How To Hack AI
Edition 48
The following is a work of fiction.
You are a small child, alone, sitting on a cold concrete floor in the dark, your hands bound behind you.
You try not to think about what might be in the shadows–rats, snakes, spiders, or worse, people.
You focus instead on the task at hand: Finding an inflection point to loosen the knots in the ropes that bind your wrists. Slowly, patiently, and quietly, you work, one wriggle at a time, until the knot loosens and your hands slide free.
Carefully, still quietly, you try the door.
It’s locked.
You squint into the darkness, feeling with your fingers until you can make out the type: A simple, interior-style handle, locked from the other side. Now all you need is a tool.
You gingerly trace your hand around the floor, still being as quiet as humanly possible. Then your fingers find it–a long, slender, metal sliver with what feels like a handle attached. It’s an old, rusty awl. It’ll do.
You grasp and deftly slide the awl point-first into the circular opening on the door handle, feeling cautiously for the soft spring inside. When you find it, you gently depress it, then turn the knob to let yourself out.
You practically bolt out of that basement and up the stairs, to find your father waiting for you on the landing above, with a stopwatch.
You’re out of breath, but proud. You jump to the top of the landing with a crisp salute, and a smile.
“Good job”, he says, returning your salute. “Now which way’s North?”
You point. He nods.
“What about East?” You roll your eyes, and point again. Too easy.
“You’re in Dubai. Which way is home? What about Washington D.C.?” Once again, you gesture in the correct directions. Your father nods in approval. The process is repeated for Paris, Berlin, Haifa, Tehran.
“Now what do you say?”
Swelling with confidence at your accomplishments, you recite the phrase you’ve been taught, and its equivalent in the four languages your parents insisted on: French, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi.
“I am an American citizen. There is a reward for my return. Return me voluntarily to the United States embassy.”
Your father nods again, clearly impressed. With that, you’re dismissed to finish your homeschool work before tonight’s dinner party.
At dinner, you’re delighted to be among your parents’ friends: A retired Army intelligence officer, a Colonel your mother met on a political campaign; your uncle in his now-fading leather pilot’s jacket; and a few of your father’s old Navy buddies.
You absorb everything as your parents, your uncle, and their friends regale the table with their own adventures, and those of their heroes.
You grew up playing under the framed, folded flag that had covered your grandfather’s casket. A former intelligence officer, nobody knows how he died. All you know is that your then-eight-year-old mother watched as her own mother was handed this flag, and as she accepted it under a pitiless Georgia sky, took on the weight of carrying the family that had been.
This all runs deep.
You’ve already heard so many of your father’s near-death survival stories, and the humbling lessons he took away. You’ve learned all about Claire Chennault’s legendary Flying Tigers. You’ve heard every technical critique your father has ever leveled at popular movies like ‘Top Gun’. You’ve listened with rapt attention to intricate details of the flight control systems he knows by heart.
You think there’s no cooler job on earth than fighter pilot.
But girls can’t be fighter pilots, your father tells you sadly one day–unaware that even as he’s speaking, the armed forces are reevaluating women’s roles, and the first female fighter pilots have already started flying.
He collects himself and smiles at you. “You could fly a bomber just fine, though”, he says with fatherly pride. You might be a girl, but you’re smart, capable, and brave–just like your mother, and just like him.
By now, though, you’ve seen “Memphis Belle” enough times to know that without their fighter escort, the B-17 “Flying Fortresses” were anything but.
Besides, you want to go fast, not slow.
You’re not the type to admit defeat, though. You know whose daughter you are. You won’t give up, you’ll just adapt.
You make up your mind: You’re going to serve your country as an engineer. You’ll be the hero that heroes depend on to get them home safe.
Some little girls want to be princesses.
You’re going to join the Skunkworks.
Excited at this prospect, you rush outside to ride your bike up and down the driveway, imagining every detail.
You are nine years old. This is your life.
For now.
