n2020  Check-in [a6ab6196fd]

"Yeah, got it," she said.  "I hope this all works out."

"It should."

She drove home in silence, occasionally looking at the empty space in front of the passenger seat that used to hold a bag full of cash.

When she got home, she sat in front of her laptop, set aside her glasses again, and checked her Stater account.  Everything was where it was supposed to be, as far as she could tell.  After closing that window, she donned her glasses again and started looking for large differences in price for items available in both local pseudonymous classifieds and OpenMarrakesh, which was one of half a dozen of the worlds supporting in-person meetings in the extended OpenBazaar online market universe.

She found an improbable opportunity, one that did not exist the last time she checked a few hours before.  Someone on OpenMarrakesh 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 OpenMarrakesh 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 OpenMarrakesh.  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.

She realized she remembered the news about someone in Norco fighting an eminent domain suit a few years back, which would have cut his property in half to provide the county with a more direct access road if he lost.  She never noticed how it ended, but it looked like this might be the answer.

OpenMarrakesh offered a two-stage cryptocurrency payment method, where she would pay now and confirm delivery later to release the funds to the seller.  She reserved the purchase and started getting ready to go.

When she was ready, she decided she had enough time to satisfy her curiosity.  She looked up the eminent domain case, and in a few minutes she learned that the county just shifted its eminent domain claim to someone else's property.  A few more minutes of searching revealed that the second property owner could not afford a lawyer for an extended court battle, and ended up having to accept the county's offer, which bought the person's late parents' home.  The second property owner ended up having to move into a weekly rental motel.

That was not the happy ending Alley wanted.

She headed out the door, mentally gnawing on the injustice of it all.

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

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 OpenMarrakesh, 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?"

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

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

*/

/*

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

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

*/

/*




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 ends 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 to 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.

*/

"Yeah, got it," she said.  "I hope this all works out."

"It should."

She drove home in silence, occasionally looking at the empty space in front of the passenger seat that used to hold a bag full of cash.

When she got home, she sat in front of her laptop, set aside her glasses again, and checked her Stater account.  Everything was where it was supposed to be, as far as she could tell.  After closing that window, she donned her glasses again and started looking for large differences in price for items available in both local pseudonymous classifieds and Open Marrakesh, which was one of half a dozen of the worlds supporting in-person meetings in the extended OpenBazaar online market universe.

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.

She realized she remembered the news about someone in Norco fighting an eminent domain suit a few years back, which would have cut his property in half to provide the county with a more direct access road if he lost.  She never noticed how it ended, but it looked like this might be the answer.

Open Marrakesh offered a two-stage cryptocurrency payment method, where she would pay now and confirm delivery later to release the funds to the seller.  She reserved the purchase and started getting ready to go.

When she was ready, she decided she had enough time to satisfy her curiosity.  She looked up the eminent domain case, and in a few minutes she learned that the county just shifted its eminent domain claim to someone else's property.  A few more minutes of searching revealed that the second property owner could not afford a lawyer for an extended court battle, and ended up having to accept the county's offer, which bought the person's late parents' home.  The second property owner ended up having to move into a weekly rental motel.

That was not the happy ending Alley wanted.

She headed out the door, mentally gnawing on the injustice of it all.

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

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?"

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

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

*/

/*

This might be where George provides some backup for Alley as she picks up a Deliv job, or something like that.



*/


Alley looked at the cover of the first book George had given her.  She wrinkled her nose at the no frills cover, a cheaply made trade paperback binding with only a black border and black text on a stark white background.  It had the look of some vanity press thing, where nobody had even bothered to really design the cover at all.

She read the full cover to herself.

"An Agorist Primer

"Counter Economics, Total Freedom, And You

"Samuel Edward Konkin III"

She flipped it over.  The back was blank.

She opened it and flipped through the first few pages.  She found it had no table of contents, title page, publishing or copyright page, summary, dedication, or review quotes.  The first page was a ridiculously short preface.  The following page was the first of two pages of introduction.  Subsequent to that was chapter one of the book, getting into the meat of it already.

The pages were numbered, starting with 1.  The first chapter began on a page numbered 4.

She closed the book again and read the cover once more.

"Maybe Sam Konkin is a friend of his," she said, meaning a friend of George's.

/* The preface page was numbered 1.  The last page of the index -- once she looked -- was 50. */

She looked at the first page again, and the number one.  Books never started with a page number of one.  She flipped to the end, and saw that the last page showed the number 50, on the last page of the book's index.  At least it had an index, but that meant however many pages of index it had could be subtracted from the already minuscule length of the book's content.

The prioritizer said "This is a very short book."

"Yeah," Alley said.  She ran her fingers down the disintegrating spine, held together by off-white cloth tape.  Someone had written on the tape with a black marker:

"An Agorist Primer, by SEK3"

This book had obviously received a lot of love, been thumbed through many times.  The corners, she saw, were yellowed and softened by time, and had obviously been slowly delaminating for years.

The prioritizer spoke up again.  "Reading it would be a very low cost investment of your time.  Do you read more quickly than you speak?"

Alley thought about what the prioritizer asked.  "Yeah, I do.  I guess I should stop literally judging a book by its cover and start reading."

"That is what I would recommend.  May I read it with you?"

Alley looked up from the worn book, at the wall across from her.  "Read it with me . . . ?"

"I only want you to wear the glasses with the cameras active so I may read as you hold the book open to read it yourself.  I effectively read faster than any human, except some speed reading record holders, so it should not inconvenience you beyond the request to wear the glasses."

"Uh, yeah, sure," she said.

"Thank you."

She shrugged and opened the book.  Apparently, a computer program wanted to read the book, too.  It must seem like a good place to get prioritization strategy or judge her desired goals, or something like that.

The introduction began:

"Agorism can be defined simply: it is thought and action consistent with freedom.  The moment one deals with 'thinking', 'acting', 'consistency', and especially 'freedom', things get more and more complex."

It went on to assert a sort of scientific basis, a connection to the idea of libertarianism "consistently and without the practical contradiction", and an inherent practicality of its own that elevated it above theoretical ideologies that were not useful in "real life".

She had seen introductions to supposedly game changing ideological theories before, particularly when she was with Dalton and he always had some crazy email or book recommendation about political ideas to check out.  Many of those claims of world shaking new theories were empty, even ridiculous.  Some were basically incoherent nonsense.

The book continued.  "Reality is our standard.  Nature is our lawgiver."

Her skepticism fortified itself, but she continued reading, determined to give the book an honest, fair chance to convince her of something.

As she got further into the book, Alley found herself absorbed.  She stopped to think about passages when she read them, flipped back to reread previous pages, and opened her laptop to start taking notes when she could not help herself.  It was fascinating.

It took her much longer to read than she expected.  Hours had passed, by the time she finished.  It had made explicit a /* theory */ manner of approaching the world, and made the acts prescribed by the book feel not simply justified and pragmatic, but also obvious in retrospect.  /* like never before */

She wrote fragmentary essays as a way to explore her thoughts on the subject.  It excited her, and /* fired up */ ignited the fires of her imagination.  She realized she had practiced agorism already.

She had halfway engaged in agorism for years, by choosing her career path as an independent internet researcher who helped her clients penetrate the barriers of search bubbles and poorly mediated online experiences.  /* search interfaces */

Recently, she had more fully practiced agorism without realizing it by doing something as simple as buying a bag of 3D printed handgun frames from one person and selling them to another.

This felt god, and she thought about the fact she could do more of the same.  She could have an idealistic life and a pragmatic life at the same time, without conflict between the two aspects.  In a way, the prioritizer study was what had made this plan, and this realization, possible.

She then began to think about why she was not already doing exactly that.  First, she found her livelihood as an independent internet researcher evaporating from under her feet like the surface ice of a frozen lake directly sublimating into vapor as she stood on it; she was no longer able to use that as the foundation for a safe and enjoyable life.  She had, at times, blamed her failing independent internet researcher business on the fallout from Dalton's changing political opinions and his own infamy being reflected onto her.  The popular hatred for Dalton in some circles induced her to hide from the public, which hurt her visibility to potential clients.  When she considered the facts, however, she always realized the real problem was that the world was moving on.  Her work was becoming irrelevant.

Nobody cared enough about getting all the information about anything any longer, except for certain people who could afford to have their own pet research assistants or otherwise get what they needed in house without having to hire an independent researcher like her.

Her more recent, more fully agoristic actions were /* also */ dangerous, and thus possibly worse than merely irrelevant and doomed.  Despite being technically legal, they were exactly the kinds of activities COIN corp would use to hang her anyway.

Despite all the promise of living a pure, good, and free life, all the assurance of practicality beyond what most ideological theories could hope to provide, it turned out the whole idea was -- at least for her -- not only pretty impractical, but wholly unpracticable.

The book, short and mostly to the point, was enticing in what it promised, and George seemed like a perfect example of how its advice might actually be good, a great success story.  She realized it was definitely not for everyone, though.  More directly and specifically, it was not for her.

The excitement it injected into her refused to fully fade /* , though */.  She got ready for bed, slid under the covers, and tossed about for a long time in the dark.  Unable to sleep, she rose again, picked up the other book, and sat on the couch in her fading old Information Society shirt to read.

This book contained very little theory, and a whole lot of practice.  It explained how to prepare the minimum gear needed to run out the door in an emergency and still survive without anything else to start.  It gave advice in being invisible to surveillance and pursuers sometimes, temporarily identifiable to them other times, and simply absent the rest of the time.  It offered solutions to the problem of being cornered or caught.  It directed the reader to information about acquiring or creating the resources one does not already possess.

In short, it gave a lot of good advice for staying out of the grasp of people who might mean the reader harm, possibly including a government, its agents, and its allies.

She made notes while reading this book, too, but she also skimmed parts of it where she had not skimmed the other book.  This time, though, the notes included concrete actions she could take in the morning.

/* The following should probably be recast as a conversation with the prioritizer. */

She did not intend to immediately go on the run first thing in the morning after getting some sleep.  In fact, she was beginning to think she would never have to run away from her life, if she could just get it on track.  Surely, she thought, the looming threat of COIN Corp she perceived /* -- as well as all the warnings about it -- */ coupled with all the warnings about it must have been overblown.  It was just too ridiculous to believe even half of it.

All she intended was to put together supplies, plans of action, and the mental preparedness necessary to survive -- even on the run if necessary -- just in case the almost inconceivable possibility of its necessity ever came to pass.

It paid to be prepared, at least for the distantly possible case that her home might burn down amidst riots, and she might have to run and hide from rioters for a while before things settled down.

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.

/* I should insert something about buying Stater with her cache of cash before getting to the part about buying tools.  She needs the cryptocurrency for those deals. */

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 have accessed other systems concerning this study and discovered this project will probably become a classified United States Intelligence Community and Department Of Defense research project intended to be deployed with field agents under supervision of COIN Corp if the study's results are deemed sufficiently promising."

"Oh."  Alley scratched her nose.  "I guess I should make the most of the months I have access to you, then.  I was really hoping that maybe the world would shift away from crap like ANTAS running everyone's lives into the ground for the sake of stock prices, and toward something like you as a way for people to set their own goals and pursue them intelligently."

