Humans are creatures of daylight. Daylight is when the world belongs to us. Once the sun sets, we lose our ability to sense danger. Our earliest fear is of often of darkness. Not the darkness itself, but what lurks within. Dusk is the harbinger of things that would feed upon us. Night is the time when people come together, to rest, to reconnect, but historically, to hide from what dwells in the darkness. Night in the industrial district of Metro5 was neither dark nor quiet, but it was filled with danger, all the same. The lights from sports bars, diners, and cheap accommodation spilled out onto the street in a haze of orange and red. Hardly anyone was walking by. The air in Metro7 would make you feel light headed after only a few minutes. Most people simply moved between buildings, cleaning the filters in their masks at each stop.

The automated police vehicle prowled down the street like a metallic, two-ton leopard. It didn’t need to feed, beyond being charged once a week, but it was hunting. It was investigating a potentially illegal broadcast, which had originated in this city block two minutes before. It had four sturdy, insect-like legs that ended in bulletproof tyres. It could use these legs to climb up and over obstacles with astonishing speed. Thirty-six cameras scanned each building, looking for signs of people. It registered heat, motion, and light in milliseconds, filtering out rats from targets. But its true advantage was in sound — constantly sweeping the spectrum, it could track even scrambled, frequency-hopping signals with ease.

Watching from a storm drain, Naomi knew all of this. She watched the vehicle through a facemask that, along with the rest of her clothes, hid her thermal signature. They were stiflingly hot, but it was better than being seen.

One of her hands gripped the transmitter she had just used. She had made it herself, only hours earlier, and it had been built to send only one burst of radio signal. To anybody listening, it would have merely sounded like an unpleasant squawk of static. Meaningless, and-to anyone but an expert-easily attributed to radio interreference from powerlines, or a generator or any of the thousands of machines that generated a large electric current in Metro5.This was the best system that they had for arranging rendezvous. The location and the frequency were known in advance, always spoken, never sent digitally or written down, but the time of the exchange had to be flexible. The people Naomi was waiting to meet had been monitoring at 52.25 Megahertz for weeks now, waiting for two pulses. Naomi had three minutes to send the second pulse, or the rendezvous would be cancelled, and the location would be ‘burned’. It had taken Naomi more than three years to establish contact with the ‘Trojans’. If they got spooked now, it was unlikely she’d be able to locate them again.  It was sheer bad luck that She'd sent her half-second pulse at the moment that this patrol car was only one street away. Usually, a small blip such as hers wouldn’t have been picked up until hours later, when the vast signal processor in the city center would flag it as suspicious. She had planned to have delivered the microfilm and be long gone by then. Unauthorized broadcasts of any kind were illegal, regardless of their content. Officially, it was deemed to be ‘unsafe’ and ‘antisocial’ to clog up airwaves with pirate radio transmissions. The reality was that The Church of the One Truth (or simply, The Cot) didn’t want any broadcasts that they didn’t control to be reaching anybody’s ears. The Trojans were as cautious as hares in a kennel. They had no base that anyone knew about. They held normal jobs and lived seemingly normal lives. The Trojans lived and fought their war ‘within the walls’ of the enemy, taking months or years to plan coordinated cyberattacks on government agencies, or free political prisoners from ‘education’ camps. Naomi glanced down at her watch. She had fifty seconds left of her three-minute window. Normally, she would simply wait and abandon the rendezvous. Data smugglers who took unnecessary risks didn’t smuggle for long.She had made four such rendezvous in the past eleven months. All of them had gone smoothly enough that nobody at her work was even remotely suspicious that their supervisor was in fact, stealing state secrets. The fact that she could code by hand was the only real way she could smuggle information out of the Department of Collections. It was one of the most secure buildings in the country. She needed to be able to get back across town and into Metro7 for her morning shift to avoid suspicion, and she couldn’t do that from inside a cell. But tonight’s delivery was crucial. It wasn’t the usual list of monthly passcodes that would enable the Trojans to access storage warehouses. No, the software that she had on her, painstakingly encoded onto a microfilm that she was wearing over one of her fingernails, was about to change everything.

It was about to make any sort of resistance completely and utterly, impossible. She gritted her teeth. There was only one thing to do.

She made a small adjustment on her mask, which housed a Techlens screen. She waited until the police vehicle was about to round the corner, and then activated her transmitter.

The robot spun 180 degrees in less than a tenth of a second, coming to an unnatural stop. She glanced across the road at the diner. She could see a haze of blue halos from the dozen patrons within, behind the tinted glass. Only fifteen meters away, the police vehicle’s laser focus was on her scanner, as she knew she herself was virtually invisible to its cameras.

She did her best to ignore it and instead, sent the data packet she had prepared.

Instantly, nearly all of the halos inside the diner turned either red or yellow. The proximity of so many ‘on parole’ users congregating in one area instantly captured the police vehicles attention. Its lights activated and a blaring siren began to sound. It launched itself across the road, blocking the doorway.

‘REMAIN INDOORS, YOU ARE IN BREACH OF YOUR PAROLE. IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE, YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR.’

The people inside began to swarm around, panicking. The machine began to repeat its message. Naomi held her breath.

 One of the patrons decided to leave out the back door of the diner instead of answering for a crime he didn’t commit, a few others followed suit. The police vehicle set off in pursuit. She felt bad knowing that a few people would be roughly apprehended, but their identity chips would clash against the names of the deceased in the dead-halos and they’d all be released before morning.

