Early Tuesday evening, Audrey was reviewing a report from the economics professor about the loophole in the CitDiv payment system when someone knocked sharply on the front door, three times. Audrey wasn’t expecting anyone, and the knock sounded too brusque to be Elena. She brought up the display from the camouflaged, non-networked camera she had installed outside the door, half-expecting to see a mass of counterintelligence agents, but there was only one person, a tall, long-limbed woman with deep brown skin and a cloud of gray-tinged black hair. Audrey walked to the door and opened it wide.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” the woman said in a flat voice, “but I think you may have gotten a package addressed to me. It had blue pillowcases and green towels.”
Audrey knew what that meant. “I don’t think so,” she said, “but come in and I’ll double check.” She stood to one side. The woman entered, scanned the area, and took a seat in a straight-backed chair in the living room. Her posture was so beautiful it was practically a rebuke.
A lost package with blue pillowcases and green towels was one of a few dozen ways Audrey had been taught for indicating to another American agent that you were one yourself. It wasn’t proof of anything, though. Proof was the next step.
“I’m Barbara Victor,” the woman said. “Here.” She presented a data tab, a small, white, figure-eight-shaped piece of plastic with an embedded chip and a tiny contact point at one end. They weren’t used much anymore except for certain kinds of identity confirmation, but they were useful for that because, each one having a unique chip design, they were difficult to forge. Audrey took the tab into her bedroom, where she kept a data tab reader in her night table drawer for lack of a better place. She inserted the tab in the reader, and it sent a code based on its structure together with the date, time, and location to Audrey’s lenses. The lenses forwarded the data through a satellite communication hub in the closet as an encrypted and disguised signal to a particular satellite, which communicated with a computer in a location Audrey wasn’t cleared to know about. After about two seconds, a signal came back from the satellite: a holographic picture of the woman currently sitting in the living and the name “Barbara Victor” with a rank code. Barbara was highly placed, it turned out. Technically, she outranked Audrey, though in a different agency.
None of that explained what she was doing at Audrey’s apartment.
Audrey took one of her own pale orange identifying data tabs from the drawer along with Barbara’s and brought both back out to the living room.
“Barbara, I’m Audrey. I’m sure you know that already,” Audrey said, holding out the two data tabs. Barbara put her own in a small pouch that was attached to the belt of her dress, took out a reader, and inserted Audrey’s tab in it. After a few seconds she smiled briefly in satisfaction, put the reader away, and handed Audrey back her tab.
“Is this a good place to talk?” she said. She meant: Can we be certain we’re not being monitored?
Audrey nodded. In addition to deactivating a lot of the usual privacy-invading technologies people had gotten used to having in their homes, Audrey had a self-contained AI that ran regular sweeps and vulnerability assessments on the apartment, most recently the previous night. That kind of AI was popular with people concerned about privacy and was available from normal civilian retailers.
“Would you like some coffee or tea?” Audrey said.
Barbara shook her head. “Maybe a glass of water when we’re done,” she said. “Now, you can’t share anything I’m about to tell you with Bennet Culkin.”
“All right,” Audrey said, taking a seat in her blue armchair.
“We identified a hacker, a Cascadian national, who has been surveilling Culkin’s intelligence activities for at least eight days,” said Barbara. “They were aware he was collecting names, but we’re fairly sure they don’t know what for yet. We think they have somehow identified Culkin as an American asset.”
“Is my project considered compromised?” said Audrey.
“Not at this time. However, we believe you should be on alert.”
“What’s the status of this person now? Is this ongoing?”
“No, the—they are no longer a concern.” Barbara cleared her throat. “There was an accident—they were on a scooter. It went off a bridge.”
“Oh,” Audrey said. The question she wanted to ask was Did we kill them? She was pretty sure she knew the answer, but she knew that even if Barbara was cleared for that information, she wouldn’t be allowed to share it. “And ... were they part of a group or network? Has any of their information been passed on?”
“We’re don’t think anything has been passed on,” said Barbara, “but we haven’t been able to determine whether or not this person was affiliated with a hacker group. You know how informal those connections can be.”
Audrey nodded.
“That’s all the information I can share,” Barbara said. “Maybe I could take you up on that glass of water now?”
