[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 the Bacteria) left off.]
Along with the additional light, her breakfast was waiting: a Pei Wei Egg McMuffin and a Da Latte[1]. Before she scarfed those down, Mo checked her bucket. It had been miraculously emptied while she slept. Or replaced. It was hard for her to tell. Out of curiosity and the idea that more information is better than less, Mo used one of her fingernails to mark the upper rim of the current bucket. She would check it again tomorrow.
After breakfast, Mo sat on her table and waited. Something would happen sooner or later. At the very least, she supposed that other prisoners-of-infection would be installed in the new cages. That might give her opportunities to interact with them, to compare stories, to collude. The spacing between the cages was such that she would need to yell to talk to someone. Coupled with the convention hall's acoustics, they would all need to be careful that only one person yelled at a time. She started planning out a CB radio[2] style yelling convention to share with her soon-to-be neighbors.
As she was watching a group of three people pallet-jack another cage into place under one of the lights, her message alert came on.
aeromonas.hydromaxia.local.net: ARE YOUR ANTENNAS FIXED?
mo.admin.local.net: IN WHAT WAY? THEY ARE FIXED TO FREQUENCY AND NETWORK.
aeromonas.hydromaxia.local.net: ARE THEY STRUCTURALLY ATTACHED TO YOUR BODY OR CAN YOU REMOVE ONE?
mo.admin.local.net: I CAN REMOVE THEM. TO WHAT END?
aeromonas.hydromaxia.local.net: IF THEY FIT THROUGH THE CAGE MESH AND YOU HAVE SOME THIN WIRE, THEN YOU MAY BE ABLE TO INITIATE COMMUNICATIONS OUTSIDE OF THIS CAGE.
mo.admin.local.net: UNDERSTOOD. LET ME INVESTIGATE.
After logging off the chat bot, Mo reached up to her ear and unscrewed the ball nuts off of each end of one of her bar antennas. With the bar in hand, she tested it on the copper mesh. It would pass through without the balls on the end. Mo had no idea what that would do to their performance. All she did know was that the length was tuned to the frequency range of her data carrier. Messing with it may mean no signal. She asked the virus, which replied with NO DATA. Yet, Mo reasoned that she would not know until she tried.
Next, she needed some thin wire. That would be trickier. All of the wire that ran her system was tattooed into her skin and would not survive being removed, even if she could remove it, which she could not and was profoundly thankful for that lack. She patted down her clothes hoping that she had a paperclip or pen or something[3]. No luck. Nothing in her hair either, no barrettes or hair clips or bobby pins. Her fly and her boots had zippers, but Mo did not think that they would carry a current.
Mo then searched the cage. This was frustrating as the whole thing was made of wire, but she could not find a loose end to pry up. The metal handle for the bucket had also been removed. It was when Mo ran her hands along under the table that her search paid off. Whoever these guys were (AVOID: Anti-Virus Operational Inter Department? She would have to keep working on that), they had rented the tables. And whoever the rental agency was kept track of their inventory through RFID tags. And RFID tags were nothing more than little antennas on a sticker. Mo peeled the sticker off carefully and started slowly pulling the coil of wire out of its paper sandwich. A few minutes later, she had six inches of thin wire.
Mo wrapped one end of the wire in place on the antenna and secured it with one of the ball nuts. She then threaded the other end of the wire through one of the piercings in her upper ear from whence the antenna had been removed. She pushed the table against one of the cage walls, sat with her back against that wall and stuck the antenna bar though the mesh until the ball nut stopped it. She closed her eyes, pretended to be asleep and watched the signal icon in her HUD. It took a second, but she eventually got a single bar of signal.
Immediately, Mo pulled the antenna back through, disconnected the wire and put the bar back in her ear.
aeromonas.hydromaxia.local.net: PLEASE EXPLAIN NEW SIGNAL LOSS.
mo.admin.local.net: TOO RISKY NOW. WILL REPLACE TONIGHT WHEN LESS LIKELY TO BE DISCOVERED.
aeromonas.hydromaxia.local.net: UNDERSTOOD.
[1] 2018 saw a global crash in fast food mostly brought on by the need to replace cow pasture acreage with more direct-to-human crops. Higher beef prices suddenly made all of the old standby's vulnerable to more grain or sea reliant chains. Coupled with the rise of the Chinese hegemony, suddenly everything was "Da" instead of "Large" or "Venti".
[2] When some of the major ISPs in the US started cracking down on certain types of data, interested citizens explored alternate pipelines for disseminating data. One of the was the infamous "Trucker Net". In a nutshell, several of the CB channels were co-opted for pure data transmission and then a hard drive and Pi style computer were hooked to the radio. The system ran on torrent and magnet link style sharing and worked over long ranges, albeit slowly, in the 500kbps range. That is it worked, until those ISPs saw their data overage charges starting to shrink. Then they put up their own radios with jammers, spoofing the original radios. Those then increased their error correction which cause the large ISPs to increase their noise and so on and so forth. The end of it all is that, earlier in her cyberlife, Mo learned CB radio etiquette.
[3] Mo had trouble remembering the last time that she had used paper to record data. Everything went into her system and cloud. As a result, paperclips and pens were things that she knew people used to carry and that she might have had something like them at some point in her life. Unfortunately, not now.
