Predictability
passwords
Kolya Petrov ordered a flat white and sat down at the high table nearest the power strip. Gate B7 at Dulles hummed with the particular exhaustion of a Monday afternoon, every seat taken by someone plugged into something. He set his laptop bag on the counter, adjusted his glasses, and did what he always did in crowds: he watched.
The glasses were Swiss. Titanium frames, photochromic lenses, and a camera module so small it lived inside the left hinge pin. The feed streamed to a server somewhere in Siberia, where something much larger than Kolya did the real work.
Three marks. He had already picked them before his coffee arrived.
The first was a woman in her fifties sitting two tables away, a carry-on plastered with airline loyalty tags. She typed on her phone with her index fingers, one deliberate tap at a time. Her boarding pass sat face-up on the table: Patricia Lowell, seat 14C, Richmond to Chicago. She wore a UVA class ring, ‘96, and kept touching it absently, turning it around her finger the way people do with things that remind them of better years. A lanyard around her neck held a CDC badge she had neglected to flip over.
The second was a younger man in a rumpled blazer, mid-thirties, hunched over a tablet with a stylus. His backpack bore a faded conference badge from CES 2024. His lock screen, which Kolya caught twice in four minutes, displayed a golden retriever wearing a lopsided bandana. Every time the screen dimmed and the photo reappeared, the man’s expression softened for half a second before he went back to frowning at his spreadsheet.
The third was a college kid in a Georgetown hoodie, AirPods in, scrolling with the frantic thumb-pace of a person who had never once considered that anyone might be watching. His phone case had a sticker that said ZACH in block letters. While Kolya watched, a notification slid down from the top of his screen. Mom. He swiped it away without reading it.
Kolya sipped his flat white. The glasses captured everything: the angle of Patricia’s thumbs, the specific rhythm of the startup founder’s stylus taps, the reflection of Zach’s screen in the window behind him. Every few seconds, a tiny green dot pulsed at the edge of Kolya’s right lens. The system was ingesting.
His earpiece clicked. A synthesized voice, gender-neutral, spoke in Russian.
“Patricia Diane Lowell. Born June 4, 1968, Charlottesville, Virginia. Two children, Kevin and Emma. Divorced 2019. Facebook profile has minimal privacy settings. She posts about her children frequently. Her class ring indicates a strong sentimental attachment to her alma mater. Likely password structure: a name she values plus a meaningful year. I have weighted candidates. Top prediction: Emma1996. Do you want me to proceed?”
Patricia was FaceTiming someone now, laughing, angling her phone toward the terminal window so the person on the other end could see the planes. “Emma, look, that’s the one I’m getting on,” she said. Her voice carried easily across the two tables between them.
Kolya murmured “da” into his coffee cup.
“Mark two. Ryan Ostrowski. Co-founder, Vektor Analytics, Austin, Texas. Active on LinkedIn, X, and three Slack workspaces indexed in a 2023 breach. Password reuse rate across known breaches: ninety-one percent. His lock screen displays a golden retriever. Instagram account confirms the dog’s name is Captain. Default password across all platforms is almost certainly Captain plus a short numeric string. Top prediction: Captain2020, the year the dog was adopted based on his earliest Instagram post. Proceeding.”
Ryan leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He turned his tablet around and held it up, and for a moment Kolya thought he was showing someone, but there was no one. He was just staring at his own numbers from a different angle, trying to make them look better. Then he glanced at his lock screen, at Captain in the bandana, and something in his shoulders loosened slightly before he went back to work.
“Mark three. Zachary Torres, sophomore, Georgetown University. Instagram public. TikTok public. Venmo transaction history public. Reddit username recoverable from a crosspost to the Georgetown subreddit in October. He uses the same handle everywhere: ztorres04. His email password was exposed in the 2024 Snowflake breach. He never changed it.”
Kolya set his cup down. “How long for all three?”
“Lowell required four minutes and a public records aggregator. Ostrowski, ninety seconds and the breached credential database. Torres, eleven seconds. His password is ztorres04.”
The green dot in his lens turned blue three times in quick succession. Three inboxes, opened and indexed. In Patricia’s, a draft email to her daughter sat unsent at the top: “Em, I know you said you’re fine but I’m your mother and I can tell when you’re not. Call me tonight? I land at 8.” Ryan’s inbox held a thread with his co-founder, the most recent message reading simply, “We need to talk about the burn rate.” Zach had nine unread emails from his mother.
Kolya closed his laptop, tucked it into his bag, and stood. He left four dollars under his cup.
Patricia was still talking to Emma, still laughing. Ryan was still staring at numbers that wouldn’t cooperate. Zach was still scrolling past his mother’s name.
Kolya walked toward Gate B12, just another tired traveler, and none of them looked up.