#KillAydaKhoury

Anonymity is Your Name

Ayda Khoury

Maryland City, Maryland

I personally think the cops would love to ticket a CIA officer, but Farah, SILVER, whatever her name is, throws the round SUV into sport mode and drives like she'll never be caught. She locks eyes with other drivers, telegraphs sudden dramatic turns for them by recurling her fingers around the wheel, gives them a conspiratorial smile that offers to let them in on whatever secret is hiding behind the blue badge, if they'll just change lanes and give her space to cut through. She's living in another world.

She accelerates into every curve, pulls a radar detector from the glovebox the second we're out of Virginia and lets gently off the accelerator when the detector beeps. She times speed changes through short-lived gaps to escape to free and open lanes on the other side.

Her soccer-mom car actually does have great suspension. Even with all the rocketing around, the ride is so smooth I can play with her phone and scroll through her playlists without being motionsick. There's a "Hawk and Dove" playlist, which appears to be all death metal and hard classic rock, no doves in sight; a "Road to Nowhere" featuring quiet ambient love-pop; and the chemical sign for cobalt, full of nostalgic old country, a little Lebanese pop by groups my mother listens to, and American 80's pop by Michael Jackson.

"Don't do that." She gently tries to pry it away without taking her eyes off the road.

"It broadcasts constantly. You're going around showing it to everyone anyway." I scroll through her home screen. There's a photography app and a flashlight and Yelp, but nothing else that didn't come with the phone. The mail app isn't connected to any accounts.

"There's an aluminum case in the glovebox." So she does know at least one way to silence the endless broadcast. She times a delicate change of speed for the slot slowly opening a car length ahead of us, and neatly trades places with a driver in the slow lane in time to make the exit into Maryland City. I wonder what it would have been like to be on the ride all the time. She's got heartless Jack Kolda wrapped around her finger, and I wonder if she could teach me to do that.

The car rolls to a smooth stop outside my apartment building, releasing me to race out the door and up the walkup stairs.

My studio apartment is tiny, full of particle board furniture and faux-granite veneer, but it's not central D.C. and it's away from my family.

I fling myself into the computer chair and log onto the Black Desert beta to see what became of our guild's castle. The beta test of this MMO is restricted to South Korea, and it takes me a couple extra seconds to join the virtual private network with a Korean exit node to fake my location. The ping is terrible, but Omar could not wait for the North American beta. The siege is still going on, thank God. By my powers of questionable Korean in the chat window, and the language cheat sheet taped to my desk, I see it's turned into potion attrition.

"Where were you?" Omar snaps in Arabic-accented English on the Ventrilo team chat.

"Witchhunt at work. You and me, sneak to town and buy potions?" Omar knows what I do, kind of, and I know what he does, kind of, and our acknowledgement of our professions is variable on the meeting venue.

We met at DEF CON, the time the Agency sent me, the first time I ever got to go, and Qatar State Security sent him. We played Eclipse Phase in his room the last night, after he'd beaten the convention's badge-hacking challenge and gotten his beautiful black black badge as reward. I'm going to beat it this year, if I still have a job to pay for admission. And if I'm not in jail.