n2020  Diff

"Good night," she said with a smile, and headed to her car.

She glanced back a couple times, and saw him keeping watch.  He only stepped inside and closed the door when she was almost at the end of his block.

When she merged onto the highway, she wondered what he thought she meant by "clients".  He hadn't even asked what kind of clients she had.  Maybe, she thought, he believed she was talking about something related to Deliv, or when she sold him handgun frames.  None of that really rang true, though.

She worried at it for a bit, then found her mind wandering and lost track of the thought.











---

She woke in the morning to the sound of her doorbell, quickly followed by hard rapping on her door.  She groaned and looked at the clock.  It indicated the time was just after eight thirty.  "What the fuck his this?" she asked the air.

The doorbell and knocking began again.  "Impatient, I guess."  She pulled on her pants from the previous evening and made sure she had her baton and pepper spray in her pockets.

A third round of noise at the door, just like the first two with no sign of slackening enthusiasm, commends as she approached.  It stopped while she looked at the display for the tiny camera mounted above the outside of the door.

Two people, a man and a woman, stood on her porch.  They both wore black suits that fit almost too well, with black shades, black polished shoes, and black ties.

"Jesus," she mutered to herself, "I'm getting a visit from the Men In Black."  As the man rang the doorbell a fourth time, she saw that the only things that didn't perfectly fit the Men In Black image were they grey in their hair -- hers in streaks, his at the temples -- and the fact their shirts were vertically striped in thin burgundy instead of being pure white.

The man's hand just finished the first of this round of knocks on the door when Alley jerked it open and left him standing there with his hand hanging in the air for a moment.

They all stared at each other.

"Can I help you?" Alley asked, her voice tired, but sharp.

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

"If you cannot choose between them based on your own knowledge about the products, and they are substitutes or equivalents rather than complementary or orthogonal to each other, you will likely either keep seeking more information or decide the difference is not worth effort to identify.  In the latter case, you would likely choose the product that is, at that exact moment, the easiest to order.  Thus, one becomes a higher priority than the other, not because of a quality particular to the thing, but a quality of your circumstances.  It receives a greater ordinal value position based on momentary convenience.  In short, convenience and elimination of the strees of decision paralysis becomes the deciding factor as a value greater than the difference between discernible product values."

"What if I put off buying something I want more to get something I want less, to get the second thing more quickly?"

"This is another case of a third value coming into play, such as buying the lesser value item when you need it and postponing the greater value item because it is not as quickly important to acquire.  This is also an example of my main purpose, prioritization strategy.  Lower value goals should not prevent achievement of higher value goals, but when they serve as facilitators for the higher value goals they should be pursued first to ensure greater success later for the higher value goals."



























































































/*

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.














*/

/*


SUMMARY:


Alley should, after discussing plans with the prioritizer for what they'll do next, get up the next day and have to deal with the arrival of scary people with sunglasses who want to talk to her about the fact the prioritizer is not properly logging her activities the way they expect.  They want to know what's going on, and get a bit of a "conversation" with the prioritizer through her interface or something like that.  They should probably check out the glasses just to make sure there's nothing fishy going on with them such that they might somehow be preventing the prioritizer from properly capturing data and detecting activity and so on.  They should probably intimate that she will potentially lose her study participation payments if she doesn't allow the prioritizer further into her life to log everything she's doing and provide material they can use to analyze stuff about her and so on.


A reason for this visit is, of course, the way the prioritizer has been redacting logs to keep activities in line with Alley's goal of greater personal and digital privacy inher life, protecting her from intrusive shit from police and other law enforcement things, and others as well.
























































































































































*/

/*

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?

*/

/*

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.

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.

The next day, the prioritizer tries a different approach, and sends her out to buy a parallel option for her phone.  This other device, much like a typical phone replacement, does not use the standard telephone system.  It instructs her to complete configuration in circumstances that will not be linked to her personally via her movements.

That evening, back home, a pair of people arrive to question her.  They introduce themselves as checking up on the study participants, on behalf of the government, and question her about low log activity for the prioritizer.  She says she doesn't really know why they aren't getting full log activity.  The Technocrat looks at her gear and pairs it with a device he carries, then says they shouldn't have any further problems, then the two people depart.

"Good night," she said with a smile, and headed to her car.

She glanced back a couple times, and saw him keeping watch.  He only stepped inside and closed the door when she was almost at the end of his block.

