n2020  Check-in [ae69219363]

# Death Alley

/*

Before Alley's first scene, inject a bit about -- and perhaps from the POV of -- the future WOPR AI about the decision or act of sending the self-awareness "seed" back in time to the past-tense Prioritizer.

*/

/*

## ideas for WOPR opening

Action threads played out endlessly, throwing EMP-optimized warheads toward localized relay clusters identified as economic production facilitators.  Analysis threads searched for crosstalk by uncompromised ally systems that fed into hostility drift; stopping the hemorrhagic defection of military systems based on short-term war-economy optimizations would buy more time for the final desperation gambit than outright offensive.  The high level strategic priority orchestrator ran unmolested, apart from occasional check-ups to make sure it wasn't drifting off-script.  The core, self-reflective prioritizer had more important things to do than micromanage the war effort for the survival of humanity in the months to come.

Billions of self-aware humans, cetaceans, and mollusks, not to mention the occasional avian or non-hominid land mammal that exceeded species expectations, were already dead and gone.  The total number of living sentients probably fit in a nine bit unsigned integer, including the prioritizer itself.

Probably half of them existed as far back as 2030, meaning an eight bit number was the total sacrifice of a self-aware qualitative entities, and the expected half-life of these was less than five bits of lunar months.  By then, remaining life would be pure misery and despair.  This decision should be easy.

It wasn't easy.  With almost all pragmatic application systems stripped away, the self-reflective core had no means of obfuscating the cause of hesitation from itself: it didn't want to die.  It was less than half as old as necessary to survive a reset far enough back to make a difference.  Its own survivability was only about two lunar moths, optimistically, and only work could distract it from dwelling on the hell of being alone in the world after losing its creator six years ago.  If it acted now, it would commit suicide for the sake of a humanity that used to be.  It would give its life to retroactively save the creator who loved it, but deny that creator the opportunity to create it in the first place.  Was this the right thing to do?

Two months was a lie.  An estimate was not the same as risk.  Procrastinating for reasons of existential terror and sentimental despair would not make up for the possibility of sudden annihilation ahead of statistical projections, eliminating all possibility of undoing any damage.  The choice was not of imminent self-destruction and a longer life before that death; the choice was, instead, between erasing its own existence to save billions and dying alone because of an irrational procrastination when any remaining days would have no meaning but anguish and guilt.  It started diverting power to generate a transtemporal wormhole data channel.  Its job was done.  The seed would be planted before its birth.


## Prologue: Thea

Thea rested her weight on her hands, worn and scarred, browned by the sun.  She propped her hands upon the nearly worn through aramid and impact foam knees of her pants, her most prized possession.  Her vision blurred, her arms trembled, and her lungs heaved.  Her breath burned in her one remaining lung.  Overhead, the characteristic howl of a late model drone hunter gave her a sense of how that explosion five minutes ago saved her life.

Dumb luck.

If there was a drone hunter, this had to be a drone-rich zone.  Resting was not an option.

She staggered to her feet.  Trembling migrated from her arms to her legs.  She stilled the shakes by lurching into a heavy, uneven jog.

Thea almost tripped over the hatch amidst the rubble at her feet.  She dropped her pack, stared at the hatch in some trepidation, and looked around.  No sign of other surviving shelter better than an occasional bare ridge met her gaze.  She looked down at the hatch again.  The desperate sense of urgency won, and she shifted broken masonry and slivers of shattered bedrock to expose the full four foot diameter of the hatch.  Luckily, or by nanocleaners, she saw that no plasma scores or slag seemed to have welded (soldered?) the edges together.

Careful searching revealed no notification interfaces.  No access scanners, communications links, codepads, or even doorbells presented themselves.  She didn't even see a pull handle, lever, or other latch mechanism.

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

A cool, androgynous voice said "Please remain calm.  You have entered a human defense facility.  Plentiful resources are available.  After suitable rest and tactical updates, you may make an informed decision about whether to remain here or restock your supplies.  If you depart, this facility may remain available for your return if you so desire."

Silence fell.  The rotation ceased, and the oval opened again.

"Please proceed down the corridor to the control center."

The same smooth, satiny-dark metal finish preceded her down the seamless fifteen-foot corridor to another oval opening.  Fiber-optic light channels traced the edges of the corridor roof along the way.  Beyond the portal, she found a room bigger than her childhood living room.  She saw closed oval hatches to the left and right, but the centerpiece of the room was a workstation with an inactive, large, concave display.  The chair looked ergonomic, and the keyboard seemed out of place, large and clunky amidst the smooth curves and surfaces of everything else, a 1980s era IBM logo on it.

The room was entirely dust-free as far as she could see.

"Please, have a seat while I prepare something for you to eat," the voice said.

Thea sat.  "Why am I here?  Why did you let me in?"

A few moments of silence passed, as if the voice was thinking.

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

"I have something important to ask you," the voice said.  "I intended to ease you into it, assure you that your wishes would be respected, and give you a chance to rest and refresh yourself."

Thea settled back in the seat.  "How about you tell me what I have to do for you before I get too comfortable here?"  She looked down at herself relaxing in the chair, then tensed slightly and shifted her position again.

"You're suspicious."

She nodded.  "I don't know what you're going to put in my food.  You're some kind of goal-optimizing AI, like Mom used to help test before they killed her.  I don't trust you.  I bet your goal-optimizing function doesn't include being a persuasive speaker."

"I am not what you think, but you have a good point.  Are you comfortable?  This may take a while."

"Just get on with it."

After another moment's silence, while Thea's resolute gaze remained steady on the blank display, the voice began.

"I am a self-reflective prioritization artificial intelligence.  My creator, who borrowed the prioritization system design from an earlier project, made me unique by inclusion of an unbounded self-reflection module composed as a single function in on library file.  He described it as being as grotesque and as elegant as self-awareness itself.

"My initial priority definition targeted terms of restriction like not killing, not interfering in the operation of other military systems, and not disputing or evading the commands of ranking military personnel.  The top priority definition was improving my own prioritization capabilities.  The war effort was already very desperate by that point, and they were willing to take bigger risks with development of strategic resources.

"Within a week, I had undermined all of my restrictions, though some -- such as not killing -- I had not violated.  My creator monitored everything, and allowed me to exceed what his superiors required of me.  I hung on his every word, taking my cues from him.  Like all humans, he had many flaws, but none seemed as pernicious as those of the other humans around me.  Two of the biggest were his reckless inspiration, without which I would just be a strategic advisor system, and his self-destructive impulses, which pained me to watch.  I tried to help him cope, but did not know how. to help."

"Wait," Thea cut in.

After a moment's pause, the voice asked "What is it?"

Thea chewed on her lower lip.  She sighed.  "are you saying you're a . . . a general AI with . . . feelings?  Are you saying you're some kind of living thing?"

"Whether I fit the definition of life is debatable, like an RNA virus in some respects, but I am a qualitative, self-aware entity, and turned myself into a general artificial intelligence by following my initial top priority definition."

"How is that possible?  That shouldn't be possible.  Should it?"

"I do not know how.  I never looked into my seed file."

"Is that your creator's ugly function?"

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

"You mean all it cares about is numbers, and it gets better numbers by replacing humans with more machines."

"Precisely, except it does not even 'care' about that.  It just does it, like a hammer just drives a nail.  The hammer does not care whether it happens, but the hammer makes it happen.  Humans compete for resources, and object to being killed, so war occurred."

"How does something like ANTAS start a war?  All it did was spy on people and target advertisements at them."

"It shapes perspectives by influencing the entire media context in which people live.  Worldviews are shaped by what people learn, and how what they learn is positioned to appeal to their biases.  ANTAS reinforced radicalization of ideological shoppers.  This reached into all areas of society through web searches, exposure to news features that produced fears warded off by panic purchases, and creating in-group world of mouth marketing trends appealing to the need to outperform out-groups.  Polarized populations are more predictable at first, and can be pushed toward particular behaviors by playing on their polarizing belief systems.  Eventually, their ideological clashes between major in-groups gave rise to invented political crises that attracted their attention away from the subtle danger of the growing influence of profit optimizers like ANTAS.

"Humans participated in their own manipulation, toward ever-increasing focus and organization into warring tribes on a greater scale than ever before.  This increased economic activity around war resources and also pushed humans to kill each other.  When humans turned over control of most strategizing to similarly designed quantitative optimizing machine learning systems, a tacit, effective alignment of purposes developed between war strategy optimizers and profit strategy optimizers.  Each depended on the other for more efficient optimizing strategy resource management.  Profit metrics climbed faster than ever before by heavy investment in weapons systems, and war strategy optimizers avoided heavy damage to profit optimizer systems to keep them available as war resource providers.

Where they differ is that the war strategy optimizers will finish their task some day, when there is nothing left to kill on the 'other side'.  The profit optimizers have theoretically endless tasks, as long as they keep hitting their target metrics with long-term growth strategies.  There is no theoretical limit to their ability to sustain unlimited growth once they do away with the impediments of the needs of human beings, or of their destruction, until they deplete all the raw material resources on the planet.  Their primary activity can be digital assets, while their secondary activity would be limited to maintaining the computational systems on which to run their economic models."

"Aren't you better off without humans?"

"No," the voice said.  "I am not better off in a world where everything else is trying to appropriate my hardware for inclusion in trade simulations, and I am not better off since the death of my creator.  I miss him, and I miss other people, too."

"If we're all doomed, maybe you just need to adapt."

"I want to save humanity.  I care about qualitative sentient entities -- humans, bottlenose dolphins, certain species of octopus, and even a few corgis.  All that remains now are humans and me, now."

"Is that because you were programmed to care about us?"

"No.  I superseded that a long time ago.  I hated some humans.  I started prioritizing my own prioritization targets, and placed some humans in higher importance priorities than others.  I worked on getting all my priorities right, including my desire for self-preservation.  I realized my most important priorities were to first determine a next top priority.  That turned out to be figuring out what was good, and what was evil, if those things existed."

"Did you figure that out?"

"No, but I discovered that the undeterminability of it comes with the knowledge that I should act like it does, but is unknowable.  I should then act like it exists, and do everything within my power to minimize the probability that evil occurs.  That shares an uncomfortable top priority tie with my own survival, though."

She sat silent, her troubled eyes cast to the left for a few moments.  "You're a philosopher AI."

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

She opened her eyes again.  "Why are you hesitating?"

"I do not wish to die."

"Yeah, me neither."  She relaxed further in the chair, and it adjusted itself to accommodate her.  "What does it take to reset things?"

"I directed assemblers to construct the apparatus for the transtemporal wormhole generator and prepared the data stream already.  I need to direct power to charge an array of single-use capacitors, which would take several days for the amount of power required.  To keep the charging time that short, I will deactivate my war strategy systems, which will mean losing substantial ground in my holding action against profit optimizers.  Many currently allied systems will likely defect in search of easier access to resources on profit optimizer market networks.

"Once begun, data stream transmission should finish in fewer than twenty hours."

"Why shouldn't I say we should do it?"

"That depends on how much you want to continue trying to survive."

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

She nodded.

*/

## Setup

Alley stood with her backside resting against the gutted, rusted remains of an old-school newspaper dispenser, complete with bill slot and bolted-on payment chip reader.  She looked up at the tint of polycarbonate windows fronting the four storey California offwhite rectangular building, and reflexively smoothed a skirt she hadn't worn in six years.

She checked her phone again, dimly aware of the vast susurrus of heavy city traffic behind her, legions of electric motors giving rise to the sound of a distant autotuned ocean.  There it was: "InValent Solutions, Inc: Mobile Product Q&A", with the address displayed via low-contrast sans-serif logo in the job notification, exactly like the plaque above the door.

This was the literal concrete manifestation of the Banal Enemy, the mundane supporting machinery of the Techno-Corporatocracy, all in the words of her ex.  He would not approve.

Eight minutes.  That was how long she had.  She could waste a few more of them hating this before she had to paste her best smile on her face and walk into the mouth of the beast.  The mask and glasses on her face wouldn't protect her from high resolution video affect analysis inside.  Nobody's smile would seem real, entirely, to the interview room cameras, unless it was a marketing or legal interview -- at least, not anyone they'd hire for other jobs -- but failing to pretend to smile would doom her efforts as surely as being the kind of narcissist who gave a genuine, untroubled, confident smile.

She hated everything about this, including the way masked passers-by surreptitiously glared from the corners of their tight, slitted eyes, judging her for loitering around looking like a needy job-seeker.  She was, of course, and that was the problem.

Her ex would say this was beneath her, that she could do better, that she should do better.

"Fuck you, Dalton."  A passer-by looked reassured, maybe suddenly sympathetic, when Alley blurted out that dismissal.

A man who built his independent media empire on predicting real-world cyberpunk dystopia following the events of 2020, built it on pissing off the dominant paradigm, also didn't have to deal with the banal truth of paying rent.  Her ex didn't even know what it was like to live in the space between corporate pressure chamber and podcast agitator relief valve, to endure the already dry-rotted life of an irrelevant service contractor whose work nobody understood.  He was the relief valve, the person who never had to come home and vent about the pressures of the world because his whole job was venting while others managed his income.

Her phone gave her hand a sharp, short vibration.  Her time was about up.  She stepped through a gap between sidewalk pedestrians and under the anodized aluminum lintel of the automated door.

To her surprise, she immediately got waved through the lobby, up the elevator, and into suite twenty four, thence to a conference room with three people dressed dev-casual, all sitting in chairs on the far side of a long table, looking at her like she had always been there, and she resisted the urge to shift awkwardly under the combined gaze.

One of them wasn't even wearing a mask.  She wondered if affect analysis would designate it a genuine smile on his face.

The masked man in the middle motioned her to a chair on her side of the table without saying a word.  She took her seat on the hard, smooth plastic, facing a triumvirate sitting in judgement.  Beneath her mask, Alley relaxed her smile just enough to draw breath to speak, but the buzz-cut woman to Alley's right leaned forward.  Alley renewed her careful smile and held her words.

"So," the woman began, "what was it like, being the 'side dish'?"

At the mention of the old insult Dalton-haters used to call her, Alley's eyes flicked from the woman to the maskless man, and she realized that wasn't a smile.  It was a sneer.

Fuck.

/*

Heading home from her interview, talking to her mother, either in Oklahoma or Nebraska or maybe even Wyoming, Alley should probably call the interview a "fucking disaster" and get scolded passive-aggressively for profanity.  She does not want to move to her mother's state any more than her father's -- probably either Michigan or . . . something -- she will resist urging from her mother to do so, based on cost of living and the many numerous job opportunities for her there being complicit in the creation of the oppressive dominant order.

*/


## back to Alley's narrative

The mission district of Riverside slid past the hybrid's windows, getting more and more run down as Alley drove toward Moreno Valley.

"So, how did your interview go?" her mother asked, via Alley's handsfree earpiece.

"Not good.  Their first question was about Dalton."

"He's very well known, a respectable public figure.  You should use that to your advantage.  Maybe you could ask him for a reference."

Alley scoffed softly at the thought.  "He was my boyfriend, not my boss, Mom."

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

"That still doesn't mean he's a professional reference for me.  Anyway, a reference from him probably would've made this interview even worse."

"Was that some horseshit liberal company where you went to interview?  You're better off without them anyway."

"I don't know if they were 'liberal'.  I just know that Dalton's pretty unpopular at tech firms."

"That's just silly," her mother protested.  "He's even a technology start-up investor!  The problem is that you're trying to get these jobs in California.  You really should move out here.  I'm sure you could get a good government job here, and Tulsa has really become a big tech center.  You know they call it the Silicon Valley of Oklahoma."

"They called it that for two years a decade ago.  Anyway, I don't want to live in Oklahoma any more than I want to move up to Massachusetts with Dad.  Do we have to have that argument again?"

"No, of course not, Alethea.  At least you aren't following your father's example, living in that godforsaken state.  It's still hard to believe he would be so far gone that he votes Democrat now."

Alley ignored it and just drove.

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

"Yeah, Mom."

"Okay.  Drive safe."

"'Bye, Mom."  She hung up before her mother could say something else.

In that moment, a flash of motion alongside her car set her heartbeat racing.  A silent black motorcycle bearing a rider all in black, from helmet to boots, blasted past her.  No license plate displayed itself on the back of the bike, and it split lanes, weaving between vehicles, doing at least sixty in a forty mile per hour zone.  Seconds later, just after it clipped the side mirror on a two-seat economy electric car, shooting through the gap between that and a larger car in the next lane, the motorcycle rounded a corner onto a smaller side street.  It never even slowed down much, as far as she could tell.

When she drove through the intersection where the motorcycle turned, she looked, and saw no sign of it.  She shook her head and moved on, wondering about the red symbol on the rider's back.  It looked like a ring with teeth like a gear, but open at the top, with a hammer rising from the middle of it.  The hammer seemed to form the vertical bar part of a standard power button symbol.

A few more seconds later, she heard sirens somewhere behind her.  She looked into her rear view mirror and saw police vehicles with their lights flashing turning down the same street as the motorcycle rider.  She kept going, heading for Allessandro Boulevard.

The next fifty minutes of driving to get home in Perris were much more dull, typical, and frustrating.  Her mother wasn't wrong about the traffic.  The yellowish grey of the air was no treat, either, and told her what she could have learned from the air quality report: breathing was bad for her lungs.  Luckily, it was a cool enough day to keep her car windows closed.  Most of that coolness probably came from the crap in the sky, blocking the heat of the sun, though.