Naomi breathed a sigh of relief, although she knew it would be only minutes before the area would be swarmed with police, both robotic and human. The human police would thoroughly investigate the use of her ‘dead-halos’, which she had acquired with considerable time and effort, and not a small amount of illegal hacking.

As she made for a side street, a man spoke from a doorway.

‘Not exactly subtle.’

She turned to see an old man wearing a low-budget rebreather. It only covered his bottom jaw and his nostrils. He had a shock of white hair and although his workman’s clothes looked worn, they were of good quality. He could have been a foreman at a factory or something similar. He opened the door behind him and gestured inside. When she didn’t move, he opened his hand to reveal a receiver the size of her thumb. Its single LED light was green.

Glancing over her shoulder, she followed him inside. As soon as the door was closed, he removed his rebreather and bolted the door. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she saw two other people standing in a dimly lit, abandoned storeroom. Aside from the old man, everyone wore a full-face mask. There were cleaning supplies and a few scattered automatic vacuums in states of disrepair. One of the shadowy figures spoke, their voice muffled by their mask.  

‘You did well. That bot was going to sniff us out, sooner or later.’

The old man seemed to disagree. He huffed in her ear as he moved past her to stand with the others.

‘I don’t know what’s so important that you had to risk bringing the entire fucking enforcement squad out here, but I guess you’d better hand it over.’

Naomi took a deep breath, the combination of her suit and the adrenaline surging through her was beginning to feel like heat stroke.

Naomi nodded and, removed her glove. The three Trojans watched with interest as she carefully peeled the microfilm off her fingernail. The silent one stepped forward and presented a small plastic tube for her put the film in. Naomi noticed from their build that she was likely an older woman. The one she assumed to be in charge nodded approvingly. He sounded younger than her, and his accent was… educated.

‘Clever. What is it.’

She tried to keep the exhaustion out of her voice. She had come this far.

‘It’s a new algorithm. Designed by the Church. It’s modeled off a basic behavioral analysis pattern. The same idea as a chess computer that can predict a person’s moves after playing them a few times.’

The leader listened intently, but the old man wasn’t impressed.

‘So what? You just went through all that to keep us from losing at online poker?’

‘That’s just the basis of the algorithm. It’s evolved far beyond that. It’s a behavioral analysis based on, on… everything. From the minute you’re born. Every time you post something, share something. The videos you watch, the essay topics you choose in school, the music you listen to. Everything is collated into a ‘consumption-persona’ and that persona is fed into the algorithm. The algorithm predicts…’

She trailed off. She hadn’t said it out loud before, and it was terrible to comprehend.

The leader spoke.

‘It predicts insurrection.’

Naomi nodded, surprised at his quick grasp of things. 

‘Exactly. It predicts people in adolescence who are likely to be, problematic in later years. The goal is to send them into reeducation before they reach adulthood. They’re calling them ‘finishing schools.’

The old man barked a short laugh, devoid of any humour.

‘How many. How many people are going to be, ‘problematic.’

‘In its current form. The algorithm is identifying about 18% of personas to be potentially problematic. But as it evolves, that number could go higher.’

There was a grim silence in the room.

The woman finally spoke. She sounded foreign.

‘Thank you, for bringing this to us. We understand what you have risked.’

Naomi took a breath.

‘What are you going to do?’

The older two glanced at the leader. He shrugged.

‘Whatever is necessary.’

He turned to the old man

‘We’re done here.’

After being led through a cleverly concealed passage, the four walked briskly though a series of tunnels. Nobody spoke. The old man seemed to know the way without a map or any other sort of reference. After what felt like over an hour, he stopped and gestured to a doorway. Naomi separated from the Trojans with barely more than a wave. But not before the woman had pressed something into her hand and whispered something into her ear.  The doorway led into another disused cluttered room, this one full of shelves. There was a single door at the far end.

She emerged, blinking, in a subway tunnel that she recognized. The door she came out of was simply marked ‘maintenance.’ She smiled. How many of these were scattered through the cities, she wondered. She pulled her mask off and shed her jacket to reveal an ordinary long sleeved shirt underneath.

As she rode the subway back towards Metro7, she glanced around to make sure that nobody was paying her too much attention. At 3 am, nobody cared much about what anybody else was doing. She scanned the airwaves to see if the situation she had caused had been resolved. Police frequencies were heavily encrypted, but their support services, ambulances, legal aid, and so on, were often not. After finding nothing about an incident in Metro5, she was satisfied that she hadn’t disrupted anybody’s evening too badly, when she heard, something. It was the grey space, the noise between frequencies. The sort of scratchy static that you’d barely notice.Except instead of a constant drone this was, rhythmic. Not a rhythm like a song or a heartbeat. It was the sort of measured syncopation that you could hear when someone spoke a foreign language. She couldn’t understand the meaning, but she could understand that there was meaning in it. She looked at the frequency. Curious.

That was when her message alert buzzed. And again. And a third time.

Raul -People came looking for you at the house. Where are you? Call me-

Sophie -Hey, on nightshift, saw something crazy come up about you. You ok?-

OFFICIAL MESSAGE: You have been found in violation of penal code 1185, submit yourself to the nearest police sta-

She closed her messages.

The dead-halos must have been traced back to her somehow.

She couldn’t go home.

Her hand gripped the small wooden horse she had been given. The woman’s words rang in her mind.

‘You are on the path.’