‘We’ll see.’ I flick the machine into reading mode and pull Cole’s arm towards me, turning it so his panel faces up. It glows beneath his skin, an oblong of soft blue light stretching from his wrist almost all the way to the crease in his elbow. There’s a thick, soft layer of silicone in there, just above the muscles, grown from the bud Cole would have been injected with a few days after birth. The function cores inside the silicone each act as tiny factories, producing nanites that build and destroy ribbons of synthetic DNA. They can also build structures out of metal or plastic to create implants inside your body. Titanium wrapped around your bones to make them unbreakable. Fibre-optic wires to pass commands to your fingers at the speed of light.
With the knowledge I have of coding and hacking, using the genkit humming beside me, there’s almost nothing I couldn’t do to Cole’s body if I wanted to. Stop his heart. Cut his oxygen supply. Shut down everything in his panel.
It’s really no surprise that he looks so uncomfortable right now.
I hold the needle end of the wire against Cole’s panel. It flashes for a second, and the probe jerks free of my grasp, burying itself in his arm. He flinches as it dives beneath his skin, and the genkit’s screen flashes white.
ALERT. Unauthorized use of this software is prohibited. Password required.
‘See?’ Cole says, reaching for the wire. ‘I don’t know the password. You’re not going to be able to get through.’
‘Hush now,’ I say, slapping his hand away. ‘I need to concentrate. No more talking.’
My fingers dance across the keyboard as I start to work, loading up libraries, feeling out the basic structure of Cole’s security. I’m not going to dump the Trojan in just yet. My first priority is blasting open his firewalls and getting access to his memory. Once I’m in and we’re scanning his panel for files left by my father, it should be easy to dump the Trojan and hide the keystrokes in a harmless-looking command. The hard part is getting in – figuring out which scripts to run, trying to remember the best methods of attack.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done this. The last panel I hacked was my own, and that was almost three years ago. Dax had been at the cabin for a month, I’d fallen head-over-heels for him, and although we’d flirted constantly, we’d never actually kissed. In retrospect, it was because I was fifteen and he was afraid of my father, but at the time I thought it was because I wasn’t pretty enough.
The other girls I’d known at boarding school had satin, colour-true skin. They had fingernails that grew in pink, and quad-follicle eyelashes that grew until they cut them. Next to them, I felt like a common grey pigeon – dull and obsolete – so I modified a cosmetic app to be hypergenesis-friendly. My father refused to test it. Too dangerous, he said. When I pushed him, he’d always tell me how my mother died. How the well-meaning doctor gave her a syringe of healing tech, and she took just fourteen seconds to die. How her cells fragmented, splitting apart like a billion screaming mouths, until she choked to death on the bloody pulp of her own lungs.
My father wouldn’t help me, but I thought that I knew better. I sat down one night, hacked my panel and uploaded the app myself.
It took thirty-seven seconds until the burning started.
The rest of the night is a blur. My father hauled me downstairs and jacked me into his industrial-grade genkit, jumping my panel to keep me alive. He stopped and restarted my heart, flushing my system, wiping any trace of the rogue nanites as he knelt on the floor beside me. With Dax’s help, I survived, lying in the basement while the skin on my back bubbled up, sloughing off in chunks.
That was the last time I disobeyed my father, and the last time I hacked my panel. I learned the hard way that there are some things in life you’re not supposed to change. I was left with an ugly track of scar tissue along my spine, but Dax didn’t seem to care. He told me that night was when he realized he was in love with me.
The memory makes the scar tissue on my back prickle as I weave past Cole’s security, feeling out his hardware. Hacking my panel’s firewalls took days of preparation and testing, and the actual attack took over an hour. But if I’m lucky, hacking Cole’s panel should only take a few minutes. When I broke through the firewalls in my arm, I discovered a weakness in the way the panel’s power is distributed. Exploiting that weakness will mean running a serious electric current into Cole’s arm, but it should also give me a shortcut to get in.
First up: distract his security scanner. Cole has a miniature AI in his arm that’s always watching for attacks, learning how to protect his code. I throw a virus at his wireless chip and watch as the AI responds, its primary defences surging around it.
Now I’m free to attack his battery.
Every panel has a power system somewhere in the body – sometimes deeper in the forearm, sometimes inside the chest. They charge up using a mixture of your body’s kinetic energy and your metabolism, gaining energy as you digest food. That means guilt-free hamburgers when you’re running power-intensive VR sessions, but it also wastes a lot of food when all you have is nutriBars. With the AI scanner distracted, I prepare the genkit’s cable to send a series of electric pulses into Cole’s arm.
‘Uh, hold on for a second,’ I say. ‘This might hurt …’
‘What?’ Cole asks, his eyes flaring. ‘Is this safe? I’m not sure you should –’
His arm goes tense as he cuts off, his whole body jerking against the counter, his eyes flashing to black for a split second.
‘What the …’ he breathes, a vein on his forehead popping up. He reaches for the genkit’s cable, but I smack his hand away again.
‘It worked,’ I say. ‘Hold on, I need to do it one more time.’
‘No –’ he starts, but it’s too late. I’ve already run the command. His eyes fly wide as it surges through him, his mouth opening silently.
He doubles over, his muscles twitching furiously. It’s probably not good for his heart to take this kind of stress, and I’m sure he’s got a dozen implants that are close to shorting out, but the last shock brought down one of his firewalls, and the final barrier is toppling before my eyes …
And it’s down. One second. That’s all I get, but it’s all the time I need to drop a single command and run. The AI surges back from the wireless chip, furious, and I flick the genkit off before it races inside to corrupt it.
Cole’s forehead glistens with sweat. ‘What the hell are you doing, Catarina?’
‘Just wait,’ I say. ‘It takes a while for your security to reset.’
‘You couldn’t do it.’ He reaches for the wire in his arm. ‘I’m not letting you shock me again.’
I grab his wrist, meeting his gaze with all the steel I can muster. I can’t let him pull the wire out. Not until I’ve logged in and checked his files for the vaccine. Not until I’ve bought myself an edge by dumping the Trojan into his arm.
‘I said wait, soldier.’ I reach out with my free hand to flick the genkit on.
ALERT. Unauthorized use of this software is prohibited. Password required.
‘See?’ he says. ‘You couldn’t do it. I told you.’
I ignore him, typing with my free hand, letting my hand slide from his wrist. ‘I just typed in your new password, which I reset for you. It’s my name – Catarina.’