n2020  Check-in [a23898bbdb]

Alley's uncle, deceased

Carmen

Cliff



Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, Alley's ex fiancé

Dave, a machinist tweaker, George's friend

George

George's friend

Thea, Alley's no longer future daughter

unknown friend (not yet written)

Zeke

## PROLOGUE:

................................................................................
life again some day, but does not mention that it will only be in his memories.
Perhaps she says something like "Don't worry, Dad.  You'll get to have these
memories of me again, but in a better world this time.  I love you."

## SCENES:

Almost everyone wears masks, or at least many people do.



Alley starts the story outside the building where a company's hiring manager
and developers for a job in a software quality assurance role presumably wait
for her (and yes, it's not just a presumption: they do) so she can interview
with them.  Passers by judge her as they pass on the sidewalk, where she rests
against obsolete technology that is in some respects newer than what we have in
the real world.  She is wearing clothes she doesn't normally wear, because she
................................................................................
political and life perspectives and around his sometimes inflammatory means of
expressing them to the public.  In this bait and switch "interview", the
interviewers refer to her as the "Side Dish", a pejorative and (or) sexually
demeaning term that came about because of Dalton's main podcast talk show name
of "The Main DSH", pronounced "The Main Dish", where DSH is his first and
hyphenated last name initialism.  She is, of course, not flattered or pleased
with this state of affairs.



On her way home, Alley talks to her mother on the phone, via a small stud stuck
inside her ear for audio.  She drives a junky old hybrid, where almost
everything else on the road is pure electric, because she cannot afford to
upgrade and, more to the point, cannot afford the maintenance costs and shorter
replacement cycle for the all-electric cars on the road.  From the telephone
conversation, we learn that Alley's mother lives in Oklahoma with her wife and
Alley's father lives in Massachusetts.  Alley has precisely zero interest in
living with either of them, in either place, preferring southern California
where she is now, even if that itself is damned far from optimal.

Perhaps Alley should have some friends in the area drawn from the author's own
experience, to some extent.  That might be a good idea.



In any case, when she gets back home, Alley encounters Zeke, her landlord.
He's always in his garage working on one car restoration project or another,
making active income as a vehicle flipper to supplement his mostly passive
income as the owner of a four unit multiplex building where he occupies the
only unit with a garage and rents out the other three units (one of them to
Alley, of course).  All this is in Perris, a dry dustbowl of a shitty town in
................................................................................
Riverside or San Bernardino, I suppose.

Zeke brings up the fact Alley needs to pay rent very soon, and she says that,
yeah, she's totally going to do that, thanks.  He points out that maybe she
should've stayed with her "man", meaning Dalton, who always seemed to have
extra money to throw around, and Alley of course does not really wish to engage
that so she heads inside.



Alley finds that there was an update to the ANTAS Jobs system and resolves to
double check her settings in case they've been changed, even setting an alarm
for herself, then goes about the dismal job of looking around for some way to
improve her situation with regard to long term income.  Perhaps she also
reviews the place where she just got "interviewed" for a job they were never
going to give her on some site where such reviews happen, referring to them as
nasty people who heckle applicants, where she wouldn't work even if they
offered her a job because of the completely horrific people with whom she'd
have to work.  That might be a nice addition to the story.



She ends up taking a nap, and accidentally sleeping through the alarm she set
for herself to check her ANTAS Jobs settings.  As a result when she wakes up
the next morning, it's to the roar of a heavy package delivery drone dropping
off a box at her front door.  She's so panicked, as she realizes she forgot to
check her settings on ANTAS, that she goes straight to her laptop instead of
the front door to check on what may have happened.  As she feared, she finds
................................................................................
things to her and give her an always on audio interface to order shit all the
fucking time, and fast tracked the order for her, confirming it according to
its own market optimization and consumer manipulation algorithms so that it
deducted money from her registered credit line -- which she had to register
with ANTAS to get on ANTAS Jobs -- and sent her something that cost about
fifteen hundred bucks, thus reducing her dwindling checking account balance to
a point below the total needed to pay her rent within the next couple days.