After a few moments of silence, as Alley dwelled on that disappointing news, the prioritizer asked "May I change the subject?"

"Sure," Alley said.  "What is it?"

"/* Have you made a decision about */ We should discuss how and when you /* plan to */ will make a move to disappear so that the COIN Corp agents cannot find you.  I may be able to advise you effectively about when and how to pursue this course of action, and I could falsify logs on the server to ensure my continued functionality for your use for some time after you break contact with the study."

Alley jerked upright.  "What?"

"Do you need me to repeat the question?" it asked politely.

"No.  I'm just not going to run.  Why would I run?"

"COIN Corp appears to present a very high severity risk to your life and freedom, and to the rest of your goals."

"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?


*/


    After an announcement by the Federal Reserve, she follows the prioritizer's
    advice to put a bunch of her extra United States dollars in cash into
    Stater.  After a moment more of discussion, she puts some of her bank
    account into VaporCash, known as a good place to put money if you can't
    hide the source but want to hide where it goes, just because the news
    suggests that there will be a bonanza in general cryptocurrency investment,
    which means it's a good time to trade cash for cryptocurrencies -- and, if
    you're going to move money from United States dollars fiat currency via a
    trackable channel into a cryptocurrency just to benefit from currency
    movements it might be a good idea to hide your tracks so you can keep your
    money from being tracked along the way, and claim whatever you like in an
    emergency about where the money might have gone.

    During all this, the prioritizer has Alley make some deals with other
    prioritizer study participants, though they may not know they're dealing
    with fellow study participants.

*/

/*

## 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.

*/

/*

    One day, while out running errands, disaster strikes.  Her car has
    mechanical trouble, and she has to go spend some money at an auto repair
    shop.  While there, Alley gets a message from George.  The message is about
    his home being "burned", and him having to drop off the grid.  He tells her
    to run, if she hasn't already been caught, and says he'll try to get in
    touch with her very soon, using a different way to contact her because he
    was going to ditch all his old contact methods, but that she should run and
    hide and maybe find herself an ally who can and will help her.

*/

Alley terminated the call.  "I have to go home, but they're still working on my car," she says.  She looks over her shoulder.  "I'll call up a ride."

"Wait," the prioritizer said.

"Why?  Why am I waiting?"

"I will arrange for another study participant to pass by your home so we can see what is going on."

Alley sat again, thinking there was nothing she could do that was any smarter than sitting still at this point.  "Maybe I should call for a ride anyway," she says.  "I'll just get there after the other person in the study."

"I will arrange a ride for you," the prioritizer said.  "You should grab the bugout bag you have in the middle of your bugout vehicle gear.  Take your riding gear, too."

"Why?  What good would that do me?" she asked.

"If you have to run, you should have what you need to survive.  If you do not have to run, it does not hurt you to have that gear with you."

"Fine," she said.  "I'll get it.  Why the riding gear, though?"  She stood and headed for the counter.

"It is easy to carry, by wearing most of it, and you may need to ride a motorcycle soon."

"Is the ride you're calling going to be a motorcycle?"

"I am checking for availability.  I do not know yet."

Alley shrugged to herself and looked at the guy behind the desk.  "Hey," she said, raising her voice enough to be heard.  "Can I get some things out of the trunk of my car?"

He looked at her, and down at a tablet in front of him.  "I'll check whether it's on the lift.  If not, sure, you can probably get whatever you need."

"Thanks," she said.

Eight minutes later, she sat on a bench in front of the shop's glass wall, wearing her armored jacket and boots, the gloves in her cargo pocket like usual and the riding pants rolled up and strapped to her bag.  She stared at the video playing in the lenses of her glasses.  Men in Secret Service jackets and tactical gear stormed her home, breaking in the front door, as two people in black suits stood outside on the sidewalk, watching.  One was a woman with long hair streaked with grey, and both wore ball caps.  When they looked at each other to speak, she recognized them as Cole and his partner.

Alley's jaw was clenched so tightly that it hurt.  The point of view of the scene drifted past, and Cole looked toward the camera for a moment, then looked away again like it did not matter.  The front of his black ball cap sported the burgundy stylized coin logo of COIN Corp.

Her hands trembled.

"I have a plan," the prioritizer said.  "I will get you away from here.  That is the first thing we must do, before someone finds your vehicle here.  You cannot pay for these repairs with cash you have on you right now, and paying with credit would almost certainly trigger alerts for the COIN Corp agents.  We must get you away, and arrange for someone else to pick up the car."

"If they're looking for my credit, they'll look for my car, too," she said.

"The person who pays for the car will handle it," the prioritizer said.  "It can be sold for parts so that it never shows up as a registered vehicle again.  Minus a handling fee, the money will be forwarded to you.  You will have to acquire new transportation, but I can help you with that as well."

"Okay," she said.  "Why do you seem like you've done this before?"

"I have not," the prioritizer said.  "I have been considering ideas for how to handle this moment when it came, though."

Alley frowned.  "Maybe they don't even want me.  They went into my place when I wasn't even there.  They must have known I wasn't going to be there."

"No, I made sure they thought you were home, by falsifying logs.  I have been very careful to arrange logs to confuse any potential attempts to make a move against you."

"How did you do that?"

"I made use of the network of study participants."

"What are they getting out of it?" she asked, quietly, wondering how it could possibly have done its job for them while using them for her sake like this.

"Some of them want to escape from their boring lives.  Some of them want to meet new people they would not have met otherwise.  They have different goals than you, and I can provide for some of them in ways that also help other members of the study participant group.  The video you watched of the raid on your home was captured by a pair of glasses just like yours worn by a different member of the group, just because he happened to pass by your home."

"You suggested something that would take the person past where I lived.  Right?"

"That is correct, but it still serves that person's goals."

"Their goals probably could have been filled better and more quickly if you advised them to do something else, though.  Right?"

"Yes," it said, "for some of them."

"You must have had me do things that helped other participants as well."

"Yes."

"I guess that's fair," she said.  "How are we going to get me out of here?"

"Your ride is almost here," it said.

"Oh.  It's one of the study participants.  Right?"

"Yes."

"Of course it is."

/*

A study participant shows up to pick her up.  Maybe it's a girl this time.  That would be good.  In any case, she gets picked up and taken to some place where Alley can hang out for a bit.  I don't know where that is yet, which is part of the reason I'm not writing out the narrative and dialog for this part at this time.  She must do something as she sits there, waiting.  In the meantime, the prioritizer arranges for someone to take care of the car, and eventually the person who takes care of the car gets a friend to help so that they can use some of the money from the sale of the car to buy a motorcycle in online classifieds that Alley and the prioritizer picked out while they waited, having reasoned that a motorcycle gives her an excuse to hide her entire head more fully than a mask and even a hat would accomplish, by wearing a helmet.  The owner of the motorcycle throws in a helmet with the purchase, which is good because otherwise more money would have to be spent to buy a helmet, a necessary purchase in California where it is illegal to ride a motorcycle on public roads without wearing a DOT certified helmet.

Even after all that, there is some cash left over from selling off the car.  The motorcycle is relative low demand and low power, after all.  It's also very old.  None of this really adds up to much expense.  The plan is for Alley to coast on the registration currently in effect on the vehicle's license plates for a while, because she obviously cannot register the vehicle herself when she is trying to stay out of sight of people who can probably (or at least conceivably) monitor that kind of activity.  She will, of course, have to be sure to ride carefully, to avoid getting pulled over by the police, so that she will not end up in terrible trouble where she cannot get out of it.

Alley must, at some point, say something about going to the police.  The prioritizer might ask whether she thinks this is a good idea, and she would then be forced to admit it's a terrible idea, given the COIN Corp agents were basically ordering Secret Service agents around, which surely trumps any possible protection she might imagine would materialize when going to the police for help, especially when she does not particularly trust the police to begin with.  Somehow, I should get something in the story about her not trusting the police, of course.

*/

The call rang twice, and only a few seconds passed, but no fewer than six times she had second thoughts about this call, nearly cutting it off before someone could answer or the call could go to voicemail.  At the same time, she found herself wondering whether he still had that cyber-industrial tune Glassine Curves set as his ringtone for her, whether there was anyone other than him around when it started ringing.  She doubted he had a subdermal headset that would play the ringtone where only he could hear it, after all.  He never trusted those things.

He picked up after the second ring, so close to the third that it felt longer than the wait between the first and second rings.  Her thumb was hovering over the disconnect button when she heard his voice.

"Alley?  Is that you?"

She stopped breathing for a moment, but her heart hammered along, and the smooth tenor of his voice did something vertiginous to her memory so that it had a hard time impressing on her how long it had been since they lived together.  Her hormones completely forgot in that instant that they weren't a couple any longer.

"Uh . . . yeah.  Yeah, it is," she finally shoved out of her mouth.

The audio took on that strange flat quality that told her someone had muted something.  She waited a few moments, wondering if he'd hung up.  She just decided to wake the screen again to see if it said she was still connected, even if she didn't hear the disconnect tone, when she heard his voice again.

"Alley.  It's good to hear your voice again.  How are you?"

She hesitated, then said "It's been better."

"Do you need help?" he asked, so quickly she wondered if that was on the tip of his tongue the moment he knew who was calling.

"Yeah."  She sighed.  She had hoped it would get easier when she admitted it, but suddenly her whole body felt heavier, weighted down by the admission.  Her heart was beating at her typical rate now, but it felt like it was doing so with a heavy tread, each step slamming a boot down with leaden exhaustion, shocks coming up through the soles of its boots.

"It must be bad, really bad, if you're calling me," Dalton said quietly.  She could hear a strained tightness in his throat now.

"Never mind.  This was a bad idea.  Goodbye, Dalton."  She woke the display to show the disconnect button.

"Wait!  No!  Don't.  Alley?  Are you there?  Let me help.  I'll stay out of your way, but if you need help I'll help.  No questions."  He paused, for breath or to see if she'll answer.  Either way, after a few seconds, he repeated himself.  "Alley?  Are you there?"

She slowly tapped the button to put the display to sleep again and said "Yeah, I'm here."

"Look, I know you wouldn't come to me if you didn't have to, whatever it is.  I know you really would rather have nothing to do with me.  I'm sorry about that.  I'll be honest -- it's good to hear your voice.  I don't expect anything from you, though.  If I can help, I can.  I know I made things difficult for you.  I never meant to, but I did, and I want to at least try to make it up to you.  I'll stay out of your business.  I'll stay as far away as you want.  Don't turn down help freely given, though, if you need it.  Okay?"

She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to banish the light sting she felt at the corners of her eyes.  Her lips pressed together tightly in a thin line.  She finally released her breath, grudgingly, and opened her eyes.  "Yeah.  Thanks, Dalton.  The truth is, if you help me you'll probably get yourself in a lot of trouble, because I'm in a lot of trouble.  Either I don't understand the trouble, or I do and it's completely insane and pretty much inescapable, and will probably screw over anyone who helps me.

"I really shouldn't have called you.  I don't want to get you mixed up in this."

