“You can see the energy app graph so the output that day is running at 96 percent of its capacity.”

  He shrugged. “So it dropped.”

  “You can also see the serial number in the upper left corner, which makes it clear that I installed a different turbine than the one you’re showing us.” Aniyah’s knees were shaking with anger. She flexed her feet inside her shoes and grimaced. “So, what I’d like to know, as an actual engineer, is why the hell you’re showing faked data.”

  The high red color of Hillam’s cheeks drained into a sickly green. He swallowed and stared at the screen. “That’s…um …I’m—”

  Aniyah looked at the numbers again. “If, say, a second microturbine was installed in the streambed below the waterfall, it would have a power output like this.”

  Lydia Pinkham shook her head and turned to Aniyah. “So—will you show us those numbers again? I think the board will be very, very interested to see your data.” She shot Hillam a hard look. “Very interested in seeing all your data.”

  “Absolutely.” She toggled her tablet to pull up the presentation she’d prepared in the first place.

  “Thank you, Dr. Ramsey.”

  It was a small thing, but the sound of her title made Aniyah nearly turn to Hillam and do a victory dance. The board would pay attention. From there, the numbers would do the rest.

  Science. The language of her people.

  Shadow Flock

  By Greg Egan

  1

  Natalie pointed down along the riverbank to a pair of sturdy-looking trees, a bald cypress and a southern live oak, about fifty meters away. “They might be worth checking out.” She set off through the scrub, her six students following.

  When they reached the trees, Natalie had Céline run a structural check, using the hand-held ground-penetrating radar to map the roots and the surrounding soil. The trees bore gray cobwebs of Spanish moss, but most of it was on the higher branches, out of harm’s way. Natalie had chosen the pair three months before, when she was planning the course; it was cheating, but the students wouldn’t have thanked her if they’d ended up spending a whole humid, mosquito-ridden day hunting for suitable pillars. In a real disaster you’d take whatever delays and hardship fate served up, but nobody was interested in that much verisimilitude in a training exercise.

  “Perfect,” Céline declared, smiling slightly, probably guessing that the result was due to something more than just a shrewd judgment made from a distance.

  Natalie asked Mike to send a drone with a surveying module across to the opposite bank. The quadrocopter required no supervision for such a simple task, but it was up to Mike to tell it which trees to target first, and the two best candidates—a pair of sturdy oaks—were impossible to miss. The way things were going, they stood a good chance of being back in New Orleans before sunset.

  With their four pillars chosen, it was time to settle on a construction strategy. They had three quads to work with, and more than enough cable, but the Tchefuncte River was about 130 meters wide here. A single spool of cable held a hundred meters, and that was as much weight as each backpack-size quad could carry.

  Josh raised his notepad to seek software advice, but Natalie stopped him. “Would it kill you to spend five minutes thinking?”

  “We’re going to need to do some kind of midair splice,” he said. “I just wanted to check what knots are available, and which would be strongest.”

  “Why splicing?” Natalie pressed him.

  He raised his hands and held them a short distance apart. “Cable.” Then he increased the separation. “River.”

  Augusto said, “What about loops?” He hooked two fingers together and strained against the join. “Wouldn’t that be stronger?”

  Josh snorted. “And halve the effective length? We’d need three spools to bridge the gap then, and you’d still need to splice the second loop to the third.”

  “Not if we preform the middle loop ourselves,” Augusto replied. “Fuse the ends, here on the ground. That’s got to be better than any midair splice. Or easier to check, and easier to fix.”

  Natalie looked around the group for objections. “Everyone agree? Then we need to make a flight plan.”

  They assembled the steps from a library of maneuvers, then prepared the cable for the first crossing. The heat was becoming enervating, and Natalie had to fight the urge to sit in the shade and bark orders. Down in Haiti she’d never cared about being comfortable, but it was harder to stay motivated when all that was at stake were a few kids’ grades in one minor elective.

  “I think we’re ready,” Céline declared, a little nervous, a little excited.

  Natalie said, “Be my guest.”

  Céline tapped the screen of her notepad and the first quad whirred into life, rising up from the riverbank and tilting a little as it moved toward the cypress.

  With cable dangling, the drone made three vertical loops around the tree’s lowest branch, wrapping it in a short helix. Then it circumnavigated the trunk twice, once close in and then a second time in a long ellipse that left cable hanging slackly from the branch. The drone circled back, dropped beneath the branch, and flew straight through the loop. It repeated the maneuver and then headed away, keeping the spool clamped until it had pulled the knot tight.

  As the first drone moved out over the glistening water, the second one was already ahead of it, and the third was drawing close to the matching tree on the far side of the river. Natalie glanced at the students, gratified by the tension on their faces: Success here was not a fait accompli. Céline’s hand hovered above her notepad; if the drones struck an unforeseen problem—and failed to recover gracefully on their own—it would be her job to intervene manually.

