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

biometrics from the pizza delivery system and was leveraging them against his drive’s encryption. The privacy arms race is amusing. Lock things up with your biometrics, sure. It’s a bad idea, but you’ll do it anyway. Make it so your thumbprint opens your phone. But then one day you want to get into your phone when it’s in the other room, and all you’ve got’s your friend’s computer. So keep your thumbprint online somewhere. What do you lock that up with? Another thirty-character passcode? Or maybe your retinal scan? Great. Now where do you keep that? For a hacker, it’s a logic puzzle—once you get one clue, you leverage it against the rest.
    By 4am I had everything I needed to convince his bank I was him. I set his account to make a series of payments to thirty different bank accounts, each transaction pre-approved. Random timed intervals between the transactions kept them from tripping the bank’s security. Work isn’t so bad.
    It was 4:30am when the battering ram slammed against the front door, a bass thud that dropped me into my body from where I’d been lost in the screen.
    “Pigs!” Ramirez shouted, going from sleeping to standing as fast as I’d managed to look up from my computer.
    We’d lose it all if Albrecht—which is to say, I—didn’t authorize the bizarre series of transactions at the end. I hate it the fucking worst when I want to fucking panic but I can’t. I wanted to cut and run, but if I cut I lost it all and if I ran, well, there wasn’t really anywhere to go.
    “Time left?” Ramirez asked.
    “Twelve minutes thirty-four,” I said.
    The ram hit the door again, and the frame cracked but didn’t buckle. Ramirez must have done more for security than the face-reg camera.
    Fuck, the camera.
    “What’s the face-reg hooked up to?” I asked.
    “Kind of busy right now,” she answered. She was typing away on the bare kitchen counter, pressing keys on an illusory keyboard only she could see.
    “Is it fucking hooked up to Lightnet?” I asked.
    “Yeah it’s fucking hooked up to Lightnet. You think I got a face-reg database in my pocket?”
    The battering ram slammed again, and this time I heard cussing from other side. They’d move to breaching rounds soon, and me without my gas mask.
    “You know I’m tagged!” I shouted. 11:36 left.
    “There’re here for you? ” she answered, still typing away.
    “There’re from the bank,” I said. “Not the bank we’re robbing, the bank that owns the house. I’m tagged for B&E.”
    A shotgun racked outside and I lost it, triggered into memory.
    It was May Day, five years back, and we were all lined up, arm-in-arm—undocumented migrants and squatters’ rights activists, all of us riffraff who just refused to disappear or die. I felt powerful, more powerful than I’d ever felt in my life. I felt more powerful in that company than I’d ever been while digging through the personal files of the most powerful men in the world, because that day I was part of something greater than myself.
    The police weren’t having it, and they did their best to corral us. But there we were, in unvanquishable number, flooding the downtown streets of Portland, disrupting the easy flow of capital. At least that day, the invisible were visible.
    But the police attacked a few hundred of us at the base of the Burnside bridge.
    I know what their plan had been, at least from up high, at least officially. I leaked it a few days later. They were supposed to leave us an exit, disperse us with gas and force as necessary.
    But they didn’t leave us an exit. The news crews dutifully departed rather than face arrest, and the cops came in with bludgeons and pepperspray. They’d tried a few new toys out on us that day, dazzlers and sticky guns and a goddam make-you-puke cannon, but at the end of it all, nothing beats the raw force of sticks and airborne poison.
    And we had our arms linked together, us brave people, and we were nonviolent back then, most of us. A