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13
Amber
I sat on a park bench across the street from Owen’s snobby, rich condo, in the snobby, rich part of town, and grinned while typing on my laptop.
Owen’s smart condo was pretty cool. He had custom-built the entire thing, I could see. His code was sloppy, but serviceable. If it were anyone else, I would have been impressed.
But it was also very exploitable. Especially once he brought his ACS laptop home and connected it to his home network, thus allowing my trojan horse behind his firewall.
I smiled at the scene on my laptop. His Home-AI system tools had a map of the layout of his condo, which showed every single microphone and speaker in the entire place. When he came within range of one of the microphones, it turned green on the map, and others turned red when he left their range. The result was that I could watch him walk through his house as clearly as if I were there. Like the Marauders’ Map from Harry Potter.
Once I revealed myself and locked him in the closet, I could hear the fear in his voice. Oh, he was mostly angry, but the fear was there—just beneath the surface. The sound was like pure ecstasy to me.
This is what you get for ruining my sister’s birthday,I thought.
I was enjoying making him squirm. Especially when he went into the kitchen. From my park bench across the street, I could see him walk into the kitchen, then flinch when all the lights turned on and off. It was so much more satisfying than watching it on my laptop screen. Standing there, staring at the ceiling as if his house was possessed by an angry IT demon. Wearing a plain white T-shirt with an expensive pair of sunglasses hanging from the collar.
Not only did I mess with everything he could see there, I programmed his Smart Fridge to send him 200,000 email reminders to buy eggs. That was the double-edged sword of technology: with new features came new exploitability.
And then I made the joke about putting his sunglasses on.
Owen didn’t react the way I expected. He suddenly got quiet. For a moment, it seemed like he was looking out the window in my direction.
Then he walked around to the terrace door and tried to open it.
“Nuh uh,” I teased. “You don’t need to go outside. All your neighbors would hear you crying and begging for help. It would be much too embarrassing for you.”
Owen didn’t reply. He calmly walked back into the kitchen, climbed up onto his counter, and unlocked his window. The pane swung outward, and I let out a soft curse. The doors were all electronically controlled, but the window was still a simple hand-lock.
“Don’t do it!” I said into my headset microphone. “You have so much to live for! I’m assuming, at least. Maybe you’re a big loser after all.”
Owen stuck his head out the window, then looked down. He was on the sixth floor. The drop to the ground was close to a hundred feet. Owen swung a leg out of the window.
“Hey,” I said nervously, “no more messing around. If you want to leave that badly I’ll open the front door…”
“Don’t need your help,” he said in my headset, voice amplified by the microphone in his kitchen.
My heart began to race. “Owen, wait…”
He swung his other leg out the window, then slowly lowered himself until his feet touched an alcove on the exterior wall. He found another hand-hold, then dropped further, hanging from both hands with his feet dangling over open air.
“God damnit,” I hissed. “If a billionaire gets himself killed because he couldn’t take a fucking joke…”
My heart pounded in my ears as I watched him drop down to the window of the condo below his. One wrong move and he would plummet to the hard pavement below, and my prank would suddenly become a much more serious crime. But Owen deftly moved from window to window, his motions careful and precise. When he reached the second floor he finally let go, dropping the final distance and landing softly on his feet on the sidewalk. His feathery hair bounced and fell back into place as if he had just left the salon.
I removed my headset and tried to appear nonchalant as he approached my bench. He looked satisfied, but he was also angry.Veryangry. I would be too if I was in his position. His hands were tight fists at his side.
I forced myself to smile and said, “Nice climbing skills. Spider Man wouldn’t hit a girl, would he?”
Owen sat on the other side of the bench, leaving a gap between us. He put his arm across the back of the bench and idly checked his shoes, which looked retro and expensive.
“Four years in the climbing gym.”
“Figures. Every rock climber I’ve ever known has been an asshole.”
“You gained access through my ACS laptop?” he asked casually.
I nodded. “We were on the same network in the office. I had root access thanks to the file system permissions on the code repositories.”