  When the second drone had traveled some forty meters from the riverbank, it began ascending, unwinding cable as it went to leave a hanging streamer marking its trail. From this distance the shiny blue line of polymer was indistinguishable from the kind its companion was dispensing, but then the drone suddenly stopped climbing, clamped the spool, and accelerated downward. The single blue line revealed its double-stranded nature, spreading out into a heart-shaped loop. The first drone shot through the heart, then doubled back, hooking the two cables together. Then the second one pulled out of its dive and continued across the river. The pierced heart always struck Natalie as surreal—the kind of thing that serenading cartoon birds would form with streamers for Snow White in the woods.

  Harriet, usually the quietest of the group, uttered an involuntary, admiring expletive.

  The third drone had finished hitching itself to the tree on the opposite bank and was flying across the water for its own rendezvous. Natalie strained her eyes as the second drone went into reverse, again separating the paired cables so its companion could slip through and form the link. Then the second drone released the loop completely and headed back to the riverbank, its job done. The third went off to mimic the first, tying its loose end to the tree where it had started.

  They repeated the whole exercise three more times, giving the bridge two hand ropes and two deck supports before breaking for lunch. As Natalie was unwrapping the sandwiches she’d brought, a dark blur the size of her thumb buzzed past her face and alighted on her forearm. Instinctively, she moved to flick it off, but then she realized that it was not a living insect; it was a small Toshiba dragonfly, its four wings iridescent with photovoltaic coatings. Whether it was mapping the forest, monitoring wildlife, or just serving as a communications node, the last thing she’d want to do was damage it. The machine should not have landed on anything but vegetation, but no one’s programming was perfect. She watched it as it sat motionless in the patch of sunlight falling on her skin. Then it ascended suddenly and flew off out of sight.

  In the afternoon, the team gave their bridge a rudimentary woven deck. Each of the students took turns donning a life jacket and hard hat before walking across the swaying structure and back, whooping with a mixture of elation at their accomplishment and adrenaline as they confronted its fragility.

  “And now we have to take it apart,” Natalie announced, prepared for the predictable groans and pleas. “No arguments!” she said firmly. “Pretty as it is, it would only take a party of five or six hikers to break it, and if they ended up dashing their brains out in the shallows that would be enough to bankrupt the university and send us all to prison.”

  2

  As Natalie started up the stairs to her apartment she heard a distinctive trilling siren, then saw a red shimmer spilling down onto the landing ahead. The delivery quad came into view, and she moved to the left to let it pass, catching a welcome cool wash from its downdraft, a sensation weirdly intensified by the lime-green tint of the receding hazard lights.

  She tensed as she approached her floor, hoping she wouldn’t find Sam waiting for her. His one talent was smooth talking, and he could always find someone willing to buzz him into the building. Against her better judgment she’d let her brother wheedle her into sinking $10,000 into his latest business venture, but when it had proved to be as unprofitable as all the rest, rather than apologizing and going in search of paid work he’d started begging her to invest even more, in order to “tip the balance”—as if his struggling restaurant were a half-submerged Spanish galleon full of gold that needed only a few more flotation bladders to rise magnificently to the surface.

  Sam wasn’t lurking in the corridor, but there was a small package in front of her door. Natalie was puzzled and annoyed; she wasn’t expecting anything, and the drones were not supposed to leave their cargo on a doormat. She stooped down and picked up the parcel; it bore the logo of a local courier, but water had somehow got inside the plastic pocket that held the waybill, turning the portion with the sender’s address into gray mush. A gentle shake yielded the clinking slosh of melting ice.

  Inside, she put the parcel in the kitchen sink, went to the bathroom, and then came back and cut open the mailing box to reveal an insulating foam container. The lid bore the words “GUESS WHO?” written in black marker. Natalie couldn’t; she’d parted company with the last two men she’d dated on terms that made surprise gifts unlikely, let alone a peace offering of chilled crabmeat or whatever this was.

  She tugged the lid off and tipped the ice into the sink. A small, pink object stood out from the slush, but it wasn’t any part of a crab. Natalie stared for several seconds, unwilling to prod the thing into position for a better view, then fetched a pair of tongs to facilitate a more thorough inspection.

  It was the top part of a human finger. A little finger, severed at the joint. She walked away and paced the living room, trying to decode the meaning of the thing before she called the police. She could not believe that Alfonso—a moody musician who’d ditched her when she’d dared to leave one of his gigs at two in the morning, on a work night—would have the slightest interest in mutilating his own precious hands in the service of a psychotic prank. Digging back further she still came up blank. Rafael had smashed crockery once, in the heat of an argument, but by now she’d be surprised to elicit any stronger reaction from him than a rueful smile if they ran into each other on the street. The truth was, the prospect of the cops hauling any of these ex-lovers in for questioning mortified her almost as much as the macabre offering itself, because pointing the finger at any of them seemed preposterously self-aggrandizing. “Really?” she could hear the whole lineup of unlikely suspects demanding, holding out their pristine mitts. “You thought you were worth that?”

  Natalie walked back to the kitchen doorway. Why was she assuming that the amputation had been voluntary? No one she knew would commit such an act—upon themselves or anyone else—but that didn’t mean she didn’t know the unwilling donor.

  She turned around and rushed to the bedroom, where she kept the bioassay attachment for her notepad. The only software she’d downloaded for it was for personal health and pregnancy testing, but it took only a minute to get the app she needed.