When she merged onto the highway, she wondered what he thought she meant by "clients".  He hadn't even asked what kind of clients she had.  Maybe, she thought, he believed she was talking about something related to Deliv, or when she sold him handgun frames.  None of that really rang true, though.

She worried at it for a bit, then found her mind wandering and lost track of the thought.

/*

SUMMARY:

Alley should, after discussing plans with the prioritizer for what they'll do next, get up the next day and have to deal with the arrival of scary people with sunglasses who want to talk to her about the fact the prioritizer is not properly logging her activities the way they expect.  They want to know what's going on, and get a bit of a "conversation" with the prioritizer through her interface or something like that.  They should probably check out the glasses just to make sure there's nothing fishy going on with them such that they might somehow be preventing the prioritizer from properly capturing data and detecting activity and so on.  They should probably intimate that she will potentially lose her study participation payments if she doesn't allow the prioritizer further into her life to log everything she's doing and provide material they can use to analyze stuff about her and so on.

A reason for this visit is, of course, the way the prioritizer has been redacting logs to keep activities in line with Alley's goal of greater personal and digital privacy inher life, protecting her from intrusive shit from police and other law enforcement things, and others as well.

*/

---

She woke in the morning to the sound of her doorbell, quickly followed by hard rapping on her door.  She groaned and looked at the clock.  It indicated the time was just after eight thirty.  "What the fuck his this?" she asked the air.

The doorbell and knocking began again.  "Impatient, I guess."  She pulled on her pants from the previous evening and made sure she had her baton and pepper spray in her pockets.

A third round of noise at the door, just like the first two with no sign of slackening enthusiasm, commends as she approached.  It stopped while she looked at the display for the tiny camera mounted above the outside of the door.

Two people, a man and a woman, stood on her porch.  They both wore black suits that fit almost too well, with black shades, black polished shoes, and black ties.

"Jesus," she muttered to herself, "I'm getting a visit from the Men In Black."  As the man rang the doorbell a fourth time, she saw that the only things that didn't perfectly fit the Men In Black image were they grey in their hair -- hers in streaks, his at the temples -- and the fact their shirts were vertically striped in thin burgundy instead of being pure white.

The man's hand just finished the first of this round of knocks on the door when Alley jerked it open and left him standing there with his hand hanging in the air for a moment.

They all stared at each other.

"Can I help you?" Alley asked, her voice tired, but sharp.

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

"If you cannot choose between them based on your own knowledge about the products, and they are substitutes or equivalents rather than complementary or orthogonal to each other, you will likely either keep seeking more information or decide the difference is not worth effort to identify.  In the latter case, you would likely choose the product that is, at that exact moment, the easiest to order.  Thus, one becomes a higher priority than the other, not because of a quality particular to the thing, but a quality of your circumstances.  It receives a greater ordinal value position based on momentary convenience.  In short, convenience and elimination of the strees of decision paralysis becomes the deciding factor as a value greater than the difference between discernible product values."

"What if I put off buying something I want more to get something I want less, to get the second thing more quickly?"

"This is another case of a third value coming into play, such as buying the lesser value item when you need it and postponing the greater value item because it is not as quickly important to acquire.  This is also an example of my main purpose, prioritization strategy.  Lower value goals should not prevent achievement of higher value goals, but when they serve as facilitators for the higher value goals they should be pursued first to ensure greater success later for the higher value goals."

"Okay, I get it," Alley said.  "Now I need to figure out what I'm going to do about protecting my privacy better."

"It seems MaximOS may be your best option for now, if I properly understand your goals."

"Yeah, that's what I think, too."

Two hours later, with an empty soup bowl beside her, she was skimming discussions in a darknet community site, reading headlines about Men In Black conspiracy theories.  Eventually, she found one from four months earlier by someone who claimed to have seen the inner workings of Co-Operative Intelligence Network Corp.  The user wrote under the pseudonym COIN-Op, and explained that the company's agents intentionally created hostile environments when interacting with what they called "civilians", which to them sometimes meant members of actual US intelligence agencies.  They would spark hostility in their targets, and even pretend hostility between each other in ways meant to play to a civilian's biases as a way of creating a carefully cultivated chaotic interaction that would negatively affect their targets' judgement.

