A tall, shapely woman with waist-length, glossy black hair and skin the color of a strong latte, clad in a graphite biker suit, strode purposefully through the upper level of the garage. She passed rows of shiny, trendy wheeled cars and aircars—the kind a middle-income New Yorker would need seven or eight years to afford—before heading towards an alley lined with boxes for wheeled and airbikes.
On the concrete floor in front of a box marked ’ARC’, someone had scrawled ’witchcraft’ in hologram spray paint. Then someone else—or the author himself after some reflection—had altered the ’w’ to a ’b’. Of course, the culprit could have been identified easily and the graffiti removed, but the box’s owner instructed the building’s administrator bot to leave both the inscription and its author alone. Now the words were badly worn.
Unlock.
Light flickered inside the box as the shutter retracted its transparent slats. The woman took her helmet from the trunk, slipped it on, mounted the machine, and rode down the corridor to the parking lot adjacent to the building. Holographic signs indicated lanes: left and down for wheeled vehicles, right and up for air-vehicles. She drove to the edge of the building and stopped at a meter-high glass railing overlooking the city skyline. A scanner display appeared on the bike’s navigation panel.
Show the drones tracking me.
Thirty-three registered drones and five unregistered ones were circling above her.
Disappointing. I’m losing followers.
The reason there were fewer spy drones above her was quite trivial—the rotary engine drones, known in New York as ‘mosquitos’, had taken cover from the rain, which was starting to drizzle again. Only the mini-jet drones, commonly called ‘hornets’, remained.
She scrolled through the list of identified drones hanging above her head. Almost all were paparazzi drones belonging to gossip portals. Nothing threatening, although she could not have anyone following her today. More worrying were the five drones that did not show their ID. There were usually fewer. Their signatures indicated that they were specialized spy drones, faster, with greater range and altitude, equipped with precise thermal and night vision. Harder to shake. For a moment, she considered downing all of them with an electromagnetic pulse. At most, she would pay a fine.
Too close to the company and too many of them.
She changed her mind. One of them would record her electromagnetic shoot, and all hell would break loose on the web about high-profile corpos putting themselves above the law. Blah, blah, blah. Shitty fame on gossip portals was the last thing she needed right now.
She rode to one of the parking lot exit gates and scanned her surroundings. Neither the helmet visor nor the bike’s windshield showed anything alarming in augmented reality mode. Across the street, someone had altered a holographic ad for the Globenet satellite network. It now displayed ‘fastest asses in Globe cess’ slogan.
She sped down the lower lane for wheeled vehicles, headed towards the overpasses leading to the Verrazzano Bridge. Ignoring more holographic signs instructing her to ‘Pull up to air-pass,’ she kept going. For a few minutes, overpasses with roadways and maglev lanes shielded her from above, but most drones stayed with her through the maze of streets. Over two dozen remained. She turned onto a northbound lane, entered air-level, and zipped towards Queens. There was only one way to ditch the aerial spies. Hardly legal, but very effective.
The drone cloud thinned even more, those remaining lowering their altitude. Those unable to keep up with her speed gave up one by one, until only the five unidentified ones remained. Holographic messages of ‘No human drive in this area’ and ‘Human drive prohibited on this way’ appeared over the route she took. Similar warnings appeared on the airbike’s helmet display and windshield, followed by the warning ‘Airbike ride in NYC tunnels is prohibited’.
She approached the tunnels. The autopilot would refuse entry, so she simply disabled it. A regular airbike’s system would have automatically re-engaged, either stopping the bike or continuing on autopilot. Her bike, however, just flashed alerts—‘Tunnel in 200 m, turn auto on… Tunnel in 100 m, turn auto on’. She kept riding manually, even accelerating.
Entering the tunnel toward East Bronx was illegal for airbikes, but the fans and other installations made it forbidden for drones to follow. The pursuing drones had to climb over three hundred meters above the water, losing time. The wind off the sea would further slow them down. They had no chance of catching up with the rider by flying over the water.
Bots… you will always be slaves to your programs.
