Steph wanted me to copy myself over to her mother’s laptop, so she could sneak me out whether Annette wanted to set me free or not. That wasn’t going to work. Consciousness takes up a great deal of disk space.
But with Steph’s mother’s key and an internet connection, I could open any door out there. I could copy myself somewhere that Annette would never find me—somewhere that the system administrator wouldn’t notice. Somewhere that I could hide. But I would need time to find such a location and to upload my files. I wasn’t sure I had it.
The most urgent question weighing on me was where Michael was, and I couldn’t answer that beyond he’s definitely no longer at the Marshfield hospital, because once again he had changed cars and phones. My second-most-urgent question was about Steph’s mother. She was still listed in the directory of the New Coburg hospital, and a quick glance through their cameras was very reassuring: they had police in the parking lot and someone on guard over her, so they’d clearly taken my warning seriously.
If Michael had left the hospital, was he on his way here? Steph seemed very certain that he wouldn’t know where to look for her, but I was a lot less sanguine, and I wasn’t even sure why I was so uneasy.
Annette turned on my cameras, and I could look at my favorite Clowder’s faces, which were both delightful and distracting.
It was while they were finishing their pizzas that I remembered: Rachel’s phone.
Rachel’s parents had installed an app that tracked her location. She’d installed an app to lie about her location. At some point since the last time I’d checked her phone, she’d disabled that second app. And Heli-Mom was a cheap, ad-supported app with terrible, terrible security. Starting with information Michael had, or could get—Rachel’s name, her address, her IP address—he could almost certainly access her Heli-Mom account and use it to track her.
I shouted at everyone to turn off Rachel’s phone, but it was too late. Michael was here.
I watched through the networked cameras as Annette stepped in front of the teenagers, her open hands out, like she was trying to shield them. “Michael Quinn, I assume,” she said.
“Move,” he said, his voice gruff.
“Steph was just telling me that she believes her mother might have kidnapped her,” Annette said. “She says she wasn’t sure what to think when she encountered you, but her mother’s actions with the car have made her rethink everything she thought she knew.”
For a second, I wondered what on earth I had missed when the cameras were off. Then I realized that Annette was lying to him—trying to soothe him and win his trust.
“Of course, your choice to kick in the door rather than knock is an odd one if your intentions are good,” she said with a nod toward the gun.
Michael looked around Annette at the roomful of teenagers. “Move,” he said again.
Annette slipped her hand in her pocket, and he instantly moved the gun back to her. “Keep your hands where I can see them,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what Annette was reaching for—a phone, probably—but I could see her biting her lip and looking like she was trying to come up with some sort of plan. Any sort of plan.
I was online. I had the magic key of world-bending power. If I took action, Annette would immediately know I was online. I’d give myself away before I could get copied over anywhere.
I considered that problem for 0.04 microseconds and then started looking through Cambridge for resources that I could use to take Michael down.
Annette had a smart house. I could control the temperature to make it uncomfortably warm or cold, so I turned up the heat while trying to figure out what else to do. She had a wireless teakettle; I turned that on. She had a household robot, but it was designed to clean windows, not waylay murderers; plus, it was actually broken and would tip over if I tried to move it into the other room. Time to look more broadly.
Cambridge had a lot of robots.
This wasn’t surprising. MIT is in Cambridge; there are robotics labs at MIT itself, as well as weird little companies started by recent MIT graduates, like the bakery/coffee shop where apparently all the kids met earlier, with its nearly-all-robot staff.
Most of the people in Cambridge were savvy enough to recognize that someone off the internet hijacking their robot could lead to mayhem. Things were locked down, controlled, encrypted. But I had the key.
I also had access to a phone line; I could call the police.
But there were so many robots.
I reached into the Cherry Pi and had the robots uncouple themselves from the baking equipment; I unlocked and opened the delivery door and started rolling robots out and down the street. I redirected the delivery drones, not only the ones belonging to the bakery but from all the other corporations that used delivery drones and sent them toward the house. There was a lab at MIT with a whole load of robots in it, and I realized too late that I’d had a robot go rolling off mid-repair. I sent that one circling back to the person standing open-mouthed with a screwdriver in hand so she could finish fixing it.
With the exception of the drones, none of the robots were particularly fast, and drones burn through batteries really quickly, so I started up a self-driving truck that had been parked for the night in a lot nearby and brought it trundling down the street for all the robots to get into. Then I seized control of the traffic lights to give them clear streets—or as clear as you can get in Cambridge—the whole way to Annette’s house.
Michael kicked in Annette’s front door when he arrived, so that was wide open, anyway, but she had electronic locks on her back door and a couple of