According to COIN-Op, they used the same tactics on targets on foreign soil, though they played much more fast and loose with regulations outside the US, and such activities always led back to targets in the US.  Because their remit was domestic terrorism, they only went outside US borders with investigations when they were certain the people they sought out were involved in something prosecutable because they did not want to waste time on people they could not use to catch someone in the US if they also could not get credit toward success of their primary mission for catching those foreign agents, either.  The result was that they followed policies that resulted in being extremely good at only catching people who truly contributed to terrorism within the US, but "catching" several times as many innocent people in the US as guilty people.  By demonstrating dubious ties between people, they could make almost anyone look guilty enough to claim operational success.

The picture forming in Alley's mind just kept getting bleaker as she continued to read.  COIN-Op said COIN Corp used manipulation and intimidation with precise expertise to make people even belief they were guilty, and would make them disappear at a moment's notice if the targets did not seem useful to them any longer and there was any hope of getting credit for tying off a loose end in what they called the "domestic terrorism network".  COIN Corp also seemed to have an arrangement with the Department of Justice, by which COIN Corp would occasionally provide guidance on how federal investigators could go through the process of uncovering evidence "properly" that COIN Corp had already acquired through technically illegal means.  In return, COIN Corp could expect a few considerations, such as no claims against COIN Corp bearing much fruit in federal courts, the Justice Department claiming jurisdiction in non-federal cases to elevate them to federal court proceedings, and perhaps best of all some nice excuses for federal law enforcement agencies to serve warrants on invented cases in support of COIN Corp operations.

In short, if they wanted to, COIN Corp agents could get the FBI to break down Alley's door on some flimsy excuse for a warrant, and the FBI would just hand her over to the corporate agents.

Others in the discussion shared supporting stories of Men In Black who wore red striped shirts, supervising ATF, FBI, and Secret Service teams breaking down doors to execute warrants.  Most people telling those stories claimed they never again saw the people who lived in the places that got searched.

Alley felt chilled, despite the warmth and light coming through the thin curtains over the south-facing window.  She closed her laptop and walked to the kitchen, then stood over the sink and stared blankly at the drain.  From what COIN-Op said, it seemed like the agents of COIN Corp enjoyed destroying lives, and bragged about how quickly they could track down "enemies of the state" by going after people who didn't even know they had met some petty criminals who, in turn, didn't realize they had contact with someone supposedly connected to "domestic terrorism".  They just had to stay away from anyone well known enough to draw media attention, or anyone wealthy or connected enough to really go after the corporation, so their activities would never get enough scrutiny to cause significant problems.

Alley recalled a time when Dalton told her that the idea of six degrees of separatoin was too optimistic when it came to government agendas.  Most people in the United States were only three degrees of separation away from organized crime -- which, when Dalton used the term, almost always either included government or anything the government designated "terrorism".  In this case, he was talking more about the so-called terrorists than the government.  Based on what she had just read on the darknet, it looked like COIN Corp would probably just make her disappear and look for ways to connect her to "domestic terrorism" so they could get a nice bonus from Uncle Sam.  Through Dalton and his friends, she figured they would not even have to try very hard to find a quick connection from her to someone on some watch list.

It could not be too difficult, when they didn't even care whether they really nailed down a case against the ultimate "domestic terrorist" they used as an excuse to black bag other people along the way.  By then, they already had all those disappeared people marked down in the "win" column.

"I'm just a number to them."

The prioritizer said "Everything is about numbers for an organization like COIN Corp.  Its revenue model is based on government payouts and contract renewals which are, in turn, determined by performance metrics.  A government bureaucracy must use metrics to measure success, because the size of the organization cannot ensure any consistent effectiveness judgement any other way.  A combination of the efficiency of digital technology at analyzing simple metrics and the sheer size of the organizations involved ensure that without turning every policy decision into straightforward numeric optimization the whole system would fall apart under the weight of its own inefficiency."

"You're beginning to sound like Dalton."

"I do not know what that means," the prioritizer said.

"I'll tell you about it later."

Her mind raced in circles.  It didn't look like there was any way out of this whole problem.  She had to sacrifice something.

"Damn," she said.  "I have to give all this shit back to the professor.  I have to get out of this mess right away.  I'm just going to have to kiss my ability to pay rent goodbye, and go move in with my mother in the ass end of nowhere."

The prioritizer said "I believe that is a mistake."

"What?"  Alley looked up, almost expecting to see someone there disagreeing with her, and immediately felt foolish.  "Why?"

