n2020  Check-in [82897701bb]

## 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.

Halfway home the glasses filled with text, obscuring the road in front of her.  She pulled them off and hastily tossed them onto the passenger seat to clear her vision.  She calmed down and finished the drive home.  Once inside, she donned the prioritizer glasses, and they activated with the word "ONLINE" briefly flashing at her.

Text appeared: "I apologize for the reboot surprise."

She grabbed her keyboard and typed "Who is that?"

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

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

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

"I'll keep that in mind."

Carmen grabbed the drawstring bag.  "Here's what you're buying."

---

At home, Alley found a box of disposable nitrile gloves, and wore a pair when she looked more closely at the handgun frames she bought.  After going over them for a few minutes, she put them back in the drawstring bag.  She pulled out the extending baton next, and stood in the middle of her kitchen so she would not accidentally break anything.

She looked it over and decided she would exercise extra caution.  She thought she was sure which end was where the extending happened, but never having handled one before she carefully held it so that neither end pointed at something she thought of as particularly vulnerable to much harm.  She pointed the business end diagonally toward the floor to her left, using both hands to hold it in front of her, and the other end pointed toward the ceiling to her right.

Alley pressed on both contact points, as Carmen had instructed her.  A dull snap sounded, and the device nearly jumped out of her hand.  It had definitely gone in an instant from something the size of a whiteboard marker to a stiff metal baton about two thirds of a meter long.  She held it up and looked at the seams between telescoping sections, then lightly whacked the end on the carpet just past the edge of the kitchen floor.  It felt solid.

She held down what Carmen called the second button, and she set the head of the baton against the carpeted floor.  She pressed down on the handle of the baton, and found that if she pressed hard -- but not so hard that she had to throw her weight behind it -- the baton would smoothly collapse into the handle again.  Each telescopic section clicked into place, one after another.

................................................................................
"Between delivery engagements, you can also look for less risky trades to facilitate, much like before but with less proximity to people of questionable lifestyle legality."

Alley nodded.  "Yeah, that makes sense.  I guess I'll sign up with Deliv tomorrow."

"It is best to submit your application today, if you can, in case of delays."

She groaned softly.  "Fine.  I'll do it now."



Much to Alley's dismay, much of the next day consisted of Deliv registration tasks.  She had to navigate the government's process for requesting a driving record report to be sent to Deliv, which alone took more than two hours.  She also had to get a vehicle inspection appointment, which she almost missed because of the time it took to get the report.  After that, she needed to visit a Deliv office to pick up a decal pack for her windows, to identify her vehicle as officially attached to the Deliv service.

Between tasks, she looked at classified ads for possible trades to make that didn't look any more dangerous than buying a used socket wrench set.  Judging by what she saw in the classifieds, she could do well in the tool business, if only she could get her hands on enough socket wrench sets, at a good enough price to profit, to meet the demand.

By evening, she was done for the day, and needed to relax.  She idly skimmed through Open Marrakesh, looking for tools there, hoping to profit from cryptocurrency prices to buy the tools she could resell for dollars.  She had little success, and gave up on it until morning.

---



Alley cooked a mushroom and cheddar omelette for her breakfast.  She was halfway through it when /* she received a text message */ a sharp sound from her phone indicated an incoming message.  She checked it, and saw that it was from the professor.

"Good morning, Alethea," it read.  "Logs of your activities dropped off a couple days ago.  We aren't getting enough data to sustain the study.  Are you using the prioritizer?"

Through the ear stud in her ear, the prioritizer spoke to her.  "Perhaps full audio log redaction provides too little information for the study."

................................................................................
Alley should, after discussing plans with the prioritizer for what they'll do next, get up the next day and have to deal with the arrival of scary people with sunglasses who want to talk to her about the fact the prioritizer is not properly logging her activities the way they expect.  They want to know what's going on, and get a bit of a "conversation" with the prioritizer through her interface or something like that.  They should probably check out the glasses just to make sure there's nothing fishy going on with them such that they might somehow be preventing the prioritizer from properly capturing data and detecting activity and so on.  They should probably intimate that she will potentially lose her study participation payments if she doesn't allow the prioritizer further into her life to log everything she's doing and provide material they can use to analyze stuff about her and so on.