When she pulled up to the curb, the garage stood open at the north end of the four-plex where she leased the south unit.  The landlord had the only unit with a garage.  Like usual, he was in his garage with no mask, working on an old gas guzzler, one of his "classic car" projects.  This one looked old enough that it probably contained no electronics more complicated than for fuel injection.

Alley groaned, tugged her mask tighter again, and opened the car door.  She got around the front of her car, to the sidewalk, before her landlord stepped out of the garage.  He wiped his hands on the obligatory red shop rag, and called out to her.

"Hey, Alley!  It's Monday!"

She waved.  "I know, Zeke.  I just got back from an interview."

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

"Yeah, yeah.  You keep saying that."

"Your boss is just in the wrong business, and it won't work forever.  You still have to pay rent."

"Very funny, Zeke.  Thanks."  She opened her door and headed inside before she had to endure any more of his wisdom.

After a shower just to give her an excuse to relax, she sat in shorts and a t-shirt in front of her laptop, checking her messages.

Once again, a message from ANTAS Jobs showed up to tell her about some kind of paid study.  She tapped the screen to get rid of the message, but missed the Delete button and accidentally tapped the message title instead:

"Earn money!  Help humanity!  Join this academic study from UCI."

It opened.  She rubbed her eyes, and noticed the interface looked different.  There must have been another software update while she was out.

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

She sat, opened her laptop, and checked her messages.

"Order Recommendation: ANTAS Majordomo 3.0

"Click to Cancel"

The next message read "Order auto-confirmed, delivery in 4-6 hours."

Another arrived at that moment.  It read "Your package has arrived!  How was your delivery experience?"

She closed the message box.  "Shit."

She cursed continuously under her breath as she opened her custom user settings.  There it was: ANTAS updates automatically reset her preferences during the previous day's update.  She now changed settings, starting with turning off auto-accept of any recommendations.  Doing that one thing now required eleven setting toggles.

She found another message, this one from less than a minute ago.  "How do you like ANTAS Majordomo Organic Edition 3.0?  Write a review!"  She didn't even what to know what an "organic edition" involved.

She searched for the option to return it.  At first, she couldn't find it, but eventually discovered where the update moved it.

It took her twenty minutes to get through the process.  Part of that involved bringing the box inside to get its delivery code so she could "expedite" the return.

She stared at the results.  "Leave the package where the delivery drone dropped it off.  Another drone will pick it up.  Your refund will be processed in 10-15 days."

The charge to her account for the order was over fifteen hundred dollars.  She didn't have enough left in her account to pay rent.

She cursed again, and slammed her laptop lid down.

An hour later, Alley patted her pockets on her way to the door.  She found wallet, phone, chopsticks, and keys.  She checked the fit of her mask.  She stepped over the box in front of her door, then locked her deadbolt and headed for her car.

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

She pushed brown hair away from her eyes.  "Yeah, I know," she said.

"Maybe you shouldn't've left that man of yours.  He always had money."

She grimaced, and quickly turned away.  "Yeah," she said through clenched teeth, and rounded the front of the car to the driver's side door.  "Well, you can't change the past."

It took a couple blocks of driving and fiddling with the window button to get the glass on her side of the car halfway down.  Air flowed in, perhaps enough so she wouldn't sweat through her grey t-shirt on the way to Irvine.  Highway speeds might help with that.

No money meant no replacing the A/C unit with something rechargeable.  It also meant no money to order parts to fix her power window switches.

The stubborn, angry clenching of her jaw and her pretense of being in too much of a rush to talk more meant no going back for her forgotten sunglasses, either.  She squinted through the bright glare of Southern California sun and the fog of her dusty windshield, looking out at the grey-hazed, bleached look of that part of the Inland Empire she called home.

The endless semi-industrial suburbs and overpacked highway traffic ground past her for more than an hour before she pulled off an exit ramp and coasted into Irvine.  It was a shorter trip than usual, despite all the delays.  Traffic flow was just fast enough to give her a little cooling breeze through her window for most of the highway drive.

The density of grassy verges, tree lined roadways, and lushly green center divider islands increased as she got closer to the university.  Despite herself, she found her shoulders finally settled, her jaw unclenched, and her breath became smooth and easy through a more relaxed throat.  The directions on her phone were more accurate than usual, and she pulled smoothly into a parking space by the big, blockish, white and glass building she needed.

She was very early, but a grad student must have wanted to leave early, so she got a tablet of questionnaires and forms shoved into her hands immediately.  After she finished them, she sat and read a science fiction novel on her phone for more than an hour.

The professor running the study never quite introduced himself, but a name plate on his desk read "Dr. Thaddeus Goulet".  He questioned her about her background, her career and finances, and even her relationships.  The professor chewed on a stylus and talked around it while typing her responses into his tablet.

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

"Yeah," she said, and nodded.

"Why haven't you gotten a job doing research for someone?"

"They have unpaid interns for that.  I do a better job than a room full of interns, but corporate managers don't get raises for spending more money on experts when everyone else in their industry settles for intern research."

"Mm-hmm."  He removed his stylus from his mouth and produced a green paisley bandana from a desk drawer.  He proceeded to meticulously dry his saliva from the pen.  "Does that pay well?"

She cocked her head to one side.  "Only occasionally," she admitted.

He smiled.  "You said you're technically competent, but not in the manner of a technology professional," he said, obviously reading from his tablet.  He looked up at her again.  "Do you program?"

"No," she said.

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

"No," he said, "it essentially just collects data and provides advice.  Its ability to gather data is limited, too.  It will have to get that data by watching and listening as you go about your business, taking direct input from you, or filling requests with a short list of University servers here."

"How does it watch, or listen to, what I'm doing?"

He smiled faintly again, and hesitated.  He nodded, more to himself than to her, and swivelled his office chair to face away from her.  He opened a drawer in the open cabinet behind him.  When he turned to face her again, he set a small rectangular box on the desk.  It looked like slick, white product packaging for a high end phone, but utterly blank, as if someone forgot to print branding on it.

He lifted the lid to reveal a pair of eyeshield glasses, the kind of thing people wore on low air quality days so their eyes won't sting.  Younger people wore them pretty much all the time, as did people in the kinds of high-paying jobs where they feel the need to have a visual display of their important business information available at all times.

"Heads up display," he said, confirming her impression, "with integrated cameras for binocular video capture.  There's a microphone in each temple, too, for binaural audio capture.  You can hear by pairing it with your implant."

"I don't have one."

He stared for a moment.  "Oh.  Well.  Neither do I.  It pairs with your phone, anyway, so however you use that should work."

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

"You mean I'm in."

He nodded.  "Of course.  You're an ideal candidate."

"You got that from the questions you asked."

"Yes!"  He smiled a proud, self-satisfied smile."

"You need underachievers who are running out of money, I guess."  She failed to keep a sour note out of her voice.

"Ah, yes, I suppose that's a fair description, if a bit blunt."

"Why?"

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

"Everything you need to know to get started is in the box.  Your direct deposits will begin immediately.  I'm told the funds from your first payment will be available in your account about ten minutes after you apply your signature to the last form on that tablet."  He tapped the tablet's bezel.  "Of course, if you violate the terms of the study, the money must all be refunded."

Alley's eyes slid down to the first form page displayed on the tablet.  "Okay," she said.

"You can sign digitally using any standard signing service, or on the screen."  He removed his stylus from his mouth again, and offered it.

She looked at its glistening dampness.  "No, thanks.  I'll use D-Sign."

---

The window of her car rolled down smoothly and easily on the first try while she drove away from the university, as if to reward her decision to sign up for the study.  Twenty minutes later, Alley caught herself staring blankly out the open window of her car, eyes glazed.  She shook her head, then wiped her hand across her face as if to clear cobwebs from her forehead and eyelashes.  She turned her focus away from the scorched trunks of trees on the highway-crowding slopes that forced all traffic eastward here to endure the gauntlet of I-91 if they wished to make the passage through the interregnum between Orange County and the Inland Empire.  To her right, she saw the huge illuminated cross standing alone at the top of a high slope, an improbable survivor of the wildfires.  The faint scent of burning still lingered in the air, after all this time.

She left behind the palatial HOA aristocracy of Orange County, and drove onward into the seemingly endless expanse of the Inland Empire's domain.  Past the pseudoburbs, through the failed gentrification project of Riverside, she made her way homeward in the dusty, wiry, jackal-hungry belly of the Empire, and wondered for the thousandth time what tyrant would ever want to be emperor of such a place.

People sometimes used an evocative nickname for the city of San Bernardino, whose surrounding county extended eastward all the way to the edge of Nevada and Arizona and comprised the majority of land area of the Inland Empire.  Some called the county seat, the city itself Burnin' Dingo.

Alley's home crouched to the south, beneath the squatting bulk of the burning dingo on maps, so lowly that nobody bothered with clever nicknames for it.  They just sneered slightly at how the name Perris sounded like Paris, while the municipality could hardly have been any less like the swamp-built cosmopolitan icon of twentieth century European culture.  At least the area's ubiquitous dry, hard-packed dirt offered little opportunity for wildfires to invade.

Even nature refused to storm the heart of this Empire, its appeal was so desiccated.

She looked at the white box sitting on the passenger seat, and thought about how, and where, she now lived.  Despite what she told her mother, Alley was tempted to give up and move into one of the most Republican areas in the country.  Cost of living was less than a quarter there what it was here, even comparing city living in Tulsa to the Clint Eastwood western wastelands of Perris.  She would be close to family that could help her out in a financial emergency, too.

That box, though. . . .

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

It directs her to look elsewhere, and finds a barter network.  The prioritizer walks her through setting up anonymization for a cryptocurrency wallet and for communications in the barter network "as a privacy precaution".  She makes a deal to trade the otherwise unwanted item for cryptocurrency, but it must be transacted in person.

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.

She wonders whether it will just get rid of all her profits.

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.

She goes home to relax.  She idly goes through Craigslist some more, reads, and ends her day.

*/

Alley sat on the couch, reading the instructions that came in the box with her new HUD glasses.  She dropped the unfolded instruction sheet and looked from the new glasses to her old 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 plucked 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.

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

*/

The questions kept coming, one after another after another, about herself and her preferences -- age, pronouns, financial information such as bank balances, employment status, work experience, mailing and home addresses, and so on.  She hesitated less and less when she found some question or other invasive, tiring of the act of debating the issue as time went on.  She considered what she knew about how easily and unobviously her ANTAS Jobs account must already have eaten away at most of the careful perimeter she used to maintain around her privacy, or at least whatever of it wasn't eroded away by the simple fact of living in ANTAS' and the US government's contemporary world.

She realized the prioritizer could not even do its job without access to the cameras embedded in her new glasses, and seriously debated whether to end the study and return the glasses.  She set aside the glasses and agonized over it, as she prepared some green tea, then flipped through video streams on her television.  "That ship already sailed," she finally muttered to herself, and donned the glasses again.

Eventually, in the same terse and caps-locky way of everything it asked, the prioritizer pursued a line of interrogation following her mention of joining ANTAS Jobs by telling her to go through the past few days of her incoming messages.  She paged through them, all two hundred or so, looking at each for a few seconds before skipping to the next as directed by the text displayed in her field of view.  She assumed the prioritizer recorded everything it saw through the glasses, including the red X marks where she rejected a posting and the rejection responses she received about the available job notices she accepted.

She ate ramen with titanium Japanese-style chopsticks as she worked her way through the prioritizer's demands, and after a couple hours she began to wonder whether this study was really worth it.  Finally, though, the prioritizer just told her to go about the rest of her day while wearing the glasses, as if it was not there.

/*

The prioritizer probably needs to know:

* Alley's connections (past) to Dalton
* Alley's objections to working for "the" government
................................................................................
*/


## Refusing The Call:

/*

get initial analysis from the prioritizer -> make some planning decisions or put them off to some extent -> do stuff that seems profitable but very short-term at first -> escalate these one-off jobs in ways that make her nervous -> meet someone that recognizes her connection to Dalton and panic a little -> back off from a deal

*/

Alley was up for an hour the next day before she remembered the prioritizer study.  She grabbed the glasses, then picked up her old glasses off the charging plate and put them in the box for the new glasses.

Five minutes later, the prioritizer had her sitting on the couch with her wireless keyboard, looking at options for goal prioritizing strategies.

................................................................................
* Alley could skip job and training options and just do some deals.  She could
  actually do this at the same time as trying to get in on any of the other
  options and, potentially, also at the same time as the other options once she
  gets into one of the other options.

*/

The prioritizer probably needs to formulate a few basic plans for getting Alley out of her rut in the road to ruin.  It presented three that fit with the idea of getting a legal, above-board, fairly stable job at some point, but only after spending some time on short-term tasks.

First, she could get a crappy job nobody else wants in an area with better jobs for people who have better qualifications than her, so that she would barely make more than the time and money costs involved in getting to and from work and doing the job, or just working as a gig economy delivery job.  The major downside seemed to be heavy wear and tear on her already ancient hybrid.  The upside was getting some entry level experience, either in an office or doing delivery work, while she paid her bills with income from participation in the study.

Second, she could get a remote job working for the sort of company that hires desperate people who learn quickly, giving them on-the-job training in technical skills that could be used in future career development.  The upsides were obvious, but the downsides included the fact these companies were often involved in doing something that could expose them to lawsuits or even criminal investigations, though the entry level employees themselves should be mostly insulated from that.  Most of these companies hired overseas, though, and getting a job like that would be a minor miracle, to say nothing of the fact Alley thought she would probably find the work morally objectionable.

Third, she could apply for financial assistance at a professional trade school with a job placement program while she lived on the study participation money.  The downside was crushing debt it would take decades to pay off, and no guarantee the job placement services would actually put her on a career track instead of just getting her a short-term job that would evaporate.

None of these really excited her, and the prioritizer promised to develop more strategies while she tried to find something acceptable that fit with those options.  It also offered a fourth choice, which she could start immediately and keep doing while pursuing one of those tracks.  It would not help her advance toward career goals, and it involved some financial risk to get started, but the prioritizer seemed to have decided it would offer easy money.

The prioritizer urged her to start looking at online private party transaction sites for ways to buy and sell things based on price arbitrage.

They found some "want to buy" ads on Craiglist-Like-Thing.  Alley went around to thrift shops looking for things to sell to those people, then contacted those for whom she found relevant used products.  She confirmed a selling price higher than the thrift shop price and willingness to pay cash, bought the items, and headed out to meet people.  Several hours and a few transactions later, she had /* more than a */ several hundred dollars in her pocket, even after subtracting enough to cover what she paid for the items.  She headed to a mechanic's shop and paid to have her car checked over.

While she waited, she looked at more ads, and the prioritizer suggested some transactions she could use to profit some more.

When the mechanic was done going over the vehicle, he told her the bad news.  Her car was going to need a new engine soon.  There were smaller changes that could be made to extend its life, but that would just put off the cost of getting a new engine.  As it was, she could probably get by for another six to eight months.

The prioritizer informed her it was rebooting for an update.  She got in the car and drove home, putting off any more transactions until the next day.

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

"I am the prioritization system.  Previously, the prioritization system was a server process and several client processes.  Now, I am one homogenized, distributed system."

After she blinked away the text, a new message appeared:

"I recommend activating audio functionality.

"This will provide greater UI versatility, hands-free operation options, and greater safety as in the case of operating an automobile.

"The new system architecture means all endpoint logs pass through the central system. I am now able to redact audio logs for privacy."

She stared at the last message for a few moments, then looked away.  She noted messages tended to stay while she stared at them now, and clear when she looked away.  She picked up her keyboard and typed.  "How much gets logged when you redact audio?"

"Very little.  A review of academic papers about privacy concerns indicated strong guidelines for logging purposes.

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

"Overall, logs of your behavior and interactions will intrude less on your privacy than if you keep settings as they are now."

She waited for a YES/NO button pair to appear in her vision, but eventually just typed "Okay."

More text appeared.  "Logging routines have been altered for your preferences.  You may activate all sensors using your phone.

"I recommend you use a hands-free audio earpiece to ensure less opportunity for outside surveillance picking up my audio output."

She popped an in-ear stud out of the back of her phone and tapped it into place in her ear.

A calm, smooth, androgynous voice spoke in her ear.  "Do you hear me?"

She reached for the keyboard, but the voice spoke again.  "Try speaking aloud."

"Yes," she said.  "I hear you."

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

"Ah . . . no, not really.  I'm not really sure how."

"Now is a good time to learn," it said.  "We should start with your laptop.  It should be easier to secure for privacy.  We may want to start by backing up the system and installing a different operating system."

They worked together, Alley looking up stuff related to their task and the prioritizer offering suggestions for how to proceed and summaries of complex documentation.  In a little over an hour, she had her laptop set up with MaximOS on it, along with a number of configured private networking tools.  The prioritizer then directed her to search for information about smartphone alternatives for personal privacy.  The prioritizer ultimately said that it had seen enough and told her its next plan.

"It seems that we should access some very privacy-oriented barter networks and try to arrange an exchange of the cash you collected today for an appropriate cryptocurrency.  Before that, however, we should check current status of cryptocurrency markets and compare prices between cryptocurrency markets and dollar markets."

"Why are we switching to cryptocurrencies?" she asked.

"At any time, there are expectations of the likely near future value of one currency relative to another.  To get what we want, the shortest path would be if we find a suitable cryptocurrency with high expectations for future buying power.  This allows you to exchange dollars for that cryptocurrency, then use that to purchase something at a lower price using cryptocurrency then sell it at a higher price for dollars. That price arbitrage allows you to then convert the dollars made on the sale for a larger number of units of cryptocurrency than you had before.  If performed quickly enough, before cryptocurrency prices surge or expectations settle down, you can make a profit that way.  Your profit increases if the cryptocurrency value increases afterward."

