Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction by Joyce Chng, Nicolette Barischoff, A.C. Buchanan, Sarah Pinsker

lot can change in five years. People can learn a lot about the nature of power.
    Ramirez had been next to me, our elbows locked. On my other side, a woman I’d never met. Fifty years old I’d say. We stared the police down.
    A cop came out from the police wall in front of us, took three steps towards me, looked me in the eyes, and raised the barrel of a shotgun, racking it. And I let go. I unlocked my arms and turned my face in fear.
    They took the old woman off in handcuffs, and they took me off in handcuffs, and I’ve forgotten that cop’s face but I’ll never forget the barrel of his gun. And maybe I’m lucky Ramirez still works with me, still trusts me at all. I know I don’t trust myself.
    The shotgun blast brought me back to the present day, but the door held. Ramirez had done her homework.
    Ten minutes, forty-three seconds left on the clock. I went into child pose. I’d never needed child pose as a child. Panic came over me in waves like fever, burning everything from my brain except the thought “I am not okay.”
    “I’m sorry about the camera,” Ramirez said, in the bizarre quiet. Whatever she’d been doing, she’d done it, and we didn’t have much to do but wait to see what the fates had in store.
    “It happens,” I said.
    We waited out the clock in silence. I needed to quit, I decided, during short bouts of lucidity. No more hacking and no more breaking and entering. If I got out of there, I’d never be back. I’d just keep my head down.
    I wasn’t okay.
    Better to just eat trash—trash was free. Sure, there were too many squatters around Southeast Portland, so I’d have to leave town. Go somewhere where I couldn’t have a community. Maybe Marcellus would come with me. He said he loved me, and he might even mean it, and that might even be enough.
    I’d never be okay.
    Or the forest. The fires were worse every year, but I wasn’t afraid of death and I wasn’t afraid of fire. I was afraid of police and I was afraid of cages. Trapped in a barricaded house with bank cops outside, I kept myself as calm as I could by thinking about pleasant things, like burning alive in a forest fire.
    I wasn’t okay.
    The clock ran out. The transactions were complete, and Albrecht signed off on them. Ramirez had it split up between the two of us in seconds. It did nothing to change my situation.
    The cops shot at the windows next, their rounds leaving cracks in the first layer of bulletproof plexi. More cursing. Ramirez was sweating—literally sweating. I thought I’d experienced every symptom of fear, but I was wrong. I didn’t sweat. That was a pleasant thought in the morass of my brain.
    Then I heard the air-raid siren. A hand-cranked thing, coming closer. And the cops outside started cussing in earnest.
    “Darknet?” I asked. It took me a long time to formulate words.
    Ramirez nodded. “I put out the call as soon as I saw them.”
    I uncurled my left arm from its place around my knees and set the door camera up on my screen. There were lights outside—squatters gathered at the closest street corner. The cops turned their backs to us, pistols and tasers drawn.
    There’d be too many of us out there for them to start shooting. That was the idea, at least. And every squatter on the street was wearing a camera broadcasting to Darknet. And for every camera there was someone at home who would rather be asleep, hitting the big fat censor button on a console or tablet or field-of-vision device every time something on screen might incriminate anyone but the police. Was it fair? Hardly. But the other side had been doing it for decades.
    Just knowing they were out there, the burning waves of fear lost the worst of their power over me. But they remained.
    I heard the crack of a grenade launcher and saw a muzzle flash, lasting so much longer on my screen thanks to the wonders of a low frames-per-second camera. The police were shooting teargas, I’d guess.
    Ramirez was looking at me, saying something, but it was