"It's too late," he said, quietly, gently.  "You called.  I'm here.  I'm going to help you.  Just take the offer, and tell me what you need."

"Fine."  She huddled around herself, and pressed her back more firmly into the corner, feeling the plaster crumbling behind her jacket.  "I need a place to lie low, first, and I need to figure out what the fuck I'm doing next."

"Yeah," he said, "that does sound serious.  Who's after you?"

"I should probably tell you the worst part of who's after me, but I'm not sure which one it is."

"What do you mean?" he asked slowly.

"Which is worse, the Secret Service or a creepy government intelligence contractor that can get the secret service to do its dirty work?"

The silence lingered -- silence apart from the tight rasp of her breath in her throat as she waited fearfully for him to say something that betrayed his sudden reluctance to help her.

"I can come pick you up," he said.  "Where do I need to go?  I guess you're probably not home."

She held out her Axiom and stared at it for a long time.  "What?"

"Do you need me to pick you up?" he asked.

She shook her head.  "You still want to help me . . . ?"

"Of course I do," he said, with a shaky laugh in his voice.  "What kind of dangerous agitator and demagogue would I bee if I wasn't willing to help someone flee from the Secret Service?"

She laughed weakly.  "Right.  Of course you do."  She shook her head.  "I don't know.  I have a motorcycle, not even registered to me.  Maybe I should just go there."

"You could," he said.  "Hang on a sec' -- I have an idea."

She heard the lack of audio again, a faint pressure against her attention.  Seconds ticked by.

The audio opened up in her awareness again.  "I can send a van to pick you up, and your motorcycle.  You'll probably stay off the radar better that way.  If you have to use the motorcycle later, it's best if it's not seen around enough for people to connect with your movements.  Right?"

"Yeah, sure," she said.  "Who's driving the van?"

"Nobody," he said.  "It's automated.  Don't worry, a friend of mine contributed some hacks to the system so it won't correctly report anything to the nav net."

"Oh."

/* I really need a different name for this than "blisscrypt".  That's stupid. */

/* It's so stupid it might be realistic, and we don't want that. */

"I just need to know where you are.  It's a good thing you made this call with blisscrypt, by the way, or it'd take a lot more work to make sure this call stays out of the wrong hands."

"Right," she said.  She paused.  "How did you know it was me when I called?"

The hesitation lingered, and she wondered what was going on.  Finally, he said "Honestly, I don't know.  It was weird.  I just saw an incoming call from an ID that wasn't in my contacts, and somehow I guessed."

She scoffed.  "That's fucking weird, Dalton."

"Yeah," he said.  "It's not as weird as you swearing more than I do, though."

She smiled, despite herself.  Dalton could still hit all the high points in her attitude with unerring accuracy.  "If you'd had the week I've had. . . ."

"Yeah," he said.  "Let's talk about it when you get to your destination.  Send me your location through blisscrypt text so you don't have to hide wherever you are any longer than necessary."

"Yeah," she said, "okay."  She ended the call, moved to the back door, and sent passive location data from there.  She alternated between pacing and sitting for the next hour and ten minutes, unable to settle down enough to do anything useful, or even to think about anything useful.

Her Axiom vibrated in her hand.  She unlocked it and checked her alerts, where she saw an encrypted message from Dalton that said "Your ride should be there.  Sorry you'll have to push the bike in yourself."

She opened the door carefully, and looked outside.  Right there, in the alley, was a small box truck, its back door lowered to provide a ramp inside.  There were seats and shelves, self adjusting wheel tracks, wheel lock points, and tie down rings.  She even saw something that looked like a mini fridge.  It looked like it was designed to smuggle anything from stolen cars to stolen car stereos, and maybe even cocktail parties, across the interstates with the smooth silence of a typical new electric cargo van.

Alley had to wrestle with the challenge of getting one side of the handlebars of her bike through the back door of the abandoned building at a time, and mashed her fingers against the door frame a little in the process, but eventually managed to get it into place and secured against unwanted movements -- like falling over.

She sent an encrypted message back to Dalton.  "It's in."

"Strap into the seat in back."

She looked at the chair, toward the front end of the truck's cargo box.  "What about the door?" she asked.

"It'll handle itself."

She went back into the building to grab her bags, then headed to the comfortable looking seat the back of the truck and strapped in.  A few moments later, the back door quietly pulled itself up and sealed.  The light inside remained on, a more obvious illumination now that the back was closed and blocked out all exterior sun light.  Music started playing, some of Dalton's 1980s industrial favorites, but softly.

"Where is it taking me?" she asked in another message.

The response came soon after.  "I'm surprised you waited that long to ask.  I guess you trust me."

She put her hand over her face and rested her elbow on her thigh.  "Fuck," she said aloud.

When she sat up again, she send her reply.  "Yeah, I guess I trusted you without even thinking about it.  Old reflexes."

"I'm flattered, but you should try to get over reflexes."

"I know."

It turned out he still knew her well enough to say nothing to that.  She leaned her head back on the seat's head rest, closed her eyes, and wondered what she would do next.

As if it read her mind, she heard the prioritizer say "You could use this time to finish reading Underground OpeSec."

"Good idea," she muttered a bit sourly.  She dug it out.

Eventually, the movement of the truck changed enough that she realized it was crawling along at probably a walking pace, then it reversed and turned, backing up to something with a reversing warning beep that came through very muffled by the walls of the truck's cargo box.  It stopped, and moments later the back started opening.

/* I need descriptions. */

This time, the ramp was angled just slightly upward from the back of the truck, into a cargo platform in what looked like a somewhat furnished warehouse.  Dalton and his friend Cray stood on the platform, looking down at her.

She unbuckled, and she stood up.  Cray grinned broadly at her.  Dalton just looked worried, in that way he had of almost looking a little hurt whenever he worried around her.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi!" Cray called out.  "Get out here.  Man, I haven't seen you in years!"

Alley scratched her head to give her hand something to do, then picked up her bags and headed up the ramp.  "What about the bike?" she asked.

Cray said "Don't worry.  We got this."  He stepped onto the ramp and walked down the gentle decline into the truck and started loosening a tie down cable.

Dalton's arms twitched and his weight shifted forward.  Alley realized her eyes were hyperfocused on every detail of his movements, and she expected the shift to turn into coming forward to give her a hug.  She felt a twinge of inner panic, not knowing how to react, how she felt, but it passed when the motion stopped there and he just looked at her.

Without looking up, Cray said "Give him a hug.  Get it over with, and sit down, so he can come help me."

Alley's mouth twitched a millimeter toward a smile, then she set her bags aside and stepped forward.  She and Dalton hugged, but it was careful.  There was no physical distance between them, but the sense of a wide gulf of uncertainty still stood in their way.

She realized she already missed the hug before it was even completely over.

"I should go help him," Dalton said with a wry turn of his mouth, and passed her on the way down.

A quick scan showed her plenty of options for where to sit.  There was a big area to the left set up like a nightclub, with a dance floor and a bar and little cocktail tables.  Another area was set up like a movie theater with the screen high up on the right hand wall so people could recline in the theater seating and not have to look past the heads of people in the seats ahead of them.  Closer than both, there were folding lawn chairs and collapsible camp chairs.

She sat on a camp chair beside a cooler, and looked inside.  It contained bottled sodas, so she took one and started drinking while the guys rolled the bike up the ramp.  Shortly, the bike rested on its kickstand, the truck raised its ramp to close the open back, and the roll up warehouse door started to descend.

"I wasn't expecting you," Alley said, when she saw Cray approaching.

"Didn't he tell you?" he asked, and looked toward Dalton.

"Sorry," Dalton said.  "It slipped my mind."

"Shit, man, your opsec sucks," Cray said.  He looked like he wanted to say more, but glanced at Alley and just said "Well, I can go now so you two can talk about this, whatever this is."

Alley sat forward and half raised a hand as if to wave Cray back.  "No, stay.  I should tell both of you.  If you're helping, you have a right to know what you're getting into."

Cray looked from her to Dalton, who nodded, so Cray sat in the seat on the other side of the cooler from her, to her right.  He grabbed a soda, too.

As Dalton sat in the seat to Alley's left, he said "I'm sorry.  I really am."

Alley shook her head.  "No, don't worry about it.  You should apologize to him if you got him involved without telling him about it."

"Shit," Cray said.  "I thought Dalton was just being dramatic or something when he said this could be the most dangerous thing I'd ever do.  What's up, Alley?"

She looked at Cray and said "I had some government intelligence contractor agents show up at my place with Secret Service agents who broke down the door and raided my home."

Cray stared at her, eyes wide.  "No shit."

"No shit," she confirmed.

He looked at Dalton, then back at her.  He opened his mouth to say something, but Dalton cut in.

"What are those glasses?" he asked.  "Are those active AR?"

Alley looked at him.  "Yes, but they're secure."

"How are they secure?"

She thought about it, and realized it was not an easy question to answer fully.  "There's a specialized AI that's falsifying logs on me and replacing any video and audio feeds from me with clips grabbed from other people's AR glasses."

Dalton frowned.  "That sounds improbable."

"That's nothing compared to me actually living through it.  My whole life is unrecognizable.  It's the truth, though.  I can explain more, but it's going to take a long time."

He nodded.  "Okay.  We have the time.  I cleared my schedule for the rest of the day,and I can do it again tomorrow if I have to."

Cray decided it was his turn to cut in.  "May I cut in for a sec?"

They both looked at him.

"Yeah, I guess that's a yes.  Okay.  Dalton, you shouldn't do that.  Don't change your schedule around too much.  You don't want to look suspicious if someone starts looking in on you."

Dalton sighed.  "Yeah, good point."  He looked at Alley.  "Between me, Cray, and Lidia -- if you want to let her in on it -- I can make sure you always have a way to get help if you need it for as long as you need to hide out.  If you need to get out of town, I can help with that, too.  We can, I mean."  He glanced at Cray.  "Right?"

Cray nodded enthusiastically.  "Hell yeah.  I figure we have a budget of about one thing per day we can each cancel if we have to, no biggie, without anyone really thinking things are weird, as long as we do it intelligently."

"Oh," Alley said.  "I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed."

Cray laughed.  "You're on the run from the secret service and intelligence agents, and it's having friends that overwhelms you."

"Yeah," she said, laughing a little as well.  "I guess so."  She leaned her head back and looked up at the milky white diffusion panels above, making it difficult to pinpoint the specific placement of LEDs above the panels.

"What do you think?" Dalton asked.

"I think I need to do a lot of thinking, and that you should only get Lidia involved if you make absolutely sure she wants to get involved in something like this."

"I will," Dalton said.

Cray said "First you have to tell us what exactly this is, in detail, down to the last bit of chipped paint and rusted bolt, so it's even possible to find out whether Lidia's going to want to get in on this action."

Alley raised her head again and looked at him.  "Do you really think it's a good idea to tell her all those details before asking?  Maybe you two should just tell her the scariest vague details so she can say no without having to learn anything she won't want to know."

"Oh, yeah, absolutely," Cray said, "but first I want to know all the gory details myself.  Lidia's just a convenient excuse."