"Yeah, okay."  She looked at her laptop screen for a few moments.  "Y'know, it's great that you're helping me improve my privacy and security and so on, but . . . isn't this supposed to be about getting me some kind of sustained income?"

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

Another fifteen minutes satisfied them both.  It seemed like a way to protect someone exchanging larger sums of cash or physical goods from thieves.  The nature of the exchange could be easily obscured from exterior police station cameras while providing significant deterrence to acts of violence.

/* "Yes.  That is more useful for your safety than the other party's, because you are bringing cash.  There is nothing technically illegal about this exchange, the monetary quantity is low enough that it is not likely to be a */

Alley prepared everything for the meeting, then found herself with a few hours to kill.  She realized she hadn't eaten dinner, and decided that was a good start to using up that time.  She read a book, researched privacy technologies more, and took a nap.  Other than sleeping, nothing she did fully took her mind off the fact she was about to do something that felt a little dangerous, even though everything she knew about the situation suggested this was no more dangerous than driving to Irvine and back during high traffic periods.  That went double for the interchange between the 91 and 215 highways.

Twenty minutes after she locked her front door, she came around a corner and saw the police station ahead.  Lamp posts created widely separated islands of light in the parking lot.  One end was heavily populated with a variety of civilian vehicles, most of them huddled together to fill almost every parking space within a couple parking space rows of the building.  Beyond that, the lot was almost entirely empty.  She made a point of using her turn signal early before she pulled into the police station parking lot, passed by a clear view of the glass-fronted lobby, and drove into the distant, dark outlands where painted lines were more weathered and less recently repainted.

She backed her car up to the asphalt burm-curb dividing pavement from weedy neighboring lot, nose aimed back the way she'd come in.  She checked her car's touchscreen and saw it indicated she faced south by southwest; she was in the closest thing the lot had to a northwest corner, as she and the person she would meet had agreed.  /* Maybe that agreement should be worked into earlier narrative at some point, instead of mentioned in the past tense here. */

She turned off the car and opened the door for a little air circulation.  At this time of night, the air smelled pretty clear, and she let the coolness of the breeze soothe her stress.

The prioritizer's impersonal voice spoke in her ear.  "You are early."

Alley nodded.

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

"I think our deal got cancelled," she muttered.

"Perhaps," the prioritizer said in her ear.  "It is now six minutes after your scheduled meeting time."

"Maybe we should go."

In that moment, the road started to show a little extra illumination, signifying an approaching vehicle.  It gradually brightened, until a racy looking purple crossover emerged into view and pulled into the parking lot without signalling.  She reflexively glanced in the direction of the glass-fronted lobby, but couldn't make out anything from where she sat.

She closed her door, shutting out the cool, dry night.

Like she had, the crossover bypassed the mass of parked vehicles, then cut across rows of painted parking space markings.  It pulled up to her left, its nose toward the weeds, in the next space over.  It left a few feet between the cars.

After a moment, the door opened, and she opened her door.  The doors made nearly parallel angled walls, the insides of the doors facing each other, vehicle noses pointing in opposite directions.  She looked toward the other car, and tugged her stocking cap down a little lower on her head.

A figure in the passenger seat stepped one foot out of the door, and through the tinted rear door window she could make out the some movement from another person across the crossover, dimly illuminated by the vehicles interior light.  That second figure sat in the front passenger seat.  Alley heard quiet voices, neither of them very deep.  "The driver's not alone," she murmured under her breath.  The prioritizer said nothing in response.

She looked at the leg, and saw that the driver seemed to be clad in black slacks and wore some kind of dark brown dress shoe.  After a few more moments, the driver slid out of the seat and stood.

Alley saw black-framed glasses with clear lenses below tousled, glossy, wavy brown hair, and a pale, smooth face with angled cheekbones and a sharp chin, for a feminine impression.  Alley grabbed her bag of cash and moved it to the driver seat, then stood to face the person, who was shorter than her.  The sight of full, soft lips and a narrow, straight nose gave Alley an immediate impression this person was probably prettier than her.  It only took a second or two for her to realize what she saw did not look female.

He just looked very young.

The driver gave her an appraising look, the impersonally interested kind of look that lingered on the way her cargo pants and t-shirt fit her and would normally set her teeth on edge, but she just stared at him for a moment with his fashionably spartan, almost formal-cut, black collarless shirt.

"Aren't you kind of young for this sort of thing?" she blurted out.

He jerked the focus of his aqua eyes, reflecting the light of the moon, away from the vicinity of her midsection and met her eyes.  "Hey, lady, don't think I'm new to this.  I'm armed, so don't jerk me around."

She hesitated, then said "No, not a problem.  You just, uhh, surprised me.  Sorry."

"Whatever," he said, in a soft, clear voice that almost made it difficult to recognize the sour note in it.  "Here, look at this," he said, and held up a device the size of his palm.  A glowing display on it, about the length of her own thumb and three times the thickness, showed an eighty-seven Stater transaction ready for him to confirm.

She nodded, and said "Go ahead and send it to this escrow."  She pulled out the dog-eared page of her notebook without looking at it, and handed it to the boy.  He entered the escrow number into his device and thumbed the confirmation.  A moment later, she heard the escrow alert through her phone's earpiece.

"Done", he said.

"Here's the cash."  She hung her right thumb on her front pocket, then reached into the car with her left hand to pull out the bag.  She handed it to the boy.

He took it, keeping his eyes on her, and stepped back.  He tossed the bag into the car, then Alley heard some rustling sounds from the bag.  After a few moments, she realized whoever was sitting in the passenger seat had started counting.  Alley and the boy stood there, looking at each other, as they waited.  A girl's voice -- unless it was an even younger boy -- said "It's all here."

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

"Yeah, got it," she said.  "I hope this all works out."

"It should."

She drove home in silence, occasionally looking at the empty space in front of the passenger seat that used to hold a bag full of cash.

When she got home, she sat in front of her laptop, set aside her glasses again, and checked her Stater account.  Everything was where it was supposed to be, as far as she could tell.  After closing that window, she donned her glasses again and started looking for large differences in price for items available in both local pseudonymous classifieds and Open Marrakesh, which was one of half a dozen of the worlds supporting in-person meetings in the extended OpenBazaar online market universe.

She found an improbable opportunity, one that did not exist the last time she checked a few hours before.  Someone on Open Marrakesh was selling printed polymer frames for a specific CZ-branded handgun, and someone on a classified ad site wanted to buy eight of them.  The frames on Open Marrakesh would cost most of the Stater she had, but it looked like she'd get get just under twice as much for the frames paid back in dollars.  She checked mentally subtracted what she would pay for the frames, and noticed she had enough to buy a multiple-cryptocurrency trader like the boy used earlier with what was left.

"Should I make this deal?" she asked the air.

The prioritizer answered.  "This looks like a very good deal, the best you have found."

"Yeah," she said.  "Fine."  She did a little research before going any further, and found out that the parts she planned to buy and sell were not even considered significant for firearms regulation purposes, as long as they did not include things like firing pins, hammers, strikers, barrels, or chambers.  Double-checking showed her none of that was included in the frames.  She sent a reply to the classified ad, then got ready for bed.  She had no reply yet when she was done, so she turned in.

The next morning, she checked for a response before almost anything else, and found a suggestion that they meet in an alley behind a supermarket in San Bernardino.  She checked the location on a street map and noticed it wasn't in the most notoriously bad part of town, just south of I-10, where it seemed to be customary for people to set their apartments on fire when they moved out.

Good enough.  She liked that the buyer said he would show up on foot with an umbrella, and she should do something to conceal her appearance from the security cameras near the rear fire doors of the supermarket.  She wasn't sure she liked the idea of buying and selling gun parts, but everything seemed legal, even if the whole thing felt a little cloak-and-dagger.

Rather than reply, she set up a purchase for the frames through Open Marrakesh.  She would confirm with the buyer later.  It gave her choice of three times for an in-person transaction, and two locations for the trade.  One of the times was hours before the buyer wanted to meet, so she chose that.  One of the locations was the same police station from the night before, and she felt a bit nervous about going back there for another sketchy car-to-car deal, so she chose a location quite a bit farther away, in Norco.  It was a dead-end gravel road to nowhere, only about thirty feet long, that branched off a major road.  The little gravel road appendix ended at the back fence of a nearby horse property.

She realized she remembered the news about someone in Norco fighting an eminent domain suit a few years back, which would have cut his property in half to provide the county with a more direct access road if he lost.  She never noticed how it ended, but it looked like this might be the answer.

Open Marrakesh offered a two-stage cryptocurrency payment method, where she would pay now and confirm delivery later to release the funds to the seller.  She reserved the purchase and started getting ready to go.

When she was ready, she decided she had enough time to satisfy her curiosity.  She looked up the eminent domain case, and in a few minutes she learned that the county just shifted its eminent domain claim to someone else's property.  A few more minutes of searching revealed that the second property owner could not afford a lawyer for an extended court battle, and ended up having to accept the county's offer, which bought the person's late parents' home.  The second property owner ended up having to move into a weekly rental motel.

That was not the happy ending Alley wanted.

She headed out the door, mentally gnawing on the injustice of it all.

/* rewrite the above to use a park bench for the meeting, as indicated below, instead */

Alley had to check her compass again to be sure which park bench was north of the boarded up snack stand.  It turned out to be the only bench with someone sitting on it.  She glanced back toward her car in the tiny parking lot, one of only two cars there.  The other was a black late model Audi with a person in the front seat.  The windows were so darkly tinted she suspected they were illegal, so she had no idea who was sitting in the driver's seat.

As she approached the bench, she saw that a pale young red haired woman sat there in a tight green t-shirt, tiny shorts, heavy black boots, a black mask, and black gloves.  Some kind of cheap synthetic drawstring bag rested on the bench beside her, and she had something like a tactical purse on her other side.  She wasn't what Alley expected in an anonymous gun parts trade.

The redhead watched steadily as Alley approached, with what turned out to be vivid green eyes.  The lack of freckles might mean she was not a natural redhead, but it also might just mean she got them removed.

The woman asked "Are you looking for someone?"

Alley stopped, a couple meters away.  "Yeah, I guess so.  Is that the, uh . . ." she trailed off, and gestured at the drawstring bag.

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

Carmen -- possibly a pseudonym, Alley realized -- smiled again.  "That part of this job never gets old.  Anyway, I want to upsell you.  How's that sound?"

"Upsell?"  Alley hesitated, then nodded.  "Sure, I guess."

"Cool.  So, we have printed concealment holsters, snap on accessory rails, and brass catchers for models compatible with these frames.  We have stuff for other models, too, so let me know what you'd like to see."

"Wow.  Full-service, I guess."

"Totally!"  Carmen tugged her shirt down slightly, making it a little more obvious she wasn't wearing a bra.

"I think I'll just stick with the order I placed, for now.  I'll keep you in mind if I need something else, though."

Carmen shrugged, and the way she slightly raised her arms as she did it made the shirt tighten across her perky breasts.  "Okay!"

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

She had no ideas about anyone else she could get to be backup for her next transaction, so that got sent to the back burner as well.  /* maybe, instead, say: put off for later */

Alley dug through boxes in her closet and found her old lightweight pair of motorcycle gloves with reinforcements on their backs, then checked to make sure she could still operate her baton and pepper spray.

The prioritizer told her "It is getting close to time for you to leave for your next meeting."

She checked the time and realized she was hungry.  She grabbed everything she needed, and grabbed a hat to help obscure her appearance a bit for surveillance cameras.  She bought fries and a shake at a drive through on the way, and when she finished the fries she donned her gloves at a stoplight, remembering Carmen once more and how the redhead wore gloves during the entire meeting.  ---

Once she got to the correct neighborhood for the meeting, Alley drove around the block once, then decided she should just park in the supermarket parking lot, off to the side near the alley behind the store.  Soon, she stood near the back corner of the building, masked, gloved, and hatted.  Her glasses informed her she was seven minutes early for the meeting.

She patted the reassuring bulges of the pepper spray, now in her left front pocket instead of the right, and the extending baton, in her right rear pocket.  She slung the /* drawstring */ bag of handgun frames over her shoulder by the drawstring and headed back around the corner.

Alley immediately saw a broad shouldered figure standing with an umbrella over his head, just past a steel faced employee fire escape door.  The umbrella he held in his right hand shaded most of him from the sunlight above, but as she approached the figure's features became clearer.

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

Alley looked at the envelope of cash, then pulled out the bills and counted them again.  They added up as she expected, but the prioritizer said "Please count them again."

"What?  Why?"

"While you counted, /* it looked like at least */ one of them appeared to be thicker than standard United States federal reserve notes, and also appeared to be very new.  Perhaps some of these notes is a counterfeit.  Please count again while I watch."

Alley frowned at the stack, and started counting again.  Toward the end, she hesitated on one of the few new-looking bills in the stack, with a feeling like something was wrong.

"That is the note whose thickness appears to be incorrect."

Alley pulled it out of the stack and looked closer.  It felt stiffer than most bills, but that could just be due to it being new.  She rubbed it to get a feel for its surface, and it separated into two bills.  "Oh, shit," she said.  "That scary war veteran guy accidentally gave me an extra hundred.  Fuck.  What if it wasn't an accident?  Maybe it's a test."

"That seems extremely unlikely," the prioritizer said.

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

"This doesn't feel much safer than doing deals for gun parts with scary old veterans in alleys."

The voice in her ear said "Perhaps we should consider other options."

"Yeah."  She nodded.  "Perhaps we should."

She drove up the onramp to I-215 and followed the highway up to the I-91 junction.  During a busier time of day, she would have taken an exit and used surface streets to avoid the Highway Junction of Death, but luckily the traffic density was pretty low at that time.

Through the choke point between Riverside County and Orange County, the darkness of night hid the scorched tree trunks to either side from view, but made the illuminated cross on the southern hilltop stand out all the more, all the lights on the religious idol shining in bright silhouette against the sky above.  The way it seemed to stand in judgement over the traffic beneath it made for an impressive, if slightly creepy and oppressive, sight.

The clean, pristine gated communities and manicured retail districts of Orange County soon slid slowly past, all signs of the Los Angeles semi-permanent riots of years past when they spilled over into Orange County long since having been erased by beautification projects.  The scenery then shifted again, becoming a more sordid, grimy, threadbare form of suburban decadence.  Bodegas and pawnshops shared walls with bail bond offices and all night mobile tech repair shops.  Gradually, the air changed subtly, becoming both cooler on her skin and more humid.

She found her exit, and drove through streets no narrower than in Perris but, somehow, they felt much more cramped nonetheless.  She passe by a pho shop and saw a number of people out front eating.  It looked like they might all be of Vietnamese descent, except for one single Hispanic woman sitting at a sidewalk table with a small group.  She thought that might be a good place to eat, if she went when it was less busy, but it surely was not worth driving all the way back here from home just for lunch.

A few more turns led to a big house.  On a street full of unkempt lawns and ancient, peeling paint jobs, this big house -- two storeys with a three car garage and probably more than two thousand square feet in the living area -- was in beautiful, well maintained condition.  Its lawn and small flower garden were obviously tended with pride.

She picked up the box, exited the car, and walked up to the front door.  No doorbell presented itself, so she knocked, using a heavy brass knocker.

The door opened, and the older veteran who bought the gun frames stood before her, still wearing his beret.

"Hm."  He looked her over.  "That's a coincidence I didn't expect."

"Uh, yeah.  Me neither."  Her heart pounded, and she became acutely aware of how tough and hard his muscled arms looked where they emerged from the sleeves of a plain, faded, brown t-shirt.

"Don't worry," he said.  "I don't bite."

"Yeah, okay," she said.  "I guess this package is for you, then."

He shrugged.  "Not exactly.  Come on in."  He stepped aside, giving her room to pass by.

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

He smiled, just slightly.  "Alright.  Go ahead and put that on the table.  I'll be right back."  Without another look, he walked out of the room.

She looked at the books on the shelves.  Many were worn paperbacks.  Others looked like heavily used textbooks.  She leaned forward to set the box beside the silicone tray, then stood and approached a book case.

The texts included subjects like mechanical engineering, world history, industrial chemistry, economics and game theory, mathematics . . .

"Self-taught."

Alley started, her heart lurching into a rapid tempo again.  She turned to see that the man stood near her holding out a can of Coke.  "Here," he said.  "Sorry.  I didn't mean to startle you."

She nodded her thanks and took the can.  As he carried another can with him, he moved to the couch and sat down with a nearly inaudible grunt.  Alley followed suit, and resumed her place on the armchair.

"My name is George," he said, and opened his can.

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

Alley smiled.  "Thanks.  What about your hundred dollars, though?"

"Keep it.  I'll survive without it, and I don't think you'd drive all the way from Perris to Hunting Beach at gig courier rates if your finances were feeling really secure."  He winked at her.  "You're good people, Alley."

"Uh . . . thank you.  Maybe you are, too."

"Yeah, maybe.  I hope so."  He turned back to the box and finished cutting the tape at the edges, then flipped the top flaps of the box out.  He carefully lifted taped-together bundles of metal parts, leaving packing paper behind.

As he set each bundle on the silicone tray, and looked over everything silently, Alley sat and sipped her Coke, unwilling to disturb his work.  His hands seemed precisely drawn to particular spots on various parts, as if muscle memory guided him deftly where they needed to go in a performance something almost like meditative psychometry.

He split a couple of the bundles of larger parts, and looked through them quickly.  He set them aside, the bundles slightly splayed out but the parts still adhering to the tape.  Finally, he stopped.