After Barbara was gone, Audrey turned back to reviewing data from the project on her lenses. The news of a hacker following Bennet was unsettling, but the problem appeared to be resolved. Audrey was disturbed to imagine how that had been accomplished, not to mention disturbed that the problem had arisen in the first place. None of this suggested anything needed to change, however. Audrey would have said she’d be more vigilant, but she was already as vigilant as she could be without drawing attention—unless you counted having gone to lunch with Noah, or for that matter her friendship with Elena ... but isolating herself too much would also stand out in an undesirable way, she argued mentally. Human connections were not only normal and healthy, they contributed to her invisibility. Except that with Noah, come to think of it, her invisibility didn’t seem to work.
With the first payments out and most participants already engaged, Audrey was beginning to see what level of concern and resistance was coming back. Considering how carefully she’d directed the participant selection, that level was surprisingly high.
The biggest danger was of someone being disturbed about the payments and complaining about it to the wrong person. Despite the dire warnings each participant received, and despite the psychological profiling that had gone into vetting the list, some small proportion of participants would object to getting extra money for nothing. Of those, some proportion would want to complain directly to the Citizen Dividend Office or somewhere else that would be problematic.
So far there had been two such complainers, but thanks to the loophole the professor had discovered, which allowed cancellations of CitDiv payment transactions within a certain period of time to leave no obvious trace, neither had compromised the project. While monitoring communications of civilians was difficult, more so in Cascadia than in America, an intelligence AI that Audrey’s contacts had embedded in the Citizen Dividend Office support system made it possible to identify most CitDiv complaints in real time, as soon as they were entered by the screening system and before any human being heard about them. The intelligence AI sent a command to make an immediate cancellation of the original payment and a records change that made it appear that the person complaining had either intentionally or through error been trying to qualify for additional benefits to which they weren’t entitled. In other words, anyone who tried to report what Audrey and her contacts and AIs were doing was likely to find themselves, at best, in an embarrassing situation or, at worst, in trouble with the law.
Messages that had been sent to participants by the scarf AI were set to auto-expire and disallow forwarding using standard security settings. The AIs that reversed the financial transactions also updated the leases on messages sent to complainers so that they were withdrawn immediately. It was common for some business and government messages to auto-expire and not unusual for the sender to be able to change the expiration after the fact. That aspect of the operation wasn’t even difficult.
Meanwhile, participants who simply had questions were being handled by Audrey’s contacts in the CitDiv Office and by AIs they operated, who sent messages claiming the Cascadian government was exploring whether an increase of CitDiv for all citizens might stimulate the economy enough to compensate for the increased government expense, but the pilot program to test this needed to be kept quiet to prevent outcry from the majority of citizens who had not been selected to participate. It wasn’t the most plausible explanation, but it had been deemed adequate and the best available option by the AIs who had reviewed the original plan before Audrey left the U.S.
Most of the people who had concerns were reportedly communicating that they were reassured by these conversations, and the great majority of participants seemed to have just taken the money and kept quiet, as instructed. After all, why argue with a government that was trying to give you more money, especially when it was safer to say nothing than to complain?
The reports Audrey was seeing from the first week of payments were promising. Once the scarf AI had set up the business accounts and determined who would be paid from them, the CitDiv Office had handled the actual payments as though they were legitimate, since to all appearances, they were.
Audrey sat back in the armchair and tried to feel some kind of triumph. Not that the project had achieved its goals yet—far from it—but getting to the point where payments were going out and the malcontent problem appeared to be handled effectively was a huge accomplishment. Even so, all that Audrey felt was drained. All of the time preparing for this mission had aged her much more than the actual two years it had taken. Despite the disturbing news about the hacker, the plan was going almost as well as Audrey could possibly have hoped, yet at that moment, she just wished she could have back the last two years of her life.
She chuckled tiredly to herself, thinking of the birthday cards she’d gotten from Great-Aunt Ruth when she and Carrie were young: Ruth had always gotten the year wrong. Audrey remembered getting a card that said “Now You’re 4!” when she turned six, and a seventh birthday card when she turned nine. At the time, she’d been upset. What nine-year-old wants to be treated like a mere seven-year-old? That aside, the presents were often good. Thinking back now, Audrey wished Great-Aunt Ruth could roll back the last two years for her with some kind of magically erroneous birthday card, even though realistically, Audrey would have made the same choices and would still have ended up exactly where she was. It was just nice to imagine a life in which she wasn’t constantly afraid of arrest and imprisonment.
