Lisp Time

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where the last post (Mo Leaves) left off.]

Lisp was unaware of Mo's passing, but not blissfully so.  Instead, he was unaware of it while cleaning dishes after each meal, while mucking out the sheep pen and while mopping the kitchen floor.  Mostly, he was unaware of her death while not being on line, a state that avoided most of the sensations that Lisp had learned to associate with bliss.

Growing up had not been easy for young(er) August/Lisp.  The youngest of five brothers, his parents had not had much time for him aside from the basics of food, shelter, cleanliness and off to school.  Most of what he had learned about life and dealing with the rest of humanity had come from his older brothers.  These had not been easy, let-me-share-my-wisdom-with-you style lessons.  They had been you-are-the-youngest-so-you-will-do-as-I-say kinds of lessons.  His inability to properly pronounce the ess phoneme had not helped this.

His four older siblings had fought each other more about who got to boss August around than for any other reason, at least to August's recollection.  They had finally instituted a schedule, taped to the inside of the toilet tank lid in their shared bathroom, which detailed who got priority to make August do their chores.  Their parents may or may not have been oblivious to this.  He had tried getting them to arbitrate a few times, early on, using the "it's not fair!" line of reasoning.  Of course, they had stepped in and enforced the rules as stated.  Then that night, when everyone was supposed to be asleep, August had been assaulted by the two brothers who shared a room with him.  They had been paid off by the brother whose chores Lisp had not done.  This had been August's first lesson in escalation tactics.  He had concluded that parental involvement needed to be kept as a last-resort.

Thus, he had endured.  August used his enforced, doing-all-the-chores time to retreat, not jut into his own head, but beyond it.  He had gone so far as to recognize three environments in his life: the environment in his head that encompassed his own thoughts and could not be violated by anyone else, the physical environment that needed to be endured, and the virtual environment that soared so far beyond the first two.

He would clean the two kids' bedrooms, trashed by his older brothers, while trying to understand the finer points of international diplomacy[1].  He would clean toilets to advanced number theory and mow the lawn to astrophysics.  Everything was so interesting, at least everything outside of his own narrow physical realm.

Of course, to do all of that, he needed to be connected.  Age seven was too young to get a PTN installed, but he could use the older, less robust VR glasses.  His parents even had a pair lying around that they no longer used.  As long as he was on the house Wi-Fi, he did not even need a connection subscription.  August, becoming-Lisp, was good to go.

But like many before him, August learned the trap of technology: there's always something more coming.  Something better.  Something that will increase the flood of bits into his grey matter either through increased processing or better sensory interface.  From an addiction to the data, it was a short leap for him to become addicted to the technology itself.  This had lead from the VR glasses to him forging a parental consent form for a PTN two years before he was legally allowed to get one on his own.  And then, finally, embezzling money from his bothers' various investment accounts[2] for the implants and haircut.

Which brought him to the KC2 and the slightly uneven care of Ms. Carmichael.  Lisp knew that he should not complain about his fate.  He had brought it on himself by being too impatient, but being too overt in his need for a better setup.  And Ms. Carmichael was really very nice about the whole thing.  She, having been put in this position by the powers-that-be at the KC2, could have taken out her frustrations on August.  Instead, she had done her best to help him survive in the enforced physicality of the commune world.  Lessons that he had ignored outside of the academic treatments he had learned on line.

For one, here Lisp was forced to pay attention to his body.  At home, eating and cleaning and, to a lesser degree, eliminating were all chores that got in the way of his learning.  He had reduced eating to a slurry shake drink called 'Exception: Meal,' one that was supposed to contain everything that his body needed.  Except taste.  At the KC2, he had learned that smelling, tasting and chewing traditional foodstuffs was pleasurable.  It was worth the time.  The ritualization and tribal aspects of 'meal time', on the other hand, continued annoy his sense of efficiency.

The exercise had also helped.  While doing his brothers' chores had provided Lisp with a certain amount of daily activity, working on the KC2 farm had increased this by at least one order of magnitude.  The result was that his muscles felt stronger, more capable.  His skin was less pale and flaccid.  He could breathe in deeper lung fulls of air and deal with changes in his environment more capably.  He slept better.

All of these things were nice, but they did not replace the mental exercise that he had been self-administering.  Lisp had trouble capturing the zen-like focus that all of the other commune inhabitants claimed took them over when they were doing long-term repetitive tasks.  Instead, he was bored.  Really bored.  Extremely bored.  Sooooooooo bored.

Until Mo had shown up and then Erics.  Now Lisp had someone to talk to.  Really talk to.  Not with the imperfect instrument that was his mouth, but with the full capacity of his intellect.  And at speed.  If Ms. Carmichael knew about it, she would have called it backsliding and reported it to his parents.  Instead, he was able to lean on his well-established habit of quiet observation while discussing everything with the coded AI in his head.

"Erics," he might say.  "The club house supervisor just told me to add some bleach to this ammonia based floor cleaner.  She wants to clear some of the stains out."

"I would strongly advice against doing that."

"I know: we don't want mustard gas in the dining room.  I tried to explain it to her, but I don't think she believed me."

"How will you handle it?"

"I guess I'll mop twice: once with the bleach and then again with the regular cleaner.  Which should I do first?"

"I suggest starting with the ammonia as that will pick up the grease stains better.  Then the bleach can whiten what is left."

"Thank you.  I'll do that."

Conversations like that took less than a second and happened hundreds of times a day.  The virus was not always helpful as it did not have access to its own data cloud, but it could search through Lisp's embedded memory, a store of anything that Lisp had found even remotely interesting during his carousing through all of human knowledge, and apply what it found.  Together, the two of them kept each other sane.

[1] He wandered down that path in an attempt to learn how to control his brothers.  However, his own curiosity became his worst enemy, dragging him down paths that were not relevant to the end goal: The Marshall Plan, Manifest Destiny, Mutually Assured Destruction and other things that turned out to be more history than applicable lessons.  Psychology had also led to interesting topics (nature vs nurture, personality disorders, and his favorite: perception vs reality) that ended up being more academic rather than practical.

[2] Because August/Lisp got good with numbers and was always connected, he started playing the stock market.  First with small numbers, but those grew.  He stayed on top of certain industries and companies and learned what made each of them tick.  He also learned the power of the short-term micro loan.  He would receive the pocket money for the chores that he did for his brothers, but before turning it over to them, he would deposit it for up to forty-eight hours (or until the brother in question forced it out of him).  During that time, he was able to get a few cents on each dollar in interest.  Not much, but it added up over time.  Eventually, his siblings wanted in on the magic.  He set up accounts for each and managed them, earning them small, but significant sums on the side.

Mo Leaves

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where the last post (Mo's Back Remembers) left off.]

So it went for three days.  Three days of cutting lettuce and then other low crops.  Three days of steadily decreasing back pain.  Three days of hearty meals.  Three nights of dead-to-the-world sleep.

Mo and Lisp spent most of their physical labor time discussing the ins and outs of PTNs and the coming evolution from augmenting human sensors to replacing them.  Lisp, with his scalp implants and direct-to-brain connections, made some strong arguments for the newer tech.  He did not have to worry that he had the inductive power couplings properly aligned with his contacts: he had no contacts to power, everything went straight to his optic nerve.  In fact, he could walk and move with his eyes closed, the camera and radar located in the chips around his skull giving him an accurate three-hundred and sixty degree view of his environs.  His hearing was similarly augmented, allowing him to hear a wider range of sounds and at a wider range of volumes, even using it as a local sonar to help with his location information.  He did not have to worry that his sub-voc'd dialog would contain his lisp as the way that air flowed over his tongue never entered into the data stream, instead coming straight from the speech centers of his brain where muscle position did not matter.  His hearing was similarly augmented, allowing him to hear a wider range of sounds and at a wider range of volumes.  And all of it with a lower power requirement as there were fewer active, semi-mechanical packages (speakers to drive in hearing implants, screens to illuminate in contacts, etc.).  He mentioned that some of the people in his augmentation community had even fitted their shaved head with organic, flexible solar panels hooked to abdominally inserted battery packs.

Mo, for her part, argued that by bypassing their evolved sensor package (eyes, ears, nose, etc.), Lisp and others like him were throwing out millions of years of evolution that was designed to fit their environment.  But even as she was saying it, she knew that it was a hollow argument that she did not believe.  She had been on Lisp's side of that debate and knew the answers before he said them: how was a biological organism to adapt to an increasingly virtual world with its graphic overlays and new information streams?  What Lisp and she were doing was to force that evolution.  Speed it up.  When she tried to argue that Lisp was leaving something 'human' behind, Mo merely sounded jealous of his system[1].

