Swipe

hit it funny. I figured it was some sort of experiment you had going or something. Like a . . . zip line for ants.” Dane laughed at himself. “Is it a zip line for ants?”
    “No . . . ,” Logan said, hyperventilating a little.
    “Weird.” Dane shrugged. “Come on. Let’s go get my hoverdisk. We’ll rock-tablet-laser to see who has to climb that tree.”
    5
    On weekends, growing up, Erin would spend Saturdays shadowing her mother in the offices on Barrier Street in Beacon. For a household run by two busy parents, it was either that or playdates, and as soon as she was old enough to say so, Erin admitted that she much preferred the office.
    The trading floors, of course, were the most exciting thing on Barrier Street. Long, cavernous rooms filled with thousands of tablet computers attached to women and men by brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. With markets fluctuating as fast as they did, the time it took for keystrokes or hand gestures or words was unacceptable. These days, stocks rose and fell with brain waves.
    But Erin never stayed long on the trading floor. Her mom was not a part of that particular frenzy.
    Her mom was above it.
    So Erin would spend her days in the corner of a small, windowless office, its wallscreens decorated with economic charts and program algorithms, and with the occasional electronic drawing made by Erin.
    It wasn’t long before Dr. Arbitor recognized that Erin needed stimulation, so she’d soon set her daughter up with a computer and her own BCI.
    At first, Erin wasn’t much interested in the tablet her mother had given her. Its preloaded games were too easy and bored her quickly, and its movies were bland. But a few weekends in, Erin’s mother took a minute between E.U. calls to show her daughter that the tablet she’d been given was more than just a tool for consuming—it was a tool for creating. Under the surface, it was a blank slate, one that could be manipulated, programmed, hacked . . .
    And a month later, when Dr. Arbitor noticed her daughter delving into source code on her own, she thought it might be time to send Erin to her friend Mac down the hall.
    Mac was a computer wiz employed by DOME. Mac could sign on to the tablet at his desk in Beacon and orchestrate an electrobus jam five minutes later in Sierra. Mac could do anything.
    And he soon took a liking to Erin. Erin was bright and curious . . . and more than a little mischievous. So Mac began teaching hacking tricks to Erin while her mom fooled herself into thinking she’d found a good babysitter for her daughter. Mac giggled endlessly the time he showed Erin how to make all the lights on the trading floor go out, and again the time he taught her how to tap into the building’s security system and set off the fire alarms. One Valentine’s Day a few years in, he even showed Erin how to stream “I Got You Babe” over the loudspeakers for a full minute and a half before the building’s mainframe immune system kicked in and booted Erin’s tablet from the network permanently.
    Dr. Arbitor didn’t let Erin see Mac after that. But it wasn’t long before Erin figured out how to hack into Mac’s operating space, and over the next few years he taught her the rest of what he could by IP chat and text message.

    Now, in her lonely Spokie apartment, Erin sat with her computer and was finally putting these skills to good use. Through trial and error she’d hacked her tablet into communicating with the DOME technology spread across her apartment floor, and to her programmer’s eye, the data it transmitted (in machine code and assembly language) painted a picture of how each object might be used.
    The chalk dust, it turned out, wasn’t chalk at all, but surveillance powder capable of absorbing sound and translating it to radio frequency, which the accompanying gel picked up live, like a one-way walkie-talkie. The tape worked similarly, but had proven more useful for recording than for live communication.
    The sticky beans would short out when squeezed, turning into a strange, taserlike defense; the button was a tracker; and on and on, each item coming together to give its user a powerful set of advantages. Erin surveyed the inventory, no longer feeling like an amateur.
    But suddenly a scream let out deep inside her ears, and Erin clutched at her head in shock and pain.
    It was the gel. At the start of her experimentation she’d put the radio gel in her ears, along with a generous dose of surveillance powder on