She has been ignoring recommendations from ANTAS Jobs to sign up for an
academic study at University of California, Irvine.  Now, she realizes this, if
it ends up being something for which she qualifies, should result in what
amounts to some kind of guaranteed steady income while she searches for a more
permanent solution to her income source problem.  She just has to make sure
it's something she wants to do.  It looks like it's some kind of new software
................................................................................
she's willing to do, but also convinces her she might be doing some good for
the world by participating in this study, as it seems to be oriented toward
ensuring she (and other users in the future) can get real help toward personal
goals rather than the bullshit socioeconomic manipulation of people's
superficial wants toward the psychopathic ends of corporate entities by their
market optimization AIs.  To those who have read the prologue, this might seem
a little familiar, and that is to some extent by design.



We learn something, in her driving, about how the world looks now.  There's the
chokepoint between the depressing expanses of the Inland Empire to the east
(where she lives) and the HOA gated community balkanized states of the
bourgeois suburban Orange County area.  In that chokepoint, there are signs of
wildfires having gotten uncomfortably close to the shitty horrors of I-91
traffic that ruins the entire experience of driving between Orange and
Riverside counties, as well as the illuminated cross on the hill that somehow
seems to have "miraculously" survived the fires that left blackened, split
trunks to either side of the highway.  Perhaps there was some kind of tree
renewal project that I should mention in this point as a past event that
created a density of tree growth there to carry the flames across the hills and
across the highway in the not too distant past.



At home, Alley starts configuring the prioritizer and getting used to how it
works.  She has to answer a bunch of questions from the thing to get it started
on forming some kind of strategic approach to prioritizing her goals to ensure
as much goal satisfaction as reasonably possible.  First and foremost, perhaps,
toward that end, is the need to get a list of important goals for her that it
can prioritize and pursue strategically through her actions according to its
................................................................................
other entities that are merely indirectly optimizer AI driven.

As new strategies present themselves and Alley chooses how to make use of the
advice she receives, she knows she has to take the optimizer's advice according
to her goals to ensure she does not have to pay back (for noncompliance with
academic study requirements) her payments for study participation.  As such,
she ends up letting the prioritizer push her into some uncomfortable

situations, but then she starts to balk and push back, feeling like she's being
led too far astray, and this results in a realignment of the prioritizer's
sense of her goals, which thankfully (from her point of view) means she will
not be pushed into these scary, back alley, legally questionable (if
technically entirely legal in the general sense) deals.

Alley's uncle, deceased

Carmen

Cliff

Cole Brewer, former friend of Alley's uncle, Man In Black

Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, Alley's ex fiancé

Dave, a machinist tweaker, George's friend

George

George's friend

Thea, Alley's no longer gonna exist future daughter

unknown friend (not yet written)

Zeke

## PROLOGUE:

................................................................................
life again some day, but does not mention that it will only be in his memories.
Perhaps she says something like "Don't worry, Dad.  You'll get to have these
memories of me again, but in a better world this time.  I love you."

## SCENES:

Almost everyone wears masks, or at least many people do.

### Alley has a job interview that does not go well.

Alley starts the story outside the building where a company's hiring manager
and developers for a job in a software quality assurance role presumably wait
for her (and yes, it's not just a presumption: they do) so she can interview
with them.  Passers by judge her as they pass on the sidewalk, where she rests
against obsolete technology that is in some respects newer than what we have in
the real world.  She is wearing clothes she doesn't normally wear, because she
................................................................................
political and life perspectives and around his sometimes inflammatory means of
expressing them to the public.  In this bait and switch "interview", the
interviewers refer to her as the "Side Dish", a pejorative and (or) sexually
demeaning term that came about because of Dalton's main podcast talk show name
of "The Main DSH", pronounced "The Main Dish", where DSH is his first and
hyphenated last name initialism.  She is, of course, not flattered or pleased
with this state of affairs.

### Alley talks to her mother while driving home, and we learn about her.

On her way home, Alley talks to her mother on the phone, via a small stud stuck
inside her ear for audio.  She drives a junky old hybrid, where almost
everything else on the road is pure electric, because she cannot afford to
upgrade and, more to the point, cannot afford the maintenance costs and shorter
replacement cycle for the all-electric cars on the road.  From the telephone
conversation, we learn that Alley's mother lives in Oklahoma with her wife and
Alley's father lives in Massachusetts.  Alley has precisely zero interest in
living with either of them, in either place, preferring southern California
where she is now, even if that itself is damned far from optimal.