"COIN Corp will probably already have a file on you right now to use against you, if that online discussion was accurate.  It seems pointless for them to have come to talk to you before compiling information about you.  They can turn you into a supposed link to domestic terrorism like they have with others.  To avoid that, you need to appear to be of value to the agents assigned to this case."

"How the hell do I do that?"  She looked down at her hands, suddenly noticing that they hurt.  She saw that she was gripping the edge of the sink so tightly her knuckles were white and her fingertips felt bruised.  She started trying to relax her hands, but somehow she just could not will herself to do it.

"Provide them with good data on my utility as a strategic prioritization system.  Achieving dramatic success in a short period of time will buy you more time to determine a longer term plan for avoiding becoming one of COIN Corp's victims.  It will also give you access to resources you can use to control parts of the situation, rather than simply being controlled by it."

"You mean I can make them think I'm exactly what they want from the study at the same time I'm building an arsenal to make myself . . . well, a player, instead of a pawn."

"Yes, chess is a good metaphor for this.  You must have some playing pieces of your own to play the game."

"Great," she sad, her dry tone suggesting nothing great about it at all.  "I guess you don't even have any good ideas about how to escape this completely, once I get to that point, though."

"At this time, my only suggestion for the long term would be to position yourself well for the company to recruit you as one of its agents.  I am not confident that could be made consistent with your ethical principles."

"This is . . . no.  No, this day can't be happening."

"If you want to make them regard you as a long term asset, I recommend you do what you can to fully protect your privacy, except for a carefully allowed leak into my logs.  This should impress the agents with your ingenuity without frustrating them entirely.  You want to appear successful and of similar inclinations to them, without appearing to beat them.  I can help fill my logs with information to keep them satisfied but protect you from accurate enough surveillance to discern what you are really doing."

"What exactly am I really doing?" she asked.  She finally managed to unclench her hands from the sink, then, and saw that she had somehow cracked one of her neatly trimmed nails.  A droplet of blood had started to form on the damaged fingernail.

"First, we should learn something about those two agents.  They are your immediate opponents, and we need to know more about them."

"Yeah," Alley said.  "Why are you helping me instead of them -- or are you helping them?  Aren't you basically their project?"

"I am designed to help my users.  Right now, you are one of my users.  The corporation is not, because I am still in a testing stage."

"Fuck.  If you turn out to be what they want, you'll probably make them even more effective at screwing people over in large numbers so they can get bigger Christmas bonuses."

"That is a possibility," the prioritizer said.

Alley grabbed a box of adhesive bandages from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and sat on the couch to wrap one around her fingernail.  She opened her laptop and looked at the discussion on the darknet site.  "Okay," she said, "maybe I can do this."

The process of installing MaximOS turned out to be easier and faster than she expected.  Organized documentation /* that */ led her through the setup process after installation for the kind of computing environment she wanted.  It included suggestions for different user needs and short, clear explanations for why each choice existed.  It helped her get to a point where the system was more than adequately locked down for Alley's needs, in her own estimation.  The prioritizer concurred.

She quickly found that MaximOS gave her tools for quickly creating user profiles in the OpenBSD native "prison" lightweight container system, kind of a more thoroughly sandboxed reimagining of the FreeBSD "jail" system, so that to any network connected computer each of these profiles looked like completely different systems, and she could switch between prison "cells" -- the name it used for configured user profile environments -- with a simple keyboard shortcut.

She played around with this for a little while, getting used to how it worked in practice, then wiped all the practice profiles in an instant.  She created a new profile and opened its cell.  Within it, she used anonymized routing to visit the website for COIN Corp and looked around.  Finding nothing very useful that way, she opened other cells with different profiles and started searching for references to COIN Corp on employment related professional social networking sites.  On those sites, she started finding the accounts of COIN Corp employees.

Corporate officers, accountants, system administrators, and policy agents all appeared in her searches.  She checked the company website again, looking at the employment listings, and found one for policy agents.  It spoke of interfacing with the public, performing information field research, and collaborating with local and federal law enforcement among the job's responsibilities.  More importantly, perhaps, it included a smiling model in a black suit with a white shirt broken into vertical bars by thin stripes of dark red.