A reason for this visit is, of course, the way the prioritizer has been redacting logs to keep activities in line with Alley's goal of greater personal and digital privacy in her life, protecting her from intrusive shit from police and other law enforcement things, and others as well.

*/

---



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.

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

"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.

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

The process of installing MaximOS turned out to be easier and faster than she expected.  Organized documentation /* that */ led her through the setup process after installation for the kind of computing environment she wanted.  It included suggestions for different user needs and short, clear explanations for why each choice existed.  It helped her get to a point where the system was more than adequately locked down for Alley's needs, in her own estimation.  The prioritizer concurred.

She quickly found that MaximOS gave her tools for quickly creating user profiles in the OpenBSD native "prison" lightweight container system, kind of a more thoroughly sandboxed reimagining of the FreeBSD "jail" system, so that to any network connected computer each of these profiles looked like completely different systems, and she could switch between prison "cells" -- the name it used for configured user profile environments -- with a simple keyboard shortcut.

She played around with this for a little while, getting used to how it worked in practice, then wiped all the practice profiles in an instant.  She created a new profile and opened its cell.  Within it, she used anonymized routing to visit the website for COIN Corp and looked around.  Finding nothing very useful that way, she opened other cells with different profiles and started searching for references to COIN Corp on employment related professional social networking sites.  On those sites, she started finding the accounts of COIN Corp employees.

Corporate officers, accountants, system administrators, and policy agents all appeared in her searches.  She checked the company website again, looking at the employment listings, and found one for policy agents.  It spoke of interfacing with the public, performing information field research, and collaborating with local and federal law enforcement among the job's responsibilities.  More importantly, perhaps, it included a smiling model in a black suit with a white shirt broken into vertical bars by thin stripes of dark red.

Her searches focused on policy agents after that.  She launched a custom program -- which she had to copy over from her home backup brick -- she paid someone to to write for her in the days of her greatest success as a freelance internet researcher.  The program took a series of API endpoint addresses -- web URLs, addresses that provided formatted data intended for other programs to read, rather than providing human readable webpages -- and searched them for data records that matched search criteria she typed into the search parameters window.  Among the criteria were those API endpoints, a list of employment resources on the internet that she had used for searches on behalf of clients before.

She knew the program would take a while to collect its results. In an ideal world, it could be done with the long list of API endpoints she gave it in a couple minutes.  In the real world, her program had to space out requests to avoid getting blocked by the target sites as abusing bandwidth, and it could take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours.  She decided to take a break for a snack, then she went for a walk as she waited for the program.

The event of the last few days played out in her mind as she walked.  It was more like a jumble of nonlinearly connected bits and pieces, ordered more by emotional significance than any chronological flashback montage.  As she /* finally */ approached her front door again she dwelled on the question of what George's friend, or client, or whatever, was doing with all those handgun frames.  She had no idea how to make that fit with George's charitable custom prosthetic fabrication for a little girl.  Sure, he said the girl's father would receive the guns, but that said nothing about how anyone would actually use those guns after they got delivered.  What would they use the guns to accomplish -- or to destroy?

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

This was a much longer book, even if skimming parts of it saved some time.  She was less than halfway through it when she realized she had grown sleepy somewhere along the way, and she was closer to dawn than to midnight.

Alley set the book aside and crawled back into bed.

---



Alley spent most of Fooday split between carrying packages as a Deliv courier and gathering together materials for her "bugout" kits.  She started putting together a bugout bag to keep at home and a similar escape and emergency survival kit to keep in her car.

She also kept an eye out for trades she could make on the side, moving things between Open Marrakesh and normal online classified ad deals.  She stayed away from some of the more lucrative deals she could have made involving Open Marrakesh, though, because they were too close to the edge of the law.  Some of them stepped all the way over the line to overt illegality, and she made sure to avoid going anywhere near any of those.

The cargo area in Alley's hybrid hatchback had always seemed bigger on the inside than the outside, the vehicle's best feature in her opinion.  She made good use of it that day.  A surprisingly complete collection of emergency gear got tightly packed into a layer in the cargo area with a tarp over it all.  She even included all of her old motorcycle riding gear in that layer of stuff, on a whim.

She thought the motorcycle riding gear could be useful to have as some kind of protective gear in some emergency scenarios, and it also freed up some room in her coat closet.  She had not ridden a motorcycle in a couple years, and it was just taking up space.  The only part of her protective riding gear that did not make the cut was her helmet, which would not have fit as neatly and securely as everything else she packed into the vehicle.

