Chapter 7 #2
Wincing, he rolled over and watched Bruno rise and charge forward.
The man slammed his shoulder against the first door’s latch bar and burst into the landing Jason had just vacated, and Jason scrabbled back as Bruno threw his weight toward the second door.
This time the latch bar was on Jason’s side.
The door shook violently as Bruno bounced off.
Jason scrambled up and ran in the opposite direction, extending a middle finger backward as he went.
This was hacking, using a system for his own ends.
In an emergency, those doors funneled everyone to the stairwell and exit chute.
The locks would not disengage from the wrong side.
The only direction Bruno could go from that stairwell was down.
Jason ran through empty hallways, hearing hushed, fearful voices from offices he passed, but seeing no one.
The Tower security system had identified him as the origin of the gunfire, and it was advising everyone nearby to skip the run part of run-hide-fight.
The message it sent Jason, floating annoyingly in his smartspace, was to remain in place and await law enforcement.
Yeah, right. He kept running until the Exit sign arrows reversed, then followed them to the Tower’s other side stairwell and escape chute.
The Tower’s security system might be tracking Jason, but it didn’t talk to the safety system.
The safety system didn’t care who Jason was; it just wanted to get everybody out.
So as he shoved the door open and stepped into the stairwell, an instruction appeared in his smartspace: You are next.
Jump when told. The escape-chute door opened, letting out a blast of air that flurried his hair.
3. 2. 1. Jump!
A life-size 3D animation of a simplified human silhouette like the ones that had posed on warning signs for a century stepped out from Jason and leaped through the door. Jason hesitated just a moment, then followed the stickman into the void.
He barely had time to mimic the stick figure’s spread-eagled posture in the torrent of air before the ground rose to meet him and he landed, on knees and then hands, on the pad below.
A door hissed open, and he didn’t need the stick figure’s example to know to lunge through it into sunlight.
He stumbled, rolled over, and scrambled up, slipping a little on the dirt and grit of the walkway, and sprinted off into the park.
Downshifting his gait from panicked to aerobic, he joined the joggers on the footpaths.
Minutes later he was crossing the arching footbridge over the Potomac and entering the thick treescrapers of DC proper.
“Jason Eric Cromartie,” said a very loud voice, and he whirled to see a boxy blue-and-white shape shadowing him.
Its digital face was fixed on him, as was the weapon in one hand.
Red and blue lights flashed, and a deep voice, generated by an AI but no less authoritative for that, issued from it: “Stop. Stop. Wait for law enforcement. Do not attempt to run.”
Jason ran.
He had to keep thinking around the systems. Be a phreaker. Exploit the rules.
Most people didn’t run from copbots, even bipedal ones like the one pursuing him, because of an infamous incident in the Cybercrash.
Rioters had brutally overwhelmed a National Guard contingent because the human soldiers were reluctant to shoot their fellow citizens until it was too late.
As the wave of agitators surged through the barricades and over the fences bordering the White House, outnumbered Secret Service agents marked a virtual line on the lawn and gave their military-model canine dronebots a shoot authorization against anyone who stepped over it.
Unlike the human soldiers, the dogbots followed orders without hesitation.
Over a hundred rioters died in the confused seconds before the remaining ones realized there was an invisible line and moved away from it.
Despite the efforts since then by law enforcement to depict their dronebots as benign guardians of the peace, they were still feared more than human cops.
Everyone knew a dronebot could kill you without a thought.
But that had been during the Crash. Since then, civilization had been restored; the system was working again.
Where there was a system, there were rules, and where there were rules, there was the opportunity to exploit them.
Jason was betting—betting his life!—that one of the rules the police would be operating under was “Do not gun down criminals in front of innocent bystanders.” That kind of thing made for bad press.
As long as Jason wasn’t a threat to anyone, the copbot wouldn’t use lethal force.
The weapon it was holding was probably a Taser, and Tasers had limited range and accuracy, which was why he was steering toward pedestrians and joggers, brushing as close to them as he could.
More than once he barged into a jogger, who leaped aside with a shout of irritation, then repeated the shout as the dronebot loped past on Jason’s heels.
