Notes on Unauthorized Bread by Cory Doctorow

let&#39;s call this as a private joke uh an attempt at conflict resolution so this is a reading of unauthorized bread by cory doctor from the book radicalized the way salima found out that bulangism had gone bankrupt her toaster wouldn&#39;t accept her bread she held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs up emoji but instead it showed her the head scratching face and made a soft bird she waved the bread again [Music] come on she turned the toaster off and on then she unplugged it counted to 10 and plugged it in then she menu through the screens until she found reset to factory default waited three minutes and punched her wi-fi password again long before she got to that point she&#39;d grown certain that it was a lost cause but these were the steps that you took when electronics stopped working so you could call the 800 number and say i&#39;ve turned it off and on i&#39;ve unplugged it i&#39;ve reset it to factory defaults and there was a touch screen option on the toaster call support but that wasn&#39;t working so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it it rang 17 times and disconnected she heaved a sigh another one bites the dust the toaster wasn&#39;t the first appliance to go that honor went to the dishwasher which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when the disher went under but it was the last straw she could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast over a candle just to be sure she asked the fridge for headlines about booleanism and there it was their cloud had burst in the night socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread she prodded a headline and learned that bulanism had been a ghost chip for at least six months because that&#39;s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data passwords logins ordering and billing details had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption there were ransom notes in the database records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of bullyingism&#39;s shitty data handling no one had ever seen them bulanism&#39;s share price had declined by 98 over the past year there might not even be a bulangism anymore when selema had pictured bulang ism she&#39;d imagined the french bakery that was on the toasters idol screen dusted with flour wood block tables with seared rags of crusty loaves she pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road she&#39;d pictured gas lamps the article had a street view shot of bulayingism&#39;s headquarters a four-story office block in pune near mumbai walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance the bullang some cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering selima&#39;s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast it come from an authorized bulanism baker which it had in the absence of a reply the paranoid little gadget would assume that salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted bulangism toaster and then tried to reneg on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to sub-optimal toast bulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in real time to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders without those profits there&#39;d be no surplus capital to divert to r d creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without salima and millions of other bulangism stakeholders never just customers waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters and what of the bulanism baker partners they&#39;d done the right thing signing up for a bulangism license subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in bulang azim&#39;s precision engineered appliances with crum and perosity and perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads these valued partners deserve to have their commitment to excellence honored not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread salima knew these arguments even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them which it did after three unsuccessful bread authorization attempts playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and re-education campaign she tried to search her fridge for booleanism hacks and bullyingism unlock codes but appliances stuck together kitchen aids network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky no results screams even though salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread she had to leave her work in half an hour and she hadn&#39;t even showered yet but god damn it first the dishwasher not a toaster she found her laptop used when she&#39;d gotten it now barely functional its battery was long dead and she&#39;d had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a cape charger cable but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates she was able to run the dark net browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling she was 45 minutes late to work that day but she had toast for breakfast god damn it the dishwasher was next once selima had found the right forum it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing after all she had to use it and now it was effectively bricked she wasn&#39;t the only one who had the dishwasher bulanism double whammy either some poor suckers who also had the poor the poor fortune to own one of the constellation of devices made by hp news core fridges toothbrushes even sex toys all of which had gone down thanks to a failure of the company&#39;s cloud provider tata while this failure was unrelated to the disher bulanism doubleheader it was pretty unfortunate timing everyone agreed the twin collapse of disher and bulangism did have a shared cause selima discovered both companies were publicly traded and both had seen more than 20 percent of their shares acquired by summerstream funds management the largest hedge fund on earth with 184 billion under management summerstream was an activist shareholder and it was very big on stock buybacks once it had a seat on each company&#39;s board both occupied by galt uh baumgardner a junior partner at the firm but from a very good kansas family they both hired the same expert consultant from deloitte to examine the company&#39;s accounts and recommend a buy-back program that would see the shareholders getting their due return from the firms without gouging so deep into the company&#39;s operating capital as to endanger them it was all mathematically provable of course the companies could easily afford to divert billions from their balance sheets to the shareholders once was this was determined it was the board&#39;s fiduciary duty to vote in favor of it which was handy since they all owned fat wads of company shares and a few billion dollars later the companies were lean mean and battle ready and didn&#39;t even miss all that money oops summer stream issued a press release often quoted in the forums salima was now obsessively haunting blaming the whole thing on volatility and alpha calling it unfortunate and disappointing they were confident that both companies would restructure and bankruptcy perhaps after a quick sale to a competitor and everyone could start toasting bread and washing dishes within a month or two selima wasn&#39;t going to wait her bullyingism didn&#39;t go easily after downloading the new firmware from the dark net she had to remove the case slicing through three separate tamper evidence seals and a large warning sticker that threatened electrocution and prosecution perhaps simultaneously for anyone foolish enough to ignore it and locate a specific component and then short out two of its pins with a pair of tweezers while booting it this dropped the toaster into a test mode that the developers had deactivated but not removed the instant the test screen came up she had a jammer usb inner usb stick removing the toaster&#39;s hood had revealed a set of usb ports a monitor port and even a little ethernet jack all stock on the commodity single board pc that controlled it at exactly the right instant then use the on-screen keyboard to tap in the login and password which were admin and admin of course it took her three tries to get the timing right but on the third try the spare login screen was replaced with the pirates firmware&#39;s cheesy text art animation of a 3d skull which she smiled at and then she burst into laughter as a piece of text art toast floated into the frame and was merely chopped to crumbs by the text art skull the crumbs cascading to the bottom of the screen and forming shifting little piles someone had put a lot of effort into the physics of simulation for that ridiculous animation it made selima feel good like she was entrusting her toaster to deep serious crafts people and not just randos who like to pick their wits against faceless programmers from big stupid companies the crumbs piled up as the skull chomped and the progress indicator counted up from 12 to 26 percent and to 34 where it stuck for a full 10 minutes until she was ready to risk really breaking the damn thing but unplugging it but then 58 and so on to an agonizing weight at the 99 and then all the crumbs rushed up from the bottom of the screen and went back out through the skull&#39;s mouth turning back into toast each reassembled piece forming up the ranks that quickly blotted out the skull and the words all done burned themselves into the toast&#39;s surface glistening with butter that ran down in rivulets she was just grabbing for her phone to get a picture of this awesome private load screen when the toaster oven blinked and rebooted itself a few seconds later she held a slice of bread to the toaster sensor and watched as its light turned green and its door yawned open halfway through munching the toast she was struck by an odd curiosity she held her hand up to the toaster palm out as though it too were a slice of bread the toaster&#39;s light turned green and the door opened she was momentarily tempted to try and toast a fork or a paper towel or a slice of apple just to see if the toaster would do it but of course it would this was a new kind of toaster a toaster that took orders rather than giving them a toaster that would give her enough rope to hang herself let her toast a lithium battery or can of hairspray or anything else she wanted to toast unauthorized bread even homemade bread the idea made her feel a little queasy and a little tremorous homemade bread or something she&#39;d read about in books seen in old dramas but she didn&#39;t know anyone who actually baked bread that was like gnawing your own furniture out of whole logs or something ingredients turned out to be incredibly simple and while her first loaf came out looking like a poop emoji it tasted amazing still warm from the little toaster and if anything the slice okay the lump she saved and toasted the next morning was even better especially with butter on it she left for work that day with a magical warm toasty feeling in her stomach she did the dishwasher that night the disher hackers were much more utilitarian in their approach but they were also swedish judging from the urls in their readme files which might explain the minimalism she&#39;d been to an ikea she got it the disher didn&#39;t require anything like the song and dance the bulanism she popped off the maintenance cover pried the rubber gasket off the usb port stuck in her stick and rebooted it the screen showed a lot of scrolling text and some cryptic error messages and then rebooted again into what looked like normal disher operating mode except without the throbbing red alerts about the unreachable server that had haunted it for a week she piled the dishes from the sink into the dishwasher feeling a tiny thrill every time the dishwasher played its new dish recognized arpeggio she thought about taking a pottery next her experience with the dishwasher and the toaster changed her though she couldn&#39;t quite say how at first leaving the apartment the next day she&#39;d found herself eyeing up the elevator bank looking at the fire department override plate under the call screen thinking about the fact that the tenants on the subsidized floors had to wait three times as long for an elevator because they were only eligible to ride cars right in the cars that had rear opening doors that exited into the back lobby with its poor doors even those cars wouldn&#39;t stop at her floor if they&#39;d picked up one of the full fair residents on the way because heaven for fent those people should have to breathe the common air of the filthy commoners i think that was heaven forbid so lima had been overjoyed to get a spot in her building the dorchester towers because the waiting list for the subsidy units that the planning department required of the developer was years deep she&#39;d been in the country for a decade at that point spending the first five years in a camp in arizona where they&#39;d watched one person after another die and the withering heat when the state department finally finished vetting her and let her out a caseworker met her with a bag of clothes a prepaid debit card and the news that her parents had died while she was in the camp she absorbed the news silently and didn&#39;t allow herself to display any outward sign of her agony she had assumed that her parents had died because they had promised to meet her in arizona within a month of her arrival just as soon as her father could call in his old debts and pay for the papers and database fiddling that would get him on the plane and to the u.s immigration checkpoint where they could claim asylum she&#39;d been a teenager then now she was a young woman with five years hard living in the camp behind her she knew how to control her tears she thanked the caseworker and asked what had become of their bodies lost at sea the woman said and donned a compassionate mask the ship and all its passengers no survivors the italians scoured the area for weeks and found nothing the wreck went straight to the bottom bad informatics they said a ship was a computer that you put desperate people inside and when the computer went bad the ship was a tomb you put desperate people inside she nodded like she understood though the sound of her blood in her ears was so loud she couldn&#39;t hear herself think the social worker said some more things gave her some paperwork which included a greyhound ticket to boston where she had been found a shelter bed she read the itinerary through three times she&#39;d learned to read english in the camp taught by a woman who&#39;d been a linguistics professor before she was a refugee she&#39;d learned geography from the mandatory civics lessons she&#39;d gone to every two weeks watching videos about life in america that were notably short on survival tips for life in the part of america where they slept three deep in bunk beds in a blazing desert surrounded by drones and barbed wire she learned where boston was though far boston two days 17 hours the social worker said you&#39;ll get to see all of america it&#39;s an incredible experience her mask slipped for a moment and she looked very tired then she pasted her smile back on get to the grocery store first that&#39;s my advice you&#39;ll want some real food to eat selma had got good at being bored over her five years in the camp mastering a kind of waking doze where her mind simply went away time scurrying past like rooches clinging to the baseboard barely visible in the corner of her eye but on the greyhound bus the skill failed her even after she found a window seat 22 hours into the journey she found her mind returning again and again to her parents the ship the deep fathoms of the mediterranean she had known that her parents were dead but there was knowing and there was knowing she debarked in boston two days and 17 hours later noting as she did that the bus didn&#39;t have a driver something she&#39;d missed boarding and debunking by the rear doors another computer you put your body into given the wrong informatics the greyhound could have plunged off a cliff or smashed into oncoming traffic there had been a charge port on the armrest and she&#39;d shared it with the seatmates who&#39;d come and gone on her bus but she&#39;d made sure she had a full charge when she stepped off the bus and it was good she did and she used up almost all of her battery getting translations and directions in order to find the shelter she&#39;d been assigned which wasn&#39;t in boston but in a suburb called worcester whose pronunciation evaded her for the next six months all her groceries were consumed and everything she owned fit into a duffel bag whose strap broke as she was plugging it up the broken escalator while changing underground t-trains on her way to worcester she&#39;d spent half the funds on her debit card on food and had eaten like a mouse like a bird like a scurrying cockroach she had started with nearly nothing and now she had nothing the hardest part of finding the shelter was the fact that it was in a dead strip mall 11 stores all refitted with bunks and showers and playrooms for kids arranged along the back plane of an empty parking lot that was half a mile from the nearest bus stop selima walked past the mall three times staring at her phone his battery was nearly flat again it was so old it barely held a charge before she figured out that this row of shops was her new home the reception was an old pharmacy that had anchored the mall it was unattended a cavernous space walled off by a roll-down gate with a row of touch screens where the cash registers had sat it smelled of piss and the floor was dirty with a kind of ancient ground and grime you got in places where people trudged over and over only one of the touch screens was working and it took a lot of trial and error before she figured out that she needed to tap about 1.5 centimeters south southwest of the button that she was hitting once she clocked this things got faster she switched the screen to arabic let the camera over uh let the camera over its scanner retinas and repeatedly pressed her fingers to the pad until the machine had read her once it had validated her she had to tap through eight screens of things she was promising that she wouldn&#39;t drink or drug or steal that she didn&#39;t have any chronic or infectious diseases that she did not support terrorism that she understood that at this stage she was not permitted to work for wages but that also in paradoxically she would be required to work in worcester in order to pay back the people of the united states for the shelter bed she was about to be assigned she read the fine print it was something she&#39;d learned to do early in the refugee process sometimes the immigration officers quizzed you on the things you just clicked through and if you couldn&#39;t answer their questions correctly they&#39;d send you back to the back of the line or reschedule your hearing for the next month because you hadn&#39;t fully appreciated the gravity of the agreement you were forging with the united states then she found out which of the former stores she&#39;d be living in and was prompted to insert her debit card which was topped up with credits she could exchange for food at specific stores that catered to people on benefits as she tapped through more screens entering her phone number choosing times for medical checkups she became aware of a low humming noise growing closer she turned around and saw a loot trolley trundling through the aisles of the derelict the derelict pharmacy with a cardboard banker&#39;s box on it it steered laboriously around corners then moved to a gate set into the roll down cage which clung to open the screen prompted her to retrieve the box which contained linens a towel couple six packs of white cotton underwear t-shirts a box of tampons and a toilet bag with shampoos soaps and deodorants it was the most functional transaction she&#39;d had in years and she wanted to kiss the stupid unlovely little robot she couldn&#39;t carry her box and her duffel bag at the same time and she didn&#39;t want to let either out of her sight so she staged them down the face of the strip mall moving the boxes 10 paces setting it down and getting her duffle and carrying it 10 paces packs the box then leap frogging the box over the duffel her pile of papers from the kiosk included a map showing the location of her storefront near the end of course so it was a long way at the halfway mark a woman came out of the store she just passed and regarded her with hands on her hips head cocked a small smile on her face the woman was somali there had been plenty in the camp and no older than selima though she had a small child clinging to her legs gender unknown she wore overalls in a boston university sweatshirt and had her hair in a kerchief and for all that she looked somehow stylish later salima would learn that the woman whose name was nadifa came from a long line of seamstresses and would unpick the seams on any piece of clothing that fell into her hands and retailer them for her measurements you are new i am selema i&#39;m new the woman cocked her head the other way where are you staying show me she walked to selima and held out her hand for the map selima showed it to her and she chopped her teeth that&#39;s no good that one has bad heat and the toilet never stops running here let us fix it without asking the woman hoisted her box and led her back to the office selima trailing after her alongside the little child who kept sneaking her looks the woman knew which screen worked and could land her finger at the exact south south western offset needed to hit the buttons her fingers flew over the screen and then she handed selima had salima stand before the retina monitor and put her fingers on the scanner again a new paper emerged in the kiosk&#39;s out tray much better the woman said selena felt confused and a little anxious that this woman just moved her in with her family where she&#39;d be a babysitter for the child who was staring at her again but she didn&#39;t need to worry single women stayed in one of the three units and families and two more selima&#39;s new home thanks to the woman who finally introduced herself had once been a nail salon and its storeroom still had a few remnants from those days but it was now hung with heavy sound absorbing blankets made out of some kind of synthetic fiber that it turned out to be surprisingly good at shedding dirt and dampening sound the women the woman and her kid left her there and she pulled the fabric corner shut and tabbed them together and spent a moment in the ringing silence of the tiny curtained roomlet a place that would truly be hers shared with no one for some indeterminate time later she&#39;d discovered all the ways that the other sheltered dwellers had decorated their little spaces which most of them called cells with heavy irony because every one of them had spent months or years in literal cells the kinds with concrete walls and iron bars she&#39;d decorate her own room and edify&#39;s children would come meant to poke their heads in without warning and demand stories or someone to play a game with or ideas for pictures to draw she wasn&#39;t exactly roped into being a babysitter but she wasn&#39;t exactly not roped into it either and she liked nadifa&#39;s kids who were just as bold and fearless as their mother who was also a lot of fun especially when she found a bottle of wine and sent the kids out to play in the common room and they&#39;d perch at opposite ends of selima&#39;s narrow bunk telling lies about men and sometimes the odd truth about their lives before the shelter would slip in and there to be a tear or two but that was all right too nadiva already had her work papers and she showed salima how to get papers of her own which took months of patient prodding at the working kiosk to get it to emit pieces of paper that she&#39;d have to bring to government offices and feed into other kiosks sneaking the trips in between her work details the irony of being too busy working to get a work permit did not escape her and oh now she laughed at the irony as she scrubbed graffiti and picked up trash in the parks and cleaned city buses in the great bus barns in places even more out of the way than her worcester strip mall getting her work papers wasn&#39;t the same as getting a job but slimo&#39;s smart and she&#39;d spend her years in the camp pursuing different qualifications by online course hair braiding and bookkeeping virus removal and cat grooming and she had felt sure there&#39;d be something she could do she searched the job boards with nadifa&#39;s help enrolled with temp agencies submitting to their humiliating background checks which included giving them access to her social media and email history an invasion that was only made worse when she was later quizzed on the messages she&#39;d saved from her parents videos and picture messages sent after they&#39;d been separated but before they&#39;d both died work trickled in a few hours here and there shifts dwarfed by the long commutes on the bus to and from the jobs but she cherished hopes that taking these shitty jobs would build her rep with the agencies that were sending her out that she&#39;d pay her dues and start getting real shifts for real money she bought a couple external batteries for her ailing phones so that she could work on the bus rides she and nadifa had divided up the entirety of new england and every day they ran hundreds of searches to look for new high-rise approvals that came with subsidized apartments and then made a note of the day that the waiting list for each would open they knew their chances of either one of them getting accepted were vanishingly small and if they were both accepted it was pretty much impossible that they&#39;d end up in a place together which is why the dorchester towers were such a miracle it was bitter december and the shelter hadn&#39;t ever gotten its promised shipment of winter coats so everyone was making do with multiple layers of sweaters and tees which didn&#39;t read as professional and it caused selima a very good week-long bookkeeping job for a think tank that was closing its quarterly books she had been worried sick about losing the job and worse getting a black mark with the temp agency which had got her several other great bookkeeping jobs that had fattened her tiny savings account more than a dozen cleaning jobs rattling around the strip mall with the other denizens trapped by the weather and the inadequate clothes she pondered raiding her sailings for a coat trying to figure out how much work she&#39;d have to lose before it would be a break-even proposition and estimating the probability that the long-delayed winter coat shipment would finally arrive before too much work was lost her phone let her know she had a government message the kind that she would have to retrieve from the kiosk in the shelter office so she put on three sweaters and stuffed her hands into three thicknesses of socks and fought the gale force winds to the office standing in a puddle of her own melt water she logged into a kiosk they had fixed them all including the one that sort of worked and now all of them were equally unreliable and prone to falling into an endless reboot cycle and retrieved the message she was just absorbing the impossibly good news when adifa staggered in from the cold carrying her smallest one close to her body for heat does that one work she pointed at selima&#39;s kiosk and selema smiled to herself as she wiped the screen and stepped away from it it works her joy was audible in her voice and adifa gave her a funny look selima stifled her grin she telling a different wind oh my god nadifo was just staring at the screen johnner&#39;s chest sulima peaked and laughed aloud me too me too the message was that dorchester towers had approved nadifa&#39;s residency with a two-room flat on the 42nd story that would be ready to move into in 18 months assuming no construction delays the rent was income indexed meaning that nadifa and her kids would be able to afford to live there no matter what happened to them in the future nadifa was sometimes loud and pushy but she was never squeaky so it amused selima quite a lot when eddie threw her hands into the air and bounced up and down on her toes making excited noises so high pitched they&#39;d have deafened a dolphin she didn&#39;t even stop bouncing when she hugged salima pulling her along as she jumped up and down laughing with delight and selima laughed even harder because of what she knew she logged nadifa out of the kiosk and logged herself in and quickly tapped her way into her official government mailbox and simply pointed wordlessly at the screen until nadifa bent and read it her jaw dropped even further you&#39;re on the 35th floor that&#39;s only six fours below us we can take the stairs to each other&#39;s places nadifa&#39;s smallest child confused by all the shouting and bouncing chose that moment to set up a whale and so nadifa put him out of his sling and twirled him around over her head we&#39;re getting a place a place of our own and auntie salima will be there too we&#39;ll have a kitchen we&#39;ll have bedrooms we&#39;ll have she broke off and cradled the boy under one arm used her free hand to grab salima and shake her by the shoulder we&#39;ll have bathrooms our own bathrooms our own bathtubs our own toilets our own toilets salima shouted and the little one said something that was almost toilets and then that set them both laughing like drains laughing until tears streamed down their faces and the kid laughed with them the coats arrived after dinner that night too so lima and nadifa clubbed together to rent a van that day they moved out and they filled it to the ceiling with the detritus of nadifa&#39;s ears and selima&#39;s months at the shelter kids toys clothes shampoo bottles with enough left inside for three more careful washes drawings picture books scrap paper for drawing and paper dolls painstakingly cut out of old printouts from the kiosk the car inched its way through the boston traffic which they could only glimpse intermittently through the teeny bits of windscreen that weren&#39;t covered in shopping bags full of possessions the van pulled into dorchester towers back alley two hours later it was a hot june day and the kids had needed two toilet breaks and several water breaks which had blown their plans to beat the rush hour traffic landing them squarely within it but the two women were stoic they&#39;d been on journeys that were much much longer and far far more difficult the poor doors for dorchester towers weren&#39;t finished yet and so they had to go through a temporary plywood tunnel to enter the building the lobby was in the same condition as the doors raw drywall open electrical receptacles rough concrete floor with troughs cast into it for conduit they loved their things into the lobby and stages leaving nadifa&#39;s eldest to stand guard and watch the kids as they went back and forth to the van trying to get everything out before the 60-minute mark when they&#39;d be billed for another hour&#39;s rental they squeaked in there in the lobby sweating and humid they met the dorchester towers elevators the touch screen asked you for your floor then tracked the passage of the cars up and down the shafts cars would touch down in the lobby and they&#39;d hear the doors on the other side sigh open and shut but the doors facing them never opened they debated what to do eventually they decided that the doors on this side must not be working at all and that it was yet another thing that had to be completed along with the lobby and the doors and please god air conditioning kids belongings themselves somehow they got themselves out of the doors again down the alley and around the building&#39;s circumference to its lobby doors which they couldn&#39;t help but notice were finished chromed and shining smudged free and guarded the guard on the other side of the door buzzed the intercom when they tried the handle he was white and wearing a semi-cop outfit some kind of private security which was unusual because that was the kind of job you saw brown people in most of the time they noticed this too yes we live here we&#39;re moving in today on the salima wave down the road on the other side but the elevators aren&#39;t working there yet we can take the stairs after we move in but she&#39;s on the 42nd floor and i&#39;m on the 35th and we have all this the pile of bags and clothes and drawings and children and themselves also disreputable especially contrasted against the shining chrome the unsmudged glass which now had two of nadifa&#39;s kids faces and hands smearing slowly across it the security guard tapped his screen elevators are working not on that side the elevators came down but the doors don&#39;t open step aside please he said it&#39;s so sharply that even nadifa&#39;s kids snapped to attention there were some people trying to get in pressing their thumbs to a map place on the door frame that didn&#39;t smudge the doors gasped open and let out a blessed gust of air conditioning that almost brought them to their knees the beaded sweat on their backs and legs and faces and scalps spilled as much of their heat as it could in a brief the brief wind then the fine people were through the door not having looked at them once they were preppy look selena had come to understand since moving to the city of colleges and universities with floppy blonde hair and carefully scuffed tennis outfits and sweaty shouting faces the security guard greeted them and chatted with them words inaudible through the closed doors they were amiable enough and waved goodbye as they stepped into the elevator as the doors closed salima saw the doors on the opposite side the doors that opened into that other lobby the security guard gave them an irritated look and shook his head like he couldn&#39;t believe they were still hanging around blocking his doorway your entrance is around back the elevators don&#39;t work so lima reminded him we waited and waited the elevators work they just give priority to the market rent side you&#39;ll get an elevator when none of these folks need one selima grasped the system and its logic in an instant the only reason she&#39;d been able to rent in this building was that the developer had to promise that they&#39;d make some low-income housing available in exchange for permission to build 50 stores instead of the 30 that the other buildings in the neighborhood rose to there was a lot of this sort of thing and she knew that there were rules about the low-income units what the landlords had to provide and what she was forbidden from doing but now that but now she saw an important truth even the prettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subcity apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it she had spent enough time as auntie salima helping to raise nadifa&#39;s three kids to recognize the logic of a malicious child who wanted to make their displeasure known come on she said as she picked up a double arm load of bags and slogged back around the building to the poor door the apartment was wonderful the promised luxury of a private shower and a bathtub she could lie down and if she squenched her legs and put her chin on her chest but it was her bathtub and a single bed with a good mattress that no one else had ever slept on and when she folded that up she could fold down the sofa slab with its bright cushions raise that slab up a little higher and twist the coffee table so that its legs extended and became a dining table and you could seat three or four if they were all very good friends the walls had good insulation and what little sound leaked in from the units around her was inaudible so long as she ran the fan in the hvac at this lower setting something she could automate with the apartment sensors so it just happened whenever she was home the kitchen had all major appliances just as advertised the tosh the toaster the dishwasher a small thing that would hold all the dishes from a meal for one along with a mixing bowl or one of the toasters baking pans the fridge they all started working when she&#39;d input her debit card number and they presented her with menus of approved consumables the dishes that would work in the dishwasher the range of food that would work with the toaster from bread to ready meals the washing machine would do a towel in sheets or two days clothes and there were dozens of compatible detergents she could order from its screen the prices all included delivery or she could shop for herself improved stores but there was always the risk that she&#39;d pick up something that was incompatible with her model so it would be better for everyone concerned if she&#39;d just do her shopping right there in the kitchen where it was the most convenient for everyone it was only a short walk to the tee and the stairs weren&#39;t that bad going down in the morning coming back up was another story 35 floors was 75 flights of stairs she braved them about once a week and told herself that she was making herself healthy with such an intense aerobic workout having a place to live that was truly hers made a huge difference in her life something about the stability the confidence hell just having a reliable place to do laundry every night it all added up to the sense that she was finally exiting the endless limbo she&#39;d lived in all her life her earliest memories were of being on the move with her parents one camp and then another then in uncle&#39;s house for a while then another camp then temporary apartments than the crossing to america the camp the shelter all that time she&#39;d had the sense that her life was on hold that she was floating around like a leaf in the breeze sometimes snagged on a branch and sometimes lofted up into the clouds but never touching down never coming to rest it meant that she never really thought about her life more than a few days in advance now in her own home she was thinking about what her future held some combination of luck and self-confidence was with her and within a month that she landed a full-time job as a bookkeeper for a company that serviced little mom-and-pop shops she&#39;d had half a dozen clients and she&#39;d tried to see each of them once a week even if she could have done most of the work from home she preferred setting up in the back room of a dry cleaner a convenience store little ice cream parlor and going over the logs from the registers and the invoices scheduling payments and chatting with the staff and the owners she learned that people liked to be warned of impending cash flow crunches and other potential snags she could see in their books and within a few months she was like more like a trusted advisor than a contractor she remembered their birthdays and bought them cards and when it was her 25th rolled around the owner of a vintage clothing store surprised her with a gorgeous japanese satin jacket from the previous century the black embroidered with a tiger that had faded beautifully over the years with a patina like a persian rug nadifa&#39;s kids got into school and adifa even started to fill in the breathing room of time to herself meant that she could get a decent meal could take care of her hair clothes she&#39;d always had a regal bearing but it wore with a natural open overburdened mother&#39;s shoulder slump exhaustion lines hands always full of kids or toys or laundry the stains on our beautifully tailored clothes with some stability in her life nadifa&#39;s underlying nature asserted itself her clothes were impeccable the lines of her face made her look serious and then when she&#39;d crack a wicked joke and her eye would gleam the contrast between the seriousness and the humor was like something you&#39;d see in an old painting nadiva&#39;s kids never lost their mischief but school was good for them gave them some structure to work within and fight against they were behind especially abdulham the eldest at 12 nadifa wrote his ass making him work through his remedial homework assignments on his phone or even the big screen in their living room provided the little ones could be attempt down to mirror chaos nadifa&#39;s place had two rooms one for the kids in the living room which was exactly like celima&#39;s