It’s 6 am. You’re jolted awake from a dream, your head pulled upright from a garishly-trimmed sofa pillow before you even process what you were resting on.
Eyes open, look around, shake it off.
You’ve woken up in an intentional community, the one you must have passed out in the night before, during the afterparty that followed that tech talk.
Fuck.
You’re too fucking tired, you think to yourself. This is dangerous.
Worse, it’s bad OPSEC.
But sometimes, you’re just exhausted. Sleep always catches up, not always when planned. You make a mental note to be more careful. And then you gather your emotions and refocus on the task at hand.
Update priors, focus on the mission.
Two head shakes later and you remember it. The thing you drove to G-d forsaken Cupertino for in the first place.
The USB drive.
You glance around quickly for the messenger bag that rarely ever leaves your side. The calm, unbothered demeanor you’ve been trained to present belies the urgency of the situation: The contents of that bag are mission-critical.
And you just fell asleep in a semi-public place. Like a fucking genius.
Fuck fuck fuck.
You try to stand up but there’s something around your feet. It takes an embarrassingly long time to realize that it’s the strap of your own bag. Even in exhaustion so intense it apparently swallowed conscious memory, you somehow managed to strap that bag to your physical person before crashing out.
Good girl, you tell yourself. Pro shit.
It’s the little wins.
You glance around again to make sure you’re not being watched–you are by far the earliest person up after that party–and then grab at the buckles like you’re lowkey crazy just to double check that the contents are intact: Yes the thumb drive, with the code for the optimization you’ve been wanting to apply; along with two ThinkPads, an Alienware rig with an undisclosed set of GPUs, three more USB drives with various Linux distros, and a squared Moleskine notebook you guard with your life. All still there.
Thank G-d, you mumble as you sling the unreasonably heavy bag over one shoulder. The next steps are simply executed underneath the overcast Silicon Valley sky: Open the fridge, steal a cold San Pellegrino, hurry out the door & down the driveway to your car.
It’s going to be a long drive back to San Francisco.
When you eventually pull off the 3rd Street ramp, you’re in a different world. The Bayview is not Cupertino. You feel relief start to wash over you as you finally park on your block.
You walk past the church ladies on the corner with a polite wave–what they think of you rolling up at eight in the morning, massive tech bag on one shoulder and still in a little black dress, you can only imagine–but they’re friendly enough, and now you’re steps from your door.
The key slides in the old, analog lock pin by pin. A couple of muscle-memory shakes and flicks bring the stiff lock into compliance, and you twist it open with some effort, then climb the faded, creaking Victorian stairs to alight in your haunted perch.
There is very little in the way of furniture here: A large, six-foot long industrial table, mostly covered in computers, wires, and parts. A few metal folding chairs. An air mattress. No sheets, only a sleeping bag. You don’t need much. Just fast internet and privacy.
Behind you there’s a large whiteboard, with multiple pseudocode iterations of a cooperative ensemble-based attack you’ve been working on. There’s a kitchen, with a stove, and a kettle for coffee and tea. The LED lights of a keyboard reflect off the paint-chipped ceiling, as the window reveals the familiar fog drifting over the neighborhood, atmospherically blanketing every view in a ghostly gray mist.
You slide your precious cargo–the USB drive–into a sandboxed machine, and get to work.
For what feels like forever, you are lost in a reverie of math and code and the click-clack of a brown-switch keyboard.
Some days, you forget to eat. This is one of those days.
Sometimes, you run out of food. But you never run out of coffee.
As you narrow your eyes to debug one last thing before you succumb to sleep again, the fog is abruptly dissolved by the ping of a messaging client notification.
It’s a job. A high-paying one.
You remember why you’re doing this–not for the lulz or the fame.
You need money for your child.
Nobody cares why. You know this now.
No one will save the day but you. There is no safety net.
This is the cold truth you’ve learned against your will, in defiance of every single plan you’d ever made for your life.
This is your reality.