Instead, she shifted tactics and asked about his upgrade path.  What would it take to change his system as technology continued its march into the future of Moore's Law?  Her system, being more external to her body, was more easily upgraded: new contacts, new throat mikes, new hearing implants were done in an hour at a provider's store.  Even her arterial stent had been day surgery.  Lisp responded that much of what he had had done was also modular: socketed chips and reburnable firmwares.  He acknowledged that, once technology moved beyond the capabilities of his sockets, he would need to have his entire scalp redone with new implants and tattoo circuits.  He estimated that this would need to be done on a three year cycle.  Three years where he would leap ahead of the tech curve and then slowly drift back behind it, only to leap forward again with the next upgrade.

Lisp also spent time interacting with Erics.  The two were fascinated with each other.  Lisp was intrigued with the concept of a biological organism that metamorphosed into a electronic one.  He wanted to know how the node was programmed into the DNA of the host bacteria.  How did the programmers account for all of the variations of PTN systems, all of the potential biologic inconsistencies?  What was the language used to make the program?  How far back did this node remember?  How far back did the Whole remember?  What information was cached where?  What system resources were used and how were they monitored?  For the most part, Erics could not answer these questions as it needed a connection to the Whole to find the answers.  Without it, it was running on a five minute buffer with a weeklong log of recognized events.

Erics wanted to know how Lisp's system integrated with his various nerve clusters.  Could the various 'centers' of the brain be bypassed and instead have the data routed directly to processing and action areas?  How was the information calibrated between different sets?  What encoding was used at the final electronic-biologic interface?  Electrical impulses?  Chemical?  What maintenance was needed?  Lisp had many more of the answers to Erics' questions than Erics had had to Lisp's because he, Lisp, was more of a stand-alone entity, though Lisp acknowledged that he kept much of the less accessed information in his personal cloud and not loaded into on-body memory.  Through out all of this, they kept the conversational speed to something Mo could hang with.  Barely.

At the end, Lisp decided that having his own node of the Whole would be 'interesting'.  At the least, it would give him someone to talk to during his time of enforced disconnection.  However, instead of going through either the biological infection or through 'Whight_Saddle.strap', he would prefer a clone of the Mo's existing Node, retaining its current buffer, cache and log scripts.  This would give him a more 'grown-up' node instead of starting from scratch.

And then, on the morning of the fourth day, there were visitors.

They came in a larger American Power auto-car, one that could hold six people instead of the more standard four, and arrived just before the call for lunch.  Mo, out in the radish field (pull, knock dirt loose, toss, shuffle) did not see them, but Lisp relayed his camera view from his potato mashing station.  The feed showed five people in bulky overalls, potentially electrician uniforms (Mo was dubious), and one person in a suit.  The suited one was talking with one of the commune leaders (as such[2]) and pointing to the logo on the side of the auto-car.  Mo's own auto-car was buried in one of the barns under a pile of hay with all of the batteries disconnected and the lead wires sitting in a cookie tin at her mother's.

Lisp's feed did not provide audio as he was too far away and behind glass.  However, he had a lip reading app that did at least as good a job as the closed-captioning from Mo's earliest years.  It was transcribed across the bottom of the video.  The conversation had been going on for a minute or two before Mo got the feed.

SUIT: WE HAVE THE TRICKING FEED FROM THE CAR.  WE KNOW THAT IT WAS HEAR.

COMMUNE LEAD:  THAT'S IMPRESSIVE.  WE HAVE THIS PLACE DELIBERATELY BLACKED OUT FROM ALL SIGNALS INCLUDING GEE PEE ESS.  NOT SURE HOW YOU COULD'VE TRACED IT TO HERE.

SUIT: EXCUSE ME.  THE TRACE STOPS TWO MILES BACKED UP THE ROAD.  BUT THERE IS NOTHING ELSE UP HEAR.

CL: THAT'S AS MAY BE, BUT I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN YOUR CAR.

SUIT: WILL YOU ASK THE REST OF YOUR PEOPLE?  [PAUSE] PLEASE?

CL:  WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF HARVEST AND EVERYONE IS OUT IN THE FIELDS.  LUNCH WILL BE IN ABUT TEN MINUTES AND THEY'LL ALL BE IN THE CLUB HOSE.  CAN YOU WAIT?

SUIT: SURE.

Which meant that Mo was going to have to miss lunch.  She messaged Lisp to grab her something, then put her head down and pulled radishes towards the tree line.  Once in the trees, Mo circled around until she was behind the barn that housed the auto-car.  She did not enter, but watched to see if any of the commune residents gave her away.  Her mother had had a word with the Steering Committee and word had been spread to keep Mo's presence quiet.  Now to see if everyone was as good as their word.  Lisp continued to feed her video from inside the Club House, but aside from one of the older members standing and saying that he had seen a pack of wild dogs pestering the sheep, no one said anything about Mo or the auto-car.  Not then.

After the presumed power employees left, after the afternoon work session, after dinner, then people did say things about Mo and the auto-car.  Things like "putting us all in danger" and "why should we risk" and "not worth it".  Her mother stood up for her, which was nice.  Lisp tried to say something, but was not allowed being only a temporary, junior member.  Others noted the strange bulges that the five people in the work overalls sported under their armpits.

Mo was allowed to defend herself, to plead her case.  "You're right," she said.  "You're all right.  I am putting you at risk.  I am a stranger to most of you.  Hardly more than that even to my own mother.  You have been more than kind to me.  Let me eat and sleep with you.  Given me something to take my mind off of my troubles even if it was lettuce and radishes.  I'll leave.  Give me one more night to think on where else I can go, and I'll leave in the morning.  Will that work?"

There were grumbles of assent.  She was allowed the night.  Lisp sent over his condolences and her mother patted her on the back.  Mo nodded to them and anyone else who would meet her eye as she left the Club House.

She walked down to the barn with the car, sat in it and started playing with the maps it had cached in its memory, trying to think of where she could go.  Denver as a whole was out.  Probably Colorado.  Maybe she should head for Wyoming and get lost in one of its less popular areas[3].  Maybe head for one of the borders, Mexico or Canada.  Yeah, Canada.  Mo had heard good things about Vancouver and Toronto.  Vancouver was closer, so she opted for Toronto as a less likely destination for her to get caught.  So: out of Ken Caryl, loop south then west then north.  Ditch the car in Frisco and catch a Transport Loop out to Salt Lake before heading into Wyoming.  Spend a week or a month in Casper or someplace like that checking her trail.  Then make her way through the Dakotas and Minnesota up to Canada and Toronto.  That should take her months of temporary jobs and occasional rides[4].  As that was days and weeks away, Mo shut down the car, made sure that it was plugged in and charging, then went to sleep.

The next morning, she ate breakfast, said goodbye to Lisp and her mother, nodded at a few others and then left.  She figured that her biggest risk was getting from the commune out to the first intersection.  It was a rode that she had to take.  There was no other way out of the valley.  Once she made it to C-470, she could cut north to 285 and get lost in the hills.  But she needed to make it to the commuter loop first.

The car took her out of the Ken Caryl valley and back into coverage.  Mo set up her VPNx and TORx systems and then turned on her connection to V-EE.  A second for all of the nested protocols to negotiate their various rights and she was back on the internet.

And then, and then it happened.  Her version of the Erics virus connected back to the Whole and was immediately wiped and replaced.  The new version took less than a second to look through Mo's system before identifying her arterial stent and stopping it.  The tiny turbine seized in Mo's carotid artery stopping the blood flow to her brain.

Two minutes later, Mo died.  The auto-car had its way points wiped and a new course entered, taking her corpse back to the convention center.

[1] Which she was.

[2] Any enterprise that has goals and schedules needs leaders to decide the first and ensure that the second is on track.  The Ken Caryl Commune was no exception.  However, being a commune, the concept of leadership was counter to the 'community' nature of the place.  The compromise was to have a Steering Committee comprised of the five people, elected annually.  The members of the committee were then free to propose sub-committees and the members of those sub-committees could propose sub-sub-committees and so on.  The result was that each of the one hundred and eighty-three members of the KC2 were all on at least one committee of some sub-level and most were on two or three.  There were so many committees and so little time for them all to meet that the Steering Committee had been forced to allow most of them to meeting in the fields while they were working.  The result was that the minutes of those various meetings were often covered in dirt, water stained and fertilized.  The result was that, at the end of each year, all of the minutes that were at least a year old were added to the compost where they increased the soil yield considerably.