turning into a bedroom by folding down the table and folding up the sofa and folding down the bed a magic trick that had come to be done in the right order or everything snagged everything else in the middle of the room in an unholy knot that had to be carefully worked to loosen it things were good until the appliances started to disobey her she did the washing machine just because she could once you had a kitchen full of devices that would obey you the one that wouldn&#39;t loomed ever larger and grew less and less tolerable besides she was single had no interest in swiping right on randos who never failed to disappoint she had become an obsessive watcher of jailbreaking videos especially since she&#39;d followed a breadcrumb trail of ever more daring videos until she found the one that told her how to download the dark net tools that would get her to the real deal sites where you could download new firmware images swap tips and complaints and jolly along with thousands of lawless anarchists like ourselves who were toasting any damn thing they felt like the washing machine was the hardest yet and involved uncoupling a lot of water hoses she kept messing up the ring clamps which she never had to use before but she bored down on it with a bookkeeper&#39;s resolve methodically trying one variation after another keeping a pan beneath the join to catch the leaks when she tested it out by turning on the water while she worked she switched to bread making videos because that was her new passion and now every time she saw nadiva&#39;s kids they begged her for whatever her latest creation was she was making braided lobes now an egg bread called hala basting and rising their dough with egg whites to give the crust a high gloss a week later she made two important discoveries first shopping for detergent in the grocery store was a lot cheaper than buying it through her machine screen and second that her persistent eczema was actually an allergic reaction to something in the authorized laundry soap spring was springing and she&#39;d been dreading sweating out the hot days in long sleeves to cover her flaking itching arms she bought three vintage short sleeved blouses and asked ned diefer to alter them to fit her as beautifully as all of nadifa&#39;s clothes did she stopped short of jailbreaking her thermostat for now the thermostat was integrated with the building&#39;s sensor grid including the camera over her door the cameras sprinkled around her apartment it recognized her even before she entered and spun the hvac system up to speed before she even closed the door behind her giving her just a moment of the claustrophobic gasping air of the shut up apartment before the white noise of the fan whisked a soft air current around and around what&#39;s more it would watch her place while she was out at work and send her a video stream if it detected anyone in her place when she wasn&#39;t there she liked that it comforted her she&#39;d been robbed twice in the shelter in arizona and had gotten used to carrying everything she owned of any value with her at all times it was such a relief to be able to amass more valuable goods than she could easily carry the elevator was another matter when she&#39;d moved into dorchester towers the building had only been in service for a few weeks and was at less than half occupancy as the apartments had filled up the number of market-rate people using the elevators had increased to the point where it could take a full 45 minutes to get a ride up to the 35th floor and when the elevator finally came for the poor of doors lobby there were so many people waiting and she&#39;d end up riding in a squash of people facing somebody&#39;s sweaty armpit and if she was lucky she&#39;d be pressed against a wall behind her and not up against some strange man she was nearly certain that the times it had seemed like she was being creeped on it had been an accident of depressive bodies and not actually creepiness but she couldn&#39;t be sure and anyway it still felt creepy one day she was sitting in nadifa&#39;s living room drinking tea and watching nadifa&#39;s eldest do his extra homework she and nadifa had been complaining about the elevators for a good 20 minutes it was a well established subject among all the subsidy tenants and they could really work themselves up about it nadifa&#39;s eldest son looked up from his mouth mama why don&#39;t we just use elevator captains do your homework nadifa operated on pure reflex when it came to her kids in homework but after a moment she added what&#39;s an elevator captain abdiraham smile was luminous it is so cool if you are the first person in the elevator in japan you are the elevator captain you have to hold the door open button till everyone boards and then you have to press the door close button and all the floor buttons the elevator captain gets out before the elevator is empty the next closest person has to do it where do you hear this we did a unit on unspoken rules in social studies i&#39;m doing an extra credit on the unspoken rules of refugee detention in america the teacher loves that she gets all solemn when i talk about it the other refugee kids think it&#39;s hilarious i don&#39;t think it&#39;s hilarious nadifa was deadpan i think it&#39;s very respectful she turned back to salima opened her mouth and started talking again and then turned it back to abra ibrahim why would we use an elevator captain his smile was twice as big we could just take turns staying in the elevator in the morning into the afternoon during the busy times it won&#39;t stop for a pour if there&#39;s a rich who needs it sure but if there&#39;s a port in it it won&#39;t stop for a rich until the poor is out nadifa mouthed a pore to salima and ruled her eyes salima covered her smile the kids knew what was what and they told it like it was meanwhile the plan was dawning on salima and nadifa it was weirdly elegant simple so there weren&#39;t many things that could go wrong plus it used the fact that the rich people didn&#39;t want to have to ever see one of them against them do your homework nadifa used her stern voice but her smile to salima was the twin of abdirahan&#39;s salima the two weeks of the elevator captains were the best in the building&#39;s short history from 7 30 to 8 45 in the morning and 5 15 to 6 30 at night there was effectively one elevator exclusively reserved for the use of the poor side of the building serving the 10 floors out of 56 that left 15 elevators for the rich people to use and so at first they may not even have noticed that their unseen neighbors living in their buildings off-limits spaces were getting up and down in a matter of minutes rather than waiting an hour or trudging the stairs but someone figured it out nadifa called salima at work using anger to mask her worry they were waiting in the lobby three security guards three and of course it had to be abdirahm who was the elevator captain it was abdiraham&#39;s idea and he was the most enthusiastic captain in the building salima had even bought him a little peaked military cap from her vintage store client stock and he wore it at a jaunty angle during his shifts looking almost indecently cute he just brought the elevator back down to the ground and was mashing the closed door button with the lightning reflexes of a 13 year old race on video games when the other door opened the rich person door the door had never ever opened while any of them were in the car the three security guards demanded abdirahm&#39;s name and papers and when he told them that they were in his home on the 42nd floor they refused to let him go get them instead they took him down into the basement using their security guard fobs to override the elevator&#39;s controls they locked him in a windowless room with a reinforced door and conspicuous cameras in each ceiling corner and slammed the door on after a long time they came in to question him he knew that he was late getting home and that his mom would be getting worried they&#39;re not frantic because nadifa didn&#39;t do frantic furious yes frantic never furious was a lot more worrying honestly that was the thought that was in his head when he explained the whole elevator captain business to the security guards who questioned him and denied him water with the use of the toilet until it seemed that every drop of water in his body was in his bladder and trying desperately to escape they went over the story again and again and he began to cry because it reminded him of the questioning they&#39;d had in the camps when he was tiny and again when they got to america when he was small this had been hard times with his father dying and refusing to show it sitting up ramrod straight and answering question after question praying they wouldn&#39;t detect his illness and use it as an excuse to turn away the family the memory of that time overcame him and he sobbed and couldn&#39;t answer their questions anymore and that&#39;s when they called nadifa finally and she was furious but not at him she yelled at them about re-traumatizing a child and demanded their names and their badge numbers and even got out her phone and recorded it all even him crying which made him ashamed but still he couldn&#39;t stop there would be a reckoning nadifa swore and salima thought she was probably right but that they would get the worst of it they did the elevators had cameras in them of course and it took the face recognition software all of 10 seconds to produce a list of all the door poor residents who&#39;d used the elevator captain system with times and dates of each ride it took a day for the building management to merge those records with forum letters informing everyone who&#39;d participated that they were in violation of their lease which forbade tampering with reverse engineering disabling bypassing disconnecting spoofing undermining damaging or subverting any of the building&#39;s systems further violations would result in eviction proceedings be warned be told it was humiliating to be addressed in this manner even for salima who had been subjected to most humiliating of depredations over the years stripped searches and confiscations collective punishments and scouring of her most private data and memories to find an excuse to deny her humanity it burned after years of spinning in place she had finally started her life in earnest with a place and a job and friends who were nearly family this was a reminder that her current life was a tissue thin surface covering the world she&#39;d lived in before for her whole life the world had been divided into the people around her people who knew her and who she was most of those were people who wished her well and supported her and she supported them back some of those people were bad people and meant her harm the camps were not paradise but even for them it was personal but there was another world vast beyond her knowing of people who didn&#39;t know her at all but who held her life in their hands the ones who thronged in demonstrations against refugees the politicians who raged about the scourge of terrorists hidden among refugees and the ones who talked and code about assimilation and too much too fast the soldiers and cops and guards who pointed guns at her barked orders at her the bureaucrat she never saw who rejected her paperwork for cryptic reasons she could only guess at and the bureaucrats who looked her in the eye and rejected her paperwork and refused to explain themselves now there was a new group in that ladder class distant as the causes of the weather the building management company and its laser printer blasting out eviction threats to people whose names they didn&#39;t know and whose faces they&#39;d never seen over transgressions so petty and rules so demeaning the elevator captains had been a good chuckle a way for everyone from the poor doors and the poor floors to feel like they were mice outsmarting the cats the letters put them in their place roaches facing exterminators the elevators weren&#39;t any better programmed than the disher or the bulangism or the thermostat or anything else really the big difference was access she could take her disher to pieces in her kitchen without having to explain herself to anyone but let her try that in the hallway in sight of the cameras and her neighbors and the situation would be very different to take out the elevators she&#39;d need to take out the cameras and then work in the very small hours and still she would risk discovery so she&#39;d need a disguise a maintenance outfit maybe she could also take out the lights and replace them with working lights she began to visualize the tab oh the taboo the tableau her down on her knees and shapeless coveralls with a hat hard hat pulled way down the lights out and illumination from floodlights that would shine right into the eyes of anyone who tried to snoop it was a fun daydream and she enjoyed the game of thinking how someone might catch her and how she might avoid being caught it was an especially good way to recover from the exhaustion of trudging 35 flights up or the frustration of waiting for 45 minutes with a cooling pod of tagine from a corner deli in her hand the smell driving her crazy she pushed around the wreckage of her tajin with a glass of cheap and delicious retsina a favorite among so many refugees who&#39;d made the passage through greece and now a staple of refugees who hadn&#39;t thanks to its popularity in the camps and looked out a tiny window and looked out a tiny window her tiny window at boston far below the charles swollen to its levees the ant like people swarming home under the street lights as autumn&#39;s early night fell swiftly upon them she daydreamed about high viz and work lights about the tools she&#39;d used to remove the front firefighter&#39;s override panel to reveal the usb port beneath the subtle ways in which she would alter the building&#39;s algorithms so that the faceless people would never discover her intrusion there was a ding at the door and the screen showed her abdirahm weirdly distorted by the camera&#39;s auto focus on his face which was a good foot below the adult height camera mounting she waved the door unlocked and he let himself in looking from her to the tangent to the wine and then back to her have you eaten it was a phrase she remembered her mother saying to everyone who came through their door even when there was no food to share it had irritated her once and now she said it automatically on those rare occasions when someone came through her door yes ebd rahm said it too quickly but you&#39;re still hungry it wasn&#39;t a question she remembered being a 13 year old hungry all the time she got him a plate and spooned some tangine into it and then found a pita and popped it onto her toaster to warm it when it was done he looked at her with white eyes yours works it took a moment for her to figure out what he meant the toaster it works she said i fixed it then with a little pride the dishwasher too and the thermostat and the fridge show me eat first the food barely touched his throat on the way down she felt like she should probably make him eat slowly in her capacity in local parentis but she was as eager to show him as he was to be shown when she said show me it made her realize that she&#39;d been bursting with secret knowledge that she wanted more than anything to share when he was done she put his dishes in the dishwasher and gestured him over so that she could show him the boot screen as she put the dishes through its paces with the fanciful graphics sheet installed of anthropomorphic dishes with bad attitude shower showering angrily in the trademark dishes spray he clapped and laughed and demanded to see the rest and then to be shown how to do it they say you don&#39;t really know how to do something until you can teach it to someone else as selena looked upon the up the instructions again she realized how much of it had just been recipe following the first time around and how much she&#39;d come to understand since so that the steps made sense she was able to explain to abdirahm why each step nearly as much as the what and the how of it and her heartbeat and her blood sang with the experience of mastery this was the antidote she realized to the feeling of distant people whom she&#39;d never met who held the power of everything over her to be able to control the computers around her rather than being controlled by them you see she said it last as realization came out of the blue to her and left her wonderstruck and thunderstruck feeling like a revelating prophet you see if someone wants to control you with a computer they have to put the computer where you are and they are not and so you can access the computer without supervision a computer you can access without supervision is a computer you can change because all these computers are the same deep down when you get down to the programs underneath the skin a toaster and a dishwasher and a thermostat they&#39;re all the same computer in different cases once you can seize control over that computer all of them are yours as the words left her mouth her messianic fervor was replaced by nagging self-doubt the knowledge that she was shouting triumphantly at a small boy who had only gotten out of temporary refugee housing a few months before and she felt foolish and small but then she saw the gleam in abdirahm&#39;s eyes and it was the same as the gleam in her eyes and she knew that the two of them were sharing the vision our dishwasher and toaster haven&#39;t worked in weeks he said oh dear she hadn&#39;t even thought of that she had reflexively kept her work a secret from nadifa because she was doing something potentially dangerous and she didn&#39;t want nadifa to point this out but that was before her vision we should do something about that she held out her hand let&#39;s go see her mother she remembered to take the rastina with her on the way out the door perhaps nadifa would have been upset at the idea of hacking the family&#39;s appliances but that was before she had spent two weeks parenting without a toaster or a dishwasher the hardship of eating everything cold or shelling out money she didn&#39;t have her takeaways had softened any concerns she might have had and as she watched abdirahm show her sisters how to jailbreak all the apartments major appliances she radiated motherly pride he&#39;s good at it selima said i only showed him once and now she gestured do you think we&#39;ll all get in trouble with the building i mean they own the appliances selima shrugged they were getting a share of the money we spent before for the special bread and soap and so on but with both companies bankrupt they won&#39;t be expecting any new money now if the companies do ever come back from bankruptcy and still no one here is using their products in a different knotted yeah that would be trouble she watched her kids who would cover who had the cover off the thermostat and were avidly watching a video on the big screen next to it where a person whose body had been mapped to a giant animated rabbit was explaining how to get it to fall back into a debug mode from which it would accept commands that let you override central commands to it but if it&#39;s just the two of us will they even find out again if the system is designed well then yes it would be very weird for our apartments to generate much lower revenues than any of the others i once did a job where i saw that two of the self-checkouts at a pharmacy were generating 20 percent less money than the rest at first i thought it was they were broken but even when they were serviced and even moved they were always 20 down from the average they got sent away for analysis and they had been hacked and were being skimmed but you are good at your job and you care about that sort of thing unspoken no one good at their job who cared about anything was involved in the poor floors of dorchester towers i&#39;m sure they care about money but perhaps they&#39;re not so well designed she pondered it i don&#39;t know they certainly care a lot about making money so the parts that help them make as much as possible would probably have their most attention i&#39;ll search for it there must be other people in this situation the kids successfully tested their modifications to the thermostat and closed it up looking this way and that for something else to attack don&#39;t forget the refrigerator nadifa said that&#39;s a fun one very tricky they raced to the screen and started typing sending idle the eldest girl to read the model number off the label on the inside of the fridge door so lima knew that the kids wouldn&#39;t stop at their own apartments of course she&#39;d passed them in the hallways sometimes rushing from one apartment to the next the feeling this gave her was hard to pin down pride and excitement but also trepidation and a sick impotent sensation the echo of the slow role her stomach had done when she came home to find that laser-printed threat stuck to her door to all their doors on the elevators selima heard whispers have you done your place yet it&#39;s so easy i&#39;m baking bread again i found some beautiful dishes at a thrift shop such a treat to be able to wash them in the machine my little boy did it so easy then one night a knock at her door urgent and low opened it and found abdirahm wide-eyed and stressed her pulse quickened her armpits slickened and she thought oh no this is it tell me she said bringing him in i did the same as always he said a toaster i&#39;ve done so many of them but something went wrong and now it won&#39;t even turn on she whooshed out a sigh of relief he&#39;d break some poor person&#39;s toaster but he hadn&#39;t gotten them all evicted let&#39;s go see there were message boards for this eventuality of course and peterham wasn&#39;t the first person to break an appliance there were tricks to get it to boot into an emergency shell from which the original factory operating system could be laboriously reinstalled and then they could start over choose device or helper reading her instructions and searching for help when they got unexpected error messages the toasters owner was an old serbian man who&#39;d never spoken a word to her though they&#39;d shared elevators and waited in the lobby together often enough she had assumed that he was a racist because that was usually the reason that white people didn&#39;t speak to her she didn&#39;t take it personally some people were just ignorant but it seemed that he was painfully shy and awkward and not necessarily racist he offered them tea and served them biscuits he counted out carefully from a packet that he took from a nearly empty cupboard in which he spotted a huge jar of food bank peanut butter and not much else he excused himself to use the toilet four times while he worked and she heard the painful dribble of an old man struggling with an enlarged prostrate prostate at one point she was ready to give up the toaster wouldn&#39;t even show her a bootloader screen it was in worse shape than when she&#39;d started but the old man looked so concerned and she knew he wouldn&#39;t be able to afford a new toaster she imagined the cold meals of biscuits and peanut butter she&#39;d been surviving he&#39;d been surviving on since bullingism had shut down so she and abri rahama went back one step checking everything everything very methodically finally they noticed that the toaster was actually an earlier model than the ones everyone else had in the building cosmetically identical but with a model number that was a single letter off and when she searched on that she found a completely different set of instructions and these worked it was after 1am when they finished but she still went down to her place and came back up with the makings of grilled cheese sandwiches on homemade bread they had a midnight feast that gave her heartburn but was worth it the next time it was a kid she didn&#39;t even know tapping at her door and asking for help with a bricked screen had apparently told his army of dorchester towers irregulars that she was a reliable source of level 2 emergency tech support the third time it happened she realized she needed to get ahead of the phenomenon if she ever wanted to have another moment to herself ambition she stared intently at the kid until he met her eyes nadifa&#39;s presence helped es auntie he only called her that when he was in trouble the rest of the time it was salimo or with burned american familiarity sally which was a new one on her that she wasn&#39;t entirely happy about the way you are doing this you and your friends it&#39;s dangerous you are going to get caught and you&#39;re going to get the people who live here cop too do you remember the elevator captains and what happened yes auntie we don&#39;t want that again do we no auntie we don&#39;t want to get everyone here thrown out into the streets do we no auntie so i want you to get all your friends to come to my place tomorrow after school 5 pm tell them anyone who doesn&#39;t come is not allowed to jailbreak anything ever again he registered surprise you mean that if we come we can still jailbreak she smiled and met nadifa&#39;s eye oh yes my boy we&#39;re not going to stop breaking the rules we&#39;re just going to be smart about it she bought snacks for the kids more than she thought she&#39;d need but it wasn&#39;t enough they just kept coming scratching at her door until she just propped it open and still they came cramming into her flat 10 kids 20 40 then she lost count they stood in the bathroom and passed around bags of sweets and pretzels filled your kitchen and stood on the counter one of them sat in her kitchen sink quiet please they shushed each other she turned to abdirahm is this everyone he made a show of craning his neck around the room nodded i think so he shook her head at him close the door please and someone turn up the air conditioning the smell was that goody musky smell of many children at various stages of puberty in an enclosed space a smell that brought her back to the kids dorms and camps she&#39;d lived in i want to start by saying that i&#39;m very proud of you all you&#39;ve taught yourself some important skills you know and you&#39;ve helped your neighbors when they needed it but you know that what you&#39;ve done what i did too is against the rules and now that it&#39;s happening so often it&#39;s going to be harder and harder not to get caught getting caught is not an option can anyone tell me why a forest of arms shot up and the smell buffeted her again she pointed to a young girl chubby with a face full of clever mischief because we&#39;ll all get thrown out of the building selima nodded what else the girl thought for a moment also everyone we&#39;ve helped will get thrown out selima nodded again very good it was good to hear that the kids knew the stakes it was also scary to hear them uttered aloud and scarier still to think of the level of recklessness the kids had exhibited even though they&#39;d understood those stakes i&#39;ve been researching this because i don&#39;t know any more about this than any of you i learned by watching the same videos and reading the same message boards as you but we&#39;re not the only ones going through this and there&#39;s been a lot of talk about it the companies that made disher and bulanism have been bought by new owners who say they&#39;ll be back online soon and so we&#39;ll need to figure out how to stay safe once that happens she checked to see whether they were following all this it was pretty esoteric this idea of bankruptcies by distant companies what did these kids think about the appliances they jailbroke did they see them as just weirdly non-functional gadgets they had to work around like the bad touch screens at the shelter or did they see them as the enemy something that they were at war with the weapons of a distant adversary who wanted to subjugate them to its will the truth is that no one seems to know exactly how the companies will monitor what we do especially after they have new owners a lot of the original programmers were fired and some of them are on those same message boards or at least they claim to be those original programmers and there&#39;s a real race on to see who can come up with a reliable way to trick the monitors into thinking that we haven&#39;t been jailbreaking we&#39;re definitely going to have to change people&#39;s appliances so that they generate some billings for the companies because they&#39;d notice if no money was coming from dorchester towers right there was nodding they were following along they were bright kids she thought kids who&#39;d spent their whole lives outsmarting gadgets that were designed to control them here&#39;s the assignment we&#39;re going to read all those message boards and bring back what we find figure out which people seem to know what they&#39;re talking about then we&#39;re going to go back to every apartment and tweak all those appliances so that they&#39;re safe that&#39;s assuming we come up with a decent plan if we decide that no one knows what they&#39;re talking about we&#39;re going to restore every appliance to its factory defaults on jailbreak everything that prompted groans and even a few cries would protest but she held her hands up i know i know but better to have bad appliances than no home there are millions of people around the world in the same situation as us anyway and they&#39;re all trying to solve this problem so perhaps it won&#39;t be so hard as all that i know that reading message boards isn&#39;t as much fun as messaging about gadgets but if you want to be able to keep jailbreaking you&#39;ll have to do the research too it was too crowded for much q a but abdirahm put his hand up anyway she called on him auntie there&#39;s one thing i can&#39;t figure out only one she smiled and he smiled back for now when i bring a notepad to school i can&#39;t write anything i can write anything i want on it i don&#39;t need to ask the company that made the pen or the store that sold me the notebook how i can use it i can tear out the pages and make paper airplanes or doodle or copy down what the teacher says when i put on a pair of shoes i can wear any socks i want i can walk anywhere i i can walk anywhere i want in my shoes i can wipe myself with any sort of toilet paper that got a laugh but i can&#39;t toast any bread i want in my toaster she waited he&#39;s struggling to find the words what&#39;s the what&#39;s the question of deirdre him he shook his head and shrugged i guess i don&#39;t know i just want to understand how it can be against the law to choose your bread but not your socks what makes a toaster different from shoes she opened her mouth to answer but discovered she didn&#39;t know the answer right up until that moment she felt like she had some intuitive sense of which things were objects with rules and which were objects without rules felted so readily that she hadn&#39;t even named the two categories until just that instant now that she tried to come up with a rule to explain the difference between the two she found she couldn&#39;t that is an excellent question she said it last why don&#39;t you research the answer and tell us all what you find out he rolled his eyes and let out a showy groan but he looked excited by the challenge he really was a bright little fellow she chased the kids out of her flat buzzing with conversation joking and shoving and posturing in the way of kids the smell lingered after they were gone and she turned up the hvac to 140 of its nominal capacity a feature whose purpose had mystified her when she jailbroken the thermostat but now she was thankful for it she tried to go to sleep but abdirahm&#39;s question nagged her so she raised her bed until it was a sofa and worked on the big screen for a couple of hours discovering to her relief that reading about technology law was better than a sleeping pill there was something about the woman standing over her on the tee that snagged her attention she wasn&#39;t anyone selema knew but something about her seemed so familiar she kept sneaking glances and then it hit her the logo on the woman&#39;s id badge dangling from a lanyard at eye height selima knew that logo though she hadn&#39;t seen it in months it was the bullyingism logo a styled slice of braid in a single continuous line three squiggly heat lines rating aiding off it the woman caught her staring and they made eye contact she was young and white and had messy brown hair and there&#39;s contacts that computer people wore to help them stare at screens all day without messing up their sleep schedules the light from the ad lining the top third of the car cast a rainbow sheen over them bulangism selena said the woman nodded enthusiastically that&#39;s right they&#39;re in boston they are now they got bought out by a fund on route 128 and then they recruited a bunch of and then they recruited a bunch of us mit kids to bash them back into shape and get them stood up again the woman was younger than salima had thought an undergrad or maybe a young grad student salima tried to picture the kids who crammed into her apartment as a classmate of this young woman getting tempted away from their studies by deep pocketed company they were smart but were they smart enough how smart did you have to be she suddenly wanted to know more about the woman do you have a bulangism selema nodded do you the woman snorted god no i mean that business model authorized bread i wouldn&#39;t put one of those in my house if you paid me why do you buy one i didn&#39;t it came with the apartment unplug it and put it in a closet get a real oven this had literally never occurred to selima she had no idea how much a toaster oven cost she could probably afford it not that she had any closet space and then there were all the other people on the poor floors the old ones the ones with kids the ones who didn&#39;t have her skills or couldn&#39;t speak english she couldn&#39;t buy ovens for all of them let alone dishwashers and all the other appliances you don&#39;t seem to think much of them the woman rolled her eyes it&#39;s a good job and the technical challenges are interesting hell even the basic units do a good job as far as that goes but the lockdown is obnoxious selima couldn&#39;t help herself i think so too they&#39;ve brought in a whole team to find people who are jailbreaking their units a snitch squad now that&#39;s a job i wouldn&#39;t do a girl&#39;s gotta have standards they&#39;d gone past the lima stop she didn&#39;t care she could always ride back the other way the conversation was too good to end i&#39;m salima wyoming the girl said and shook her hands were slim and clever typists hands though they were in a very public place salima felt a bubble of inattention around them that urban thing where you pretended you couldn&#39;t see the people pressed up against you it was something she&#39;d gotten good at in the camps where there were so many times when the skill was necessary to keep her sanity when do you think you&#39;ll have the servers up against lima said the guy next to her stood to debark as they pulled into a station how many more stops would they have suleiman thought she&#39;d stay on one stop past wyoming get off and cross to the opposite platform and ride back if she got off at the same stop she&#39;d seem like a creepy stalker wyoming startled at the question oh i didn&#39;t even think of it this must have sucked for you how long has it been four months five with no oven you must be so sick of waiting for us huh five months lima said it certainly has been a long time you poor thing i would have just jailbroken mine there&#39;s been so much of that honestly it&#39;ll be months before they sort it out i don&#39;t blame the users either i mean i agree they both laughed the car was mostly empty now and there were only two more stops left before they reached the end of the line where did this girl live with a fancy coder&#39;s salary she could afford a beautiful place in the middle of cambridge not a place out here and needham selima took a risk she liked this woman is it hard jailbreaking no it&#39;s not hard at all i mean how could it be look it&#39;s just basic security basic math you want to run a program on your toaster that lets you override the bread check we don&#39;t want you to run that so we have something in the operating system it checks to see whether the program you&#39;re running is the one that we&#39;ve approved to check that we look at a cryptographic signature we check to see whether the program has been signed by a private key that we keep secret let me back up in crypto we have this idea of private keys and public keys they come in pairs anything the private key scrambles only the public key can unscramble and vice versa if the public key unscrambles it it must have been scrambled by the public key if the private key can unscramble it it must have been scrambled with a public key do you get it suddenly so much of what you&#39;d read on the message boards made sense public keys and private keys coming in pairs what one does the other undoes i can code message with your public key and my private key and only you can read it and you know only i have written it it came out slowly but understanding was flooding through her it was so elegant that&#39;s exactly right well a booleanism ships with the company&#39;s public key and all the code updates that get sent out are signed with the private key if the public key can unscramble that signature then the toaster knows to trust the update because it has to have been signed by someone using the company&#39;s keys more understanding like the final act of a murder mystery where all the clues slot together and the confusion is transformed into an orderly series of events she must jumped in to say something but stopped herself because she thought she knew where this was about to go and she didn&#39;t want to tip the stranger off by knowing too much she was a nice lady sure but she worked for the enemy that would work a hundred percent of the time because the math really works something that&#39;s been scrambled with one half of the key pair can only ever be unscrambled with the other half like it would take billions of years to fake it even with all the computers in the world working on it together but there&#39;s a weakness salima&#39;s heart pounded she knew what wyoming would say next because the mystery was in its final act and she found she and she was front running the detective as he revealed the killer and the details of the crime the public key that your bullyingism checked is stored on your bullyingism itself it&#39;s buried in a secure chip that&#39;s not supposed to be changeable but there are so so many ways around that sometimes there&#39;s a mistake and a secure chip something that lets you change the key more often there&#39;s the boot up sequence where the computer and the booleanism learns what kind of computer it is and where it needs to look for public keys that&#39;s also in a secure storage but there has to be ways to update it because programmers make mistakes and when we do our stuff can be hacked by bad guys so we want to be able to send you new code for your appliances so booleanism owner goes online figures out how to change the key or change where the computer looks for the key and swaps in a key that the owner has a private key for and now they can sign any code and get the booleanism to run it boonlangism hired skilled engineers to spend years locking down their products and they get defeated in hours by teenagers with amateur equipment it&#39;s not that those coders were stupid but they were sure doing something stupid slim a smile but you don&#39;t do the stupid part you work on something else wyoming smiled back that&#39;s right i&#39;d rather eat glass than do that stupid i work on the adaptive cooking you know using sensors to make sure the food is perfect it&#39;s super satisfying and delicious because i get to i get a test bench where i actually cook stuff from time to time that&#39;s a nice perk yeah and there&#39;s a gym too which is a good thing because it&#39;s only two weeks in and i&#39;ve gained three pounds the train pulled into a station and there was an incomprehensible garble from the pa as the