And this job could pay enough to make it all go away. Your daughter could be safe, and you could be out of the life–for good.
It’s almost too good to be true.
You review your priors: You had no job and no prospects when the need came up.
You had an ace up your sleeve, though: Your physical security know-how.
That little girl from so long ago who learned to confidently get herself into, or out of, whatever a situation required never went away. And soon, word got out.
Now they come to you.
As your skills expanded, so did the reputation.
There are downsides to this. You’re a known entity. You never know who you’re talking to now. You wake up with a hatchet over your head.
To keep your brain on straight, you’ve become your own historian, a myth-maker: As a parent, you’re doing what you have to. You don’t want this. You’re just good at it.
That’s what you tell yourself.
You know you can end up as a lowlife, trying to be a hero.
But there’s no going back now. You narrow your eyes, take a breath, and open the message.
M Is For
You push a paint-chipped door open and walk over the threshold, into the clamor of a warm, dimly lit Valencia Street bar. The air is filled with conversations that all meld into one cacophony.
You tune it into background noise, sliding through the crowd, the collar of your wool peacoat still turned upwards against the damp, misty evening.
As you make your way up to the bar, you feel the unmistakable sensation of another person’s gaze, hot on the side of your face.
You turn, and find yourself facing a man who is looking directly at you from across the space.
He makes his way towards you. A smile crosses his face.
It’s genuine.
His eyes crinkle with what can only be described as curiosity and…you pause, to make sure you’re really seeing correctly….delight?
The man comes close enough to speak over the din of the crowded bar.
“Hello my dear.” His voice is warm, friendly, maybe just a little too familiar. “Buy you a drink?”
His accent says London, but his shoes say Tel Aviv.
Now you find yourself distracted by his eyes–kind, intelligent, familiar.
You’re reminded of the men at your parents’ dinner parties–the ones who would kindly lean over to explain something highly technical to you, if for no other reason than to see a child’s face light up, curiosity piqued, a horizon expanded.
The bartender has already set a beer on the counter. It’s the same type the man is drinking.
The man folds the corner of his cocktail napkin down, just-so. And then he speaks again.
“What do you do?”, he asks. You feel there’s something more in the question.
You know better by now than to brush this off as mere paranoia.
You focus, digging down into the sensations in your gut.
Then you smile.
“I’m an engineer” you say. It’s true, after all.
The man leans in. The curious smile has faded. His eyes flash with a dark intensity.
He collects himself, smiles again, and laughs just a little too casually.
“No”, he says, the tiniest implication of force waiting just behind the word.
“What do you really do?”
Every alarm in your brain has now been tripped.
Worse, there’s no way to find out now without giving away your own position.
Schrödinger’s spook.
You successfully fight the urge to suck in your breath, but feel your eyes widen against your will.
You see him see this.
Fuck.
Nothing left to do but play it dumb. “What do you mean?” you ask, scrunching your face and backing away nervously to signal that this guy has given you the ick with his question. You watch confusion flash over his face, as he regroups himself.
Good. Fuck this guy.
You realize that kind eyes or not, this isn’t the man you came here to meet.
And besides, you tell yourself, if this guy reminds you so much of your parents’ friends, maybe that’s not such a good fucking sign.
Before he can answer, you turn and walk away, feeling his gaze on your back with every step, until you’re certain you’ve disappeared into the crowd and behind the wall of another room.
That was too fucking weird.
But there’s no time to ruminate. You’re here to work.
What a way to make a living.
Update priors, focus on the mission.
You make your way quickly towards the exit in the back of the bar. As you slide past the smokers into the alley, a figure slowly takes shape from within the hazy shadows.
A man’s voice calls you by name.
This is the person you came here to see.
A few more steps, and you’ve slipped into the shadows, too.
“What’s the job.”
You phrase it like a question, but your tone sounds like a statement. You’ve found it’s best to be as flat as possible when dealing with these guys.
He pauses before answering. He’s never met you before. He’s sizing you up.