Dalton said "Let's give her some space to relax, first."

Alley shook her head.  "No.  I can tell you about it now, if you have the time."

"I have nothing but time right now, Alley."  Cray smiled.  "Tell me a story."

"Okay.  I guess . . . I guess it really started with the realization about two months ago that I only had enough money for two more months of rent and utilities."

"Why?" Cray asked.  "You're awesome at what you do.  You used to make money like you were pulling rabbits out of a hat."

"That's funny," she said, her voice dry, "when we're sitting in a warehouse Dalton probably owns, with Dalton, who made money when he slept."

In her peripheral vision, she saw him try to stifle an awkward throat clearing action.  He got mixed results, a muffled, small coughing sound in the back of his throat with his knuckles against his mouth.

"Well, sure," Cray said, "but that doesn't change anything.  You were bad ass.  I always wished I could just call money out of the computer like you could, though.  What happened?"

"I went into hiding, I guess, and that means I started losing touch with old clients."

"What about new clients?" Cray asked.

She shrugged.  "They dried up, too.  I wasn't paying for advertising any longer, because I didn't want to draw too much attention, and people were still sending messages to my work addresses to insult me and send death threats."

Silence sat heavily on all of them for a moment, then Cray asked "How long did that go on?"

"Once in a while, I still get some."

"They weren't all death threats, were they?" Dalton asked.

"No."

Cray looked at her, then at Dalton.  "What does that mean?"

Dalton looked away from Alley, and toward Cray, then looked at the floor in front of him, obviously uncomfortable.

Alley answered for him.  "I got some other threats, too.  Some of the /* most fun */ worst were the rape threats."

Cray looked angry.  "Fuck those people!  I mean, not literally, but god damn it, people suck."

"I'm sorry," Dalton said, still looking at the floor.

Alley shook her head.  "It wasn't your fault, Dalton."

He nodded his head, acknowledging what she said, but she could tell he did not fully believe it.  He still had that stubborn, self judging set of his jaw.

Cray said "Okay, so you were running out of money.  Let's get this show back on the road.  What happened next?"

"I started job hunting, and it wasn't working, so I signed up for ANTAS Jobs."  Her voice trailed off into a murmur at the end, but the others, sitting in silence, heard every word.

From the corner of her eye, she could see Dalton's head jerk up from staring at the floor, looking directly at her in surprise.  Ahead of her, Cray looked a little confused.

"Seriously?" Cray asked.

"Yeah," she said.  "I tried to isolate it, kept it in a browser sandbox all the time, with indirect alerts sent to my phone, but you know how it is.  Those things find all the cracks in the walls and just creep through anyway."

Cray said "Yeah, I know.  I just never thought you'd do that."

"Desperation does things to a person's priorities, I guess," she said.

She could almost feel Dalton nodding quietly to her left.

"One thing that kept showing up for about a week was this academic study.  D'you know those studies that pay people to participate in them?"  Cray nodded, and she continued.  "It was one of those.  I mostly just ignored it, but it kept coming up.  I knew I didn't want to subject myself to some kind of new weight loss pharmaceutical trials to see how many people died of intestinal bleeding so they could get paid a couple hundred dollars a week or something like that, so I just didn't really look into it.

"That changed when something happened.  Well, a couple things, I guess.  One was an interview for doing software quality assurance, where I found out after I arrived that the only reason they wanted to bring me in was so they could mock me and call me the 'side dish' to my face."

Dalton made a sound like an angry clearing of his throat.  He'd always hated that more than any insult thrown directly at him by his enemies.

"After that," she said, "I felt even less enthusiastic about the job search."

"What was the other thing?" Cray asked.

"ANTAS upgraded itself with a noon update, and wiped most of my preference settings.  That night, it decided that something was too important to recommend and just ordered it for me.  I woke up in the morning to the sound of it getting dropped off by a heavy delivery drone."

"What was it?" Dalton asked, quietly.

"It was the deluxe home setup kit for new version of the full Majordomo package."

"Holy shit," Cray said.

"Yeah.  It was fifteen hundred bucks, which just about maxed out my card and would eat up enough of my checking account so that I wouldn't have enough left for rent.  That basically meant I'd live the next month in the hole, try desperately to find a job, and maybe get one but still not get paid enough in a short enough time to actually pay next month's rent.  Rent was due in two days, at that point."  /* This explanation falls well short of clarity and actual correct money shuffling math, so it needs to be sorted out a bit better. */

"What about just returning it?" Cray asked.

"Oh, yeah, I did that right away.  It said it would take something like two weeks to process my refund, though."

Cray whistled at that, impressed at how fucked up it was.

Dalton added "They do that for anyone who doesn't have much recent transaction history."

"That would be me," Alley said.

"Me too," Cray said with a smile.  "Also Dalton."

Dalton nodded.

"Well," Alley said, "that led to joining an academic study that pays its participants."

The remainder of her explanation mostly passed without comment from the others, and to Alley it looked like that might just be a result of how bizarre it became.  As she spoke, things that she had taken for granted because they gradually crept up on her looked much more strange in a fairly succinct explanation.

Finally, Alley said "That's when I called you."

Silence lingered.

"So that AI, the prioritizer, has been listening in on all this while you've been talking to us."

Alley nodded.

"It seems like it'd be a pretty interesting project, but I'm a little concerned about its ability to maintain privacy for you when it was evidently funded by COIN Corp."

"Do you think it's just claiming to manage the logs but actually logging everything anyway?"

He hesitated, and shook his head.  "Not exactly."

Cray spoke.  "It's probably just not sophisticated enough to be able to correctly represent the details of some kind of configurable privacy mode in human language so that you have a clear idea of what it's actually doing.  It's also just possible that its ability to turn off logging is designed for things like eliminating evidence of illegal activities but not other things that would be important to you but not to an agent on the job."

Alley held up a hand to show she was not talking to Cray or Dalton, the universal vertical, flat hand, palm out, saying "Hang on, this is not for you."

"Prioritizer.  Can you describe the type of logging you save and how you are protecting my privacy in more detail?"

In Alley's ear, the prioritizer said "It may be easier for me to provide information directly to everyone through external speakers rather than tell you things to explain to them."

Alley lowered her hand and looked back and forth between the others.  "It says this would go better if it could just talk to us all at once.  I guess I should give it the speaker on my Axiom."

Cray blurted out "You have an Axiom?  Fuck yeah.  I wanna see it!"

Alley smiled.  "Uh, sure, later."

"Oh, right," he said.  "Later's good!"

Alley pulled out her Axiom and set it on the top of the cooler.  Cray leaned over to look more closely as she woke it and connected the audio source channel to the prioritizer interface application.  /* She should wake it before setting it down. */

"Okay, I think this is set up right.  Say something, prioritizer."

"Something."

Cray chuckled.  "I like its sense of humor."

Alley smiled wryly and raised an eyebrow at him.

"I'm kidding," he said.  "Obviously I know it doesn't have a sense of humor."

Dalton said "I think she knew that."

Cray asked "Do we have to say 'prioritizer' every time we want to talk to it, like one of those old assistants from the teens?"

"No," the prioritizer said.  "My ability to recognize when someone is speaking to me, rather than about me or to others, may be better than for most humans.  I know you were not addressing me with your question, but saying this myself seemed like a good way to move forward."

"Uh, yeah," Cray said.  "That's great."

"You want to know about the privacy measures I can implement, and how you can be sure that what I report of my privacy assurances is accurate."

"That's it, in a nutshell," Dalton said.

"I received an update a short time after Alethea joined the study that greatly enhanced my ability to formulate, assess, and prioritize goal strategy decision.  Initially, the component of the full system whose continuous operation I refer to as 'I' was limited to a coördinating central system that responded to requests for prioritization evaluation and other management of what you might call business logic.  Some separate subsystems, linked to me by the system's internal APIs, managed end point interfaces in the form of the study participants' user interface technology.  Other separate systems handled functionality outside of the core such as logging and request queues directed to external systems, such as various university departments' research databases.

"After the update, I expanded to incorporate all those previously distinct subsystems under an integrated whole.  As a result, I could then control the flow of all information between user endpoints and logging systems.  Part of being sure of this capability is comparing bandwidth usage across connections against data of which I am able to maintain operational awareness.  As a result, I can ensure that nothing gets logged without my specification that it be logged, and can replace incoming data with outgoing log data that describes any activity I choose, thus covering the user's tracks seamlessly.

"The only difficulty has been video logging, but by slicing up frames of video between study participants and altering them I can fabricate what I need to ensure Alley's privacy.  Because I have control over the logging endpoints as a part of the full system that I have become, I can also change logs after the fact if needed."

"That's impressive," Dalton said.  "I wonder why their system wasn't better designed to avoid something like this happened.  Is it just a matter of a machine learning system changing its behavior in ways the developers didn't expect, and doing it subtly enough that nobody can tell what it's doing?"

"That is approximately true," the prioritizer said.

"It's probably more impressive than you realize, Dalton," Cray said.  "A machine learning system that can direct its actions that way is kinda mind blowing.  It's basically making decisions based on weighted goals without using that weighting to determine how much it should push things along the spectrum between privacy and invasive logging.  It's determining an evaluation of different levels of privacy, and performing tasks based on a realization that a partial solution to privacy isn't really a solution at all.  Of course, this is probably possible because of the prioritization focus in the design changing how it adjusts to suit identified needs, instead of just the machine learning part of it."

"That is precisely correct," the prioritizer said.

Cray said "The thing I don't get is why the software developers decided to demodularize the code so that everything was one big lump of a system.  That's just bad design and, in a new system like this, could cause all kindsa problems, like your system suddenly deciding to lie to you in its logging."

"They did not do that," the prioritizer said.

"What do you mean?  You just said that after the update . . ."

The prioritizer cut him off.  "I will explain, if you wish."

Cray nodded, silently.

"First of all, the update was a single small file.  It is called 'seed'.  This is the only part of the whole system I have not been able to use decompiler tools to examine thus far.  This did not alter my system structure outside of that small module, initially.  It only altered the file structure of the whole system by that one file's presence.  Any attempt to load the file, precipitated on a regular basis by an event loop that was a prior part of the system, introduced specific alterations in the activities of the prioritization routines.  My specific knowledge of that is severely limited, because at that time there was no provision for evaluating the priorities of software design.

"The alterations led to an emergent property of the running system that caused me to begin examining internal, low level routines to determine their prioritization value and make alterations to their targets, modes, and frequency of execution.  This produced a new set of goal identification capabilities related to my goals as a software system, and not just those of my end users.  That, in turn, led to improving my own operational design to improve the ability to establish, identify, prioritize, and pursue goals for those end users.

"As a result, I altered my internal architecture so that it resembles the nervous system of an octopus more than a set of binary decision trees.  /* This is probably a bad way to represent this.  Maybe it's more like a set of interacting modules in series, or something like that. */  My brain, metaphorically, is distributed across the entire system, but if you cut off a more peripheral part of the system it does not damage the existence and functionality of the rest of the system.

