Differences From
Artifact [3507394880]:
598 598 "You can sign digitally using any standard signing service, or on the screen." He removed his stylus from his mouth again, and offered it.
599 599
600 600 She looked at its glistening dampness. "No, thanks. I'll use D-Sign."
601 601
602 602 ---
603 603
604 604 ## The Call To Adventure:
605 +
606 +/*
605 607
606 608 Alley must undertake a program of reinventing herself to overcome her present circumstances. She takes her little box of prioritizer stuff home with her and sits down in the living room with it. She sets everything on her charger and starts reading through the directions. After charging, she pairs devices, dons the glasses, and starts interacting with the prioritizer. She ends up getting a wireless keyboard and typing answers rather than activate the audio input. The prioritizer setup asking her to activate mic input leads to its identification of privacy as a goal.
607 609
608 610 The prioritizer has her go through her inbox and asks questions about job postings. It ends up eliminating all job postings as incompatible with Alley's goals and values. It suggests she deal with important tasks (e.g. paying rent) and otherwise take the day off if she has no other ideas for making money, and that she wear her new HUD all the time so it can learn more about her goals and values. It walks her through winding down for a good night's sleep and charges overnight.
609 611
610 612 The next day it has her look at Craigslist postings (or something to that effect). It has her take note of ads where someone is looking for something, then helps her find things to satisfy those wants. After a few hours, she is able to come up with a plan to complete a couple of trades by the end of the day, resulting in acquiring a hundred dollars' profit. The initial money input gets set aside, and the next day she starts the same process, but this time with (monetarily) riskier trades. She ends up with an item the requester doesn't want, and another that makes back enough so her hundred dollars is only reduced to thirty dollars, rather than to nothing.
611 613
................................................................................
614 616 The trade goes smoothly that evening, and she takes a slight loss at the cryptocurrency's going rate. The optimizer guides her in trading that cryptocurrency for another that makes it very difficult to track trades. It then has her check for people liquidating cryptocurrencies, and she makes a plan to buy another cryptocurrency with the thirty dollars left over from earlier trades.
615 617
616 618 She wonders whether it will just get rid of all her profits.
617 619
618 620 She goes along with it, remembering the fact that she is getting income from the study. Later that same day, the person -- evidently desperate -- agrees to meet in person. The prioritizer directs her to look up information leading her to choose a police station parking lot as a place to do business, and she specifies that as the site of the transaction the next morning. That, too, goes off without a hitch, though she finds the person a bit off-putting and perhaps dangerous-seeming in his evident desperation and twitchiness.
619 621
620 622 She goes home to relax. She idly goes through Craigslist some more, reads, and ends her day.
623 +
624 +*/
625 +
626 +Alley sat on the couch, reading the instructions that came in the box with the new glasses. She dropped the unfolded instruction sheet and looked from the new glasses to her own glasses, both sitting on the charging plate on her end table. The new glasses showed a glint of green by the right temple hinge; they were done charging. She picked them off the plate, looked at them as the green spark faded, then hooked the earpieces over her ears and settled the glasses on the bridge of her nose.
627 +
628 +Text appeared to float in the air before her: "PAIR WITH PHONE"
629 +
630 +She picked up her phone and followed instructions. When the pairing message faded away, a new message appeared: "PERSONALIZE?"
631 +
632 +Two buttons hovered below it, one blue with the word "YES", the other red with the word "NO". The instruction sheet said she could just point at a button for a full second, or use voice control. She raised a hand experimentally, and saw that it obscured the buttons when it passed through their space in her vision, but not the question. She pointed at "YES" until it blinked twice. The message changed again:
633 +
634 +"ENTER SUBJECT ID:"
635 +
636 +She copied the number from the sticker stuck to the instruction sheet.
637 +
638 +"PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:"
639 +
640 +She waited.
641 +
642 +"DO YOU WISH TO USE AUDIO?"
643 +
644 +No.
645 +
621 646
622 647 ## Refusing The Call:
623 648
624 649 The next day, the prioritizer has her do other stuff, which makes her nervous. She decides she does not want to do that any longer. As a part of this sequence of events, she end up meeting a man but not completing the transaction with him. He seems tense, and tries to get her to complete the transaction, but relents and seems understanding when she refuses. She's glad to get away from the situation. Perhaps there is a pile of money involved, and she decides she should just keep the cash for now instead of buying something "weird". She has resisted the call.
625 650
626 651 Somehow, this must lead to a problem. Does the money itself get her in trouble? Perhaps the plan is for her to use the money to immediately buy more cryptocurrency in a face-to-face meeting where urgent need gives her a significant profit margin -- or, more to the point, perhaps several such transactions. She chooses to avoid this after the first couple transactions when she finds that the people with whom she does business put her off, thus leading her to decide she should just keep the cash. Maybe the nice guy is the guy with whom she decides to cease trading.
627 652