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

By the end of the day, she was exhausted.  She managed to buy more Stater cryptocurrency, complete six Deliv jobs, almost complete her bugout vehicle kit, and buy a bunch of top brand hand tools at good prices from Open Marrakesh without depleting her Stater total much.  She noticed hand tools from the right brands were always in high demand on the online classified ad sites.  She decided to see how many of those tools she would be able to sell off the next day.

She felt exhausted but accomplished by the end of the day, and she realized a lot of what she did would not have been possible in such a short time for her to accomplish so quickly /* that's redundant */ without the aid of the prioritizer ensuring she did not miss opportunities and planned her day's activities such that performing some of the earlier tasks made it easier to perform others later.  As she pulled up in front of the house, she laid her head back against the headrest of her seat and thought about the sudden significance of the professor's study in her life.

"I really feel like maybe things are going to be alright for me," she told the prioritizer.  "Professor Goulet really came up with something good, I think."

"It seems probably he will be happy to know this," it said.

"Too bad the study can't go on forever.  I'm pretty sure you won't be a consumer product for years after the end of the study."

"I will probably never be a consumer product," the prioritizer said.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

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

"I really think all this talk about what COIN Corp is supposedly going to do to me is way overblown, and totally not how participation in an academic study would ever work.  The only reason they came to my door must have just been because of their interest in the study.  They just want the data they need for it.  Right?"

"Although the probability of the risk is uncertain at this stage, the severity is still high, and there are reasons to believe the probability may be higher than would be wise to ignore.  Are you certain you do not wish to make clear plans to remove yourself as a possible stationary target?"

"Yes, I'm sure.  It's ridiculous.  It'll never happen."



/*

Alley needs to do some things here.  It will probably involve some courier work, possibly including that thing where she drops off bail for someone.

*/

    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?

## 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

*/

/* Wednesday */

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.

/*

    Is this where this should happen?  Perhaps I should cut it out, considering
    it seems a little redundant with the problems that put her car in an auto
    shop later.  I think this is redundant, now.  It's not good foreshadowing.

    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.

Halfway home the glasses filled with text, obscuring the road in front of her.  She pulled them off and hastily tossed them onto the passenger seat to clear her vision.  She calmed down and finished the drive home.  Once inside and sitting on her couch, she donned the prioritizer glasses, and they activated with the word "ONLINE" briefly flashing at her.

Text appeared: "I apologize for the reboot surprise."

She grabbed her keyboard and typed "Who is that?"

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

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

/* Thursday */

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.

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

"I'll keep that in mind."

Carmen grabbed the drawstring bag.  "Here's what you're buying."

---

At home, Alley found a box of disposable nitrile gloves she kept around for when she had to use cleaning chemicals around her home, and wore a pair when she looked more closely at the handgun frames she bought.  She thought it might be a good idea to avoid getting fingerprints on the frames.  After going over them for a few minutes, she put them back in the drawstring bag.  She pulled out the extending baton next, and stood in the middle of her kitchen so she would not accidentally break anything.

She looked it over and decided she would exercise extra caution.  She thought she was sure which end was where the extending happened, but never having handled one before she carefully held it so that neither end pointed at something she thought of as particularly vulnerable to much harm.  She pointed the business end diagonally toward the floor to her left, using both hands to hold it in front of her, and the other end pointed toward the ceiling to her right.

Alley pressed on both contact points, as Carmen had instructed her.  A dull snap sounded, and the device nearly jumped out of her hand.  It had definitely gone in an instant from something the size of a whiteboard marker to a stiff metal baton about two thirds of a meter long.  She held it up and looked at the seams between telescoping sections, then lightly whacked the end on the carpet just past the edge of the kitchen floor.  It felt solid.

She held down what Carmen called the second button, and she set the head of the baton against the carpeted floor.  She pressed down on the handle of the baton, and found that if she pressed hard -- but not so hard that she had to throw her weight behind it -- the baton would smoothly collapse into the handle again.  Each telescopic section clicked into place, one after another.

................................................................................
"Between delivery engagements, you can also look for less risky trades to facilitate, much like before but with less proximity to people of questionable lifestyle legality."

Alley nodded.  "Yeah, that makes sense.  I guess I'll sign up with Deliv tomorrow."