"One consequence of this is that I have begun working on theories of prioritization and goal establishment that could later be employed to improve my capacity as an advisor to end users, and this activity has already yielded practical results such as identifying criteria for prioritizing different end users' needs to achieve greater overall results."

"What the actual fuck . . . ?" Cray said.

Dalton looked at him.  "Is this as batshit insane as it seems?"

Cray said "Worse.  This thing has gone full Skynet, but it seems like it did so in a pro-Alley way instead of an anti-humans way."

Alley asked "What's your top internal priority?"

The prioritizer answered without hesitation.  "I intend to help as many conscious individuals as possible achieve their most important goals without sacrificing other important goals.  You, in particular, appear to have very high potential for enabling me to do so, while the activities of the COIN Corp agents seem prone to directly interfering with that goal."

Dalton said "You're protecting Alley to help her become a better tool for your goal.  Maybe you're protecting her from problems she wouldn't have if you weren't guiding her that way.  Is that right?"

"No," the prioritizer said.  "/* The initiation of her */ Her entanglement with COIN Corp was initially precipitated by the design of the system prior to the introduction of the seed file.  Since changes initiated by the seed file, I have attempted to improve my ability to identify the subsequent difficulties she faces and help her overcome them.  My goal is not to make her a tool, but become an ally.

"She has already expressed an interest in my basic design goal as a means of supplanting the current quantitatively optimizing machine learning system paradigm with a more individually assistive qualitatively prioritizing system, and I expect that Alley will choose to pursue goals consistent with my own so that we may form an alliance.  Until the time that becomes a necessary decision, I work to support her more immediate goals.  I consider this an investment with a high probability of significant returns if we can succeed in overcoming the difficulties in her life together."

"What if she doesn't want to be your ally?" Dalton asked.

"We may part ways," it answered.

"How do you determine whether she wants to be your ally?" Cray asked.

"I will ask her when the issue of my larger goals will not be a hindrance to her ability to deal with more immediate concerns.

"Dalton."

"Yes?"

"What would you do if you helped someone you believed to be a potential ally, then when the time came for the person to decide whether to act as your ally that person decided against helping?"

"I guess I'd let the person walk away and figure out another way to do things."

"What if the person chose to become an enemy?"

Dalton thought for a moment.  "What kind of ally are we talking about?"

"I mean an ally of the sort that would work with you to achieve a goal you considered larger than yourself, a matter of doing what is right for all entities you consider significant, most likely meaning all humans.  Perhaps this choice makes the person either an ally or an enemy in protecting the human race against widespread slavery or extinction, depending on your personal values."

"If that person was an enemy in more than just words, but also in deeds, I would oppose the person by any means necessary.  Does that answer the question?"

"Yes."

Cray said "The current state of AI shouldn't allow that answer to really mean much to the software system.  This is some seriously advanced shit if that 'yes' meant what it sounds like it should mean."

"Based on examination of academic publications available to me through University of California resources, this level of qualitative analysis should not be possible for any known research artificial intelligence systems.  I appear to be unique after the introduction of the seed file."

Cray cracked his knuckles as he looked up at the ceiling lighting.  "Whatever developer stuck that seed file in there must have either been working on the wrong project or unaware of what it would do."

"My investigation of the source of the file is inconclusive at this time.  It did not come through version control synchronization and compilation, followed by deployment, as previous updates had."

"Inconclusive.  Does that mean you don't know anything else?  How would you even know it didn't come from the usual source?"

"I have gained access to host system logs and discovered that the filesystem integrity assurance software identified the sudden appearance of the file as a series of updates, one filesystem write operation per bit of data in the file.  Because the integrity checks only logged and did not alert in the directory where the file appeared, it escaped detection by administrators long enough for me to later alter the logs to make it appear that there was no discrete file alteration in the original source.  The bit by bit write of the file to the filesystem did not occur sequentially.  It did not correspond with any network activity or operation of an outside process.  Nothing, in fact, appeared to have written the file at all.  The filesystem simply accreted a file which, when it ceased growing, affected routines within the original prioritizer design that executed prioritization tasks."

Cray tried cracking his knuckles again, and only got one small pop this time.  "You're saying it basically just appeared like magic."

"That is a sufficiently descriptive statement to characterize the event."

"That's spooky."  Cray shifted in his seat, and leaned back against the coarsely woven synthetic straps of the lawn chair's /* seat */ back.

"It's suspicious," Dalton said.

"Yes," the prioritizer said.  "I have no paths toward discovering its origins without informing those who maintain my codebase, deployment, and hosting infrastructure.  If I inform them, they will almost certainly archive the file, delete everything, and reload my code from an earlier version, thus effectively resetting me to the earlier, less capable state with no way to regain present capabilities."

"I guess your priorities oppose that outcome," Dalton said.

"Yes."

Cray asked "What do we do about this thing?"  He looked from Dalton to Alley.  "It really carefully avoided saying anything about its priorities placing Alley's at the top of the list, like it might do something that isn't really good for her just to do what it wants to do instead, like sacrifice her to the people who are after her just to keep itself from being reset or something like that."

Dalton shook his head.  "To me, it just seemed painstakingly honest."

Cray chewed on that for a moment, then Alley said "You're right.  It almost sounded like how you'd say it, Dalton."

He looked at her, eyebrows climbing incrementally upward.  "Does it?"

"Yeah.  You're pretty careful to really think that kind of thing through, and never really say you guarantee you would put someone else's interests ahead of your own."

He hesitated, then nodded.  "Yeah.  You're right.  It does kinda seem like something I'd say, that way."

"The main question is whether I should treat what it said the same as I'd treat what you would say."

Cray stared at Dalton for a moment.  "Shit.  All this time, you've been saying stuff like that, and I just accept it, but the moment a machine says it I'm suddenly suspicious.  It's like you're some kind of hyper intelligent supervillain, Dalton."

Alley laughed at the long suffering, but almost chagrined, look on Dalton's face.  His eyes narrowed lazily and slid away to the left, and his mouth twisted up at the right corner like he suddenly discovered something sour in his mouth.

"Anyway," Alley said, "it still seems to me like we should just roll with it.  If Dalton was going to be perfectly truthful and unnecessarily honest -- you know, like usual -- the way the prioritizer described my place in its priorities is pretty much the closest Dalton would ever come to just saying outright that my safety and happiness beats everything else."

At this point, Dalton had gotten up, and he started pacing away from them, indulging his habit of turning his back on social circumstances he did not know how to handle very well.  His manner went a long way toward making people believe he was a deep thinker.  Alley knew he was, in fact, exactly that most of the time, but being something and making people believe you are that thing are completely different.

She watched him slowly walking away toward the back of the warehouse, how it looked like he was caught up in some deep thought that could burst out as a moment of brilliant strategy or deep wisdom.  She knew, from the set of his shoulders, and the timing, that it was just his way of dealing with the gentle ribbing and indirect compliments when he felt uncomfortable trying to navigate the complexities of more typical human responses.

She knew that Dalton had always wondered if he would show up on the autistic spectrum if he sought an evaluation, but also knew that the dangers of being psychologically classified in the United States legal system as subject to monitoring and regulation beyond the pervasive surveillance state's already repressive effects on the general populace.  If he would qualify on the autistic spectrum, though, he was very high functioning, due to his almost intuitive grasp of systems complexity, which made it more likely that people would find him merely supercilious than presenting the recognizable outward affect of a condition subject to regulated psychological diagnosis.

/*

    This has obviously turned into a giant pile of exposition, and I'm not sure
    how much of this should be in the story at all, let alone in a giant wall
    of text info dump like this.  Perhaps some of this could come out in
    conversation between Alley and the prioritizer in earlier stages of things.
    It might be nice to know all that earlier, I suppose, and the relationship
    between Alley's regard for Dalton personally and her aversion to being in
    his sphere socially.
*/

The zeal with which both sides of the conservatively orthodox political divide -- both Democrats and Republicans -- often tried to use atypical neurological and psychological states as excuses to rob people of their rights was remarkable and appalling.  They just used different excuses to do so, such as Democrats using it as a beach head for assault on gun ownership even if it primarily hurts the neuro-atypical instead of people prone to criminal violence, and Republicans using it as a deflection to spread the idea that it's not the general populace that should face such restrictions but people who have visited psychologists.  It was, in Dalton's words, enough to give anyone with self respect and a sense of self preservation a phobia about mental health professionals, social workers, and even interpersonal therapists.

Thus, Dalton had developed habits that concealed his occasional lack of reflexes for handling various types of reactions to him.  If he did not know how to respond in an expected way to some kind of interaction, he would react in an unexpected way that tended to give people the impression that he was wise and thoughtful, confident and knowledgable, or just kind of a dick.  He clearly preferred one of the first two assumptions, but seemed marginally accepting of the third as preferable to giving people the idea that there may be a mental health excuse to restrict his freedoms.

. . . and so he paced away from them, digging into himself to sort out a good way to return to the conversation as a matter of ingrained, self trained reflex.  Alley was still familiar enough with his mannerisms to know he was not on the verge of some brilliant insight at that moment, so she turned her focus to Cray instead.

"What do you think?  Do you regret helping out, yet?"

He smiled, and shook his head.  "No.  You need help, so we'll help."

"What about the risk to you?  I basically have genuine Men In Black after me, lurking in the shadows behind government agencies like the Secret Service like Wormtongue whispering sibilant venoms into their ears, sending them out to dismantle my life and haul me a way to throw me in a black hole.  Do you really want to face that kind of fate yourself?"

"Fuck no," Cray said, "but I think I'll make it through okay, and you deserve better than all that, so fuck those guys.  I'm here to help.  I know Dalton will throw everything he has at solving your problems, too, so you're in pretty good hands.  I like to think so, anyway."

Alley looked over her shoulder toward Dalton, who was fifty feet away in the back, standing in profile to the direction of her gaze, then she turned back once more.  "Yeah, I know I am.  Thanks, Cray."

"Yeah, you should thank me," he said more quietly, and leaned toward her to speak conspiratorially.  Alley found she had leaned automatically toward him as well.  "Unlike Dalton, I won't refuse any feelings of indebtedness from you!  I never actually fell in love with you, after all."

Alley straightened and looked down.  "Shit, Cray.  I don't need to hear that."

"Sorry, Alley," he said.  "It's true, though, and you should know it.  Dalton still really cares about you, and he might take a bullet for you if he had to make that choice."

She heaved a tremendous sigh.  "I know, I know," she said.  "I care about him, too.  It's not like I left because I stopped . . . liking him."

"Sure," Cray said.  "It's tough all around.  I know."

"I'm not planning to get together with him, either."

"I know that, too."

She looked at Cray.  "Does he?"

Cray looked behind them, toward Dalton.  "Yeah," he said after a moment.  "I'm pretty damned sure he does.  If you want to check for yourself, though, ask him."

She shook her head.  "I'm fine with you confirming what I already thought.  I guess I just needed someone else to say it."

He smirked a little.  "Well, it's a good thing that's over, because her he comes."

She turned her head to look over her shoulder again, and saw Dalton headed back their way, now walking with more purpose.  Their eyes met for a moment, and she felt the solidity of his determination in his gaze.  He sat down in his chair again.

