Free Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction by Joyce Chng, Nicolette Barischoff, A.C. Buchanan, Sarah Pinsker Page A

over. “Anything that’s not on Lightnet or Darknet. Anything I can do direct.”
    “You’re still not over it?” she asked.
    I could have hit her.
    “No,” I told her instead. “I’m still not over it.”
    “Maybe you should see somebody,” she told me. “If your anxiety’s so bad it’s keeping you offline, maybe you should do something about it.”
    A million answers poured into my head unheeded. I took a few breaths, then picked the only one that hurt to say: “I am.”
    Even squatters needed therapy, and mine came from a woman named Helga. She’d worked as a cognitive therapist for three decades before she got laid off and her husband took her savings on a one-way trip to Florida. Motherfucker had got his comeuppance, though, in one of those nightmare storms, and her cash and his corpse had washed out to sea. She moved into a squat a few months later, and we all did what we could to help one another out. Me, I fixed things. Helga, she fixed people.
    “Well,” Ramirez said, from her tech-zen holier-than-thou fucking yoga mat on the floor of a stolen house, “let’s get to work.”
    She meant well. She was probably even my friend. But people don’t open up in person anymore. Were we really friends if I never read her status updates? If our profiles weren’t linked?
    I took out my laptop. It was encrypted to nine hells with layered volumes, but I think what kept it safe is that no one even used the fucking things anymore. No one under thirty remembered how they worked and sure as hell no one of any age spent their time trying to figure out how to break into them—the damn thing still had a CD drive. I couldn’t just move my eyes across the screen to shift its focus, I had to drag a little icon of an arrow around the screen and I had to press buttons on the keyboard. It was tactile. It did non-tactile things, but I could still touch it. I could close it. I could look away from it.
    “There’s an exec in Rackman Ltd who’s been leaving a trail of meta that leads right offshore,” Ramirez told me.
    Ramirez was a fixer, not a hacker. She kept track of information, things like who needed robbing and where they kept their shit. But she couldn’t get in the proverbial door.
    “How much?” I asked.
    She answered. Not an insubstantial sum.
    It was a simple job. Break into Jonathan Albrecht’s files and then his offshore bank account. Take out two percent. Any more than that and he might decide hiring a hit squad was worth the financial and legal liabilities. If we were lucky, we’d find some blackmail while we were in there, wire it up on a deadman switch so if I stopped breathing, his wife would find out about his affair or, if nothing else, the IRS would find out about his tax dodge. And I’d walk away with $5k for a night’s work. Simple.
    Took me all night.
    Ramirez did yoga for awhile, murmuring instructions to her contact lens computer while in downward dog and a thousand other poses. She said the names aloud—revolved triangle, pigeon, camel—and presumably got some kind of biofeedback telling her if she was doing them right. The rest of her jabbering was pure business though—checking up on clients and projects and whatever the hell it was she did besides find me yuppies to rob.
    I live in a world where some people feel it’s more efficient if they multitask their relaxation with their work.
    Ramirez was a squatter because it was cool. She was a criminal because it was fun. Honestly, with her skills and drive and education and upbringing—but minus her criminal record, perhaps—she could have been the mark we were about to rob. She could have had his job and his life and his underlings and his investments. But as she told me once, stealing felt a lot more honest when it was illegal.
    I was still going hard at Albrecht’s vapor drive when she checked in with me at 2am. Simple jobs aren’t always simple. Ramirez stretched out on the yoga mat and fell asleep.
    By 3am I’d gotten his