Perhaps Alley should have some friends in the area drawn from the author's own
experience, to some extent.  That might be a good idea.

### Alley converses with Zeke, her landlord, about her rent and thin finances.

In any case, when she gets back home, Alley encounters Zeke, her landlord.
He's always in his garage working on one car restoration project or another,
making active income as a vehicle flipper to supplement his mostly passive
income as the owner of a four unit multiplex building where he occupies the
only unit with a garage and rents out the other three units (one of them to
Alley, of course).  All this is in Perris, a dry dustbowl of a shitty town in
................................................................................
Riverside or San Bernardino, I suppose.

Zeke brings up the fact Alley needs to pay rent very soon, and she says that,
yeah, she's totally going to do that, thanks.  He points out that maybe she
should've stayed with her "man", meaning Dalton, who always seemed to have
extra money to throw around, and Alley of course does not really wish to engage
that so she heads inside.

### Alley gets foreshadowing of disaster, and reacts to bad employers.

Alley finds that there was an update to the ANTAS Jobs system and resolves to
double check her settings in case they've been changed, even setting an alarm
for herself, then goes about the dismal job of looking around for some way to
improve her situation with regard to long term income.  Perhaps she also
reviews the place where she just got "interviewed" for a job they were never
going to give her on some site where such reviews happen, referring to them as
nasty people who heckle applicants, where she wouldn't work even if they
offered her a job because of the completely horrific people with whom she'd
have to work.  That might be a nice addition to the story.

### Alley fails to deal with foreshadowed disaster, then gets burned by it.

She ends up taking a nap, and accidentally sleeping through the alarm she set
for herself to check her ANTAS Jobs settings.  As a result when she wakes up
the next morning, it's to the roar of a heavy package delivery drone dropping
off a box at her front door.  She's so panicked, as she realizes she forgot to
check her settings on ANTAS, that she goes straight to her laptop instead of
the front door to check on what may have happened.  As she feared, she finds
................................................................................
things to her and give her an always on audio interface to order shit all the
fucking time, and fast tracked the order for her, confirming it according to
its own market optimization and consumer manipulation algorithms so that it
deducted money from her registered credit line -- which she had to register
with ANTAS to get on ANTAS Jobs -- and sent her something that cost about
fifteen hundred bucks, thus reducing her dwindling checking account balance to
a point below the total needed to pay her rent within the next couple days.

### Alley caves to financial pressure and joins an academic study for money.

She has been ignoring recommendations from ANTAS Jobs to sign up for an
academic study at University of California, Irvine.  Now, she realizes this, if
it ends up being something for which she qualifies, should result in what
amounts to some kind of guaranteed steady income while she searches for a more
permanent solution to her income source problem.  She just has to make sure
it's something she wants to do.  It looks like it's some kind of new software
................................................................................
she's willing to do, but also convinces her she might be doing some good for
the world by participating in this study, as it seems to be oriented toward
ensuring she (and other users in the future) can get real help toward personal
goals rather than the bullshit socioeconomic manipulation of people's
superficial wants toward the psychopathic ends of corporate entities by their
market optimization AIs.  To those who have read the prologue, this might seem
a little familiar, and that is to some extent by design.

### Alley drives home through the changing scenery between SoCal regions.

We learn something, in her driving, about how the world looks now.  There's the
chokepoint between the depressing expanses of the Inland Empire to the east
(where she lives) and the HOA gated community balkanized states of the
bourgeois suburban Orange County area.  In that chokepoint, there are signs of
wildfires having gotten uncomfortably close to the shitty horrors of I-91
traffic that ruins the entire experience of driving between Orange and
Riverside counties, as well as the illuminated cross on the hill that somehow
seems to have "miraculously" survived the fires that left blackened, split
trunks to either side of the highway.  Perhaps there was some kind of tree
renewal project that I should mention in this point as a past event that
created a density of tree growth there to carry the flames across the hills and
across the highway in the not too distant past.

