n2020  Check-in [c140fa1712]

At some point, she should set up a meeting for an exchange in a private conference room at a co-working space.  Someone should recognize her and ask whether she's meeting a client, to which she replies vaguely in a positively interpretable fashion without literally confirming that assumption with her words.

I wanted the person who greets her to say something that raises some factoid of her life, but I'm not sure any longer what I had in mind.  Did it have anything to do with getting out of Dalton's shadow?

Does the person she's meeting recognize her connection to Dalton?

*/



    After an announcement by the Federal Reserve, she follows the prioritizer's
    advice to put a bunch of her extra United States dollars in cash into
    Stater.  After a moment more of discussion, she puts some of her bank
    account into VaporCash, known as a good place to put money if you can't
    hide the source but want to hide where it goes, just because the news
    suggests that there will be a bonanza in general cryptocurrency investment,
................................................................................
    you're going to move money from United States dollars fiat currency via a
    trackable channel into a cryptocurrency just to benefit from currency
    movements it might be a good idea to hide your tracks so you can keep your
    money from being tracked along the way, and claim whatever you like in an
    emergency about where the money might have gone.

    During all this, the prioritizer has Alley make some deals with other
    prioritizer study participants, though they may not know they're dealing
    with fellow study participants.

*/

/*

## Crossing The Threshold:
................................................................................
    to run, if she hasn't already been caught, and says he'll try to get in
    touch with her very soon, using a different way to contact her because he
    was going to ditch all his old contact methods, but that she should run and
    hide and maybe find herself an ally who can and will help her.

*/














































































































































Alley terminated the call.  "I have to go home, but they're still working on my car," she says.  She looks over her shoulder.  "I'll call up a ride."

"Wait," the prioritizer said.

"Why?  Why am I waiting?"

"I will arrange for another study participant to pass by your home so we can see what is going on."

Alley sat again, thinking there was nothing she could do that was any smarter than sitting still at this point.  "Maybe I should call for a ride anyway," she says.  "I'll just get there after the other person in the study."

"I will arrange a ride for you," the prioritizer said.  "You should grab the bugout bag you have in the middle of your bugout vehicle gear.  Take your riding gear, too."

"Why?  What good would that do me?" she asked.

"If you have to run, you should have what you need to survive.  If you do not have to run, it does not hurt you to have that gear with you."

"Fine," she said.  "I'll get it.  Why the riding gear, though?"  She stood and headed for the counter.

................................................................................

"Of course it is."

/*

A study participant shows up to pick her up.  Maybe it's a girl this time.  That would be good.  In any case, she gets picked up and taken to some place where Alley can hang out for a bit.  I don't know where that is yet, which is part of the reason I'm not writing out the narrative and dialog for this part at this time.  She must do something as she sits there, waiting.  In the meantime, the prioritizer arranges for someone to take care of the car, and eventually the person who takes care of the car gets a friend to help so that they can use some of the money from the sale of the car to buy a motorcycle in online classifieds that Alley and the prioritizer picked out while they waited, having reasoned that a motorcycle gives her an excuse to hide her entire head more fully than a mask and even a hat would accomplish, by wearing a helmet.  The owner of the motorcycle throws in a helmet with the purchase, which is good because otherwise more money would have to be spent to buy a helmet, a necessary purchase in California where it is illegal to ride a motorcycle on public roads without wearing a DOT certified helmet.

Even after all that, there is some cash left over from selling off the car.  The motorcycle is relative low demand and low power, after all.  It's also very old.  None of this really adds up to much expense.  The plan is for Alley to coast on the registration currently in effect on the vehicle's license plates for a while, because she obviously cannot register the vehicle herself when she is trying to stay out of sight of people who can probably (or at least conceivably) monitor that kind of activity.  She will, of course, have to be sure to ride carefully, to avoid getting pulled over by the police, so that she will not end up in terrible trouble where she cannot get out of it.









































































































































Alley must, at some point, say something about going to the police.  The prioritizer might ask whether she thinks this is a good idea, and she would then be forced to admit it's a terrible idea, given the COIN Corp agents were basically ordering Secret Service agents around, which surely trumps any possible protection she might imagine would materialize when going to the police for help, especially when she does not particularly trust the police to begin with.  Somehow, I should get something in the story about her not trusting the police, of course.