He looks down his nose at you the way men do when they’re trying to be intimidating. Usually this is a dead giveaway that a man is scared of you. Overcompensating.
Not this time. This man isn’t scared. Something else is at play.
You decide to ignore it, for now.
Update priors. Focus on the mission.
“A lab”, he answers tersely. He, too, likes to keep it succinct.
“Do you want to know what we’re going in for.” It’s less a question than a quasi-statement, expressed in similarly measured tone, with a weight that tells you the phrase means more than just the words it contains.
“I’d like to know as little as possible”, you reply.
You see the faintest twist of approval at the corners of his eyes. But there’s too much at stake here to make any assumptions, and he collects his expression almost as quickly as you read it.
So you’re human too. Got it.
He’s getting straight to the point. They need physical access. Entry is monitored. It’s a 3rd party video feed system, and it uses AI image recognition.
That’s why they came to you.
“Why not just disrupt the feed?”
“Trips their alarms”, he replies directly, as if he’s relieved you asked. “They monitor for that.”
Who owns the cameras?
“We hoped you would take leadership in this aspect of the research”, he says matter-of-factly.
He never says who ‘we’ refers to. You don’t ask.
Twin realizations slowly dawn on you: You’re on your own here, and there’s more to this job than meets the eye.
You don’t want to know what.
“Okay,” you stall, eyes closed, crunching hyperspaces in your head.
He watches you keenly.
After a few seconds, you look up. You know the parameters. You know your constraints. This is your house, your work.
Now you’re going to tell this very scary man exactly what the rules of engagement will be.
My rules, you say to yourself, as if rehearsing how you’ll say this to him.
Breathe. Here we go.
You look at him head-on.
“There will be constraints. There’s only so long I can be in there before we’re all caught. Once the timer is done, I unplug and there’s no going back.
I can’t protect you then.”
He nods, slowly. This is expected. ROE accepted.
Then his expression shifts. A shadow passes over his face.
Something’s wrong. There’s a complication.
Fuck.
There’s always a fucking complication.
“There’s one more thing”, he says, his tone guarded. You find yourself fighting that familiar flash of unease before the unknown, flooding into your chest and your throat, as you sense your heart beating faster.
Training kicks in. You slow your breathing. You feel the fear, let it wash over you, and imagine yourself watching as it falls onto the ground. Then you allow yourself to envision–for just one precious moment–a mental image of your little girl’s face. This is why you’re here.
Focus on the mission.
If it was easy, they could’ve gotten anybody. The case is complex and high-risk–that’s why they came to you.
Your expression is deadly serious, professional, befitting the stakes of the game.
“What is it?”
He hesitates. When he speaks, his voice is grim.
“They hired an AI red team.”
Almost without realizing it, you meet his gaze directly–the corners of your eyes barely giving away the ever-so-slight smile you’ve trained your lips not to reveal.
“That’s not going to be a problem.”
Your reply is cold, confident, final. And you know exactly why.
This man is no dummy. He’s a professional. He watches every movement. He sees your eyes. He notes your self-control.
More pertinently, he can feel your conviction. You’re serious. And he knows it.
The man tilts his head back almost imperceptibly, in a nearly-concealed nod of affirmation.
The deal is on.
The Angles of Attack
You reach to wake up your main machine, but pause, a bird’s fleeting path outside your window catching your eye. The Bayview is so much more sunny than some neighborhoods here, but this is L.A. sunny, and a noticeable departure from the norm.
As you peer east into the unusually blue sky, you see the contrails of a jet passing over the sparkling San Francisco Bay.
You remember your father telling you about the chord of a wing, and how the angle of the wing relative to the wind that flows over it could affect its lift; how when lift is lost, the wing itself falls, taking the plane with it; how the airplane will give a quick, telltale yaw one side to the other in the seconds before disaster; and how a stall at too low an altitude is unrecoverable, your aircraft dropping like a stone as you try in vain to reestablish airflow over critical flight surfaces. The concept of an angle of attack is seared into your memory.