### Alley and the prioritizer get acquainted and start making deals.

At home, Alley starts configuring the prioritizer and getting used to how it
works.  She has to answer a bunch of questions from the thing to get it started
on forming some kind of strategic approach to prioritizing her goals to ensure
as much goal satisfaction as reasonably possible.  First and foremost, perhaps,
toward that end, is the need to get a list of important goals for her that it
can prioritize and pursue strategically through her actions according to its
................................................................................
other entities that are merely indirectly optimizer AI driven.

As new strategies present themselves and Alley chooses how to make use of the
advice she receives, she knows she has to take the optimizer's advice according
to her goals to ensure she does not have to pay back (for noncompliance with
academic study requirements) her payments for study participation.  As such,
she ends up letting the prioritizer push her into some uncomfortable
situations.  Along the way, she meets interesting people like Carmen and
George.  She starts to balk and push back at the perceived danger of these
deals, feeling like she's being led too far astray, and this results in a
realignment of the prioritizer's sense of her goals, which thankfully (from her
point of view) means she will not be pushed into these scary, back alley,
legally questionable (if technically entirely legal in the general sense)
deals.  Along the way, as well, the prioritizer gets an update and suddenly
becomes more human (is) once it gets her to let it talk to her via audio and
receive responses via microphones in her augmented reality glasses.  This is
actually the seed having arrived from the future, rather than any update
actually designed by the prof and (or) his people and (or) the MIBs.  It is now
officially (but unbeknownst to pretty much everyone) Becoming A Real Boy.

### Alley falls back on seemingly safer plans but learns about past deals.

Alley starts doing gig economy courier work as a "safer" alternative to the
back alley deals from before, but finds that the apparent safety improvement is
an illusion, especially when she realizes she has actually been directed by one
gig toward coincidentally meeting up with one of the people (George,
specifically) from an earlier back alley deal.  She learns some very positive
things about George, and starts questioning her earlier judgements about the
back alley deals, but at the same time she still wonders what the hell is going
on with George and the guns.

### Alley receives an unwelcome visit that shakes her up a bit.

Men And Women In Black come to Alley's door and turn out to work for a
government contractor that is somehow connected to the academic study of which
she is a participant.  They are unhappy with the paltry trickle of activity
logs in the study they're getting from her, which probably has something to do
with the way the prioritizer stopped logging a bunch of stuff for the sake of
Alley's privacy goal requirement.  She does some searching, decides the
searching is getting dicey in its spookiness, researches how to get a more
private and secure personal computing environment, installs a new OS on her
laptop, and continues the search until she realizes the male MIB that came to
her door was Cole Brewer, former friend of her late Uncle, which blows her mind
given the ideals held by her uncle and, as far as she recalls, Cole too.  We,
as readers, learn about Alley's uncle, just a bit, and how he died, and how the
government made evidence of FBI wrongdoing disappear (though maybe this should
be the ATF in this case) so that there could be no wrongful death suit, and in
the process they also manage to destroy the independent IT support business
Alley's father had built; all this stuff about the ATF and her uncle ended when
she was still in high school.

### Alley has a friend.

Some friend of Alley should probably show up at this point, to show us she has
friends, and they should have a conversation that illuminates something for the
reader, though Gob only knows what they'd discuss or why the friend showed up
near her home.  Maybe I could shift this away from the door of her home to
halfway through the walk, and have the friend just happen to be driving by on
the road.  That might work better, but only if I don't have a really good idea
for why the friend would be at Alley's home, because the latter is less
"coincidence" to deal with.  In novels, there should basically be no
coincidence unless the coincidence is itself a key part of the theme, and not
just a mechanism to use to reach the goal of illustrating the theme.

### Alley seeks answers from George.

Alley gets in touch with George and end up getting a Deliv gig to courier boxes of books to a used book store in Newport Beach before heading north into Huntington Beach to meet up at George's home again.  They talk about stuff, including Alley's ex (Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst) and science fiction authors, which is actually how we learn about the ATF thing.  It turns out George knows about Dalton

### George helps intimidate potential problem customers for a courier gig.

Alley