by so many groups, from Amazon and Google to NASA. From Palantir and TIBCO to Goldman-Sachs, to the Vatican and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Humanity badly needed better predictive methods. But if one group or secretive elite ever got their hands on something truly effective, it wouldn’t matter much whether they were corporate, criminal, or some foreign alliance. Human nature being what it is, even Sophia’s agglomeration of academics and civil servants might be tempted to leverage such power, rationalizing they were only acting for the common good.
And her team operated under safeguards. Multiple paths of civilian oversight. I shivered at the thought of a true anticipation engine being discovered and monopolized by the likes of Johann Mazella.