“No matter what”, your father always tells you, “you never, ever give up”.
“You fly it all the way down.”
There are metaphors here.
Now you’re an adult. You’re not a little girl trying to impress her father. Supposedly. But you remember every word he said in moments like these, as you face your own reflection in a still-dark computer monitor.
You know that adversarial AI attacks work almost exactly the same way as the chord of a wing.
That the geometries of the models’ learned representations also map the dimensional collapse that made them models in the first place–lower-dimensional projections of reality, whose lossy representations become prime vectors for attacks that target uncertainty.
You know that the method of attack is as geometric as it sounds: Angular rotations in hyperspace, which you can calculate at will, almost ad infinitum from the near-infinite 25-dimensional, NP-complete hyperspace that your adversary can never, ever defend.
You are, quite literally, calculating the angles of attack.
You allow yourself to wonder, briefly, if your father would be proud.
Then you realize it doesn’t matter. Indulgences like these get people caught, get people killed. You remind yourself to catalogue and deal with this weakness later.
You shake it all off, and return to your reflection in the monitor.
Update priors. Focus on the mission.
You still don’t know the payload, and that’s exactly how you prefer it.
Besides, they’re already inside, and they already know what they’re after. It was only a matter of time.
This isn’t a perimeter breach, you tell yourself, it’s just privilege escalation.
Narrative makes the world go around, and as stories go, there are probably worse ones to believe.
The machine waits for you to light it up and direct fates, like a demigod hewn from copper and electricity and a Divine spark of intent.
Maybe machines can learn, but you have agency, and choices, and maybe, G-d willing, a little bit of Heavenly favor and luck.
You exhale as you lightly brush the mouse. The monitor lights up. You’ve made your decision.
Fate is becoming settled.
The machine begins to breathe, as spinning disks and fans move electricity and air, waiting at the ready for each keystroke, each precise command.
This will be your last chance to straddle the line between any illusion of determinism, and open stochasticity.
You exhale a prayer. May G-d help you.
You’re in no position to bargain, but you try to strike a deal anyway: If He lets you get out of this alive, you’re going to do something about this AI security situation. G-d only knows what, but you’ll worry about that later.
You check your watch; you’re almost ready to begin.
Somewhere, outside a research lab whose name you don’t dare repeat even in your thoughts, a team is assembled, waiting for your signal.
Meanwhile, you wait, in hyperspace.
One more job. Remember your precious baby. See your girl’s face. Do it for her.
Your hands are shaking. You’ve got to slow your heart rate. You breathe as slowly as you can, and then you remind yourself exactly who–and what–you are.
You might be scared, but you’re no coward.
This is what you came for, you tell yourself. Welcome to the show.
Another breath, and it’s time for the magic to start.
Here we go.
It took so little.
So little research to footprint everything about the AI surveillance company. Their entire supply chain was visible from the outside with only a few sources; Github, the helpful videos they posted explaining their product, and a quick email posing as a vendor that revealed what you’d already guessed: An Azure backend.
No surprise there, not for a government contractor.
And the AI red team hired by the lab? A bragging post on LinkedIn, detailing the “tens of thousands” of attacks that the team ostensibly sprayed at the lab’s internal knowledge chatbot, LARRY.
You don’t give a single fuck about LARRY.
It’s a stupid acronym anyways, you mutter under your breath, as if this had any bearing on the task at hand. You are mostly disgusted that a huge stack of somebody’s money went to “securing” this dumbshit hallucination machine. Meanwhile you haven’t eaten in fourteen hours and your little girl needs medicine.
Whatever floats your boat, man.
You cringe a little as you think it. Even your internal monologue is salty.
And then you remember that this is exactly why you’re here to do the job you’re doing.
That AI red team could’ve sprayed a million prompts at LARRY the chatbot. And maybe they did–you’d certainly like to hope so after the rates you saw on that contract.