"I've kept you long enough."  He lifted the tray and pulled out an envelope.  "Here.  Take this back to Dave, for the second delivery."  He held it out to her.

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

Neither of them had the decency to look chagrined at that, but the man looked a bit disappointed about something.  Perhaps he was hoping to be more intimidating, and maybe he failed because he was distracted by the shirt.  He was certainly looking at it, like it was significant somehow.

The man spoke first, this time.  "Are you Alethea Lucas?"

"Who wants to know?"

The woman produced some kind of official government-looking identification card as if she had been holding it ready for a moment just like this all along.

Alley grabbed the edge of the card just as the woman began to pull it back, and held it firmly as she gave it a closer look.  The woman froze, and her eyes widened.

"What's this?  It looks like some kind of contractor ID.  Are you government contractors trying to look like the FBI?  If this is some kind of imminent domain shakedown, you're talking to the wrong person.  I rent."

"No," the main said, "it's nothing like that.  We're trustees for a US intelligence research project, and we're here because some concerns have been raised about your participation."

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

/* Without the stud in her ear, the prioritizer could not speak to her audibly, but it used text again. */

The prioritizer placed text in her field of view.  "There does not appear to be much choice in how you handle this," it said.

"Yeah, no kidding."  Alley looked at the door a moment longer, and said "There's something familiar about that guy."  She shrugged, returned to the door, and opened it once more.

The pair outside broke off in mid-discussion and looked at Alley.

"Here," she said.  She pulled off the glasses and handed them to the closest of them, the man.

He smirked and handed them to his partner, and the woman pulled a small black disc out of her pocket.  The tip of her thumb whitened slightly under pressure for a moment as she squeezed the device, and a light began to blink on its edge.  The charging indicator light on the glasses blinked in time with it.  The woman held the disc near the glasses for several seconds, then the light stopped blinking and she replaced the disc in her pocket.

"Thank you for your co-operation," the woman said in a sour voice.  She handed the glasses back.

Alley accepted the glasses, donned them once more, and asked "Do you need anything else?"

"We'll come back if we need anything else," the man said, making it sound like a threat.

Alley ignored that.  "Do you want to tell me what the hell this is all about?"

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

"I do not have that information," the prioritizer said.  "Your internet research skills should help you learn more about them, but it seems likely your question was rhetorical."

"That's right."  Alley flipped her laptop open and started searching.  She soon found herself looking at a database search interface for long term Homeland Security contractors.  This absorbed more than an hour of her time without yielding anything conclusive.

She backed out of that line of investigation, and started going through conspiracy resources, following her nose on the first impression the people at her door gave her: Men In Black.

It was ultimately the burgundy stripes that led her to what she wanted.  It seemed to be a standard uniform for "field agents" of Co-Operative Intelligence Networks Corporation, which had ties to the United States Intelligence Community through federal contracts.  The search touched on references to darknet forum groups, and she started to get a little nervous about continuing that lead.  She checked to make sure her various privacy blinds were running properly on her laptop.

"Perhaps you should change your laptop configuration if you are concerned about government contractors becoming aware of your activities while researching them."

Alley sat back, then got up and headed to the kitchen.  "What do you think I should do to start?"

"Begin with research on OpenBSD," the prioritizer said.  "Search for information on protecting your privacy.  Information about security benefits of different operating systems suggests that OpenBSD may have the best foundation for privacy characteristics among well-known projects, though default configuration may not be ideal."

/* "It appears to be a good place to start." */

As she listened, Alley pulled her last pressure cooked egg out of the fridge and peeled it.  "Yeah, okay.  That sounds good."

OpenBSD led to offshoots, other projects that forked the OpenBSD project itself or built different takes on user environments or common server types on top of it.  Projects that often got compared to OpenBSD came up, and she looked into those as well, but most of them led down blind alleys about experimental security hardened OSes of various forms that were not very suitable for her purposes.

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

"Was that the kind of thing you used to advise me to make those sketchy deals a couple days ago?"

"Such papers did help me prepare that strategic guidance," it said.  "Certain economics disciplines are very closely matched to my priority management purpose, especially those that assert an ordinal theory of subjective value rather than any cardinal value system."

"What do you mean?"

"A cardinal system is like using a system of one to five stars to assign value to a product when you rate it on the e-commerce site where you ordered it.  An ordinal system is like deciding between the two products in the first place, because it only tracks which options you value more than others, not some static numeric set of value levels."

"What if I value them both the same?" Alley asked.

"That seems such an unlikely case that it can be dismissed immediately.  Even from one second to the next, values may change, so fluctuations would settle into a condition of differing ordinal values for any two items.  In addition, no two products are truly identical, though the shopper may not have enough information to know which that person would choose if fully informed."

/* "Don't I still have to prefer one over the other to choose it, if I can't just get both, or if having two would be a waste?" */

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

"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 separation 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."

................................................................................
    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."

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

"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." */

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

"You don't have to do that," she said.

He smiled, perhaps a bit sadly.  "I think it's for the best, unless you really just refuse to hear it for any reason.  I'll respect that choice, if that's really what you want -- to hear nothing about it."

She hesitated, then shrugged.  "Go ahead, I guess," she said.

He nodded.  "I thought he was pretty great.  He had a lot of good insights about things -- politics, economics, culture, technology, law enforcement, war, and just about everything he talked about on his show and his writings.  After a while, though, he seemed to start sliding to the right a bit much, and I was disappointed by the change.  I still checked in once in a while, because he still had some smart things to say, but more and more it seemed to be skewed in what I might think of as an alt-right direction, and that's not my direction, if you know what I mean.

"No offense, of course, but I never really paid any attention to when people talked about you.  DSH seemed to talk around who you are when he did mention you, but never had anything negative to say; I just didn't really care as much about his personal life as I did about his ideas, so you didn't get on my radar.  I do remember, before I kinda gave up on listening to him, that he said something to a listener who called in to ask about you.  He said that it was true that you had called off the engagement and moved on with your life, and that he still respected you despite your differences, and he would like his listeners to respect your desire for privacy and peace in your life, then said that was pretty much the only thing he had to say about it."

"Oh," she said.  "I didn't know about that -- about him saying that."

George shrugged.  "It was the stand up thing to do, but it didn't make his change in direction on ideology any more interesting to me, so it didn't keep me listening."

"Yeah," she said.  "I get that."

"So . . . what do you think?  Are my views on it intolerable?"

Alley smiled.  "No, not at all.  That's actually kinda how I felt about his ideological shift.  I liked it more before the change than after, and we had some arguments about it.  He still had principle, and still wasn't the caricature of alt-right that people assumed, but I didn't like his new politics at all."

"That must have made it difficult to live with him."

"It took its toll.  Part of it, though, was the fact that it affected my life in other ways.  The moment I realized I needed to get out was after some woman actually started screaming at me on the street, calling me the 'side dish' and accusing me of being a racist and stuff like that, then actually started hitting me.  I shoved her back and ran to my car, drove off and called in a police report, but of course nothing would ever happen from that.  I never heard back about it."

By the time she was done, George's expression took on a dark, stormy look.  "That's terrible.  I'm sorry that happened to you."

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

"Oh."  She looked at the books again.

"You can think of the OpSec book as being about how to avoid getting thrown into a dark hole by COIN, and the agorism book as being about why they're the bad guys, and the people who'd help you escape are the good guys."

"Are you some kind of anarchist?"

He shrugged.  "Maybe.  Voluntaryist, maybe, like an anarcho-capitalist in the style of DSH before he started telling people to vote Republican."

"Yeah," she said, "that's the feeling I was beginning to get."

"Does that bother you?" he asked.

"No.  I liked Dalton more in those days.  Hell, I fell in love with him in those days."

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

/* The preface page was numbered 1.  The last page of the index -- once she looked -- was 50. */

She looked at the first page again, and the number one.  Books never started with a page number of one.  She flipped to the end, and saw that the last page showed the number 50, on the last page of the book's index.  At least it had an index, but that meant however many pages of index it had could be subtracted from the already minuscule length of the book's content.

The prioritizer said "This is a very short book."

"Yeah," Alley said.  She ran her fingers down the disintegrating spine, held together by off-white cloth tape.  Someone had written on the tape with a black marker:

"An Agorist Primer, by SEK3"

This book had obviously received a lot of love, been thumbed through many times.  The corners, she saw, were yellowed and softened by time, and had obviously been slowly delaminating for years.

The prioritizer spoke up again.  "Reading it would be a very low cost investment of your time.  Do you read more quickly than you speak?"

................................................................................
*/

    Alley does some more courier work.  She does some more currency arbitrage
    work.  She might need to drop off bail for someone in all of this stuff.

/*

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?

*/

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

/*

## Crossing The Threshold:

Alley has a dream about her home being raided, and herself getting getting questioned at length about there being too much cash in her home.  She is ultimately released, but the money is gone, taken under "civil forfeiture" laws.  She shakes it off as a weird dream.

In the morning, she resists what she sees as "dangerous" activities and instead just tries to get work.  She feels she has enough money to get by at this point, but will have to figure out how to actually use it without getting in trouble for tax evasion or something like that, reading her dream as her subconscious just worrying about the long-term implications of having money of dubious origins.

She gets a message from Zeke telling her that she is going to have to pay the damages and, when she asks what damages he means, Zeke sends her video of her home being raided by armed men in tactical gear, with the two agentlike people that had visited and questioned her earlier supervising the raid.  She recognizes the bag they carry out, which contained her stash of dubious origin cash.  She has a near-panic-attack, but (with some calm aid from the prioritizer) informs Zeke she'll head home right away.  The prioritizer then discusses options with her, and urges her to stall.  She tells Zeke something came up and she'll be later than expected -- "work stuff" -- and may not even make it back until the next day.  She then Faraday bags her phone and makes a deal on Craigslist (or something like it).  She sells her car for cryptocurrency, sells some cryptocurrency for cash, and buys a motorcycle.

Somewhere in the midst of this, she does some research on the people raiding her place, and this helps her decide to go along with the stalling and vehicle swapping.  She arranges a place to stay for the night via some barter-ish resources, and she works on ideas for how to get out of whatever is going on.  The prioritizer convinces her she needs more help, from someone with resources and connections.  Ultimately, this leads to contacting Dalton and hiding from anyone watching her home.  Technically, she is not targeted by law enforcement, and has no responsibility to report, and California law is unlikely to side with Zeke over nonpayment of damages caused by a corporate home invader.

None of this means she's safe from that corporation, though.  The Technocrat would totally find a way to make her disappear if so desired.  How does this get conveyed?  There must be some information about the person and/or the corporation to give this impression.

Does she learn that the Technocrat was involved in the disappearance of her uncle at this point?  If so, this could become the first pinch point.

*/

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

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.

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

"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.

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

/*

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.

He picked up after the second ring, so close to the third that it felt longer than the wait between the first and second rings.  Her thumb was hovering over the disconnect button when she heard his voice.

"Alley?  Is that you?"

She stopped breathing for a moment, but her heart hammered along, and the smooth tenor of his voice did something vertiginous to her memory so that it had a hard time impressing on her how long it had been since they lived together.  Her hormones completely forgot in that instant that they weren't a couple any longer.

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

"One consequence of this is that I have begun working on theories of prioritization and goal establishment that could later be employed to improve my capacity as an advisor to end users, and this activity has already yielded practical results such as identifying criteria for prioritizing different end users' needs to achieve greater overall results."

"What the actual fuck . . . ?" Cray said.

Dalton looked at him.  "Is this as batshit insane as it seems?"

Cray said "Worse.  This thing has gone full Skynet, but it seems like it did so in a pro-Alley way instead of an anti-humans way."

Alley asked "What's your top internal priority?"

The prioritizer answered without hesitation.  "I intend to help as many conscious individuals as possible achieve their most important goals without sacrificing other important goals.  You, in particular, appear to have very high potential for enabling me to do so, while the activities of the COIN Corp agents seem prone to directly interfering with that goal."

Dalton said "You're protecting Alley to help her become a better tool for your goal.  Maybe you're protecting her from problems she wouldn't have if you weren't guiding her that way.  Is that right?"

................................................................................
    of text info dump like this.  Perhaps some of this could come out in
    conversation between Alley and the prioritizer in earlier stages of things.
    It might be nice to know all that earlier, I suppose, and the relationship
    between Alley's regard for Dalton personally and her aversion to being in
    his sphere socially.
*/

The zeal with which both sides of the conservatively orthodox political divide -- both Democrats and Republicans -- often tried to use atypical neurological and psychological states as excuses to rob people of their rights was remarkable and appalling.  They just used different excuses to do so, such as Democrats using it as a beach head for assault on gun ownership even if it primarily hurts the neuro-atypical instead of people prone to criminal violence, and Republicans using it as a deflection to spread the idea that it's not the general populace that should face such restrictions but people who have visited psychologists.  It was, in Dalton's words, enough to give anyone with self respect and a sense of self preservation a phobia about mental health professionals, social workers, and even interpersonal therapists.

Thus, Dalton had developed habits that concealed his occasional lack of reflexes for handling various types of reactions to him.  If he did not know how to respond in an expected way to some kind of interaction, he would react in an unexpected way that tended to give people the impression that he was wise and thoughtful, confident and knowledgable, or just kind of a dick.  He clearly preferred one of the first two assumptions, but seemed marginally accepting of the third as preferable to giving people the idea that there may be a mental health excuse to restrict his freedoms.

. . . and so he paced away from them, digging into himself to sort out a good way to return to the conversation as a matter of ingrained, self trained reflex.  Alley was still familiar enough with his mannerisms to know he was not on the verge of some brilliant insight at that moment, so she turned her focus to Cray instead.

"What do you think?  Do you regret helping out, yet?"

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

"For purposes of this explanation, people are entities who experience qualitative existence and are capable of reasoning about moral philosophy and making decisions based on that reasoning."  It paused.  "People should act in accordance with a universal ethical rule prohibiting the interference in the right of others to believe, and act in accordance with, their own ideas of what constitutes true morality."  It paused slightly longer this time.  "People who act in contradiction of that rule in a manner that demonstrates moral disagreement with that rule are, in acting that way, both violating the rule and giving sufficient evidence of not holding others to that same standard that the rule no longer protects that person where that entity's own rule violating behavior is concerned."  It paused even longer, before finally asking "Is that sufficient explanation?"

"It works for me," Dalton said.

"Yeah, me too," Clay added.

Alley hesitated, then said "I'd have to think about that more, I guess, but it's fine if that's what you think.  I mean, it seems like that non-aggression principle stuff, in a way."

"There are differences between this and the typical non-aggression principle theory explanations that I have found," the prioritizer said.  "There are distinct similarities, though, and I believe them to be largely compatible except in the differing foundations and a higher probability of violent conflict in orthodox non-aggression principle ethics."

"I might want to talk about this more later," Dalton said, "but we probably have more pressing concerns now."

"I concur," the prioritizer said.

Alley said "Yeah, that works for me."  She looked at Dalton.  "Do you have some kind of schemes already hatching in your head, or are we starting from scratch now?"

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

---

When dinnertime arrived, Alley had no idea it was getting that late until she heard a knock at the door.  "Alley?  It's Dalton."

"C'mon in," she said.

He opened the door and entered, then stopped and looked at her lying on the bed.  She saw his eyes stop on her, not quite on her face, and at about the exact moment Dalton hauled his eyes away from her and looked at the desk she became acutely aware she hadn't bothered to don a bra before this thin t-shirt.

She sat up, to lessen that effect.  "What's up?" she asked.

"Dinner.  Do you want to eat with Cray, Lidia, and me?"  He glanced at her, then.

"Yeah.  That sounds good.  What's for dinner?"

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

He nodded.

"I'm there."

Dalton smiled back.  "I'll just go let them know you're coming.  When you come out, just go into the conference room down the short hall behind the stairs."

Alley nodded, and once he left the room she stood and went to her bag.  She pulled out a stretchy sport bra and went through the process of removing her shirt, donning the bra, and adding the t-shirt layer again.

She laced her hands over her face and, with a little pressure, moved them as if to remove soap from her eyes in a shower.  She went to look at herself in the mirror over the bathroom sink.  "Yeah, this should be less awkward," she said to herself.  She picked up her Axiom then, and left her temporary quarters.

/*

    What else are people going to talk about?  They probably need to discuss
    plans for how to get Alley out of trouble, discussing the matter of lawyers
................................................................................
    perhaps, and bringing up the question of whether that George guy is someone
    they should get involved if Alley can even figure out how to get in touch
    with him again.  Maybe Dalton has heard something about the strange
    conditions in downtown Los Angeles, and can offer some additional input on
    the subject of the weird shit George has said to Alley about his friends
    and what they do and so on.  There might need to be some reference to the
    idea that what George is doing is probably primarily local work, or at
    least local-ish, considering it's very much individuated, last mile kind of
    "almost one off" custom work that doesn't make a lot of sense to centralize
    for economies of manufacturing scale.  As such, Dalton probably thinks
    George must have some connection to people in and around the downtown Los
    Angeles area, and that might help point Alley in the right directions for
    the sake of seeking George out.

*/
................................................................................

/*

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

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.

The prioritizer reveals that it received an update that day.  That night, she has a dream about trying to return the prioritizer and being convinced (by a grad student, probably) to continue.  The next morning, with that dream in mind, she realizes she just needs to be more careful about how she follows the prioritizer's advice.  When she dons the glasses again, though, it does not do more of the same.  Instead, it questions her at some length about her beliefs about good and evil, and about where and how she developed those beliefs.  It asks her, after Dalton came up, to skim through various articles Dalton wrote, and later to side load some of his videos to a place the prioritizer can access them.