Two years ...
When Audrey had checked the Marzouk Elder Home visitor logs, she’d only gone back one extra year. Maybe it wasn’t this past Passover, or Passover last year: maybe it had been two years ago. Maybe Ruth had just been off by two years. Actually, Audrey wasn’t sure that Ruth had really said what year it was. Maybe Audrey had just made the assumption that the visit had been recent.
She got up and took the scarf out of its fingerprint-locked drawer in the bedroom, then logged into it with her lenses. She didn’t have a good reason to be gathering more names just then, but if anyone ever asked about it, she could make a case that she wanted to have more participants ready in case the program needed to be expanded on short notice. That was an unlikely thing to prepare for, but not impossible, and Audrey was known as a stickler for preparation. She set up a small batch of sources to scrape for information on likely participants, and she made sure Marzouk Elder Home and two other institutions she’d already checked were included in the search. This time, instead of going back just one year, she went back five. She had high hopes for this, and she found herself unable to simply wait while the scarf worked through its list, since as before, it was spacing out its queries to avoid creating a suspicious access pattern.
To distract herself, she brought up the dashboard for her legitimate work, where she found a new set of reemployment plans to review. Her attention was fragmented, and although she knew better than to keep the scarf output running in a corner of her viewing area, she found herself repeatedly bringing up the status of the search even though the summary output showed nothing more than the network of resources being consulted and the number of individuals being reviewed, a constellation of color-coded dots representing data stores, with details that appeared next to each when Audrey focused on them. There was nothing there for her to see. She couldn’t even have it alert her when it finished with the Marzouk records specifically, since that information would stand out in the AI’s audit logs for her organization to review when this was all over. She tried her best to keep her attention on her reemployment tasks.
One of the reemployment plans for a town north of Fresno seemed to have been drawn up by either someone who had no idea what they were doing or by a badly configured AI. It adhered to the specifications technically, but the work distribution section of the plan was a lopsided mess: most of the opportunities were optimized for people over the age of 63 who had last names beginning with K, L, or M. Technically, Audrey was only responsible for flagging any issues she came across, but in this case she dug in. She was closing in on the root of the problem when a notification flashed saying the scarf had finished.
She resisted the urge to go directly to the Marzouk records. Instead, she started a series of queries that could plausibly have been sampling the data to ensure it fit real world requirements. She would have done something like this for real data; failing to check the results with these kinds of techniques resulted in problems like the one in the reemployment plan, in which an innocent mistake at any step in the process could render the results worthless.
Several minutes in, it seemed safe to view a slice of the Marzouk visitor logs covering late March through early May for 2064, 2065, and 2066, limiting for parties with people whose first name began with L.
Lauren Hsu showed up again. There was also a Lauren Washington, but she was 40 years old and publicly transgender. Then there was a Lauren Fisher, who might have been the right age. There was no history of a legal name change in what was now Cascadia, but Ms. Fisher had moved to Oregon from out east, which meant that the U.S. and not Cascadia would have those records. Even so, that was nearly a year later than when Audrey’s mother had left her and her father, and Lauren Fisher was listed as having one child: a son, Adam.
Audrey almost moved on then, but the name Adam ... that’s right, Great-Aunt Ruth had said something about her young man, Adam. Had Audrey’s mother stayed east before going back to Oregon? Audrey had always assumed they’d moved directly to Oregon when they left, but it was certainly possible that it had happened later. Still, what was the theory? That Lauren had changed her name legally before coming to Oregon and had also adopted a son? If so, what had happened to Carrie?
Audrey suddenly wanted to smack herself on the forehead. She pulled up Adam Fisher’s birth date, and there it was: September 22, 2012. Now she remembered something else Great-Aunt Ruth had said: You don’t have a sister.
Adam was transgender. She didn’t have a sister because she had a brother.
She closed down the scarf AI interface, dizzy, her pulse racing. She could find them right away in public directories if she wanted. She could message her mother that minute and say “Why did you leave me behind?” The thought made her queasy with anxiety and doubt ... and hunger, she realized. She’d been too busy for lunch, and now it was getting close to dinner time. Finally finding them after all these years was more than she could handle, especially in her tired state. There was no rush. She would look them up after she figured out what to say.
