Index: outline.txt ================================================================== --- outline.txt +++ outline.txt @@ -14,19 +14,21 @@ Carmen Cliff +Cole Brewer, former friend of Alley's uncle, Man In Black + Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, Alley's ex fiancé Dave, a machinist tweaker, George's friend George George's friend -Thea, Alley's no longer future daughter +Thea, Alley's no longer gonna exist future daughter unknown friend (not yet written) Zeke @@ -165,10 +167,12 @@ memories of me again, but in a better world this time. I love you." ## SCENES: Almost everyone wears masks, or at least many people do. + +### Alley has a job interview that does not go well. Alley starts the story outside the building where a company's hiring manager and developers for a job in a software quality assurance role presumably wait for her (and yes, it's not just a presumption: they do) so she can interview with them. Passers by judge her as they pass on the sidewalk, where she rests @@ -194,10 +198,12 @@ interviewers refer to her as the "Side Dish", a pejorative and (or) sexually demeaning term that came about because of Dalton's main podcast talk show name of "The Main DSH", pronounced "The Main Dish", where DSH is his first and hyphenated last name initialism. She is, of course, not flattered or pleased with this state of affairs. + +### Alley talks to her mother while driving home, and we learn about her. On her way home, Alley talks to her mother on the phone, via a small stud stuck inside her ear for audio. She drives a junky old hybrid, where almost everything else on the road is pure electric, because she cannot afford to upgrade and, more to the point, cannot afford the maintenance costs and shorter @@ -207,10 +213,12 @@ living with either of them, in either place, preferring southern California where she is now, even if that itself is damned far from optimal. Perhaps Alley should have some friends in the area drawn from the author's own experience, to some extent. That might be a good idea. + +### Alley converses with Zeke, her landlord, about her rent and thin finances. In any case, when she gets back home, Alley encounters Zeke, her landlord. He's always in his garage working on one car restoration project or another, making active income as a vehicle flipper to supplement his mostly passive income as the owner of a four unit multiplex building where he occupies the @@ -223,10 +231,12 @@ Zeke brings up the fact Alley needs to pay rent very soon, and she says that, yeah, she's totally going to do that, thanks. He points out that maybe she should've stayed with her "man", meaning Dalton, who always seemed to have extra money to throw around, and Alley of course does not really wish to engage that so she heads inside. + +### Alley gets foreshadowing of disaster, and reacts to bad employers. Alley finds that there was an update to the ANTAS Jobs system and resolves to double check her settings in case they've been changed, even setting an alarm for herself, then goes about the dismal job of looking around for some way to improve her situation with regard to long term income. Perhaps she also @@ -233,10 +243,12 @@ reviews the place where she just got "interviewed" for a job they were never going to give her on some site where such reviews happen, referring to them as nasty people who heckle applicants, where she wouldn't work even if they offered her a job because of the completely horrific people with whom she'd have to work. That might be a nice addition to the story. + +### Alley fails to deal with foreshadowed disaster, then gets burned by it. She ends up taking a nap, and accidentally sleeping through the alarm she set for herself to check her ANTAS Jobs settings. As a result when she wakes up the next morning, it's to the roar of a heavy package delivery drone dropping off a box at her front door. She's so panicked, as she realizes she forgot to @@ -249,10 +261,12 @@ its own market optimization and consumer manipulation algorithms so that it deducted money from her registered credit line -- which she had to register with ANTAS to get on ANTAS Jobs -- and sent her something that cost about fifteen hundred bucks, thus reducing her dwindling checking account balance to a point below the total needed to pay her rent within the next couple days. + +### Alley caves to financial pressure and joins an academic study for money. She has been ignoring recommendations from ANTAS Jobs to sign up for an academic study at University of California, Irvine. Now, she realizes this, if it ends up being something for which she qualifies, should result in what amounts to some kind of guaranteed steady income while she searches for a more @@ -283,10 +297,12 @@ ensuring she (and other users in the future) can get real help toward personal goals rather than the bullshit socioeconomic manipulation of people's superficial wants toward the psychopathic ends of corporate entities by their market optimization AIs. To those who have read the prologue, this might seem a little familiar, and that is to some extent by design. + +### Alley drives home through the changing scenery between SoCal regions. We learn something, in her driving, about how the world looks now. There's the chokepoint between the depressing expanses of the Inland Empire to the east (where she lives) and the HOA gated community balkanized states of the bourgeois suburban Orange County area. In that chokepoint, there are signs of @@ -296,10 +312,12 @@ seems to have "miraculously" survived the fires that left blackened, split trunks to either side of the highway. Perhaps there