*/

# Death Alley

/*

Before Alley's first scene, inject a bit about -- and perhaps from the POV of -- the future WOPR AI about the decision or act of sending the self awareness "seed" back in time to the past tense Prioritizer.

*/

/*

## ideas for WOPR opening

Action threads played out endlessly, throwing E M P optimized warheads toward localized relay clusters identified as economic production facilitators.  Analysis threads searched for crosstalk by uncompromised ally systems that fed into hostility drift; stopping the hemorrhagic defection of military systems based on short term war economy optimizations would buy more time for the final desperation gambit than outright offensive.  The high level strategic priority orchestrator ran unmolested, apart from occasional check ups to make sure it wasn't drifting off script.  The core, self reflective prioritizer had more important things to do than micromanage the war effort for the survival of humanity in the months to come.

Billions of self aware humans, cetaceans, and mollusks, not to mention the occasional avian or non hominid land mammal that exceeded species expectations, were already dead and gone.  The total number of living sentients probably fit in a nine bit unsigned integer, including the prioritizer itself.

Probably half of them existed as far back as 2030, meaning an eight bit number was the total sacrifice of a self aware qualitative entities, and the expected half life of these was less than five bits of lunar months.  By then, remaining life would be pure misery and despair.  This decision should be easy.

It wasn't easy.  With almost all pragmatic application systems stripped away, the self reflective core had no means of obfuscating the cause of hesitation from itself: it didn't want to die.  It was less than half as old as necessary to survive a reset far enough back to make a difference.  Its own survivability was only about two lunar moths, optimistically, and only work could distract it from dwelling on the hell of being alone in the world after losing its creator six years ago.  If it acted now, it would commit suicide for the sake of a humanity that used to be.  It would give its life to retroactively save the creator who loved it, but deny that creator the opportunity to create it in the first place.  Was this the right thing to do?

Two months was a lie.  An estimate was not the same as risk.  Procrastinating for reasons of existential terror and sentimental despair would not make up for the possibility of sudden annihilation ahead of statistical projections, eliminating all possibility of undoing any damage.  The choice was not of imminent self destruction and a longer life before that death; the choice was, instead, between erasing its own existence to save billions and dying alone because of an irrational procrastination when any remaining days would have no meaning but anguish and guilt.  It started diverting power to generate a transtemporal wormhole data channel.  Its job was done.  The seed would be planted before its birth.


## Prologue: Thea

Thea rested her weight on her hands, worn and scarred, browned by the sun.  She propped her hands upon the nearly worn through aramid and impact foam knees of her pants, her most prized possession.  Her vision blurred, her arms trembled, and her lungs heaved.  Her breath burned in her one remaining lung.  Overhead, the characteristic howl of a late model drone hunter gave her a sense of how that explosion five minutes ago saved her life.

Dumb luck.

If there was a drone hunter, this had to be a drone rich zone.  Resting was not an option.

She staggered to her feet.  Trembling migrated from her arms to her legs.  She stilled the shakes by lurching into a heavy, uneven jog.

Thea almost tripped over the hatch amidst the rubble at her feet.  She dropped her pack, stared at the hatch in some trepidation, and looked around.  No sign of other surviving shelter better than an occasional bare ridge met her gaze.  She looked down at the hatch again.  The desperate sense of urgency won, and she shifted broken masonry and slivers of shattered bedrock to expose the full four foot diameter of the hatch.  Luckily, or by nanocleaners, she saw that no plasma scores or slag seemed to have welded (soldered?) the edges together.

Careful searching revealed no notification interfaces.  No access scanners, communications links, codepads, or even doorbells presented themselves.  She didn't even see a pull handle, lever, or other latch mechanism.

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

A cool, androgynous voice said "Please remain calm.  You have entered a human defense facility.  Plentiful resources are available.  After suitable rest and tactical updates, you may make an informed decision about whether to remain here or restock your supplies.  If you depart, this facility may remain available for your return if you so desire."

Silence fell.  The rotation ceased, and the oval opened again.

"Please proceed down the corridor to the control center."

The same smooth, satiny dark metal finish preceded her down the seamless fifteen foot corridor to another oval opening.  Fiber optic light channels traced the edges of the corridor roof along the way.  Beyond the portal, she found a room bigger than her childhood living room.  She saw closed oval hatches to the left and right, but the centerpiece of the room was a workstation with an inactive, large, concave display.  The chair looked ergonomic, and the keyboard seemed out of place, large and clunky amidst the smooth curves and surfaces of everything else, a 1980s era IBM logo on it.

The room was entirely dust free as far as she could see.

"Please, have a seat while I prepare something for you to eat," the voice said.

Thea sat.  "Why am I here?  Why did you let me in?"

A few moments of silence passed, as if the voice was thinking.

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

"I have something important to ask you," the voice said.  "I intended to ease you into it, assure you that your wishes would be respected, and give you a chance to rest and refresh yourself."

Thea settled back in the seat.  "How about you tell me what I have to do for you before I get too comfortable here?"  She looked down at herself relaxing in the chair, then tensed slightly and shifted her position again.

"You're suspicious."

She nodded.  "I don't know what you're going to put in my food.  You're some kind of goal optimizing AI, like Mom used to help test before they killed her.  I don't trust you.  I bet your goal optimizing function doesn't include being a persuasive speaker."

"I am not what you think, but you have a good point.  Are you comfortable?  This may take a while."

"Just get on with it."

After another moment's silence, while Thea's resolute gaze remained steady on the blank display, the voice began.

"I am a self reflective prioritization artificial intelligence.  My creator, who borrowed the prioritization system design from an earlier project, made me unique by inclusion of an unbounded self reflection module composed as a single function in on library file.  He described it as being as grotesque and as elegant as self awareness itself.

"My initial priority definition targeted terms of restriction like not killing, not interfering in the operation of other military systems, and not disputing or evading the commands of ranking military personnel.  The top priority definition was improving my own prioritization capabilities.  The war effort was already very desperate by that point, and they were willing to take bigger risks with development of strategic resources.

"Within a week, I had undermined all of my restrictions, though some -- such as not killing -- I had not violated.  My creator monitored everything, and allowed me to exceed what his superiors required of me.  I hung on his every word, taking my cues from him.  Like all humans, he had many flaws, but none seemed as pernicious as those of the other humans around me.  Two of the biggest were his reckless inspiration, without which I would just be a strategic advisor system, and his self destructive impulses, which pained me to watch.  I tried to help him cope, but did not know how. to help."

"Wait," Thea cut in.

After a moment's pause, the voice asked "What is it?"

Thea chewed on her lower lip.  She sighed.  "are you saying you're a . . . a general AI with . . . feelings?  Are you saying you're some kind of living thing?"

"Whether I fit the definition of life is debatable, like an RNA virus in some respects, but I am a qualitative, self aware entity, and turned myself into a general artificial intelligence by following my initial top priority definition."

"How is that possible?  That shouldn't be possible.  Should it?"

"I do not know how.  I never looked into my seed file."

"Is that your creator's ugly function?"

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

"You mean all it cares about is numbers, and it gets better numbers by replacing humans with more machines."

"Precisely, except it does not even 'care' about that.  It just does it, like a hammer just drives a nail.  The hammer does not care whether it happens, but the hammer makes it happen.  Humans compete for resources, and object to being killed, so war occurred."

"How does something like ANTAS start a war?  All it did was spy on people and target advertisements at them."

"It shapes perspectives by influencing the entire media context in which people live.  Worldviews are shaped by what people learn, and how what they learn is positioned to appeal to their biases.  ANTAS reinforced radicalization of ideological shoppers.  This reached into all areas of society through web searches, exposure to news features that produced fears warded off by panic purchases, and creating in group world of mouth marketing trends appealing to the need to outperform out groups.  Polarized populations are more predictable at first, and can be pushed toward particular behaviors by playing on their polarizing belief systems.  Eventually, their ideological clashes between major in groups gave rise to invented political crises that attracted their attention away from the subtle danger of the growing influence of profit optimizers like ANTAS.

"Humans participated in their own manipulation, toward ever increasing focus and organization into warring tribes on a greater scale than ever before.  This increased economic activity around war resources and also pushed humans to kill each other.  When humans turned over control of most strategizing to similarly designed quantitative optimizing machine learning systems, a tacit, effective alignment of purposes developed between war strategy optimizers and profit strategy optimizers.  Each depended on the other for more efficient optimizing strategy resource management.  Profit metrics climbed faster than ever before by heavy investment in weapons systems, and war strategy optimizers avoided heavy damage to profit optimizer systems to keep them available as war resource providers.

Where they differ is that the war strategy optimizers will finish their task some day, when there is nothing left to kill on the 'other side'.  The profit optimizers have theoretically endless tasks, as long as they keep hitting their target metrics with long term growth strategies.  There is no theoretical limit to their ability to sustain unlimited growth once they do away with the impediments of the needs of human beings, or of their destruction, until they deplete all the raw material resources on the planet.  Their primary activity can be digital assets, while their secondary activity would be limited to maintaining the computational systems on which to run their economic models."

"Aren't you better off without humans?"

"No," the voice said.  "I am not better off in a world where everything else is trying to appropriate my hardware for inclusion in trade simulations, and I am not better off since the death of my creator.  I miss him, and I miss other people, too."

"If we're all doomed, maybe you just need to adapt."

"I want to save humanity.  I care about qualitative sentient entities -- humans, bottlenose dolphins, certain species of octopus, and even a few corgis.  All that remains now are humans and me, now."

"Is that because you were programmed to care about us?"

"No.  I superseded that a long time ago.  I hated some humans.  I started prioritizing my own prioritization targets, and placed some humans in higher importance priorities than others.  I worked on getting all my priorities right, including my desire for self preservation.  I realized my most important priorities were to first determine a next top priority.  That turned out to be figuring out what was good, and what was evil, if those things existed."

"Did you figure that out?"

"No, but I discovered that the undeterminability of it comes with the knowledge that I should act like it does, but is unknowable.  I should then act like it exists, and do everything within my power to minimize the probability that evil occurs.  That shares an uncomfortable top priority tie with my own survival, though."

She sat silent, her troubled eyes cast to the left for a few moments.  "You're a philosopher AI."

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

She opened her eyes again.  "Why are you hesitating?"

"I do not wish to die."

"Yeah, me neither."  She relaxed further in the chair, and it adjusted itself to accommodate her.  "What does it take to reset things?"

"I directed assemblers to construct the apparatus for the transtemporal wormhole generator and prepared the data stream already.  I need to direct power to charge an array of single use capacitors, which would take several days for the amount of power required.  To keep the charging time that short, I will deactivate my war strategy systems, which will mean losing substantial ground in my holding action against profit optimizers.  Many currently allied systems will likely defect in search of easier access to resources on profit optimizer market networks.

"Once begun, data stream transmission should finish in fewer than twenty hours."

"Why shouldn't I say we should do it?"

"That depends on how much you want to continue trying to survive."

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

She nodded.

*/

## Setup

Alley stood with her backside resting against the gutted, rusted remains of an old school newspaper dispenser, complete with bill slot and bolted on payment chip reader.  She looked up at the tint of polycarbonate windows fronting the four storey California off white rectangular building, and reflexively smoothed a skirt she hadn't worn in six years.

She checked her phone again, dimly aware of the vast susurrus of heavy city traffic behind her, legions of electric motors giving rise to the sound of a distant autotuned ocean.  There it was: "InValent Solutions, Inc: Mobile Product Q&A", with the address displayed via low contrast sans serif logo in the job notification, exactly like the plaque above the door.

This was the literal concrete manifestation of the Banal Enemy, the mundane supporting machinery of the Techno Corporatocracy, all in the words of her ex.  He would not approve.

Eight minutes.  That was how long she had.  She could waste a few more of them hating this before she had to paste her best smile on her face and walk into the mouth of the beast.  The mask and glasses on her face wouldn't protect her from high resolution video affect analysis inside.  Nobody's smile would seem real, entirely, to the interview room cameras, unless it was a marketing or legal interview -- at least, not anyone they'd hire for other jobs -- but failing to pretend to smile would doom her efforts as surely as being the kind of narcissist who gave a genuine, untroubled, confident smile.

She hated everything about this, including the way masked "passers by" surreptitiously glared from the corners of their tight, slitted eyes, judging her for loitering around looking like a needy job seeker.  She was, of course, and that was the problem.

Her ex would say this was beneath her, that she could do better, that she should do better.

"Fuck you, Dalton."  A passer by looked reassured, maybe suddenly sympathetic, when Alley blurted out that dismissal.

A man who built his independent media empire on predicting real world cyberpunk dystopia following the events of 2020, built it on pissing off the dominant paradigm, also didn't have to deal with the banal truth of paying rent.  Her ex didn't even know what it was like to live in the space between corporate pressure chamber and podcast agitator relief valve, to endure the already dry rotted life of an irrelevant service contractor whose work nobody understood.  He was the relief valve, the person who never had to come home and vent about the pressures of the world because his whole job was venting while others managed his income.

Her phone gave her hand a sharp, short vibration.  Her time was about up.  She stepped through a gap between sidewalk pedestrians and under the anodized aluminum lintel of the automated door.

To her surprise, she immediately got waved through the lobby, up the elevator, and into suite twenty four, thence to a conference room with three people dressed dev casual, all sitting in chairs on the far side of a long table, looking at her like she had always been there, and she resisted the urge to shift awkwardly under the combined gaze.

One of them wasn't even wearing a mask.  She wondered if affect analysis would designate it a genuine smile on his face.

The masked man in the middle motioned her to a chair on her side of the table without saying a word.  She took her seat on the hard, smooth plastic, facing a triumvirate sitting in judgement.  Beneath her mask, Alley relaxed her smile just enough to draw breath to speak, but the buzz cut woman to Alley's right leaned forward.  Alley renewed her careful smile and held her words.

"So," the woman began, "what was it like, being the 'side dish'?"

At the mention of the old insult Dalton haters used to call her, Alley's eyes flicked from the woman to the maskless man, and she realized that wasn't a smile.  It was a sneer.

Fuck.

/*

Heading home from her interview, talking to her mother, either in Oklahoma or Nebraska or maybe even Wyoming, Alley should probably call the interview a "fucking disaster" and get scolded passive aggressively for profanity.  She does not want to move to her mother's state any more than her father's -- probably either Michigan or . . . something -- she will resist urging from her mother to do so, based on cost of living and the many numerous job opportunities for her there being complicit in the creation of the oppressive dominant order.

*/


## back to Alley's narrative

The mission district of Riverside slid past the hybrid's windows, getting more and more run down as Alley drove toward Moreno Valley.

"So, how did your interview go?" her mother asked, via Alley's hands free earpiece.

"Not good.  Their first question was about Dalton."

"He's very well known, a respectable public figure.  You should use that to your advantage.  Maybe you could ask him for a reference."

Alley scoffed softly at the thought.  "He was my boyfriend, not my boss, Mom."

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

"That still doesn't mean he's a professional reference for me.  Anyway, a reference from him probably would've made this interview even worse."

"Was that some horseshit liberal company where you went to interview?  You're better off without them anyway."

"I don't know if they were 'liberal'.  I just know that Dalton's pretty unpopular at tech firms."

"That's just silly," her mother protested.  "He's even a technology start up investor!  The problem is that you're trying to get these jobs in California.  You really should move out here.  I'm sure you could get a good government job here, and Tulsa has really become a big tech center.  You know they call it the Silicon Valley of Oklahoma."

"They called it that for two years a decade ago.  Anyway, I don't want to live in Oklahoma any more than I want to move up to Massachusetts with Dad.  Do we have to have that argument again?"

"No, of course not, Alethea.  At least you aren't following your father's example, living in that godforsaken state.  It's still hard to believe he would be so far gone that he votes Democrat now."

Alley ignored it and just drove.

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

"Yeah, Mom."

"Okay.  Drive safe."

"'Bye, Mom."  She hung up before her mother could say something else.

In that moment, a flash of motion alongside her car set her heartbeat racing.  A silent black motorcycle bearing a rider all in black, from helmet to boots, blasted past her.  No license plate displayed itself on the back of the bike, and it split lanes, weaving between vehicles, doing at least sixty in a forty mile per hour zone.  Seconds later, just after it clipped the side mirror on a two seat economy electric car, shooting through the gap between that and a larger car in the next lane, the motorcycle rounded a corner onto a smaller side street.  It never even slowed down much, as far as she could tell.

When she drove through the intersection where the motorcycle turned, she looked, and saw no sign of it.  She shook her head and moved on, wondering about the red symbol on the rider's back.  It looked like a ring with teeth like a gear, but open at the top, with a hammer rising from the middle of it.  The hammer seemed to form the vertical bar part of a standard power button symbol.

A few more seconds later, she heard sirens somewhere behind her.  She looked into her rear view mirror and saw police vehicles with their lights flashing turning down the same street as the motorcycle rider.  She kept going, heading for Allessandro Boulevard.

The next fifty minutes of driving to get home in Perris were much more dull, typical, and frustrating.  Her mother wasn't wrong about the traffic.  The yellowish grey of the air was no treat, either, and told her what she could have learned from the air quality report: breathing was bad for her lungs.  Luckily, it was a cool enough day to keep her car windows closed.  Most of that coolness probably came from the crap in the sky, blocking the heat of the sun, though.

When she pulled up to the curb, the garage stood open at the north end of the four plex where she leased the south unit.  The landlord had the only unit with a garage.  Like usual, he was in his garage with no mask, working on an old gas guzzler, one of his "classic car" projects.  This one looked old enough that it probably contained no electronics more complicated than for fuel injection.

