An Unlikely Recruit
“Prospect 33/1, getaway driver… getaway driver?”
“Mm-hm.”
“I understand why we’re reviewing these… work histories, but why are we interested in a getaway driver?”
The senior ironmonger steepled his fingers and leaned back in his chair; the other rolled his eyes.
“Consider, my dear Sulcis, just what is involved in practicing the gentle art of getaway driving in this modern age. First, one must be a good enough hardware engineer to bypass the many and various safety systems on your flitter designed to prevent it from maneuvering in any of the ways which one might wish to maneuver during your getaway. Likewise, you must also be a good enough software engineer to write your own drive-manager for said flitter, which not only avoids the software safeties, but emulates them – and the rest of the optimal safe style – well enough to fool everyone into thinking that all’s well when you aren’t being pursued.
“And you must achieve all of this while bypassing the road-grid – which otherwise would simply order your flitter to lock its doors and deliver you to the constabulary – by either stealthing or spoofing. In the former case, you need to have written a drive-manager that can somehow deal with the unfortunate consequences of the road-grid perceiving you as an invisible hole – or rather, a motile obstruction to be cleared away by emergency response – and in the latter case, to pretend to be multiple vehicles without tripping a trouble-flag, and should you fail at that, handling the attempts to take remote control of your vehicle via the road-grid interface, or to switch to stealthing and disable the grid interface in mid-flight without tripping any of those safety systems. Either of these options is very likely to involve an uncomfortable amount of updating code on the fly without crashing. Literally, and literally.
“Possibly while dodging flak, foam, and EMPs.”
Sulcis frowned. “So they have to be good, but you could say the same about –”
“For values of good equal to gods-kissed technical geniuses whom we want working for us only slightly more than MinTrans and the odocorps want them interrogated, patched, and probably shot, yes.”