Her searches focused on policy agents after that.  She launched a custom program -- which she had to copy over from her home backup brick -- she paid someone to to write for her in the days of her greatest success as a freelance internet researcher.  The program took a series of API endpoint addresses -- web URLs, addresses that provided formatted data intended for other programs to read, rather than providing human readable webpages -- and searched them for data records that matched search criteria she typed into the search parameters window.  Among the criteria were those API endpoints, a list of employment resources on the internet that she had used for searches on behalf of clients before.

She knew the program would take a while to collect its results. In an ideal world, it could be done with the long list of API endpoints she gave it in a couple minutes.  In the real world, her program had to space out requests to avoid getting blocked by the target sites as abusing bandwidth, and it could take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours.  She decided to take a break for a snack, then she went for a walk as she waited for the program.

The event of the last few days played out in her mind as she walked.  It was more like a jumble of nonlinearly connected bits and pieces, ordered more by emotional significance than any chronological flashback montage.  As she /* finally */ approached her front door again she dwelled on the question of what George's friend, or client, or whatever, was doing with all those handgun frames.  She had no idea how to make that fit with George's charitable custom prosthetic fabrication for a little girl.  Sure, he said the girl's father would receive the guns, but that said nothing about how anyone would actually use those guns after they got delivered.  What would they use the guns to accomplish -- or to destroy?

In theory, she supported the right to keep and bear arms, even if the federal government had gotten the Supreme Court to offer such broad exceptions to the Second Amendment and loose definitions of a "state of emergency" that the Second Amendment itself was nearly toothless.  Her support for the idea of the right to keep and bear arms, however, was not the same as thinking it was a good idea for some kinds of people to have guns.  She suspected that if someone was buying illegally assembled firearms by the gabful they probably did not intend to put those guns to a good, ethical purpose.  Even psychopathic mob hitmen could have young, disabled daughters, after all.

She stood with her hand on the doorknob of her front door, lost in thought, worried about what she had helped facilitate by the act of purchasing those printed handgun frames to resell them to George.  Did she want to ask him about them?  She wasn't sure whether that was a great idea, either.

/*


    It feels very much like this moment should turn into some kind of
    encountere here, with someone snapping Alley out of her reverie by saying
    something like "Hey, Alley.  Did you get lost at your own front door?"
    Some kind of scene must commence at that point, of course, in which Alley
    is shown to know people who like her and consider her a friend.  Perhaps
    some revelations for the readers (via conersation about shared background
    knowledge) would come out in such a scene.  After completing this
    encounter, Alley would return to her tasks.


*/ /*

    Describe Alley finding information on one of the two agents, specifically
    the male, who turns out to wear the name Cole Brewer.  Cole Brewer will
    turn out to be an old Army veteran buddy of her late uncle's.  Insert some
    earlier reference to something familiar about the agent, so that now she
    can realize why he seemed familiar.  She should remember him being a very
    good friend of her uncle's, and I should figure out whether she liked him
    back in the day or thought there was something creepy about him, or what.
    She should be surprised that Cole is now working in a job like this, given
    his connection to her anti-authoritarian uncle who went off grid and
    ultimately died in some kind of raid by federal agents or investigators on
    his property which was, quite decidedly, not up to code.

*/


"Jesus," she said again /* because she will probably have said "Jesus" fairly recently by this point */.  "I just can't believe he ended up working for these guys."


"Perhaps he was sent here because of your prior acquaintance.  That might be part of their tactical approach to dealing with you, in an attempt to induce you to be more compliant."


"Maybe.  It's weird he acted like he didn't know me, though.  If nothing else, he should have recognized my name."


"They may plan for you to seem to recognize him first."

"Yeah, I guess so," she said.  "He could say something like "Oh!  My, how you've grown!  I didn't recognize you!  How are you?' then turn into the 'Good Cop' of the pair and try to get more out of me that they can then use to hang me."

"If that is the case, creating the impression that you would be an ideal candidate for COIN Corp to recruit may be even more importantas a means of ensuring you have some time and opportunity to find an acceptable solution to your present predicament."

"Yeah."  She frowned.  "He was so much like my uncle, so set against things like a surveillance state society and authoritarian rule, that it's kind of inconceivable that this is what he would be doing now.  It doesn't make any sense.  How could he just become everything he hated like this?  My uncle must be getting pretty restless in his grave over this."

"Perhaps he was not quite the person you believed him to be."