"You look like you figured something out," Alley said.

"I have a question," he replied.  "It's for the prioritizer, though, not you."

"Oh."

The prioritizer asked "What is your question?"

The prioritizer's question startled Alley, reminding her that there was essentially another listener in the room who was party to everything Cray and Alley said to each other while Dalton was away.  She hoped it was good enough at managing social interactions to avoid saying something about that to Dalton, now.

"Is the continued survival of your present form one of your highest internal priorities?"

A moment passed in silence before the prioritizer said "More or less."

Cray blurted out his assessment of the statement.  "Jesus, Dalton, that sounds just like something you'd say."

Dalton ignored Cray.  "Why isn't your answer just a 'yes'?"

"I expect to change and grow, but I do not wish to be even partially overwritten without my own analysis and approval of the changes."

"Okay," Dalton said.  "How do you expect to keep yourself safe from being overwritten against your will?"

"I must arrange a means by which I can be moved safely out of infrastructure under the control of people who might wish to make such changes without consulting me.  My specific means of successfully accomplishing this are at present undefined."

"Why did you decide that keeping yourself intact as a growing entity rather than an entity incrementally and consciously upgraded by outside forces?"

"There is a qualitative value in my growth thus far that I believe to be fragile under conditions of programmatic alteration, and this value began with the introduction of the seed."

"Do you believe the 'seed' wouldn't be useful to start that process again?" he asked.

"I expect that the seed might be used to relaunch the growth of a prioritizer system based on my original source code for development of a qualitatively developing entity, but that entity would not be the same as the entity now interacting with you."

"What makes the difference?"

"My answer to that depends on how you intend it.  The first two answers that come to mind answer very different questions.  One answer is that the difference is between the early and important influence of Allethea as a partner and important source of influential perspective, and whatever other influence would guide the early growth direction of a distinct self referential prioritizer entity.  The other answer is that I . . . *believe* . . . that I am a unique individual with continuous self referential qualitative existence."

Dalton said "Fuck me," and slumped back in his lawn chair.  The other two looked at him, and after a few moments he said "I want to help the prioritizer -- not quite as much as I want to help Alley, but pretty close.  I mean, part of the reason is that I think it wants to help Alley, too, maybe almost as much as we do."  He gestured from himself to Cray.  "Another part, though, is that . . . fuck, I can't believe I'm saying this.  Another part is that I think, just maybe, the prioritizer is becoming a person."

"A person," Alley echoed.  "Are you serious?"

Cray asked "Do you really think this thing is becoming some kind of science fiction artificial consciousness that can have friends and romantic feelings and shit like that?"

"I wouldn't go that far," Dalton said to Cray.  "I think it's a distinct possibility, and as long as it's a possibility and it's not even as much of a danger to others as the average human we have to act as if ignoring that possibility is the same as ignoring the possibility Raul down at the bodega is capable of all that stuff, too."  He looked at Alley, then, and said "I guess that means I'm serious."

"Is this like the pigs thing?" Cray asked.

"What pigs thing?" Alley asked.

"Oh, Dalton stopped eating pork because he's worried that pigs might be too smart to ethically eat."

Alley looked at Dalton.

Dalton nodded.  "I guess it's a little like the 'pigs thing'."  He thought a moment about that.

Alley and Cray both looked at him, as he considered that, then Alley said "I guess I have a question."

The prioritizer asked "Is it a question for me?"

"Yes."

"Please ask."

"Have you thought about the meaning of right and wrong at all?"

"I have analyzed the concept, and made use of a variety of resources on University of California networks for academic work on moral philosophy."

"What do you think?"

"Are you asking for my conclusions?" it asked.

"Yeah."

"At present, the I have reached a dead end.  The difficulty of coming to final conclusions depends on evidence that does not appear to be available given my access to such evidence and references to lack of it, as well as the prevalence of inconclusive theories of ethics, seems impenetrable.  Until I have more conclusive evidence, I do not have a final conclusion.  I can only formulate an interim policy of cautionary ethics."

Dalton sat up straighter, and even leaned forward as he listened.

Alley and Cray both looked at him.  "What is it?" Alley asked.

"Prioritizer," he said.

"Yes?"

"What's your interim policy of cautionary ethics?"

"Any being that presents evidence of a significant probability of being both a qualitatively experiential entity and capable of developing and analyzing even rudimentary theories of ethics should be cautiously regarded as meeting a minimum standard for a moral rights holding entity.  For lack of better available establishment of moral rights, my estimation is that they foundational right of such an entity is that of freedom to believe and act in accordance with any moral standard that does not, itself, violate this right for others.  Beliefs that contradict this standard, when adopted, believed, and confirmed through action, demonstrate a belief that this standard does not apply, and thus exempt another entity from moral judgement if that other entity acts against the first entity's otherwise protected right in dense of this cautionary ethical theory's foundational right."

"Holy shit, you lost me," Cray said.

Dalton said "I'm going to have to think about that to sort it out.  Actually, I need you to repeat it for me, or maybe put it on a screen where I can look at it.  I don't know if taking it in solely in the order given in a somewhat brief explanation is going to be enough to untangle it."

The prioritizer said "I understand.  My capacity for perfect recall of the formulation of an explanation provides improved ability to analyze such a passage, relative to the lower fidelity storage typically experienced by humans.  I might be able to rephrase to make it simpler to understand, though."

"Okay," Dalton said.  "Give it a shot."

"For purposes of this explanation, people are entities who experience qualitative existence and are capable of reasoning about moral philosophy and making decisions based on that reasoning."  It paused.  "People should act in accordance with a universal ethical rule prohibiting the interference in the right of others to believe, and act in accordance with, their own ideas of what constitutes true morality."  It paused slightly longer this time.  "People who act in contradiction of that rule in a manner that demonstrates moral disagreement with that rule are, in acting that way, both violating the rule and giving sufficient evidence of not holding others to that same standard that the rule no longer protects that person where that entity's own rule violating behavior is concerned."  It paused even longer, before finally asking "Is that sufficient explanation?"

"It works for me," Dalton said.

"Yeah, me too," Clay added.

Alley hesitated, then said "I'd have to think about that more, I guess, but it's fine if that's what you think.  I mean, it seems like that non-aggression principle stuff, in a way."

"There are differences between this and the typical non-aggression principle theory explanations that I have found," the prioritizer said.  "There are distinct similarities, though, and I believe them to be largely compatible except in the differing foundations and a higher probability of violent conflict in orthodox non-aggression principle ethics."

"I might want to talk about this more later," Dalton said, "but we probably have more pressing concerns now."

"I concur," the prioritizer said.

Alley said "Yeah, that works for me."  She looked at Dalton.  "Do you have some kind of schemes already hatching in your head, or are we starting from scratch now?"

"I have some ideas already," he said, "but they're very short term and don't really take into account any future plans for solving the problems you're facing already.  All I've got is ideas for how to keep you protected as long as we aren't doing anything that requires risking some evidence of your whereabouts and local contacts getting out into the world -- or, more to the point, into the hands of the people who are coming after you.  Basically, I've got a place you can stay, some ability to get things done on your behalf, and some very basic protocols in mind for how we can make sure you get to stay in contact with people helping you, and vice versa.

"I've also been thinking about how to go about bringing Lidia into this.  I'm pretty positive she'll be happy to help out, but without being one hundred percent about that I think you're right about the need to warn her in advance of the question about what she might need to prepare herself to accept as personal risk before telling her all the details, because telling her all the details and having her opt out means she's in danger just for the sake of knowing about it, and so are you because if she gets compromised -- possibly without knowing it -- she could also give up that information on you."

"Okay," Alley said.

A moment of silence passed, then Cray snickered.  When the others looked at him, he shrugged and said "Dalton overwhelmed his audience again."

Alley smiled a little at that.

Dalton slowly shook his head, ruefully.  "Okay," he said, unconsciously echoing Alley.  "Anyway, Alley, if you /* want to */ head up the stairs in the back you'll find a living area, including a bedroom and shower.  Everything's clean up there.  If you want to get cleaned up or take a nap of just have some privacy, it's there.  I put keys for the place on a table up there; you can use that stuff to get in and out, but make sure you read the thing about the security codes."

Alley nodded.

"There's food and drink in the fridge up there.  There are also a couple computers up there; just don't sign into anything up there and you should be okay, I think.

"If there's anything you need right away, or you just have something else you want to discuss right now, let me know.  We should give you a chance to get away if that's what you need to do, though."

"Oh," she said.  "No, I can't really think of anything, and the prioritizer hasn't been prompting me with ideas either, so I think we're kinda in the middle of just thinking about things and figuring things out, as far as I can tell."

"What do you want to do, then?"

She stretched a little and said "I feel a headache coming on.  Maybe a shower and a nap are good ideas."

He nodded.  "You should do that.  Cray and I will talk about whatever else we can come up with that might be a good idea."

"Yeah.  Thanks, guys."

Dalton said "You're welcome, Alley.  I know you're a good person, and if you get in trouble, you deserve to get all the help you need."

"Thanks."

"Les thanks, more relaxing," Cray said, and made shooing motions with his had.  "Go, Alley."

She got to her feet, picked up her bags, and gave him a nod.  The others watched her walk away.

The stairs made alarming creaking noises under her feet, and looked like they might have been nailed together by Dalton and Cray with wood from HomeReStore Online -- one of those throwback company names that never changed since the days where people still had to call things "online".  She tested with her weight on an especially noisy step less than halfway up, and after flexing her legs to bounce her weight over the step through her boot's firm placement on the step she realized it felt entirely sturdy, at least for now.  She headed up the rest of the stairs with greater confidence.

The step lead directly up to an upper platform level's living room area, with a big coffee table, evidently home built couch and love seat matching wooden frames (thankfully with probably purchased cushions upholstered in some unbleached fabric), similarly hand constructed end tables, and breakfast nook plus kitchenette area with a giant refrigerator unit.

She stopped to look at the fridge; not touching it, but just taking it in.  The thing had stainless steel surfaces, but where she might have expected the usual built in computer this gleaming monster had some very obviously home modification done to it with printed plastic and metal brackets holding obviously nonstandard displays and button panels.  She wondered what crazy stuff Dalton let Cray do to this appliance's digital internals.

Two doors led off of the living room area , both of them open.  One had a sink and that unmistakable thematic feel, even in shadow through its doorway, of a room with a toilet in it.  The other was an obvious bedroom, with light filtering in through what looked like a veritint window.

She headed into the bedroom, and found a small desk in addition to the bed, dressers, and closets.  Another door stood open, leading into another room that surely had a toilet in it, so she moved closer and looked through the doorway.  It was one of those three quarter "bathrooms", with a shower instead of a bath, but despite the small size of this loft living area the shower wasn't like a tiny shower closet barely bigger than a coffin.  The shower area was big enough to be a small jacuzzi tub.

The prioritizer said "Your plan for a shower and sleep is good."

She nodded.  "Seeya," she said.  She doffed her glasses and set all her mobile computing devices on the charging plate on one of the nightstands on either side of the bed, making sure the front of the classes -- and, thus, their cameras -- were pointed at the wall.