*/

The call rang twice, and only a few seconds passed, but no fewer than six times she had second thoughts about this call, nearly cutting it off before someone could answer or the call could go to voicemail.  At the same time, she found herself wondering whether he still had that cyber-industrial tune Glassine Curves set as his ringtone for her, whether there was anyone other than him around when it started ringing.  She doubted he had a subdermal headset that would play the ringtone where only he could hear it, after all.  He never trusted those things.

................................................................................

Alley looked between them.  "Shouldn't we take this a little more seriously?"

Dalton shrugged.  "I am taking it seriously, but we have to lighten up a little or we'll just get in our own way."

"Hmph."

"What AIP, like, you know, and ape, but it stands for 'artificial intelligence prioritizer'?"

"That's awful," Dalton said.

Alley said "After Lidia came up with Pry, I think it told her to call it Rio."

"Like the Spanish word for 'river'?" Cray asked.

"Yeah, like that."

"That's not bad," Dalton said.  "Great.  /* Too bad this'll cut down on my word count bonus when talking about the prioritizer. */  That'll make things easier, having a short name for it."

"I'm not sure that makes that big a difference," Cray said, "especially when we're spending maybe as much time talking about it as we would spend talking about it without having a short name for it."

Alley snickered, and Dalton smiled.

"It makes things feel better, though -- doesn't it?" Dalton asked.

Cray looked thoughtfully upward for a moment, then said "Yeah, I guess it does."











/*

    Perhaps I should revisit some scenes from previous (or template) work for
    ideas about how to handle this kind of thing.  Maybe some kind of drone
    presence could be worked into all this shit, too.  That'd be pretty
    interesting.  Of course, a great reason for not having a drone following
................................................................................
    for his podcast.  In any case, there should have already been some talk
    (probably not at the Temp Auto Zone location, of course) in which some hint
    of what's going on with the prioritizer got across to the Second Realm
    people, catching their interest.

    They of course don't know all the details Alley knows, or even all of them
    Dalton learned from Alley.  As such, they'll have to talk directly with
    Alley to get some of the details of this stuff and start planning next
    steps in the artificial intelligence prioritizer system liberation
    operation.






*/

/*

Maybe Alley could go to a doctor to get a prescription for something that she can then sell to others as a way to make money.  This is obviously illegal.  It should probably only come up after she ends up on the run because of the people coming to her home and thus scaring her off.  Then again . . . how does she get a prescription from a doctor if she's on the run?






Maybe Alley could just carry drugs for someone.  Again, this is pretty sketchy, and is probably not appropriate right now.


*/

/*

STORY TIMELINE PLACEMENT UNCERTAIN; DEFINITELY BEFORE WHERE I HAVE THESE NOTES:

At some point, she should set up a meeting for an exchange in a private conference room at a co-working space.  Someone should recognize her and ask whether she's meeting a client, to which she replies vaguely in a positively interpretable fashion without literally confirming that assumption with her words.

I wanted the person who greets her to say something that raises some factoid of her life, but I'm not sure any longer what I had in mind.  Did it have anything to do with getting out of Dalton's shadow?

Does the person she's meeting recognize her connection to Dalton?

*/

/*

    After an announcement by the Federal Reserve, she follows the prioritizer's
    advice to put a bunch of her extra United States dollars in cash into
    Stater.  After a moment more of discussion, she puts some of her bank
    account into VaporCash, known as a good place to put money if you can't
    hide the source but want to hide where it goes, just because the news
    suggests that there will be a bonanza in general cryptocurrency investment,
................................................................................
    you're going to move money from United States dollars fiat currency via a
    trackable channel into a cryptocurrency just to benefit from currency
    movements it might be a good idea to hide your tracks so you can keep your
    money from being tracked along the way, and claim whatever you like in an
    emergency about where the money might have gone.