conductor announced something with the start selema realized that he was telling them they&#39;d pulled into the end of the line and everyone had to get off she stood up and tried to figure out how she could remain on the platform and ride back without tipping off wyoming that she&#39;d stayed on the train just to pump her for info wyoming shrugged into her backpack and selima slung her purse and put it under her arm and they stepped off the train and drifted toward the escalator up to the surface level salima resigned herself to wasting a subway fare by going up to the street level and walking around the block and then heading back into the station at the foot of the escalator wyoming put one of her clever long fingered hands on her arm and drew her to one side i have a confession she was blushing oh my stop was about eight back i was just enjoying talking with you so i stayed on the train i don&#39;t really get to talk about my work much and you&#39;re a good listener selima couldn&#39;t help herself she laughed my stop is also several back green street i was enjoying our talk so much that wyoming&#39;s eyes widened and she put her hand to her mouth you&#39;re not serious she giggled and that sets salima off and their laughs fed one another until they were both gasping as the conductor announced that the train they just debarked was ready for boarding and they staggered right back into the seats they just vacated on the ride back selima learned that wyoming had come from cincinnati that she&#39;d done an undergrad in electrical engineering and computer science at mit and started a master&#39;s in applied math when the booleanism recruiter had offered her a huge signing bonus stock in a new company that the hedge fund was spinning out and a big monthly paycheck salima told a little of her own story cautiously because she&#39;d met lots of very nice white people who were not very nice at all when she said the word refugee by the time they reached her stop wyoming had texted her set of messages addresses messaging and addresses and her number and offered to help selima anytime her bulangism was acting up they shook hands when she got to go got up to go and salima looked back at wyoming why she took call said call her why and found her looking back at her and they smiled one last time and waved goodbye riding up the escalator she had a brief bout of paranoia their conversation had been so easy and warm and pleasurable could it be a setup did bulang ism spies who tried to entrap suspected pirates befriending them on t&#39;s by the t by positioning themselves with prominent id badges at eye height she shook her head and lined up for the crush at the turnstiles it was absurd the world was merely a small and odd place and there was no disputing that in the lobby that night she ran into three of the kids she&#39;d lectured in the crush of her apartment along with assorted parents sweating in the unexpectedly warm early spring thaw coats draped over their arms with woolly hats and scarves poking out of the pockets the kids called her auntie and she smiled at them and introduced herself formally to the adults two moms and a grandfather familiar faces she&#39;d seen in the elevators and corridors but never had cause to chat with the adults knew who she was that was clear and they treated her with an odd reverence as the bringer of technological freedom she recognized the relationship from the camps where there were always fixers and hustlers who could get things done lay hands on special food and liquor get you a phone voucher or fix your phone after it gave up the coast she had never thought of herself in those terms but with her newfound understanding it made perfect sense even to her the small task with these neighbors seemed like a continuation of the chatter with why on the train part of the long conversation about the subject that had taken over her life taking charge of the technologies around her the ones that were used by those distant and faceless forces to take charge of her why had made a big deal out of the hopelessness of trying to control someone with a gadget that they could take home and abuse in private and that made perfect sense to her now and it was a revelation the sense of hopelessness of being surrounded by sensors and devices that were designed to push her around was transformed into a sense of inevitable triumph over the fools who thought they could make that work what had why said it&#39;s not that those coders were stupid but they were sure doing something stupid that newfound confidence sang in her as she heated a bit of goat curry and yolaf rice and her bulangism and sat down in front of the living room&#39;s big screen to poke around for a way to keep all their gadgets under their control without tipping off the manufacturers she didn&#39;t find any immediate solutions but that didn&#39;t matter she was reveling in her new expertise rereading message board threads she puzzled over before chasing down references and learning more and more and more the ding at her door brought her out of her reverie and she glanced up at the corner of her screen to see and deiter him at the door the clock read 8 45 pm nearly his bedtime she let him in and got him an apple from her fruit bowl he was always hungry i found out how a toaster isn&#39;t like a pair of shoes he said around a mouthful of apple she sat back and made a go on gesture it&#39;s copyright law you know like the warnings at the start of movies that didn&#39;t sound right to her but she tried not to let it show on her face if he was wrong they could figure it out together in the meantime he was a 13 year old boy gone off and read a bunch of boring explanations of technology law because she told him to and that deserved a respectful hearing i know them a long time ago in the last century they made it a crime to he scrunched up his face as he struggled with an awkward memorized phrase to circumvent an effective means of access control if there&#39;s a copyrighted thing you know a movie or whatever and there&#39;s something else that controls access to it you can&#39;t remove that control or do anything with it not even for a good reason they can send you to jail for doing it five years in a half a million dollar fine for a first offense okay that sounds like it could be true but what does that have to do with toasters is there copyright bread he shook his head that&#39;s where i got confused too but it&#39;s not the bread that&#39;s copyrighted it&#39;s the software and the toaster all the stuff we change when we jailbreak it the part where you have to reset it and do something weird and complicated to get the fix to work that&#39;s the circumventing she could tell he&#39;d practice the word and the copyright that that&#39;s the code we&#39;re changing so if it has code in it and there&#39;s an access control you&#39;re not allowed to change the code even if it belongs to you another huge piece of comprehension was sliding into place for now more than half understood posts from half remembered threads slotting themselves into orderly procession she nodded vigorously and dirham i think you&#39;re right that sounds exactly right you did very well you should be proud of yourself he beamed around a mouthful of apple he was down to the core and was gnawing away at every bit of flesh on it with the practice of someone who&#39;d grown up hungry what a strange world where this boy was teaching her about copyright law from another century just talking about it is a crime which is why you can&#39;t find anything on the regular net why you have to use the dark net tools to find out more telling someone how to jailbreak a device is the same as jailbreaking it it&#39;s called trafficking like with drugs and it&#39;s the same five years in prison for the first offense her guts did a slow roll how many people had she taught to jailbreak how many five-year prison sentences had she amassed she missed her old ignorance just a few hours ago when none of this had occurred to her and the forums were all a mystery from the joy of comprehension to terror in minutes what was the name of that law abdirahm consulted his phone it&#39;s section 1201 of the digital millennium copyright act of 1998. she made a note thank you of dieterhem i&#39;m going to do some more reading he let her give him another apple on the way out of the apartment she made herself a cup of coffee just regular drip that she wished she could go up to nadifa&#39;s for a pot of strong gritty ethiopian coffee and tiny cups and started to read about the law salima was glad when nadifa came down the next night after she&#39;d come home from a day at the little sandwich shop going over their books and dragging her thoughts back over and over from their endless loop of worry about the risks she&#39;d subjected all her neighbors to nadiva brought down a bottle of verstina ratzina and a plate of little kymac filled pieces of baklava dripping with honey salima&#39;s earliest memory was of this flavor a pure sense memory from a time when she was a very little girl maybe even a baby just starting on solid food it was a taste she&#39;d forgotten in her years in the camps and the first time she&#39;d encountered it in boston it had been a revelation a shock that had her crying and thinking of her parents so long lost it was so easy for an old normal to make way for a new one so easy to blot the memories of that old normal that was a skill that had served her well but in that bite and it&#39;s honey she&#39;d counted the cost for the first time nadifa knew about this but she also knew how much salima liked the cakes because she understood what it was like to embrace the unthinkable parts of your past that had made you who you were it was a bond the two women shared i haven&#39;t seen you in so long i have to hear about you from amd ibrahim she used to she used a swallow of wine just loose away the honey the tartness and sweetness mixing he&#39;s such a bright boy you know i know too bright always since he was small asking why why why all the time never being satisfied with because i said so it&#39;s a sign of good character i was that way once once nadifa snorted you&#39;ve spent the past six months reprogramming all our apartments selima you&#39;ve never stopped girl she shook her head i think i made a mistake yes i know you do that&#39;s what abdiraham told me he thinks you&#39;re scared i never told him that yes he&#39;s a smart boy remember i am scared she tapped her screen showed nadiva her search alert two weeks ago bulanism got restarted today it was disher she tapped again look at this compliance assurance llc a new company received 28 million in funding for product to discover hacked appliances that&#39;s just today&#39;s news your defended and looked thoughtful i don&#39;t pretend to understand all of this but i know some of it enough to appreciate why you&#39;d be scared the question is what will you do about it salima stared at our screen she didn&#39;t want to meet nadifa&#39;s eyes i&#39;ve been trying to find a solution there are so many people in the same situation as us people who jailbroke everything after the company started to go under and now don&#39;t know what to do i could tell the kids to go around and put everything back the way it was nadifa snorted again no you couldn&#39;t i could tell them to but they might not do it they wouldn&#39;t do it they&#39;re kids if they understood risks they wouldn&#39;t join uprisings and march in the streets and the world would be a simpler place not a better one of course but simpler then i&#39;d better keep searching for a solution those assurance compliance llc people are coming for us nadifa patted her shoulder you&#39;ll find something she did an hour later and it wasn&#39;t good hello is this why yeah she sounded tired though it was only nine o&#39;clock at night aren&#39;t techies all supposed to be night owls who&#39;s this it&#39;s salima we met on the tea oh hi sorry rough day and i was just dozing on the couch what&#39;s up selima had known that if she&#39;d planned this call she&#39;d have chickened out before she could make it she opened her mouth and nothing came out it&#39;s lima it&#39;s it&#39;s kind of an emergency are you okay she was much more awake now anxious i&#39;m okay but she broke off can you meet me somewhere i can come to you maybe a coffee shop a pause and stretched then yeah okay i&#39;ll text you a place okay okay i&#39;ll let you know when i get off the train okay um it&#39;s just around the corner from me salima didn&#39;t really think that enforcement agents for bulang is a more disher were listening in on her phone but she still invinctively thought that it would be better to have this talk with as little technology in the loop as it was possible she fretted on the t and text from texted from the escalator the diner was fully automated which meant that there weren&#39;t any humans around to eavesdrop on them but it also meant that there were cameras and mics everywhere she grimaced and tried not to stare at them as she waited for y to show up she came in wearing a jean jacket it was a faded t-shirt with a picture of an anthropomorphic baseball with arms and legs and a big sea on its jacket which salima deduced had something to do with cincinnati salima didn&#39;t have any days with logos from back home was there a libyan baseball team benghazi bengal tigers hi there why said and tapped out a quick order on the table with a long with long practiced ease and the conveyor that snaked around the backs of the booths lurched into life and started juttering toward them with a squeak thank you for coming the hot box on the conveyor reached their table and gasped open lid yawning wide while i extracted a cup of tea with a packet of cookies balanced on its pressed cornstarch saucer sure have you ordered anything the grilled sandwiches are good if you&#39;re hungry they&#39;ve also got really good boba is this how mit students ate thanks selima said she quickly scanned the menu and jabbed at a celery soda which sounded vile but cost exactly the minimum per person amount noted at the bottom of the menu the hot box closed itself and the conveyor started to move again and thanks again for coming i mean it like i said it&#39;s no problem normally i&#39;d be wide awake at this hour but my sleep&#39;s been screwed up from work stress lately and i had a bad night last night it was good to hear from you again honestly she smiled it was pretty with good white teeth and a lopsided dimple she was so young even if she was a year older than selena i called you because i didn&#39;t know who to talk to i she breathed i helped my neighbors jailbreak their things their things everything dishers bulaying-isms thermostats fridges tvs phones everything she checked herself not the elevators though she laughed laughed the elevators i live on a poor floor low rent the elevators only stop first if there&#39;s no one from the regular floors waiting or riding it can take a very long time she stopped smiling and that&#39;s why all your appliances needed jailbreaking they came with the apartments we&#39;re not allowed to touch them it&#39;s in the beast we could get thrown out i mean all of us she stared at salima with wide eyes she opened her biscuits and ate one still looking at selima sucks it was selena&#39;s turn to smile we&#39;d think so too so what you want to revert everything before you get caught we don&#39;t want to get caught oh oh you want to keep doing it huh i know there&#39;s some stuff out there that&#39;s supposed to work i&#39;ve been looking there&#39;s a lot of advice and it all contradicts itself i can&#39;t tell what works yeah that sounds like online tech advice all right she sipped her tea selima tried the celery soda prepared to discreetly spit it back down the straw but it wasn&#39;t bad why i had a far away looking she said give me a sec she got a screen out of her pocket and poked it at what added a while showing it her retinas after a few seconds then tapping some more i think i have an idea you&#39;ll help us she snorted why wouldn&#39;t i help you you could lose your job she shrugged i wasn&#39;t gonna last there anyway i can tell that already there&#39;s other jobs selima had never been fired in her life she couldn&#39;t imagine it when things were hard at work she were twice as hard she felt gratitude to why who was risking her job for her but there was a slithering serpent of disapproval of wise breezy attitude towards her career did she even understand how lucky she was perhaps if she did she wouldn&#39;t be so quick to help salima keep kept her face carefully neutral what about getting arrested it&#39;s a five-year prison sentence for jailbreaking only if it&#39;s commercial if i don&#39;t charge all they can do is sue me i&#39;ll cover my tracks i have an idea anyway do you know what a virtual machine is selema didn&#39;t and she could tell that if she just said no then why would explain something to her and that would lead to why doing something to help her and wasn&#39;t that what she&#39;d hoped for but she couldn&#39;t just go along please stop salima said it was a mistake i can&#39;t ask you to risk yourself for us she blinked hard at the tears that sprung up in her eyes the kids in my building i showed them what i was doing and they took it up and now they could all be punished along with their families because i wasn&#39;t careful about letting other people take my risks this is a bad situation but i&#39;ll cover my tracks but i&#39;ll cover my tracks isn&#39;t going to save you everyone who got in trouble thought they&#39;d covered their tracks i thought i&#39;d covered my tracks i&#39;m sorry why i really shouldn&#39;t have called you she picked up her jacket and started to stand why put her hand on her arm and squeeze stopping her please don&#39;t go salima i can cover my tracks it won&#39;t be hard at the very least i can help you figure out how to restore everything so that you won&#39;t get into trouble okay look i&#39;m a grown adult i can decide what risks i take the tears are going to breach any moment salima firmly pulled her arm free thank you wyoming i&#39;ll call you when it&#39;s all sorted out and we can have a drink to celebrate okay she didn&#39;t give her a chance to answer the tears came out when she reached the street and she wished she&#39;d grabbed some napkins on her way out of the diner she never cried never not since her parents had died anyway why was she crying now she was almost asleep when she answered her own question she cried because she had something to lose for the first time since she&#39;d lost her parents it was a terrible realization like she&#39;d been betrayed by her own happiness everything she&#39;d attained was something she had to lose if she had not only tried if she had only not tried to make a life for herself she wouldn&#39;t have anything at stake if she hadn&#39;t made friends she wouldn&#39;t have any friends to have betrayed with her knowledge drunk recklessness if she hadn&#39;t basked in the admiration of those kids the kids wouldn&#39;t have put themselves and their parents in harm&#39;s way she wasn&#39;t almost asleep anymore she went back to her screen dug into the dark web and got the recipes to put everything back the way it had been she practiced on her own in the kitchen making sure she had it down cold once she&#39;d mastered it her whirling brain finally decided to let her sleep but the sun was already rising she set an alarm for an hour later and when it went off she made four pods of dried out nearly undrinkable coffee she found at the back of a drawer and drank it as a penance a sour acid liquid scalded her tongue and rolled their guts all the way to her first day of the job when she got back that night there was a crowd of kids and their grown-ups waiting in the lobby as usual they called out to her she hustled past them and climbed the stairs sleeplessness waiting her legs sweat coursing down her neck and back down her face and into her eyes the exhaustion was like a dead thing on her back as she staggered into the apartment flopping down on the sofa and letting her eyes close just for a moment that turned into an hour as she crashed only to wake with a guilty start she had work to do she walked up to nadifa&#39;s apartment after the 35 floors she&#39;d climbed on her way home another six should have been easy but her legs and butt were sore and tired and she had to drag herself by the handrail she realized that she&#39;d forgotten to eat dinner and then realized that she couldn&#39;t remember she&#39;d eaten lunch it&#39;d been a long time since she&#39;d missed any significant amount of sleep she was out of practice nadifa took one look at her and let her into the apartment and piled her with plied her with mint tea and small cakes that she&#39;d sworn she had no appetite for but which you couldn&#39;t stop eating ed ibrahim was nominally doing his homework but selima could tell he was burning with curiosity and eavesdropping so after her second cup of tea she called for him to join them he turned around on the screen seat and raised it up to table height abedi rahm i&#39;ve made a decision and you&#39;re not going to like it he had a good poker face kids who grew up in the camps got good at controlling the information they transmitted to the people around them she could tell he knew what was coming though and that he didn&#39;t like it when i started jailbreaking i didn&#39;t know what i was doing i didn&#39;t understand the risks but now i do thanks to you and my own reading and abedibraham the risk is just too great there&#39;s no way to know for sure what the companies will do to to catch us and if they do we could lose everything even if we could fool the companies the management of the building will notice when they don&#39;t get their share of the money now that the companies are being restarted the people your friends have helped out didn&#39;t appreciate what they were being signed up for none of us did but now that we do we have a responsibility to help them out his poker face was slipping his bottom lip was trembling his knuckles were white where they grip the table&#39;s edge nadifa gave him a warning look salima&#39;s heartbreak for him after all he&#39;d been through he&#39;d found a way to take charge of a world that had never given him the tiniest amount of control and she was going to make him undo it all she wanted to cry and she could only marvel at his self-control she put her hand at nadifa&#39;s arm i&#39;m sorry abdirahm you have every right to be angry it&#39;s not right but it is necessary that&#39;s the most difficult kind of situation she took a deep breath i can&#39;t do it without you that&#39;s not me trying to make you feel good you are the one who taught the other kids and only they know which apartments they worked on and what they did i couldn&#39;t get the other kids to listen to me without your help will you help me she could tell nadifa wanted to order him to say yes and she squeezed nadiva&#39;s arm gently but firmly let him make up his own mind he started his hands for a long long time his breath was ragged she wondered if he was going to cry after all but then he raised his head and blinked his wet eyes at them i&#39;ll do it auntie she knew he&#39;d taken the time to really think it through and had come to the right conclusion after that careful deliberation and not because an adult had told him so not even because his mother would never have tolerated refusal i knew you would have iran she squeezed nadiva&#39;s arm one more time she&#39;d be very proud of this one i am she said she petted her son&#39;s hand she knew what this had cost him too suddenly sulima was so very tired she&#39;d been tired before but this was an all-new height or maybe depth for a moment she literally couldn&#39;t stop her eyes from closing she fought them open again nadifa was looking at her with concern we&#39;ll take you downstairs they each got a shoulder under her arms abdirahm was as tall as his mother already and drunk walked her to the elevators and pushed the button time wavered and felt like an hour before the car arrived inside open and it smelled of expensive perfume from someone from the parallel universe of non-poor floors who&#39;d finished their ride and free to the elevator for a grudging ride for the likes of them nadiphos sent abdirahm back upstairs once they were in salima&#39;s apartment then helped her change into a nightie and adjusted the sofa to a bed configuration screwing the table down and dropping its leaves so it became a bed table she brought out the comforter and draped it over selima and in her half-conscious state selima recovered a memory long buried of a time before a time when she lay in her crib and her mother had tucked her in the memory was so sweet without any of the sorrow that usually went with the memories of her mother she drifted away into dreams with a smile that was still with her when she got up a few hours later to pee and swipe at her teeth to clear the rotten taste from her mouth before falling back into bed a sense of purpose is a wonderful tonic for anxiety now that suleiman knew what she had to do the helpless fretting was replaced by a boundless energy after an early breakfast she ran rang in a different to confirm that fd rahama was awake and she bounded up the stairs two at a time and showed him how to reset the factory defaults on everything in their apartment just as she&#39;d done in her place she made him run through it twice to make sure he had it and then made him write out the procedure from memory on a notepad he was a quick study as she knew he&#39;d be now you need to spread the word can you have the children come to my place again tonight after school and before supper say 6 p.m he wasn&#39;t happy about it they will hate this i know i hate it it&#39;s like giving up but giving up is smarter than fighting a battle you can&#39;t win that&#39;s as important a lesson as any you know defended there are much harder ways to learn that lesson she got a far away look abadi rahm looked miserable i know this is very hard salima said you were a hero when you taught your friends now you&#39;re going to be that frightened boy who make them put it all back i&#39;ll take the blame i&#39;ll explain it to them just bring them to my place alright a night&#39;s sleep had done her so much good her day went so smoothly it might as well have been oiled she found some small systematic errors in the books of the dry cleaners that explained why his profits had been consistently down and he confessed that he&#39;d been about to fire his sole employee for stealing and was so relieved that he hugged her she got a seat on the tee both ways spring had finally stopped oscillating between freezing and basting and settled on a sunny breezy happy median then scuttered the fluffy clouds overhead like a screensaver and the new buds on the trees all seemed to have burst open overnight she bought a much bigger bag of snacks for that night&#39;s meeting mindful of the previous meeting shortcomings she had to shop at the bulangism isle of the corner market for bread and she bought coffee pods and dishwasher soaps in the adjacent sections that brought her down making the last block home a slow march she thought back to her first meeting with y about why is horror that anyone would use a bulangism salima was earning well now even saving money every month a savings that had grown for the months when she&#39;d been able to choose her groceries from anywhere in the shop there were places to live that weren&#39;t dorchester towers places where she could choose which appliances she used they were they were more expensive so many of the rental ads had fine print notifying prospective tenants that their lease prohibited alteration of the landlord&#39;s revenue earning appliances but they existed with a roommate or two she could afford one but dorchester towers wasn&#39;t just where she lived it was a little community a place where she fit where she had her friends and people who were something like family like nadifa and the kids who called her auntie people who understood what she&#39;d been through imagine living in a house full of wise girls who seemed so young with an unbridgeable canyon between their life experiences and her own the kids in the elevator lobby asked her excitedly about the meeting that night and she understood that abedibraham hadn&#39;t given them any hints about the agenda she couldn&#39;t blame him they crowded in and ate all the snacks there may not be enough snacks in all the world to fill all those little bellies this isn&#39;t going to be easy to hear the whispering and grins and fidgeting ended in an instant and every eye was on her so much for her perfect day since our last meeting i&#39;ve learned some things important things she told them she told them about the law about the prison sentences about the new companies that have been formed out of the remains of the old ones and the teams they&#39;d hired to catch cheaters like them the risks to them and their families eviction and worse she watched their faces go grave and then graver the chubby girl the bright one who&#39;d put up her hand last time was the first to speak when salima finished how do we solve it it was a terrible moment the worried faces brightened and the whole room&#39;s attention was intensely fixed on her the kids were bright enough to understand the risks but not bright enough to figure out that she couldn&#39;t do anything to fix it we can&#39;t we have to put it all back the way it was undo it all factory defaults for everything before anyone could say anything she said it&#39;s over the kids faces said it all shock then disbelief then defiance muttering a word no quietly then louder than racing from kid to kid no yes she shouted holding up her hands i&#39;m sorry i&#39;m so so so sorry but yes we have to do this it was a mistake she held her hands higher it was getting louder i mean i mean it we&#39;ll find something else you can help me but first we have to do this some of the kids were leaving she saw the raham shaking his head it has to be this way more of them left please the last one there i&#39;m sorry was all he said before he too left she wouldn&#39;t surrender of course she started with the people she&#39;d serviced working from the upper floors downward doing two or three per night abid ibrahim came along sometimes and helped but he was clearly unenthused about the work and he made mistakes that set her back as often as he helped she didn&#39;t think it was exactly on purpose but it certainly wasn&#39;t exactly an accident either many times she was tempted to text why and set up a meeting to pump her for information about the state of bulanism and how long she had before they were up and running again she had reasoned that the building&#39;s owners wouldn&#39;t expect full reviews straight away after the toasters started working again it would take a while for people to notice that their appliances were working again and switch from whatever arrangements they&#39;ve made during the outage but there would come a time when it would be obvious that it had all been fiddled unless she put it back working in her neighbor&#39;s apartments she saw their kids kids who had watched her jailbreak their apartments and gone on to do the same for their neighbors the kids who&#39;d walked out on her when she told them they&#39;d have to put it all back the way they&#39;d found it kids who watched her out of the corners of their eyes pretending to do their homework she made a point of describing the consequences of getting caught for their parents in a loud voice and in eye-watering detail it took her five nights and all weekend to work through the apartments she&#39;d personally jailbroken on monday night she came home from work bolted a humiliating pre-packaged approved dinner from the microwave and headed out to the top pour floor seven floors above she waited briefly for an elevator then admitted that the only reason she&#39;d tried for an elevator was that she knew it was a prime time and that she might kill half an hour even 45 minutes waiting for a car to come putting off what would come next by that much she took the stairs and knocked on the first door beside the stairwell after carefully noting its number in a little notebook she brought with her in her neat bookkeeper&#39;s hand the woman who answered was a little familiar someone she&#39;d shared an elevator with once or twice salvadorian or honduran she thought yes she was a little older than salima hi she&#39;d rehearse this but her mouth dried up and the words wouldn&#39;t come hi i live in the building and that was wrong did some of the buildings kids help you with your kitchen appliances or maybe your thermostat the woman looked suspicious this wasn&#39;t how it was supposed to go i don&#39;t think so selema&#39;s cheeks and ear tips burned i&#39;m sorry to bother you honestly but look the day the toaster stopped working i figured out how to get mine to work again then i showed some of the kids and they went all over and did it for everyone else but then i found out that the manufacturers can tell who&#39;s done this and they can come after us for it the landlords too they gotta cut up the money we spent so i&#39;ve come to put it all back before you get in trouble before we all get in trouble she gave her best most trustworthy smile the woman shook her head i never had any kids around here salima was sure she was lying the quickness of her answer the way she looked around as she said it look if i don&#39;t do this you will get caught you could lose your home worse they could send the kid who did it to jail that wasn&#39;t quite true based on what wyatt told her but it was nearly true the kid could get in trouble she was sure and so of course so could she please i told you no kids can i see then the woman looked angry i mean maybe you forgot can i check just to be sure i have to go the door clicked shut before she could get another word in she was conscious of the camera on her so she kept her face neutral as she made a note in her notebook then took a deep breath and moved on to the next apartment it was going to be a long night work became a kind of dream or waking nightmare in which she returned over and over to the real job racing through the floors of the building knocking on the doors begging near strangers to let her make them poorer make their lives worse word had gotten around and she got curious stares and sometimes hostile ones in the elevators and abdirahm wasn&#39;t even pretending to help her anymore she didn&#39;t complain to nadifa because she didn&#39;t want to have to confess all her sins to the last real friend she had she got better at pitching her case at the door anyway and almost everyone let her into their places to do her business which she&#39;d also gotten better at working through appliances with a quick practiced hand in private moments at night searching for elusive sleep she admitted to herself that some of the kids were probably going around undoing everything she&#39;d done with the complicity of the adults who should have known better every time she rode home from the dry cleaners she looked for why on the tee not sure if she would be happy or frightened to see her she never found her but then one afternoon as she was trying to find her own errors and the work she&#39;d done closing the quarter for an ice cream shop numbers swimming before her eyes her phone chirped i need to talk to you why she opened her little notebook and looked at the apartment numbers she&#39;d gotten through more than three quarters of the places most of them had let her work she would have been reverted by kids but perhaps it was still enough maybe wyatt found a trick that would let them keep their jailbreaks after all something foolproof but only fools believed in foolproof tricks i finish at five i&#39;m on mass ave today near harvard square i can meet you 5 15 at the cambridge at the cannon in cambridge common okay a foolish hope fl grew in samila despite her best efforts she&#39;d never forgotten the excitement that wyatt&#39;s spoken with when she&#39;d started thinking about how to help them all beat the booleanism the bulanism the absurd certainty she&#39;d radiated that she could outsmart the whole industry perhaps she could though of course she couldn&#39;t summer was in full roast and it was hot and sticky with few students left this late in the year she found herself with a folding chinese fan she&#39;d bought from a cart a few days before when the heat came on and the humidity soared she&#39;d thought that arizona was hot but this humidity was trying to strangle her from the inside out a feeling that cold to mind dark and buried memories of the mediterranean crossing when she&#39;d been a small child sense memories of thirst and nausea and stink she found herself and looked around but she didn&#39;t see why until she was right there because she&#39;d cut her ash blonde hair sensibly short for the heat and put some pink tint in it she was thinner than the last time they&#39;d met two paler long hours selima guest we came why said hi salima said i came she was still embarrassed by their last meeting i&#39;m sorry about before it was very nice of you to offer but yeah i know the risk i understand it sort of i mean i know i can&#39;t really understand what you&#39;ve gone through but she armed sweat from her forehead i mean i get it sorry too and don&#39;t be sorry she was really sweet i&#39;ve been putting it all back everything reset to factory defaults no one wants to help me though the kids hate me for it that sucks it does look i wanted to meet with you because there&#39;s something happening at bulanism i thought you&#39;d be interested in but you can&#39;t talk about it because i&#39;m not supposed to be telling anyone without getting a non-disclosure first is that okay i mean can i tell you and you&#39;ll keep it just a secret she nodded of course so we were almost ready to relaunch and then the new owners bought two more of our competitors and folded us all together into a single platform now we&#39;re a lot bigger and they have all these plans like letting people buy jailbreaks by the day or the week so they can cook anything they want they&#39;ve been watching the darknet boards they know that everyone&#39;s been figuring out how to jailbreak their while we&#39;ve been getting restarted and they figure all these people could be customers but instead of paying for food we sell them they&#39;d pay us to use food someone else sold them salima almost laughed it was a crime if she did it a product if they sold it to her everything could be a product it&#39;s weird i know but here&#39;s where you come in they&#39;ve got this research unit anthropologists and data scientists and marketers and they want to talk to people like you find out what you&#39;d pay for different kinds of products they want to see if you&#39;d sell the package to your neighbor if you could get a cut of the money from them like a commission they&#39;ve got one plan you could teach those kids you were working with to sell paid unlocking to the people in your building and they&#39;d get a commission and you&#39;d get a commission because you recruited them it&#39;s a pyramid scheme it&#39;s an affiliate program the kids wouldn&#39;t be allowed to recruit people to work under them we&#39;d hand pick the affiliate recruiters and they&#39;d be the only ones who&#39;d get the double commissions leaders it&#39;s still just an idea but when i heard about it i immediately thought of you i mean it solves all your problems doesn&#39;t it your kids get to go legit even make some pocket money you get to use your skills and the respect of your neighbors to help them out and earn some money for yourself oh and of course you&#39;d get to be you&#39;d get to permanently unlock everything that we make so you can demonstrate it for your neighbors like i say it&#39;s not a sure thing but i thought you could come in and meet the team talk it over make a call she trailed off searching salima&#39;s face for a clue about her reaction salima carefully maintained a neutral expression why she said it&#39;s so kind of