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

just white noise to me. All I could hear was the ruckus outside and the cold sound of my slow-beating heart. I really shouldn’t have gone to work. I should have stayed in bed. I wasn’t okay.
    “We gotta go!” Ramirez was shouting. She didn’t need to shout—words that promised a chance of escape cut through every frequency.
    She had her yoga mat rolled up under her arm, the modem in her hand, and her teeth gritted. Whatever she saw on the Darknet, it must have been more promising than the haze I saw on my screen. I slammed the laptop shut.
    She threw open the door and dove into a cloud of pink smoke—cover, provided by our side.
    I ran, choking my way into a maelstrom of shouts and smoke and pepperspray. The cop silhouettes were the ones bulky with gear and belts and guns. My friends’ silhouettes were the thin ones and the fat ones unencumbered by armor or by much weaponry. They were the ones that kept on the move, playing mouse to the police’s cat.
    The police were outnumbered but unafraid, backed by an empire’s worth of legitimacy. They had jails and judges and healthcare and rich patrons and immunity. We had whatever we could make or steal or whatever minimum wage could buy.
    Ferocity was enough that night. A cop grabbed at Ramirez as she sprinted past—they always go for the smallest target—but backed off when a heavyset woman stepped closer with a ski mask and a bat.
    No one got hurt, no one got arrested. Thirty squatters—most of them strangers, some of them kids—had turned out for the alarm and the cops beat a retreat once we were past their line.
    Invisible people take care of one another.
    If the bank would budget for it, the cops would be back during the day, combing the house for the clues they weren’t going to find. Worst case, Ramirez was going to get tagged the same as me as a person of note and she’d have be more careful around cameras in hot neighborhoods. But more likely than anything else, the bank would drop it. We won, and they weren’t going to want to draw attention to that. We won, but I didn’t feel much like a winner.
    I was on edge the whole ride back to my neighborhood. Every time I saw another car on the street, I got a little spike of adrenaline. In the dark, every set of headlights was Schrödinger’s cop car.
    Ramirez rode with me back to my neighborhood and I had her drop me off a few blocks from home. I wouldn’t let her self-driving car take me closer. I don’t trust the things. One day, I’m going to get into some friend’s car and the car itself is gonna just drive us both to jail. I know better than most people that machines will take orders from anyone with good enough code.
    “Thanks for the work,” I told her when I got out in the soft twilight of morning.
    She laughed. Not the condescending, haughty laughter I keep thinking she’ll belt out, but a childish giggle that reminded me why I trusted her. “We’d make so much money together,” she said.
    “I’ll call you when I’m starving,” I told her. And she drove off.
    It wasn’t her fault. She lived like she’d never been hurt, like she’d never been broken, so I kept her at arm’s length. Her strength reminded me of my weakness.
    There’s something I tell myself, a kind of mantra I mutter on long nights when the far-off sirens keep me wired or when I’m walking home through the fog and trying desperately not to jump at my own shadow as I pass from the light of one streetlight to another and my own silhouette suddenly appears in front of me. And that mantra is: beauty lies on the far side of fear.
    Everything I’ve done in my life that I’m proud of has terrified me. I’d earned enough that night to keep a whole warehouse of people eating well for the next three months, and that wasn’t nothing. It might just be worth it.
    Marcellus was lying on his back and snoring in earnest when I crept back into the room. He’d wrapped himself up in the comforter and I had to pry him free to get my