by Sebrina Somers
I had tapped into the network and cloned my ID tracker to run the Great Wall Marathon. The point wasn’t to just get the fastest time, any hacker could do that. My goal was to run a race convincing enough to win the cash prize and add the gold medal to the trophy collection in my bedroom. That meant fooling the judges into believing I was actually there. No easy feat when I was sitting on my front porch on the other side of the planet.
I heard a tap on the screen door a few feet away and ignored it. The race was about to begin, and I still needed to tie up a few loose ends. I had uploaded my travel itinerary a week ago and coded my avatar to wander the streets of Beijing for the last two days. Now, I just needed to situate my tracker in the middle of the race pack at the Yin and Yang Square start line, sync it to the timing chips assigned to my race bibs, and run my biometric avoidance program so that I didn’t occupy the same geo-space as any of the physical runners, or other illicit virtual runners for that matter.
There was another tap on the door, a little louder this time. They could wait. The first wave of runners had just set off and I needed to be ready to start with the second wave.
“I…can…see…you…” A quiet voice stammered through the screen door.
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