you to think of me really but suleima slumped i don&#39;t know there&#39;s a but but i can&#39;t say what it is exactly it&#39;s a weird idea why i said i know but maybe you could think about it for a while i don&#39;t need an answer right now selima wanted to just say no but she didn&#39;t even as something inside her was recoiling at the offer another part of her understood that why might be right this could be the very best option how long do you think we have until you have to decide lima had thought of why as her ally every bit is offended by the lockdown world of dorchester towers as she was but why had been working long hours for bulangism and its new sister companies she thought the problem was that salima didn&#39;t want to get into trouble salima had been thinking that too but that wasn&#39;t the problem bulanism itself was the problem the whole rotten business was the problem until mulanism finds out what we&#39;ve been doing and gets us evicted why shook her head didn&#39;t you hear me that won&#39;t happen they&#39;re trying carrots these days not sticks they want to treat people like you as customers not crooks okay sure but how long until that happens i looked hurt i don&#39;t know soon though a week or two they&#39;re really excited about the unlock upsell but they want to do a little research on the price point before they roll it out so that&#39;ll delay things for a while but the owners aren&#39;t going to keep paying everyone&#39;s salaries forever without any money coming in a couple weeks she could get through the places she&#39;d missed then start over again on the top floor and work her way down again impressing on people that it was essential that they tell her if they&#39;d let one of the kids fiddle their stuff again yeah looks lima i think you should really consider this it&#39;s a good plan good for everyone i will her voice sounded unconvincing even to her own ears why looked even more distraught selima felt bad she&#39;d only wanted to help you had dinner i&#39;m crazy hungry do you like fish there&#39;s a fish place near here that&#39;s amazing the kind of place where visiting parents take their kids for a good meal during the school year ever since i started taking home a paycheck i&#39;ve been meaning to go back but i&#39;ve been too busy would you join me i&#39;ll pay i don&#39;t want to have to eat a loon no she wanted to say no i have to go home and get back to work no i can&#39;t afford your charity because you might have to testify against me no i don&#39;t need to be friends with anyone from your world yes she said that would be very nice she was too hungry to say no and she was sick of overpriced pre-packaged microwave meals she got home after 10 much too late to ring anyone&#39;s doorbell and have an awkward conversation about their appliances the elevator had been blessedly responsive which was a good thing since between the wine and the stress of the recent weeks she wasn&#39;t going to be able to climb the stairs or even stay awake very long in the lobby the elevator smelled of expensive hair product telling her that it had been recently vacated by someone who&#39;d gone out the other doors on the way to a nice date or maybe on the way back relieving the babysitter a midnight snack in an oven that cooked anything you told it to the smell lingered in her nostrils citrus and tobacco as she trailed her hand down the corridor wall to her apartment she was about to open her door when she saw the words scrawled there and fat permanent marker off the letters were large angry and yet uncertain like they&#39;d been written by a child or perhaps someone who was just learning english she was so tired she licked her finger and rubbed at the ink it didn&#39;t even smear she let herself in and went to the camera feed for her door discovered it was blank perfectly erased so maybe it was a kid who&#39;d written it a kid who&#39;d learned to search the darknet for ways to control technology designed to control them a kid who was outraged at being asked to forget how to do that and to go back to being meekly controlled would a kid like that ever work on commission installing official unlocking codes in the poor floor apartments of dorchester towers was there enough money in the world and if there was did she want to be the one who used that money to convince that kid to give up on that uncompromising ferocity she&#39;d buy some solvent on her way home from work the next day she ran into nadifa on the stairs the next morning struggling with the stroller chevying idle the older girl and carrying yasmine the toddler salima took the stroller an idol leaving nadifa to sling yasmine on her hip and to hold the handrail with her free hand nadifa sighed and thanked her you look terrible nadifa said three flights down i didn&#39;t sleep very well you haven&#39;t been by in so long the retsina is starting to pile up in my refrigerator her eyes welled up and she blinked hard she&#39;d missed nadifa and missed the days when she&#39;d overflowed with the excitement of mastering the building the rearguard action of putting everything back had filled her with a buried and unspeakable shame and just thinking of showing her face to nadiva that made her feel sick but it was so good to see her again i&#39;m sorry it&#39;s been hard she swallowed then she told nadifa about the words on her door using careful euphemisms in front of the kids she told nadiva about the cameras she stopped short of telling her about abdirahm abandoning her she wanted a friendly shoulder to lean on not retribution for a 13 year old that&#39;s terrible i&#39;ll come by when you get home from work and we&#39;ll clean it together it&#39;s okay i can do it she thought of telling nadifa about the offer from why but she didn&#39;t nadifa might tell her to do it or tell her not to her arms were back on fire when they reached the ground level thank you so much nadifa said as she unfolded the stroller normally i wouldn&#39;t try to leave until the rush was over but idol has to see the dentist this morning idol smiled up at her showing cute gaps in her teeth nadifa strapped the baby into the stroller and then she swept salima up into a fierce hug it will be okay you have been through so much worse than this you are strong salima embarrassed herself by snuffling up snot but the alternative was leaking it all over nadifa&#39;s shoulder and a deep had the manners to pretend not to notice anyway so she was able to salvage a little dignity at least she didn&#39;t get a seat on the tee that morning and as she hung from the strap rocking back and forth with the train&#39;s motion she stared idly at the ad over her head eyes unfocused with sleepiness and it was only as she got off the train that she realized it had been an ad for the new booleanism she got a text from y on the escalator affiliate program is a go can i hold a place for you in it you in she marked it unread so she&#39;d remember to reply to it later every time she looked at her screen that day at work she saw the alert for it it was very hard to concentrate she made a mistake early on and ended up spending an hour unraveling it it wasn&#39;t a good day i think i need to talk to abdirahm nadiva looked puzzled then talked to him salima swirled the wine in her glass the problem is that he hasn&#39;t been very eager to talk to me he&#39;s angry adi come here came out of his room wooden faced i&#39;m doing homework auntie salima said she would like to talk to you all right said in a tone made that it was anything but he got the idea of the pay to unlock as quickly as she laid it out for him quicker than she had it&#39;s like my school books i can read them at school or at home but if i want to study in the park i have to pay to unlock them i didn&#39;t know they worked that way he shrugged it&#39;s okay i don&#39;t need to study in the park she told him about the affiliate program so you could make money for your family to help out around the house your friends too and auntie salimo would make money too nadifa said so she can save to get her place of her own she looked sharply at nadifo why would i want to leave dorchester towers nadifa snorted who wouldn&#39;t want to leave if they could move somewhere with a proper elevator with real appliances a place where you were wanted nadifa trapped in her apartment every day until the elevator rush ended or having to drag her stroller and the baby in a small child down 42 floors worth of stairs of course she wanted to go but how would that ever happen she she&#39;d been a tailor in somalia but she hadn&#39;t worked in a shop in more than a decade and by the time yes mean was in school for full days it would be nearly 20 years even if she could find work a seamstress&#39;s salary wasn&#39;t going to pay rent in a boss in boston and support three kids salimo was careful with money like careful like a bookkeeper she lived on her own and had saved up some real money especially when she&#39;d been able to cook any food she wanted and could buy ingredients instead of ready to eat meals she could move out now if she wanted to find a housemate and if she signed up one or two more bookkeeping clients she&#39;d be able to get a place with on her own within a year but she never thought of leaving dorchester towers it was where she belonged i wouldn&#39;t go i want to see your kids grow up don&#39;t be ridiculous we&#39;d come and visit as soon as you can go you should abdirahm watched the two grown women politely argue and salima wondered how much of the subtext he was getting she wondered how much she was getting it&#39;s not right to charge her neighbors to use their own things he said breaking in nadifa was about to say something to him about respecting his auntie but salima cut her off do you think so of course he said it so quickly so firmly that she knew there was no room for argument why because it&#39;s their homes why should they have to pay to use the things in their homes i agree with you but the company would say it&#39;s because they chose to live in a place where the rent was lower because the landlord thought he&#39;d make money from their appliances it was a deal and that&#39;s their end of it and they can pay more somewhere else if they want that choice can we pay more nadifa snorted not until you graduate from college and get a good job adi he looked at salima i know i didn&#39;t say i agreed with it it&#39;s just what they&#39;d say there are lots of deals you can make and the deal here is that you have to use their products the way that makes them the most money or pay to unlock them they&#39;d say that you&#39;re getting more choice because they&#39;ll let you buy an unlocking but we already have that choice she looked sharply at him no you don&#39;t not if you&#39;ve restored your appliances to defaults he looked guilty for an instant and said okay we had that choice and we can&#39;t and we can get it for ourselves again for free you showed us that slow roll in our guts again he&#39;d unlocked it all everything in their home and they were going to get caught everyone was going to get caught if abedibraham wouldn&#39;t do what she asked who would she took a deep breath what i&#39;m about to say isn&#39;t how i see things but it is how the company sees them they say that you don&#39;t have that choice that they have that choice and they&#39;ll sell it to you but if you take it without paying that stealing again that&#39;s what they think he was fast but you&#39;d be able to unlock all your things without paying right so why isn&#39;t that stealing bush little sharp boy with smarts of someone who has to think fast all the time with bad consequences for getting it wrong because i&#39;d be working for the company against your neighbors but you say you wouldn&#39;t leave here because you belong here but you get treated like you&#39;re better than us he was losing his cool still a boy after all she didn&#39;t let herself get angry sneaking a look at nadifa she saw her friend was very thoughtful forgetting to tell off her son for disrespecting his elder i don&#39;t think i&#39;m better the company just saw my skills and offered me a job like your mother getting money when she sews someone&#39;s clothes they&#39;d pay you too remember i wouldn&#39;t take their money he looked at his mother i have homework to do do your homework got up and went into the other room they didn&#39;t look at each other what will you do nadifa asked selima shrugged i&#39;ll have to think about it why sent her two more texts before bed which she didn&#39;t answer she fell asleep at last with the hum of the air conditioning in the fridge compressor in her ears her phone rang while she was brushing her teeth why she spat and rinsed and didn&#39;t answer it rang again and again hello i&#39;m sorry to be such a nag but it&#39;s all kicking off here the board loved the affiliate id and they&#39;ve pressed ahead with it throwing tons of engineers at it they want to do a big release next week press conference and everything with the affiliates in eight countries they love your story and want to feature you you can even get some money for the publicity work you know to help you out with missing work i&#39;ve been at the office since 6 00 am it turns out i&#39;m the only one here who knows a real life jailbreaker and that makes me the resident expert she killed nervously i&#39;m sorry it just happened but we need to move everything is waiting on you she couldn&#39;t think of anything to say hello selima why salima i know it&#39;s crazy but this solves everyone&#39;s problems please say you come down at least and talk to them i have to work where we can come to you she felt trapped i&#39;m working at home today she got to do that every week or two and there were a lot of little reconciling jobs to do perfect that&#39;s just perfect i&#39;ll text you when we know our arrival time okay why but she&#39;d already hung up after that selena couldn&#39;t concentrate at all she listened to the sounds of her neighbors leaving for work then the mothers with the little kids moving through the halls heading to one another&#39;s places accompanied by piping children&#39;s voices for playdates and friendly com commiseration the numbers swam onto her big screen refusing to cohere she pastes the tiny apartment then the corridor her little notebook was in her pocket the apartment numbers and the dates and her notes she&#39;d been in so many of these places estimated arrival time 15 minutes okay she signed okay she went back into her place to listen for the downstairs buzzer at least they were arriving after the morning rush so that she wouldn&#39;t have to wait long for an elevator so they wouldn&#39;t have to wait too long for an elevator indeed they were at her door just minutes after she buzzed them in why and two guys one white and one indian both in bulangism teas both with youthful haircuts and big polished straight toothed smiles thank you for seeing us the indian one said he was called paul but his business card said pritpal he&#39;d refused tea and water as had the white guy rawg but wyatt accepted a coffee and was watching intently as selima fed a pot into the machine and put a cup beneath then injected the pot and threw it out it&#39;s okay she said why i was very excited about it why had the good grace to look a bit chagrined paul didn&#39;t notice she&#39;s been very excited about you too we&#39;ve heard a lot about you and honestly you couldn&#39;t be more perfect for what we have in mind we think it could be very big he held up his hands arms spread as wide as he could in her crowded room very big good for us good for you and good for people like you people like me people who fall between the cracks people who can&#39;t afford to pay full price for everything but who sometimes want to splurge on more features for a special occasion it&#39;s really the best of both worlds a new kind of flexibility the old booleanism owners were blind to that but we&#39;re totally energized about the possibilities of working with our customers not against them we hope you&#39;ll be part of that there was a space in the conversation here where selema would say something positive everyone in the room wanted her to say something positive the conversation had a shape or maybe a direction and she could pat it on the back give it a little push in that direction and the next stop would be something glad from paul or y or the white guy and then back to her push and push and push until it had picked up enough velocity that no one could stop it it seemed petty to refuse then but she could see that a positive word here was a ticket on an express train with no more stops that sounds very nice but i don&#39;t think i&#39;m the right person for you well i looked shocked paul and the white guy looked wooden for a moment and then pasted on smiles of course we respect your decision but i wonder if you could tell us why we&#39;ve come a long way to talk about this with you after all maybe if you explain your reservations we can learn something from you that will help us do better in our next meeting she didn&#39;t say that she hadn&#39;t asked them to come over i just don&#39;t feel right about it i understand your idea here that you&#39;re selling us more freedom but that&#39;s only because our appliances take away so much freedom to begin with and then sell it back but no one forced you to choose a booleanism you chose a product that came with restrictions and in return you got a good deal on your rent do you have a booleanism toaster no i don&#39;t why not it&#39;s not the choice we&#39;ve made the white guy said we choose a different deal that&#39;s the great thing about freedom we all get to choose the proposition that suits us best soleima managed a tight little smile you keep talking about choosing this is the only place i could get into and it took months how is that a choice you were living somewhere before this place right a refugee shelter you could have chosen to stay there right she wanted these people gone i don&#39;t think that is much of a choice he shook his head the point is that you had a choice and that&#39;s because appliances like ours made it economical for landlords to build subsidy units she didn&#39;t say anything she was getting angry and she didn&#39;t like to be angry she didn&#39;t want to show these people that she was angry we want to help you people let you get more out of your lives give you more choices what about the choice to jailbreak my things she didn&#39;t ask it honestly i can&#39;t understand your decision here choice is good so long as i don&#39;t choose not to help you she didn&#39;t say it can&#39;t you see we want to help you i can see that you want me to help you get more money from people like me she still didn&#39;t say it maybe we should go why said unlike the two men she was paying attention to salima&#39;s reactions we&#39;re just having a friendly conversation the white guy said we don&#39;t have to be back at the office for an hour anyway so lima can you just tell me what the problem is she heard herself say i would rather help my neighbors save their money than spend it what is that supposed to mean unlocking your toaster could save tons if you&#39;re smart about bulk groceries and what you cook again her voice said we&#39;d save more money if we didn&#39;t have to pay to unlock our toasters i don&#39;t see what that he stopped oh yeah sure but you know what happens if you get caught doing that i would rather help them not get caught you snorted everyone gets caught how would you know people you never caught would be the people you never knew about she met his eyes he was angry now red flushed a vein showing in his forehead yeah maybe so but that&#39;s not gonna be you lady we know what&#39;s going on here you know you&#39;re on our radar i mean i hope you&#39;ve got all your right because if there&#39;s anything out of order here we&#39;ll see it we&#39;ll know who to talk to first too why opened her mouth shut it she gave seleema an apologetic look she was also flushed paul stood up i think we&#39;d better be going thank you very much for your time salima she watched them leave then after the door closed opened it silently and put her eye to it to watch them call the elevator wanting to be sure they left without talking to her neighbors moments after they pressed the call button the doors opened and there was a surprise looking woman already in the car a woman she&#39;d never seen before dressed in a smart summer weight suit smart makeup smart little haircut someone from the other side whose elevator should never ever open on a poor floor and the three booleanism employees nodded at her as though nothing was amiss and stepped into the car when they turned around she caught wise eye for a moment and was shrugged and grimaced in an eloquent expression of ambiguous apology was she sorry for the way her boss had spoken for the threat for the fact that the elevators came for them when they called them but not for selima selima climbed six floors to nadif&#39;s floor and rang her bell they only had to wait a few minutes in the school office before abdirahma appeared mama he looked worried and then when he saw salima confused come on we&#39;ll talk as we walk nadifa said giving him a complicated look that silenced any questions that was a look they must have had a lot of cause to use over these years though not for some time when they were out on the street and hustling toward the bus stop salimus said we need to restore everything in the building to factory defaults yeshuka said i thought you&#39;d already done that yes and you and your friends have undone it started to deny it she cut him off i&#39;m not a fool of d rahm i don&#39;t even disagree but i turned them down today i told them i would not help them sell unlock codes to our friends they&#39;re angry and they&#39;re going to try to punish me for it they&#39;re going to watch us all very closely and they&#39;re working with the owners of dorchester towers that was a guess but it was a good one after all the landlords were getting a commission from them so they had to have some kind of relationship so we need to get everything put back before they catch us he walked several steps in silence then it won&#39;t stay that way too many people know how to jailbreak i know that she said but we need to invent a better way why had talked about virtual machines and there was a clue in there the message boards were as usual full of disagreements speculations insults both spam and obscenity abedi rahm had grudgingly gone through selema&#39;s notebook and pointed out the apartments that he knew to be jailbroken including a few that she&#39;d never been able to get to admit to it working together they&#39;d gone door to door again bringing along nadifa for moral support ringing doorbells long after any decent hour working until they were so tired that they started making foolish mistakes they&#39;d take turns working in each apartment one of them reverting devices and the other one talking to the people there especially the kids about the importance of leaving everything as is just for a little while until they could come up with a better solution searching for virtual machines on the message boards made things a little clearer but it also sent them down a rabbit hole of reading about computer science ideas neither of them really had the background for thankfully there were a lot of bulanism and disher owners around the world who were also unqualified to understand virtual machines but nevertheless insistent that someone explained them and they were able to piece together something like comprehension it helped between between them nadifa salim and abdibrahim could read several seven languages computers it seemed were in some important way all the same every computer shared a common heritage an architecture that let it run any program that could be written in computer languages in software code some computers were faster or had more memory than others and some of them expected the instructions to be written in different ways but even the slowest computer could run the most complicated programs though it might take years to accomplish a task that another computer could come complete in an ibling but you didn&#39;t need to translate computer code to get it to run on a different computer instead you could write a computer program that was in effect a computer itself you could write a computer program that could run on a disher whose purpose was to run booleanism programs yes you could convince your dishwasher that it was a toaster when the toaster inside your dishwasher gave the instructions to turn on a heating element or take a picture of the food in its bay to test its doneness the dishwasher running its computer could send it any data it wanted and it would blindly trust it this was the virtual machine an imaginary computer inside another computer as if that wasn&#39;t weird enough you could run a booleanism virtual machine inside of booleanism making the toaster pretend to be another toaster which seemed like a kind of flourish or game to selima until abedira got it in a flash and explained it if you have a toaster that has been jailbroken you can run a virtual toaster inside it then you can run a regular factory version of the toaster software on the virtual toaster whenever the factory contacts your toaster it sends the communications to the virtual toaster the virtual toaster tells it how to answer to seem like it&#39;s unmodified it&#39;s like taking an enemy hostage and making him tell you what to tell his commanding officer so he won&#39;t get suspicious he rubbed his hands together does it work he shrugged and pointed at his screen they say it does but they wouldn&#39;t know for sure would they i wish i could ask why she said she would know you said she told you about virtual machines yes but she was just thinking out loud maybe she thought it over and found a flaw in the plan he couldn&#39;t even look up from the screen which where he&#39;d been avidly reading about virtual machines you could ask her it wouldn&#39;t be fair to her nothing is fair he said it so nonchalantly that it shocked her such a small boy such a big thought she went so far as to look up wise number but she didn&#39;t dial it instead she got her bulanism and helped ibrahim install a virtual machine on it they were going to have to get very good at this the day that bulanism relaunched every virtual machine inside every toaster and dishwasher disher dishwasher chimed awake and announced the new exciting unlocking offer these alerts loaded in little windows they had to tap to unsize and read before dismissing them they all spent the day with tight shoulders and quick movements jumping every time they got a buzz sure it was someone at home telling them they&#39;d be raided or that everything had stopped working or that the landlords were at the door telling them to get out but the day passed and then the next and the next cautiously one muscle at a time they relaxed salimo was very good at baking she had discovered nordic breads and made four little cardamom buns every morning dusted with cinnamon she ate one and gave three to the first three people she met in the stairwell on the way down still warm leaving behind a smell that was better than the nicest with perfume you might encounter in the elevator after it had been vacated by someone from the other side she was waiting for the bulanism to chime when her screen rang she almost didn&#39;t answer it blocked number and early hour almost certainly a spammer but she slit her finger across it salima why&#39;s voice was tight a little out of breath selena&#39;s shoulders wound himself as tight as tennis rackets somewhere in her mind she&#39;d always expected this call yes the virtual machines you&#39;re using aren&#39;t fooling them anymore they sent out an update that is designed to break the break on bms i just checked your building you&#39;re just hanging out there now there&#39;s no way they&#39;ll miss it you&#39;re just hanging out there now there&#39;s no way they&#39;ll miss it oh she squeezed her eyes shut the boulangism chimed and its door swung open the smell of cinnamon and cardamon and fresh bread the sound of her blood thundering in her ears oh but there&#39;s a fix a fix the vm i use for testing it&#39;s undetectable it has to be or i wouldn&#39;t be able to do simulations in my lab i&#39;ve packaged it and know why yes selena you aren&#39;t going to risk everything from me you are going to get caught because i didn&#39;t help you selima hadn&#39;t thought of it like that the people in her building would get caught if selena didn&#39;t help them that would destroy her salima would get caught if why didn&#39;t help her so yes why why i actually laughed a tiny and tight sound i&#39;ll send you something she named a darknet site one that selema had an account on that she&#39;d never discussed it with why she wondered how much why i knew about what she&#39;d been up to in a week since they&#39;d spoken abdirah hadn&#39;t left for school yet and indefa didn&#39;t even hesitate when selena said she&#39;d need him for the day her notebook was scuffed and dog-eared from being carried from apartment to apartment so many times you trust her she nodded if all she wanted to do was get me in trouble it would be so much easier than this the new vm and its control software was much tidier than anything they downloaded from the dark net it hid itself very well unless you knew the multi-touch pattern to swap your screen from the real jailbreaking controls to the sham controls of the vm the notes with it promised that it would also be perfectly hidden from the booleanism&#39;s network network tools it was easy enough to install just an update to the settings that they already had in place but it was also morning when so many people were heading out for the day leaving their appliances exposed to the company&#39;s snoopy probing they worked on a cis outa system she knocked on a door explain things quickly to never answered and send it and addie to start working then she&#39;d go on to the next door and the next talking urgently begging people to leave their doors unlocked for them addie finished one apartment and then the next letting himself into the unlocked places they&#39;d get to the old people the disabled people the stay-at-home moms but they had to get to these places before their occupants left she raced from one place to the next and managed nearly all of them and got phone numbers for the four she&#39;d missed and trekked up the stairs back to adi frantically dialing them getting to and leaving messages for the other two she&#39;d call them back it was a good thing that wise software was so slick and easy to install because selima was a wreck though abdibraham was all teenaged in cool bravado making short work of each place chess puffed out in an easy smile playing over his lips as he concentrated but they were doing it by lunch they were more than halfway through and they knocked on the door of the old serbian man and he insisted on giving them peanut butter on crackers which they both gobbled surprised at how hungry they were selima remembered that she had four cardamom buns in her toaster and ran to get them and they each ate one and left the extra for the serb he smiled and waved at them as they walked in the hall to the next place just as they were descending the stairs to the next floor selima&#39;s screen rang nadifa the landlords were knocking on the doors the voice was an urgent whisper where starting on 41 they were just at our place inspecting the appliances they&#39;d done their own apartments first partly to make sure they knew what they were doing partly because they thought that the landlords might start with them okay they didn&#39;t find anything whatever you did it worked okay they&#39;re getting in the elevator okay for a moment all she could hear was the thought of blood in her ears she realized she was staring at her phone blankly abdirahm was looking at her with alarm how many left she pulled out her notebook tattered with annotations in both their hands ran his finger down the columns moved his lips as he counted 24 he said she closed her eyes and took a deep breath 24 the landlords and the elevators her place was safe and that&#39;s where the landlords would go next the remaining places were scattered among the seven poor floors there were four floors above them three below she took the notebooks from abdibrham and tore out the pages for the four floors above and folded them and put them back in the pot back pocket of her jeans do the bottom three she said be careful check before you go into the hallways don&#39;t let the landlord see you if they catch you don&#39;t let them get the notebook he had gone ashade paler his teenaged bravado drained he swallowed audibly he looked at the remaining notebook pages scanned down them okay okay she said he turned but she caught him and gave him a fierce hug go she whispered and turned on her heel and raced up the stairs a calm descended on her as she stepped out onto the next floor there were three unlocked apartments on this one no person she&#39;d have to talk to and so she stepped into the first one eyes moving around to take in the appliances matching them to her list one two three she pulled the usb out of her pocket she hadn&#39;t remembered to warn addy to ditch that if he was in danger but he would know that wouldn&#39;t he and stepped to the toaster and lifted it with sure economical motions one apartment two three stairwell two more here people in them ring the first doorbell exposed and anxious the hum of the elevators in their shafts a few yards away heart thudding armpits slick usb grip so tight in her fist it hurt the woman who answered was old but she stood tall and clear-eyed thin and wrinkled and brown selema remembered that she&#39;d been a pediatrician in damascus she&#39;d once played violin but the arthritis that had swollen her knuckles took that from her landlords in the building selima whispered as she slipped past the woman the woman stepped to one side and let her get to work when salima was done the woman stopped her and clutched at her hand fingers dry and brittle and bent thank you she said and gave a small squeeze the feeling lingered only lima&#39;s hand as she consulted her notes and rang the next doorbell she ducked into the stairwell and her phone buzzed she checked it landlords on the stairwell oh she could hear her stealthy movement now the soft here stealthy movement now the soft tread of a shoe someone ascending and trying to keep it silent there was another stairwell at the end of dorchester towers reserved for emergencies with an alarmed door the steps drew closer she opened the door again and went back into the hallway she could knock on someone&#39;s door try to get rid of the notebook in the usb before the landlords came and if she failed they would all be in trouble she and addie had nearly done it perhaps half a dozen apartments remained too few she thought for the landlords to be able to evict them all for conspiracy she could hear the steps from the stairwell now they weren&#39;t bothering to be quiet they must have heard the door shut behind her the elevator hummed she was trapped she crossed her arms over her chest spread her feet apart and waited the elevator doors opened before the store well door stairwell door she turned to face it not letting any fear show a cool mask that&#39;s what she&#39;d show them abdirahm was inside get it the doors closed and the elevator lurched into motion abdirahm lobby button they&#39;re in the lobby too he said so he can&#39;t go there the elevator was descending rapidly the floor counter hit 35 and then displayed the two hyphens it showed as they raced past the full price floors they&#39;d be in the lobby in seconds addie he smiled and pressed a rapid sequence on the elevator panel fingers racing and sure the elevator slowed stopped the doors opened the other doors the doors that opened into the rich floor come on he said they stepped into the hallway the carpet was a rich purply brown and it had neat lines from a vacuum robot that had swept its nap into a uniform direction addie he smiled again i figured out the elevators the day after they stopped the elevator captains it wasn&#39;t hard on the poor floors the elevator&#39;s infographics only showed the positions of the cars when they were traversing the floors they were allowed to stop at seeming to vanish between 42 and the penthouse 35 in the lobby here the infographics showed it at all here the infographics showed it all a car stopped at 37 went up to 38. no resident of poor floors would waste their time calling an elevator for a single floor&#39;s ride that was the landlord&#39;s with special fobs that would summon an elevator directly even to the poor floors now what she said she was making sense of what adi had done he showed her the notebook with tick marks beside every entry now we finish her list two more floors to go 35 and 36 she handed him a sheet took one herself and then he summoned another elevator and pressed another fast sequence then 35 then 36 when the doors open he sprinted into the hallway all recklessness not even checking to see whether the landlords were waiting for him she was more careful when the doors opened on 36 peering around the door before stepping into the hall then she too sprinted for the last door on her list another voice message for you updates going on oh another vm for you updates going in next week that&#39;s enough time selima tapped her screen and replied you are a very bad employee wyoming i suppose i am but you are a good friend i suppose i am thank you why anytime selima stretched and stood she had to go to work now the ice cream parlor they were doing a roaring trade thanks to an unusually warm spring they had a new flavor she adored too black olive brittle and goat&#39;s cheese which was the weirdest ice cream she&#39;d ever tasted but also the best she collected her cardamom buns checked her hair in the mirror the screen buzzed send me the cardamom bun recipe please she did and left for work