    During all this, the prioritizer has Alley make some deals with other
    prioritizer study participants, though she may not know they're dealing
    with fellow study participants.

*/

/*

## Crossing The Threshold:
................................................................................
    to run, if she hasn't already been caught, and says he'll try to get in
    touch with her very soon, using a different way to contact her because he
    was going to ditch all his old contact methods, but that she should run and
    hide and maybe find herself an ally who can and will help her.

*/

"It looks like I should turn here," Alley said, checking the map /* on her augmented reality heads up display */ shown in the HUD on her glasses, and rolled up to a stop at an intersection.

"Continue ahead," the prioritizer said.  "It is better to avoid police checkpoints."

Alley hesitated as the light turned green, then drove on.  "Okay, yeah.  That makes sense."  As they passed the intersection, she looked to her right, and saw half a dozen police officers in black around the barricade half a block away.  They wore helmets and bulky body armor, each of them armed with some kind of long arm -- rifles, shotguns, or a third option /* something */ she did not recognize.

"How am I getting there if I don't go through a checkpoint?" Alley asked.  "The drop off is in the hot zone."

/*

    Here, the prioritizer tells Alley what they'll do to get past the barricade
    perimeter.  It probably ties in with some kind of means smugglers use to
    run the blockades, though how the prioritizer knows about it is beyond me
    at this point.  Perhaps the prioritizer simply reasons that there are
    people who are prepared to smuggle people and objects across blockades in
    urban hot zones, and that there must be a way to contact them even if you
    have never done so before and don't know how to get in touch with those
    smugglers.  Alley might look up something with her Axiom via anonymized
    distributed networks.  At this point, she might also contact George for
    help getting in touch with a smuggler, though, instead of getting someone
    online.  In fact, doing so might be what led to George getting raided, and
    her as well.  It could be that the raid was planned for shortly after when
    she would have arrived at home, and only the fact her car broke down saved
    her from that fate.  I could also ensure that, actually, the prioritizer
    manipulated Alley by arranging for the car to break down somehow, knowing
    (somehow) that Alley was in significant danger of being raided at that
    time.  This is kind of a big decision, though.  Should that be how it
    happened, or should it actually just be luck?  Such luck often feels wrong,
    improbable, in stories.  I just need good explanations for the plotting to
    work out in a way that readers might find plausible and right.

*/

"Just ask for Smuggler," George said.

---

Alley donned her motorcycle jacket, stuffed her gloves in the jacket pockets, and strapped on her low profile pack and locked her car.  She looked at the front of the house, drew a deep breath, and let it out slowly.  She walked up to the front door and pressed the old fashioned doorbell on a house that looked like it had been built in the 1970s.

It took less than ten seconds for the door to open, but no one stood inside.  "Hello?" she called.

"Hello."

She nearly jumped out of her skin, and spun around to see a figure in a full face ballistic mask and hooded urban tunic.  He was holding his hands slightly out from his sides, fingers spread, showing her his palms.

"Are you looking for someone?" in what she began to realize was a very masculine voice, distorted by the voice emitter of his mask.

"I'm looking for, uh . . ." she began, hesitating.  She cleared her throat as the masked man waited patiently.  "I'm looking for the smuggler."

His chuckle came out sounding sinister with the metallic gravelly vibration imparted to it by the voice emitter.  "Just Smuggler," he said, "like the name you're given at birth."

"Oh."

"You know George," he said, and she thought she detected a bit of a rise at the end, like it was a question.

"Not for long," she said, "but yeah.  He seems like a good guy."

"You must've made an impression, if he referred you to me."

"Really?"

He nodded, and motioned past her.  "Let's talk inside."

"Oh, right," she said.  Her hand brushed her back pocket, the thin cylindrical bulge of her baton creating a harder ridge that her knuckles knocked across, but she headed inside.  Beyond the small linoleum entryway a living room with patterns of staining and fading overlapping so much it was difficult to determine what shade of brown was original opened up.  Its wood panel walls were warped with age.  There was no furniture in the room, but there were rectangular spots on the walls with nail holes at the top that were a lighter off white than the rest of the wall surfaces.  From where she now stood, she could see into the dining room, though the sliding glass doors in the back seemed to be covered with foil.  The only significant light came through the open front door and front windows with blinds angled upward so that light dimly striped the ceiling.

