Short story: The barista who could disarm nuclear bombs
Marcelo Rinesi
2020-09-14 00:00:00
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For the week that took them to find and fix the problem, her glasses would have recognized an armed nuclear bomb and overlaid instructions for its safe disposal, which she would have followed with the same confident speed with which she operated espresso machines and greeted by name customers she had never seen.

Three days before the self-leaked military software was erased from a few hundred unsuspecting coworkers' glasses, she very illegally copied some files from her own to her little brother's in an attempt to make doing the dishes like she did at work a glamorous grown-up game. It didn't work.

The fourteen-year-old never saw a nuclear bomb either, but his aimless, obsessive testing of every possible software option activated detailed, context-specific instructions on his glasses for infrastructural sabotage and network disruption. As every good student and would-be employable person was taught to, he followed the instructions as well as he could without concerning himself on whys and what fors - for a month of so, at which point he lost interest, although the network of cells he had set up among other pre-teens was already growing on its own.