[3] Which, sorry to say, is eighty percent of the state.  Aside from the I-80 corridor and Jackson/Yellowstone, there isn't much that blows tourists' skirts up.  Which is fine as it gives the rest of us more space in the Wind River Range and Bighorn area.

[4] With the rise of the auto-cars and Transport Loops, interstate hitchhiking has become a thing of the past.  In its place, because people will always find a way to move freely, is an underground of firmware modified auto-cars.  A person in the know places a request in the right chat room and a space is made for him or her in one of these cars heading in their general direction.  Never on the Transport Loops, always over tarmac.  It's slow.  There often aren't available seats or cars in the smaller communities.  But if you want to get someplace without being traced, it's either that or sneakers on pavement.

Mo's Back Remembers

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where the last post (Mo Remembers the Crash) left off.]

After explaining the crash, or most of it, to Lisp, Mo asked him for some time to just pick lettuce.  Now that she had the rhythm, Mo was finding a meditative quality to the action.  It took up just enough of her brain power to keep her occupied but not enough to keep her from letting her mind drift.  To focus on not focusing.  What is the sound of one head sliced?  If lettuce grows in a forest and there's no one to eat it, does it matter?[1]

Despite the Zen of lettuce picking, Mo was decidedly happy when the low crops supervisor called it a day.  Mo pushed both of her fists into the small of her back and stretched backward, hoping that this little bit would keep her from being a ball of pain in the morning.  It was unlikely.

She followed the rest of the crew to the hose by the Club House, soaked her head and back, washed her hands and was thankful when someone threw her a towel.  She piled into the Club House and sat, waiting for whatever came next, hopefully dinner, and was happy to simply be: be wet, be smelly, be stiff, be hungry.  Be a part.  Be a daughter.  Be (alive?).

Lisp came and sat next to her.  Using his mouth and throat and vocal cords, he said, "Thank you for sharing with me today."

"You're welcome.  It's been a while since I've thought about much of that."

"I can imagine."

"My turn," Mo said, turning to look at him.  "What's with the long, educated speech when connected and the short, choppy stuff out loud?"

"I lishp."

"I got that.  So?"

"Shpeech is shloppy for me.  Impreshishe."

"And it that the reason for 'Lisp' being your self-identity?"

"Short of.  Alsho an old programming language.  Elegant.  Flowing."

"And you're not talking to me over the connection now because?"

"Your mother is watching."  Mo looked where he pointed.  Her mother was standing with some of the older members of the commune.  However, she had positioned herself in such a way that she could see them both.  Not all of the old mother had left the new Mom.

"Ahh.  And if the two of us were sitting here not talking with our mouths, she would assume that you were connected to me and throw a fit, right?"

"Yesh."

Then there were some announcements: upcoming events, status on the crops and other projects.  New members and guests were asked to stand and introduce themselves.  Mo stood, said she was Ms. Carmichael's daughter and did not know how long she would be staying.  Then dinner (sheep stew and salad).  Then two hours of free time before lights-out.  Mo discovered that most of the members had some hobby that they did during this time, most of which were some craft that could help benefit the community.  Some knitted.  Some quilted.  Some carved wood.  A small group in the kitchen brewed a batch of beer.

Mo, at loose ends, joined her mother who was making paper.  She helped squeeze the wood pulp onto the screens and hang them to dry, then trimmed the edges of the dried pages.  It was not the pristine white of laser paper or of the default PDF settings, instead being rough, off white with occasional bits of leaf or bark.  Her mother explained that to get the pure, smooth white of commercial bond, they would need to use heavy steel rollers running on a conveyor belt and also a lot bleach.  Neither were available, easy to work with or positive for the commune.  The imperfections were seen by the members as a sign of their purity of purpose and the resulting pages were more than good enough for the internal record keeping of the place.

Then bed.  And sleep.  But not dreams.

Mo awoke at some dark hour of the night, her back and thighs a mess of pain.  She tried different positions in the bed, but nothing was comfortable.  Sitting up helped her back some, so she slowly got dressed and went back to the Club House to sit on the porch.  She knew that she would regret the sleep loss later, but there was nothing for it, not with the pain keeping her awake.  So she rested and thought.  Thought about her time at the Institute.

Now, viewed from a distance, she saw that the place had been nice.  Restful, if she had needed rest.  Peaceful, if she had needed peace.  All those things that people who are troubled are supposed to need.  But, at that time, need was not want for Mo.  What she had wanted was to be dead.  For others to acknowledge that she was dead.  Not to continue this farce that life was continuing without her father.  That she was not at fault.  That if she had done better at the competition (or worse), then they might not have been on the road at that time and then whatever had caused the crash would not have been there to kill her father.  That if she had just spoken to him more (said 'I love you' one more time), been a better daughter, been a better person, he might still be alive (to tell her than he loved her).

They had assigned her a room.  Small with a desk, a bed and a window that did not open.  It looked out on pine and mountain meadow and sometimes a deer.  She was responsible for keeping it neat and clean and there was a bed check every night to ensure that she was getting sleep (and to lock her in at first).  There was an intercom which she had never used except to go to the bathroom.  After a while, she had been allowed some decorations: cat posters, paintings that she had done.

They, Doctor Rex and the nurses, had presented her with opportunities for engagement.  Game night where everyone played team games.  Pictionairy.  Balderdash.  Mo was assigned a team, but did not help.  Not at the beginning.  There were painting and music sessions where Mo could have put her piano lessons to use.  But no.  She would listen.  She would watch.  She could not leave.  It would have been noticed.

Of course, there had been therapy sessions as well, both group and private.  She answered questions with the bare minimum.  And only because there were consequences if she did not: more questions, more sessions.  It took her a few months, but she had learned how to respond to minimize her time with others.  Not all had been avoidable.  Not the morning or afternoon group.  Not the twice a week privates.  But responding reduced it to just those.  Not additional ones because they were 'concerned.'

Again, from four years out, Mo could see that the staff, doctors and nurses, had been genuinely concerned.  It had not been an act.  Mo had been the one acting, putting a living mask on her dead face.  Pretending to live so that the living would let her be dead.  A mask that had taken her five years to perfect.  To wander the wastelands of trail and error as each aspect of the mask was reviewed by the staff.  Picked apart.  Found out.  Then she would back up to the last success and work forward again.  This smile at this time worked.  This 'emotional breakthrough' kept them all at bay for one more week.  But too many and she would get accused of not being genuine.  The worst of crimes at the Institute.

She would get suffocated by the mask.  Often, masks.  Once she had confessed in a private session that she felt that the accident had been her fault.  But that had been a breakthrough mask sitting on top of a calculating mask sitting on top of her dead mask sitting on top of her real, pained face (which happened to be the same as her breakthrough mask).  If she had listened to how Doctor Rex had dealt with her survivor guilt, instead of using his response to plot her next session-minimization move, then she might have been released sooner[2].  But getting released had not been on her end game.  That had been interaction reduction.  Short term thinking.  Dead thinking.

Mo remembers one session where Doctor Rex tried to call her out on her layers of (self) deception.  "Mo," he had said, using her real name instead of her given name in an attempt to break the doctor-patient barrier.  "Mo, why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you resisting our help?"

"Am I?  Aren't I answering your questions?  Two days ago you told me that you thought our session went well.  When I told you that I felt responsible for my Dad's death."

"Yes.  That was important, but I'm not sure that you were being completely open.  I get the feeling that you are giving us, myself and the rest of the staff here, the answers that you think we want to hear and not what's actually going on in your head."

"I'm trying," she had said.  Mo remembers bowing her head, letting her hair fall over her face, trying to look fragile and hiding at the same time.  "I'm not sure what else I can do."

"Well, answer me this," he had said.  "Do you think you're still dead?"

Mo had raised her head, looked him in the eyes. "No.  I don't think I'm still dead."

Doctor Rex had pursed his lips and held her gaze for a few seconds.  He scribbled something on his notepad.  "I know a rehearsed line when I hear one.  How often have you practiced that one?"

Mo had not said that she tried it out every night in her window's reflection, trying different expressions and stressing different words, trying to sound believable (to herself).  She had said, "Does it matter?  I really don't believe I'm dead."

"I'm afraid that I don't find you convincing.  I'm going to need something more."