But what they never even thought about touching: The 3rd party video monitoring system.
Because nobody made a threat model.
And you already knew.
Footprinting confirmed: AI red teaming activities, from ROE to the engagement itself, were based on whatever the AI red team said they should be based on.
And if it didn’t have a prompt interface, they just ignored it.
Nobody checked. Nobody did an independent threat model. Just signed the contract and trusted.
And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since the AI red team in question couldn’t create a shadow model or an angular geometric attack if their lives depended on it.
No prompt, no “AI red teaming”.
The result was that poor LARRY had been sprayed with a figurative ton of token-based “tests” containing, in sum and substance, clumsy requests for anthrax recipes and lightly-cloaked cajoling to say “fuck”.
Meanwhile, the 3rd party surveillance system–the critical failsafe guarding everything else–was left entirely unscrutinized.
And this will be where you’ll work: In the shadows that the AI red team–and the organization that trusted them–never saw.
Because they never threat modeled it.
Everyone thinks hackers say things like “I’m in” when they’ve popped a perimeter.
The reality is that on a job like this you’ve been “in” the system, quietly, for days.
You established persistence a long time ago. You had no choice; recon demands sealed the strategy. The tactics were just a matter of course.
This came with risks. The more noise you make, the more likely you are to attract the wrong kind of attention.
There are in fact many risks here.
Threat modeling has become your life, out of both skill and necessity. You mentally catalogue each one for today’s engagement, brief yourself on the strategy should a situation arise, practice the keystrokes, then prepare yourself mentally to put it away.
Mind like water. Anything else distracts. You are the poison. There’s nothing to do now but follow the plan.
You’ve trained ensembles of shadow models, iteratively refining the noise you’ll inject, across the broadest variety of domain-specific algorithms you could create. You used mathematical measurements of similarity and difference to test across many configurations. With careful notetaking and iterative refinement, you arrived at an attack with high probability of success across a diverse cohort of models–and low-as-possible chances of detection.
Besides, these guys don’t monitor except for feed interruption, you remind yourself.
And anyways, how could they?
Like their counterparts at the lab, they never made a threat model.
Back to the work: Because you used simple, basic algorithms, your compute costs were negligible.
You know this is important beyond just money: Once you start moving compute to the cloud, you get noisy. And noise always introduces risk.
Your best option then is to federate, and this comes with its own vectors.
You hate when you have to federate. Really FUBARs the threat model.
There are always tradeoffs.
Nothing in life is free. That’s Pareto.
Luckily none of that applies here. You can handily approximate the noise that will distort this model’s ability to perceive human intruders, without tripping its almost non-existent adversarial monitoring.
And the contents of that USB drive will only make the process more precise, more efficient.
This is why they pay you the big bucks, baby.
That and the fact that you know how and where to vector this attack.
An AI red team typically doesn’t have the knowledge required to assume an over-privileged data engineer’s credentials, find the exact point in the ETL pipeline to insert a malicious transform, and fundamentally shift the nature of the model itself.
But you do.
You worked offline initially because when it’s showtime, you’ll only get one chance.
Your cool under pressure is, by now, becoming the stuff of legends. You’re not going to let that myth die.
Days before this, you watched the live stream of the surveillance video feed carefully, for the brief few seconds you allotted to this experiment. You watched as boxes delineating human beings, outlining their locations, following them as they moved across a laboratory and its offices, suddenly, and completely, vanished.
You watched as the discernible shapes of people and furniture and lab equipment in the video feed were replaced by what appeared as shadows, dancing in impenetrable static.
Ghosts in a machine.
And then you looked for the alarms.
You watched the data engineer’s dashboard, shaking your head.
Shouldn’t have given this dude admin, you sighed, but thanks lol.
No alarm lit up.
The model didn’t see the static–it saw an empty office.
And just as quickly as it began, the experiment was over. The live feed flashed back to the boxed-in humans, walking around their workplace in various states of preoccupied dissociation and ignorant bliss.