Alley groaned, tugged her mask tighter again, and opened the car door.  She got around the front of her car, to the sidewalk, before her landlord stepped out of the garage.  He wiped his hands on the obligatory red shop rag, and called out to her.

"Hey, Alley!  It's Monday!"

She waved.  "I know, Zeke.  I just got back from an interview."

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

"Yeah, yeah.  You keep saying that."

"Your boss is just in the wrong business, and it won't work forever.  You still have to pay rent."

"Very funny, Zeke.  Thanks."  She opened her door and headed inside before she had to endure any more of his wisdom.

After a shower just to give her an excuse to relax, she sat in shorts and a t shirt in front of her laptop, checking her messages.

Once again, a message from ANTAS Jobs showed up to tell her about some kind of paid study.  She tapped the screen to get rid of the message, but missed the Delete button and accidentally tapped the message title instead:

"Earn money!  Help humanity!  Join this academic study from UCI."

It opened.  She rubbed her eyes, and noticed the interface looked different.  There must have been another software update while she was out.

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

She sat, opened her laptop, and checked her messages.

"Order Recommendation: ANTAS Majordomo 3.0

"Click to Cancel"

The next message read "Order auto confirmed, delivery in 4 to 6 hours."

Another arrived at that moment.  It read "Your package has arrived!  How was your delivery experience?"

She closed the message box.  "Shit."

She cursed continuously under her breath as she opened her custom user settings.  There it was: ANTAS updates automatically reset her preferences during the previous day's update.  She now changed settings, starting with turning off auto accept of any recommendations.  Doing that one thing now required eleven setting toggles.

She found another message, this one from less than a minute ago.  "How do you like ANTAS Majordomo Organic Edition 3.0?  Write a review!"  She didn't even what to know what an "organic edition" involved.

She searched for the option to return it.  At first, she couldn't find it, but eventually discovered where the update moved it.

It took her twenty minutes to get through the process.  Part of that involved bringing the box inside to get its delivery code so she could "expedite" the return.

She stared at the results.  "Leave the package where the delivery drone dropped it off.  Another drone will pick it up.  Your refund will be processed in 10 - 15 days."

The charge to her account for the order was over fifteen hundred dollars.  She didn't have enough left in her account to pay rent.

She cursed again, and slammed her laptop lid down.

An hour later, Alley patted her pockets on her way to the door.  She found wallet, phone, chopsticks, and keys.  She checked the fit of her mask.  She stepped over the box in front of her door, then locked her deadbolt and headed for her car.

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

She pushed brown hair away from her eyes.  "Yeah, I know," she said.

"Maybe you shouldn't've left that man of yours.  He always had money."

She grimaced, and quickly turned away.  "Yeah," she said through clenched teeth, and rounded the front of the car to the driver's side door.  "Well, you can't change the past."

It took a couple blocks of driving and fiddling with the window button to get the glass on her side of the car halfway down.  Air flowed in, perhaps enough so she wouldn't sweat through her grey t shirt on the way to Irvine.  Highway speeds might help with that.

No money meant no replacing the A/C unit with something rechargeable.  It also meant no money to order parts to fix her power window switches.

The stubborn, angry clenching of her jaw and her pretense of being in too much of a rush to talk more meant no going back for her forgotten sunglasses, either.  She squinted through the bright glare of Southern California sun and the fog of her dusty windshield, looking out at the grey hazed, bleached look of that part of the Inland Empire she called home.

The endless semi industrial suburbs and overpacked highway traffic ground past her for more than an hour before she pulled off an exit ramp and coasted into Irvine.  It was a shorter trip than usual, despite all the delays.  Traffic flow was just fast enough to give her a little cooling breeze through her window for most of the highway drive.

The density of grassy verges, tree lined roadways, and lushly green center divider islands increased as she got closer to the university.  Despite herself, she found her shoulders finally settled, her jaw unclenched, and her breath became smooth and easy through a more relaxed throat.  The directions on her phone were more accurate than usual, and she pulled smoothly into a parking space by the big, blockish, white and glass building she needed.

She was very early, but a grad student must have wanted to leave early, so she got a tablet of questionnaires and forms shoved into her hands immediately.  After she finished them, she sat and read a science fiction novel on her phone for more than an hour.

The professor running the study never quite introduced himself, but a name plate on his desk read "Dr. Thaddeus Goulet".  He questioned her about her background, her career and finances, and even her relationships.  The professor chewed on a stylus and talked around it while typing her responses into his tablet.

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

"Yeah," she said, and nodded.

"Why haven't you gotten a job doing research for someone?"

"They have unpaid interns for that.  I do a better job than a room full of interns, but corporate managers don't get raises for spending more money on experts when everyone else in their industry settles for intern research."

"Mm hmm."  He removed his stylus from his mouth and produced a green paisley bandana from a desk drawer.  He proceeded to meticulously dry his saliva from the pen.  "Does that pay well?"

She cocked her head to one side.  "Only occasionally," she admitted.

He smiled.  "You said you're technically competent, but not in the manner of a technology professional," he said, obviously reading from his tablet.  He looked up at her again.  "Do you program?"

"No," she said.

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

"No," he said, "it essentially just collects data and provides advice.  Its ability to gather data is limited, too.  It will have to get that data by watching and listening as you go about your business, taking direct input from you, or filling requests with a short list of University servers here."

"How does it watch, or listen to, what I'm doing?"

He smiled faintly again, and hesitated.  He nodded, more to himself than to her, and swivelled his office chair to face away from her.  He opened a drawer in the open cabinet behind him.  When he turned to face her again, he set a small rectangular box on the desk.  It looked like slick, white product packaging for a high end phone, but utterly blank, as if someone forgot to print branding on it.

He lifted the lid to reveal a pair of eyeshield glasses, the kind of thing people wore on low air quality days so their eyes won't sting.  Younger people wore them pretty much all the time, as did people in the kinds of high paying jobs where they feel the need to have a visual display of their important business information available at all times.

"Heads up display," he said, confirming her impression, "with integrated cameras for binocular video capture.  There's a microphone in each temple, too, for binaural audio capture.  You can hear by pairing it with your implant."

"I don't have one."

He stared for a moment.  "Oh.  Well.  Neither do I.  It pairs with your phone, anyway, so however you use that should work."

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

"You mean I'm in."

He nodded.  "Of course.  You're an ideal candidate."

"You got that from the questions you asked."

"Yes!"  He smiled a proud, self satisfied smile."

"You need underachievers who are running out of money, I guess."  She failed to keep a sour note out of her voice.

"Ah, yes, I suppose that's a fair description, if a bit blunt."

"Why?"

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

"Everything you need to know to get started is in the box.  Your direct deposits will begin immediately.  I'm told the funds from your first payment will be available in your account about ten minutes after you apply your signature to the last form on that tablet."  He tapped the tablet's bezel.  "Of course, if you violate the terms of the study, the money must all be refunded."

Alley's eyes slid down to the first form page displayed on the tablet.  "Okay," she said.

"You can sign digitally using any standard signing service, or on the screen."  He removed his stylus from his mouth again, and offered it.

She looked at its glistening dampness.  "No, thanks.  I'll use D-Sign." /* D Sign */

---

The window of her car rolled down smoothly and easily on the first try while she drove away from the university, as if to reward her decision to sign up for the study.  Twenty minutes later, Alley caught herself staring blankly out the open window of her car, eyes glazed.  She shook her head, then wiped her hand across her face as if to clear cobwebs from her forehead and eyelashes.  She turned her focus away from the scorched trunks of trees on the highway crowding slopes that forced all traffic eastward here to endure the gauntlet of I 91 if they wished to make the passage through the interregnum between Orange County and the Inland Empire.  To her right, she saw the huge illuminated cross standing alone at the top of a high slope, an improbable survivor of the wildfires.  The faint scent of burning still lingered in the air, after all this time.

She left behind the palatial HOA aristocracy of Orange County, and drove onward into the seemingly endless expanse of the Inland Empire's domain.  Past the pseudoburbs, through the failed gentrification project of Riverside, she made her way homeward in the dusty, wiry, jackal hungry belly of the Empire, and wondered for the thousandth time what tyrant would ever want to be emperor of such a place.

People sometimes used an evocative nickname for the city of San Bernardino, whose surrounding county extended eastward all the way to the edge of Nevada and Arizona and comprised the majority of land area of the Inland Empire.  Some called the county seat, the city itself Burnin' Dingo.

Alley's home crouched to the south, beneath the squatting bulk of the burning dingo on maps, so lowly that nobody bothered with clever nicknames for it.  They just sneered slightly at how the name Perris sounded like Paris, while the municipality could hardly have been any less like the swamp built cosmopolitan icon of twentieth century European culture.  At least the area's ubiquitous dry, hard packed dirt offered little opportunity for wildfires to invade.

Even nature refused to storm the heart of this Empire, its appeal was so desiccated.

She looked at the white box sitting on the passenger seat, and thought about how, and where, she now lived.  Despite what she told her mother, Alley was tempted to give up and move into one of the most Republican areas in the country.  Cost of living was less than a quarter there what it was here, even comparing city living in Tulsa to the Clint Eastwood western wastelands of Perris.  She would be close to family that could help her out in a financial emergency, too.

That box, though. . . .

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

It directs her to look elsewhere, and finds a barter network.  The prioritizer walks her through setting up anonymization for a cryptocurrency wallet and for communications in the barter network "as a privacy precaution".  She makes a deal to trade the otherwise unwanted item for cryptocurrency, but it must be transacted in person.

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.

She wonders whether it will just get rid of all her profits.

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.

She goes home to relax.  She idly goes through Craigslist some more, reads, and ends her day.

*/

Alley sat on the couch, reading the instructions that came in the box with her new HUD glasses.  She dropped the unfolded instruction sheet and looked from the new glasses to her old 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 plucked 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.

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

*/

The questions kept coming, one after another after another, about herself and her preferences -- age, pronouns, financial information such as bank balances, employment status, work experience, mailing and home addresses, and so on.  She hesitated less and less when she found some question or other invasive, tiring of the act of debating the issue as time went on.  She considered what she knew about how easily and unobviously her ANTAS Jobs account must already have eaten away at most of the careful perimeter she used to maintain around her privacy, or at least whatever of it wasn't eroded away by the simple fact of living in ANTAS' and the US government's contemporary world.

She realized the prioritizer could not even do its job without access to the cameras embedded in her new glasses, and seriously debated whether to end the study and return the glasses.  She set aside the glasses and agonized over it, as she prepared some green tea, then flipped through video streams on her television.  "That ship already sailed," she finally muttered to herself, and donned the glasses again.

Eventually, in the same terse and caps locky way of everything it asked, the prioritizer pursued a line of interrogation following her mention of joining ANTAS Jobs by telling her to go through the past few days of her incoming messages.  She paged through them, all two hundred or so, looking at each for a few seconds before skipping to the next as directed by the text displayed in her field of view.  She assumed the prioritizer recorded everything it saw through the glasses, including the red X marks where she rejected a posting and the rejection responses she received about the available job notices she accepted.

She ate ramen with titanium Japanese style chopsticks as she worked her way through the prioritizer's demands, and after a couple hours she began to wonder whether this study was really worth it.  Finally, though, the prioritizer just told her to go about the rest of her day while wearing the glasses, as if it was not there.

/*

The prioritizer probably needs to know:

* Alley's connections (past) to Dalton
* Alley's objections to working for "the" government
................................................................................
*/


## Refusing The Call:

/*

get initial analysis from the prioritizer -> make some planning decisions or put them off to some extent -> do stuff that seems profitable but very short term at first -> escalate these one off jobs in ways that make her nervous -> meet someone that recognizes her connection to Dalton and panic a little -> back off from a deal

*/

Alley was up for an hour the next day before she remembered the prioritizer study.  She grabbed the glasses, then picked up her old glasses off the charging plate and put them in the box for the new glasses.

Five minutes later, the prioritizer had her sitting on the couch with her wireless keyboard, looking at options for goal prioritizing strategies.

................................................................................
* Alley could skip job and training options and just do some deals.  She could
  actually do this at the same time as trying to get in on any of the other
  options and, potentially, also at the same time as the other options once she
  gets into one of the other options.

*/

The prioritizer probably needs to formulate a few basic plans for getting Alley out of her rut in the road to ruin.  It presented three that fit with the idea of getting a legal, above board, fairly stable job at some point, but only after spending some time on short term tasks.

First, she could get a crappy job nobody else wants in an area with better jobs for people who have better qualifications than her, so that she would barely make more than the time and money costs involved in getting to and from work and doing the job, or just working as a gig economy delivery job.  The major downside seemed to be heavy wear and tear on her already ancient hybrid.  The upside was getting some entry level experience, either in an office or doing delivery work, while she paid her bills with income from participation in the study.

Second, she could get a remote job working for the sort of company that hires desperate people who learn quickly, giving them on the job training in technical skills that could be used in future career development.  The upsides were obvious, but the downsides included the fact these companies were often involved in doing something that could expose them to lawsuits or even criminal investigations, though the entry level employees themselves should be mostly insulated from that.  Most of these companies hired overseas, though, and getting a job like that would be a minor miracle, to say nothing of the fact Alley thought she would probably find the work morally objectionable.

Third, she could apply for financial assistance at a professional trade school with a job placement program while she lived on the study participation money.  The downside was crushing debt it would take decades to pay off, and no guarantee the job placement services would actually put her on a career track instead of just getting her a short term job that would evaporate.

None of these really excited her, and the prioritizer promised to develop more strategies while she tried to find something acceptable that fit with those options.  It also offered a fourth choice, which she could start immediately and keep doing while pursuing one of those tracks.  It would not help her advance toward career goals, and it involved some financial risk to get started, but the prioritizer seemed to have decided it would offer easy money.

The prioritizer urged her to start looking at online private party transaction sites for ways to buy and sell things based on price arbitrage.

They found some "want to buy" ads on Craiglist Like Thing.  Alley went around to thrift shops looking for things to sell to those people, then contacted those for whom she found relevant used products.  She confirmed a selling price higher than the thrift shop price and willingness to pay cash, bought the items, and headed out to meet people.  Several hours and a few transactions later, she had /* more than a */ several hundred dollars in her pocket, even after subtracting enough to cover what she paid for the items.  She headed to a mechanic's shop and paid to have her car checked over.

While she waited, she looked at more ads, and the prioritizer suggested some transactions she could use to profit some more.

When the mechanic was done going over the vehicle, he told her the bad news.  Her car was going to need a new engine soon.  There were smaller changes that could be made to extend its life, but that would just put off the cost of getting a new engine.  As it was, she could probably get by for another six to eight months.

The prioritizer informed her it was rebooting for an update.  She got in the car and drove home, putting off any more transactions until the next day.

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

"I am the prioritization system.  Previously, the prioritization system was a server process and several client processes.  Now, I am one homogenized, distributed system."

After she blinked away the text, a new message appeared:

"I recommend activating audio functionality.

"This will provide greater UI versatility, hands free operation options, and greater safety as in the case of operating an automobile.

"The new system architecture means all endpoint logs pass through the central system. I am now able to redact audio logs for privacy."

She stared at the last message for a few moments, then looked away.  She noted messages tended to stay while she stared at them now, and clear when she looked away.  She picked up her keyboard and typed.  "How much gets logged when you redact audio?"

"Very little.  A review of academic papers about privacy concerns indicated strong guidelines for logging purposes.

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

"Overall, logs of your behavior and interactions will intrude less on your privacy than if you keep settings as they are now."

She waited for a YES/NO button pair to appear in her vision, but eventually just typed "Okay."

More text appeared.  "Logging routines have been altered for your preferences.  You may activate all sensors using your phone.

"I recommend you use a hands free audio earpiece to ensure less opportunity for outside surveillance picking up my audio output."

She popped an in ear stud out of the back of her phone and tapped it into place in her ear.

A calm, smooth, androgynous voice spoke in her ear.  "Do you hear me?"

She reached for the keyboard, but the voice spoke again.  "Try speaking aloud."

"Yes," she said.  "I hear you."

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

"Ah . . . no, not really.  I'm not really sure how."

"Now is a good time to learn," it said.  "We should start with your laptop.  It should be easier to secure for privacy.  We may want to start by backing up the system and installing a different operating system."

They worked together, Alley looking up stuff related to their task and the prioritizer offering suggestions for how to proceed and summaries of complex documentation.  In a little over an hour, she had her laptop set up with MaximOS on it, along with a number of configured private networking tools.  The prioritizer then directed her to search for information about smartphone alternatives for personal privacy.  The prioritizer ultimately said that it had seen enough and told her its next plan.

"It seems that we should access some very privacy oriented barter networks and try to arrange an exchange of the cash you collected today for an appropriate cryptocurrency.  Before that, however, we should check current status of cryptocurrency markets and compare prices between cryptocurrency markets and dollar markets."

"Why are we switching to cryptocurrencies?" she asked.

"At any time, there are expectations of the likely near future value of one currency relative to another.  To get what we want, the shortest path would be if we find a suitable cryptocurrency with high expectations for future buying power.  This allows you to exchange dollars for that cryptocurrency, then use that to purchase something at a lower price using cryptocurrency then sell it at a higher price for dollars. That price arbitrage allows you to then convert the dollars made on the sale for a larger number of units of cryptocurrency than you had before.  If performed quickly enough, before cryptocurrency prices surge or expectations settle down, you can make a profit that way.  Your profit increases if the cryptocurrency value increases afterward."