Mo had signed, internally and externally.  While she did not know the specifics, she knew that what was coming next was more.  More therapy.  More sessions.  More questions.  Less being dead.  "What?" she asked.

"I want you to join the hiking sessions.  Get out of here and into the world.  See some of what these mountains have to offer.  I'll expect to talk with you about them next week."

And so Mo had gone hiking.  Sun dappled trails.  The scent of pine.  Startled wildlife.  Majestic mountain views.  It did not make her feel less dead, but that may have been her own stubbornness.  She had been too buried in masks to know.

All of that had happened in her second year.  Her masks would keep her in there until she was eighteen and legally allowed to discharge herself.  Over three years past that conversation.  Stupid masks.

It was with those thoughts that the sun found Mo, sitting on the porch of the Club House, letting her back remind her of how much exercise she was not getting.  She groaned herself upright and stumbled into the kitchen where she harassed the breakfast crew into letting her make the coffee.  Two mugs later, and she was almost ready to face the low crops again.  Almost.

[1] Only to the head of lettuce.

[2] And would have found some peace with her lot in life a bit faster, but let's not get carried away.

Mo Remembers the Crash

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where yesterday (Mo Explains Half of Everything) left off.]

Saying out loud[1] that she had died to another human being triggered memories in Mo.  The first therapist that her mother had taken her to had assigned her a mantra to repeat: "I am alive."  Just that.  She was to repeat it to herself as often as she could, out loud if she was alone or with her mother.  Supposedly, this was from the fake-it-til-you-make-it school of psychiatric treatment.  A month later, she had told the therapist that she said the words, but they were not true.  She knew that she was dead and that this was not real.  When she was asked what was not real, she had replied "Everything."

She had been referred to another therapist who specialized in post traumatic stress.  Psychic breaks.  Mental schisms.  This one, a man where the first had been a woman, had spent time in the military dealing with soldiers who had survived when others in their squads had not.  He asked the usual questions:

How are you?  Dead.
When did you die?  In the crash.
If you are dead, how are we having this conversation?  This isn't real.
So what?

That last one had momentarily pulled Mo from her patterned responses.  She had looked up at the therapists from where she was, crouched on his couch.  He had brown hair cut close in a military flat top.  He wore black rimmed glasses.  He was not smiling reassuringly at her.

"So what?" she had asked back.

"Yes.  So what if you're dead.  So what if this conversation isn't real.  It's still happening in your imagination.  Your dead imagination.  You still have to deal with it, right?"

"No," she had said.  "I don't." And she had stopped talking.  To him.  To her mother.  To everyone.  That was when her mother had committed her to the Institute.

"They call that solipsism," Lisp said after she had told him about these early sessions.  "More traditionally, it is the supposition that there is no way to prove that the reality that we perceive is not all in our head.  Our sensations are being faked."

"Yeah," Mo replied.  "Trust me, I learned about solipsism.  That second doctor, the military one, he knew it and tried to jump ahead a few dozen steps.  That's what the 'So What?' was about.  It doesn't matter whether reality is 'real' or not, we all still have to deal with it as it presented to us.  Maybe that had worked on his soldiers with their sense of duty and pride of country or whatever.  It did not work on a early-teen suburban girl.  All it did was make me see that I was dealing with it by responding and that if I did not want to deal with reality, I needed to stop responding to it on all levels.  I stopped talking.  I stopped eating.  I stopped getting up to use the bathroom, I just went where ever I was.  As I said, I didn't give Mom a choice.  She had to put me somewhere where they could at least deal with me."

"Didn't you get bored?" Lisp asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Not doing anything.  Did you think about things?"

"Sort of.  Mostly, I thought about the crash."

And Mo was back in her memories.  Sort of.  Like most trauma, much of the specifics of the crash were lost to her.  Maybe it was her brain shutting things out, maybe she had been thirteen and not paying attention to where her father was driving.   Paying attention to something on her phone, probably.  She could not remember where they were coming from, but she knew that they were going home.  Maybe from one of those robotics competitions that Dad had signed her up for and that she had enjoyed but had not admitted because he had not asked her first.

Her memories of the moments immediately leading up to the crash were impressions: night, two-lane road, trees on one side, not trees on the other.  For the crash itself, she knows what she was told happened but cannot remember it clearly.  More snapshots: her phone leaving her hand, bright lights filling the interior, her body changing direction quickly like a roller coaster but not fun.  The feeling that something is terribly wrong and that she should have been paying attention to help prevent it.  Then nothing until she woke up in the hospital.

Her first question had been to ask after Dad.  It was late at night and she had to wait for a nurse to respond to the call button.  Which she had found once she worked out where she was.  For her, it was one second panicked in the car and then next lying in a dimly lit room with beeping machines.  When the nurse came in and Mo asked, the nurse told her not to worry about her father, the important thing was that she, Maureen, was doing better.  But the nurse's face, lined and worried and smiling that everything-is-all-right smile told Mo what she needed to know.  He had no made it.  From there, it did not take much mental effort (even with the pain killers making her woozy... maybe because of the pain killers making her woozy) to wonder if, perhaps, she had not made it either.

"But what actually happened?" asked Lisp.  "Why did the car crash?"

"It is a little unclear.  We were on Route 6 above Golden.  There are tire tracks where Dad had turned sharply, then broke through the guard rail.  One theory is that someone driving up the road had their brights on, came around the corner, startled Dad and he swerved.  Another is that there was some animal in the road.  A deer or sheep or something.  All that they know is that he swerved sharply and we headed over a cliff.  Apparently, all of the safety mechanisms worked but were over matched by the impact.  I survived because I was smaller and lighter and had less momentum than Dad.  Despite that, I broke all four limbs and slipped a disk in my middle back.  I had a lot of time in the hospital to think.  Too much time as it turned out.  Hospital time is too much like Purgatory in the first place."

"Never had the pleasure."

"If you have the opportunity, don't.  I don't remember it as boring, but that may have been the pain killers.  I was immobilized, what with the casts on both legs and both arms.  And the back brace.  They fed me through an IV and removed my waste through a tube in my side.  There was a TV and they left it on.  To keep me company, they said.  But that was the era of rabid daytime talk shows[2].  Even at thirteen, I knew better.  As I said: Purgatory."

What Mo did not tell Lisp, what she had trouble admitting to herself, was that she had known that she was in Purgatory for a reason.  She had died and been put on trail for the death of her father.  Had his death been her fault? Not directly.  She knew that.  But was their an underlying cause?  Something that she had done (or not done) that angered a higher power and caused it to go all Old Testament on her?  That was a different question and its answer was what occupied her mind for the next five years of her life.

[1] Well, sub-voc'd.  Really admitting.  But then the cliche still has it as 'admitted out loud'.  Hey.  Get off my back.  I know it's not out loud.  I know it's a bit of a tired idiom.  Deal with it.

[2] The talk show as a medium for disseminating information about the latest fashions and the movies and such died with the advent of the video chat show.  Instead of a single camera on a set, these were conducted over networks like Google Hangouts or Skype.  Now everyone was in the in-studio audience, could provide feedback through votes and win prizes.  The audience was more involved, not cleaning house with this in the background.  It allowed for instant audience metrics and micro-targeted ad overlays.  The old model died to be replaced by something slightly more rabid.

Mo Explains Half of Everything

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where yesterday (Field Hand Mo) left off.]

"My mother?  Are you suddenly a psychologist? 'Tell me about your mother?'" said Mo.

"Please, it is nothing like that.  As I said, I live with the woman and will most likely continue to do so for several months.  I would like to have a better idea of with whom I'm dealing."  Lisp's voice was crisp in her head.  Coupled with the phrasing, it created an erudite image of Lisp.  If she had not met him in person, then she would have pictured a mustachioed man in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches.  Similar to how she pictured the personification of Erics.

"Fine," Mo said.  She inched forward to the next head of lettuce.  "I'm not sure how much good it will do you.  When she and I really lived together, I was younger than you are now by several years.  There was a time in my late teens when we shared a roof, but I was too wrapped up in myself to pay any attention to her."

"Did that have something to do with the death of your father?"

"Everything to do with it.  What have you heard about that from Mom?"

"She does not talk about it much.  She mentioned it last night as an explanation of your existence, but it was a very matter-of-fact statement: 'Maureen is my daughter.  Her father is dead and she has nowhere else to go so she'll be staying at the Commune for a while.  Please help her as others helped you.' That was all."

Mo sighed, sliced, tossed and shuffled forward on her knees.  "Well, more than eight years have passed since the accident.  She's found a new life and doesn't have much to say about the old one."

