[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 (Script Mo) left off.]
"It's time and they aren't back."
Mo opened her eyes and looked up from her seat on the turf. Darren was standing above her, hands on his hips. "Huhn?" she said.
"It's been two hours since Melissa and Arthur left. I don't think they're coming back. We should move on." he said.
"Right. Yeah. Just a second." Reviewing the script that Erics had put together had forced her to concentrate. The virus had reverse compiled its draft and Mo was nearly certain that it would work, but nearly certain was not good enough. Unfortunately, the virus had no concept of commenting on its work or on formatting the code so that it was easy to read. Instead, Mo had to add all of that. She had spent most of the time hunting parentheses and brackets, adding spaces to the beginnings of lines and comments at the end, all so that she could piece together what Erics had done to her two scripts. At this point, she was about half way through the code. Aside from the formatting, she had found nothing that looked out of place. The error check in the compiler also came back clean. "Screw it," she said.
Mo reached up to her ears and afixed her antenna bars. Then she closed her eyes, pulled up 'Whight_Saddle.strap', compiled it again and ran it. Next, she double-checked that her connection with V-EE was turned off. Finally, she pulled up a counter in her HUD to monitor the number of concurrent connections she had with the rest of the world, prioritizing those that pinged back that they we part of the botnet. Only after all of that, did Mo stand up.
"Okay," she said to Darren. "Everything is good to go on my end. What have you discovered?"
"Not much. A few of the locals warned me away from the Cherry Creek mall. Apparently there's a rival community living in there. 'Cheap hos and needle-boys' according to one of the less nasally offensive people I talked to. Despite that, I don't think we should go there."
"Why not?"
"If Melissa and Arthur have been captured, they know that's where we were going to go. We have to assume that 'they' know as much about our plans as those two did."
"Makes sense," Mo said. She checked her counter and saw that she already had over a hundred direct connections, hopefully all getting infected as they spoke. "Did anyone offer any alternatives? Less 'ho-y' and 'needle-y'?"
"Sort of. I asked and that started one of those arguments that people set in their ways have. You know, where one of them say that we should go to the soup kitchen next to the bus terminal, then another says that the first is crazy, we should go to the church up on Colfax. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth all chime in. I left at that point."
"So no real direction, then. Where do you think we should go?"
"I'd like to get down by the Platte River somehow. Maybe even to the other side. We'd have to pass the Convention Center, but then we'd be headed a direction that they won't expect. There's another clan of homeless in Elitch Gardens. Or maybe we keep moving toward the mountains."
"Great. Give me a minute to check on our financial situation." Mo saw that her counter was now over three hundred and climbing. Seventy-three showed that they were part of the botnet and ready to receive instructions. She turned on TORx and VPNx, routing them through the botnet before getting to the larger Internet. Finally, drawing a breath, she pulled up her bank account:
We're sorry. There seems to be an issue with your account. Please contact us immediately, either through our e-chat or come into any one of our hundreds of branches. We look forward to hearing from you.
Mo supposed that she should have been more prepared for just how far 'they' were willing to go. But she was not and the message hit her harder than it should have.
"Well, Satan's tiny toenails. They've frozen my account," she said. "Unless you have a better solution, I guess we're not only hoofing it, but starving while we're at it."
Darren frowned. "That will mean mine is frozen as well." He looked around at the homeless crowd. "They have food. Maybe even some way onto public transportation. Heaven knows, I see enough of them on the buses. But we have nothing to trade and they weren't too open to my charity suggestions earlier."
"Then I guess we best get going."
