n2020  Check-in [c6caa8dc44]

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

"Keep it.  I'll surive 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."


















































































































































































































































































/*

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.

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

"Keep it.  I'll surive 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.

She nodded.  "Sure."

"Are you saving up for something, or going back to school?"

Alley hesitated a moment.  "Why?"

He shrugged.  "Curious."

"Not exactly.  I'm trying to dig myself out of a hole."

"Debts?"

She shook her head.  "I had a strange career path, and it's dying.  I don't really have the work experience to pick a new direction, so I'm just working on that."

"Ah.  Reinventing yourself.  The world changes so fast it's hard to keep up."

Alley nodded, then stopped, and shook her head again.  "I don't know," she says.  "A lot of people seem to have no problem.  They just go to school, get a piece of paper, apply for a job, and work until they retire."

"It seems that way," George said, "but most of them don't really do that."

"What do you mean?"

"More and more people aren't retiring, or get laid off and end up on the street.  Most of them don't have enough imagination these days to even conceive of completely reinventing their paths.  You look like you do, but maybe you're looking in the wrong direction."  He leaned forward on the couch, rested his forearms on his thighs, and wrong his hands like he meant to massage cramps out of them.  He looked toward a bookshelf as he spoke again.  "It's easy to see what other people are doing and think that they have it together, that they have a path and security and happiness.  Most people lie to each other about how well they're doing, and almost every single one of them, deep down inside, thinks 'I must be the only person who can't really figure it out.'  They're all up to their eyeballs in debt, living paycheck to paycheck.

"There are a few people who have things sorted out pretty well, prudent people who played it safe most of the time but took advantage of opportunities when they came, and were lucky enough to get ahead that way.  Many of them don't even realize they're insecure and confused all the time, because they got so good at lying to people about it that they've even convinced themselves.

"There are others who really do believe they have everything figured out, and in a way they're even right about that, but not in a way anyone should have things figured out.  They lie and cheat and steal, maybe even kill with the stroke of a pen or an Enter key, and make it to the top over mounds of bodies, metaphorical a lot of the time, but literal bodies sometimes.

"My advice is: don't be like any of them."  He looked at her again, caught her gaze, and she felt an almost physical force holding it.  "There's always something we overlook, because there's always too much to see to have time to see it all.  Don't just close your eyes, though.  Keep them open, and seize what you find as a path that feels right.  You don't have time for everything, but you definitely have time for something, and you should spend it on something good."

He sat back again, resting his open hands on the tops of his thighs.

"Look at me, getting all philosophical with you.  If what I'm saying doesn't make any sense, just ignore me.  I'm an old man, and I've seen a lot, but I don't even understand most of what I saw myself.  I feel like I understand less, the more I see."

She quirked one corner of her lips.  "You give better advice than Obi Wan."

George chuckled.  "I hope so.  He's just some character on paper, and a good actor.  Anyway, I don't really know you, so I don't really know if I even have any idea what you're going through or what you need.  Don't feel like you have to humor me."

"Maybe I started out thinking I should humor you, but now I just want to talk to you some more."  She looked at a ticking clock on an end table.  "Maybe not now, though.  It's getting late."

"Yeah," he said, "go drop off that envelope, then get home and sleep.  Never underestimate the importance of a good night's rest.  That's one piece of advice I know is good, for anyone."

"Thanks."

He nodded, then rose and headed for the door.  He unlocked it as she approached and opened the door, then stepped outside ahead of her and looked around.  He turned to her as she followed him out.  "Be careful out there.  The world's a surprising place."

"Yeah."

"If you want to try your hand at something way outside of 'normal' as a new path in life, look me up.  I might have a few ideas.  Otherwise, I wish you the best at whatever you find."

"Thanks," she said again.  "How should I get in touch?"

He scoffed at himself.  "Right -- forgot about that part."  He pulled out his wallet, and slipped out a business card, no longer crisp and new.  "Here you go."

She took it, and saw that it contained nothing but an email address and a series of letters and numbers.

"That's my public encryption key," he said.  "If you don't encrypt the message, it goes straight to spam.  Do you know how to use encrypted email like that?"

"I use pubkey encryption for clients sometimes," she said.

"Good girl.  You're already way ahead of the pack.  Good night, now."

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

They all stared at each other.

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

The woman said "You have a little hole in your shirt, there."

Alley looked where the woman pointed, and saw a hole in her Information Society shirt /* around the area of her right kidney */ over the right side of her abdomen.  The hole had been there since before her uncle gave her this shirt as a kid.

She looked back at the woman.  "Yeah," she said.  "I sleep in this thing.  Strangers don't usually get to see it."

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.

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."

Alley peered at him.  "Are you serious?"

He nodded once, curtly.

"You're going to have to be a little more specific," she said.

"May we come in to talk about this?" the woman asked.

Alley caught the man giving his partner an irritated look.  "No, I don't think so," Alley answered.

"Are you involved in too many US Intelligence research projects to know what I"m talking about?" he asked.

"It's the opposite," she said, as if really she didn't think he understood.  "I don't know anything about any US Intelligence research projects in my life right now.  Do you want to tell me why you're here, or should we play a guessing game?"

The woman's eyes narrowed, and she opened her mouth as if to snap something at Alley, but the man leaned into Alley's personal space.  He blocked half of the view between the two women, and the man's partner closed her mouth again, surprised by the intrusion.

He said "You have access to some experimental task assistance artificial intelligence technology for the purpose of participating in a study for Professor Goulet at the University of California.  Does that ring any bells?" he asked.

"Oh.  Yeah.  Why didn't you just say so?"  She held her ground until the man finally backed off again.

"I take it you did not actually read the information you were given when you signed up for the study."

She shrugged.  "I did, but I don't remember every single word of the small print.  It must have been buried pretty well."