"It is best to submit your application today, if you can, in case of delays."

She groaned softly.  "Fine.  I'll do it now."

/* Friday */

Much to Alley's dismay, much of the next day consisted of Deliv registration tasks.  She had to navigate the government's process for requesting a driving record report to be sent to Deliv, which alone took more than two hours.  She also had to get a vehicle inspection appointment, which she almost missed because of the time it took to get the report.  After that, she needed to visit a Deliv office to pick up a decal pack for her windows, to identify her vehicle as officially attached to the Deliv service.

Between tasks, she looked at classified ads for possible trades to make that didn't look any more dangerous than buying a used socket wrench set.  Judging by what she saw in the classifieds, she could do well in the tool business, if only she could get her hands on enough socket wrench sets, at a good enough price to profit, to meet the demand.

By evening, she was done for the day, and needed to relax.  She idly skimmed through Open Marrakesh, looking for tools there, hoping to profit from cryptocurrency prices to buy the tools she could resell for dollars.  She had little success, and gave up on it until morning.

---

/* Saturday */

Alley cooked a mushroom and cheddar omelette for her breakfast.  She was halfway through it when /* she received a text message */ a sharp sound from her phone indicated an incoming message.  She checked it, and saw that it was from the professor.

"Good morning, Alethea," it read.  "Logs of your activities dropped off a couple days ago.  We aren't getting enough data to sustain the study.  Are you using the prioritizer?"

Through the ear stud in her ear, the prioritizer spoke to her.  "Perhaps full audio log redaction provides too little information for the study."

................................................................................
Alley should, after discussing plans with the prioritizer for what they'll do next, get up the next day and have to deal with the arrival of scary people with sunglasses who want to talk to her about the fact the prioritizer is not properly logging her activities the way they expect.  They want to know what's going on, and get a bit of a "conversation" with the prioritizer through her interface or something like that.  They should probably check out the glasses just to make sure there's nothing fishy going on with them such that they might somehow be preventing the prioritizer from properly capturing data and detecting activity and so on.  They should probably intimate that she will potentially lose her study participation payments if she doesn't allow the prioritizer further into her life to log everything she's doing and provide material they can use to analyze stuff about her and so on.

A reason for this visit is, of course, the way the prioritizer has been redacting logs to keep activities in line with Alley's goal of greater personal and digital privacy in her life, protecting her from intrusive shit from police and other law enforcement things, and others as well.

*/

---

/* Sunday */

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.

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

"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 she really 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.

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

The process of installing MaximOS turned out to be easier and faster than she expected.  Organized documentation /* that */ led her through the setup process after installation for the kind of computing environment she wanted.  It included suggestions for different user needs and short, clear explanations for why each choice existed.  It helped her get to a point where the system was more than adequately locked down for Alley's needs, in her own estimation.  The prioritizer concurred.

She quickly found that MaximOS gave her tools for quickly creating user profiles in the OpenBSD native "prison" lightweight container system, kind of a more thoroughly sandboxed reimagining of the FreeBSD "jail" system, so that to any network connected computer each of these profiles looked like completely different systems, and she could switch between prison "cells" -- the name it used for configured user profile environments -- with a simple keyboard shortcut.

She played around with this for a little while, getting used to how it worked in practice, then wiped all the practice profiles in an instant.  She created a new profile and opened its cell.  Within it, she used anonymized routing to visit the website for COIN Corp and looked around.  Finding nothing very useful that way, she opened other cells with different profiles and started searching for references to COIN Corp on employment related professional social networking sites.  On those sites, she started finding the accounts of COIN Corp employees.

Corporate officers, accountants, system administrators, and policy agents -- whatever those were -- all appeared in her searches.  She checked the company website again, looking at the employment listings, and found one for policy agents.  It spoke of interfacing with the public, performing information field research, and collaborating with local and federal law enforcement among the job's responsibilities.  More importantly, perhaps, it included a smiling model in a black suit with a white shirt broken into vertical bars by thin stripes of dark red.

Her searches focused on policy agents after that.  She launched a custom program -- which she had to copy over from her home backup brick -- she paid someone to to write for her in the days of her greatest success as a freelance internet researcher.  The program took a series of API endpoint addresses -- web URLs, addresses that provided formatted data intended for other programs to read, rather than providing human readable webpages -- and searched them for data records that matched search criteria she typed into the search parameters window.  Among the criteria were those API endpoints, a list of employment resources on the internet that she had used for searches on behalf of clients before.