let&amp;#39;s call this as a private joke uh an attempt at conflict resolution so this is a reading of unauthorized bread by cory doctor from the book radicalized the way salima found out that bulangism had gone bankrupt her toaster wouldn&amp;#39;t accept her bread she held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs up emoji but instead it showed her the head scratching face and made a soft bird she waved the bread again [Music] come on she turned the toaster off and on then she unplugged it counted to 10 and plugged it in then she menu through the screens until she found reset to factory default waited three minutes and punched her wi-fi password again long before she got to that point she&amp;#39;d grown certain that it was a lost cause but these were the steps that you took when electronics stopped working so you could call the 800 number and say i&amp;#39;ve turned it off and on i&amp;#39;ve unplugged it i&amp;#39;ve reset it to factory defaults and there was a touch screen option on the toaster call support but that wasn&amp;#39;t working so she used the fridge to look up the number and call it it rang 17 times and disconnected she heaved a sigh another one bites the dust the toaster wasn&amp;#39;t the first appliance to go that honor went to the dishwasher which stopped being able to validate third-party dishes the week before when the disher went under but it was the last straw she could wash dishes in the sink but how the hell was she supposed to make toast over a candle just to be sure she asked the fridge for headlines about booleanism and there it was their cloud had burst in the night socials crawling with people furious about their daily bread she prodded a headline and learned that bulanism had been a ghost chip for at least six months because that&amp;#39;s how long security researchers had been contacting the company to tell it that all its user data passwords logins ordering and billing details had been hanging out there on the public internet with no password or encryption there were ransom notes in the database records inserted by hackers demanding cryptocurrency payouts in exchange for keeping the dirty secret of bullyingism&amp;#39;s shitty data handling no one had ever seen them bulanism&amp;#39;s share price had declined by 98 over the past year there might not even be a bulangism anymore when selema had pictured bulang ism she&amp;#39;d imagined the french bakery that was on the toasters idol screen dusted with flour wood block tables with seared rags of crusty loaves she pictured a rickety staircase leading up from the bakery to a suite of cramped offices overlooking a cobbled road she&amp;#39;d pictured gas lamps the article had a street view shot of bulayingism&amp;#39;s headquarters a four-story office block in pune near mumbai walled in with an unattended guard booth at the street entrance the bullang some cloud had burst and that meant that there was no one answering selima&amp;#39;s toaster when it asked if the bread she was about to toast it come from an authorized bulanism baker which it had in the absence of a reply the paranoid little gadget would assume that salima was in that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted bulangism toaster and then tried to reneg on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to sub-optimal toast bulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in real time to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders without those profits there&amp;#39;d be no surplus capital to divert to r d creating the continuous improvement that meant that hardly a day went by without salima and millions of other bulangism stakeholders never just customers waking up with exciting new firmware for their beloved toasters and what of the bulanism baker partners they&amp;#39;d done the right thing signing up for a bulangism license subjecting their process to inspections and quality assurance that meant that their bread had exactly the right composition to toast perfectly in bulang azim&amp;#39;s precision engineered appliances with crum and perosity and perfect balance to absorb butter and other spreads these valued partners deserve to have their commitment to excellence honored not cast aside by bargain-hunting cheaters who wanted to recklessly toast any old bread salima knew these arguments even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them which it did after three unsuccessful bread authorization attempts playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and re-education campaign she tried to search her fridge for booleanism hacks and bullyingism unlock codes but appliances stuck together kitchen aids network filters gobbled up her queries and spat back snarky no results screams even though salima knew perfectly well that there was a whole underground economy devoted to unauthorized bread she had to leave her work in half an hour and she hadn&amp;#39;t even showered yet but god damn it first the dishwasher not a toaster she found her laptop used when she&amp;#39;d gotten it now barely functional its battery was long dead and she&amp;#39;d had to unplug her toothbrush to free up a cape charger cable but after she had booted it and let it run its dozens of software updates she was able to run the dark net browser she still had kicking around and do some judicious googling she was 45 minutes late to work that day but she had toast for breakfast god damn it the dishwasher was next once selima had found the right forum it would have been crazy not to unlock the thing after all she had to use it and now it was effectively bricked she wasn&amp;#39;t the only one who had the dishwasher bulanism double whammy either some poor suckers who also had the poor the poor fortune to own one of the constellation of devices made by hp news core fridges toothbrushes even sex toys all of which had gone down thanks to a failure of the company&amp;#39;s cloud provider tata while this failure was unrelated to the disher bulanism doubleheader it was pretty unfortunate timing everyone agreed the twin collapse of disher and bulangism did have a shared cause selima discovered both companies were publicly traded and both had seen more than 20 percent of their shares acquired by summerstream funds management the largest hedge fund on earth with 184 billion under management summerstream was an activist shareholder and it was very big on stock buybacks once it had a seat on each company&amp;#39;s board both occupied by galt uh baumgardner a junior partner at the firm but from a very good kansas family they both hired the same expert consultant from deloitte to examine the company&amp;#39;s accounts and recommend a buy-back program that would see the shareholders getting their due return from the firms without gouging so deep into the company&amp;#39;s operating capital as to endanger them it was all mathematically provable of course the companies could easily afford to divert billions from their balance sheets to the shareholders once was this was determined it was the board&amp;#39;s fiduciary duty to vote in favor of it which was handy since they all owned fat wads of company shares and a few billion dollars later the companies were lean mean and battle ready and didn&amp;#39;t even miss all that money oops summer stream issued a press release often quoted in the forums salima was now obsessively haunting blaming the whole thing on volatility and alpha calling it unfortunate and disappointing they were confident that both companies would restructure and bankruptcy perhaps after a quick sale to a competitor and everyone could start toasting bread and washing dishes within a month or two selima wasn&amp;#39;t going to wait her bullyingism didn&amp;#39;t go easily after downloading the new firmware from the dark net she had to remove the case slicing through three separate tamper evidence seals and a large warning sticker that threatened electrocution and prosecution perhaps simultaneously for anyone foolish enough to ignore it and locate a specific component and then short out two of its pins with a pair of tweezers while booting it this dropped the toaster into a test mode that the developers had deactivated but not removed the instant the test screen came up she had a jammer usb inner usb stick removing the toaster&amp;#39;s hood had revealed a set of usb ports a monitor port and even a little ethernet jack all stock on the commodity single board pc that controlled it at exactly the right instant then use the on-screen keyboard to tap in the login and password which were admin and admin of course it took her three tries to get the timing right but on the third try the spare login screen was replaced with the pirates firmware&amp;#39;s cheesy text art animation of a 3d skull which she smiled at and then she burst into laughter as a piece of text art toast floated into the frame and was merely chopped to crumbs by the text art skull the crumbs cascading to the bottom of the screen and forming shifting little piles someone had put a lot of effort into the physics of simulation for that ridiculous animation it made selima feel good like she was entrusting her toaster to deep serious crafts people and not just randos who like to pick their wits against faceless programmers from big stupid companies the crumbs piled up as the skull chomped and the progress indicator counted up from 12 to 26 percent and to 34 where it stuck for a full 10 minutes until she was ready to risk really breaking the damn thing but unplugging it but then 58 and so on to an agonizing weight at the 99 and then all the crumbs rushed up from the bottom of the screen and went back out through the skull&amp;#39;s mouth turning back into toast each reassembled piece forming up the ranks that quickly blotted out the skull and the words all done burned themselves into the toast&amp;#39;s surface glistening with butter that ran down in rivulets she was just grabbing for her phone to get a picture of this awesome private load screen when the toaster oven blinked and rebooted itself a few seconds later she held a slice of bread to the toaster sensor and watched as its light turned green and its door yawned open halfway through munching the toast she was struck by an odd curiosity she held her hand up to the toaster palm out as though it too were a slice of bread the toaster&amp;#39;s light turned green and the door opened she was momentarily tempted to try and toast a fork or a paper towel or a slice of apple just to see if the toaster would do it but of course it would this was a new kind of toaster a toaster that took orders rather than giving them a toaster that would give her enough rope to hang herself let her toast a lithium battery or can of hairspray or anything else she wanted to toast unauthorized bread even homemade bread the idea made her feel a little queasy and a little tremorous homemade bread or something she&amp;#39;d read about in books seen in old dramas but she didn&amp;#39;t know anyone who actually baked bread that was like gnawing your own furniture out of whole logs or something ingredients turned out to be incredibly simple and while her first loaf came out looking like a poop emoji it tasted amazing still warm from the little toaster and if anything the slice okay the lump she saved and toasted the next morning was even better especially with butter on it she left for work that day with a magical warm toasty feeling in her stomach she did the dishwasher that night the disher hackers were much more utilitarian in their approach but they were also swedish judging from the urls in their readme files which might explain the minimalism she&amp;#39;d been to an ikea she got it the disher didn&amp;#39;t require anything like the song and dance the bulanism she popped off the maintenance cover pried the rubber gasket off the usb port stuck in her stick and rebooted it the screen showed a lot of scrolling text and some cryptic error messages and then rebooted again into what looked like normal disher operating mode except without the throbbing red alerts about the unreachable server that had haunted it for a week she piled the dishes from the sink into the dishwasher feeling a tiny thrill every time the dishwasher played its new dish recognized arpeggio she thought about taking a pottery next her experience with the dishwasher and the toaster changed her though she couldn&amp;#39;t quite say how at first leaving the apartment the next day she&amp;#39;d found herself eyeing up the elevator bank looking at the fire department override plate under the call screen thinking about the fact that the tenants on the subsidized floors had to wait three times as long for an elevator because they were only eligible to ride cars right in the cars that had rear opening doors that exited into the back lobby with its poor doors even those cars wouldn&amp;#39;t stop at her floor if they&amp;#39;d picked up one of the full fair residents on the way because heaven for fent those people should have to breathe the common air of the filthy commoners i think that was heaven forbid so lima had been overjoyed to get a spot in her building the dorchester towers because the waiting list for the subsidy units that the planning department required of the developer was years deep she&amp;#39;d been in the country for a decade at that point spending the first five years in a camp in arizona where they&amp;#39;d watched one person after another die and the withering heat when the state department finally finished vetting her and let her out a caseworker met her with a bag of clothes a prepaid debit card and the news that her parents had died while she was in the camp she absorbed the news silently and didn&amp;#39;t allow herself to display any outward sign of her agony she had assumed that her parents had died because they had promised to meet her in arizona within a month of her arrival just as soon as her father could call in his old debts and pay for the papers and database fiddling that would get him on the plane and to the u.s immigration checkpoint where they could claim asylum she&amp;#39;d been a teenager then now she was a young woman with five years hard living in the camp behind her she knew how to control her tears she thanked the caseworker and asked what had become of their bodies lost at sea the woman said and donned a compassionate mask the ship and all its passengers no survivors the italians scoured the area for weeks and found nothing the wreck went straight to the bottom bad informatics they said a ship was a computer that you put desperate people inside and when the computer went bad the ship was a tomb you put desperate people inside she nodded like she understood though the sound of her blood in her ears was so loud she couldn&amp;#39;t hear herself think the social worker said some more things gave her some paperwork which included a greyhound ticket to boston where she had been found a shelter bed she read the itinerary through three times she&amp;#39;d learned to read english in the camp taught by a woman who&amp;#39;d been a linguistics professor before she was a refugee she&amp;#39;d learned geography from the mandatory civics lessons she&amp;#39;d gone to every two weeks watching videos about life in america that were notably short on survival tips for life in the part of america where they slept three deep in bunk beds in a blazing desert surrounded by drones and barbed wire she learned where boston was though far boston two days 17 hours the social worker said you&amp;#39;ll get to see all of america it&amp;#39;s an incredible experience her mask slipped for a moment and she looked very tired then she pasted her smile back on get to the grocery store first that&amp;#39;s my advice you&amp;#39;ll want some real food to eat selma had got good at being bored over her five years in the camp mastering a kind of waking doze where her mind simply went away time scurrying past like rooches clinging to the baseboard barely visible in the corner of her eye but on the greyhound bus the skill failed her even after she found a window seat 22 hours into the journey she found her mind returning again and again to her parents the ship the deep fathoms of the mediterranean she had known that her parents were dead but there was knowing and there was knowing she debarked in boston two days and 17 hours later noting as she did that the bus didn&amp;#39;t have a driver something she&amp;#39;d missed boarding and debunking by the rear doors another computer you put your body into given the wrong informatics the greyhound could have plunged off a cliff or smashed into oncoming traffic there had been a charge port on the armrest and she&amp;#39;d shared it with the seatmates who&amp;#39;d come and gone on her bus but she&amp;#39;d made sure she had a full charge when she stepped off the bus and it was good she did and she used up almost all of her battery getting translations and directions in order to find the shelter she&amp;#39;d been assigned which wasn&amp;#39;t in boston but in a suburb called worcester whose pronunciation evaded her for the next six months all her groceries were consumed and everything she owned fit into a duffel bag whose strap broke as she was plugging it up the broken escalator while changing underground t-trains on her way to worcester she&amp;#39;d spent half the funds on her debit card on food and had eaten like a mouse like a bird like a scurrying cockroach she had started with nearly nothing and now she had nothing the hardest part of finding the shelter was the fact that it was in a dead strip mall 11 stores all refitted with bunks and showers and playrooms for kids arranged along the back plane of an empty parking lot that was half a mile from the nearest bus stop selima walked past the mall three times staring at her phone his battery was nearly flat again it was so old it barely held a charge before she figured out that this row of shops was her new home the reception was an old pharmacy that had anchored the mall it was unattended a cavernous space walled off by a roll-down gate with a row of touch screens where the cash registers had sat it smelled of piss and the floor was dirty with a kind of ancient ground and grime you got in places where people trudged over and over only one of the touch screens was working and it took a lot of trial and error before she figured out that she needed to tap about 1.5 centimeters south southwest of the button that she was hitting once she clocked this things got faster she switched the screen to arabic let the camera over uh let the camera over its scanner retinas and repeatedly pressed her fingers to the pad until the machine had read her once it had validated her she had to tap through eight screens of things she was promising that she wouldn&amp;#39;t drink or drug or steal that she didn&amp;#39;t have any chronic or infectious diseases that she did not support terrorism that she understood that at this stage she was not permitted to work for wages but that also in paradoxically she would be required to work in worcester in order to pay back the people of the united states for the shelter bed she was about to be assigned she read the fine print it was something she&amp;#39;d learned to do early in the refugee process sometimes the immigration officers quizzed you on the things you just clicked through and if you couldn&amp;#39;t answer their questions correctly they&amp;#39;d send you back to the back of the line or reschedule your hearing for the next month because you hadn&amp;#39;t fully appreciated the gravity of the agreement you were forging with the united states then she found out which of the former stores she&amp;#39;d be living in and was prompted to insert her debit card which was topped up with credits she could exchange for food at specific stores that catered to people on benefits as she tapped through more screens entering her phone number choosing times for medical checkups she became aware of a low humming noise growing closer she turned around and saw a loot trolley trundling through the aisles of the derelict the derelict pharmacy with a cardboard banker&amp;#39;s box on it it steered laboriously around corners then moved to a gate set into the roll down cage which clung to open the screen prompted her to retrieve the box which contained linens a towel couple six packs of white cotton underwear t-shirts a box of tampons and a toilet bag with shampoos soaps and deodorants it was the most functional transaction she&amp;#39;d had in years and she wanted to kiss the stupid unlovely little robot she couldn&amp;#39;t carry her box and her duffel bag at the same time and she didn&amp;#39;t want to let either out of her sight so she staged them down the face of the strip mall moving the boxes 10 paces setting it down and getting her duffle and carrying it 10 paces packs the box then leap frogging the box over the duffel her pile of papers from the kiosk included a map showing the location of her storefront near the end of course so it was a long way at the halfway mark a woman came out of the store she just passed and regarded her with hands on her hips head cocked a small smile on her face the woman was somali there had been plenty in the camp and no older than selima though she had a small child clinging to her legs gender unknown she wore overalls in a boston university sweatshirt and had her hair in a kerchief and for all that she looked somehow stylish later salima would learn that the woman whose name was nadifa came from a long line of seamstresses and would unpick the seams on any piece of clothing that fell into her hands and retailer them for her measurements you are new i am selema i&amp;#39;m new the woman cocked her head the other way where are you staying show me she walked to selima and held out her hand for the map selima showed it to her and she chopped her teeth that&amp;#39;s no good that one has bad heat and the toilet never stops running here let us fix it without asking the woman hoisted her box and led her back to the office selima trailing after her alongside the little child who kept sneaking her looks the woman knew which screen worked and could land her finger at the exact south south western offset needed to hit the buttons her fingers flew over the screen and then she handed selima had salima stand before the retina monitor and put her fingers on the scanner again a new paper emerged in the kiosk&amp;#39;s out tray much better the woman said selena felt confused and a little anxious that this woman just moved her in with her family where she&amp;#39;d be a babysitter for the child who was staring at her again but she didn&amp;#39;t need to worry single women stayed in one of the three units and families and two more selima&amp;#39;s new home thanks to the woman who finally introduced herself had once been a nail salon and its storeroom still had a few remnants from those days but it was now hung with heavy sound absorbing blankets made out of some kind of synthetic fiber that it turned out to be surprisingly good at shedding dirt and dampening sound the women the woman and her kid left her there and she pulled the fabric corner shut and tabbed them together and spent a moment in the ringing silence of the tiny curtained roomlet a place that would truly be hers shared with no one for some indeterminate time later she&amp;#39;d discovered all the ways that the other sheltered dwellers had decorated their little spaces which most of them called cells with heavy irony because every one of them had spent months or years in literal cells the kinds with concrete walls and iron bars she&amp;#39;d decorate her own room and edify&amp;#39;s children would come meant to poke their heads in without warning and demand stories or someone to play a game with or ideas for pictures to draw she wasn&amp;#39;t exactly roped into being a babysitter but she wasn&amp;#39;t exactly not roped into it either and she liked nadifa&amp;#39;s kids who were just as bold and fearless as their mother who was also a lot of fun especially when she found a bottle of wine and sent the kids out to play in the common room and they&amp;#39;d perch at opposite ends of selima&amp;#39;s narrow bunk telling lies about men and sometimes the odd truth about their lives before the shelter would slip in and there to be a tear or two but that was all right too nadiva already had her work papers and she showed salima how to get papers of her own which took months of patient prodding at the working kiosk to get it to emit pieces of paper that she&amp;#39;d have to bring to government offices and feed into other kiosks sneaking the trips in between her work details the irony of being too busy working to get a work permit did not escape her and oh now she laughed at the irony as she scrubbed graffiti and picked up trash in the parks and cleaned city buses in the great bus barns in places even more out of the way than her worcester strip mall getting her work papers wasn&amp;#39;t the same as getting a job but slimo&amp;#39;s smart and she&amp;#39;d spend her years in the camp pursuing different qualifications by online course hair braiding and bookkeeping virus removal and cat grooming and she had felt sure there&amp;#39;d be something she could do she searched the job boards with nadifa&amp;#39;s help enrolled with temp agencies submitting to their humiliating background checks which included giving them access to her social media and email history an invasion that was only made worse when she was later quizzed on the messages she&amp;#39;d saved from her parents videos and picture messages sent after they&amp;#39;d been separated but before they&amp;#39;d both died work trickled in a few hours here and there shifts dwarfed by the long commutes on the bus to and from the jobs but she cherished hopes that taking these shitty jobs would build her rep with the agencies that were sending her out that she&amp;#39;d pay her dues and start getting real shifts for real money she bought a couple external batteries for her ailing phones so that she could work on the bus rides she and nadifa had divided up the entirety of new england and every day they ran hundreds of searches to look for new high-rise approvals that came with subsidized apartments and then made a note of the day that the waiting list for each would open they knew their chances of either one of them getting accepted were vanishingly small and if they were both accepted it was pretty much impossible that they&amp;#39;d end up in a place together which is why the dorchester towers were such a miracle it was bitter december and the shelter hadn&amp;#39;t ever gotten its promised shipment of winter coats so everyone was making do with multiple layers of sweaters and tees which didn&amp;#39;t read as professional and it caused selima a very good week-long bookkeeping job for a think tank that was closing its quarterly books she had been worried sick about losing the job and worse getting a black mark with the temp agency which had got her several other great bookkeeping jobs that had fattened her tiny savings account more than a dozen cleaning jobs rattling around the strip mall with the other denizens trapped by the weather and the inadequate clothes she pondered raiding her sailings for a coat trying to figure out how much work she&amp;#39;d have to lose before it would be a break-even proposition and estimating the probability that the long-delayed winter coat shipment would finally arrive before too much work was lost her phone let her know she had a government message the kind that she would have to retrieve from the kiosk in the shelter office so she put on three sweaters and stuffed her hands into three thicknesses of socks and fought the gale force winds to the office standing in a puddle of her own melt water she logged into a kiosk they had fixed them all including the one that sort of worked and now all of them were equally unreliable and prone to falling into an endless reboot cycle and retrieved the message she was just absorbing the impossibly good news when adifa staggered in from the cold carrying her smallest one close to her body for heat does that one work she pointed at selima&amp;#39;s kiosk and selema smiled to herself as she wiped the screen and stepped away from it it works her joy was audible in her voice and adifa gave her a funny look selima stifled her grin she telling a different wind oh my god nadifo was just staring at the screen johnner&amp;#39;s chest sulima peaked and laughed aloud me too me too the message was that dorchester towers had approved nadifa&amp;#39;s residency with a two-room flat on the 42nd story that would be ready to move into in 18 months assuming no construction delays the rent was income indexed meaning that nadifa and her kids would be able to afford to live there no matter what happened to them in the future nadifa was sometimes loud and pushy but she was never squeaky so it amused selima quite a lot when eddie threw her hands into the air and bounced up and down on her toes making excited noises so high pitched they&amp;#39;d have deafened a dolphin she didn&amp;#39;t even stop bouncing when she hugged salima pulling her along as she jumped up and down laughing with delight and selima laughed even harder because of what she knew she logged nadifa out of the kiosk and logged herself in and quickly tapped her way into her official government mailbox and simply pointed wordlessly at the screen until nadifa bent and read it her jaw dropped even further you&amp;#39;re on the 35th floor that&amp;#39;s only six fours below us we can take the stairs to each other&amp;#39;s places nadifa&amp;#39;s smallest child confused by all the shouting and bouncing chose that moment to set up a whale and so nadifa put him out of his sling and twirled him around over her head we&amp;#39;re getting a place a place of our own and auntie salima will be there too we&amp;#39;ll have a kitchen we&amp;#39;ll have bedrooms we&amp;#39;ll have she broke off and cradled the boy under one arm used her free hand to grab salima and shake her by the shoulder we&amp;#39;ll have bathrooms our own bathrooms our own bathtubs our own toilets our own toilets salima shouted and the little one said something that was almost toilets and then that set them both laughing like drains laughing until tears streamed down their faces and the kid laughed with them the coats arrived after dinner that night too so lima and nadifa clubbed together to rent a van that day they moved out and they filled it to the ceiling with the detritus of nadifa&amp;#39;s ears and selima&amp;#39;s months at the shelter kids toys clothes shampoo bottles with enough left inside for three more careful washes drawings picture books scrap paper for drawing and paper dolls painstakingly cut out of old printouts from the kiosk the car inched its way through the boston traffic which they could only glimpse intermittently through the teeny bits of windscreen that weren&amp;#39;t covered in shopping bags full of possessions the van pulled into dorchester towers back alley two hours later it was a hot june day and the kids had needed two toilet breaks and several water breaks which had blown their plans to beat the rush hour traffic landing them squarely within it but the two women were stoic they&amp;#39;d been on journeys that were much much longer and far far more difficult the poor doors for dorchester towers weren&amp;#39;t finished yet and so they had to go through a temporary plywood tunnel to enter the building the lobby was in the same condition as the doors raw drywall open electrical receptacles rough concrete floor with troughs cast into it for conduit they loved their things into the lobby and stages leaving nadifa&amp;#39;s eldest to stand guard and watch the kids as they went back and forth to the van trying to get everything out before the 60-minute mark when they&amp;#39;d be billed for another hour&amp;#39;s rental they squeaked in there in the lobby sweating and humid they met the dorchester towers elevators the touch screen asked you for your floor then tracked the passage of the cars up and down the shafts cars would touch down in the lobby and they&amp;#39;d hear the doors on the other side sigh open and shut but the doors facing them never opened they debated what to do eventually they decided that the doors on this side must not be working at all and that it was yet another thing that had to be completed along with the lobby and the doors and please god air conditioning kids belongings themselves somehow they got themselves out of the doors again down the alley and around the building&amp;#39;s circumference to its lobby doors which they couldn&amp;#39;t help but notice were finished chromed and shining smudged free and guarded the guard on the other side of the door buzzed the intercom when they tried the handle he was white and wearing a semi-cop outfit some kind of private security which was unusual because that was the kind of job you saw brown people in most of the time they noticed this too yes we live here we&amp;#39;re moving in today on the salima wave down the road on the other side but the elevators aren&amp;#39;t working there yet we can take the stairs after we move in but she&amp;#39;s on the 42nd floor and i&amp;#39;m on the 35th and we have all this the pile of bags and clothes and drawings and children and themselves also disreputable especially contrasted against the shining chrome the unsmudged glass which now had two of nadifa&amp;#39;s kids faces and hands smearing slowly across it the security guard tapped his screen elevators are working not on that side the elevators came down but the doors don&amp;#39;t open step aside please he said it&amp;#39;s so sharply that even nadifa&amp;#39;s kids snapped to attention there were some people trying to get in pressing their thumbs to a map place on the door frame that didn&amp;#39;t smudge the doors gasped open and let out a blessed gust of air conditioning that almost brought them to their knees the beaded sweat on their backs and legs and faces and scalps spilled as much of their heat as it could in a brief the brief wind then the fine people were through the door not having looked at them once they were preppy look selena had come to understand since moving to the city of colleges and universities with floppy blonde hair and carefully scuffed tennis outfits and sweaty shouting faces the security guard greeted them and chatted with them words inaudible through the closed doors they were amiable enough and waved goodbye as they stepped into the elevator as the doors closed salima saw the doors on the opposite side the doors that opened into that other lobby the security guard gave them an irritated look and shook his head like he couldn&amp;#39;t believe they were still hanging around blocking his doorway your entrance is around back the elevators don&amp;#39;t work so lima reminded him we waited and waited the elevators work they just give priority to the market rent side you&amp;#39;ll get an elevator when none of these folks need one selima grasped the system and its logic in an instant the only reason she&amp;#39;d been able to rent in this building was that the developer had to promise that they&amp;#39;d make some low-income housing available in exchange for permission to build 50 stores instead of the 30 that the other buildings in the neighborhood rose to there was a lot of this sort of thing and she knew that there were rules about the low-income units what the landlords had to provide and what she was forbidden from doing but now that but now she saw an important truth even the prettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subcity apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it she had spent enough time as auntie salima helping to raise nadifa&amp;#39;s three kids to recognize the logic of a malicious child who wanted to make their displeasure known come on she said as she picked up a double arm load of bags and slogged back around the building to the poor door the apartment was wonderful the promised luxury of a private shower and a bathtub she could lie down and if she squenched her legs and put her chin on her chest but it was her bathtub and a single bed with a good mattress that no one else had ever slept on and when she folded that up she could fold down the sofa slab with its bright cushions raise that slab up a little higher and twist the coffee table so that its legs extended and became a dining table and you could seat three or four if they were all very good friends the walls had good insulation and what little sound leaked in from the units around her was inaudible so long as she ran the fan in the hvac at this lower setting something she could automate with the apartment sensors so it just happened whenever she was home the kitchen had all major appliances just as advertised the tosh the toaster the dishwasher a small thing that would hold all the dishes from a meal for one along with a mixing bowl or one of the toasters baking pans the fridge they all started working when she&amp;#39;d input her debit card number and they presented her with menus of approved consumables the dishes that would work in the dishwasher the range of food that would work with the toaster from bread to ready meals the washing machine would do a towel in sheets or two days clothes and there were dozens of compatible detergents she could order from its screen the prices all included delivery or she could shop for herself improved stores but there was always the risk that she&amp;#39;d pick up something that was incompatible with her model so it would be better for everyone concerned if she&amp;#39;d just do her shopping right there in the kitchen where it was the most convenient for everyone it was only a short walk to the tee and the stairs weren&amp;#39;t that bad going down in the morning coming back up was another story 35 floors was 75 flights of stairs she braved them about once a week and told herself that she was making herself healthy with such an intense aerobic workout having a place to live that was truly hers made a huge difference in her life something about the stability the confidence hell just having a reliable place to do laundry every night it all added up to the sense that she was finally exiting the endless limbo she&amp;#39;d lived in all her life her earliest memories were of being on the move with her parents one camp and then another then in uncle&amp;#39;s house for a while then another camp then temporary apartments than the crossing to america the camp the shelter all that time she&amp;#39;d had the sense that her life was on hold that she was floating around like a leaf in the breeze sometimes snagged on a branch and sometimes lofted up into the clouds but never touching down never coming to rest it meant that she never really thought about her life more than a few days in advance now in her own home she was thinking about what her future held some combination of luck and self-confidence was with her and within a month that she landed a full-time job as a bookkeeper for a company that serviced little mom-and-pop shops she&amp;#39;d had half a dozen clients and she&amp;#39;d tried to see each of them once a week even if she could have done most of the work from home she preferred setting up in the back room of a dry cleaner a convenience store little ice cream parlor and going over the logs from the registers and the invoices scheduling payments and chatting with the staff and the owners she learned that people liked to be warned of impending cash flow crunches and other potential snags she could see in their books and within a few months she was like more like a trusted advisor than a contractor she remembered their birthdays and bought them cards and when it was her 25th rolled around the owner of a vintage clothing store surprised her with a gorgeous japanese satin jacket from the previous century the black embroidered with a tiger that had faded beautifully over the years with a patina like a persian rug nadifa&amp;#39;s kids got into school and adifa even started to fill in the breathing room of time to herself meant that she could get a decent meal could take care of her hair clothes she&amp;#39;d always had a regal bearing but it wore with a natural open overburdened mother&amp;#39;s shoulder slump exhaustion lines hands always full of kids or toys or laundry the stains on our beautifully tailored clothes with some stability in her life nadifa&amp;#39;s underlying nature asserted itself her clothes were impeccable the lines of her face made her look serious and then when she&amp;#39;d crack a wicked joke and her eye would gleam the contrast between the seriousness and the humor was like something you&amp;#39;d see in an old painting nadiva&amp;#39;s kids never lost their mischief but school was good for them gave them some structure to work within and fight against they were behind especially abdulham the eldest at 12 nadifa wrote his ass making him work through his remedial homework assignments on his phone or even the big screen in their living room provided the little ones could be attempt down to mirror chaos nadifa&amp;#39;s place had two rooms one for the kids in the living room which was exactly like celima&amp;#39;s turning into a bedroom by folding down the table and folding up the sofa and folding down the bed a magic trick that had come to be done in the right order or everything snagged everything else in the middle of the room in an unholy knot that had to be carefully worked to loosen it things were good until the appliances started to disobey her she did the washing machine just because she could once you had a kitchen full of devices that would obey you the one that wouldn&amp;#39;t loomed ever larger and grew less and less tolerable besides she was single had no interest in swiping right on randos who never failed to disappoint she had become an obsessive watcher of jailbreaking videos especially since she&amp;#39;d followed a breadcrumb trail of ever more daring videos until she found the one that told her how to download the dark net tools that would get her to the real deal sites where you could download new firmware images swap tips and complaints and jolly along with thousands of lawless anarchists like ourselves who were toasting any damn thing they felt like the washing machine was the hardest yet and involved uncoupling a lot of water hoses she