n2020  Check-in [ff532e46c0]

He looked toward the window, or perhaps at something that wasn't there except inside his own mind.  "It's the right thing to do," he said.

The silence stretched as she looked at his profile, the determined set of his jaw, the hardness of his eyes, and the miles of hardening experience that seemed to lie behind his wrinkles and grey hairs.  Text scrolled across her field of view, the prioritizer saying "I advise you to take his offer.  I believe he has connections that can help you."

"I'm sorry to impose on you like this, even if I had no idea it was going to come to this."  She met his eyes when he looked at her.  "I'll take your help, though."

He nodded.  "I'll tell you that part of what I do, and part of the reason I needed those frames, is because I supply people who make it their job to do things like help people in your situation right now."

"You're kidding."

He shook his head.  "No, I'm not kidding."































































































/*

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

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

He looked toward the window, or perhaps at something that wasn't there except inside his own mind.  "It's the right thing to do," he said.

The silence stretched as she looked at his profile, the determined set of his jaw, the hardness of his eyes, and the miles of hardening experience that seemed to lie behind his wrinkles and grey hairs.  Text scrolled across her field of view, the prioritizer saying "I advise you to take his offer.  I believe he has connections that can help you."

"I'm sorry to impose on you like this, even if I had no idea it was going to come to this."  She met his eyes when he looked at her.  "I'll take your help, though."

He nodded.  "I'll tell you that part of what I do, and part of the reason I needed those frames, is because I supply people who make it their job to do things like help people in situations like yours with COIN Corp right now."

"You're kidding."

He shook his head.  "No, I'm not kidding."

She looked down at her hands as she mentally digested that for a while, and George quietly watched until she looked up at him again.  "How is that a job?  That doesn't even make sense."

He smiled.  "That's not their whole job, but it's something they do.  They do things that lie outside the bounds of strict legality, I guess, and they're dangerous jobs.  If they screw up, people might get hurt, so they have to be ready for that.

"They're not a charity.  They make money doing what they do, and not everything they do is heroic, but the people I'm talking about have standards for what they're willing to do.  They'll help bad people who're hurting each other, but not bad people who're hurting good people, for instance.  Sometimes, a couple of them do something just because they think it's the right thing to do, but usually they need money, especially if they think it'll get really dangerous.

"I've seen a couple of these people help a woman escape an abusive husband who happened to be a senior assistant district attorney, and when she tried to pay them they told her to keep it, but that's a pretty rare case, and some of the people I'm talking about -- because they work together a lot -- just won't do jobs where their clients can't pay no matter how much someone thinks it's a good thing to do."

Alley frowned.  "I guess you probably aren't technically doing something illegal by selling parts to someone," she said.

"That's right," he said, "but everyone's doing something illegal sometimes, and it's not like someone couldn't use the law to destroy me for doing this kind of thing."

"Why are you telling me all this?  Doesn't that put you in danger?"

He shrugged.  "It does, but I'm ready to disappear if I have to.  I did it once before.  Anyway, I think you're going to need the kind of people I'm talking about soon.  COIN Corp has been a serious problem for a lot of people since it was officially founded four years ago.  It just appeared out of nowhere, and some of us think it was a retirement plan for someone who worked in the NSA.  In that short a time, it developed a strong reputation in some circles for using the excuse of fighting domestic terrorism to get big contracts from the federal agencies of the US Intelligence Community and pin a bunch of manufactured speculative 'evidence' on innocent people to line the founder's pockets.

"If COIN has its sights on you, things aren't going to go well.  They say that if you can't beat 'em you should join 'em, and this is one of those things where almost nobody has any chance of beating them, but there's a third option: get help, and get away.  I'd rather see you take that option than the other two -- losing, or joining.

"There's always the other possibility, that they won't try to frame you up as connected to terrorists, but that's just a matter of sitting around, waiting, and maybe ending up disappearing, because you never tried to do something to protect yourself."

"Shit," she said.  "What about getting ready to run, but waiting to see how things go?  I mean, I shouldn't run if nothing happens.  Right?"

"It's a risk.  That's all there is to it.  They're not going to give you any warning at all, if they can help it.  The fact they came to talk to you at all might be the only warning you get.  Maybe you can pull it off, though.

"My first warning that they might come for me would probably be you disappearing, though.  If that happens, I'm not going to wait around to see if they're on my tail.  I'll make myself disappear, instead of waiting around to see if they'll make me disappear before I get around to it."

"Okay.  Yeah.  That's a lot to think about.  I'm going to have to think about it."

He nodded.  "You should think pretty hard about it," he said.  "Stay alert, try to avoid doing anything that might catch their attention, and stay out of trouble.  Try to keep them happy without giving them anything to use against you.

"Mostly, though, think hard and think fast about how you want to handle it, because you don't know how much time you have to make that decision, and as decisions go this one is huge.  It might be the biggest of your life."

"No pressure," she said, with a wry smile.

"You got it."  He looked at his book cases, then stood and walked to them.  He pulled a couple of books off his shelves, then went to the chair where Alley sat and held them out to her.  "Here.  Give these a read, if you have time."

She accepted them, and looked at them.  One was titled *An Agorist Primer*.  The other was *Underground OpSec*.  "What are these?"

When he saw she was not handing them back, he went back to his couch and sat down.  "Agorism is kind of a combination of ideal and strategy.  The ideal is living outside of the control of others, and the strategy is using that to bring other people into doing the same thing, to change the world for the better a little at a time.  The guy who wrote the agorism book basically thought of this as a way to starve the government of its source of power and eventually bring it down, basically turning the black market into a political revolution, but I don't think it's very realistic to expect that to work the way he hoped.  I think it has to be more about just building communities that work outside of the state, and choosing to make your life about that part of society as much as possible.

"OpSec is how to keep yourself off the radar of people who are looking for you, whether they know about you personally or just want someone who fits a profile, hiding what you do, and escaping their ability to see what you're doing so you can keep doing it.  That book is about OpSec for people who live below the legal line, and some of it is about how to get across that line if you were trying to live above it, but have to run.  The underground it's talking about is a criminal class who don't prey on other people any more than people who are legal -- just people who choose to live outside the law, or are forced to do so, for reasons other than theft and murder, such as someone who wants to make a living without paying taxes to pay for foreign wars, or fighting against a tyrannical government, or just being bisexual in some parts of the Middle East."

"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."

"You don't consider yourself a voluntaryist, or anarchist, or something like that, though.  Do you?"

"No, I guess not."

"What do you consider yourself?"

She surprised herself a little with a dry chuckle.  "I don't know.  I guess I'm rabidly apolitical."

"You might have more in common with a voluntaryist than you think, then," he said.

"I said apolitical, not antipolitical, though I guess the line can be pretty thin."

"Okay," George said.  "I get it.  Will you read the books?"

"Yeah," she said, "I'll give it a shot.  I'll get them back to you when I'm done."

"No, just keep them," he said.  "I'll get more of them.  Just pass them on to someone who needs them at some point, if you don't want to keep them."

"Sure," she said, uncertainly.

"Have you had dinner?"

"No," she said.  "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking I'm hungry, and you're welcome to join me.  I was going to cook up some pasta."

She nodded.  "That sounds good."

"It'll give us a few more minutes to hang out without talking about anything so serious before you go home and think the hard thoughts about what you're going to do."  He got up and started toward the kitchen.

"Thanks."

/*

George really needs to be less ignorant of the possible dangers of Alley's AR glasses.  He knows this technology exists.  He's not just going to blithely go on talking about a bunch of insane stuff without noticing there's some danger of it getting out because of the technology people carry around with them.

*/

/*

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

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