[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's Message) left off.]
Her bus stop[1] at the Convention Center was across the street from the old RTD Light Rail[2] stop and around the corner from the Blue Bear statue. The walk gave Mo an opportunity to appreciate how wrecked the place had become. Graffiti abounded, absolutely, but the simple tags of yesteryear were now several layers of paint down. Instead, the concrete pillars and metal fascia of the parking structure were covered with semi-intelligent RFID tags and aggressive loc-ads. There was garbage everywhere (and one lonely tumbleweed which got there God only knows how) competing for space with the homeless and their tracker-disabled shopping carts. Mo ran her finger up and down her visual menus, ensuring that all of her defenses were up and running. The radio space was certain to be malicious. She also started a few probes to see who was doing what and because offense is defense.
Turning the corner from Champa onto 14th brought the Blue Bear into sight, but improved nothing else. The glass facade of the Center had the look of one of those old computer punch cards they had shown all of the kids during the high school trip to the History Museum: boards here, glass there, empty frames trying to program a budget increase with forgotten code. Even the Bear was not what it (gender not being a part of civic art) used to be. A forty-foot statue of a bear with its fore paws on the Convention Center wall and its face peering in, it had originally been intended to as a symbol of curiosity. Now it stood against the building as if it were the one setting up the punch card, trying to code its way out of the mess. No longer curious, but urgent. A layer of smart playbills, political posters and lost cat flyers covered its legs to the knee.
Mo scanned the area for Vacuum dude, but no one stood out. She walked up to the Bear and leaned against its leg, setting off a series of intrusion alarms in her HUD as the posters tried to grab her attention. She shushed them all and continued to look about. There were a lot of homeless. A. Lot. Most were looking at her, maybe not directly, but checking her out both IRL and virtually. Not all of the alarms had been from posters, the persistent ones included the old Kickstarter and Panhandler hosts among others. There was even an old BitCoin attack looking to steal her processing cycles for some mining. Here probes made some headway against the systems that were more than chips on a card, having already set up trojans in twenty of them. Just in case. Again she shut the alarms down and waited.
At precisely noon, a man appeared out of the Convention Center and approached her. "Hello, Mo," he said, extending a hand. Mo kept her hands tucked under her arms and looked this person up and down. Tall. Skinny. Casually dressed in jeans, t-shirt and fleece[3]. There were no visible tattoos, but the skin around his eyes had strange wrinkles, as if he had had bad plastic surgery: a sure sign of the new InvisiTrace ink from Hewlett-Pfizer[4]. Before she spoke, Mo pinged his network out of curiosity. Her best probes did not see him at all. He blinked his left eye.
"Military grade protection, I assume. Must be nice," she said still ignoring his outstretched hand. "Do you have a name or do you really want me to give you my carpet lint?"
He looked at his hand and shrugged, tucking both hands behind his back. "You can call me Gabriel."
"Okay, Gabriel. How can one nearly broke waitress help someone like you?" She kept probing, looking for something that proved he was working in the virtual world. Finally, she turned on all of the trojans in the homeless net. There were now closer to fifty hijacked systems. She had all of them go after this Gabriel, tagging a one meter GPS location as the target. All of the requests were accepted, not blocked, but then nothing actually happened. Instead of an 'access denied' message, all of them, including her own requests were cycling, waiting, as if whatever server they had connected to was taking a long time to respond. For the hell of it, she got all of the homeless nets to send endless requests at his system. A DDOS from the streets. Gabriel blinked both eyes.
"Well, as soon as you're done messing with the local fauna, I'll take you in and show you why we need a broke waitress." Mo nodded and shut down her bots. Gabriel extended an arm back the way he had come, gesturing her into the Convention Center. Mo started walking.
"I thought this place was deserted. There hasn't been an actual convention here for as long as I can remember."
Gabriel followed half a step behind her. "Most of it is and that's why we like it."
"We?"
"All in good time." He stepped forward and opened a service door for Mo. Beyond was a beige corridor leading parallel to the outside wall. Gabriel motioned her to the right. Mo stopped right outside.
"Sorry, that's not enough. Pardon a girl if this looks too much like some elaborate rape setup. I'm going to need more than your advanced skin and word before I enter an unmarked door."
"Understood. We had hoped for more trust."
"Based on what? To my knowledge, you're the one asking for favors from me. There's been no bonding. No basis. Give me something or I open my firewall to the street rats and start screaming." Mo hoped she would not have to do that. Clearing the viruses out of her system would take days and she would need to restart several of her on-line profiles from scratch. On the other hand, it would set off her internal alarms and send location and status to the police.
"Of course." Gabriel stood holding the door, but with his body almost blocking her route to the street. "We have been studying a group of people with similar PTN mods to your own. The network structure and use has potential to do much more. Things it was not intended to do initially. We have begun to see some of those signs in your network."
"So, you've been monitoring me without my consent?"
"Absolutely not. Did you read the EULA that came with your memory upgrade?"
"Of course not. No one does. Anyway, didn't the Supreme Court rule that using a EULA as an excuse was not enough?[5]"
"It would be enough to get us through your firewalls without a warrant, but maybe not enough to go any farther. If we were the people who made your upgrades. Or the government. We're not those people. So, basically, we don't care."
"Then the EULA?"
"Just something to keep you talking."
"Keep me talking? Talking until when?"
"Until this guy got here." A shadow filled the Convention Center door, extended an arm and tasered Mo until her hair stood on end.
[1] As if she owned it. As if.
[2] Light Rail made sense once, back when people still lived in those suburbs. But as the money shifted and some places got gentrified and others slid into the gutter, the rails were unable to adapt, being spiked into the ground. Buses got smart, became electric, lost their drivers and picked up the slack.
[3] Colorado Formal Wear
[4] Actions, Innovations and Health(R)
[5] End User Licence Agreements have been around for ages, just as long as people who scroll to the bottom as quickly as possible to click "Accept" and get on with their lives. Most of the clauses in them are there as a "told you so" by the manufacturer in case the user does something stupid, like sit in their chair for three days hacking orcs on-line without eating off-line. However, when the world of auto-cars exploded. There was an almost instant secondary market that sold after-market firmwares and other apps that promised priority on the street. People bought and installed them as soon as the auto-car got them home. The auto-makers finally picked on one Clarence Lorman and sued him into three lifetimes of poverty. Appeals made it to the SCOTUS where it was determined that clicking "Accept" was not enough to legally bind someone. As a result, when someone buys a car now, they have to be video taped actually reading upwards of fifty pages on dos-and-don'ts.