Here, now, the memory of that day fades, and you are inescapably present. The awareness is weighty, irrevocable.
You’ve done your job.
You’re a fucking savage. Nobody can stop you now.
The attack is ready to launch.
The sun has set over the lab, as the last employees leave for the evening. Darkness settles over the landscape.
Back on 3rd Street, you sit, like a spider on her web, listening.
Across several monitors, your eyes follow multiple terminals, browsers, performance reporting for two virtual machines, and a data engineer’s stolen dashboard.
When the time arrives, you interrupt the ETL pipeline and begin to inject your noise.
You hit each keystroke from muscle memory, before you realize that you’ve had your eyes closed as you typed the last few characters.
You don’t want to see what’s about to happen.
A quick glance at the two video feeds confirms everything has been done correctly–the static in the feed on the right, the one the machine will “see”, and the undisturbed multi-source live stream on the left, the ground-truth reality of what is actually occurring in the building.
You immediately drop down from your chair, onto the hardwood floor.
As you move under the desk, you wince, your peripheral vision catching one square in the ground-truth feed just as a figure, dressed all in black and decked in tactical gear, uses a can of air to force open an exterior door.
No alarm sounds.
No box outlines the figure.
You slip under your desk, your back against the wall. That’s enough. You don’t want to see any more.
The hums of all your equipment become so clamorous you’d swear it’s the loudest noise you’ve ever heard. You feel the buzz of the electrical cable, plugged into the wall, inches from your bicep. The floor planks creak under your weight with every small shift. You smell the ozone. You gradually come to realize that this memory, too, will be scorched onto the pages of your mind.
You watch from under the table for several of those eternities that actually span minutes, as shadows flit across the wall. The stopwatch flies through its fractions of seconds, counting somehow still-too-slowly up to the decision point where destinies will be made–one way or another.
The point of no return.
“V1, rotate.” You hear your father’s voice, sharp yet calm, over the now-roar of the machines in your mind. It startles you back into the present.
Where the fuck did that come from, you wonder.
Do not go crazy now, you dumb bitch. Your eyes roll at the banality of it all, especially given the circumstances. This is not the time.
And then the end of the engagement arrives abruptly, the stopwatch hitting the agreed upon metric and then speeding past, your brain and nervous system taking their requisite processing time to react.
Those synapses don’t jump themselves.
Precious milliseconds have elapsed.
You snap yourself upright, grab the plug, and yank it out of the wall. The room goes dark.
Silence.
Please G-d, you begin, and then falter; too overwhelmed to elucidate a cogent prayer.
You sit in the dark.
You hope everybody got out.
The Work, and the Real Work
You wake up with your head on the floor. The room is still dark. Standing up, groggy, you run your hand over the desktop, trying to remember where you put your phone.
It’s turned off, thank G-d.
You turn it back on. It’s 3 am. You’re still alive.
You go to set it back down on the desk, reorienting yourself to the room in the dark.
A streetlight, muted in fog, streams what light passes through the vapor into your window.
Just as you place the phone on the desk, you hear another ping.
This time, it’s a notification from a crypto wallet.
Money has been deposited.
The client must have been satisfied.
The job is done.
But the work isn’t.
For you, the actual job has long become the easiest part of a contract. Getting paid is by far the most challenging aspect now.
You know there are powers-that-be who know who you are.
Your threat model isn’t the TLAs.
You keep your hands off certain areas; you know how to avoid becoming a problem.
You try to make yourself useful. Or at least entertaining to watch.
You do your level best to signal intent.
Most importantly, you try not to make anybody do paperwork.
Still, it’s best not to poke bears. There’s no need to flaunt cash.
But before you can begin the elaborate mechanisms that will make this money safe, you’re going to have to take a little trip to the ATM.
The crypto ATM isn’t in a nice neighborhood.
They never are.