  There was no visible blood left inside the fingertip, but when she picked it up with the tongs it was full of meltwater that ought to be brimming with sloughed cells. She tipped a little of the water onto the assay chip and waited ten long minutes for the software to announce a result.

  Chance of fraternity: 95%

  Sam must have gone elsewhere for money, but it would have disappeared into the same bottomless pit as her own investment. And when his creditors had come for him with their bolt cutters, who else was he going to rope in to help him repay his debt but his sister?

  Natalie wanted to scream with anger, but she found herself weeping. Her brother was an infuriating, immature, self-deluding brat, but he didn’t deserve this. If she had to remortgage the apartment to get him out of these people’s clutches, so be it. She wasn’t going to abandon him.

  As she began trying to think through the logistics of dealing with the bank as quickly as possible—without explaining the true purpose of the loan—her phone rang.

  3

  “We don’t want your money. But there is a way you can resolve this situation without paying a cent.”

  Natalie stared at the kidnapper, who’d asked her to call him Lewis. The food court to which he’d invited her was as busy as she’d ever seen it on a Wednesday night; she had even spotted a few cops. The undeniable fact of their meeting proved nothing incriminating, but how could he know she wasn’t recording his words?

  She said, “You’re not a loan shark.”

  “No.” Lewis had an accent from far out of state, maybe the Midwest. He was a dark-haired, clean-shaven white man, and he looked about forty. Natalie tried to commit these facts to memory, terrified that when the police finally questioned her she’d be unable to recall his face at all. “We’d like you to consult for us.”

  “Consult?” Natalie managed a derisive laugh. “Who do you think I work for, the NSA? Everything I know about drones is already in the public domain. You didn’t need to kidnap my brother. It’s all on the Web.”

  “There are time pressures,” Lewis explained. “Our own people are quick studies, but they’ve hit a roadblock. They’ve read your work, of course. That’s why they chose you.”

  “And what am I supposed to help you do? Assassinate someone?” The whole conversation was surreal, but the hubbub of their boisterous fellow diners was so loud that unless she’d stood up on the table and shouted the question, no one would have looked at them twice.

  Lewis shook his head. At least he hadn’t insulted her intelligence by feigning offense. “No one will get hurt. We just need to steal some information.”

  “Then find yourself a hacker.”

  “The targets are smarter than that.”

  “Targets, plural?”

  Lewis said, “Only three that will concern you directly—though in all fairness I should warn you that your efforts will need to synchronize with our own on several other fronts.”

  Natalie felt light-headed. When exactly had she signed the contract in blood? “You’re taking a lot for granted.”

  “Am I?” There wasn’t a trace of menace in his voice, but then the stakes had already been made clear.

  “I’m not refusing,” she replied. “I won’t help you to inflict bodily harm, but if you’re open with me and I’m sure that there’s no chance of that, I’ll do what you ask.”

  Lewis nodded, amiable in a businesslike way. He, or his associates, had been cold-blooded enough to mutilate Sam as proof of their seriousness, but if they planned to kill her once she’d served her purpose, why meet physically, in a public space, where a dozen surveillance drones would be capturing the event?

  “The targets are all bitionaires,” he said. “We don’t plan to touch a hair on their heads; we just want their key strings…which are not stored on anything vulnerable to spyware.”

  “I see.” Natalie’s own stash of electronic pocket change didn’t merit any great precautions, but she was aware of the general idea: Anyone prudent, and sufficiently wealthy, kept the cryptographic key to their anonymized digital fortune in a purpose-built wallet. The operating system and other software resided solely on read-only media, and even the working memory functioned under rigid, hardware-enforced protocols that made the whole setup effectively incorruptible. “So how can I get around that? Am I meant to infiltrate the wallet factory?”

  “No.” Lewis paused, but he wasn’t turning coy on her, merely hiding a faint belch behind a politely raised hand. “The basic scenario is the kind of thing any competent stage magician could pull off. The target takes their wallet from its safe, then gets distracted. We substitute an identical-looking device. The target commences to log in to their exchange with the fake wallet; we’ve already cloned their fingerprints so we can mimic those preliminaries on the real wallet. The target receives a one-time password from the exchange on their cellphone and enters it into the fake wallet, and we use it to enact our preferred transactions via the real one.”

  Natalie opened her mouth to protest: Her understanding was that the message from the exchange would also include a hash of the transaction details, allowing the user to double-check exactly what it was they were authorizing. But she wasn’t thinking straight: To the human looking at that string of gibberish, the information would be invisible. Only the wallet itself had the keys required to reveal the hash’s true implications, and the fake wallet would blithely pretend that everything matched up perfectly.

  She said, “So all you need to do is invite these people to bring their wall safes to a Las Vegas show.”

  Lewis ignored her sarcasm. “The transactions can’t be rescinded, but it won’t take the targets long to discover that they’ve been duped—and to spread the word. So we need to ensure that these individual operations are as close to concurrent as possible.”

  Natalie struggled to maintain a tone of disapproval even as her curiosity got the better of her. “How do you make all these people get an itch to buy or sell at the same time?”

 

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