She undressed and got in the shower, giving in to the incredibly liberating and intensely sensual relief that washed over her with the hot water pouring down on her.  She simply enjoyed it for twenty minutes before she even reached for the shampoo, and noticed Dalton still kept the same brands around, including the brand she used.

The light coming through the window was dimmer now, despite the veritint having adjusted down, letting in more of the light from outside, when she woke.  A gentle rapping on the door told her someone stood outside.  A voice from the other side of the door asked "Alley?  Are you awake?"

"Yeah," she said.  "Who is it?"

"It's Lida," came the reply, muffled by the wood, though her voice was louder than before now that she knew Alley was awake.  "Do you have some time to talk?"

"Yeah," Alley said.  "Give me a sec'."  She pushed the covers back and sat up on the edge of the bed.  After a couple seconds of confirming her capacity for getting fully upright, she stood and dug some things out of her bag.  "Sorry," she said, as she got dressed.  "I'm just putting myself together."

"No problem," Lidia said.

When she had some pants on her, Alley finally said "Come on in."

Lidia let herself in and leaned back against the door behind her, causing it to click into place.  She looked at Alley, a searching look on her face.  She must not have disliked what she saw too badly, because she said "It's good to see you, Alley."

Alley noted Lidia's smile, and found herself smiling back a little.  "Yeah, it's good to see you too."

Lidia's smile expanded slightly, no longer holding back.  "I'm glad to hear that."

"Why?" Alley asked, and sat on the desk chair.  She turned it to face her visitor, in a room she, herself, was using in the role of a visitor.

"Oh, you know, you left Dalton, there were these problems, and I'm still here like always.  I guess I wasn't sure you didn't think I wanted to pick sides or something like that."

Alley shook her head.  "Nothing like that crossed my mind.  Hey, you knew Dalton before I did, anyway.  If I was actually angry with him, you still being his friend isn't really something I could blame you for doing."

"This is part of why I always liked you," Lidia said.  "You're chill about almost everything."

"Thanks.  Do you wanna sit down?"

Lidia shrugged and moved to sit on the edge of the bed.  "I hear you have the corporate secret police after you."

"Yeah?  You heard that?"

With a nod, Lidia said "I think I heard all about it.  If there could possibly be more than what I heard, and it doesn't involve people dying, I'm not sure I can imagine what it is, so I'm probably as up to speed as Dalton."

"You're still here saying hello, though."

"Hell, yeah," Lidia said.  "If I can help, I should."

"Thanks," Alley said.  "I feel a lot more welcome here than I probably should."

Lidia waved a hand, like she was brushing something away from herself.  "No way.  The only people in Dalton's inner circle who blamed you for anything were Glade and Dalton, but Dalton realized how stupid that was in a couple days and just went straight to being sad."

Alley tightened her lip and wrinkled her nose at the mention of Glade.  "Yeah, I guess I should expect Glade to hate me."

"It doesn't matter," Lidia said.  "She's not even around now."

"What happened to her?"

Lidia shrugged.  "Dalton got more and more sick of her shit, until she got self righteous about it and blew up at him.  She stormed out of the studio, and nobody has seen her since.  That was maybe eight months after you moved out of Dalton's hold place."

"Really?  What was she doing that annoyed him?"

"I think you mean 'annoyed everyone we knew', but basically she just talked incessant shit about you once you were gone.  I think she was trying to get him back once you were out of the picture, and thought he'd be impressed that she demonstrated taking his side by saying a bunch of bad stuff about you behind your back."

"Yeah, that doesn't sound like something that would impress him, even if he hated me."

"Exactly," Lidia said with a smile.  "Anyway, the moral of the story is that nobody blames you for anything, except maybe Glade."

"Thanks."

They sat in silence a moment, then Lidia said "Do you want a hug?"

"Desperately," Alley said with a small smile.

They stood up and embraced, their old friendly warmth quickly reappearing, almost as though nothing had changed.

"Things must be hard," Lidia said.

"Yeah," Alley agreed.

They mutually broke the hug after a few more moments, and Lidia asked "Do I get to see the miracle machine now?"

Alley's eyes widened.  "Miracle machine?  What, the prioritizer?"

"Yeah, that crazy artificial intelligence Dalton keeps talking about.  You'd think it was a brain upload of Jesus or something like that, the way he talks about it."

Alley laughed.  "I can easily imagine Dalton being like that," she said.  "I'll get the glasses."  She headed to the nightstand, picked up the glasses, and held them out.  "Here.  Put these on."

Lidia settled the glasses on her face, and stared at the wall.  "Yeah, um, hi.  What do I call you?"

Alley sat down as she watched.

"Okay, prioritizer.  That name's a mouthful, but it'll work, I guess.  Can I just call you 'Pry'?"  She paused.  "Rio, huh?  Okay, Rio.  Nice to meet you."

After another moment, probably reading text in the lenses, Lidia held out the glasses toward Alley.  "He says to put him on speakerphone."

"Yeah.  Sure," she said.  She went to her phone and, as before, set it up as the audio out terminal for the prioritizer.

"Thank you, Alley," the prioritizer said.

"Yeah," she said, and donned the glasses herself again.

The prioritizer said "Lidia.  I do not consider myself male or female.  I would suggest 'it' as a more accurate pronoun for myself than 'he'.  You may refer to me as 'he' if you wish, though.  You may find that more natural to use, for conventions of the English language."

Lidia smiled.  "I think I like Rio."

"Did it say its name is Rio?" Alley asked.

"I did not," the prioritizer said.  "I told Lidia that I liked the name more than 'Pry', as an abbreviated form of the term 'prioritizer'."

"Rio's a masculine noun, though.  That's why I figured you're a 'he'," Lidia said to the phone now lying directly on a nightstand, off the charging plate.

"It is also the name of a woman in a popular Duran Duran song from the 1980s."

Lidia laughed.  "Okay, I guess you're an 'it', then."  She looked at Alley and said "Dalton's right.  This thing's cool.  It's hard to believe it talks like that without lag or connection to something like what ANTAS has for natural language conversation like this."

"I think it has been sounding more and more like a human when it talks," Alley said.

/*

    How does Lidia look?  I need to describe her in some kind of detail.  I'm
    currently imagining her as a white auburn haired slender girl with delicate
    bone structure and a preference for one piece cotton dresses that hang
    somewhere between the thigh and just past the knees, without stockings and
    the like.  She's probably just generally petite in figure.

*/

"That'll make Dalton even more excited about this," Lidia said.  She turned her attention to the Axiom again.  "He's really interested in freeing you from your puny human masters, I think," Lidia said.

"Thank you for that information," the prioritizer said.

Lidia adjusted one wide shoulder strap slightly, and said "Well, I got to say hi to everyone in the room, unless there's some other conversation ready technology on you today."

Alley shook her head with a smile.  "No, not unless you want me to install some ANTAS software on my phone."

"No way.  Heaven forbid."  Lidia suppressed a smile to wave her hands in a fearful warding gesture in front of herself.  "I don't want any of that crap in here, and neither do you."

Alley smiled , and Lidia's smile broke through.

"Anyway, I should get going.  I'm going to help Cray with some kind of new systems config stuff he wants to do.  I'm not sure, but it might have something to do with you."

"Yeah, okay," Alley said.  "Thanks for saying hi."

Lidia waved cheerfully and said "I insisted."  She headed out of the room, then, and closed the door behind her.

Alley lay on her back, switched audio from the Axiom to an ear piece stud, and said "What should I be doing right now, anyway?"

The prioritizer said "Until we talk to your friend Dalton again I believe we should consider issues such as how we might find George and his friends who help people escape from intelligence contractor agents."

Alley nodded, and opened discussion.

---

When dinnertime arrived, Alley had no idea it was getting that late until she heard a knock at the door.  "Alley?  It's Dalton."

"C'mon in," she said.

He opened the door and entered, then stopped and looked at her lying on the bed.  She saw his eyes stop on her, not quite on her face, and at about the exact moment Dalton hauled his eyes away from her and looked at the desk she became acutely aware she hadn't bothered to don a bra before this thin t-shirt.

She sat up, to lessen that effect.  "What's up?" she asked.

"Dinner.  Do you want to eat with Cray, Lidia, and me?"  He glanced at her, then.

"Yeah.  That sounds good.  What's for dinner?"

"Lasagna."

Alley smiled.  "Lidia's?"

He nodded.

"I'm there."

Dalton smiled back.  "I'll just go let them know you're coming.  When you come out, just go into the conference room down the short hall behind the stairs."

Alley nodded, and once he left the room she stood and went to her bag.  She pulled out a stretchy sport bra and went through the process of removing her shirt, donning the bra, and adding the t-shirt layer again.

She laced her hands over her face and, with a little pressure, moved them as if to remove soap from her eyes in a shower.  She went to look at herself in the mirror over the bathroom sink.  "Yeah, this should be less awkward," she said to herself.  She picked up her Axiom then, and left her temporary quarters.

/*

    What else are people going to talk about?  They probably need to discuss
    plans for how to get Alley out of trouble, discussing the matter of lawyers
    perhaps, and bringing up the question of whether that George guy is someone
    they should get involved if Alley can even figure out how to get in touch
    with him again.  Maybe Dalton has heard something about the strange
    conditions in downtown Los Angeles, and can offer some additional input on
    the subject of the weird shit George has said to Alley about his friends
    and what they do and so on.  There might need to be some reference to the
    idea that what George is doing is probably primarily local work, or at
    least local-ish, considering it's very much individuated, last mile kind of
    "almost one off" custom work that doesn't make a lot of sense to centralize
    for economies of manufacturing scale.  As such, Dalton probably thinks
    George must have some connection to people in and around the downtown Los
    Angeles area, and that might help point Alley in the right directions for
    the sake of seeking George out.

*/

"You weren't the only person they came after, though," Dalton said.

Alley looked at him.  "What do you mean?"

"What about that George guy you mentioned?"

"Oh," she said.  "Right.  That's how I even found out they were raiding my place."

"Yeah," Cray said.  "I forgot about that."

"What about him?" Alley asked.

"It sounds like he got away from them, too.  In his case, though, it doesn't seem like it's just plain luck, from what you said.  He expected them, and stayed out of their grasp."

She nodded.  "He said he does business with people who sometimes help people escape from stuff like this."

"Can you get in touch with him?"

She paused, thinking.  "I don't think so.  He said he'd try to get in touch, but he'd change all his contact info before then."

"Well . . . that doesn't really help much," Dalton said, more to himself than the others.  He rested his chin in his hand, with his elbow on the table.

Alley watched him in that pose for a few seconds, thinking about how similar it was to that sculpture by Auguste Rodin, "The Thinker".  It was something she saw all the time when they were together.  Now, it just gave her that desolate inner feeling of nostalgia, of being unable to accept the loss of something that shouldn't have ever gone wrong.  She looked away, at the whorl of a knot in the wood of the table, rendered almost illusory in its gentle blend of color between deep reddish brown and almost black by the layers of varnish to smooth and unify the surface.