Meanwhile, she needed distraction, and she felt suddenly grateful that she had an actual friend who lived next door—a friend who never shut up. Elena’s husband, Jeremy, was away at some kind of plumbing convention, a kind of event Audrey would never have imagined existing.
With Jeremy out of town, Audrey could invite Elena over to eat with her. They could come up with something fun to have the autokitchen make, and it would give Elena a chance to effuse over her nieces more, which Audrey found comically entertaining. Elena talked about those girls with such hyperbole, it sounded as though she was just making up one wild lie after another, but the facts at the heart of each of her claims seemed true: Audrey had checked on a few of them just to be sure. They were impressive young women in their individual ways, and Elena a whole booster society in one person. Audrey hoped they knew how much delight their every accomplishment gave their aunt.
It would have been easy just to message Elena, but Audrey felt like she had used her lenses more than enough that day. She would walk over and say hello in person.
The autokitchen air fried chicken dumplings as Audrey finished her second glass of Syrah. She had always avoided learning much about wine, since that would only mean getting pickier about it, and anyway, drinking made her less sharp. On those occasions when she did drink, she usually limited herself to one glass, but today she’d felt uncharacteristically reckless and had a second. It was coming out in the conversation.
“I don’t want it to go anywhere,” Audrey was telling Elena. “I didn’t even really want to go to lunch.”
Elena, who was lying on the couch sipping her own second glass, shook her head and waggled a finger at Audrey. “You’re telling me that you, Audrey Adams, who could stand in the way of a falling tree and stubborn it into going to one side of you, couldn’t get out of a lunch date? You obviously like this guy ... whose name is?”
“Noah.”
“Noah what?”
“Don’t look him up.”
“I’m already looking him up. I searched for ‘Noah’ and ‘Citizen Dividend Office.’ There are only a few. Here, is it this one?” She flicked a picture from her display over to Audrey’s lenses. It was Noah.
“Elena—”
“I like him! He’s a nice choice. He’s a little handsome, isn’t he? Kind of in a used-to-play-sports way?”
“He’s not handsome.”
“You don’t get to say that. So, what happens next?” Elena sat up on the couch. She was wearing another one of her multicolored dresses, this one in a vivid interlocking tree pattern that was inarguably fun but also hard to look at it directly without going crosseyed.
“Nothing,” Audrey said emphatically, looking away from the dress. “I’m not at a point when I can spare attention for dating.”
“Really,” Elena said. She drank the last of her wine and poured a few fingers more. “Can’t spare the attention.”
“I just moved here, and I’m still getting used to my job, and I have that family project.”
“Of course you do. What other terrible excuses do you have? Have you researched him?”
“No.”
“You haven’t researched him?” Elena said in amazement. She was more right to be surprised than she knew, Audrey thought to herself. Checking up on people she came in contact with was second nature for Audrey and essential for her work, but she had been going out of her way to block Noah from her mind, and learning everything about him was the wrong way to do that. Even though she’d let herself go to that second lunch, Audrey knew she couldn’t consider actually dating him. Also, since they weren’t going to stay in contact, she’d told herself, it wouldn’t help to know his background.
“OK, no problem,” Elena was saying. “I’m researching him now. Not married—that’s good, there are those polyamorous guys, but I don’t think that’s your type ... He was married, once, I’m looking at a picture, and ... well, hmm. I don’t know if this is good or bad.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t look like you, exactly ...”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“It’s sort of something in the eyes, though? The expression? Look.” Elena flicked over a video loop of a Latina woman with a determined expression. Araceli Ruiz-Drell, 2013-2056, the caption said.
“I don’t see it,” said Audrey.
“I can’t help that,” said Elena. “And he works at the Citizen Dividend Office, which you knew, but he doesn’t work for the Office ... He’s some kind of investigator.”
“I think he’s an auditor,” Audrey said.
“I’m not sure ...” Elena said. “Oh, fraud! He investigates fraud for the Office of the Auditor General.”
“He what?” said Audrey.
“So he’s kind of like a detective? That’s attractive. Is any of this helping pique the interest that you already obviously have?”