Smuggler followed her and closed the door behind them.  "You need to get into the hot zone and want to avoid official attention."  He did something with his gloved right hand, and light spilled from LEDs on his knuckles.  He kept them aimed at the carpeted floor nearby so that they created bright spots on the floor but a secondary glow made it possible to make out the edges of the walls a bit better.

"Yeah," she said.  "Can you take me through, somehow?  In and back, I mean."

He nodded.  "Yes, I could."

"How much would I owe you for it?"

"Are you offering to pay me to take you to the other side?" he asked.

She nodded.  "Yeah, I guess so.  Isn't that how this works?"

"Normally," he said, "but I'm not taking your money."

"Why won't you take me through?  Do you think I'm a cop or something like that?"

After a moment's hesitation, he shook his head.  "I didn't say I wouldn't take you into the zone.  I just said I'm not taking your money."

"Why not?" she asked, her eyes narrowing.

"Let's just say, for now, that the first hit's free."

"That seems strange, like there's something addictive about getting past the barricades."

He shrugged again.  "Some people find the hot zone addictive, to tell the truth.  Some of them find their way to the cold zone, and that's often an even stronger addiction.  /* Maybe I'm addicted to both of them.  I'm not sure. */ "

"What's a cold zone?"

"Maybe you'll find out some day," he said.  "It's an area you can't reach without going through the hot zone, or through the corporate center of LA.  The police don't even go in there.  Most of the world doesn't know it exists.  You definitely don't want to go there today, though, if you've never even heard of it."

She shook her head.  "No, it doesn't sound like that's where I want to be."

"Where do you want to be?"

She shrugged.  "Maybe Colorado or New Hampshire."

"Are you ready to go?"

She patted her pockets, checking what she had with her, then nodded.  "Yeah, I guess so."

"Step into my pantry, said the spider to the fly."  He brushed past her and headed into the kitchen.

She followed, her steps tentative, and looked around with eyes wide, trying to take in every detail of this old house.  A hallway disappeared into deeper darkness to her left just before she angled right into the dining room near the back of the house.  A few more steps led her to where the kitchen opened to the left, and she saw Smuggler opening a pantry door, true to his word.

He reached in and with the sweep of his glove lights she saw shelves stocked with ancient dry goods.  A click brought up a flood of brighter light as the back wall shifted away, revealing a narrow hole in the floor beaming illumination toward the ceiling of the pantry.  "After you," he said, and stepped out of the pantry to give her room.

She moved closer, steps wary, and leaned to look down the hole.  She saw a steel ladder bolted to the concrete side of the rectangular hole leading downward.  She looked back at Smuggler, who nodded, though she did not know what that meant.  Another look confirmed ti wasn't a very deep hole, maybe ten feet, and it looked like after a couple of those feet one side opened up into a larger room.

Alley /* sat down */ got down on hands and knees and carefully backed over the edge onto the ladder, then climbed down.  She kept looking down at the rising floor, over her shoulder, and she saw that it was a well-lit chamber about as wide as it was tall, more than enough for someone very tall to lie down but not with a lot of room left over.

She looked up to see Smuggler looking down, then he rotated and lowered a foot to the ladder.  She looked away from him, hopped the last foot or two down to the floor, and stepped away from the ladder.  A single LED lighting unit mounted on the ceiling flooded the small chamber in bright light, and a door stood closed at the other end of the room.

While Smuggler descended, she heard a soft brushing sound and looked up to see the aperture at the top of the ladder closing.  When he reached the bottom, he turned without a word to the door.  As he touched the handle, the light vanished, plunging them into darkness apart from the lights on Smuggler's glove.

"I still have contact with you," the prioritizer said.

She shook her head slightly, not wanting to speak aloud to the prioritizer in front of Smuggler.