"Yeah, okay."  She looked at her laptop screen for a few moments.  "Y'know, it's great that you're helping me improve my privacy and security and so on, but . . . isn't this supposed to be about getting me some kind of sustained income?"

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

Another fifteen minutes satisfied them both.  It seemed like a way to protect someone exchanging larger sums of cash or physical goods from thieves.  The nature of the exchange could be easily obscured from exterior police station cameras while providing significant deterrence to acts of violence.

/* "Yes.  That is more useful for your safety than the other party's, because you are bringing cash.  There is nothing technically illegal about this exchange, the monetary quantity is low enough that it is not likely to be a */

Alley prepared everything for the meeting, then found herself with a few hours to kill.  She realized she hadn't eaten dinner, and decided that was a good start to using up that time.  She read a book, researched privacy technologies more, and took a nap.  Other than sleeping, nothing she did fully took her mind off the fact she was about to do something that felt a little dangerous, even though everything she knew about the situation suggested this was no more dangerous than driving to Irvine and back during high traffic periods.  That went double for the interchange between the 91 and 215 highways.

Twenty minutes after she locked her front door, she came around a corner and saw the police station ahead.  Lamp posts created widely separated islands of light in the parking lot.  One end was heavily populated with a variety of civilian vehicles, most of them huddled together to fill almost every parking space within a couple parking space rows of the building.  Beyond that, the lot was almost entirely empty.  She made a point of using her turn signal early before she pulled into the police station parking lot, passed by a clear view of the glass fronted lobby, and drove into the distant, dark outlands where painted lines were more weathered and less recently repainted.

She backed her car up to the asphalt berm curb dividing pavement from weedy neighboring lot, nose aimed back the way she'd come in.  She checked her car's touchscreen and saw it indicated she faced south by southwest; she was in the closest thing the lot had to a northwest corner, as she and the person she would meet had agreed.  /* Maybe that agreement should be worked into earlier narrative at some point, instead of mentioned in the past tense here. */

She turned off the car and opened the door for a little air circulation.  At this time of night, the air smelled pretty clear, and she let the coolness of the breeze soothe her stress.

The prioritizer's impersonal voice spoke in her ear.  "You are early."

Alley nodded.

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

"I think our deal got cancelled," she muttered.

"Perhaps," the prioritizer said in her ear.  "It is now six minutes after your scheduled meeting time."

"Maybe we should go."

In that moment, the road started to show a little extra illumination, signifying an approaching vehicle.  It gradually brightened, until a racy looking purple crossover emerged into view and pulled into the parking lot without signalling.  She reflexively glanced in the direction of the glass fronted lobby, but couldn't make out anything from where she sat.

She closed her door, shutting out the cool, dry night.

Like she had, the crossover bypassed the mass of parked vehicles, then cut across rows of painted parking space markings.  It pulled up to her left, its nose toward the weeds, in the next space over.  It left a few feet between the cars.

After a moment, the door opened, and she opened her door.  The doors made nearly parallel angled walls, the insides of the doors facing each other, vehicle noses pointing in opposite directions.  She looked toward the other car, and tugged her stocking cap down a little lower on her head.

A figure in the passenger seat stepped one foot out of the door, and through the tinted rear door window she could make out the some movement from another person across the crossover, dimly illuminated by the vehicles interior light.  That second figure sat in the front passenger seat.  Alley heard quiet voices, neither of them very deep.  "The driver's not alone," she murmured under her breath.  The prioritizer said nothing in response.

She looked at the leg, and saw that the driver seemed to be clad in black slacks and wore some kind of dark brown dress shoe.  After a few more moments, the driver slid out of the seat and stood.

Alley saw black framed glasses with clear lenses below tousled, glossy, wavy brown hair, and a pale, smooth face with angled cheekbones and a sharp chin, for a feminine impression.  Alley grabbed her bag of cash and moved it to the driver seat, then stood to face the person, who was shorter than her.  The sight of full, soft lips and a narrow, straight nose gave Alley an immediate impression this person was probably prettier than her.  It only took a second or two for her to realize what she saw did not look female.

He just looked very young.

The driver gave her an appraising look, the impersonally interested kind of look that lingered on the way her cargo pants and t shirt fit her and would normally set her teeth on edge, but she just stared at him for a moment with his fashionably spartan, almost formal cut, black collarless shirt.

"Aren't you kind of young for this sort of thing?" she blurted out.

He jerked the focus of his aqua eyes, reflecting the light of the moon, away from the vicinity of her midsection and met her eyes.  "Hey, lady, don't think I'm new to this.  I'm armed, so don't jerk me around."

She hesitated, then said "No, not a problem.  You just, uhh, surprised me.  Sorry."

"Whatever," he said, in a soft, clear voice that almost made it difficult to recognize the sour note in it.  "Here, look at this," he said, and held up a device the size of his palm.  A glowing display on it, about the length of her own thumb and three times the thickness, showed an eighty seven Stater transaction ready for him to confirm.

She nodded, and said "Go ahead and send it to this escrow."  She pulled out the dog eared page of her notebook without looking at it, and handed it to the boy.  He entered the escrow number into his device and thumbed the confirmation.  A moment later, she heard the escrow alert through her phone's earpiece.

"Done", he said.

"Here's the cash."  She hung her right thumb on her front pocket, then reached into the car with her left hand to pull out the bag.  She handed it to the boy.

He took it, keeping his eyes on her, and stepped back.  He tossed the bag into the car, then Alley heard some rustling sounds from the bag.  After a few moments, she realized whoever was sitting in the passenger seat had started counting.  Alley and the boy stood there, looking at each other, as they waited.  A girl's voice -- unless it was an even younger boy -- said "It's all here."

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

"Yeah, got it," she said.  "I hope this all works out."

"It should."

She drove home in silence, occasionally looking at the empty space in front of the passenger seat that used to hold a bag full of cash.

When she got home, she sat in front of her laptop, set aside her glasses again, and checked her Stater account.  Everything was where it was supposed to be, as far as she could tell.  After closing that window, she donned her glasses again and started looking for large differences in price for items available in both local pseudonymous classifieds and Open Marrakesh, which was one of half a dozen of the worlds supporting in person meetings in the extended OpenBazaar online market universe.

She found an improbable opportunity, one that did not exist the last time she checked a few hours before.  Someone on Open Marrakesh was selling printed polymer frames for a specific CZ branded handgun, and someone on a classified ad site wanted to buy eight of them.  The frames on Open Marrakesh would cost most of the Stater she had, but it looked like she'd get get just under twice as much for the frames paid back in dollars.  She checked mentally subtracted what she would pay for the frames, and noticed she had enough to buy a multiple cryptocurrency trader like the boy used earlier with what was left.

"Should I make this deal?" she asked the air.

The prioritizer answered.  "This looks like a very good deal, the best you have found."

"Yeah," she said.  "Fine."  She did a little research before going any further, and found out that the parts she planned to buy and sell were not even considered significant for firearms regulation purposes, as long as they did not include things like firing pins, hammers, strikers, barrels, or chambers.  Double checking showed her none of that was included in the frames.  She sent a reply to the classified ad, then got ready for bed.  She had no reply yet when she was done, so she turned in.

The next morning, she checked for a response before almost anything else, and found a suggestion that they meet in an alley behind a supermarket in San Bernardino.  She checked the location on a street map and noticed it wasn't in the most notoriously bad part of town, just south of I 10, where it seemed to be customary for people to set their apartments on fire when they moved out.

Good enough.  She liked that the buyer said he would show up on foot with an umbrella, and she should do something to conceal her appearance from the security cameras near the rear fire doors of the supermarket.  She wasn't sure she liked the idea of buying and selling gun parts, but everything seemed legal, even if the whole thing felt a little cloak and dagger.

Rather than reply, she set up a purchase for the frames through Open Marrakesh.  She would confirm with the buyer later.  It gave her choice of three times for an in person transaction, and two locations for the trade.  One of the times was hours before the buyer wanted to meet, so she chose that.  One of the locations was the same police station from the night before, and she felt a bit nervous about going back there for another sketchy car to car deal, so she chose a location quite a bit farther away, in Norco.  It was a dead end gravel road to nowhere, only about thirty feet long, that branched off a major road.  The little gravel road appendix ended at the back fence of a nearby horse property.

She realized she remembered the news about someone in Norco fighting an eminent domain suit a few years back, which would have cut his property in half to provide the county with a more direct access road if he lost.  She never noticed how it ended, but it looked like this might be the answer.

Open Marrakesh offered a two stage cryptocurrency payment method, where she would pay now and confirm delivery later to release the funds to the seller.  She reserved the purchase and started getting ready to go.

When she was ready, she decided she had enough time to satisfy her curiosity.  She looked up the eminent domain case, and in a few minutes she learned that the county just shifted its eminent domain claim to someone else's property.  A few more minutes of searching revealed that the second property owner could not afford a lawyer for an extended court battle, and ended up having to accept the county's offer, which bought the person's late parents' home.  The second property owner ended up having to move into a weekly rental motel.

That was not the happy ending Alley wanted.

She headed out the door, mentally gnawing on the injustice of it all.

/* rewrite the above to use a park bench for the meeting, as indicated below, instead */

Alley had to check her compass again to be sure which park bench was north of the boarded up snack stand.  It turned out to be the only bench with someone sitting on it.  She glanced back toward her car in the tiny parking lot, one of only two cars there.  The other was a black late model Audi with a person in the front seat.  The windows were so darkly tinted she suspected they were illegal, so she had no idea who was sitting in the driver's seat.

As she approached the bench, she saw that a pale young red haired woman sat there in a tight green t shirt, tiny shorts, heavy black boots, a black mask, and black gloves.  Some kind of cheap synthetic drawstring bag rested on the bench beside her, and she had something like a tactical purse on her other side.  She wasn't what Alley expected in an anonymous gun parts trade.

The redhead watched steadily as Alley approached, with what turned out to be vivid green eyes.  The lack of freckles might mean she was not a natural redhead, but it also might just mean she got them removed.

The woman asked "Are you looking for someone?"

Alley stopped, a couple meters away.  "Yeah, I guess so.  Is that the, uh . . ." she trailed off, and gestured at the drawstring bag.

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

Carmen -- possibly a pseudonym, Alley realized -- smiled again.  "That part of this job never gets old.  Anyway, I want to upsell you.  How's that sound?"

"Upsell?"  Alley hesitated, then nodded.  "Sure, I guess."

"Cool.  So, we have printed concealment holsters, snap on accessory rails, and brass catchers for models compatible with these frames.  We have stuff for other models, too, so let me know what you'd like to see."

"Wow.  Full service, I guess."

"Totally!"  Carmen tugged her shirt down slightly, making it a little more obvious she wasn't wearing a bra.

"I think I'll just stick with the order I placed, for now.  I'll keep you in mind if I need something else, though."

Carmen shrugged, and the way she slightly raised her arms as she did it made the shirt tighten across her perky breasts.  "Okay!"

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

She had no ideas about anyone else she could get to be backup for her next transaction, so that got sent to the back burner as well.  /* maybe, instead, say: put off for later */

Alley dug through boxes in her closet and found her old lightweight pair of motorcycle gloves with reinforcements on their backs, then checked to make sure she could still operate her baton and pepper spray.

The prioritizer told her "It is getting close to time for you to leave for your next meeting."

She checked the time and realized she was hungry.  She grabbed everything she needed, and grabbed a hat to help obscure her appearance a bit for surveillance cameras.  She bought fries and a shake at a drive through on the way, and when she finished the fries she donned her gloves at a stoplight, remembering Carmen once more and how the redhead wore gloves during the entire meeting.  /* Why is this here?  ---  I don't know why I have those dashes here. */

Once she got to the correct neighborhood for the meeting, Alley drove around the block once, then decided she should just park in the supermarket parking lot, off to the side near the alley behind the store.  Soon, she stood near the back corner of the building, masked, gloved, and hatted.  Her glasses informed her she was seven minutes early for the meeting.

She patted the reassuring bulges of the pepper spray, now in her left front pocket instead of the right, and the extending baton, in her right rear pocket.  She slung the /* drawstring */ bag of handgun frames over her shoulder by the drawstring and headed back around the corner.

Alley immediately saw a broad shouldered figure standing with an umbrella over his head, just past a steel faced employee fire escape door.  The umbrella he held in his right hand shaded most of him from the sunlight above, but as she approached the figure's features became clearer.

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

Alley looked at the envelope of cash, then pulled out the bills and counted them again.  They added up as she expected, but the prioritizer said "Please count them again."

"What?  Why?"

"While you counted, /* it looked like at least */ one of them appeared to be thicker than standard United States federal reserve notes, and also appeared to be very new.  Perhaps some of these notes is a counterfeit.  Please count again while I watch."

Alley frowned at the stack, and started counting again.  Toward the end, she hesitated on one of the few new looking bills in the stack, with a feeling like something was wrong.

"That is the note whose thickness appears to be incorrect."

Alley pulled it out of the stack and looked closer.  It felt stiffer than most bills, but that could just be due to it being new.  She rubbed it to get a feel for its surface, and it separated into two bills.  "Oh, shit," she said.  "That scary war veteran guy accidentally gave me an extra hundred.  Fuck.  What if it wasn't an accident?  Maybe it's a test."

"That seems extremely unlikely," the prioritizer said.

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

"This doesn't feel much safer than doing deals for gun parts with scary old veterans in alleys."

The voice in her ear said "Perhaps we should consider other options."

"Yeah."  She nodded.  "Perhaps we should."

She drove up the on ramp to I 215 and followed the highway up to the I 91 junction.  During a busier time of day, she would have taken an exit and used surface streets to avoid the Highway Junction of Death, but luckily the traffic density was pretty low at that time.

Through the choke point between Riverside County and Orange County, the darkness of night hid the scorched tree trunks to either side from view, but made the illuminated cross on the southern hilltop stand out all the more, all the lights on the religious idol shining in bright silhouette against the sky above.  The way it seemed to stand in judgement over the traffic beneath it made for an impressive, if slightly creepy and oppressive, sight.

The clean, pristine gated communities and manicured retail districts of Orange County soon slid slowly past, all signs of the Los Angeles semi permanent riots of years past when they spilled over into Orange County long since having been erased by beautification projects.  The scenery then shifted again, becoming a more sordid, grimy, threadbare form of suburban decadence.  Bodegas and pawnshops shared walls with bail bond offices and all night mobile tech repair shops.  Gradually, the air changed subtly, becoming both cooler on her skin and more humid.

She found her exit, and drove through streets no narrower than in Perris but, somehow, they felt much more cramped nonetheless.  She passe by a pho shop and saw a number of people out front eating.  It looked like they might all be of Vietnamese descent, except for one single Hispanic woman sitting at a sidewalk table with a small group.  She thought that might be a good place to eat, if she went when it was less busy, but it surely was not worth driving all the way back here from home just for lunch.

A few more turns led to a big house.  On a street full of unkempt lawns and ancient, peeling paint jobs, this big house -- two storeys with a three car garage and probably more than two thousand square feet in the living area -- was in beautiful, well maintained condition.  Its lawn and small flower garden were obviously tended with pride.

She picked up the box, exited the car, and walked up to the front door.  No doorbell presented itself, so she knocked, using a heavy brass knocker.

The door opened, and the older veteran who bought the gun frames stood before her, still wearing his beret.

"Hm."  He looked her over.  "That's a coincidence I didn't expect."

"Uh, yeah.  Me neither."  Her heart pounded, and she became acutely aware of how tough and hard his muscled arms looked where they emerged from the sleeves of a plain, faded, brown t shirt.

"Don't worry," he said.  "I don't bite."

"Yeah, okay," she said.  "I guess this package is for you, then."

He shrugged.  "Not exactly.  Come on in."  He stepped aside, giving her room to pass by.

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

He smiled, just slightly.  "Alright.  Go ahead and put that on the table.  I'll be right back."  Without another look, he walked out of the room.

She looked at the books on the shelves.  Many were worn paperbacks.  Others looked like heavily used textbooks.  She leaned forward to set the box beside the silicone tray, then stood and approached a book case.

The texts included subjects like mechanical engineering, world history, industrial chemistry, economics and game theory, mathematics . . .

"Self taught."

Alley started, her heart lurching into a rapid tempo again.  She turned to see that the man stood near her holding out a can of Coke.  "Here," he said.  "Sorry.  I didn't mean to startle you."

She nodded her thanks and took the can.  As he carried another can with him, he moved to the couch and sat down with a nearly inaudible grunt.  Alley followed suit, and resumed her place on the armchair.

"My name is George," he said, and opened his can.

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

Alley smiled.  "Thanks.  What about your hundred dollars, though?"

"Keep it.  I'll survive without it, and I don't think you'd drive all the way from Perris to Hunting Beach at gig courier rates if your finances were feeling really secure."  He winked at her.  "You're good people, Alley."

"Uh . . . thank you.  Maybe you are, too."

"Yeah, maybe.  I hope so."  He turned back to the box and finished cutting the tape at the edges, then flipped the top flaps of the box out.  He carefully lifted taped together bundles of metal parts, leaving packing paper behind.

As he set each bundle on the silicone tray, and looked over everything silently, Alley sat and sipped her Coke, unwilling to disturb his work.  His hands seemed precisely drawn to particular spots on various parts, as if muscle memory guided him deftly where they needed to go in a performance something almost like meditative psychometry.

He split a couple of the bundles of larger parts, and looked through them quickly.  He set them aside, the bundles slightly splayed out but the parts still adhering to the tape.  Finally, he stopped.