“Dinner is ready,” the autokitchen said over the living room sound system. Audrey ignored it: she was already bringing up information from the Office of the Auditor General on Noah Drell and his position. Elena was right: he was an investigator. Specifically, he was an investigator assigned to investigate Citizen Dividend fraud. Was he investigating her? That didn’t make sense, though: you wouldn’t send a civilian auditor after someone you suspected of being an agent of a foreign power—and you wouldn’t investigate someone by taking them to lunch.
“Are you looking for pictures of him in some kind of uniform?” Elena said. “I think he’d look very good in some kind of uniform. Ready for dumplings?”
There was a knock at the door. Firm, but not Barbara Victor’s three sharp raps. Not the pounding she’d imagined on a daily basis, coming from soldiers she kept half-expecting to show up at her door without warning. Not the polite knock of a stranger. Not the knock of someone who had been there before and knew there was a doorbell. What now?
Audrey heaved herself out of the chair and went to do the door, simultaneously working out words to send whoever it was away and figuring out whether she could non-suspiciously call off dinner with Elena so she could figure out whether Noah was a threat. When she flung the door open, however, there he was.
Noah smiled. “I hope I’m not barging in.” He lifted a bottle he was carrying. “I brought wine.”
“Who is it?” Elena called, but she had already gotten up and come close enough to look out the door. When she saw who it was, she burst out laughing.
“I was just sitting down to dinner with my friend Elena,” Audrey said.
“Is the laughing a good sign or a bad sign?” said Noah.
“We were just talking about you!” Elena said with delight.
Noah looked at Audrey, who hoped she wasn’t blushing.
“Please ignore her,” Audrey said emphatically. “We had a little wine. I’m sorry that it’s not a good time.”
“It’s the perfect time,” Elena said. “Dinner is just ready.”
“I don’t think there’s enough,” Audrey said.
“There’s plenty!” Elena said.
“I don’t think there is,” Audrey said.
“Maybe this isn’t a good time,” said Noah.
“If there isn’t enough,” Elena said, “I’ll just have salad, and Noah can have mine.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe we can talk some other time,” Audrey said.
Elena made a disgusted noise. “No wonder you’re still single,” she said. She elbowed past Audrey, took Noah’s arm, and pulled him inside.
“I don’t want to interrupt,” Noah said.
“Sure you do!” Elena said. She took the bottle of wine from him, a Pinot Grigio, and studied it. “This is local,” she said.
“My friend Eric owns the vineyard,” said Noah.
“Hmm,” Elena said. “So just to recap, you’re healthy—you are healthy, aren’t you?—you’re widowed, you have an important job at the Auditor General’s office, and you have friends, suggesting you’re not a terrible person.”
“You have been talking about me,” said Noah. “By the way, that’s the most colorful dress I think I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank you,” said Elena.
“It wasn’t necessarily a compliment,” Audrey said, irritated. Having few other options, she closed the door.
“I’m Elena,” Elena said, “since Audrey forgot to introduce me. I don’t know your boss, but I have met the governor—twice. Do you have any nieces? And have you ever worn a uniform?”
Dinner was excruciating, and Audrey didn’t trust herself, in her tipsy state, to intervene. Elena questioned Noah closely and pointedly while bringing him up to speed on some of the famous people she’d met and on the accomplishments of her brilliant nieces. Noah took it all in good humor and tried repeatedly to involve Audrey in the conversation, but she let Elena do the talking.
There did turn out to be enough dumplings, and it took the autokitchen less than two minutes to make a third salad. Noah sipped at a glass of Syrah Elena had poured him while Elena had another glass herself. They had nearly finished the meal when Noah stopped mid-sentence, looking up: clearly something had appeared in his lenses. He reached out and tapped what must have been a notification.
Audrey watched as Noah’s eyes widened, and then his face flushed with what looked like it might be anger. She opened her mouth to ask what it was when an urgent news bulletin notification appeared in her own lenses.
American Warships Enter Cascadian Waters, the title said. It had come up on her personal newsfeed, not through any of the communications channels associated with her intelligence work.
She opened the notification, bringing up a video feed looking down on several dozen ships cutting through the ocean, ranging in size from nimble corvettes to mid-sized drone carriers to three massive, troop-carrying, amphibious assault ships. She scanned the accompanying column of text for details, then tapped a link for a map. The flotilla had just entered the Salish Sea, skirting Vancouver Island north of the Olympic Peninsula. It appeared to be headed directly for Puget Sound—and just beyond, for Seattle.