On the other hand. If I couldn’t get into the Slovstakian state networks, then I didn’t really have much to offer Kriztina anymore, did I? I’d given them the help I could, when I could, and I’d warned them to get away when it became clear that I wasn’t going to be able to keep on offering that kind of help. It had been good advice and they were adults, capable of making their own decisions. The fact that they—and every other dissident—were likely to end up in the knucklebreakers’ custody was a reality they would have to reconcile for themselves.
Aeroflot had been steadily cutting the flight schedules to Blzt as the protests had grown and grown and the number of business travelers had shelved off. There was still a daily Moscow flight, and a twice-weekly Berlin service. I could get that Berlin flight the day after next, visit the offices of my Swiss bank on the Ku’damm, take a fast train to a luxury spa in the countryside somewhere, and decompress for a week or two, far from conflict and responsibilities. A week of that, I’d be ready to think about what to do next. That was the advantage of being me: I could fight other peoples’ battles—for money or for my own reasons—but I didn’t have to.
* * *
I tried to go clothes shopping, slogging from heavily guarded mall to heavily guarded mall, stubbornly insisting that somewhere there must be a store selling a single, solitary garment I’d voluntarily wear. It was a comfortably pointless way to spend a few hours, and I ate a numb pizza at a Domino’s and went back to the hotel. There was another protest planned for the square, and I had to detour around several police blockades. That was okay by me. The last thing I wanted was to involve myself with the protests. I’d be in Berlin in thirty-six hours. All I needed to do between now and then was nothing.
I shared the elevator to the eighth floor with a hooker and her client, all of us awkwardly looking away from one another. When the doors opened, the man behind the desk waved them through, then insisted on seeing my key and noting its number. I began to get the impression that the eighth floor was reserved for the most special guests at the hotel.
I set down my bag next to my bed, stripped off my underlayers, and then pulled on thermal tights and a sweatshirt—the room was freezing, presumably on the assumption that any tenants would be (a) short-term and (b) engaged in vigorous physical activity. I plugged my laptop into the wall charger and then zipped it into my bag, climbed into the sleep-sack, and closed my eyes. For a merciful change, I fell asleep quickly.
* * *
I woke to find myself in the dark room, with the sense that there had just been a loud noise. I sat up, looking around, reaching for my bag, shucking swiftly out of the sleep-sack, trying to remember where the light was, where I’d left my shoes.
Then I heard a scream from the street below, and a car horn, and then more screams, and then a terrible, rending crash. I stopped feeling for the light switch and went to the window, opening the blinds from the edge, looking down.
It was a bad crash, one of the city’s Finecab subcompact autonomous taxis bent around an empty planter, and I reflexively snorted: the self-driving vehicles were an absurd source of national pride for Slovstakia, and if you’ve heard of Slovstakia, there’s a pretty good chance that this is literally the only thing you know about it: “Oh, that’s the country that was stupid enough to buy gen-one automatic taxis.” The Finecabs were notorious for getting into fender benders, and had become a symbol of how easy it was for foreign companies to sell garbage tech to the country’s ruling elite (see also: Xoth).
But this wasn’t one of the customary comedy-crashes. From the sounds filtering up from the road, someone had been hurt. I saw someone in hotel livery rush to the car and decided it wasn’t my problem anymore. I went back to bed.
I was just drifting off when I heard another crash, farther away, accompanied by blaring horns, then another, almost immediately after, and screams that didn’t stop. I looked out the window and saw that others were doing the same, some of them holding their phones, and then they were shouting excitedly at each other in Boris. I retreated to my bed and got out my phone, tunneled out to the free world, and started looking for Slovstakia in the feeds.
Even though it was all in Cyrillic, it wasn’t hard to figure out the night’s news from the pictures: first the massive protests in the central square, then a baton charge from the cops and a countercharge, blood and tear gas, and then more gas, pepper spray, and the crowd broke and ran for it. That much I’d seen before, but what came next was anything but the usual.
At first, it was just photos of car wrecks, all involving Finecabs, many with injuries. Judging from the clothing of the injured, they were all protesters. I started to get a bad feeling. I kept scrolling. More injuries, more crashes—then, a shakicam video, racking up views like a broken odometer: an autonomous taxi speeding toward a crowd of protesters who were standing on an empty street corner. The protesters noticed the cab as it drew near to them and broke and ran, and then—the cab chased one of them. It was a woman, in a puffa jacket and snow boots, and as she ran, her friends screamed in horror. She turned a corner and the view from the camera started to jerk as whomever was holding it raced after it, rounding the corner just as the car sped off. The woman was lying motionless in the street.
That’s the video you probably saw, if you saw any of them, but for me, it wasn’t the worst. Compared to the videos taken from inside the taxis, by passengers who were hammering at the emergency stop buttons, that video was relatively benign. The screams from inside the cars as their victims’ heads starred the windshields and left behind streaks of blood and hair were a thousand times more terrifying.
I knew I wouldn’t be going back to bed that night. I logged in to Aeroflot and booked a ticket on the next flight out, to Moscow the next morning. It wasn’t Berlin, but it didn’t have to be. I could get to Berlin from there. I could get anywhere from there.
Where should I go? I felt alone and small, and ashamed to have been fired. I was good at being alone, and scared could go into a compartment, easy.
Apparently I wasn’t the kind of person who worked for Xoth anymore. I didn’t want to be that kind of person. Chances were pretty high that Xoth had sold Litvinchuk and pals the exploits to take over those cars. I’d been complicit in some pretty terrible shit before, sure, but what if Kriztina had been thrown over one of those little subcompacts, or crushed against a building by one, or run down and driven over?
I messaged her, just a quick encrypted check-in, and then, because I was going to be leaving soon, I packed my bag and synched my sensitive files to an encrypted cloud store, then securely erased them off my laptop. Now I could comply with an order to log in to my laptop and enter my hard drive’s passphrase without turning over my most sensitive data.
Doing that took my mind off Kriztina, but it also focused my attention on what I was going to do after my flight landed in Moscow in a few hours. Reflexively, I looked at my calendar, though of course all my appointments related to a job I’d just been fired from with extreme prejudice. But looking also reminded me that it was Tanisha’s birthday, or it was in Europe and would be shortly in San Francisco. The reminder was smart enough to include my address book entry for her and that was smart enough to include her last social post, a selfie of her in afro-puffs, grinning in front of a huge crowd of protesters somewhere else—Oakland, of course.