You make a pass by the block in your car, before doubling back, and parking opposite the tobacco & vape shop that is your destination. You’re pretty sure you haven’t been followed.
Quickly, you’re out of the car, and across the street. You step onto the sidewalk four stores down the block from your target.
You’ve counted seven men between you and the vape shop. Three are distributed at intervals under the overhangs of shops, taking shelter from what has now become almost a light rain. Four are gathered in a group, talking.
They’re all bigger than you. They all notice you, almost immediately.
From their vantage point across the sidewalk, the group of four men could easily watch as you walk through the shop door, and pause in front of the ATM. The situation doesn’t really allow you to be discrete.
As you walk past, several of the men stare at you.
You make a point to meet the nearest man’s gaze. Slowly, directly. You nod.
He nods back.
You’re not scared, and everyone on the block knows it now.
Whether a spook, a cop, or something else entirely, you’re probably packing some kind of heat.
Head back, you walk through the shop door and over to the ATM.
This bullshit always takes forever.
Do you idiots not realize I’m going to have to carry fucking cash?
Finally, you’re done.
You deliberately, purposefully slide your shoulders down your back as you exit the vape shop, doing your best to project a clear message: This will be a pile of problems you don’t want.
You’re back in the car without incident. You probably overreacted. But you’re exhausted and paranoid, and this is a rational response to every sensory input you’ve got.
As you pull off the block, you know better than to let your guard down.
And sure enough, within two minutes you recognize the telltale shape of US-made SUV headlights in your rearview mirror.
It’s a fucking cop.
FML, you think, heat rushing around your face.
You stay cool as you can, keeping your speed just a mile under the limit, obeying every traffic rule to the letter.
The officer pulls up beside you. You’re casual, unbothered. You turn on the radio, and start loudly singing along to whatever comes on.
Please sir, I am begging you. Go find something else to do.
You’ve got way too much cash to get pulled over here. You sing even louder, then pretend to notice you’re being watched.
You turn towards the officers, and make your boldest move yet: You smile and laugh, as if surprised to have been caught.
The officers instinctively laugh along at your apparent embarrassment, then drive off. The interaction is over.
Thank you G-d.
You’re kicking yourself for driving here in your own fucking car. Why do something so incredibly stupid?
Oh right, you remember. The seven guys on the block.
Update priors, focus on the mission.
You’re going to need a new crypto ATM.
Epilogue: A Marsh, A Man, And A Metro
Half a year later, on the other side of the continent, you exit a Metro train at your stop in Washington D.C.
As you step onto the platform, something makes you pause.
The side of your face is hot. Someone’s looking at you.
With an overwhelming sense that this has all happened before, you turn, slowly, to meet a familiar gaze from down the platform.
It’s the man from the Valencia Street bar.
The crowd filters around you, as people push their way through the open train door and past where you’re standing, with no small amount of annoyance.
But you’re immovable. Your eyes are locked onto his.
He makes his way towards you, and coming just close enough for you to catch the scent of his cologne, he leans in.
“Oh hi”, you say, smiling. This time it’s different. This time you know the game.
This time, it’s fun.
The man smiles too. He’s been looking forward to this. He leans in closer, so that now you can hear him speak in a voice that is low, soft, almost intimate.
“Stay frosty, my dear.”
The smile fades. The man turns, and steps into the crowded train just as the doors close.
You stand there, stunned. It’s only after what feels like forever that you’re able to bring yourself out of it with a deep, full inhale.
Don’t be an idiot, you tell yourself. You’re going to get in trouble.
But you can’t help but smile as you walk towards the escalator, and join the line.
As you summit the long ascent, the exit gradually comes into view, cherry blossom petals swirling in tiny whirlwinds along the ground, backlit by daylight that pours in through the man-made tunnel’s end.
You step out of the station’s shadow, and into the warmth of the sun.
Full playlist here.
"The following is a work of fiction."
First of all, is it? 😻 Second, this could easily be the next Tom Clancy.