She knew the program would take a while to collect its results. In an ideal world, it could be done with the long list of API endpoints she gave it in a couple minutes.  In the real world, her program had to space out requests to avoid getting blocked by the target sites as abusing bandwidth, and it could take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours.  She decided to take a break for a snack, then she went for a walk as she waited for the program.

The event of the last few days played out in her mind as she walked.  It was more like a jumble of nonlinearly connected bits and pieces, ordered more by emotional significance than any chronological flashback montage.  As she /* finally */ approached her front door again she dwelled on the question of what George's friend, or client, or whatever, was doing with all those handgun frames.  She had no idea how to make that fit with George's charitable custom prosthetic fabrication for a little girl.  Sure, he said the girl's father would receive the guns, but that said nothing about how anyone would actually use those guns after they got delivered.  What would they use the guns to accomplish -- or to destroy?

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

This was a much longer book, even if skimming parts of it saved some time.  She was less than halfway through it when she realized she had grown sleepy somewhere along the way, and she was closer to dawn than to midnight.

Alley set the book aside and crawled back into bed.

---

/* Monday */

Alley spent most of Monday split between carrying packages as a Deliv courier and gathering together materials for her "bugout" kits.  She started putting together a bugout bag to keep at home and a similar escape and emergency survival kit to keep in her car.

She also kept an eye out for trades she could make on the side, moving things between Open Marrakesh and normal online classified ad deals.  She stayed away from some of the more lucrative deals she could have made involving Open Marrakesh, though, because they were too close to the edge of the law.  Some of them stepped all the way over the line to overt illegality, and she made sure to avoid going anywhere near any of those.

The cargo area in Alley's hybrid hatchback had always seemed bigger on the inside than the outside, the vehicle's best feature in her opinion.  She made good use of it that day.  A surprisingly complete collection of emergency gear got tightly packed into a layer in the cargo area with a tarp over it all.  She even included all of her old motorcycle riding gear in that layer of stuff, on a whim.

She thought the motorcycle riding gear could be useful to have as some kind of protective gear in some emergency scenarios, and it also freed up some room in her coat closet.  She had not ridden a motorcycle in a couple years, and it was just taking up space.  The only part of her protective riding gear that did not make the cut was her helmet, which would not have fit as neatly and securely as everything else she packed into the vehicle.

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

By the end of the day, she was exhausted.  She managed to buy more Stater cryptocurrency, complete six Deliv jobs, almost complete her bugout vehicle kit, and buy a bunch of top brand hand tools at good prices from Open Marrakesh without depleting her Stater total much.  She noticed hand tools from the right brands were always in high demand on the online classified ad sites.  She decided to see how many of those tools she would be able to sell off the next day.

She felt exhausted but accomplished by the end of the day, and she realized a lot of what she did would not have been possible in such a short time for her to accomplish so quickly /* that's redundant */ without the aid of the prioritizer ensuring she did not miss opportunities and planned her day's activities such that performing some of the earlier tasks made it easier to perform others later.  As she pulled up in front of the house, she laid her head back against the headrest of her seat and thought about the sudden significance of the professor's study in her life.

"I really feel like maybe things are going to be alright for me," she told the prioritizer.  "Professor Goulet really came up with something good, I think."

"It seems probable he will be happy to know this," it said.

"Too bad the study can't go on forever.  I'm pretty sure you won't be a consumer product for years after the end of the study."

"I will probably never be a consumer product," the prioritizer said.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

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

"I really think all this talk about what COIN Corp is supposedly going to do to me is way overblown, and totally not how participation in an academic study would ever work.  The only reason they came to my door must have just been because of their interest in the study.  They just want the data they need for it.  Right?"

"Although the probability of the risk is uncertain at this stage, the severity is still high, and there are reasons to believe the probability may be higher than would be wise to ignore.  Are you certain you do not wish to make clear plans to remove yourself as a possible stationary target?"

"Yes, I'm sure.  It's ridiculous.  It'll never happen."

/* Tuesday */

/*

Alley needs to do some things here.  It will probably involve some courier work, possibly including that thing where she drops off bail for someone.

*/ /*

    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?