"It must be your Axiom establishing connections through some kind of mesh network down here.  I do not have access to check it, so I cannot confirm this is the case."

Alley followed Smuggler into the dark tunnel beyond the heavy door, which softly closed behind them on its own.  After a couple minutes of walking, she quietly asked "How far is it?"  The sound seemed louder than it should have been, after the deep quiet of nothing but the echoes of their own movements, and she nearly stumbled in surprise.

"It's about a ten minute walk," he said, "mostly because we need to move slowly."

"Why slowly?  It looks straight as far as I can see, and I doubt anyone would hear us."

She saw his head shake, silhouetted against the glow of his glove lights ahead of him.  His stride did not change.  "If we go too fast, we'll set off alarms.  It's the best way to make sure the alarms will go off when someone's on the run, but it's not the only way the alarms can be triggered."

"What happens if alarms go off?"

"A lot of exciting stuff," he said, "ending with this tunnel not being available to run the blockade any more."

"Oh."

---

Alley terminated the call.  "I have to go home, but they're still working on my car," she said.  She looked over her shoulder, at the mechanics' garage.  "I'll call up a ride."

"Wait," the prioritizer said.

"Why?  Why am I waiting?"

"I will arrange for another study participant to pass by your home so we can see what is going on."

Alley sat again, thinking there was nothing she could do that was any smarter than sitting still at this point.  "Maybe I should call for a ride anyway," she says.  "I'll just get there after the other person in the study."

"I will arrange a ride for you," the prioritizer said.  "You should retrieve the bugout bag you have in the middle of your bugout vehicle gear.  Take your riding gear, too."

"Why?  What good would that do me?" she asked.

"If you have to run, you should have what you need to survive.  If you do not have to run, it does not hurt you to have that gear with you."

"Fine," she said.  "I'll get it.  Why the riding gear, though?"  She stood and headed for the counter.

................................................................................

"Of course it is."

/*

A study participant shows up to pick her up.  Maybe it's a girl this time.  That would be good.  In any case, she gets picked up and taken to some place where Alley can hang out for a bit.  I don't know where that is yet, which is part of the reason I'm not writing out the narrative and dialog for this part at this time.  She must do something as she sits there, waiting.  In the meantime, the prioritizer arranges for someone to take care of the car, and eventually the person who takes care of the car gets a friend to help so that they can use some of the money from the sale of the car to buy a motorcycle in online classifieds that Alley and the prioritizer picked out while they waited, having reasoned that a motorcycle gives her an excuse to hide her entire head more fully than a mask and even a hat would accomplish, by wearing a helmet.  The owner of the motorcycle throws in a helmet with the purchase, which is good because otherwise more money would have to be spent to buy a helmet, a necessary purchase in California where it is illegal to ride a motorcycle on public roads without wearing a DOT certified helmet.

Even after all that, there is some cash left over from selling off the car.  The motorcycle is a product with relative low demand and low power, after all.  It is also very old, used, and no longer stock (so it's not a "cherry" classic).  None of this really adds up to much expense.  The plan is for Alley to coast on the registration currently in effect on the vehicle's license plates for a while, because she obviously cannot register the vehicle herself when she is trying to stay out of sight of people who can probably (or at least conceivably) monitor that kind of activity.  She will, of course, have to be sure to ride carefully, to avoid getting pulled over by the police, so that she will not end up in terrible trouble where she cannot get out of it.

*/

"Well, here I am, alone again -- except you, of course."

The prioritizer said "It is probably best at this time to avoid extended contact with other human beings unless we can establish contact with someone worthy of your trust and willing to help you with substantive commitment to take action and ability to help."

She sighed.  "Yeah, of course."

"Is there someone you can contact for help now?"

Alley thought about it, and said "I don't know off hand about anyone I ever see these days who could really help me right now."

"Can one of your friends give you a place to stay for the night?"

Alley shook her head.  "I don't want to get them caught up in this, and I guess I'm not entirely sure they wouldn't say something they shouldn't if police showed up or something like that."