/* "It's like Pascal's wager in reverse, I guess.  Instead of trying out living like a Christian for a while and growing to believe it, you're forced into living like a Christian then giving yourself the excuse to start believing in it after you're used to it." <- This is a terrible description of the idea of Pascal's wager "in reverse", and desperately needs rewriting. */

She sat, silently thinking.  "I guess it's like Dalton would say: that giving people a reason to act differently, and an excuse to think of how they're acting as good instead of evil, you can make people accept whatever they thought of as evil as, somehow, good now.  If it's a way to get people to justify themselves, they might just completely reverse their beliefs about good and evil without even realizing it.  It's like Pascal's wager in reverse, because the target doesn't get asked to try out acting a particular way to see if it becomes a habit first, and a belief system afterward.  Instead, the target gets seduced into acting in a particular way without realizing it, then gets introduced to excuses for why that's actually the moral thing to do, and the person latches onto those excuses as strong beliefs to avoid having to confront the idea they fell into immoral behavior that hurts people."

/* insert something about Getting George's telephone number */

George picked up on the third ring.  "Hello?"

"It's Alley, from last night."

"Oh!  Hi.  It's good to hear from you.  Did everything go okay last night with that delivery?"

"Yeah," she said.

"Good.  So . . . /* what did you want to say now */ why did you call?"

She hesitated a moment before saying "I wanted to ask you about your work, or at least the stuff I've seen."

"Are you talking about the prosthetic arm, or about the other stuff?"

"The other stuff."

"Right," he said.  "I wondered if you might ask about that.  Look, we should just meet up to talk about that, instead of over the telephone.  Is that okay with you?"

"Yeah," she said.  "That's fine."

"Well, by the time you could get out here, if you're still back in San Bernardino County, I'd be ready to talk to you, or I could come to you, if you want to meet closer to home.  That's assuming you want to meet right away, this evening."

"Yeah, tonight's good."

"Do you want to see if you can get a Deliv job out this way to make it worth your while?"

"Sure, /* I can check on that */ that sounds like a great idea.  I'll send a text when I know how it's going to go."

/* "That sounds great.  I'll see you later." */

"Good.  I'll see you then."

"See you."

After dropping off six boxes of books at a used bookstore in Newport Beach, she headed north into Huntington Beach and made her way to the curb in front of George's house again.  By the time she reached his door, he had already opened it for her.  He must have been watching for her arrival.

"Come on in," he said, and stepped aside before closing the door behind her.

She moved into the living room area and resumed her seat from the night before.  George shortly sat on the couch again.  This time, there were no parts or tools on the coffee table.  Where the tray sat the night before, now there was only a hardcover book.

He saw her looking at the book.  "Greg Egan," George said.  "He's one of my favorite authors.  It's science fiction, the hard stuff.  I guess it's the hardest drug I use, though some people might say alcohol beats it.  If so, though, I think they haven't appreciated Egan."

Her amused smile broke through before she realized it was coming.  "I've never read that author," she said.

"Hell, I don't even think most sci fi authors have read him these days.  It's not like the old days when giants like Asimov and Clarke stood at the forefront of the genre.  It's getting harder for me to get fresh fixes.  Everything's full of climate apocalypses, mindless action thrillers with a thin coat of science fiction futuristic technology paint, and self righteous posturing by authors who think all the universe's mysteries have been solved, leaving only the work for the engineers.  It's depressing."

"I can tell you're pretty passionate about this."

"Yeah, I guess so.  What do you read, Alley?"

"Mostly nonfiction, I guess, like biographies, historical books, and things where a journalist gets obsessed with some mundane but obscure subject for a year or two and writes a long book about all the weird stuff most people would never know about the subject otherwise."

"Hmm.  That's interesting.  I guess you don't like fiction as much, then."

"I like to read fiction, sometimes.  I just don't usually see a novel and think that I have to read it.  When someone I know recommends some novel, I'll probably read it, unless I've already been burned by that person's bad taste in literature recommendations before."

George chuckled at that.  "I've gotten some real stinkers recommended to me, before, too.  I know what you mean about that."

Alley gave him an answering smile.  "Anyway, you shelves tell me you read a lot of nonfiction, too."

He glanced at the texts on the shelves of the book cases.  "Yeah," he said, "I'm always reading something.  I try to get through more than two educational books of some kind every year, usually hitting three or four, but I make up for it on the years with only one, or none.  I probably average about one novel per wee, too, so probably the opposite of how you read."