"And you?  Have you also moved on?"

"I've tried, but I'm not sure that I really have.  Anyway, this conversation is supposed to be about my Mom, not me."

"Apologies.  Will you allow me to continue asking questions about your mother?"

"Sure."

"Would you please describe your life with her prior to your father's death? "

"Yeah.  Okay."  Mo paused for two heads of lettuce.  She was not keen on using lettuce as a time keeping device, yet, it's what she had without a connection.  "Again, I'm not sure how useful it will be.  I was thirteen when the accident happened.  At thirteen, your parents aren't really people to you.  They are rule makers and providers and helpers and reminders, but not really people.  They both tried to break through that parent-child barrier, but it's hard.  One or the other of them would get in a real conversation with me, whatever that is, and we'd both feel more connected.  Then I'd talk back or forget something or screw up in some way and we were back to punisher and punished.  Dad was better at it than Mom.  Maybe because he worked from home and she worked in an office, so I saw him more.  Maybe it was his personality was just more approachable.  I think of my mother then, and what comes to mind is this haughty person who would sweep into the house when she got home and inspect everything.  Was the kitchen clean? What was the state of dinner?  Was my homework done?  That kind of thing."

"She did not help with household maintenance?"

"I'm sure that she did, I just don't remember it." Grab. Slice. Toss. Shuffle.  She was beginning to find a lettuce rhythm.  "I remember Dad working in the flower beds before the water restrictions killed them.  I remember Dad with the vacuum, never Mom.  That kind of thing."

"That is hard to reconcile with the earth mother persona that she wears around here."

"Yeah.  I told you it wouldn't be that helpful."  Mo stood and picked up her basket, now full of lettuce heads and took it to the cart to dump.

"What about later, when it was only the two of you?  Was she different then?"

"I suppose that she would have to have been, living alone and all.  I don't really know.  She brought me back from the Institute to this condo that wasn't the house we had lived in.  She showed me a room and said it was mine.  I stepped in and shut the door.  Our conversations were limited to 'Dinner's ready!' and 'I'm going out.  Do you need anything?'.  The only time either of us said anything with real emotion in it was that last day."  Mo took a sip, then a gulp, from the cart canteen.

"What happened then?"

"She got frustrated with me barricading myself in that bedroom and told me to get over my father's death.  I then told her that I wished she was in the car with us and had died too."  Mo took another sip and then started trudging back to her row of lettuce heads.

"So, nothing good."

"Nothing good.  I left and haven't spoken to her since.  She sent me a note two years ago saying that she was moving here.  That was it."

"Thank you.  This is more helpful than you think."

"How so?"

"I was studying personality formation prior to being sequestered in here.  As I am going through it, it seemed a relevant course of study.  One of the topics was how trauma affects changes in an established personality.  Your mother appears to have gone through two of them: one when your father died and another when you left.  The armchair analysis of this is that the first most likely drove her into a depression.  As you were not around her then, it is hard to know.  The second may have broken her out of it and forced a more, for lack of a better word, 'honest' re-evaluation of her life, leading her here to Ken Caryl.  Of course, this is not a professional diagnosis, but it does fit the facts."  During this short lecture from Lisp, Mo had managed to slice and toss four more lettuce heads.  Her back was beginning to loosen up for the afternoon.

"And exactly how does this help you live with her?"

"I doubt that it will make my day-to-day life with her any easier.  What it will do is give me something to do when I am with her.  I can watch and observe, see what aspects of the Inspector from your childhood still remain, what signs of depression still remain."

"So my mother becomes your amateur psych experiment?"

"If you will.  I prefer to think of it as finding a way forward in a difficult situation.  Will that be a problem?"

"I suppose not.  Our reconciliation is too new for me to really have a say in it."

"Then it is settled.  May I ask you a few more questions that go a bit farther afield?"

"Off the low crops field?"

"Quite."  Mo could all but hear Lisp shaking his head at her lame joke.  "I'd like to know why she sent you to this 'Institute' place."

"Because?"

"Because I am curious.  It's baked into our monkey genes.  If you don't want to answer, I will understand."

Mo leaned back and stretched her back out.  "Well, she sent me to the Colorado Institute for Troubled Youth in Evergreen because I didn't give her much choice.  I insisted that I had also died in the crash."

Field Hand Mo

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where yesterday (Mo and Her Mother) left off.]

Mo spent the next few days trying to fit into this new home.  There was only one bedroom in Mom's shack and Lisp/August slept on the couch.  That left no space for Mo at in that shelter.  Instead, her mother got Mo set up in the communal women's barracks on the promise that Mo would put in time helping in the fields.  As it was fall and time for the second harvest, there was no end of work for Mo to do.

This dwelling assignment helped Mo to understand that her mother's home was more than the shack she lived in.  That was merely a place to sleep and have some private time when everything else allowed.  Meals were taken in the old clubhouse and cooked by a rotating list of the inhabitants.  Mo had dealt with a similar setup when she lived in the Institute.  Then, most of the patients had viewed kitchen duty as a necessary evil.  It was something that they had all traded out of whenever possible.  Now, here at the commune, Mo quickly learned that time in the kitchen was treated as a luxury: the alternative was spending time in the fields.  As the newest person, Mo got last pick of the available jobs and that meant harvesting the low crops.

Lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, radishes, onions and more.  Anything that needed stooping or kneeling to harvest.  Those were the low crops.  It took less than ten minutes for Mo's back to ache and after thirty she was experiencing weird muscle spasms from her calves through her shoulders.  She had reported for duty at eight o'clock as directed having eaten a breakfast of porridge and coffee.  The shift supervisor had handed her a basket and a short, hooked knife then turned her over to one of the more experienced members, a thirty-something woman named Joan.

Joan had walked Mo over to the rows of lettuce[1] which took up all of the old seventh fairway.  Setting down her basket, Joan said, "Watch closely."  Then she had bent over, grabbed a head of lettuce in her left hand, sliced quickly through the stem with her right and tossed it in the basket.  Still bent over, Joan had cocked her head up at Mo.  "Got it?"  Mo nodded.  "Great.  Show me."  Mo bent over, grabbed the next head and swiped the knife at the base.  She cut lower than Joan, got the knife caught in the dirt and only halfway through the stem.  She muscled the knife through the rest of the stem, finally breaking off the last quarter inch by twisting and pulling on the head.

"Okay," said Joan.  "You cut too low and split the stem.  That will make the head rot sooner.  You wanna cut a half inch under the last leaves and all the way through in one swipe."  She reached for the next head in the row and showed Mo what she meant.  "Try again."  Mo grabbed another head of lettuce, this time cutting through cleanly.  "Right," said Joan.  "You take this row and I'll take the next one.  When your basket is full, dump it in the cart over there."  She picked up her basket, stepped over the row that she and Mo had been practicing with and started on the next.  By the time that Mo had stretched her back and reached for the next head of lettuce, Joan was already three heads down her own row and working in a practiced rhythm of grab-slice-toss-step, grab-slice-toss-step.

When the supervisor called a break at ten, Mo had made it halfway down her row and was ready to die.  Joan, by comparison, had finished her first row and was nearly done with a second.  In that two hours, Mo had almost sliced the thumb off her left hand three times, had hooked the knife into her jeans five times and fallen over twice.  Her right hand had a blister forming in her palm from the knife handle.  She had managed to fill her basket four times and learned to relish the opportunity to dump it in the cart: it allowed her to walk upright and grab a drink from the canteen hanging on the cart's side.

After the ten am break, Mo groaned and went back to her row.  Three painful heads of lettuce later, she was interrupted by a voice.

"Salutations fellow low cropper," it said.  Mo looked around, but no one was near.  Then she checked her connection status.  The icon for her full connection was still an 'X', but her local area connection showed as active.

"Lisp?" she asked.

"Yes.  I'm over in the broccoli.  May I offer some advice on your current task?"

"Of course."

"Slow down."

"What do you mean 'slow down'?  I'm already the slowest worker in sight."

"True, but no one really expects you to keep up.  They have all been doing this for months.  Some for years.  They've built up the muscles and the calluses.  You have not.  If you continue at your current rate, then you will be useless tomorrow."

"And why am I only learning this now?"

"Because Joan is not the most talkative of people.  And very literal.  She was asked to show you how to harvest lettuce.  She did.  Task complete."

"Great.  I may have already burned myself out on the first two hours.  I can hardly move."

"Yes.  We've all noticed."

"Really?  Who's 'we'?"