"In that case, we must find you a place to stay for the night.  Please look for motels that accept cryptocurrency payments below the reporting threshold of three hundred united states dollars."

"Sure," she said, "but I don't know how we're going to get there.  It's not like cabs usually take cash these days, and they all have cameras in them, so I would just end up on camera for the whole trip."

"Can you still ride a motorcycle?"

"Yeah, I should be able to."  She furrowed her brow.  "Why?"

"We should check online classifieds for private party sale, low price, working motorcycles that can be purchased in either cash or cryptocurrency units."

"Oh, yeah.  I guess a motorcycle would even be cheaper than a junker car."

She pulled out her Axiom and woke the device, then hesitated.

"How am I even going to get the motorcycle?  I can't get to it from here."

"I will arrange something," the prioritizer said.  "It will probably cost you extra to do so, but a fellow study participant with appropriate skills may be willing to facilitate your transaction."

"Wouldn't that mean the whole thing will get recorded and stored in logs, though?"

"No.  I will alter logs and remove all evidence of these activities' significance from storage."

"Okay, I guess that's fine."

"By my estimate, the risk of this transaction for you should be less than the typical road dangers of driving a motorcycle in afternoon traffic from here to a seller in most parts of Riverside."

"I guess that's comforting," she said.  "Riding a motorcycle is more dangerous than making a deal with a middleman when the Men In Black are after me."

"The same statement is accurate if you drive a car, as well, though statistics suggest the danger of driving a car is slightly less than that of riding a motorcycle."

"Yeah, thanks for clearing that up for me," Alley said.  "Let's start looking at motorcycles, then."

When she selected a custom modification of a 1990s motorcycle closer to her father's age than her own, the prioritizer told her it had a middleman ready to go.  It was only twenty minutes later that it told her /* about a digital bootleg safety upgrade. */ what the middleman had learned from the seller.

"The motorcycle's seller reports that it has a number of upgrades.  Most notably, it has been upgraded with an anti lock brake system he fabricated in his home workshop, using reverse engineered physical specifications for production aftermarket brake upgrades, using open source software to program the system."

"Isn't that illegal?  I don't know if I really need to pile more evidence someone can use against me on top of what's already going on," Alley said.

"It appears that the use of the plans for the brakes is not illegal, and only the distribution of the plans and the sale of the brakes after they have been fabricated would violate copyright and patent laws.  Because the plans were evidently reverse engineered, they are unlikely to be protected by copyright.  As the recipient of the motorcycle, you seem to be immune to any legal issues that may arise from this, and the chances of detection of the crime in this case are statistically  insignificant."

"Yeah, okay," she said.

"When the motorcycle arrives, you will be able to pay the person who delivers it directly in Stater.  He is interested in acquiring the cryptocurrency as an investment."

"Did he use Stater to buy the bike?"

"No.  He made a cash transaction.  For him, this is an indirect way to buy a cryptocurrency without the purchase being tracked and without dealing with less trustworthy individuals who deal in cryptocurrencies."

"Yeah," she said, "that makes sense.  How much is this going to set me back?"

"You will profit from this transaction.  Another study participant picked up the car from the auto shop and gave money to the middleman for the motorcycle purchase, with instructions to convey whatever cash is left after the purchase to you.  While you will have fewer Stater for now, your overall liquid asset totals represent greater purchasing power than if the car had not required maintenance and you still had it now."

"Is someone getting screwed over for this?" she asked.

"No.  Every participant in these transactions profited from an opportunity that would not have existed if you did not need to acquire more reliable and less recognizable transportation."

"Hm.  Thanks."

"You are welcome."

She brushed away gravelly debris to clear a spot on the ground, and sat on the cracked concrete slab with her back against the cinder block wall of the car wash bay.  She looked at the chipped and dingy paint on the opposite wall of the bay and searched for patterns in the midst of its slow decay.

Alley muttered chastisements to herself, under her breath, for wasting time while her world was falling apart around her.  She pulled the Axiom out of her pocket and started a circumspect search for things like "mercenaries in California" and "real-life A-Team".  She got nothing useful, but she did learn that the A-Team movie she saw a few years ago was the third A-Team movie remake.