"Why aren't you wearing your AR glasses?" he suddenly asked.

"Let's rewind to the point when I told you I'm still half in my pajamas," Alley said.

He frowned, and asked "Have you looked at your phone yet this morning?"

"This is starting to feel like we're playing twenty questions after all.  No, I haven't looked at my phone.  I got out of bed, made myself barely decent to answer the door, and came to welcome you cheerful early birds to my door.  Why?"

"I suggest you check your messages."

"Fine," Alley said.  "I'll be right back."  She managed to restrain herself from slamming the door, but it wasn't gentle.

She hit the button to lock the door, then sat on the couch and plucked her phone from the charging plate.  A message notification blinked at her.

Alley donned the prioritizer's glasses and checked her messages.  One had arrived from the professor over an hour earlier.  It told her to give the glasses to the men who would come to see her that morning with government IDs.

She looked at the door, and muttered ". . . men?"  She wondered if the professor expected different people, but this was clearly close enough.  Maybe he just meant Men In Black.

/* 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 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 coöperation," 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?"

"No," the man said.

"Have a good day."  Alley spoke without feeling, and she closed the door on them again.

Alley sat on the couch.  "Fuck," she said.  "Who are those people, really?"

"I do not have that information," the prioritizer said.

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.

One option, QueBSD, was based on OpenBSD and promised clean separation between pseudonymous online presences -- avoiding being tracked as a person by confusing tracking technologies into trying to track many different entities that they never correlated as a single person.  She eventually realized its approach to separating environments was just OpenBSD a cut down OpenBSD system with some extra interfaces around OpenBSD's own virtual machine management tools.  To make much use of it would involve installing other OSes on top of QueBSD in virtual machines.

Another option, Minix, seemed good for security and privacy based on some comments in a few mailing lists and forum discussions, but after digging in further she realized that most of what people said about its privacy benefits looked like either things that could be done on many other OSes, including OpenBSD, and things that were just people misunderstanding Minix reliability benefits.  It did not seem to be a particularly privacy oriented option.

Ultimately, she ended up looking at two things.  One was MaximOS, which seemed like a close relative of OpenBSD.  The other was something called 9front, with no relation to OpenBSD that she could find.

She had a difficult time navigating the jargon filled, often sarcastic tone of 9front documentation, but it looked like a kind of sleeping giant among operating systems for people who value their privacy and personal security.  9front also looked like it would require weeks of work to get it set up properly for what she wanted to do, after which she would have to run other operating systems in virtual machines and move files between the virtual machines and the 9front host system to get anything significant done.  It looked like the way most people used 9front for privacy reasons was to just have a single machine dedicated to it and use it only for specific purposes, doing everything else on a different computer with a different OS.

She looked back at MaximOS again.  It seemed to be a specialized configuration of OpenBSD with a bunch of extra documentation and privacy protecting software.  The two projects -- OpenBSD and MaximOS -- shared a lot of code, and each project audited all of its software pretty thoroughly, notably including the software it got from the other project.

"Why is all this software auditing stuff so buried?" she muttered.

"What do you mean?" the prioritizer asked.

"It seems like one of the best things about OpenBSD is the code audits.  I didn't even find out about how thoroughly they check out their code for problems until I got to the 'Why Maxim OS?' page, where it links to pages about the audits on it and on OpenBSD.  With that much auditing, it seems like the obvious choice for keeping governments and corporations from slipping something into the software that would undermine privacy."

"I do not know why the OpenBSD project would not present that information more prominently.  MaximOS appears to be an excellent choice for your purposes, though.  It may be a good choice for security your phone as well."

"Yeah," Alley said, "I saw that info about the mobile tech version of /* the operating system */ MaximOS."

"The devices sold by the company that develops MaximOS may be a good choice as well."

"Sure, if I could afford to buy one."

She sat and thought, idly clicking through pages on the MaximOS site.  She stopped on the main page and read the slogan at the top out loud:

"The enemy knows the system."

The prioritizer said "That is known as Shannon's maxim.  It may be the origin of the name MaximOS."

"That's kind of an ominous slogan," Alley mused.

"It is a rephrasing of Kerckhoffs' principle, which asserts that a cryptosystem should remain secure even if everything about the system except its key is public knowledge.  Claude Shannon's formulation broadens the idea to include all information systems, where Auguste Kerckhoffs' focus was specific to cryptography.  Shannon also inverted the perspective to demonstrate the importance of the principle as guidance for system design."

"Yeah, I get that," Alley said, and nodded.  "If the enemy knows the system, you should make sure none of its security depends on keeping the system design secret.

"You seem to know a lot about this stuff."

"I searched informatoin security cademic papers on the UCI network and paraphrased from one of them."

"That seems like it would be pretty handy, having instant access to all those academic papers and being able to make use of what they say.  I should probably lean on that more.  I don't suppose there's more in there that would be useful for me trying to change my career course.  Is there?"

"That does not seem likely," the prioritizer said.  "Apart from basic statistical studies of fields of employment and how they change or become obsolete over time, the only well studied areas I have found that appear relevant to your situation pertain to black market activities.  Your aversion to engaging in blatantly illegal activity for reasons of high risk severity preclude making use of most of that information."

Alley chuckled drily.  "Great.  The best guidance for a career change in the ivory tower is about becoming a career criminal, I guess.  I'm not sure whether that says worse things about universities or about the law."

"Most of the papers about these subjects are could offer something useful, if you wished to pursue black market opportunities, are related to the field of economics.  To judge by those, the fount often seems to lie with the law."

"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 ecommerce 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?" */

"What about when I just can't decide between two options, and I can't get both of them?  Isn't that proof of being able to value two things equally?"

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

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

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


/*

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

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