n2020  Check-in [0903e923d9]

She was committed to it, now.  She was tired.

She took a nap, and slept through her reminder alarm.

---

The low roar of a delivery drone woke Alley in the morning.  She stared at the door of her bedroom, then scrambled out of bed and rushed to the living room.

She 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."



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 changed settings, including turning off auto-accept of any recommendations, which required eleven setting toggles.

She found another message, this one from less than a minute ago.  "How do you like ANTAS Majordomo 3.0?  Write a review!"

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 to "expedite" the return.

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

The charge to her account for the order was 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, pen, and keys.  She checked the fit of her mask.  She stepped over the box in front of her door.  She locked her deadbolt and headed for her car.

"Hey, Alley!  It's Tuesday!"

The rough voice brought her up short, one booted foot hovering off the edge of the cracked old curb.  She turned to look.  "Hey, Zeke.  I'm just on my way to a meeting.  Job stuff."

"Yeah?"  The landlord emerged from the shadows of his garage and fully into the day's bright sunlight.  "Good.  The meter's running.  Don't start collecting late fees on your rent."

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

"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 Call To Adventure:

/*

Alley must undertake a program of reinventing herself to overcome her present circumstances.  She takes her little box of prioritizer stuff home with her and sits down in the living room with it.  She sets everything on her charger and starts reading through the directions.  After charging, she pairs devices, dons the glasses, and starts interacting with the prioritizer.  She ends up getting a wireless keyboard and typing answers rather than activate the audio input.  The prioritizer setup asking her to activate mic input leads to its identification of privacy as a goal.

The prioritizer has her go through her inbox and asks questions about job postings.  It ends up eliminating all job postings as incompatible with Alley's goals and values.  It suggests she deal with important tasks (e.g. paying rent) and otherwise take the day off if she has no other ideas for making money, and that she wear her new HUD all the time so it can learn more about her goals and values.  It walks her through winding down for a good night's sleep and charges overnight.
................................................................................

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 the new glasses.  She dropped the unfolded instruction sheet and looked from the new glasses to her own 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 picked 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.

Text appeared to float in the air before her: "PAIR WITH PHONE"

She picked up her phone and followed instructions.  When the pairing message faded away, a new message appeared: "PERSONALIZE?"

Two buttons hovered below it, one blue with the word "YES", the other red with the word "NO".  The instruction sheet said she could just point at a button for a full second, or use voice control.  She raised a hand experimentally, and saw that it obscured the buttons when it passed through their space in her vision, but not the question.  She pointed at "YES" until it blinked twice.  The message changed again:

"ENTER SUBJECT ID:"

She copied the number from the sticker stuck to the instruction sheet.

"PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:"

She waited.

"DO YOU WISH TO USE AUDIO?"

No.



































## Refusing The Call:



























































The next day, the prioritizer has her do other stuff, which makes her nervous.  She decides she does not want to do that any longer.  As a part of this sequence of events, she end up meeting a man but not completing the transaction with him.  He seems tense, and tries to get her to complete the transaction, but relents and seems understanding when she refuses.  She's glad to get away from the situation.  Perhaps there is a pile of money involved, and she decides she should just keep the cash for now instead of buying something "weird".  She has resisted the call.

Somehow, this must lead to a problem.  Does the money itself get her in trouble?  Perhaps the plan is for her to use the money to immediately buy more cryptocurrency in a face-to-face meeting where urgent need gives her a significant profit margin -- or, more to the point, perhaps several such transactions.  She chooses to avoid this after the first couple transactions when she finds that the people with whom she does business put her off, thus leading her to decide she should just keep the cash.  Maybe the nice guy is the guy with whom she decides to cease trading.

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

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

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 sideload some of his videos to a place the prioritizer can access them.




## 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 was committed to it, now.  She was tired.

She took a nap, and slept through her reminder alarm.

---

The low roar of a delivery drone woke Alley in the morning.  She stared at the door of her bedroom, then scrambled out of bed and rushed to the living room.  She stopped, staring at the door, and realized that if she needed to do something it would be on a computer.

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.

"Hey, Alley!  It's Tuesday!"

The rough voice brought her up short, one booted foot hovering off the edge of the cracked old curb.  She turned to look.  "Hey, Zeke.  I'm just on my way to a meeting.  Job stuff."

"Yeah?"  The landlord emerged from the shadows of his garage and fully into the day's bright sunlight.  "Good.  The meter's running.  Don't start collecting late fees on your rent."

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

"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 blanky out the open window of her car, eyes glazed.  She shook her head, then wpied 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, thorugh 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. . . .

If the prioritizer she signed up to test could actually help, maybe she could stop entertaining these defeated thoughts of running to her mother.  Maybe, if she could get ahead of things, she could even move somewhere else entirely, somewhere she'd actually like to live.