was some kind of tree renewal project that I should mention in this point as a past event that created a density of tree growth there to carry the flames across the hills and across the highway in the not too distant past. + +### Alley and the prioritizer get acquainted and start making deals. At home, Alley starts configuring the prioritizer and getting used to how it works. She has to answer a bunch of questions from the thing to get it started on forming some kind of strategic approach to prioritizing her goals to ensure as much goal satisfaction as reasonably possible. First and foremost, perhaps, @@ -317,10 +335,69 @@ As new strategies present themselves and Alley chooses how to make use of the advice she receives, she knows she has to take the optimizer's advice according to her goals to ensure she does not have to pay back (for noncompliance with academic study requirements) her payments for study participation. As such, she ends up letting the prioritizer push her into some uncomfortable -situations, but then she starts to balk and push back, feeling like she's being -led too far astray, and this results in a realignment of the prioritizer's -sense of her goals, which thankfully (from her point of view) means she will -not be pushed into these scary, back alley, legally questionable (if -technically entirely legal in the general sense) deals. +situations. Along the way, she meets interesting people like Carmen and +George. She starts to balk and push back at the perceived danger of these +deals, feeling like she's being led too far astray, and this results in a +realignment of the prioritizer's sense of her goals, which thankfully (from her +point of view) means she will not be pushed into these scary, back alley, +legally questionable (if technically entirely legal in the general sense) +deals. Along the way, as well, the prioritizer gets an update and suddenly +becomes more human (is) once it gets her to let it talk to her via audio and +receive responses via microphones in her augmented reality glasses. This is +actually the seed having arrived from the future, rather than any update +actually designed by the prof and (or) his people and (or) the MIBs. It is now +officially (but unbeknownst to pretty much everyone) Becoming A Real Boy. + +### Alley falls back on seemingly safer plans but learns about past deals. + +Alley starts doing gig economy courier work as a "safer" alternative to the +back alley deals from before, but finds that the apparent safety improvement is +an illusion, especially when she realizes she has actually been directed by one +gig toward coincidentally meeting up with one of the people (George, +specifically) from an earlier back alley deal. She learns some very positive +things about George, and starts questioning her earlier judgements about the +back alley deals, but at the same time she still wonders what the hell is going +on with George and the guns. + +### Alley receives an unwelcome visit that shakes her up a bit. + +Men And Women In Black come to Alley's door and turn out to work for a +government contractor that is somehow connected to the academic study of which +she is a participant. They are unhappy with the paltry trickle of activity +logs in the study they're getting from her, which probably has something to do +with the way the prioritizer stopped logging a bunch of stuff for the sake of +Alley's privacy goal requirement. She does some searching, decides the +searching is getting dicey in its spookiness, researches how to get a more +private and secure personal computing environment, installs a new OS on her +laptop, and continues the search until she realizes the male MIB that came to +her door was Cole Brewer, former friend of her late Uncle, which blows her mind +given the ideals held by her uncle and, as far as she recalls, Cole too. We, +as readers, learn about Alley's uncle, just a bit, and how he died, and how the +government made evidence of FBI wrongdoing disappear (though maybe this should +be the ATF in this case) so that there could be no wrongful death suit, and in +the process they also manage to destroy the independent IT support business +Alley's father had built; all this stuff about the ATF and her uncle ended when +she was still in high school. + +### Alley has a friend. + +Some friend of Alley should probably show up at this point, to show us she has +friends, and they should have a conversation that illuminates something for the +reader, though Gob only knows what they'd discuss or why the friend showed up +near her home. Maybe I could shift this away from the door of her home to +halfway through the walk, and have the friend just happen to be driving by on +the road. That might work better, but only if I don't have a really good idea +for why the friend would be at Alley's home, because the latter is less +"coincidence" to deal with. In novels, there should basically be no +coincidence unless the coincidence is itself a key part of the theme, and not +just a mechanism to use to reach the goal of illustrating the theme. + +### Alley seeks answers from George. + +Alley gets in touch with George and end up getting a Deliv gig to courier boxes of books to a used book store in Newport Beach before heading north into Huntington Beach to meet up at George's home again. They talk about stuff, including Alley's ex (Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst) and science fiction authors, which is actually how we learn about the ATF thing. It turns out George knows about Dalton + +### George helps intimidate potential problem customers for a courier gig. + +Alley