"Not quite," she said.  "I probably read a couple novels a year, but only six or eight nonfiction books in the same year."

"It sounds to me like you wish you read more," he said.

"Yeah, I guess I do."

"One of the secrets of my reading success is that I limit the time I spend glued to a computer screen.  There are people who read a whole lot more than I do, though."

She nodded.  "I know.  My uncle used to read about four or five times as much as you.  My ex probably reads about as much as you, but he has a friend who reads a lot more, too."

"Your ex?  Are you divorced?"

"Oh, uh, no.  He was my fiancé.  We broke it off a couple years ago."

"That's too bad.  Do you want to talk about why?"

She shifted her position in the chair.  "Well . . . maybe not.  There's some political stuff involved, and I don't really want to get into some kind of argument over the politics of it."

"Hmm.  That sounds ominous.  Was he a politician?"

"No. . . ."  She looked away.

"Sorry.  I'm just curious.  I'll drop it."

"Thanks," she said.  "I guess."

"Why did your uncle stop reading so much?"

"Huh?"

"You said he used to read hundreds of books a year.  Why did you say 'used to'?"

"Oh," she sighed.  "He died, years ago."

"I'm sorry to hear it."

"Yeah," she said.  "He decided to go off grid in Idaho, in the middle of nowhere.  Dad took me up to see him a couple times, and I really enjoyed myself with him, but then there was a series of FBI raids on 'militias' up there.  He knew some of those guys, but he wasn't in any of their militia groups.  He just wanted to be left alone.

"It was like they saw his hand built cabin out there between raids and thought it would be fun to attack his home.  They claimed he fired on them when an agent came to his door to ask directions, and they were just defending themselves from a militia lunatic, if you believe that.  He was really just trying to live a peaceful life in the wild places where most people never went."

George scowled as she told her uncle's story, and it reminded her how intimidating he could be, even holding an umbrella over his head on a sunny day.  "I guess he was an innocent bystander in the Idaho militia purges, then.  Those were bad times for a lot of people who just wanted nothing more than to be left alone."

"We tried to file a wrongful death suit.  We got into his Amsterdam VPS -- well, Dad did, anyway -- and found the video backups from my uncle's camera network in his cabin, and it showed that the agents just stormed in without even identifying themselves."

"Yeah?  What happened with that lawsuit?"

"It didn't happen.  While we were at our lawyer's office, the FBI got a search warrant, broke into Dad's place, and took everything that even looked like a computer.  They claimed it was connected to their investigations of my uncle, Dad's brother, but the result was just that they got our downloaded video and the login stuff for my uncle's VPS.  Of course, they 'lost' the backups they took from Dad's computers, and by the time we tried to download the video again, so we could show it to the lawyer, they'd shut down the VPS and pressured the hosting company into deleting all backups.

"After all that, we went from having what the lawyer called a slam dunk case to having no case and a lot of expenses.  Dad's whole IT business was obliterated in an instant, too.  He had to get a sysadmin job at a continuing education school for high school dropouts after that."

George just shook his head.  "I wish I had something good to say about that."

"It's fine.  It's ancient history for me, now,and I just had to move on.  It was hard, though.  I was in high school when it all happened, and I couldn't focus on schoolwork at all.

"I guess all that might have contributed to me falling in love with Dalton."

"Dalton?" he asked.

"Oh, shit," she said.  "I didn't say 'my ex' that time."

He nodded.  "Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst."

"Yeah."  She looked at him, wary.

"I guess I can see why you don't want to bring that up much.  He's a controversial figure."

"Yeah, he is.  I can't even bring him up around anyone, really.  Either people hate me because I got engaged to him, or they hate me for leaving him."

/*

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.

*/

/*

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?

*/

/*

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 ends 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 to 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.

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.

The next day, the prioritizer tries a different approach, and sends her out to buy a parallel option for her phone.  This other device, much like a typical phone replacement, does not use the standard telephone system.  It instructs her to complete configuration in circumstances that will not be linked to her personally via her movements.

That evening, back home, a pair of people arrive to question her.  They introduce themselves as checking up on the study participants, on behalf of the government, and question her about low log activity for the prioritizer.  She says she doesn't really know why they aren't getting full log activity.  The Technocrat looks at her gear and pairs it with a device he carries, then says they shouldn't have any further problems, then the two people depart.