Massachusetts never even crossed her mind.

## The Call To Adventure:

/*

Alley must undertake a program of reinventing herself to overcome her present circumstances.  She takes her little box of prioritizer stuff home with her and sits down in the living room with it.  She sets everything on her charger and starts reading through the directions.  After charging, she pairs devices, dons the glasses, and starts interacting with the prioritizer.  She ends up getting a wireless keyboard and typing answers rather than activate the audio input.  The prioritizer setup asking her to activate mic input leads to its identification of privacy as a goal.

The prioritizer has her go through her inbox and asks questions about job postings.  It ends up eliminating all job postings as incompatible with Alley's goals and values.  It suggests she deal with important tasks (e.g. paying rent) and otherwise take the day off if she has no other ideas for making money, and that she wear her new HUD all the time so it can learn more about her goals and values.  It walks her through winding down for a good night's sleep and charges overnight.
................................................................................

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.

Text appeared to float in the air before her: "PAIR WITH PHONE"

She picked up her phone and followed instructions.  When the pairing message faded away, a new message appeared: "ENTER SUBJECT ID:"

A virtual keyboard appeared, floating in her field of view.  She recalled that the instruction sheet said she could just point at a button for a full second, or use voice control.  After a moment's hesitation, she grabbed a wireless keyboard and paired it with her phone, then copied the number from a sticker stuck to the instruction sheet.

"PERSONALIZE?"

Two buttons hovered below it, one blue with the word "YES", the other red with the word "NO".  She raised a hand experimentally, and saw that it obscured the buttons when it passed through their space in her vision, but not the question.  She pointed at "YES" until it blinked twice.  The message changed again:

"PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:"

She pointed at "CONTINUE".

"DO YOU WISH TO USE THE AUDIO INTERFACE?"

No.

"DO YOU WISH TO DISABLE AUDIO INTEGRATION?"

Yes.

/*

SUPERSEDED NARRATIVE TEXT:

She answered a series of other questions about herself and her preferences -- full name, birthdate, preferred pronouns and nicknames, financial information such as bank balances, employment status, work experience, address, dietary restrictions, and so on.  She hesitated before answering some, finding the series of questions a bit invasive at times, but looked at her laptop with its ANTAS Jobs bookmarks.  "That ship already sailed," she muttered.

*/

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 alrady 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
* Alley's objections to working for optimizer developers
* Alley's preference for privacy rights and free speech
* Alley's work history (or lack thereof)
* Alley's preferred future living conditions

*/


## 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 get a shit job that does not make enough money to justify the
  drive, but does offer future recent work experience at a "regular" job while
  she collects direct deposits from her study participation.  Is this a
  commute?  Is it a driving job, such as deliveries or courier work?  Courier
  work probably doesn't fit this idea, but maybe a gig economy delivery job
  would qualify.

* Alley could get a remote job doing something legal but very sketchy, which
  would net her more income than the driving option.  This could also give her
  more mobility for the sake of moving somewhere "better" to live.

* Alley could sign up for training in a professional trade and perhaps get some
  kind of job placement assistance as part of the deal (plus, of course, some
  crushing debt that she'll spend decades paying off).

* 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 deperate 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.

/*

At some point, she should set up a meeting for an exchange in a private conference room at a co-working space.  Someone should recognize her and ask whether she's meeting a client, to which she replies vaguely in a positively interpretable fashion without literally confirming that assumption with her words.

I wanted the person who greets her to say something that raises some factoid of her life, but I'm not sure any longer what I had in mind.  Did it have anything to do with getting out of Dalton's shadow?

Does the person she's meeting recognize her connection to Dalton?

*/

/*

The next day, the prioritizer has her do other stuff, which makes her nervous.  She decides she does not want to do that any longer.  As a part of this sequence of events, she end up meeting a man but not completing the transaction with him.  He seems tense, and tries to get her to complete the transaction, but relents and seems understanding when she refuses.  She's glad to get away from the situation.  Perhaps there is a pile of money involved, and she decides she should just keep the cash for now instead of buying something "weird".  She has resisted the call.

Somehow, this must lead to a problem.  Does the money itself get her in trouble?  Perhaps the plan is for her to use the money to immediately buy more cryptocurrency in a face-to-face meeting where urgent need gives her a significant profit margin -- or, more to the point, perhaps several such transactions.  She chooses to avoid this after the first couple transactions when she finds that the people with whom she does business put her off, thus leading her to decide she should just keep the cash.  Maybe the nice guy is the guy with whom she decides to cease trading.

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

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

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 sideload some of his videos to a place the prioritizer can access them.

*/


## 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.

*/