kept messing up the ring clamps which she never had to use before but she bored down on it with a bookkeeper&amp;#39;s resolve methodically trying one variation after another keeping a pan beneath the join to catch the leaks when she tested it out by turning on the water while she worked she switched to bread making videos because that was her new passion and now every time she saw nadiva&amp;#39;s kids they begged her for whatever her latest creation was she was making braided lobes now an egg bread called hala basting and rising their dough with egg whites to give the crust a high gloss a week later she made two important discoveries first shopping for detergent in the grocery store was a lot cheaper than buying it through her machine screen and second that her persistent eczema was actually an allergic reaction to something in the authorized laundry soap spring was springing and she&amp;#39;d been dreading sweating out the hot days in long sleeves to cover her flaking itching arms she bought three vintage short sleeved blouses and asked ned diefer to alter them to fit her as beautifully as all of nadifa&amp;#39;s clothes did she stopped short of jailbreaking her thermostat for now the thermostat was integrated with the building&amp;#39;s sensor grid including the camera over her door the cameras sprinkled around her apartment it recognized her even before she entered and spun the hvac system up to speed before she even closed the door behind her giving her just a moment of the claustrophobic gasping air of the shut up apartment before the white noise of the fan whisked a soft air current around and around what&amp;#39;s more it would watch her place while she was out at work and send her a video stream if it detected anyone in her place when she wasn&amp;#39;t there she liked that it comforted her she&amp;#39;d been robbed twice in the shelter in arizona and had gotten used to carrying everything she owned of any value with her at all times it was such a relief to be able to amass more valuable goods than she could easily carry the elevator was another matter when she&amp;#39;d moved into dorchester towers the building had only been in service for a few weeks and was at less than half occupancy as the apartments had filled up the number of market-rate people using the elevators had increased to the point where it could take a full 45 minutes to get a ride up to the 35th floor and when the elevator finally came for the poor of doors lobby there were so many people waiting and she&amp;#39;d end up riding in a squash of people facing somebody&amp;#39;s sweaty armpit and if she was lucky she&amp;#39;d be pressed against a wall behind her and not up against some strange man she was nearly certain that the times it had seemed like she was being creeped on it had been an accident of depressive bodies and not actually creepiness but she couldn&amp;#39;t be sure and anyway it still felt creepy one day she was sitting in nadifa&amp;#39;s living room drinking tea and watching nadifa&amp;#39;s eldest do his extra homework she and nadifa had been complaining about the elevators for a good 20 minutes it was a well established subject among all the subsidy tenants and they could really work themselves up about it nadifa&amp;#39;s eldest son looked up from his mouth mama why don&amp;#39;t we just use elevator captains do your homework nadifa operated on pure reflex when it came to her kids in homework but after a moment she added what&amp;#39;s an elevator captain abdiraham smile was luminous it is so cool if you are the first person in the elevator in japan you are the elevator captain you have to hold the door open button till everyone boards and then you have to press the door close button and all the floor buttons the elevator captain gets out before the elevator is empty the next closest person has to do it where do you hear this we did a unit on unspoken rules in social studies i&amp;#39;m doing an extra credit on the unspoken rules of refugee detention in america the teacher loves that she gets all solemn when i talk about it the other refugee kids think it&amp;#39;s hilarious i don&amp;#39;t think it&amp;#39;s hilarious nadifa was deadpan i think it&amp;#39;s very respectful she turned back to salima opened her mouth and started talking again and then turned it back to abra ibrahim why would we use an elevator captain his smile was twice as big we could just take turns staying in the elevator in the morning into the afternoon during the busy times it won&amp;#39;t stop for a pour if there&amp;#39;s a rich who needs it sure but if there&amp;#39;s a port in it it won&amp;#39;t stop for a rich until the poor is out nadifa mouthed a pore to salima and ruled her eyes salima covered her smile the kids knew what was what and they told it like it was meanwhile the plan was dawning on salima and nadifa it was weirdly elegant simple so there weren&amp;#39;t many things that could go wrong plus it used the fact that the rich people didn&amp;#39;t want to have to ever see one of them against them do your homework nadifa used her stern voice but her smile to salima was the twin of abdirahan&amp;#39;s salima the two weeks of the elevator captains were the best in the building&amp;#39;s short history from 7 30 to 8 45 in the morning and 5 15 to 6 30 at night there was effectively one elevator exclusively reserved for the use of the poor side of the building serving the 10 floors out of 56 that left 15 elevators for the rich people to use and so at first they may not even have noticed that their unseen neighbors living in their buildings off-limits spaces were getting up and down in a matter of minutes rather than waiting an hour or trudging the stairs but someone figured it out nadifa called salima at work using anger to mask her worry they were waiting in the lobby three security guards three and of course it had to be abdirahm who was the elevator captain it was abdiraham&amp;#39;s idea and he was the most enthusiastic captain in the building salima had even bought him a little peaked military cap from her vintage store client stock and he wore it at a jaunty angle during his shifts looking almost indecently cute he just brought the elevator back down to the ground and was mashing the closed door button with the lightning reflexes of a 13 year old race on video games when the other door opened the rich person door the door had never ever opened while any of them were in the car the three security guards demanded abdirahm&amp;#39;s name and papers and when he told them that they were in his home on the 42nd floor they refused to let him go get them instead they took him down into the basement using their security guard fobs to override the elevator&amp;#39;s controls they locked him in a windowless room with a reinforced door and conspicuous cameras in each ceiling corner and slammed the door on after a long time they came in to question him he knew that he was late getting home and that his mom would be getting worried they&amp;#39;re not frantic because nadifa didn&amp;#39;t do frantic furious yes frantic never furious was a lot more worrying honestly that was the thought that was in his head when he explained the whole elevator captain business to the security guards who questioned him and denied him water with the use of the toilet until it seemed that every drop of water in his body was in his bladder and trying desperately to escape they went over the story again and again and he began to cry because it reminded him of the questioning they&amp;#39;d had in the camps when he was tiny and again when they got to america when he was small this had been hard times with his father dying and refusing to show it sitting up ramrod straight and answering question after question praying they wouldn&amp;#39;t detect his illness and use it as an excuse to turn away the family the memory of that time overcame him and he sobbed and couldn&amp;#39;t answer their questions anymore and that&amp;#39;s when they called nadifa finally and she was furious but not at him she yelled at them about re-traumatizing a child and demanded their names and their badge numbers and even got out her phone and recorded it all even him crying which made him ashamed but still he couldn&amp;#39;t stop there would be a reckoning nadifa swore and salima thought she was probably right but that they would get the worst of it they did the elevators had cameras in them of course and it took the face recognition software all of 10 seconds to produce a list of all the door poor residents who&amp;#39;d used the elevator captain system with times and dates of each ride it took a day for the building management to merge those records with forum letters informing everyone who&amp;#39;d participated that they were in violation of their lease which forbade tampering with reverse engineering disabling bypassing disconnecting spoofing undermining damaging or subverting any of the building&amp;#39;s systems further violations would result in eviction proceedings be warned be told it was humiliating to be addressed in this manner even for salima who had been subjected to most humiliating of depredations over the years stripped searches and confiscations collective punishments and scouring of her most private data and memories to find an excuse to deny her humanity it burned after years of spinning in place she had finally started her life in earnest with a place and a job and friends who were nearly family this was a reminder that her current life was a tissue thin surface covering the world she&amp;#39;d lived in before for her whole life the world had been divided into the people around her people who knew her and who she was most of those were people who wished her well and supported her and she supported them back some of those people were bad people and meant her harm the camps were not paradise but even for them it was personal but there was another world vast beyond her knowing of people who didn&amp;#39;t know her at all but who held her life in their hands the ones who thronged in demonstrations against refugees the politicians who raged about the scourge of terrorists hidden among refugees and the ones who talked and code about assimilation and too much too fast the soldiers and cops and guards who pointed guns at her barked orders at her the bureaucrat she never saw who rejected her paperwork for cryptic reasons she could only guess at and the bureaucrats who looked her in the eye and rejected her paperwork and refused to explain themselves now there was a new group in that ladder class distant as the causes of the weather the building management company and its laser printer blasting out eviction threats to people whose names they didn&amp;#39;t know and whose faces they&amp;#39;d never seen over transgressions so petty and rules so demeaning the elevator captains had been a good chuckle a way for everyone from the poor doors and the poor floors to feel like they were mice outsmarting the cats the letters put them in their place roaches facing exterminators the elevators weren&amp;#39;t any better programmed than the disher or the bulangism or the thermostat or anything else really the big difference was access she could take her disher to pieces in her kitchen without having to explain herself to anyone but let her try that in the hallway in sight of the cameras and her neighbors and the situation would be very different to take out the elevators she&amp;#39;d need to take out the cameras and then work in the very small hours and still she would risk discovery so she&amp;#39;d need a disguise a maintenance outfit maybe she could also take out the lights and replace them with working lights she began to visualize the tab oh the taboo the tableau her down on her knees and shapeless coveralls with a hat hard hat pulled way down the lights out and illumination from floodlights that would shine right into the eyes of anyone who tried to snoop it was a fun daydream and she enjoyed the game of thinking how someone might catch her and how she might avoid being caught it was an especially good way to recover from the exhaustion of trudging 35 flights up or the frustration of waiting for 45 minutes with a cooling pod of tagine from a corner deli in her hand the smell driving her crazy she pushed around the wreckage of her tajin with a glass of cheap and delicious retsina a favorite among so many refugees who&amp;#39;d made the passage through greece and now a staple of refugees who hadn&amp;#39;t thanks to its popularity in the camps and looked out a tiny window and looked out a tiny window her tiny window at boston far below the charles swollen to its levees the ant like people swarming home under the street lights as autumn&amp;#39;s early night fell swiftly upon them she daydreamed about high viz and work lights about the tools she&amp;#39;d used to remove the front firefighter&amp;#39;s override panel to reveal the usb port beneath the subtle ways in which she would alter the building&amp;#39;s algorithms so that the faceless people would never discover her intrusion there was a ding at the door and the screen showed her abdirahm weirdly distorted by the camera&amp;#39;s auto focus on his face which was a good foot below the adult height camera mounting she waved the door unlocked and he let himself in looking from her to the tangent to the wine and then back to her have you eaten it was a phrase she remembered her mother saying to everyone who came through their door even when there was no food to share it had irritated her once and now she said it automatically on those rare occasions when someone came through her door yes ebd rahm said it too quickly but you&amp;#39;re still hungry it wasn&amp;#39;t a question she remembered being a 13 year old hungry all the time she got him a plate and spooned some tangine into it and then found a pita and popped it onto her toaster to warm it when it was done he looked at her with white eyes yours works it took a moment for her to figure out what he meant the toaster it works she said i fixed it then with a little pride the dishwasher too and the thermostat and the fridge show me eat first the food barely touched his throat on the way down she felt like she should probably make him eat slowly in her capacity in local parentis but she was as eager to show him as he was to be shown when she said show me it made her realize that she&amp;#39;d been bursting with secret knowledge that she wanted more than anything to share when he was done she put his dishes in the dishwasher and gestured him over so that she could show him the boot screen as she put the dishes through its paces with the fanciful graphics sheet installed of anthropomorphic dishes with bad attitude shower showering angrily in the trademark dishes spray he clapped and laughed and demanded to see the rest and then to be shown how to do it they say you don&amp;#39;t really know how to do something until you can teach it to someone else as selena looked upon the up the instructions again she realized how much of it had just been recipe following the first time around and how much she&amp;#39;d come to understand since so that the steps made sense she was able to explain to abdirahm why each step nearly as much as the what and the how of it and her heartbeat and her blood sang with the experience of mastery this was the antidote she realized to the feeling of distant people whom she&amp;#39;d never met who held the power of everything over her to be able to control the computers around her rather than being controlled by them you see she said it last as realization came out of the blue to her and left her wonderstruck and thunderstruck feeling like a revelating prophet you see if someone wants to control you with a computer they have to put the computer where you are and they are not and so you can access the computer without supervision a computer you can access without supervision is a computer you can change because all these computers are the same deep down when you get down to the programs underneath the skin a toaster and a dishwasher and a thermostat they&amp;#39;re all the same computer in different cases once you can seize control over that computer all of them are yours as the words left her mouth her messianic fervor was replaced by nagging self-doubt the knowledge that she was shouting triumphantly at a small boy who had only gotten out of temporary refugee housing a few months before and she felt foolish and small but then she saw the gleam in abdirahm&amp;#39;s eyes and it was the same as the gleam in her eyes and she knew that the two of them were sharing the vision our dishwasher and toaster haven&amp;#39;t worked in weeks he said oh dear she hadn&amp;#39;t even thought of that she had reflexively kept her work a secret from nadifa because she was doing something potentially dangerous and she didn&amp;#39;t want nadifa to point this out but that was before her vision we should do something about that she held out her hand let&amp;#39;s go see her mother she remembered to take the rastina with her on the way out the door perhaps nadifa would have been upset at the idea of hacking the family&amp;#39;s appliances but that was before she had spent two weeks parenting without a toaster or a dishwasher the hardship of eating everything cold or shelling out money she didn&amp;#39;t have her takeaways had softened any concerns she might have had and as she watched abdirahm show her sisters how to jailbreak all the apartments major appliances she radiated motherly pride he&amp;#39;s good at it selima said i only showed him once and now she gestured do you think we&amp;#39;ll all get in trouble with the building i mean they own the appliances selima shrugged they were getting a share of the money we spent before for the special bread and soap and so on but with both companies bankrupt they won&amp;#39;t be expecting any new money now if the companies do ever come back from bankruptcy and still no one here is using their products in a different knotted yeah that would be trouble she watched her kids who would cover who had the cover off the thermostat and were avidly watching a video on the big screen next to it where a person whose body had been mapped to a giant animated rabbit was explaining how to get it to fall back into a debug mode from which it would accept commands that let you override central commands to it but if it&amp;#39;s just the two of us will they even find out again if the system is designed well then yes it would be very weird for our apartments to generate much lower revenues than any of the others i once did a job where i saw that two of the self-checkouts at a pharmacy were generating 20 percent less money than the rest at first i thought it was they were broken but even when they were serviced and even moved they were always 20 down from the average they got sent away for analysis and they had been hacked and were being skimmed but you are good at your job and you care about that sort of thing unspoken no one good at their job who cared about anything was involved in the poor floors of dorchester towers i&amp;#39;m sure they care about money but perhaps they&amp;#39;re not so well designed she pondered it i don&amp;#39;t know they certainly care a lot about making money so the parts that help them make as much as possible would probably have their most attention i&amp;#39;ll search for it there must be other people in this situation the kids successfully tested their modifications to the thermostat and closed it up looking this way and that for something else to attack don&amp;#39;t forget the refrigerator nadifa said that&amp;#39;s a fun one very tricky they raced to the screen and started typing sending idle the eldest girl to read the model number off the label on the inside of the fridge door so lima knew that the kids wouldn&amp;#39;t stop at their own apartments of course she&amp;#39;d passed them in the hallways sometimes rushing from one apartment to the next the feeling this gave her was hard to pin down pride and excitement but also trepidation and a sick impotent sensation the echo of the slow role her stomach had done when she came home to find that laser-printed threat stuck to her door to all their doors on the elevators selima heard whispers have you done your place yet it&amp;#39;s so easy i&amp;#39;m baking bread again i found some beautiful dishes at a thrift shop such a treat to be able to wash them in the machine my little boy did it so easy then one night a knock at her door urgent and low opened it and found abdirahm wide-eyed and stressed her pulse quickened her armpits slickened and she thought oh no this is it tell me she said bringing him in i did the same as always he said a toaster i&amp;#39;ve done so many of them but something went wrong and now it won&amp;#39;t even turn on she whooshed out a sigh of relief he&amp;#39;d break some poor person&amp;#39;s toaster but he hadn&amp;#39;t gotten them all evicted let&amp;#39;s go see there were message boards for this eventuality of course and peterham wasn&amp;#39;t the first person to break an appliance there were tricks to get it to boot into an emergency shell from which the original factory operating system could be laboriously reinstalled and then they could start over choose device or helper reading her instructions and searching for help when they got unexpected error messages the toasters owner was an old serbian man who&amp;#39;d never spoken a word to her though they&amp;#39;d shared elevators and waited in the lobby together often enough she had assumed that he was a racist because that was usually the reason that white people didn&amp;#39;t speak to her she didn&amp;#39;t take it personally some people were just ignorant but it seemed that he was painfully shy and awkward and not necessarily racist he offered them tea and served them biscuits he counted out carefully from a packet that he took from a nearly empty cupboard in which he spotted a huge jar of food bank peanut butter and not much else he excused himself to use the toilet four times while he worked and she heard the painful dribble of an old man struggling with an enlarged prostrate prostate at one point she was ready to give up the toaster wouldn&amp;#39;t even show her a bootloader screen it was in worse shape than when she&amp;#39;d started but the old man looked so concerned and she knew he wouldn&amp;#39;t be able to afford a new toaster she imagined the cold meals of biscuits and peanut butter she&amp;#39;d been surviving he&amp;#39;d been surviving on since bullingism had shut down so she and abri rahama went back one step checking everything everything very methodically finally they noticed that the toaster was actually an earlier model than the ones everyone else had in the building cosmetically identical but with a model number that was a single letter off and when she searched on that she found a completely different set of instructions and these worked it was after 1am when they finished but she still went down to her place and came back up with the makings of grilled cheese sandwiches on homemade bread they had a midnight feast that gave her heartburn but was worth it the next time it was a kid she didn&amp;#39;t even know tapping at her door and asking for help with a bricked screen had apparently told his army of dorchester towers irregulars that she was a reliable source of level 2 emergency tech support the third time it happened she realized she needed to get ahead of the phenomenon if she ever wanted to have another moment to herself ambition she stared intently at the kid until he met her eyes nadifa&amp;#39;s presence helped es auntie he only called her that when he was in trouble the rest of the time it was salimo or with burned american familiarity sally which was a new one on her that she wasn&amp;#39;t entirely happy about the way you are doing this you and your friends it&amp;#39;s dangerous you are going to get caught and you&amp;#39;re going to get the people who live here cop too do you remember the elevator captains and what happened yes auntie we don&amp;#39;t want that again do we no auntie we don&amp;#39;t want to get everyone here thrown out into the streets do we no auntie so i want you to get all your friends to come to my place tomorrow after school 5 pm tell them anyone who doesn&amp;#39;t come is not allowed to jailbreak anything ever again he registered surprise you mean that if we come we can still jailbreak she smiled and met nadifa&amp;#39;s eye oh yes my boy we&amp;#39;re not going to stop breaking the rules we&amp;#39;re just going to be smart about it she bought snacks for the kids more than she thought she&amp;#39;d need but it wasn&amp;#39;t enough they just kept coming scratching at her door until she just propped it open and still they came cramming into her flat 10 kids 20 40 then she lost count they stood in the bathroom and passed around bags of sweets and pretzels filled your kitchen and stood on the counter one of them sat in her kitchen sink quiet please they shushed each other she turned to abdirahm is this everyone he made a show of craning his neck around the room nodded i think so he shook her head at him close the door please and someone turn up the air conditioning the smell was that goody musky smell of many children at various stages of puberty in an enclosed space a smell that brought her back to the kids dorms and camps she&amp;#39;d lived in i want to start by saying that i&amp;#39;m very proud of you all you&amp;#39;ve taught yourself some important skills you know and you&amp;#39;ve helped your neighbors when they needed it but you know that what you&amp;#39;ve done what i did too is against the rules and now that it&amp;#39;s happening so often it&amp;#39;s going to be harder and harder not to get caught getting caught is not an option can anyone tell me why a forest of arms shot up and the smell buffeted her again she pointed to a young girl chubby with a face full of clever mischief because we&amp;#39;ll all get thrown out of the building selima nodded what else the girl thought for a moment also everyone we&amp;#39;ve helped will get thrown out selima nodded again very good it was good to hear that the kids knew the stakes it was also scary to hear them uttered aloud and scarier still to think of the level of recklessness the kids had exhibited even though they&amp;#39;d understood those stakes i&amp;#39;ve been researching this because i don&amp;#39;t know any more about this than any of you i learned by watching the same videos and reading the same message boards as you but we&amp;#39;re not the only ones going through this and there&amp;#39;s been a lot of talk about it the companies that made disher and bulanism have been bought by new owners who say they&amp;#39;ll be back online soon and so we&amp;#39;ll need to figure out how to stay safe once that happens she checked to see whether they were following all this it was pretty esoteric this idea of bankruptcies by distant companies what did these kids think about the appliances they jailbroke did they see them as just weirdly non-functional gadgets they had to work around like the bad touch screens at the shelter or did they see them as the enemy something that they were at war with the weapons of a distant adversary who wanted to subjugate them to its will the truth is that no one seems to know exactly how the companies will monitor what we do especially after they have new owners a lot of the original programmers were fired and some of them are on those same message boards or at least they claim to be those original programmers and there&amp;#39;s a real race on to see who can come up with a reliable way to trick the monitors into thinking that we haven&amp;#39;t been jailbreaking we&amp;#39;re definitely going to have to change people&amp;#39;s appliances so that they generate some billings for the companies because they&amp;#39;d notice if no money was coming from dorchester towers right there was nodding they were following along they were bright kids she thought kids who&amp;#39;d spent their whole lives outsmarting gadgets that were designed to control them here&amp;#39;s the assignment we&amp;#39;re going to read all those message boards and bring back what we find figure out which people seem to know what they&amp;#39;re talking about then we&amp;#39;re going to go back to every apartment and tweak all those appliances so that they&amp;#39;re safe that&amp;#39;s assuming we come up with a decent plan if we decide that no one knows what they&amp;#39;re talking about we&amp;#39;re going to restore every appliance to its factory defaults on jailbreak everything that prompted groans and even a few cries would protest but she held her hands up i know i know but better to have bad appliances than no home there are millions of people around the world in the same situation as us anyway and they&amp;#39;re all trying to solve this problem so perhaps it won&amp;#39;t be so hard as all that i know that reading message boards isn&amp;#39;t as much fun as messaging about gadgets but if you want to be able to keep jailbreaking you&amp;#39;ll have to do the research too it was too crowded for much q a but abdirahm put his hand up anyway she called on him auntie there&amp;#39;s one thing i can&amp;#39;t figure out only one she smiled and he smiled back for now when i bring a notepad to school i can&amp;#39;t write anything i can write anything i want on it i don&amp;#39;t need to ask the company that made the pen or the store that sold me the notebook how i can use it i can tear out the pages and make paper airplanes or doodle or copy down what the teacher says when i put on a pair of shoes i can wear any socks i want i can walk anywhere i i can walk anywhere i want in my shoes i can wipe myself with any sort of toilet paper that got a laugh but i can&amp;#39;t toast any bread i want in my toaster she waited he&amp;#39;s struggling to find the words what&amp;#39;s the what&amp;#39;s the question of deirdre him he shook his head and shrugged i guess i don&amp;#39;t know i just want to understand how it can be against the law to choose your bread but not your socks what makes a toaster different from shoes she opened her mouth to answer but discovered she didn&amp;#39;t know the answer right up until that moment she felt like she had some intuitive sense of which things were objects with rules and which were objects without rules felted so readily that she hadn&amp;#39;t even named the two categories until just that instant now that she tried to come up with a rule to explain the difference between the two she found she couldn&amp;#39;t that is an excellent question she said it last why don&amp;#39;t you research the answer and tell us all what you find out he rolled his eyes and let out a showy groan but he looked excited by the challenge he really was a bright little fellow she chased the kids out of her flat buzzing with conversation joking and shoving and posturing in the way of kids the smell lingered after they were gone and she turned up the hvac to 140 of its nominal capacity a feature whose purpose had mystified her when she jailbroken the thermostat but now she was thankful for it she tried to go to sleep but abdirahm&amp;#39;s question nagged her so she raised her bed until it was a sofa and worked on the big screen for a couple of hours discovering to her relief that reading about technology law was better than a sleeping pill there was something about the woman standing over her on the tee that snagged her attention she wasn&amp;#39;t anyone selema knew but something about her seemed so familiar she kept sneaking glances and then it hit her the logo on the woman&amp;#39;s id badge dangling from a lanyard at eye height selima knew that logo though she hadn&amp;#39;t seen it in months it was the bullyingism logo a styled slice of braid in a single continuous line three squiggly heat lines rating aiding off it the woman caught her staring and they made eye contact she was young and white and had messy brown hair and there&amp;#39;s contacts that computer people wore to help them stare at screens all day without messing up their sleep schedules the light from the ad lining the top third of the car cast a rainbow sheen over them bulangism selena said the woman nodded enthusiastically that&amp;#39;s right they&amp;#39;re in boston they are now they got bought out by a fund on route 128 and then they recruited a bunch of and then they recruited a bunch of us mit kids to bash them back into shape and get them stood up again the woman was younger than salima had thought an undergrad or maybe a young grad student salima tried to picture the kids who crammed into her apartment as a classmate of this young woman getting tempted away from their studies by deep pocketed company they were smart but were they smart enough how smart did you have to be she suddenly wanted to know more about the woman do you have a bulangism selema nodded do you the woman snorted god no i mean that business model authorized bread i wouldn&amp;#39;t put one of those in my house if you paid me why do you buy one i didn&amp;#39;t it came with the apartment unplug it and put it in a closet get a real oven this had literally never occurred to selima she had no idea how much a toaster oven cost she could probably afford it not that she had any closet space and then there were all the other people on the poor floors the old ones the ones with kids the ones who didn&amp;#39;t have her skills or couldn&amp;#39;t speak english she couldn&amp;#39;t buy ovens for all of them let alone dishwashers and all the other appliances you don&amp;#39;t seem to think much of them the woman rolled her eyes it&amp;#39;s a good job and the technical challenges are interesting hell even the basic units do a good job as far as that goes but the lockdown is obnoxious selima couldn&amp;#39;t help herself i think so too they&amp;#39;ve brought in a whole team to find people who are jailbreaking their units a snitch squad now that&amp;#39;s a job i wouldn&amp;#39;t do a girl&amp;#39;s gotta have standards they&amp;#39;d gone past the lima stop she didn&amp;#39;t care she could always ride back the other way the conversation was too good to end i&amp;#39;m salima wyoming the girl said and shook her hands were slim and clever typists hands though they were in a very public place salima felt a bubble of inattention around them that urban thing where you pretended you couldn&amp;#39;t see the people pressed up against you it was something she&amp;#39;d gotten good at in the camps where there were so many times when the skill was necessary to keep her sanity when do you think you&amp;#39;ll have the servers up against lima said the guy next to her stood to debark as they pulled into a station how many more stops would they have suleiman thought she&amp;#39;d stay on one stop past wyoming get off and cross to the opposite platform and ride back if she got off at the same stop she&amp;#39;d seem like a creepy stalker wyoming startled at the question oh i didn&amp;#39;t even think of it this must have sucked for you how long has it been four months five with no oven you must be so sick of waiting for us huh five months lima said it certainly has been a long time you poor thing i would have just jailbroken mine there&amp;#39;s been so much of that honestly it&amp;#39;ll be months before they sort it out i don&amp;#39;t blame the users either i mean i agree they both laughed the car was mostly empty now and there were only two more stops left before they reached the end of the line where did this girl live with a fancy coder&amp;#39;s salary she could afford a beautiful place in the middle of cambridge not a place out here and needham selima took a risk she liked this woman is it hard jailbreaking no it&amp;#39;s not hard at all i mean how could it be look it&amp;#39;s just basic security basic math you want to run a program on your toaster that lets you override the bread check we don&amp;#39;t want you to run that so we have something in the operating system it checks to see whether the program you&amp;#39;re running is the one that we&amp;#39;ve approved to check that we look at a cryptographic signature we check to see whether the program has been signed by a private key that we keep secret let me back up in crypto we have this idea of private keys and public keys they come in pairs anything the private key scrambles only the public key can unscramble and vice versa if the public key unscrambles it it must have been scrambled by the public key if the private key can unscramble it it must have been scrambled with a public key do you get it suddenly so much of what you&amp;#39;d read on the message boards made sense public keys and private keys coming in pairs what one does the other undoes i can code message with your public key and my private key and only you can read it and you know only i have written it it came out slowly but understanding was flooding through her it was so elegant that&amp;#39;s exactly right well a booleanism ships with the company&amp;#39;s public key and all the code updates that get sent out are signed with the private key if the public key can unscramble that signature then the toaster knows to trust the update because it has to have been signed by someone using the company&amp;#39;s keys more understanding like the final act of a murder mystery where all the clues slot together and the confusion is transformed into an orderly series of events she must jumped in to say something but stopped herself because she thought she knew where this was about to go and she didn&amp;#39;t want to tip the stranger off by knowing too much she was a nice lady sure but she worked for the enemy that would work a hundred percent of the time because the math really works something that&amp;#39;s been scrambled with one half of the key pair can only ever be unscrambled with the other half like it would take billions of years to fake it even with all the computers in the world working on it together but there&amp;#39;s a weakness salima&amp;#39;s heart pounded she knew what wyoming would say next because the mystery was in its final act and she found she and she was front running the detective as he revealed the killer and the details of the crime the public key that your bullyingism checked is stored on your bullyingism itself it&amp;#39;s buried in a secure chip that&amp;#39;s not supposed to be changeable but there are so so many ways around that sometimes there&amp;#39;s a mistake and a secure chip something that lets you change the key more often there&amp;#39;s the boot up sequence where the computer and the booleanism learns what kind of computer it is and where it needs to look for public keys that&amp;#39;s also in a secure storage but there has to be ways to update it because programmers make mistakes and when we do our stuff can be hacked by bad guys so we want to be able to send you new code for your appliances so booleanism owner goes online figures out how to change the key or change where the computer looks for the key and swaps in a key that the owner has a private key for and now they can sign any code and get the booleanism to run it boonlangism hired skilled engineers to spend years locking down their products and they get defeated in hours by teenagers with amateur equipment it&amp;#39;s not that those coders were stupid but they were sure doing something stupid slim a smile but you don&amp;#39;t do the stupid part you work on something else wyoming smiled back that&amp;#39;s right i&amp;#39;d rather eat glass than do that stupid  i work on the adaptive cooking you know using sensors to make sure the food is perfect it&amp;#39;s super satisfying and delicious because i get to i get a test bench where i actually cook stuff from time to time that&amp;#39;s a nice perk yeah and there&amp;#39;s a gym too which is a good thing because it&amp;#39;s only two weeks in and i&amp;#39;ve gained three pounds the train pulled into a station and there was an incomprehensible garble from the pa as the conductor announced something with the start selema realized that he was telling them they&amp;#39;d pulled into the end of the line and everyone had to get off she stood up and tried to figure out how she could remain on the platform and ride back without tipping off wyoming