About the time she was ready to give up, she heard a rare sound these days: an internal combustion engine motorcycle that did not sound like a V-twin, slowly approaching, then coming to a halt nearby.  She stood and brushed collected dust from her backside.

"This is your contact," the prioritizer said.

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then hooked her thumb in her back pocket, touching the handle of her baton.  She stepped out of concealment and saw a big figure slowly dismounting a small grey blue motorcycle.  It was the four cylinder 350 she had /* bought with money she never saw. */ selected from the classifieds.

The man wore an open face helmet along with his mask and glasses.  The glasses were identical to her own, she immediately noticed.  An electric car waited by the curb not far away.  She indicated the car with a movement of her chin and asked "Friends of yours?"

"Nah," he said.  "It's just my car.  The autopilot was set to auto-follow."  He approached, his hands at his sides, and stopped with ample distance between them.  "The key's in the ignition.  The envelope's under the seat."

The prioritizer told her, via text in her glasses, "The envelope contains your left over cash from the sale of the car."

"Do you know how to work everything on a bike like this?" he asked.

She looked at it, then back at him.  "Yeah."  She stopped herself from explaining how she knew, reining in the reflex -- a foolish habit, in these circumstances.

"Cool," he said.  "What about a helmet?  You're going to get pulled over without one."

"I have that covered.  Thanks."

"Sure."  He looked her over.  "You ever need any help with a bike problem, you let me know.  Us bikers gotta stick together."

She smiled.  "Yeah, thanks," she said.  "You're what Dad used to call 'one of the good ones', I guess."

He laughed.  "If you say so," he said.  "I'll get going so you can do whatever you gotta do.  Don't worry any about me, though.  As far as anyone else would get out of me, I never met you.  I just dropped off a bike somewhere miles away from here."

"Thanks," she said again, as he walked away.  He got in the car with a last wave of his hand and drove away, the electric motors running too silently for her to hear.

Alley wheeled the bike into the third wash bay, near her gear, then unlocked the seat and lifted it to find a manila envelope folded in half.  She had not seen an envelope like that in over fifteen years and, when she picked up this envelope, the [ how do ancient, dried out manila envelopes feel? ] feel of the paper made her think this envelope must have been sitting unused in a box in someone's garage for at least that long.

A quick check inside revealed two large stacks of hundred dollar bills, bundled with silicone cable ties.

She stuffed the envelope into a cargo pocket, the opened the panniers on the sides of the bike and loaded her gear into them, choreographing an awkward, unsychronized dance of items pulled out of bags and rearranged until she could get enough of what she had into the alloy boxes to make it reasonably comfortable to carry the rest on her back.  She pulled on her riding gear, hefted the backpack on her shoulders, then pushed her mask down as a bit of extra protection from flying debris for her neck and donned the helmet.

She stopped.  "Shit," she said.  "Where am I going?  Maybe a gas station.  I don't know how full this thing is."  She rapped the tank once with a gloved knuckle."

"The other study participant filled it for you."

"Oh."

"You should leave this area," the prioritizer said.  "It is best to be farther from where COIN Corp and law enforcement expect to find you."

"That makes sense, I guess.  Now I just need to figure out where to go."

"Perhaps you should go to Rancho Cucamonga.  The distance seems sufficiently far to increase the search difficulty substantially.  Every mile of distance yields exponential increases in search difficulty, ignoring digital surveillance analysis potential, and your aim should be to undermine the effectiveness of surveillance infrastructure."

"Yeah, okay.  What should I do when I get there, though?"

"Find a place to hide, eat, and rest.  My academic resources suggest Rancho Cucamonga and nearby areas might offer a number of abandoned structures that could be used for a temporary base."

Alley groaned.  "How can this be happening?"

The prioritizer seemed smart enough to realize that was rhetorical and self pitying.  It offered no reply.