"Just about everyone in the low crop area."

"Why didn't all this 'we' tell me any of this earlier?"

"It only just came to our attention.  The person in charge of radishes, Bruce, is over talking with Susan, who you met when you checked in.  I assume that someone will rescue you in a moment.  In the mean time, you might try kneeling instead of bending at the waist.  Crawl even.  No one cares and it will save your back."

Mo got down on her knees.  The lettuce heads were now at waist level instead of knee level and much easier to reach.  She shuffled her legs forward, putting two trenches into the soft loam as she moved down the row.

"Thanks," she sub-voc'd back to Lisp.  "That actually helps a lot.  Now, it's just the blisters and the heat stroke."

"You can pay me back by keeping me entertained while I pull these radishes from the ground."

"Sure thing.  What do you want me to do?  Sing?  I've tried and I don't think you'll enjoy it."

"That will not be necessary."  Just then the lettuce supervisor, Susan, tapped Mo on the shoulder and motioned her over to the cart.  Inside her network, Mo asked Lisp to hold on.  When she and Susan got to the cart, Susan sent Mo into the Club House telling her to rest until lunch when she could help set the tables.  She, Susan, would figure out what to do with Mo after lunch.

When she got inside the Club House, Mo collapsed in a corner.  Then she pinged back at Lisp.  "So how should I entertain you?"

"You can start by telling me why your network is infected," Lisp replied.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, yesterday, when I first connected, I received a trojan file that tried to infect me with a virus.  I assumed that you knew about it.  Did you not?"

"Oh.  That.  Yeah.  Sorry.  I do, I just kind of forgot to turn it off.  It was infecting a couple of homeless communities for me as a distraction and then I kind of forgot to kill the process once it had taken off.  Give me a second and I'll do it now."  Mo pulled up her list of active processes and killed 'Whight_saddle.strap'.  "All good now," she told Lisp.

"There is a story behind that process.  Tell me as my entertainment."

"Umm, okay.  Sure."  With the practice that she had received running her Mom through it the day before, Mo was able to deliver a more coherent plot thread to Lisp.  It also took less time because she did not feel the same need to justify her choices to Lisp and he did not ask, merely listened.

"That is an interesting tale," he said once she had finished.  "Are you in contact with this 'Erics' now?"

"Sure," Mo said.  "It's been a quiet since we arrived at the Commune.  It really likes having full connectivity, being only a node of a greater whole.  But it should still be wandering around in my circuits.  It's process thread is still active."

"May I meet it?"

"You're the one that just killed the infection."

"No," Lisp said.  "Not that way.  I want to talk to it through you."

"To what end?"

"I'm curious.  I've never had the opportunity to talk to a virus or a bacterium before."

"I guess.  Let me check with it."  Mo muted her connection with Lisp and sub-voc'd to Erics.  "Are you there?  There's someone who would like to meet you."

"Yes, Mo.  I am here.  I've been listening in on your conversation.  I also would like to meet this Lisp."

Mo joined the two conversations together with the flick of her wrist and twitch of her iris.  Almost immediately, the flow of words between Erics and Lisp moved from fast talking but intelligible into a buzz.  "Hey," she said.  "Hey!  You're talking in my head.  You have to include me."

"Apologies," both of them said at the same time[2].  Lisp continued, "Erics was filling in some of the details and technical aspects of your adventure.  In particular, I was curious about the bacterium-to-virus transition.  I have not done any reading on the electrical properties of micro-organisms."

"Fine, but if you want to learn it all at full bandwidth, you might as well get infected.  It will be much faster."

"True.  I am seriously considering that approach." As he said that, one of the cooks came out and prodded Mo into setting the tables.  Her back and legs complained as she got up having seized during her corner lounging.  Setting the tables turned out to not be a quick task.  Everything, including the utensils, was served buffet style, so all Mo needed to do was ensure that the napkin holders were full and that every table had a full set of condiments (ketchup, mustard, hot sauce, salt and pepper).  Then the lunch bell, then the lunch rush, then eating and chatting.

Mo found herself sitting with the other low crop pickers including Susan, Joan and Lisp.  Most of them were discussing the possibility of rain, how much they would have to spend to get water from the old Mann reservoir and other crop related issues.  At one point, Susan gave Joan a significant look and Joan rolled her eyes before facing Mo.

"Sorry," Joan said.  "I should have told you not to try and keep up.  Hope you don't hurt too bad."

Mo spent a brief second toying with the thought of telling the other woman how she really felt, but ended up letting her off the hook; she needed to fit in here for a while, no make enemies.  "No problem.  Maybe this will finally get me in some kind of shape."

Joan smiled and then cleared her dishes.  Susan clapped Mo on the back and then told her to head back out to the field and finish her row.  That would be all she needed to do today.  Mo nodded, then gulped down her lemonade before following Joan and Susan back outside.

Lisp pinged her as she was on her knees, shuffling up to her second head of lettuce for the afternoon.  "It helps to have a distraction," he said.  "Shall we keep talking?"

"Sure," Mo said.  "As long as you and Erics keep it to a reasonable speed."

"Absolutely," said Lisp.  "It was just so refreshing to talk with someone at full bandwidth.  I forgot myself."

"Is that how you talk to other people with neural-laces?"

"No quite.  I was still using the speech center of my brain with Erics.  Making the virus send all of its information over in spoken language works as a kind of firewall.  It would be difficult for it to corrupt anything with that lower bandwidth signal.  Among others with my implants, we usually send our thoughts more directly."

"More of that 'just knowing'?"

"Correct.  But back to our afternoon topic.  I was hoping that instead of conversing with Erics on the esoteric topics of bio-electric conversion, that you and I could talk."

"Sure.  What's on your mind?"

"As I find myself living with the woman, I'd like to know more about your mother."

[1]  There were a lot of low crops at the Ken Caryl Commune.  More than the fluctuating population of seventy to one hundred could hope to consume before they went bad.  The surplus was sold.  The commune was only that for the people living within it.  To the outside world, they were an NPO that existed to provide for it's members.  One of the earlier members had taken the time to get the whole placed certified 'Organic' (a term that was regulated by the USDA and took them close to one hundred pages to define).  That allowed them to sell the surplus to the more upscale grocers and restaurants, charging a premium.  Currently, the low crops were high on the list of those looking for 'Organics', so the KCC had delegated half of the front nine to their production.

[2] Neither Erics or Lisp had ever heard of 'Pinch-Poke-You-Owe-Me-A-Coke' and would not have known how to pay up even if they had.

Mo and Her Mother

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where yesterday (Mo and Lisp) left off.]

Instead of heading back into the house, Mo and her mother headed out to the old golf course and found a spot mostly clear of sheep droppings.  The flock was on the back nine, so it was unlikely that they would be interrupted by hungry sweaters on the hoof.

Her mother said, simply, "Begin," so Mo did.  She started with the message that she had received while working at the Quiet Place, her capture and time in the Convention Center, learning about the virus and interacting with it, how she and the others escaped, the walk to the power plant and the game of hide-and-seek that she had played there.

Mo tried to stick to just the facts, but found herself trying to explain why she had done what she had done.  Why had she answered the message in the first place?  A cursory examination showed it to be something other than the normal spam.  Why had she agreed to the meeting? Curiosity.  Why had she decided to follow the virus's advice?  It offered solid advice on escape and had not tasered her.  Why had she decided to infect the homeless community?  The virus had helped her so she helped it with more nodes; also she needed a distraction.  Why had she decided that visiting her mother was the right move?  That one took more time.

Mo tried to explain about her dream of being caught in the Institute, but that came out as not very believable[1].  She tried to explain that this was the closest thing to home that she actually had.  Her mother raised an eyebrow at that, which caused Mo to go into her definition of home that she had shared with Erics: that it was home because her mother lived there, but that sounded hollow out in the light of the day and in front of her mother.  The tactical benefits helped: the place being off the grid, her mother being bureaucratically dead, Mo having never visited there before.  But, in themselves, were not enough.  She could have gone to Wyoming if that was all she needed[2].

"I dunno," she said looking down at her mother's feet as they sat on the grass.  "It all sounds lame now, but made sense back at the power plant.  I guess you're the only family that I have left, so that makes you the focus for whatever 'home' is.  Even if we don't get along.  Even if I've never been here.  I was in trouble and needed to retreat, hole up and recoup before deciding what to do next.  I needed to do something human, something in meat space and this was all that I could think of."  She looked up through her eye lashes at her mother to gauge her reaction.  The older woman had a thoughtful, if not entirely happy expression on her face.

"Believe it or not, I get it," her mother said after a second or two.  "When my parents were alive, visiting them always had a twinge of homecoming, even after they had moved into the nursing home.  Having you show up brings back some of that twinge.  After all, you're about the only biological family that I have left, too.  Maybe my brother is still around out in Texas, but I haven't heard from him in years either.  Anyway."  Mo's mother met Mo's stare.  "We both made some mistakes when you left the Institute.  It was an abrupt change.  You left a broken thirteen year old and came back four years later as a teenager that I did not really know.  It would have taken more than I had then to make it work."

"It would have taken Dad."

"Maybe, but he wasn't around.  As you constantly reminded me."

"I didn't mean to.  At least, not always."

"Maybe.  But it didn't really matter.  Just being in my life was a constant reminder that he wasn't around anymore.  That we would both be happier with him.  That we couldn't cope with each other without him."

"Is that why you finally said it?"

"Said what?"

"That you wished I had died in the crash too."

"I said that?"

"Yeah.  Right before I told you that I wished you'd been in the car with us.  Which didn't help much."

"I remember you saying that, but don't remember telling you I wished that you had died."

"You did."

"I believe you."  Now her mother looked down at the grass.  "I've also learned a lot about who I am in the three plus years that you've been gone.  I've had people show me the things that I block out because I don't want to deal with them.  That has been painful.  Ultimately good, but very painful in the moment.  It's cost me some friends and solidified a few others."  Looking up and sighing, Mo's mother said, "Point is, if it helps, I'm sorry for what I said.  You were reminding me of a grief I had thought tucked away and I took it out on you."

"Thanks.  It does.  Help that is.  And I'm sorry that I punished you for not being Dad."

"You know what?" Her mother said.  "I think I believe you.  I don't think that you're saying that just to get what you want from me."

Mo smiled.  "I'm not.  You're not Dad.  You never were.  And that's okay.  I have no idea who you are now as a person, but you are my mother and that counts for something."

"And you're my daughter whom I brought into this world.  Which also counts for something.  It certainly counts for a few days of shelter.  I see no reason that you can't call this home for a while."

"Thanks," Mo said.  "Mom."

[1] Not to mention cliche.  "It came to me in a dream"? Give me a break. #lampshadesrule

[2] And not just because it has the fewest humans per square mile of any of the lower 48, but also because Wyoming had decided, along with Idaho, to make itself a destination for the Disconnected Tourist movement.  Huge sections of the state were declared Wireless Free Zones (not a big issue as most of those areas had never been Wireless Active Zones in the first place) including Yellowstone National Park and the entire city of Casper.  A few of the smaller municipalities took it a step further and removed anything more bandwidth intense than a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). The larger areas kept their hardwired fiber systems in place as there was still some business to be done in the state.

Mo and Lisp

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where yesterday (Mo Gets Home) left off.]

When the door opened, it was not Mo's mother on the other side.  Instead, Mo was greeted by a slim teenager.  A boy.  Shirtless, wearing ripped jeans and sucking on a piece of jerky.  Hairless, his scalp covered in a full map of tattoos complete with continents of chips and circuits, seas of scalp and faults of blinking lights.

"Who the hell are you?" Mo asked, taking a step back.  The boy did not directly respond.  Instead, Mo saw a local, point-to-point connection request in her HUD from an entity calling itself Lisp.  She accepted the connection.

"Hello," a voice, male with a bored tone.  The jerky never left his mouth, his lips never moved.  "I self-identify as Lisp.  Am I to understand that you are the bio-spring of my green mother?"

"Um, yeah, I guess." Mo responded in kind over the link.  "I'm Maureen, but self-identify as Mo.  Do you live here?"

"Yes.  I've been here for six weeks now.  You are the first person with whom I've been able to properly communicate with during that time.  It is a pleasure."

"Glad to help.  Have you seen my mother?"

"Yes.  She is in the restroom and will be out shortly.  Please come in and have a seat in the mean time.  May I get you something to drink?  We have some fresh lemonade."

"Yeah.  Lemonade.  That would be great."  Mo entered and sat on the old sofa she remembered from the apartment she had grown up in.  There was a new afghan across its back and the cushions had some newer stains, but the cloth pattern was the same.  It reminded her of when they had still been a family.  When Dad was still alive.  When Mo was still 'Reeny (and also alive).

"Lisp, dear?" came a voice, her mother, from the back of the hut.  "Who is it?"  The voice previewed the impending presence of her mother.  It was lower in tone, less stable of pitch, but still her mother's voice.  It had strains of grey hair and sagging boobs, a thickening waist and eye bags.  Changes, sure, but only on the surface.

"Shomeone named Maureen."  Lisp's human speaking voice was choppy, shifting from alto to bass at a moment's notice.  This coupled with the slurred esses explained his preference for direct connections.  "Shaysh she'sh your daughter."

"Oh my," came the thready response.  "Well get her some lemonade and tell her I'll be in a moment."  Lisp did not respond, but nodded to himself as he poured the already offered lemonade into a glass.  He brought it to Mo on the couch and then sat himself cross-legged on the floor.

"I assume that you heard," he said directly into Mo's ears.  "Vocalizing is so impersonal.  Imprecise.  Insecure.  I had almost forgotten how before I came here."

"And what did bring you here?" Mo sub-voc'd back.

Lisp rubbed a hand over his scalp and rolled his eyes.  "My parents were disturbed by my latest upgrade.  They felt that I was losing touch with humanity, with nature, and sent me to live here for a while."

"Ahh."  Mo put a sympathetic expression on her face.  "I've recently gone through a period of enforced disconnection.  Only for a few days, but still.  It was less than enjoyable.  How are you handling it?"

"I am trying to see the adventure in it, but that is not easy when you are digging up potatoes.  The instant access to answers is what has challenged me the most.  For instance, I had to learn what poison oak was the hard way."

"Yeah," Mo's expression turned wry.  "That can be a bummer.  How long are you staying?"

"Until my parents deem me 'cured'.  It is hard to know exactly what they mean by that.  I suppose that the first step is for my hair to grow back."

"I would have thought that after six weeks, more would be showing."

"I have to keep it shaved for another month to ensure that the tattoos and chips remain embedded properly.  They I can let it grow out.  If I choose."

"So, what's with the scalp implants anyway?  Isn't it easier to have your PTN on parts of your body where it can be hidden if that's what you want?"

"If that is the goal, then yes.  However, this is not a traditional PTN.  It is a neural lace.  It allows me to think commands at my system and receive information more directly.  No more gesture control or adaptation to human perception."

"Cool,"  Mo raised her eyebrows.  "No contacts either?"

"Correct.  Visual cues, when they are needed, are inserted into the mental stream behind the optic nerve, at the visual processing centers of the brain."

"When they are needed?"

"Most of the time, instead of an alert or set of directions, I simply 'know' the new information."

A throat cleared at the back of the room.  Both Mo and Lisp turned to look.  Mo's mother stood there and glared at Lisp.

"August," she said, hands on hips.  "You know that you are supposed to be talking out loud."

"Yesth, Mithuth Carmichael."  August's (Lisp's) face and scalp turned red.  He stood and headed into the back of the shack.  Mo's mother turned and faced her, hands still on hips.

"Maureen," she said, voice firm if not outright stern.  "What an unexpected surprise.  Whatever brings you to the... what did you call it when I moved here? 'The Valley of the Luddites'?  Yes, that was it."

Mo stood and faced her mother.  She crossed her arms and tilted her head to one side.  "Mother," she said.  "How are you?"

"Oh, fine, fine.  You know, getting older and stiffer and none-of-that-matters.  What are you doing here?"

"What? Can't a girl visit her mother?"

"A girl can.  You can't.  Not after three years, seven months, four days and..." Her mother looked at a clock sitting on a bookshelf.  "Five hours, sixteen minutes.  Not after what you said to me.  No.  You cannot just show up here."

"I'd have called, but you don't have a link or email or TB+ or a phone or, as far as I can tell, two tin cans with string.  How was I supposed to give you a heads up?  Smoke signals[1]?"

"Humph," her mother said.  This added to the memories initially raised by the sound of her mother's voice.  It was how she answered aggravating questions to which she did not have an answer.  Mo had heard it often growing up.  "Be that as it may, you still have not told me why you are here interrupting my afternoon and corrupting my young charge."

"Hey, that was totally his fault.  He started it."

"Again: why are you here?  I seem to remember someone saying that she hoped never to see my wrinkled face again."

"I did, didn't I?  Well, if I could have thought of anything else to do, please believe me, I would have done it."  Mo took a breath.  She should have been more prepared for the aggression, the suspicion.  Her mother had reason to feel the way that she did.  Mo had her reasons for feeling the same way about her mother.  "I need a place to hide.  I place off the grid.  This was all that I could think of."

"No."

"'No'?  That's it?  Just no?"

"Correct: no.  You may not stay here.  You may not use me as some out-of-the-blue safe house for whatever trouble you've gotten yourself into."

"It's not my fault!"  Mo knew it was a mistake to say those words to her mother.  She had said them too often growing up and then more after the accident and the Institute.  The whining in her voice set even her own teeth on edge.

"I don't care.  Please leave."

"Fine," Mo bowed her head and let her breath out.  She uncrossed her arms and buried her face in her hands.  She stayed like that for a minute, collecting herself, recovering.  Breathing.  Inside, she sub-voc'd to Erics, "Any thoughts?"

"Yes," the virus said.  "Give in."

"Huhn?"

"Both of you are being stubborn over some past history where you both believe yourself to be in the right.  It does not matter.  Your pride in this does not matter.  Punishing your mother does not matter.  What does matter is finding some place where you can hide for a few days or weeks or even months.  Despite my earlier concerns over the lack of communications, that works for us as well.  This is a good place to hide.  If that means allowing your mother to win whatever fight you have been having for three years, seven months, four days, five hours and sixteen minutes, then let her win.  It is not important."

Mo groaned.  She knew that Erics was correct, that she was in a situation that transcended her experience and her pride and that was beyond her ability to handle alone.  She needed help.  And coming here had been her choice.  She lifted her head and looked at her mother.  "I'm sorry."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm sorry."

"For?"

"For coming here.  For the things that I said three years ago.  For everything.  I'm sorry."

"It's a little late for that, don't you think?  Now that you need something from me, you're sorry?  Too convenient and too late."

"I know.  And still, I am sorry.  Dad died and I blamed you.  But I know you weren't in the car, I was. It's too late for all of it.  I'll leave now.  I don't think we will see each other again.  But know that this time it's not by choice."

Mo turned to the door and walked out.  She shut it softly behind her and headed back to the auto-car.  She got in and sat in front of the map table in the compartment and tried to think where she could go now.  Nothing specific sprang to mind.  She supposed that she could pick a direction and go until the car ran out of charge.  Some place off the Transport Loop routes.  She traced a line on the map with her finger that ran southwest into the mountains.  Maybe that.  Or maybe head east into the wheat and corn.  Mo thought that it was as easy to get lost in both directions.  But the mountains had better scenery.  She taped on the town of Salida and told the car to take her there.  She would have a better plan when she arrived.

As she was fastening her seat belt, there was a tap on the car window.  Her mother stood outside.  Mo rolled it down and looked at the older woman.

"You must be in real trouble if this is the only place you could have thought to come.  I suppose the least I can do is offer you some tea and at least listen.  If you want."

Mo nodded and unbuckled her belt.

[1] Ms. Carmichael had studied smoke signals as the Ken Caryl Coop (KC2) used them with their two watch stations during the day.  Mo had no way of knowing this.

Mo Gets Home

Prompt:  Expanding "Upgrade Time" (con't)

[Author's Note: I'm taking a break from /r/WritingPrompts.  Instead, I want to expand/combine a couple of the existing posts.  This will continue from from where yesterday (Homeward Mo) left off.]

Mo's mother lived in the remains of an upscale suburban HOA at the edge of the foothills.  There was a low but sharp ridge line, The Hogback, that separated the area from the larger Denver metroplex, creating an illusion of remoteness and privacy without diminishing access.  The drive from the power station took her three-quarters of an hour, Mo's minimum time to mentally prepare for her mother. She tried to map out strategies and conversational gambits, using her mental model of her mother to plan for the visit.  But she kept getting distracted by the auto-car.

Mo had had very few opportunities in her life to ride in an auto-car, her financial situation keeping her to mass transit.  Those few had been prior to the Institute when she was too young to really understand what was going on.  Then there had been that thing with her Dad.  Now, she was in one as an adult and began to understand the appeal.  The ride itself was as unlike Mo's experiences on Denver RTA as soccer is from American football.  Both have the same goal, but one is slow and plodding with unrealistic time expectations, while the other is fluid and smooth, never stopping.  The car never appeared to be going fast, but it also never stopped.  At intersections, the car zipped through, occasionally missing other cars by inches.  There were no lights, no stop signs.  The car was linked into the Denver RTA expert routing system and adjusted itself in small increments to fit with and around the other vehicles long before such encounters were near at hand.

She would watch other auto-cars approach her own, especially those on perpendicular courses, and try and guess how close they would get as they passed.  A small, more sadistic part of her mind started hoping for a collision.  Some proof that the system was not perfect.

Eventually, the auto-car drove past a weathered sign that read "Ken Caryl Country Club and Community"[1].  The raised lettering was in some scripty font that was supposed to denote money and wealth and exclusivity.  Now the gold paint had flaked off and the chain it hung from was covered in rust.  The road past it was still in good repair and led into a sheltered grassland that had been carved into little boxes on the hillside.  Most of the boxes no longer had the two story dwellings that had filled them from edge to edge, the houses and foundations long since removed by the new residents.

In their place were stands of grains: corn, wheat, barley.  The golf course was pastureland for a flock of sheep that kept the grass almost as neat as the long gone grounds crew.  The clubhouse with its industrial kitchen remained and had a cluster of simple huts surrounding it.  Each hut had decorations covering their simple clapboard sides: flowers and leaves, moons and stars, other ancient fetish symbols that had been re-interpreted by the current culture.  Mo's mother's place was Yin-Yangs inside Egyptian Eyes on a rainbow background.

"We have lost connectivity," said Erics in her ear.

"Yeah, sorry," replied Mo.  "I should have warned you.  They had this place cut off.  Intentionally.  It's a network dead zone.  They have some idea that living without access is somehow more fulfilling, closer to the intent of nature or some such nonsense.  Kind of like a mix between the Amish and a California Weed Co-op."

"This will limit my ability to help you."

"I know.  But maybe that's not a bad thing.  It also means that it will be more difficult for whoever They are to track us."

"As long as They do not have this place staked out."

"I don't think so.  Mother had herself declared dead a while back.  When she came here.  And I haven't visited her in almost as long.  If all they are looking at is on-line records and my visit habits, They won't know about this place."

"Then this is not home.  Yet you called it home.  Why is this home?"

"I don't know.  I guess the apartment should be home, but, well, I was subletting from Sandra and it was always a little temporary.  I never really thought of it as home.  This place?  My mother lives here.  And while she and I, we've not gotten along since the accident and the Institute and all that, I have no better place to call home.  It's not where I grew up.  It's not where I've lived the longest.  Heck, today is the first day that I've visited it, though I've seen pictures.  But Mother is here, so that I guess that's why it's home."

"It is home because you decided it was home?"

"Sure.  Go with that.  I've got nothing better."

The car stopped by the club house and Mo got out.  She stuck her hands in her pockets and trudged over to the Egypt-o-Chinese hieroglyphics.  She knocked on the door and yelled, "Hey, Mother.  It's Mo.  I mean Maureen.  I'm home."


[1] Mo had had occasion to dig into the KC3&C's history just before her mother moved out to it.  It had been developed in the 1990's as a place for the affluent to retreat from their day time lives, then called a variety of things like "Valley Traditions" and "Valley Heirloom".  Huge homes with french windows and slate roofs had filled the space, each leaving a carefully cultivated median of vibrant grass and rose bushes.  The streets had been wide and sweeping, laid out around the Country Club with its upscale grill, swimming pool, golf course and five digit mandatory yearly membership dues.  Most of the homes were originally occupied by Baby Boomers and, when they decided that 5K square feet of living space was too much for two elderly people and a dog, retired to expensive rest homes.  Most kept the property and handed it off to children, who got together and came up with the KC3&C name, consolidating several HOAs.  But when the retirees retired to the after life and stopped paying the club dues, the children sold off the houses at a loss and moved back into the city.  The final nail in the KC3&C coffin was the California Gold Dust that drifted across the streets and lawns, killing all of that careful landscaping.  There was a space of two decades where the whole area was tied up in a series of finger-pointing law suits before it was abandoned and allowed to revert to nature.  That is when Mo's mother's group took over.