that she&amp;#39;d stayed on the train just to pump her for info wyoming shrugged into her backpack and selima slung her purse and put it under her arm and they stepped off the train and drifted toward the escalator up to the surface level salima resigned herself to wasting a subway fare by going up to the street level and walking around the block and then heading back into the station at the foot of the escalator wyoming put one of her clever long fingered hands on her arm and drew her to one side i have a confession she was blushing oh my stop was about eight back i was just enjoying talking with you so i stayed on the train i don&amp;#39;t really get to talk about my work much and you&amp;#39;re a good listener selima couldn&amp;#39;t help herself she laughed my stop is also several back green street i was enjoying our talk so much that wyoming&amp;#39;s eyes widened and she put her hand to her mouth you&amp;#39;re not serious she giggled and that sets salima off and their laughs fed one another until they were both gasping as the conductor announced that the train they just debarked was ready for boarding and they staggered right back into the seats they just vacated on the ride back selima learned that wyoming had come from cincinnati that she&amp;#39;d done an undergrad in electrical engineering and computer science at mit and started a master&amp;#39;s in applied math when the booleanism recruiter had offered her a huge signing bonus stock in a new company that the hedge fund was spinning out and a big monthly paycheck salima told a little of her own story cautiously because she&amp;#39;d met lots of very nice white people who were not very nice at all when she said the word refugee by the time they reached her stop wyoming had texted her set of messages addresses messaging and addresses and her number and offered to help selima anytime her bulangism was acting up they shook hands when she got to go got up to go and salima looked back at wyoming why she took call said call her why and found her looking back at her and they smiled one last time and waved goodbye riding up the escalator she had a brief bout of paranoia their conversation had been so easy and warm and pleasurable could it be a setup did bulang ism spies who tried to entrap suspected pirates befriending them on t&amp;#39;s by the t by positioning themselves with prominent id badges at eye height she shook her head and lined up for the crush at the turnstiles it was absurd the world was merely a small and odd place and there was no disputing that in the lobby that night she ran into three of the kids she&amp;#39;d lectured in the crush of her apartment along with assorted parents sweating in the unexpectedly warm early spring thaw coats draped over their arms with woolly hats and scarves poking out of the pockets the kids called her auntie and she smiled at them and introduced herself formally to the adults two moms and a grandfather familiar faces she&amp;#39;d seen in the elevators and corridors but never had cause to chat with the adults knew who she was that was clear and they treated her with an odd reverence as the bringer of technological freedom she recognized the relationship from the camps where there were always fixers and hustlers who could get things done lay hands on special food and liquor get you a phone voucher or fix your phone after it gave up the coast she had never thought of herself in those terms but with her newfound understanding it made perfect sense even to her the small task with these neighbors seemed like a continuation of the chatter with why on the train part of the long conversation about the subject that had taken over her life taking charge of the technologies around her the ones that were used by those distant and faceless forces to take charge of her why had made a big deal out of the hopelessness of trying to control someone with a gadget that they could take home and abuse in private and that made perfect sense to her now and it was a revelation the sense of hopelessness of being surrounded by sensors and devices that were designed to push her around was transformed into a sense of inevitable triumph over the fools who thought they could make that work what had why said it&amp;#39;s not that those coders were stupid but they were sure doing something stupid that newfound confidence sang in her as she heated a bit of goat curry and yolaf rice and her bulangism and sat down in front of the living room&amp;#39;s big screen to poke around for a way to keep all their gadgets under their control without tipping off the manufacturers she didn&amp;#39;t find any immediate solutions but that didn&amp;#39;t matter she was reveling in her new expertise rereading message board threads she puzzled over before chasing down references and learning more and more and more the ding at her door brought her out of her reverie and she glanced up at the corner of her screen to see and deiter him at the door the clock read 8 45 pm nearly his bedtime she let him in and got him an apple from her fruit bowl he was always hungry i found out how a toaster isn&amp;#39;t like a pair of shoes he said around a mouthful of apple she sat back and made a go on gesture it&amp;#39;s copyright law you know like the warnings at the start of movies that didn&amp;#39;t sound right to her but she tried not to let it show on her face if he was wrong they could figure it out together in the meantime he was a 13 year old boy gone off and read a bunch of boring explanations of technology law because she told him to and that deserved a respectful hearing i know them a long time ago in the last century they made it a crime to he scrunched up his face as he struggled with an awkward memorized phrase to circumvent an effective means of access control if there&amp;#39;s a copyrighted thing you know a movie or whatever and there&amp;#39;s something else that controls access to it you can&amp;#39;t remove that control or do anything with it not even for a good reason they can send you to jail for doing it five years in a half a million dollar fine for a first offense okay that sounds like it could be true but what does that have to do with toasters is there copyright bread he shook his head that&amp;#39;s where i got confused too but it&amp;#39;s not the bread that&amp;#39;s copyrighted it&amp;#39;s the software and the toaster all the stuff we change when we jailbreak it the part where you have to reset it and do something weird and complicated to get the fix to work that&amp;#39;s the circumventing she could tell he&amp;#39;d practice the word and the copyright that that&amp;#39;s the code we&amp;#39;re changing so if it has code in it and there&amp;#39;s an access control you&amp;#39;re not allowed to change the code even if it belongs to you another huge piece of comprehension was sliding into place for now more than half understood posts from half remembered threads slotting themselves into orderly procession she nodded vigorously and dirham i think you&amp;#39;re right that sounds exactly right you did very well you should be proud of yourself he beamed around a mouthful of apple he was down to the core and was gnawing away at every bit of flesh on it with the practice of someone who&amp;#39;d grown up hungry what a strange world where this boy was teaching her about copyright law from another century just talking about it is a crime which is why you can&amp;#39;t find anything on the regular net why you have to use the dark net tools to find out more telling someone how to jailbreak a device is the same as jailbreaking it it&amp;#39;s called trafficking like with drugs and it&amp;#39;s the same five years in prison for the first offense her guts did a slow roll how many people had she taught to jailbreak how many five-year prison sentences had she amassed she missed her old ignorance just a few hours ago when none of this had occurred to her and the forums were all a mystery from the joy of comprehension to terror in minutes what was the name of that law abdirahm consulted his phone it&amp;#39;s section 1201 of the digital millennium copyright act of 1998. she made a note thank you of dieterhem i&amp;#39;m going to do some more reading he let her give him another apple on the way out of the apartment she made herself a cup of coffee just regular drip that she wished she could go up to nadifa&amp;#39;s for a pot of strong gritty ethiopian coffee and tiny cups and started to read about the law salima was glad when nadifa came down the next night after she&amp;#39;d come home from a day at the little sandwich shop going over their books and dragging her thoughts back over and over from their endless loop of worry about the risks she&amp;#39;d subjected all her neighbors to nadiva brought down a bottle of verstina ratzina and a plate of little kymac filled pieces of baklava dripping with honey salima&amp;#39;s earliest memory was of this flavor a pure sense memory from a time when she was a very little girl maybe even a baby just starting on solid food it was a taste she&amp;#39;d forgotten in her years in the camps and the first time she&amp;#39;d encountered it in boston it had been a revelation a shock that had her crying and thinking of her parents so long lost it was so easy for an old normal to make way for a new one so easy to blot the memories of that old normal that was a skill that had served her well but in that bite and it&amp;#39;s honey she&amp;#39;d counted the cost for the first time nadifa knew about this but she also knew how much salima liked the cakes because she understood what it was like to embrace the unthinkable parts of your past that had made you who you were it was a bond the two women shared i haven&amp;#39;t seen you in so long i have to hear about you from amd ibrahim she used to she used a swallow of wine just loose away the honey the tartness and sweetness mixing he&amp;#39;s such a bright boy you know i know too bright always since he was small asking why why why all the time never being satisfied with because i said so it&amp;#39;s a sign of good character i was that way once once nadifa snorted you&amp;#39;ve spent the past six months reprogramming all our apartments selima you&amp;#39;ve never stopped girl she shook her head i think i made a mistake yes i know you do that&amp;#39;s what abdiraham told me he thinks you&amp;#39;re scared i never told him that yes he&amp;#39;s a smart boy remember i am scared she tapped her screen showed nadiva her search alert two weeks ago bulanism got restarted today it was disher she tapped again look at this compliance assurance llc a new company received 28 million in funding for product to discover hacked appliances that&amp;#39;s just today&amp;#39;s news your defended and looked thoughtful i don&amp;#39;t pretend to understand all of this but i know some of it enough to appreciate why you&amp;#39;d be scared the question is what will you do about it salima stared at our screen she didn&amp;#39;t want to meet nadifa&amp;#39;s eyes i&amp;#39;ve been trying to find a solution there are so many people in the same situation as us people who jailbroke everything after the company started to go under and now don&amp;#39;t know what to do i could tell the kids to go around and put everything back the way it was nadifa snorted again no you couldn&amp;#39;t i could tell them to but they might not do it they wouldn&amp;#39;t do it they&amp;#39;re kids if they understood risks they wouldn&amp;#39;t join uprisings and march in the streets and the world would be a simpler place not a better one of course but simpler then i&amp;#39;d better keep searching for a solution those assurance compliance llc people are coming for us nadifa patted her shoulder you&amp;#39;ll find something she did an hour later and it wasn&amp;#39;t good hello is this why yeah she sounded tired though it was only nine o&amp;#39;clock at night aren&amp;#39;t techies all supposed to be night owls who&amp;#39;s this it&amp;#39;s salima we met on the tea oh hi sorry rough day and i was just dozing on the couch what&amp;#39;s up selima had known that if she&amp;#39;d planned this call she&amp;#39;d have chickened out before she could make it she opened her mouth and nothing came out it&amp;#39;s lima it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s kind of an emergency are you okay she was much more awake now anxious i&amp;#39;m okay but she broke off can you meet me somewhere i can come to you maybe a coffee shop a pause and stretched then yeah okay i&amp;#39;ll text you a place okay okay i&amp;#39;ll let you know when i get off the train okay um it&amp;#39;s just around the corner from me salima didn&amp;#39;t really think that enforcement agents for bulang is a more disher were listening in on her phone but she still invinctively thought that it would be better to have this talk with as little technology in the loop as it was possible she fretted on the t and text from texted from the escalator the diner was fully automated which meant that there weren&amp;#39;t any humans around to eavesdrop on them but it also meant that there were cameras and mics everywhere she grimaced and tried not to stare at them as she waited for y to show up she came in wearing a jean jacket it was a faded t-shirt with a picture of an anthropomorphic baseball with arms and legs and a big sea on its jacket which salima deduced had something to do with cincinnati salima didn&amp;#39;t have any days with logos from back home was there a libyan baseball team benghazi bengal tigers hi there why said and tapped out a quick order on the table with a long with long practiced ease and the conveyor that snaked around the backs of the booths lurched into life and started juttering toward them with a squeak thank you for coming the hot box on the conveyor reached their table and gasped open lid yawning wide while i extracted a cup of tea with a packet of cookies balanced on its pressed cornstarch saucer sure have you ordered anything the grilled sandwiches are good if you&amp;#39;re hungry they&amp;#39;ve also got really good boba is this how mit students ate thanks selima said she quickly scanned the menu and jabbed at a celery soda which sounded vile but cost exactly the minimum per person amount noted at the bottom of the menu the hot box closed itself and the conveyor started to move again and thanks again for coming i mean it like i said it&amp;#39;s no problem normally i&amp;#39;d be wide awake at this hour but my sleep&amp;#39;s been screwed up from work stress lately and i had a bad night last night it was good to hear from you again honestly she smiled it was pretty with good white teeth and a lopsided dimple she was so young even if she was a year older than selena i called you because i didn&amp;#39;t know who to talk to i she breathed i helped my neighbors jailbreak their things their things everything dishers bulaying-isms thermostats fridges tvs phones everything she checked herself not the elevators though she laughed laughed the elevators i live on a poor floor low rent the elevators only stop first if there&amp;#39;s no one from the regular floors waiting or riding it can take a very long time she stopped smiling and that&amp;#39;s why all your appliances needed jailbreaking they came with the apartments we&amp;#39;re not allowed to touch them it&amp;#39;s in the beast we could get thrown out i mean all of us she stared at salima with wide eyes she opened her biscuits and ate one still looking at selima sucks it was selena&amp;#39;s turn to smile we&amp;#39;d think so too so what you want to revert everything before you get caught we don&amp;#39;t want to get caught oh oh you want to keep doing it huh i know there&amp;#39;s some stuff out there that&amp;#39;s supposed to work i&amp;#39;ve been looking there&amp;#39;s a lot of advice and it all contradicts itself i can&amp;#39;t tell what works yeah that sounds like online tech advice all right she sipped her tea selima tried the celery soda prepared to discreetly spit it back down the straw but it wasn&amp;#39;t bad why i had a far away looking she said give me a sec she got a screen out of her pocket and poked it at what added a while showing it her retinas after a few seconds then tapping some more i think i have an idea you&amp;#39;ll help us she snorted why wouldn&amp;#39;t i help you you could lose your job she shrugged i wasn&amp;#39;t gonna last there anyway i can tell that already there&amp;#39;s other jobs selima had never been fired in her life she couldn&amp;#39;t imagine it when things were hard at work she were twice as hard she felt gratitude to why who was risking her job for her but there was a slithering serpent of disapproval of wise breezy attitude towards her career did she even understand how lucky she was perhaps if she did she wouldn&amp;#39;t be so quick to help salima keep kept her face carefully neutral what about getting arrested it&amp;#39;s a five-year prison sentence for jailbreaking only if it&amp;#39;s commercial if i don&amp;#39;t charge all they can do is sue me i&amp;#39;ll cover my tracks i have an idea anyway do you know what a virtual machine is selema didn&amp;#39;t and she could tell that if she just said no then why would explain something to her and that would lead to why doing something to help her and wasn&amp;#39;t that what she&amp;#39;d hoped for but she couldn&amp;#39;t just go along please stop salima said it was a mistake i can&amp;#39;t ask you to risk yourself for us she blinked hard at the tears that sprung up in her eyes the kids in my building i showed them what i was doing and they took it up and now they could all be punished along with their families because i wasn&amp;#39;t careful about letting other people take my risks this is a bad situation but i&amp;#39;ll cover my tracks but i&amp;#39;ll cover my tracks isn&amp;#39;t going to save you everyone who got in trouble thought they&amp;#39;d covered their tracks i thought i&amp;#39;d covered my tracks i&amp;#39;m sorry why i really shouldn&amp;#39;t have called you she picked up her jacket and started to stand why put her hand on her arm and squeeze stopping her please don&amp;#39;t go salima i can cover my tracks it won&amp;#39;t be hard at the very least i can help you figure out how to restore everything so that you won&amp;#39;t get into trouble okay look i&amp;#39;m a grown adult i can decide what risks i take the tears are going to breach any moment salima firmly pulled her arm free thank you wyoming i&amp;#39;ll call you when it&amp;#39;s all sorted out and we can have a drink to celebrate okay she didn&amp;#39;t give her a chance to answer the tears came out when she reached the street and she wished she&amp;#39;d grabbed some napkins on her way out of the diner she never cried never not since her parents had died anyway why was she crying now she was almost asleep when she answered her own question she cried because she had something to lose for the first time since she&amp;#39;d lost her parents it was a terrible realization like she&amp;#39;d been betrayed by her own happiness everything she&amp;#39;d attained was something she had to lose if she had not only tried if she had only not tried to make a life for herself she wouldn&amp;#39;t have anything at stake if she hadn&amp;#39;t made friends she wouldn&amp;#39;t have any friends to have betrayed with her knowledge drunk recklessness if she hadn&amp;#39;t basked in the admiration of those kids the kids wouldn&amp;#39;t have put themselves and their parents in harm&amp;#39;s way she wasn&amp;#39;t almost asleep anymore she went back to her screen dug into the dark web and got the recipes to put everything back the way it had been she practiced on her own in the kitchen making sure she had it down cold once she&amp;#39;d mastered it her whirling brain finally decided to let her sleep but the sun was already rising she set an alarm for an hour later and when it went off she made four pods of dried out nearly undrinkable coffee she found at the back of a drawer and drank it as a penance a sour acid liquid scalded her tongue and rolled their guts all the way to her first day of the job when she got back that night there was a crowd of kids and their grown-ups waiting in the lobby as usual they called out to her she hustled past them and climbed the stairs sleeplessness waiting her legs sweat coursing down her neck and back down her face and into her eyes the exhaustion was like a dead thing on her back as she staggered into the apartment flopping down on the sofa and letting her eyes close just for a moment that turned into an hour as she crashed only to wake with a guilty start she had work to do she walked up to nadifa&amp;#39;s apartment after the 35 floors she&amp;#39;d climbed on her way home another six should have been easy but her legs and butt were sore and tired and she had to drag herself by the handrail she realized that she&amp;#39;d forgotten to eat dinner and then realized that she couldn&amp;#39;t remember she&amp;#39;d eaten lunch it&amp;#39;d been a long time since she&amp;#39;d missed any significant amount of sleep she was out of practice nadifa took one look at her and let her into the apartment and piled her with plied her with mint tea and small cakes that she&amp;#39;d sworn she had no appetite for but which you couldn&amp;#39;t stop eating ed ibrahim was nominally doing his homework but selima could tell he was burning with curiosity and eavesdropping so after her second cup of tea she called for him to join them he turned around on the screen seat and raised it up to table height abedi rahm i&amp;#39;ve made a decision and you&amp;#39;re not going to like it he had a good poker face kids who grew up in the camps got good at controlling the information they transmitted to the people around them she could tell he knew what was coming though and that he didn&amp;#39;t like it when i started jailbreaking i didn&amp;#39;t know what i was doing i didn&amp;#39;t understand the risks but now i do thanks to you and my own reading and abedibraham the risk is just too great there&amp;#39;s no way to know for sure what the companies will do to to catch us and if they do we could lose everything even if we could fool the companies the management of the building will notice when they don&amp;#39;t get their share of the money now that the companies are being restarted the people your friends have helped out didn&amp;#39;t appreciate what they were being signed up for none of us did but now that we do we have a responsibility to help them out his poker face was slipping his bottom lip was trembling his knuckles were white where they grip the table&amp;#39;s edge nadifa gave him a warning look salima&amp;#39;s heartbreak for him after all he&amp;#39;d been through he&amp;#39;d found a way to take charge of a world that had never given him the tiniest amount of control and she was going to make him undo it all she wanted to cry and she could only marvel at his self-control she put her hand at nadifa&amp;#39;s arm i&amp;#39;m sorry abdirahm you have every right to be angry it&amp;#39;s not right but it is necessary that&amp;#39;s the most difficult kind of situation she took a deep breath i can&amp;#39;t do it without you that&amp;#39;s not me trying to make you feel good you are the one who taught the other kids and only they know which apartments they worked on and what they did i couldn&amp;#39;t get the other kids to listen to me without your help will you help me she could tell nadifa wanted to order him to say yes and she squeezed nadiva&amp;#39;s arm gently but firmly let him make up his own mind he started his hands for a long long time his breath was ragged she wondered if he was going to cry after all but then he raised his head and blinked his wet eyes at them i&amp;#39;ll do it auntie she knew he&amp;#39;d taken the time to really think it through and had come to the right conclusion after that careful deliberation and not because an adult had told him so not even because his mother would never have tolerated refusal i knew you would have iran she squeezed nadiva&amp;#39;s arm one more time she&amp;#39;d be very proud of this one i am she said she petted her son&amp;#39;s hand she knew what this had cost him too suddenly sulima was so very tired she&amp;#39;d been tired before but this was an all-new height or maybe depth for a moment she literally couldn&amp;#39;t stop her eyes from closing she fought them open again nadifa was looking at her with concern we&amp;#39;ll take you downstairs they each got a shoulder under her arms abdirahm was as tall as his mother already and drunk walked her to the elevators and pushed the button time wavered and felt like an hour before the car arrived inside open and it smelled of expensive perfume from someone from the parallel universe of non-poor floors who&amp;#39;d finished their ride and free to the elevator for a grudging ride for the likes of them nadiphos sent abdirahm back upstairs once they were in salima&amp;#39;s apartment then helped her change into a nightie and adjusted the sofa to a bed configuration screwing the table down and dropping its leaves so it became a bed table she brought out the comforter and draped it over selima and in her half-conscious state selima recovered a memory long buried of a time before a time when she lay in her crib and her mother had tucked her in the memory was so sweet without any of the sorrow that usually went with the memories of her mother she drifted away into dreams with a smile that was still with her when she got up a few hours later to pee and swipe at her teeth to clear the rotten taste from her mouth before falling back into bed a sense of purpose is a wonderful tonic for anxiety now that suleiman knew what she had to do the helpless fretting was replaced by a boundless energy after an early breakfast she ran rang in a different to confirm that fd rahama was awake and she bounded up the stairs two at a time and showed him how to reset the factory defaults on everything in their apartment just as she&amp;#39;d done in her place she made him run through it twice to make sure he had it and then made him write out the procedure from memory on a notepad he was a quick study as she knew he&amp;#39;d be now you need to spread the word can you have the children come to my place again tonight after school and before supper say 6 p.m he wasn&amp;#39;t happy about it they will hate this i know i hate it it&amp;#39;s like giving up but giving up is smarter than fighting a battle you can&amp;#39;t win that&amp;#39;s as important a lesson as any you know defended there are much harder ways to learn that lesson she got a far away look abadi rahm looked miserable i know this is very hard salima said you were a hero when you taught your friends now you&amp;#39;re going to be that frightened boy who make them put it all back i&amp;#39;ll take the blame i&amp;#39;ll explain it to them just bring them to my place alright a night&amp;#39;s sleep had done her so much good her day went so smoothly it might as well have been oiled she found some small systematic errors in the books of the dry cleaners that explained why his profits had been consistently down and he confessed that he&amp;#39;d been about to fire his sole employee for stealing and was so relieved that he hugged her she got a seat on the tee both ways spring had finally stopped oscillating between freezing and basting and settled on a sunny breezy happy median then scuttered the fluffy clouds overhead like a screensaver and the new buds on the trees all seemed to have burst open overnight she bought a much bigger bag of snacks for that night&amp;#39;s meeting mindful of the previous meeting shortcomings she had to shop at the bulangism isle of the corner market for bread and she bought coffee pods and dishwasher soaps in the adjacent sections that brought her down making the last block home a slow march she thought back to her first meeting with y about why is horror that anyone would use a bulangism salima was earning well now even saving money every month a savings that had grown for the months when she&amp;#39;d been able to choose her groceries from anywhere in the shop there were places to live that weren&amp;#39;t dorchester towers places where she could choose which appliances she used they were they were more expensive so many of the rental ads had fine print notifying prospective tenants that their lease prohibited alteration of the landlord&amp;#39;s revenue earning appliances but they existed with a roommate or two she could afford one but dorchester towers wasn&amp;#39;t just where she lived it was a little community a place where she fit where she had her friends and people who were something like family like nadifa and the kids who called her auntie people who understood what she&amp;#39;d been through imagine living in a house full of wise girls who seemed so young with an unbridgeable canyon between their life experiences and her own the kids in the elevator lobby asked her excitedly about the meeting that night and she understood that abedibraham hadn&amp;#39;t given them any hints about the agenda she couldn&amp;#39;t blame him they crowded in and ate all the snacks there may not be enough snacks in all the world to fill all those little bellies this isn&amp;#39;t going to be easy to hear the whispering and grins and fidgeting ended in an instant and every eye was on her so much for her perfect day since our last meeting i&amp;#39;ve learned some things important things she told them she told them about the law about the prison sentences about the new companies that have been formed out of the remains of the old ones and the teams they&amp;#39;d hired to catch cheaters like them the risks to them and their families eviction and worse she watched their faces go grave and then graver the chubby girl the bright one who&amp;#39;d put up her hand last time was the first to speak when salima finished how do we solve it it was a terrible moment the worried faces brightened and the whole room&amp;#39;s attention was intensely fixed on her the kids were bright enough to understand the risks but not bright enough to figure out that she couldn&amp;#39;t do anything to fix it we can&amp;#39;t we have to put it all back the way it was undo it all factory defaults for everything before anyone could say anything she said it&amp;#39;s over the kids faces said it all shock then disbelief then defiance muttering a word no quietly then louder than racing from kid to kid no yes she shouted holding up her hands i&amp;#39;m sorry i&amp;#39;m so so so sorry but yes we have to do this it was a mistake she held her hands higher it was getting louder i mean i mean it we&amp;#39;ll find something else you can help me but first we have to do this some of the kids were leaving she saw the raham shaking his head it has to be this way more of them left please the last one there i&amp;#39;m sorry was all he said before he too left she wouldn&amp;#39;t surrender of course she started with the people she&amp;#39;d serviced working from the upper floors downward doing two or three per night abid ibrahim came along sometimes and helped but he was clearly unenthused about the work and he made mistakes that set her back as often as he helped she didn&amp;#39;t think it was exactly on purpose but it certainly wasn&amp;#39;t exactly an accident either many times she was tempted to text why and set up a meeting to pump her for information about the state of bulanism and how long she had before they were up and running again she had reasoned that the building&amp;#39;s owners wouldn&amp;#39;t expect full reviews straight away after the toasters started working again it would take a while for people to notice that their appliances were working again and switch from whatever arrangements they&amp;#39;ve made during the outage but there would come a time when it would be obvious that it had all been fiddled unless she put it back working in her neighbor&amp;#39;s apartments she saw their kids kids who had watched her jailbreak their apartments and gone on to do the same for their neighbors the kids who&amp;#39;d walked out on her when she told them they&amp;#39;d have to put it all back the way they&amp;#39;d found it kids who watched her out of the corners of their eyes pretending to do their homework she made a point of describing the consequences of getting caught for their parents in a loud voice and in eye-watering detail it took her five nights and all weekend to work through the apartments she&amp;#39;d personally jailbroken on monday night she came home from work bolted a humiliating pre-packaged approved dinner from the microwave and headed out to the top pour floor seven floors above she waited briefly for an elevator then admitted that the only reason she&amp;#39;d tried for an elevator was that she knew it was a prime time and that she might kill half an hour even 45 minutes waiting for a car to come putting off what would come next by that much she took the stairs and knocked on the first door beside the stairwell after carefully noting its number in a little notebook she brought with her in her neat bookkeeper&amp;#39;s hand the woman who answered was a little familiar someone she&amp;#39;d shared an elevator with once or twice salvadorian or honduran she thought yes she was a little older than salima hi she&amp;#39;d rehearse this but her mouth dried up and the words wouldn&amp;#39;t come hi i live in the building and that was wrong did some of the buildings kids help you with your kitchen appliances or maybe your thermostat the woman looked suspicious this wasn&amp;#39;t how it was supposed to go i don&amp;#39;t think so selema&amp;#39;s cheeks and ear tips burned i&amp;#39;m sorry to bother you honestly but look the day the toaster stopped working i figured out how to get mine to work again then i showed some of the kids and they went all over and did it for everyone else but then i found out that the manufacturers can tell who&amp;#39;s done this and they can come after us for it the landlords too they gotta cut up the money we spent so i&amp;#39;ve come to put it all back before you get in trouble before we all get in trouble she gave her best most trustworthy smile the woman shook her head i never had any kids around here salima was sure she was lying the quickness of her answer the way she looked around as she said it look if i don&amp;#39;t do this you will get caught you could lose your home worse they could send the kid who did it to jail that wasn&amp;#39;t quite true based on what wyatt told her but it was nearly true the kid could get in trouble she was sure and so of course so could she please i told you no kids can i see then the woman looked angry i mean maybe you forgot can i check just to be sure i have to go the door clicked shut before she could get another word in she was conscious of the camera on her so she kept her face neutral as she made a note in her notebook then took a deep breath and moved on to the next apartment it was going to be a long night work became a kind of dream or waking nightmare in which she returned over and over to the real job racing through the floors of the building knocking on the doors begging near strangers to let her make them poorer make their lives worse word had gotten around and she got curious stares and sometimes hostile ones in the elevators and abdirahm wasn&amp;#39;t even pretending to help her anymore she didn&amp;#39;t complain to nadifa because she didn&amp;#39;t want to have to confess all her sins to the last real friend she had she got better at pitching her case at the door anyway and almost everyone let her into their places to do her business which she&amp;#39;d also gotten better at working through appliances with a quick practiced hand in private moments at night searching for elusive sleep she admitted to herself that some of the kids were probably going around undoing everything she&amp;#39;d done with the complicity of the adults who should have known better every time she rode home from the dry cleaners she looked for why on the tee not sure if she would be happy or frightened to see her she never found her but then one afternoon as she was trying to find her own errors and the work she&amp;#39;d done closing the quarter for an ice cream shop numbers swimming before her eyes her phone chirped i need to talk to you why she opened her little notebook and looked at the apartment numbers she&amp;#39;d gotten through more than three quarters of the places most of them had let her work she would have been reverted by kids but perhaps it was still enough maybe wyatt found a trick that would let them keep their jailbreaks after all something foolproof but only fools believed in foolproof tricks i finish at five i&amp;#39;m on mass ave today near harvard square i can meet you 5 15 at the cambridge at the cannon in cambridge common okay a foolish hope fl grew in samila despite her best efforts she&amp;#39;d never forgotten the excitement that wyatt&amp;#39;s spoken with when she&amp;#39;d started thinking about how to help them all beat the booleanism the bulanism the absurd certainty she&amp;#39;d radiated that she could outsmart the whole industry perhaps she could though of course she couldn&amp;#39;t summer was in full roast and it was hot and sticky with few students left this late in the year she found herself with a folding chinese fan she&amp;#39;d bought from a cart a few days before when the heat came on and the humidity soared she&amp;#39;d thought that arizona was hot but this humidity was trying to strangle her from the inside out a feeling that cold to mind dark and buried memories of the mediterranean crossing when she&amp;#39;d been a small child sense memories of thirst and nausea and stink she found herself and looked around but she didn&amp;#39;t see why until she was right there because she&amp;#39;d cut her ash blonde hair sensibly short for the heat and put some pink tint in it she was thinner than the last time they&amp;#39;d met two paler long hours selima guest we came why said hi salima said i came she was still embarrassed by their last meeting i&amp;#39;m sorry about before it was very nice of you to offer but yeah i know the risk i understand it sort of i mean i know i can&amp;#39;t really understand what you&amp;#39;ve gone through but she armed sweat from her forehead i mean i get it sorry too and don&amp;#39;t be sorry she was really sweet i&amp;#39;ve been putting it all back everything reset to factory defaults no one wants to help me though the kids hate me for it that sucks it does look i wanted to meet with you because there&amp;#39;s something happening at bulanism i thought you&amp;#39;d be interested in but you can&amp;#39;t talk about it because i&amp;#39;m not supposed to be telling anyone without getting a non-disclosure first is that okay i mean can i tell you and you&amp;#39;ll keep it just a secret she nodded of course so we were almost ready to relaunch and then the new owners bought two more of our competitors and folded us all together into a single platform now we&amp;#39;re a lot bigger and they have all these plans like letting people buy jailbreaks by the day or the week so they can cook anything they want they&amp;#39;ve been watching the darknet boards they know that everyone&amp;#39;s been figuring out how to jailbreak their while we&amp;#39;ve been getting restarted and they figure all these people could be customers but instead of paying for food we sell them they&amp;#39;d pay us to use food someone else sold them salima almost laughed it was a crime if she did it a product if they sold it to her everything could be a product it&amp;#39;s weird i know but here&amp;#39;s where you come in they&amp;#39;ve got this research unit anthropologists and data scientists and marketers and they want to talk to people like you find out what you&amp;#39;d pay for different kinds of products they want to see if you&amp;#39;d sell the package to your neighbor if you could get a cut of the money from them like a commission they&amp;#39;ve got one plan you could teach those kids you were working with to sell paid unlocking to the people in your building and they&amp;#39;d get a commission and you&amp;#39;d get a commission because you recruited them it&amp;#39;s a pyramid scheme it&amp;#39;s an affiliate