/*

Alley must, at some point, say something about going to the police.  The prioritizer might ask whether she thinks this is a good idea, and she would then be forced to admit it's a terrible idea, given the COIN Corp agents were basically ordering Secret Service agents around, which surely trumps any possible protection she might imagine would materialize when going to the police for help, especially when she does not particularly trust the police to begin with.  Somehow, I should get something in the story about her not trusting the police, of course.

*/

The call rang twice, and only a few seconds passed, but no fewer than six times she had second thoughts about this call, nearly cutting it off before someone could answer or the call could go to voicemail.  At the same time, she found herself wondering whether he still had that cyber-industrial tune Glassine Curves set as his ringtone for her, whether there was anyone other than him around when it started ringing.  She doubted he had a subdermal headset that would play the ringtone where only he could hear it, after all.  He never trusted those things.

................................................................................

Alley looked between them.  "Shouldn't we take this a little more seriously?"

Dalton shrugged.  "I am taking it seriously, but we have to lighten up a little or we'll just get in our own way."

"Hmph."

"What AIP, like, you know, an ape, but it stands for 'artificial intelligence prioritizer'?"

"That's awful," Dalton said.

Alley said "After Lidia came up with Pry, I think it told her to call it Rio."

"Like the Spanish word for 'river'?" Cray asked.

"Yeah, like that."

"That's not bad," Dalton said.  "Great.  /* Too bad this'll cut down on my word count bonus when talking about the prioritizer. */  That'll make things easier, having a short name for it."

"I'm not sure that makes that big a difference," Cray said, "especially when we're spending maybe as much time talking about how we can come up with a short name for it as we would spend using the long name /* talking about it without having a short name for it */ ."

Alley snickered, and Dalton smiled.

"It makes things feel better, though -- doesn't it?" Dalton asked.

Cray looked thoughtfully upward for a moment, then said "Yeah, I guess it does."

/* This is my attempt to wedge the lawyer bit into the story now. */
/* The characters don't know, like I do, that lawyers won't help. */
/* They don't have to know.  They don't have to dismiss the idea. */
/* In fact, it may be much better if they pursue that idea first. */
/* Contacting a lawyer might bring in the M I B COIN Corp agents. */
/* If the agents come for her, Alley will have reason to get out. */
/* Having reason to get out means having reason to go cypherpunk. */
/* Dalton then gets hurt by Alley's desire to go full mainstream. */
/* Dalton still helps Alley get away though, giving her a chance. */

/*

    Perhaps I should revisit some scenes from previous (or template) work for
    ideas about how to handle this kind of thing.  Maybe some kind of drone
    presence could be worked into all this shit, too.  That'd be pretty
    interesting.  Of course, a great reason for not having a drone following
................................................................................
    for his podcast.  In any case, there should have already been some talk
    (probably not at the Temp Auto Zone location, of course) in which some hint
    of what's going on with the prioritizer got across to the Second Realm
    people, catching their interest.

    They of course don't know all the details Alley knows, or even all of them
    Dalton learned from Alley.  As such, they'll have to talk directly with
    Alley to get some of the details of this stuff and start planning the next
    steps in the group's artificial intelligence prioritizer system liberation
    operation.  By then, something should have happened to make Alley's effort
    kind of a cause célèbre amongst the cypherpunks and some people more
    thoroughly cyberpunk oriented (but only some).  This will help ensure that
    I don't have to have Alley explain the same things over and over again so
    much that it actually drags on the story and keeps Alley from being a very
    interested and engaged and action oriented character.

*/

/*

    Maybe Alley could go to a doctor to get a prescription for something that
    she can then sell to others as a way to make money.  This is obviously
    illegal.  It should probably only come up after she ends up on the run
    because of the people coming to her home and thus scaring her off.  Then
    again . . . how does she get a prescription from a doctor if she's on the
    run?  That could prove very difficult indeed.

    Maybe Alley could just carry drugs for someone.  Again, this is pretty
    sketchy, and is probably not appropriate right now.

*/

/*

STORY TIMELINE PLACEMENT UNCERTAIN; DEFINITELY BEFORE WHERE I HAVE THESE NOTES: