[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 in a Box) left off.]
That night, Mo lay on her table not sleeping. She was worried about what would happen to her with this group of whatevers that had her in the cage, but that was not what kept her awake: attempting to sleep on a plastic folding table was. The table was designed to keep light things devoid of nerves at a comfortable height for a seated human, not to be comfortable for those same humans. As far as Mo was concerned, the designers had done their lack of comfort job well. Its only saving grace was that it was more comfortable than the floor. Mo knew. She had tried.
Gabriel had returned with a sandwich several hours after their interview. He had pulled the door open to the limit of the chain, leaving a six inch gap, and handed it though along with a nutrition shake. "Stay healthy," he had said. Mo had only grunted in return.
Now, Mo mulled over what she knew about her situation. What she really knew. For instance, Gabriel had said that he was a member of a team. However, so far he was the only one that she had seen. Was he a team of one? She supposed that the shadowy whatever that had tasered her counted. That gave her a lower limit of two people on the team. She knew that there were probably more, but she wanted to make sure that she was differentiating between known facts and assumptions.
Next up on her list was the infection. Again, she was being told something with very little back up. Gabriel said that she was infected. He had put a piece of paper on his table when he said it. He had not shown her the paper and even if he had, all it would have proven was that they had paper and a printer. She had no way of knowing if the information on it was real or made up. Mo needed to determine if she was actually infected. That was something that she might be able to do, even inside the cage.
She brought her hand up and engaged her HUD's UI. Mo scrolled down to her utilities folder. All of the programs in here she kept stored in local memory for these king of off-line situations. First she started her virus/trojan scan as that took a while and she could check other things while it was running. Next, she pulled the log from the last scan, done while she slept twenty-two hours ago[1]. The log showed that a bunch of low risk cookies and other trackers had been removed, but nothing else. She had not expected much from this. If Gabriel was telling the truth, then whatever this infection was was too new for her to have the required scanning heuristics installed. If he was lying, then nothing would be there anyway. Either way, basic troubleshooting technique had taught her that you started with basic, obvious stuff and then worked your way into the more exotic situations.
Next, she pulled her connection log for the past twenty-four hours. This should show all of the data that she both sent and received during that time period. This was a much harder list to parse as many of the connections were not listed by their URL, but by their IP address. TF+ was not tweetfaceplus.soc, but five sets of three digits[2] that identified the actual server connected to the Internet. Next to that was a set of six letter-number couplets that further identified the exact hardware to which her system had connected. Mo checked this log file rarely, but often enough to be able to identify roughly three quarters of the IP addresses. Most were to her cloud server. There was also a block of connections to TF+ and another to the Quiet Place order management server. Clearing those out still left her with a couple of hundred addresses that she could not immediately identify. Mo figured that if she was infected, if she was 'sending out these weird packets,' that they would most likely go to the same IP address or block of addresses. She copied this list over to a spreadsheet and sorted them by the number of connections she had made to each. After the sorting, she stared harder at the top few listings, trying to remember them in any context. She grunted and deleted the second from the top: it was the apartment server that Sandra had setup and forgotten about. Mo had broken its encryption over a year ago as an exercise and then pushed it from her own memory. Apparently, she was still logging in every time she got home. The rest of the list, though, brought nothing to mind. She saved the file and closed it. She would not be able to get any farther with it until she was back on line.
The virus scan had completed checking seventy percent of her system and had not thrown off anything more exotic than a erectile dysfunction spam bot. Mo moved on to her next diagnostic: her internal bio monitors. Gabriel had said that this infection was a bacteria. Blood tests were something that her system could administer and flag should anything come up. She also had sensors implanted in her intestines to keep an eye on her digestive flora. On top of that, she had internal urine, fecal and breath monitors. Mo started combing those for abnormalities. Nothing popped up immediately on blood or breath. Urine and fecal would have to wait for bucket time, something that Mo planned on putting off as long as possible. She was a little unclear on the schedule and procedure for emptying it. A five gallon plastic bucket was not going to fit through the door's chain gap.
The digestive flora monitor was a bit more difficult. It quickly gave her a list of all the different strains that resided in her intestines. Unfortunately, the list did not mean anything to her. She needed to be on-line to cross reference the list with a medical database. Most of the entries were things that the scan could identify but it had red flagged one item, the only entry that it was unable to name. Mo grimaced. That added some credence to Gabriel's infection claim.
Mo stared at the blinking red question marks with which her system had tagged the unknown gut flora. Normally, she would link the data to a health database and get a list of treatments, usually a broad spectrum antibiotic. Inside the cage, all she could do was look at it. She tried to think of ways to flush her intestines with her available resources, but kept coming up empty. There were systems that she could install that kept vials of injectables under her skin, ready to administer at a moment's notice, but that was not how she had chosen to spend her upgrade money, opting for better processing and cooler tattoos. She promised herself that she would have them all installed the next time that she could afford it.
The virus scan flashed that it was finished. It had also found an anomaly: an unknown bot taking up space in the low level sectors of her system's connectivity chipset. She looked at the recommended actions and was told that, while the system could not make a firm recommendation due the inability to log on to its servers, bots like this were usually cleared when the whole system (memory, storage, cache, everything) was cleared and started from a fresh, hash checked install of the PTN OS. Mo could do that while stuck in the cave. She would lose a few things: her music, all of the logs that she had just scanned. The fresh PTN OS would be an issue. There was a copy in a locked off portion of her storage, but ideally it would need to be verified prior to running this operation and she had no way of doing that while off-line. She decided that that was a chance she was willing to take and started running through the process. She had nothing better to do while locked in a cage and disconnected.
As Mo started flushing various systems in preparation for the re-installation, a message popped up in the center of her HUD:
aeromonas.hydromaxia.local.net: PLEASE STOP
[1] With the addition of the stent turbine, Mo was able to set up some running triggers based on both her heart rate and brain waves. For example, when she left REM and entered deep sleep, this triggered the virus scan to run a full system scan.
[2] A fifth triplet was added in 2021 when IP6 decidedly did not take off.