A cross street loomed, a vehicle street with light traffic and wide gaps between the cabs and cars and delivery trucks.
Jason didn’t have to slow down to thread between them.
A short blast of siren made him jerk his head around as he crossed: A police cruiser was rolling down the street toward him, cabs pulling automatically out of its way.
Exploit the rules. “Map,” Jason gasped, and one obediently appeared in the air before him, showing him a representation of himself as a tiny dot crossing the street.
It didn’t show the police car, but he could see it in his peripheral vision, gunning to close the distance.
He spread his fingers and the map zoomed out—jerkily, since his hands, pumping with his run, kept passing out of his field of view.
Good ol’ TransNet; you never needed to look far to find a place where it was operating at the limits of its capacity.
Only a block away was a major intersection, its plus shape shaded red to show slowing, heavy traffic.
Jason’s mind briefly overlaid another intersection on top of it, and his stomach lurched, but he gritted his teeth.
“Go here,” he said jerkily, focusing on it.
The map winked out, and a bright-orange line appeared beneath his feet, shooting out in front of him, plunging beneath the tree canopy that shaded the footlanes and curving around a fancy hotel.
Jason put his head down and ran. The world blurred and seemed to compress until there was only the rush of wind in his face and the drumbeat of his footsteps following the orange line—and the syncopated footfalls of the copbot’s peg-like legs behind him.
He rounded the corner of the hotel and found the intersection before him, eight vehicle lanes meeting between towers.
A vine-encrusted footbridge diverted the footlanes overhead, but he ignored it and plunged onto the ancient, faded crosswalk instead.
In his mind’s eye, he saw another figure stepping onto the crosswalk ahead of him, a slim shape looking back over her shoulder.
With his real eyes, he caught a swift glimpse of neat rows of electric vehicles, the green lights above their windshields showing that they were operating on automatic, weaving between each other in slowed but unbroken streams from four directions, and then he was among them.
As he reached the nearest cab, he leaped and his foot came down on its hood.
He pushed off, legs extended, hit the roof of the next cab with a one-two pitter-patter of footfalls, and dove for the far side of the street.
He didn’t make it. A truck in the fourth lane struck him.
He spun off, stumbled forward with his momentum, and fell, skidding on his back against the curb on the far side of the street.
The truck had slowed to thread through the intersection, and he’d barely felt it through the adrenaline.
Perfect. He’d planned on thumping a hood or two to set off the proximity sensors, but getting hit by a grill was better.
He rolled onto his stomach and watched as every vehicle on the street came to a stop bumper-to-bumper, their steady green lights changing to flashing red ones.
Jumping up, he caught a glimpse between the cars of the copbot questing for a gap it could maneuver through. It couldn’t jump on top of the cars because it was programmed not to damage personal property. It was stuck.
Police lights stabbed the corner of his eye—a cop car threading its way on manual along the curb.
He ducked away. A narrow footlane loomed nearby, and he veered into it, sprinted down its long, dim, forestlike length, and burst back into sunlight at the far end.
The vehicle street here had no intersection, and cars flew past too fast and spaced too closely for him to cross.
But suddenly they all braked hard and came to a stop, and their lights, too, blinked red.
Red light spread up the street in rushes and splashes.
He pumped a fist skyward. He’d created a redlock.
TransNet was overloaded, and it was freezing the vehicles it controlled until it could untangle the mess.
But no one likes to wait. Swearing came from open windows, and a couple of cars activated manual mode—illegal here in downtown traffic—and drove onto the sidewalk.
As they wove through the automatic cars, they triggered more collision warnings, which spread the radius of frozen cars farther as TransNet struggled to track them and prevent more accidents.
Angry commuters in the stationary cars shouted that the manual drivers were spreading the redlock.
Hands popped out of windows on both sides, middle fingers extended.
A downtown redlock could last hours. That cop car wasn’t going anywhere fast. And there was no sign of the copbot.
Jason pulled his hoodie up. A hacker stereotype for a reason, it was useful for hiding hair and head shape from watching lenses.
His darkened glasses also helped hide his face.
But there was one thing that rendered him findable, regardless.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and flicked it away into the vehicle street.
The crunch of a cab shattering its glass face felt like a part of him cracking.