program the kids wouldn&amp;#39;t be allowed to recruit people to work under them we&amp;#39;d hand pick the affiliate recruiters and they&amp;#39;d be the only ones who&amp;#39;d get the double commissions leaders it&amp;#39;s still just an idea but when i heard about it i immediately thought of you i mean it solves all your problems doesn&amp;#39;t it your kids get to go legit even make some pocket money you get to use your skills and the respect of your neighbors to help them out and earn some money for yourself oh and of course you&amp;#39;d get to be you&amp;#39;d get to permanently unlock everything that we make so you can demonstrate it for your neighbors like i say it&amp;#39;s not a sure thing but i thought you could come in and meet the team talk it over make a call she trailed off searching salima&amp;#39;s face for a clue about her reaction salima carefully maintained a neutral expression why she said it&amp;#39;s so kind of you to think of me really but suleima slumped i don&amp;#39;t know there&amp;#39;s a but but i can&amp;#39;t say what it is exactly it&amp;#39;s a weird idea why i said i know but maybe you could think about it for a while i don&amp;#39;t need an answer right now selima wanted to just say no but she didn&amp;#39;t even as something inside her was recoiling at the offer another part of her understood that why might be right this could be the very best option how long do you think we have until you have to decide lima had thought of why as her ally every bit is offended by the lockdown world of dorchester towers as she was but why had been working long hours for bulangism and its new sister companies she thought the problem was that salima didn&amp;#39;t want to get into trouble salima had been thinking that too but that wasn&amp;#39;t the problem bulanism itself was the problem the whole rotten business was the problem until mulanism finds out what we&amp;#39;ve been doing and gets us evicted why shook her head didn&amp;#39;t you hear me that won&amp;#39;t happen they&amp;#39;re trying carrots these days not sticks they want to treat people like you as customers not crooks okay sure but how long until that happens i looked hurt i don&amp;#39;t know soon though a week or two they&amp;#39;re really excited about the unlock upsell but they want to do a little research on the price point before they roll it out so that&amp;#39;ll delay things for a while but the owners aren&amp;#39;t going to keep paying everyone&amp;#39;s salaries forever without any money coming in a couple weeks she could get through the places she&amp;#39;d missed then start over again on the top floor and work her way down again impressing on people that it was essential that they tell her if they&amp;#39;d let one of the kids fiddle their stuff again yeah looks lima i think you should really consider this it&amp;#39;s a good plan good for everyone i will her voice sounded unconvincing even to her own ears why looked even more distraught selima felt bad she&amp;#39;d only wanted to help you had dinner i&amp;#39;m crazy hungry do you like fish there&amp;#39;s a fish place near here that&amp;#39;s amazing the kind of place where visiting parents take their kids for a good meal during the school year ever since i started taking home a paycheck i&amp;#39;ve been meaning to go back but i&amp;#39;ve been too busy would you join me i&amp;#39;ll pay i don&amp;#39;t want to have to eat a loon no she wanted to say no i have to go home and get back to work no i can&amp;#39;t afford your charity because you might have to testify against me no i don&amp;#39;t need to be friends with anyone from your world yes she said that would be very nice she was too hungry to say no and she was sick of overpriced pre-packaged microwave meals she got home after 10 much too late to ring anyone&amp;#39;s doorbell and have an awkward conversation about their appliances the elevator had been blessedly responsive which was a good thing since between the wine and the stress of the recent weeks she wasn&amp;#39;t going to be able to climb the stairs or even stay awake very long in the lobby the elevator smelled of expensive hair product telling her that it had been recently vacated by someone who&amp;#39;d gone out the other doors on the way to a nice date or maybe on the way back relieving the babysitter a midnight snack in an oven that cooked anything you told it to the smell lingered in her nostrils citrus and tobacco as she trailed her hand down the corridor wall to her apartment she was about to open her door when she saw the words scrawled there and fat permanent marker  off the letters were large angry and yet uncertain like they&amp;#39;d been written by a child or perhaps someone who was just learning english she was so tired she licked her finger and rubbed at the ink it didn&amp;#39;t even smear she let herself in and went to the camera feed for her door discovered it was blank perfectly erased so maybe it was a kid who&amp;#39;d written it a kid who&amp;#39;d learned to search the darknet for ways to control technology designed to control them a kid who was outraged at being asked to forget how to do that and to go back to being meekly controlled would a kid like that ever work on commission installing official unlocking codes in the poor floor apartments of dorchester towers was there enough money in the world and if there was did she want to be the one who used that money to convince that kid to give up on that uncompromising ferocity she&amp;#39;d buy some solvent on her way home from work the next day she ran into nadifa on the stairs the next morning struggling with the stroller chevying idle the older girl and carrying yasmine the toddler salima took the stroller an idol leaving nadifa to sling yasmine on her hip and to hold the handrail with her free hand nadifa sighed and thanked her you look terrible nadifa said three flights down i didn&amp;#39;t sleep very well you haven&amp;#39;t been by in so long the retsina is starting to pile up in my refrigerator her eyes welled up and she blinked hard she&amp;#39;d missed nadifa and missed the days when she&amp;#39;d overflowed with the excitement of mastering the building the rearguard action of putting everything back had filled her with a buried and unspeakable shame and just thinking of showing her face to nadiva that made her feel sick but it was so good to see her again i&amp;#39;m sorry it&amp;#39;s been hard she swallowed then she told nadifa about the words on her door using careful euphemisms in front of the kids she told nadiva about the cameras she stopped short of telling her about abdirahm abandoning her she wanted a friendly shoulder to lean on not retribution for a 13 year old that&amp;#39;s terrible i&amp;#39;ll come by when you get home from work and we&amp;#39;ll clean it together it&amp;#39;s okay i can do it she thought of telling nadifa about the offer from why but she didn&amp;#39;t nadifa might tell her to do it or tell her not to her arms were back on fire when they reached the ground level thank you so much nadifa said as she unfolded the stroller normally i wouldn&amp;#39;t try to leave until the rush was over but idol has to see the dentist this morning idol smiled up at her showing cute gaps in her teeth nadifa strapped the baby into the stroller and then she swept salima up into a fierce hug it will be okay you have been through so much worse than this you are strong salima embarrassed herself by snuffling up snot but the alternative was leaking it all over nadifa&amp;#39;s shoulder and a deep had the manners to pretend not to notice anyway so she was able to salvage a little dignity at least she didn&amp;#39;t get a seat on the tee that morning and as she hung from the strap rocking back and forth with the train&amp;#39;s motion she stared idly at the ad over her head eyes unfocused with sleepiness and it was only as she got off the train that she realized it had been an ad for the new booleanism she got a text from y on the escalator affiliate program is a go can i hold a place for you in it you in she marked it unread so she&amp;#39;d remember to reply to it later every time she looked at her screen that day at work she saw the alert for it it was very hard to concentrate she made a mistake early on and ended up spending an hour unraveling it it wasn&amp;#39;t a good day i think i need to talk to abdirahm nadiva looked puzzled then talked to him salima swirled the wine in her glass the problem is that he hasn&amp;#39;t been very eager to talk to me he&amp;#39;s angry adi come here came out of his room wooden faced i&amp;#39;m doing homework auntie salima said she would like to talk to you all right said in a tone made that it was anything but he got the idea of the pay to unlock as quickly as she laid it out for him quicker than she had it&amp;#39;s like my school books i can read them at school or at home but if i want to study in the park i have to pay to unlock them i didn&amp;#39;t know they worked that way he shrugged it&amp;#39;s okay i don&amp;#39;t need to study in the park she told him about the affiliate program so you could make money for your family to help out around the house your friends too and auntie salimo would make money too nadifa said so she can save to get her place of her own she looked sharply at nadifo why would i want to leave dorchester towers nadifa snorted who wouldn&amp;#39;t want to leave if they could move somewhere with a proper elevator with real appliances a place where you were wanted nadifa trapped in her apartment every day until the elevator rush ended or having to drag her stroller and the baby in a small child down 42 floors worth of stairs of course she wanted to go but how would that ever happen she she&amp;#39;d been a tailor in somalia but she hadn&amp;#39;t worked in a shop in more than a decade and by the time yes mean was in school for full days it would be nearly 20 years even if she could find work a seamstress&amp;#39;s salary wasn&amp;#39;t going to pay rent in a boss in boston and support three kids salimo was careful with money like careful like a bookkeeper she lived on her own and had saved up some real money especially when she&amp;#39;d been able to cook any food she wanted and could buy ingredients instead of ready to eat meals she could move out now if she wanted to find a housemate and if she signed up one or two more bookkeeping clients she&amp;#39;d be able to get a place with on her own within a year but she never thought of leaving dorchester towers it was where she belonged i wouldn&amp;#39;t go i want to see your kids grow up don&amp;#39;t be ridiculous we&amp;#39;d come and visit as soon as you can go you should abdirahm watched the two grown women politely argue and salima wondered how much of the subtext he was getting she wondered how much she was getting it&amp;#39;s not right to charge her neighbors to use their own things he said breaking in nadifa was about to say something to him about respecting his auntie but salima cut her off do you think so of course he said it so quickly so firmly that she knew there was no room for argument why because it&amp;#39;s their homes why should they have to pay to use the things in their homes i agree with you but the company would say it&amp;#39;s because they chose to live in a place where the rent was lower because the landlord thought he&amp;#39;d make money from their appliances it was a deal and that&amp;#39;s their end of it and they can pay more somewhere else if they want that choice can we pay more nadifa snorted not until you graduate from college and get a good job adi he looked at salima i know i didn&amp;#39;t say i agreed with it it&amp;#39;s just what they&amp;#39;d say there are lots of deals you can make and the deal here is that you have to use their products the way that makes them the most money or pay to unlock them they&amp;#39;d say that you&amp;#39;re getting more choice because they&amp;#39;ll let you buy an unlocking but we already have that choice she looked sharply at him no you don&amp;#39;t not if you&amp;#39;ve restored your appliances to defaults he looked guilty for an instant and said okay we had that choice and we can&amp;#39;t and we can get it for ourselves again for free you showed us that slow roll in our guts again he&amp;#39;d unlocked it all everything in their home and they were going to get caught everyone was going to get caught if abedibraham wouldn&amp;#39;t do what she asked who would she took a deep breath what i&amp;#39;m about to say isn&amp;#39;t how i see things but it is how the company sees them they say that you don&amp;#39;t have that choice that they have that choice and they&amp;#39;ll sell it to you but if you take it without paying that stealing again that&amp;#39;s what they think he was fast but you&amp;#39;d be able to unlock all your things without paying right so why isn&amp;#39;t that stealing bush little sharp boy with smarts of someone who has to think fast all the time with bad consequences for getting it wrong because i&amp;#39;d be working for the company against your neighbors but you say you wouldn&amp;#39;t leave here because you belong here but you get treated like you&amp;#39;re better than us he was losing his cool still a boy after all she didn&amp;#39;t let herself get angry sneaking a look at nadifa she saw her friend was very thoughtful forgetting to tell off her son for disrespecting his elder i don&amp;#39;t think i&amp;#39;m better the company just saw my skills and offered me a job like your mother getting money when she sews someone&amp;#39;s clothes they&amp;#39;d pay you too remember i wouldn&amp;#39;t take their money he looked at his mother i have homework to do do your homework got up and went into the other room they didn&amp;#39;t look at each other what will you do nadifa asked selima shrugged i&amp;#39;ll have to think about it why sent her two more texts before bed which she didn&amp;#39;t answer she fell asleep at last with the hum of the air conditioning in the fridge compressor in her ears her phone rang while she was brushing her teeth why she spat and rinsed and didn&amp;#39;t answer it rang again and again hello i&amp;#39;m sorry to be such a nag but it&amp;#39;s all kicking off here the board loved the affiliate id and they&amp;#39;ve pressed ahead with it throwing tons of engineers at it they want to do a big release next week press conference and everything with the affiliates in eight countries they love your story and want to feature you you can even get some money for the publicity work you know to help you out with missing work i&amp;#39;ve been at the office since 6 00 am it turns out i&amp;#39;m the only one here who knows a real life jailbreaker and that makes me the resident expert she killed nervously i&amp;#39;m sorry it just happened but we need to move everything is waiting on you she couldn&amp;#39;t think of anything to say hello selima why salima i know it&amp;#39;s crazy but this solves everyone&amp;#39;s problems please say you come down at least and talk to them i have to work where we can come to you she felt trapped i&amp;#39;m working at home today she got to do that every week or two and there were a lot of little reconciling jobs to do perfect that&amp;#39;s just perfect i&amp;#39;ll text you when we know our arrival time okay why but she&amp;#39;d already hung up after that selena couldn&amp;#39;t concentrate at all she listened to the sounds of her neighbors leaving for work then the mothers with the little kids moving through the halls heading to one another&amp;#39;s places accompanied by piping children&amp;#39;s voices for playdates and friendly com commiseration the numbers swam onto her big screen refusing to cohere she pastes the tiny apartment then the corridor her little notebook was in her pocket the apartment numbers and the dates and her notes she&amp;#39;d been in so many of these places estimated arrival time 15 minutes okay she signed okay she went back into her place to listen for the downstairs buzzer at least they were arriving after the morning rush so that she wouldn&amp;#39;t have to wait long for an elevator so they wouldn&amp;#39;t have to wait too long for an elevator indeed they were at her door just minutes after she buzzed them in why and two guys one white and one indian both in bulangism teas both with youthful haircuts and big polished straight toothed smiles thank you for seeing us the indian one said he was called paul but his business card said pritpal he&amp;#39;d refused tea and water as had the white guy rawg but wyatt accepted a coffee and was watching intently as selima fed a pot into the machine and put a cup beneath then injected the pot and threw it out it&amp;#39;s okay she said why i was very excited about it why had the good grace to look a bit chagrined paul didn&amp;#39;t notice she&amp;#39;s been very excited about you too we&amp;#39;ve heard a lot about you and honestly you couldn&amp;#39;t be more perfect for what we have in mind we think it could be very big he held up his hands arms spread as wide as he could in her crowded room very big good for us good for you and good for people like you people like me people who fall between the cracks people who can&amp;#39;t afford to pay full price for everything but who sometimes want to splurge on more features for a special occasion it&amp;#39;s really the best of both worlds a new kind of flexibility the old booleanism owners were blind to that but we&amp;#39;re totally energized about the possibilities of working with our customers not against them we hope you&amp;#39;ll be part of that there was a space in the conversation here where selema would say something positive everyone in the room wanted her to say something positive the conversation had a shape or maybe a direction and she could pat it on the back give it a little push in that direction and the next stop would be something glad from paul or y or the white guy and then back to her push and push and push until it had picked up enough velocity that no one could stop it it seemed petty to refuse then but she could see that a positive word here was a ticket on an express train with no more stops that sounds very nice but i don&amp;#39;t think i&amp;#39;m the right person for you well i looked shocked paul and the white guy looked wooden for a moment and then pasted on smiles of course we respect your decision but i wonder if you could tell us why we&amp;#39;ve come a long way to talk about this with you after all maybe if you explain your reservations we can learn something from you that will help us do better in our next meeting she didn&amp;#39;t say that she hadn&amp;#39;t asked them to come over i just don&amp;#39;t feel right about it i understand your idea here that you&amp;#39;re selling us more freedom but that&amp;#39;s only because our appliances take away so much freedom to begin with and then sell it back but no one forced you to choose a booleanism you chose a product that came with restrictions and in return you got a good deal on your rent do you have a booleanism toaster no i don&amp;#39;t why not it&amp;#39;s not the choice we&amp;#39;ve made the white guy said we choose a different deal that&amp;#39;s the great thing about freedom we all get to choose the proposition that suits us best soleima managed a tight little smile you keep talking about choosing this is the only place i could get into and it took months how is that a choice you were living somewhere before this place right a refugee shelter you could have chosen to stay there right she wanted these people gone i don&amp;#39;t think that is much of a choice he shook his head the point is that you had a choice and that&amp;#39;s because appliances like ours made it economical for landlords to build subsidy units she didn&amp;#39;t say anything she was getting angry and she didn&amp;#39;t like to be angry she didn&amp;#39;t want to show these people that she was angry we want to help you people let you get more out of your lives give you more choices what about the choice to jailbreak my things she didn&amp;#39;t ask it honestly i can&amp;#39;t understand your decision here choice is good so long as i don&amp;#39;t choose not to help you she didn&amp;#39;t say it can&amp;#39;t you see we want to help you i can see that you want me to help you get more money from people like me she still didn&amp;#39;t say it maybe we should go why said unlike the two men she was paying attention to salima&amp;#39;s reactions we&amp;#39;re just having a friendly conversation the white guy said we don&amp;#39;t have to be back at the office for an hour anyway so lima can you just tell me what the problem is she heard herself say i would rather help my neighbors save their money than spend it what is that supposed to mean unlocking your toaster could save tons if you&amp;#39;re smart about bulk groceries and what you cook again her voice said we&amp;#39;d save more money if we didn&amp;#39;t have to pay to unlock our toasters i don&amp;#39;t see what that he stopped oh yeah sure but you know what happens if you get caught doing that i would rather help them not get caught you snorted everyone gets caught how would you know people you never caught would be the people you never knew about she met his eyes he was angry now red flushed a vein showing in his forehead yeah maybe so but that&amp;#39;s not gonna be you lady we know what&amp;#39;s going on here you know you&amp;#39;re on our radar i mean i hope you&amp;#39;ve got all your right because if there&amp;#39;s anything out of order here we&amp;#39;ll see it we&amp;#39;ll know who to talk to first too why opened her mouth shut it she gave seleema an apologetic look she was also flushed paul stood up i think we&amp;#39;d better be going thank you very much for your time salima she watched them leave then after the door closed opened it silently and put her eye to it to watch them call the elevator wanting to be sure they left without talking to her neighbors moments after they pressed the call button the doors opened and there was a surprise looking woman already in the car a woman she&amp;#39;d never seen before dressed in a smart summer weight suit smart makeup smart little haircut someone from the other side whose elevator should never ever open on a poor floor and the three booleanism employees nodded at her as though nothing was amiss and stepped into the car when they turned around she caught wise eye for a moment and was shrugged and grimaced in an eloquent expression of ambiguous apology was she sorry for the way her boss had spoken for the threat for the fact that the elevators came for them when they called them but not for selima selima climbed six floors to nadif&amp;#39;s floor and rang her bell they only had to wait a few minutes in the school office before abdirahma appeared mama he looked worried and then when he saw salima confused come on we&amp;#39;ll talk as we walk nadifa said giving him a complicated look that silenced any questions that was a look they must have had a lot of cause to use over these years though not for some time when they were out on the street and hustling toward the bus stop salimus said we need to restore everything in the building to factory defaults yeshuka said i thought you&amp;#39;d already done that yes and you and your friends have undone it started to deny it she cut him off i&amp;#39;m not a fool of d rahm i don&amp;#39;t even disagree but i turned them down today i told them i would not help them sell unlock codes to our friends they&amp;#39;re angry and they&amp;#39;re going to try to punish me for it they&amp;#39;re going to watch us all very closely and they&amp;#39;re working with the owners of dorchester towers that was a guess but it was a good one after all the landlords were getting a commission from them so they had to have some kind of relationship so we need to get everything put back before they catch us he walked several steps in silence then it won&amp;#39;t stay that way too many people know how to jailbreak i know that she said but we need to invent a better way why had talked about virtual machines and there was a clue in there the message boards were as usual full of disagreements speculations insults both spam and obscenity abedi rahm had grudgingly gone through selema&amp;#39;s notebook and pointed out the apartments that he knew to be jailbroken including a few that she&amp;#39;d never been able to get to admit to it working together they&amp;#39;d gone door to door again bringing along nadifa for moral support ringing doorbells long after any decent hour working until they were so tired that they started making foolish mistakes they&amp;#39;d take turns working in each apartment one of them reverting devices and the other one talking to the people there especially the kids about the importance of leaving everything as is just for a little while until they could come up with a better solution searching for virtual machines on the message boards made things a little clearer but it also sent them down a rabbit hole of reading about computer science ideas neither of them really had the background for thankfully there were a lot of bulanism and disher owners around the world who were also unqualified to understand virtual machines but nevertheless insistent that someone explained them and they were able to piece together something like comprehension it helped between between them nadifa salim and abdibrahim could read several seven languages computers it seemed were in some important way all the same every computer shared a common heritage an architecture that let it run any program that could be written in computer languages in software code some computers were faster or had more memory than others and some of them expected the instructions to be written in different ways but even the slowest computer could run the most complicated programs though it might take years to accomplish a task that another computer could come complete in an ibling but you didn&amp;#39;t need to translate computer code to get it to run on a different computer instead you could write a computer program that was in effect a computer itself you could write a computer program that could run on a disher whose purpose was to run booleanism programs yes you could convince your dishwasher that it was a toaster when the toaster inside your dishwasher gave the instructions to turn on a heating element or take a picture of the food in its bay to test its doneness the dishwasher running its computer could send it any data it wanted and it would blindly trust it this was the virtual machine an imaginary computer inside another computer as if that wasn&amp;#39;t weird enough you could run a booleanism virtual machine inside of booleanism making the toaster pretend to be another toaster which seemed like a kind of flourish or game to selima until abedira got it in a flash and explained it if you have a toaster that has been jailbroken you can run a virtual toaster inside it then you can run a regular factory version of the toaster software on the virtual toaster whenever the factory contacts your toaster it sends the communications to the virtual toaster the virtual toaster tells it how to answer to seem like it&amp;#39;s unmodified it&amp;#39;s like taking an enemy hostage and making him tell you what to tell his commanding officer so he won&amp;#39;t get suspicious he rubbed his hands together does it work he shrugged and pointed at his screen they say it does but they wouldn&amp;#39;t know for sure would they i wish i could ask why she said she would know you said she told you about virtual machines yes but she was just thinking out loud maybe she thought it over and found a flaw in the plan he couldn&amp;#39;t even look up from the screen which where he&amp;#39;d been avidly reading about virtual machines you could ask her it wouldn&amp;#39;t be fair to her nothing is fair he said it so nonchalantly that it shocked her such a small boy such a big thought she went so far as to look up wise number but she didn&amp;#39;t dial it instead she got her bulanism and helped ibrahim install a virtual machine on it they were going to have to get very good at this the day that bulanism relaunched every virtual machine inside every toaster and dishwasher disher dishwasher chimed awake and announced the new exciting unlocking offer these alerts loaded in little windows they had to tap to unsize and read before dismissing them they all spent the day with tight shoulders and quick movements jumping every time they got a buzz sure it was someone at home telling them they&amp;#39;d be raided or that everything had stopped working or that the landlords were at the door telling them to get out but the day passed and then the next and the next cautiously one muscle at a time they relaxed salimo was very good at baking she had discovered nordic breads and made four little cardamom buns every morning dusted with cinnamon she ate one and gave three to the first three people she met in the stairwell on the way down still warm leaving behind a smell that was better than the nicest with perfume you might encounter in the elevator after it had been vacated by someone from the other side she was waiting for the bulanism to chime when her screen rang she almost didn&amp;#39;t answer it blocked number and early hour almost certainly a spammer but she slit her finger across it salima why&amp;#39;s voice was tight a little out of breath selena&amp;#39;s shoulders wound himself as tight as tennis rackets somewhere in her mind she&amp;#39;d always expected this call yes the virtual machines you&amp;#39;re using aren&amp;#39;t fooling them anymore they sent out an update that is designed to break the break on bms i just checked your building you&amp;#39;re just hanging out there now there&amp;#39;s no way they&amp;#39;ll miss it you&amp;#39;re just hanging out there now there&amp;#39;s no way they&amp;#39;ll miss it oh she squeezed her eyes shut the boulangism chimed and its door swung open the smell of cinnamon and cardamon and fresh bread the sound of her blood thundering in her ears oh but there&amp;#39;s a fix a fix the vm i use for testing it&amp;#39;s undetectable it has to be or i wouldn&amp;#39;t be able to do simulations in my lab i&amp;#39;ve packaged it and know why yes selena you aren&amp;#39;t going to risk everything from me you are going to get caught because i didn&amp;#39;t help you selima hadn&amp;#39;t thought of it like that the people in her building would get caught if selena didn&amp;#39;t help them that would destroy her salima would get caught if why didn&amp;#39;t help her so yes why why i actually laughed a tiny and tight sound i&amp;#39;ll send you something she named a darknet site one that selema had an account on that she&amp;#39;d never discussed it with why she wondered how much why i knew about what she&amp;#39;d been up to in a week since they&amp;#39;d spoken abdirah hadn&amp;#39;t left for school yet and indefa didn&amp;#39;t even hesitate when selena said she&amp;#39;d need him for the day her notebook was scuffed and dog-eared from being carried from apartment to apartment so many times you trust her she nodded if all she wanted to do was get me in trouble it would be so much easier than this the new vm and its control software was much tidier than anything they downloaded from the dark net it hid itself very well unless you knew the multi-touch pattern to swap your screen from the real jailbreaking controls to the sham controls of the vm the notes with it promised that it would also be perfectly hidden from the booleanism&amp;#39;s network network tools it was easy enough to install just an update to the settings that they already had in place but it was also morning when so many people were heading out for the day leaving their appliances exposed to the company&amp;#39;s snoopy probing they worked on a cis outa system she knocked on a door explain things quickly to never answered and send it and addie to start working then she&amp;#39;d go on to the next door and the next talking urgently begging people to leave their doors unlocked for them addie finished one apartment and then the next letting himself into the unlocked places they&amp;#39;d get to the old people the disabled people the stay-at-home moms but they had to get to these places before their occupants left she raced from one place to the next and managed nearly all of them and got phone numbers for the four she&amp;#39;d missed and trekked up the stairs back to adi frantically dialing them getting to and leaving messages for the other two she&amp;#39;d call them back it was a good thing that wise software was so slick and easy to install because selima was a wreck though abdibraham was all teenaged in cool bravado making short work of each place chess puffed out in an easy smile playing over his lips as he concentrated but they were doing it by lunch they were more than halfway through and they knocked on the door of the old serbian man and he insisted on giving them peanut butter on crackers which they both gobbled surprised at how hungry they were selima remembered that she had four cardamom buns in her toaster and ran to get them and they each ate one and left the extra for the serb he smiled and waved at them as they walked in the hall to the next place just as they were descending the stairs to the next floor selima&amp;#39;s screen rang nadifa the landlords were knocking on the doors the voice was an urgent whisper where starting on 41 they were just at our place inspecting the appliances they&amp;#39;d done their own apartments first partly to make sure they knew what they were doing partly because they thought that the landlords might start with them okay they didn&amp;#39;t find anything whatever you did it worked okay they&amp;#39;re getting in the elevator okay for a moment all she could hear was the thought of blood in her ears she realized she was staring at her phone blankly abdirahm was looking at her with alarm how many left she pulled out her notebook tattered with annotations in both their hands ran his finger down the columns moved his lips as he counted 24 he said she closed her eyes and took a deep breath 24 the landlords and the elevators her place was safe and that&amp;#39;s where the landlords would go next the remaining places were scattered among the seven poor floors there were four floors above them three below she took the notebooks from abdibrham and tore out the pages for the four floors above and folded them and put them back in the pot back pocket of her jeans do the bottom three she said be careful check before you go into the hallways don&amp;#39;t let the landlord see you if they catch you don&amp;#39;t let them get the notebook he had gone ashade paler his teenaged bravado drained he swallowed audibly he looked at the remaining notebook pages scanned down them okay okay she said he turned but she caught him and gave him a fierce hug go she whispered and turned on her heel and raced up the stairs a calm descended on her as she stepped out onto the next floor there were three unlocked apartments on this one no person she&amp;#39;d have to talk to and so she stepped into the first one eyes moving around to take in the appliances matching them to her list one two three she pulled the usb out of her pocket she hadn&amp;#39;t remembered to warn addy to ditch that if he was in danger but he would know that wouldn&amp;#39;t he and stepped to the toaster and lifted it with sure economical motions one apartment two three stairwell two more here people in them ring the first doorbell exposed and anxious the hum of the elevators in their shafts a few yards away heart thudding armpits slick usb grip so tight in her fist it hurt the woman who answered was old but she stood tall and clear-eyed thin and wrinkled and brown selema remembered that she&amp;#39;d been a pediatrician in damascus she&amp;#39;d once played violin but the arthritis that had swollen her knuckles took that from her landlords in the building selima whispered as she slipped past the woman the woman stepped to one side and let her get to work when salima was done the woman stopped her and clutched at her hand fingers dry and brittle and bent thank you she said and gave a small squeeze the feeling lingered only lima&amp;#39;s hand as she consulted her notes and rang the next doorbell she ducked into the stairwell and her phone buzzed she checked it landlords on the stairwell oh she could hear her stealthy movement now the soft here stealthy movement now the soft tread of a shoe someone ascending and trying to keep it silent there was another stairwell at the end of dorchester towers reserved for emergencies with an alarmed door the steps drew closer she opened the door again and went back into the hallway she could knock on someone&amp;#39;s door try to get rid of the notebook in the usb before the landlords came and if she failed they would all be in trouble she and addie had nearly done it perhaps half a dozen apartments remained too few she thought for the landlords to be able to evict them all for conspiracy she could hear the steps from the stairwell now they weren&amp;#39;t bothering to be quiet they must have heard the door shut behind her the elevator hummed she was trapped she crossed her arms over her chest spread her feet apart and waited the elevator doors opened before the store well door stairwell door she turned to face it not letting any fear show a cool mask that&amp;#39;s what she&amp;#39;d show them abdirahm was inside get it the doors closed and the elevator lurched into motion abdirahm lobby button they&amp;#39;re in the lobby too he said so he can&amp;#39;t go there the elevator was descending rapidly the floor counter hit 35 and then displayed the two hyphens it showed as they raced past the full price floors they&amp;#39;d be in the lobby in seconds addie he smiled and pressed a rapid sequence on the elevator panel fingers racing and sure the elevator slowed stopped the doors opened the other doors the doors that opened into the rich floor come on he said they stepped into the hallway the carpet was a rich purply brown and it had neat lines from a vacuum robot that had swept its nap into a uniform direction addie he smiled again i figured out the elevators the day after they stopped the elevator captains it wasn&amp;#39;t hard on the poor floors the elevator&amp;#39;s infographics only showed the positions of the cars when they were traversing the floors they were allowed to stop at seeming to vanish between 42 and the penthouse 35 in the lobby here the infographics showed it at all here the infographics showed it all a car stopped at 37 went up to 38. no resident of poor floors would waste their time calling an elevator for a single floor&amp;#39;s ride that was the landlord&amp;#39;s with special fobs that would summon an elevator directly even to the poor floors now what she said she was making sense of what adi had done he showed her the notebook with tick marks beside every entry now we finish her list two more floors to go 35 and 36 she handed him a sheet took one herself and then he summoned another elevator and pressed another fast sequence then 35 then 36 when the doors open he sprinted into the hallway all recklessness not even checking to see whether the landlords were waiting for him she was more careful when the doors opened on 36 peering around the door before stepping into the hall then she too sprinted for the last door on her list another voice message for you updates going on oh another vm for you updates going in next week that&amp;#39;s enough time selima tapped her screen and replied you are a very bad employee wyoming i suppose i am but you are a good friend i suppose i am thank you why anytime selima stretched and stood she had to go to work now the ice cream parlor they were doing a roaring trade thanks to an unusually warm spring they had a new flavor she adored too black olive brittle and goat&amp;#39;s cheese which was the weirdest ice cream she&amp;#39;d ever tasted but also the best she collected her cardamom buns checked her hair in the mirror the screen buzzed send me the cardamom bun recipe please she did and left for work

Transcript for:Notes on Unauthorized Bread by Cory Doctorow

Transcript for:
Notes on Unauthorized Bread by Cory Doctorow