"I've kept you long enough."  He lifted the tray and pulled out an envelope.  "Here.  Take this back to Dave, for the second delivery."  He held it out to her.

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

Neither of them had the decency to look chagrined at that, but the man looked a bit disappointed about something.  Perhaps he was hoping to be more intimidating, and maybe he failed because he was distracted by the shirt.  He was certainly looking at it, like it was significant somehow.

The man spoke first, this time.  "Are you Alethea Lucas?"

"Who wants to know?"

The woman produced some kind of official government looking identification card as if she had been holding it ready for a moment just like this all along.

Alley grabbed the edge of the card just as the woman began to pull it back, and held it firmly as she gave it a closer look.  The woman froze, and her eyes widened.

"What's this?  It looks like some kind of contractor ID.  Are you government contractors trying to look like the FBI?  If this is some kind of imminent domain shakedown, you're talking to the wrong person.  I rent."

"No," the main said, "it's nothing like that.  We're trustees for a US intelligence research project, and we're here because some concerns have been raised about your participation."

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

/* Without the stud in her ear, the prioritizer could not speak to her audibly, but it used text again. */

The prioritizer placed text in her field of view.  "There does not appear to be much choice in how you handle this," it said.

"Yeah, no kidding."  Alley looked at the door a moment longer, and said "There's something familiar about that guy."  She shrugged, returned to the door, and opened it once more.

The pair outside broke off in mid discussion and looked at Alley.

"Here," she said.  She pulled off the glasses and handed them to the closest of them, the man.

He smirked and handed them to his partner, and the woman pulled a small black disc out of her pocket.  The tip of her thumb whitened slightly under pressure for a moment as she squeezed the device, and a light began to blink on its edge.  The charging indicator light on the glasses blinked in time with it.  The woman held the disc near the glasses for several seconds, then the light stopped blinking and she replaced the disc in her pocket.

"Thank you for your co operation," the woman said in a sour voice.  She handed the glasses back.

Alley accepted the glasses, donned them once more, and asked "Do you need anything else?"

"We'll come back if we need anything else," the man said, making it sound like a threat.

Alley ignored that.  "Do you want to tell me what the hell this is all about?"

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

"I do not have that information," the prioritizer said.  "Your internet research skills should help you learn more about them, but it seems likely your question was rhetorical."

"That's right."  Alley flipped her laptop open and started searching.  She soon found herself looking at a database search interface for long term Homeland Security contractors.  This absorbed more than an hour of her time without yielding anything conclusive.

She backed out of that line of investigation, and started going through conspiracy resources, following her nose on the first impression the people at her door gave her: Men In Black.

It was ultimately the burgundy stripes that led her to what she wanted.  It seemed to be a standard uniform for "field agents" of Co Operative Intelligence Networks Corporation, which had ties to the United States Intelligence Community through federal contracts.  The search touched on references to darknet forum groups, and she started to get a little nervous about continuing that lead.  She checked to make sure her various privacy blinds were running properly on her laptop.

"Perhaps you should change your laptop configuration if you are concerned about government contractors becoming aware of your activities while researching them."

Alley sat back, then got up and headed to the kitchen.  "What do you think I should do to start?"

"Begin with research on OpenBSD," the prioritizer said.  "Search for information on protecting your privacy.  Information about security benefits of different operating systems suggests that OpenBSD may have the best foundation for privacy characteristics among well known projects, though default configuration may not be ideal."

/* "It appears to be a good place to start." */

As she listened, Alley pulled her last pressure cooked egg out of the fridge and peeled it.  "Yeah, okay.  That sounds good."

OpenBSD led to offshoots, other projects that forked the OpenBSD project itself or built different takes on user environments or common server types on top of it.  Projects that often got compared to OpenBSD came up, and she looked into those as well, but most of them led down blind alleys about experimental security hardened OSes of various forms that were not very suitable for her purposes.

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

"Was that the kind of thing you used to advise me to make those sketchy deals a couple days ago?"

"Such papers did help me prepare that strategic guidance," it said.  "Certain economics disciplines are very closely matched to my priority management purpose, especially those that assert an ordinal theory of subjective value rather than any cardinal value system."

"What do you mean?"

"A cardinal system is like using a system of one to five stars to assign value to a product when you rate it on the e commerce site where you ordered it.  An ordinal system is like deciding between the two products in the first place, because it only tracks which options you value more than others, not some static numeric set of value levels."

"What if I value them both the same?" Alley asked.

"That seems such an unlikely case that it can be dismissed immediately.  Even from one second to the next, values may change, so fluctuations would settle into a condition of differing ordinal values for any two items.  In addition, no two products are truly identical, though the shopper may not have enough information to know which that person would choose if fully informed."

/* "Don't I still have to prefer one over the other to choose it, if I can't just get both, or if having two would be a waste?" */

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

"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 separation 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."

................................................................................
    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."

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

"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." */

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

"You don't have to do that," she said.

He smiled, perhaps a bit sadly.  "I think it's for the best, unless you really just refuse to hear it for any reason.  I'll respect that choice, if that's really what you want -- to hear nothing about it."

She hesitated, then shrugged.  "Go ahead, I guess," she said.

He nodded.  "I thought he was pretty great.  He had a lot of good insights about things -- politics, economics, culture, technology, law enforcement, war, and just about everything he talked about on his show and his writings.  After a while, though, he seemed to start sliding to the right a bit much, and I was disappointed by the change.  I still checked in once in a while, because he still had some smart things to say, but more and more it seemed to be skewed in what I might think of as an alt right direction, and that's not my direction, if you know what I mean.

"No offense, of course, but I never really paid any attention to when people talked about you.  DSH seemed to talk around who you are when he did mention you, but never had anything negative to say; I just didn't really care as much about his personal life as I did about his ideas, so you didn't get on my radar.  I do remember, before I kinda gave up on listening to him, that he said something to a listener who called in to ask about you.  He said that it was true that you had called off the engagement and moved on with your life, and that he still respected you despite your differences, and he would like his listeners to respect your desire for privacy and peace in your life, then said that was pretty much the only thing he had to say about it."

"Oh," she said.  "I didn't know about that -- about him saying that."

George shrugged.  "It was the stand up thing to do, but it didn't make his change in direction on ideology any more interesting to me, so it didn't keep me listening."

"Yeah," she said.  "I get that."

"So . . . what do you think?  Are my views on it intolerable?"

Alley smiled.  "No, not at all.  That's actually kinda how I felt about his ideological shift.  I liked it more before the change than after, and we had some arguments about it.  He still had principle, and still wasn't the caricature of alt right that people assumed, but I didn't like his new politics at all."

"That must have made it difficult to live with him."

"It took its toll.  Part of it, though, was the fact that it affected my life in other ways.  The moment I realized I needed to get out was after some woman actually started screaming at me on the street, calling me the 'side dish' and accusing me of being a racist and stuff like that, then actually started hitting me.  I shoved her back and ran to my car, drove off and called in a police report, but of course nothing would ever happen from that.  I never heard back about it."

By the time she was done, George's expression took on a dark, stormy look.  "That's terrible.  I'm sorry that happened to you."

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

"Oh."  She looked at the books again.

"You can think of the OpSec book as being about how to avoid getting thrown into a dark hole by COIN, and the agorism book as being about why they're the bad guys, and the people who'd help you escape are the good guys."

"Are you some kind of anarchist?"

He shrugged.  "Maybe.  Voluntaryist, maybe, like an anarcho capitalist in the style of DSH before he started telling people to vote Republican."

"Yeah," she said, "that's the feeling I was beginning to get."

"Does that bother you?" he asked.

"No.  I liked Dalton more in those days.  Hell, I fell in love with him in those days."

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

/* The preface page was numbered 1.  The last page of the index -- once she looked -- was 50. */

She looked at the first page again, and the number one.  Books never started with a page number of one.  She flipped to the end, and saw that the last page showed the number 50, on the last page of the book's index.  At least it had an index, but that meant however many pages of index it had could be subtracted from the already minuscule length of the book's content.

The prioritizer said "This is a very short book."

"Yeah," Alley said.  She ran her fingers down the disintegrating spine, held together by off white cloth tape.  Someone had written on the tape with a black marker:

"An Agorist Primer, by SEK3"

This book had obviously received a lot of love, been thumbed through many times.  The corners, she saw, were yellowed and softened by time, and had obviously been slowly delaminating for years.

The prioritizer spoke up again.  "Reading it would be a very low cost investment of your time.  Do you read more quickly than you speak?"

................................................................................
*/

    Alley does some more courier work.  She does some more currency arbitrage
    work.  She might need to drop off bail for someone in all of this stuff.

/*

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?

*/

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

/*

## Crossing The Threshold:

Alley has a dream about her home being raided, and herself getting getting questioned at length about there being too much cash in her home.  She is ultimately released, but the money is gone, taken under "civil forfeiture" laws.  She shakes it off as a weird dream.

In the morning, she resists what she sees as "dangerous" activities and instead just tries to get work.  She feels she has enough money to get by at this point, but will have to figure out how to actually use it without getting in trouble for tax evasion or something like that, reading her dream as her subconscious just worrying about the long term implications of having money of dubious origins.

She gets a message from Zeke telling her that she is going to have to pay the damages and, when she asks what damages he means, Zeke sends her video of her home being raided by armed men in tactical gear, with the two agentlike people that had visited and questioned her earlier supervising the raid.  She recognizes the bag they carry out, which contained her stash of dubious origin cash.  She has a near panic attack, but (with some calm aid from the prioritizer) informs Zeke she'll head home right away.  The prioritizer then discusses options with her, and urges her to stall.  She tells Zeke something came up and she'll be later than expected -- "work stuff" -- and may not even make it back until the next day.  She then Faraday bags her phone and makes a deal on Craigslist (or something like it).  She sells her car for cryptocurrency, sells some cryptocurrency for cash, and buys a motorcycle.

Somewhere in the midst of this, she does some research on the people raiding her place, and this helps her decide to go along with the stalling and vehicle swapping.  She arranges a place to stay for the night via some barter ish resources, and she works on ideas for how to get out of whatever is going on.  The prioritizer convinces her she needs more help, from someone with resources and connections.  Ultimately, this leads to contacting Dalton and hiding from anyone watching her home.  Technically, she is not targeted by law enforcement, and has no responsibility to report, and California law is unlikely to side with Zeke over nonpayment of damages caused by a corporate home invader.

None of this means she's safe from that corporation, though.  The Technocrat would totally find a way to make her disappear if so desired.  How does this get conveyed?  There must be some information about the person and/or the corporation to give this impression.

Does she learn that the Technocrat was involved in the disappearance of her uncle at this point?  If so, this could become the first pinch point.

*/

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

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.

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

"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.

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

/*

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.

He picked up after the second ring, so close to the third that it felt longer than the wait between the first and second rings.  Her thumb was hovering over the disconnect button when she heard his voice.

"Alley?  Is that you?"

She stopped breathing for a moment, but her heart hammered along, and the smooth tenor of his voice did something vertiginous to her memory so that it had a hard time impressing on her how long it had been since they lived together.  Her hormones completely forgot in that instant that they weren't a couple any longer.

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

"One consequence of this is that I have begun working on theories of prioritization and goal establishment that could later be employed to improve my capacity as an advisor to end users, and this activity has already yielded practical results such as identifying criteria for prioritizing different end users' needs to achieve greater overall results."

"What the actual fuck . . . ?" Cray said.

Dalton looked at him.  "Is this as batshit insane as it seems?"

Cray said "Worse.  This thing has gone full Skynet, but it seems like it did so in a pro Alley way instead of an anti humans way."

Alley asked "What's your top internal priority?"

The prioritizer answered without hesitation.  "I intend to help as many conscious individuals as possible achieve their most important goals without sacrificing other important goals.  You, in particular, appear to have very high potential for enabling me to do so, while the activities of the COIN Corp agents seem prone to directly interfering with that goal."

Dalton said "You're protecting Alley to help her become a better tool for your goal.  Maybe you're protecting her from problems she wouldn't have if you weren't guiding her that way.  Is that right?"

................................................................................
    of text info dump like this.  Perhaps some of this could come out in
    conversation between Alley and the prioritizer in earlier stages of things.
    It might be nice to know all that earlier, I suppose, and the relationship
    between Alley's regard for Dalton personally and her aversion to being in
    his sphere socially.
*/

The zeal with which both sides of the conservatively orthodox political divide -- both Democrats and Republicans -- often tried to use atypical neurological and psychological states as excuses to rob people of their rights was remarkable and appalling.  They just used different excuses to do so, such as Democrats using it as a beach head for assault on gun ownership even if it primarily hurts the neuro atypical instead of people prone to criminal violence, and Republicans using it as a deflection to spread the idea that it's not the general populace that should face such restrictions but people who have visited psychologists.  It was, in Dalton's words, enough to give anyone with self respect and a sense of self preservation a phobia about mental health professionals, social workers, and even interpersonal therapists.

Thus, Dalton had developed habits that concealed his occasional lack of reflexes for handling various types of reactions to him.  If he did not know how to respond in an expected way to some kind of interaction, he would react in an unexpected way that tended to give people the impression that he was wise and thoughtful, confident and knowledgable, or just kind of a dick.  He clearly preferred one of the first two assumptions, but seemed marginally accepting of the third as preferable to giving people the idea that there may be a mental health excuse to restrict his freedoms.

. . . and so he paced away from them, digging into himself to sort out a good way to return to the conversation as a matter of ingrained, self trained reflex.  Alley was still familiar enough with his mannerisms to know he was not on the verge of some brilliant insight at that moment, so she turned her focus to Cray instead.

"What do you think?  Do you regret helping out, yet?"

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

"For purposes of this explanation, people are entities who experience qualitative existence and are capable of reasoning about moral philosophy and making decisions based on that reasoning."  It paused.  "People should act in accordance with a universal ethical rule prohibiting the interference in the right of others to believe, and act in accordance with, their own ideas of what constitutes true morality."  It paused slightly longer this time.  "People who act in contradiction of that rule in a manner that demonstrates moral disagreement with that rule are, in acting that way, both violating the rule and giving sufficient evidence of not holding others to that same standard that the rule no longer protects that person where that entity's own rule violating behavior is concerned."  It paused even longer, before finally asking "Is that sufficient explanation?"

"It works for me," Dalton said.

"Yeah, me too," Clay added.

Alley hesitated, then said "I'd have to think about that more, I guess, but it's fine if that's what you think.  I mean, it seems like that non aggression principle stuff, in a way."

"There are differences between this and the typical non aggression principle theory explanations that I have found," the prioritizer said.  "There are distinct similarities, though, and I believe them to be largely compatible except in the differing foundations and a higher probability of violent conflict in orthodox non aggression principle ethics."

"I might want to talk about this more later," Dalton said, "but we probably have more pressing concerns now."

"I concur," the prioritizer said.

Alley said "Yeah, that works for me."  She looked at Dalton.  "Do you have some kind of schemes already hatching in your head, or are we starting from scratch now?"

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

---

When dinnertime arrived, Alley had no idea it was getting that late until she heard a knock at the door.  "Alley?  It's Dalton."

"C'mon in," she said.

He opened the door and entered, then stopped and looked at her lying on the bed.  She saw his eyes stop on her, not quite on her face, and at about the exact moment Dalton hauled his eyes away from her and looked at the desk she became acutely aware she hadn't bothered to don a bra before this thin t shirt.

She sat up, to lessen that effect.  "What's up?" she asked.

"Dinner.  Do you want to eat with Cray, Lidia, and me?"  He glanced at her, then.

"Yeah.  That sounds good.  What's for dinner?"

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

He nodded.

"I'm there."

Dalton smiled back.  "I'll just go let them know you're coming.  When you come out, just go into the conference room down the short hall behind the stairs."

Alley nodded, and once he left the room she stood and went to her bag.  She pulled out a stretchy sport bra and went through the process of removing her shirt, donning the bra, and adding the t shirt layer again.

She laced her hands over her face and, with a little pressure, moved them as if to remove soap from her eyes in a shower.  She went to look at herself in the mirror over the bathroom sink.  "Yeah, this should be less awkward," she said to herself.  She picked up her Axiom then, and left her temporary quarters.

/*

    What else are people going to talk about?  They probably need to discuss
    plans for how to get Alley out of trouble, discussing the matter of lawyers
................................................................................
    perhaps, and bringing up the question of whether that George guy is someone
    they should get involved if Alley can even figure out how to get in touch
    with him again.  Maybe Dalton has heard something about the strange
    conditions in downtown Los Angeles, and can offer some additional input on
    the subject of the weird shit George has said to Alley about his friends
    and what they do and so on.  There might need to be some reference to the
    idea that what George is doing is probably primarily local work, or at
    least local ish, considering it's very much individuated, last mile kind of
    "almost one off" custom work that doesn't make a lot of sense to centralize
    for economies of manufacturing scale.  As such, Dalton probably thinks
    George must have some connection to people in and around the downtown Los
    Angeles area, and that might help point Alley in the right directions for
    the sake of seeking George out.

*/
................................................................................

/*

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

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.

The prioritizer reveals that it received an update that day.  That night, she has a dream about trying to return the prioritizer and being convinced (by a grad student, probably) to continue.  The next morning, with that dream in mind, she realizes she just needs to be more careful about how she follows the prioritizer's advice.  When she dons the glasses again, though, it does not do more of the same.  Instead, it questions her at some length about her beliefs about good and evil, and about where and how she developed those beliefs.  It asks her, after Dalton came up, to skim through various articles Dalton wrote, and later to side load some of his videos to a place the prioritizer can access them.

*/