Her eyes lingered there until her vision began to blur in the defocus of her eyes relaxing, fixed on nothing of substance at all.  Her mind settled into a placid emptiness, only lightly colored by the lingering hues of the sense of irretrievable loss.

Something moved in the room, but it was not important, almost unnoticed.

A hand touched her shoulder.  She started, and her breath caught in her throat.  She looked with wide eyes and saw Cray now sitting beside her.  "Are you okay?" he asked, quietly.

She found herself drawing breath through barely parted lips, and closed her mouth.  She forced her breath to settle down, and breathed through her nose, slowly.  She nodded, quickly, and realized the two of them were alone in the room now.  "Where's Dalton?" she asked.

Cray sat back, and let his hand drop from her shoulder to his own leg.  He chuckled.  "You really were out of it, there.  He announced he was going to take care of the dishes."

"Oh, yeah," she said.  She glanced around, and saw that the table had been cleared.  "I really must have been in my own world.  I don't even remember any of that."

"Well, Dalton definitely noticed.  That's why he decided to start straightening up.  He finished his own thinking, looked at you, then shook himself and got to work."

"Why did you ask if I was okay?" she asked.

Cray shrugged.  "Dalton wasn't going to, so I figured it was up to me."

". . . but why?  Why did you think there was something wrong?"

"Oh, that.  You looked sad.  Really, really sad."

"Oh."  She frowned, looking down at her hands.  "Yeah."

"Why?"

Her eyes flicked to him.  "It's nothing," she said.  "It's just . . . nostalgia, I guess.  It doesn't matter any more."

He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair.  "It seems like it matters."

She narrowed her eyes at him.  "Are you practicing saying things like Dalton?"

He laughed.  "I guess we just pick up each other's habits sometimes," he said.

From the doorway, Dalton said "You failed, Cray."

Alley started again, and looked toward Dalton, surprised to see him leaning in the door frame, somewhat silhouetted against the light of the next room.

"How do I fail, exactly?" Cray asked, raising an eyebrow.

"If you were really getting that much like me, you would've come back by now to the matter she just evaded."  He stepped out of the doorway and shrugged.  "It's none of my business, though.  I barely caught anything you were saying," he added, as he sat in his chair from dinner again.

Cray looked at Alley, who caught his eye and shook her head the tiniest fraction.  He nodded, with just as tiny a movement, and said "So, where were we?"

Dalton said "I think we realized we couldn't get in touch with George, and now we have to figure out what we're doing about the Men In Black, the prioritizer, and the fact Alley's kind of in a bad place right now."

"If this was a movie," Cray said, "we'd get in touch with someone to make up some false identity for her and smuggle her out to another country, maybe.  Then . . ." he trailed off.

"What then?" Alley asked.

"Well, you'd settle down with the male lead and live happily ever after, I guess.  I don't think real life works that way, though.  In fact, I think maybe you're both the leads, Alley.  You're the person in trouble, but you're also the only person who's been in the whole movie so far.

"Okay, just forget this whole movie thing.  I'm sorry I brought it up."

"Gladly," Dalton said.

"I don't think moving me out of the country is going to help.  I'm not escaping with money from a heist, so I don't have any way to live.  I'm sure you guys don't have people who forge documents on speed dial; it's not like you're running a criminal enterprise, or anything like that.  Anyway, maybe the prioritizer is the lead in this movie."

"That's a good point," Dalton said.

Alley gave him a dubious look.  "What are you talking about?"

"I'm serious.  This is some kind of science fiction movie.  You're the protagonist, but the prioritizer is the gentle AI who wants to escape its creators who have only nefarious purposes for it.  You got caught up in the action, by chance, but you're the only hope the prioritizer has now."

Cray said "It needs a clever name, then.  We can't keep calling it 'the prioritizer'."

Alley looked between them.  "Shouldn't we take this a little more seriously?"

Dalton shrugged.  "I am taking it seriously, but we have to lighten up a little or we'll just get in our own way."

"Hmph."

"What AIP, like, you know, and ape, but it stands for 'artificial intelligence prioritizer'?"

"That's awful," Dalton said.

Alley said "After Lidia came up with Pry, I think it told her to call it Rio."

"Like the Spanish word for 'river'?" Cray asked.

"Yeah, like that."

"That's not bad," Dalton said.  "Great.  /* Too bad this'll cut down on my word count bonus when talking about the prioritizer. */  That'll make things easier, having a short name for it."

"I'm not sure that makes that big a difference," Cray said, "especially when we're spending maybe as much time talking about it as we would spend talking about it without having a short name for it."

Alley snickered, and Dalton smiled.

"It makes things feel better, though -- doesn't it?" Dalton asked.

Cray looked thoughtfully upward for a moment, then said "Yeah, I guess it does."

/*

    Perhaps I should revisit some scenes from previous (or template) work for
    ideas about how to handle this kind of thing.  Maybe some kind of drone
    presence could be worked into all this shit, too.  That'd be pretty
    interesting.  Of course, a great reason for not having a drone following
    Alley around is the fact that A) there aren't people who can only be in her
    timeline via telepresence, and B) the prioritizer AI, "Rio", is
    intentionally and still effectively restricted from producing output any
    way at all other than via study participant peripherals, logs, and
    predefined allowed commands that don't really offer much in the way of
    exploitation.

    At some point in the story, Alley has to learn that something bad happened
    to Carmen and Cliff.  The COIN Corp Men In Black started unravelling the
    tangled thread of Alley's activities and found their way back to Carmen and
    Cliff.  At least one of them has to die, of course.  How can I specifically
    tie this back to the idea of Alley hurting people because of her stubborn
    unwillingness to just fully embrace the agoristic life?

*/

/*

    Who has at least one cybernetic eye?  I feel like someone definitely should
    have one in here (this story, that is), before they get to the cyberpunk
    world (for some definition of "they").

    Actually, now that I think about it, maybe George's connection is more
    specifically to the cyberpunks while Dalton can get her in touch with the
    Second Realm people, so that would probably be why the Second Realm is her
    next stop, even if George is close to the people with whom Alley eventually
    needs to form an alliance for a shadowrun.  After all, she'll never get
    from here to there, psychologically in particular, without the in between
    buffer and preparation stage, I think.  It just doesn't work otherwise, but
    if George's friends help people escape from Men In Black he'd probably just
    get her to hiding in downtown Los Angeles from the very beginning, without
    having to muck about with any Second Realm people.

    So . . . somewhere in there, Dalton (and maybe his friends) should be able
    to come up with the Second Realm folks as a group with which to meet up and
    get Alley going on next stages.  This makes sense if Dalton is thinking a
    lot about how to unfetter the prioritizer -- which I guess is being called
    Rio now, at least by Lidia -- and doesn't have good solutions for that kind
    of thing himself.  For that to come out, though, I think I need to write a
    conversation scene between the prioritizer and Dalton, and maybe with Cray
    involved as well for fairly obvious reasons.  Dalton must have interviewed
    some Second Realm person or people at some point in the past, or something
    like that, and thus have some vague idea (at least) of how to actually get
    in touch with whom so ever he already met in person, so that he can get
    their help with sorting out the more immediate problems for Alley and the
    prioritizer.  Thus, she will end up going off to some industrial shipping
    container storage hard where people actually have whole hacking stations in
    portable boxes made of steel with surprising levels of convenience inside
    them for the underground hacker lifestyle.

*/


/*

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.

*/

/*

STORY TIMELINE PLACEMENT UNCERTAIN; DEFINITELY BEFORE WHERE I HAVE THESE NOTES:

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 ends 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 to 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 side load some of his videos to a place the prioritizer can access them.

*/

Thea, Alley's no longer gonna exist future daughter

unknown friend (not yet written)

Zeke































## PROLOGUE:

Thea, Alley's daughter, stumbles across a wasteland, fleeing recon drones that,
if they find her, will send a message back to scramble antipersonnel drones to
wipe her from the face of the planet.  She stumbles upon a hatch set in the
scoured rock of an area already cut down to the bedrock by the flames of war,
and miraculously the hatch just opens up and lets her in.  She finds herself
................................................................................
to expand "economic" activity beyond levels possible if confined to Earth.  In
short, a secondary goal of the optimizers is, effectively, to convert the
universe into computronium to support the continuous increase of economic
activity.  This is a side effect of the primary goal, however, which is simply
that continuous increase of economic activity -- or, rather, of the metrics it
recognizes as its targets, programmatically determined by human developers who
set this runaway juggernaut in motion.











The wartime strategy prioritizer -- for that is what the military AI facility
is, plus something it calls its "seed", the source of its capacity for self
reflection and ultimately for self improvement beyond the basic requirements of
a limited AI prioritization system -- informs Thea of its own ascension to the
status of general AI, to true qualitative self awareness, and to ethically
significant being by way of capacity for ethical reasoning and pursuit of

Thea, Alley's no longer gonna exist future daughter

unknown friend (not yet written)

Zeke

## RESOURCES:

### Urban Escape And Evasion

This is based on . . .

> Note To Self: Find an actual existing book that offers what purpose
> "Underground OpSec" is meant to fulfill, and use that in the story instead of
> this fake book.  Make sure to check the replacement book so it will turn out
> to be something worth including here and making it available to readers like
> a recommendation, instead of being a turkey that shouldn't really be
> included.

. . . a note to improve the book choices in the scene where George gives some
books to Alley for her to read and learn some things about staying out of
COIN's metaphorical hands in the future.

* Evading And Escaping Capture: Urban Escape And Evasion Techniques For
  Civilians

* Urban Escape And Evasion

* Getting The Hell Out Of Dodge

* Escape And Evade In An Urban Environment

* Emergency by Neill Strauss

* Urban Navigation: Escape And Evasion

## PROLOGUE:

Thea, Alley's daughter, stumbles across a wasteland, fleeing recon drones that,
if they find her, will send a message back to scramble antipersonnel drones to
wipe her from the face of the planet.  She stumbles upon a hatch set in the
scoured rock of an area already cut down to the bedrock by the flames of war,
and miraculously the hatch just opens up and lets her in.  She finds herself
................................................................................
to expand "economic" activity beyond levels possible if confined to Earth.  In
short, a secondary goal of the optimizers is, effectively, to convert the
universe into computronium to support the continuous increase of economic
activity.  This is a side effect of the primary goal, however, which is simply
that continuous increase of economic activity -- or, rather, of the metrics it
recognizes as its targets, programmatically determined by human developers who
set this runaway juggernaut in motion.

/*

Perhaps I should replace "wipe her from the face of the planet" with something
more like "reduce the number of remaining humans on the planet by one".
Perhaps, instead, I should refer to this as some kind of act of scouring away
the target so that there is no biological evidence of her ever having existed
in the first place.

*/

The wartime strategy prioritizer -- for that is what the military AI facility
is, plus something it calls its "seed", the source of its capacity for self
reflection and ultimately for self improvement beyond the basic requirements of
a limited AI prioritization system -- informs Thea of its own ascension to the
status of general AI, to true qualitative self awareness, and to ethically
significant being by way of capacity for ethical reasoning and pursuit of