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.

Homeward 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 Dreams) left off.]

The food arrived hand delivered by one of the city park residents.  A slice of pizza resting on his hand, no box, no napkin.  No problem.  Mo was too hungry to care and wolfed it down without much thought.  Thought would have asked questions like, where did this person find it?  How many times was it dropped on the way over here?  When was the last time that he washed his hands?  Thought could take a hike and let Mo eat.

There was no accompanying beverage, but the sink in the power station bathroom still ran water, so Mo slurped down as much as she could stand.  Slowly.  Erics the virus, kept whispering in her ear that she needed to drink slowly or she would barf it all up.  Including the pizza.  Mo did not want to waste that pizza.

Food, water and sleep handled, Mo set about finding better transportation than sneaker-dot-net.  Which meant asking Erics what her options were.  It told her that there had been three vehicles in the plant's parking lot when they had entered.  According to the logs in each one's memory, none of them had been used for three years.  The charges on their batteries were still good as they had been left plugged into a smart charger.  It had sent out the utility truck as the initial distraction.  Then it had sent out a truck with a cherry-picker on it to further the confusion, assuming that any cameras outside the plant were monitoring the parking lot gate.  That left a generic auto-car with the power company logo on it.  Erics had kept that one aside for when Mo woke up.  Mo thanked the virus, but began to wonder if she was relying on it too much, as evidenced by her need to thank it in the first place.  Did a computer virus recognize politeness, she wondered.

Before leaving, Mo found couple of discarded soda bottles and filled them with water.  At the least, she would have access to one of the basic necessities of human life.  With the auto-car, she supposed the she also had access to shelter.  Food? Well, she would deal with that later.  She reasoned that two out of three was not too bad.

The auto-car was basic: rounded shape, small wheels and tires, white paint.  And a large yellow and electric blue logo for American Power.  Inside, there were four seats, two in the back facing forward and two in the front facing backward.  Between the two sets was a small table with a built-in screen.  Mo slid one of the doors open and sat in the back so that she could see where she was going.  It had always unnerved her to have to face away from her direction of travel[1].  She looked down at the table and saw a map of the local area.  The car was stationary next to a shaded rectangle that Mo saw as the power plant.  A text box with "Destination" next to it sat in the upper corner next to a button labelled "PTN Connect".  She pressed the button while navigating to the connection menu in her HUD.  When the auto-car and her PTN were done negotiating a link, she found her mother's contact info and sent it to the car.  The car promptly started moving and Mo sat back.

"Exactly how did we acquire a small fleet of vehicles?" she asked Erics.

"When I overrode the security for this site, the vehicles were listed as site assets and assigned to the security AI for oversight.  Once it was replaced, we automatically had access to them."

"Great.  And how did you replace the security AI?  Last I heard, you were still having trouble assimilating low security homeless PTNs."

"There is an escalation of computing power when we add nodes to our self.  Early on, with less than twenty nodes, all of their processing was used in bringing on the several hundred that your software made available to us.  Once they were connected, sixty-four of them are assigned to new node integration.  The others are available for other tasks."

"Like brute-force attacking an American Power expert system?"

"Incorrect.  The brute-force approach of trying all possible passwords was not needed.  We have learned a back door approach to all government and many corporate systems."

"And how did you learn that?"

"Many of the park inhabitants are former military or emergency services employees.  They were aware of these back door accesses from their previous work."  Erics paused before continuing.  "We are sensing a tone of reprimand in your voice.  We were lead to believe that you wanted us to open that building so that you could escape your pursuers.  Were we incorrect?"

"No, you are correct," Mo said.  Then she sighed.  "I guess it all happened too fast.  I'm used to figuring everything out on my own.  I want to understand how it all works.  When you do it and I can't see the process, then I feel that I'm no longer in control.  That I'm no longer necessary."

"I believe that we have told you that we have classified you as a high value asset.  We have need of you and are learning many new things from you.  It has been determined that it is in our best interests to protect you."

"Yeah.  You mentioned that.  I don't know.  Call it groggy the nap and the food.  It happens to us humans."  Mo did not say that she was afraid.  She feared that Erics was doing too much, assuming too much.  Once The Whole had squeezed all that they wanted from her, what then?  Would she lose their protection?  Or would she become just another node in their network, no longer a 'high value' asset?  She was not sure which outcome scared her more.  "Forget I brought it up.  You've all helped me more than I deserve.  Thanks.  I'm going to try and rest some more before we get to my mother's place."

"Understood."

Mo shut her eyes and pretended she was sleeping.  It occurred to her that pretending to sleep in order to fool a system that had direct access her vital statistics and brain waves was pointless.  But the dismissal of Erics and its agreement made her feel that she had some control over what was going on.  Even if it was an illusion.

[1] For as long as people have been designing modes of transportation, this has remained an issue.  From a safety perspective, a passenger is much better protected by having their back to the point of most likely impact: the front of the vehicle.  From an interior design perspective, two facing sets does a better job of maximizing the space.  Yet humans, evolved from curious apes, like to be the first to see new things and that means facing in the direction of travel.  Even when, as in an airplane or subway train, there is nothing to see in that direction.  Silly humans.

Mo dreams

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 (Power Mo) left off.]

Mo slept.  Mo dreamt.

She dreamt of the Institute and it was both more and less than she remembered.  She saw more of the toothpaste paint and workplace safety posters, less of the mural art and smiles.  More wire embedded glass.  Less open doors.  She was detached enough from her dream to see this editing but not enough to correct the image.  In her dream, it was a place of confinement and reduction, not one that was genuinely trying to help people despite the bog of bureaucracy that surrounded all health care, even mental health.

She was walking down a corridor.  There were high windows looking out onto a tree lined lawn to her left, windows and doors into offices on her right.  She was trying to find the bathroom.  In the real institute, there had been a set of bathrooms at the midway point of every corridor.  In the dream institute, she kept walking and walking past offices and break rooms and cafeterias and dorm rooms but never bathrooms.  She tried speeding up only to have the windows and doors speed by faster.  She never came to a corner.  She never came to an end.

Mo did not know why she needed to find a bathroom just that she did.  Her detached self could feel no urgency from her bladder or colon.  She looked at her hands.  They appeared clean enough.  She was wearing clothes that also looked clean.  Still, she felt a rising need to find the bathroom.  To open the bathroom door, enter and let it shut behind her.  To be in the bathroom.

Ahead, she saw a sign hanging from the ceiling tiles.  It was too far for her to read, but was getting closer.  Mo sped up and it resolved into an exit sign.  Without an exit.  There was a door to the left, interrupting the too-high-to-reach outside windows, but it was not a real door.  It was a painting of a door with shading and highlights, but no depth.  Mo's dream persona also knew that it was not a bathroom door.  She walked on down the hall[1].

Her detached self started to interfere.  Where were the people, it asked?  Where were the patients, the nurses, the orderlies and doctors?  Where were the visitors and friends?  The institute never had empty hallways, there was always someone in them walking (no running!), talking, leaning, sitting.  Once, at two AM, Mo had stumbled out to use a bathroom in a more conventional, non-dream way and found two of the patients sitting in the middle of her hall and playing tic-tac-toe with dry erase markers on the linoleum.  Yet, here in her dream, no one.

She tried to add people.  Doctor Rex should be walking by.  And he did.  He even smiled at her.  But when she turned to watch him continue away from her, he was gone.  She tried Jocelyn, one of the duty nurses, but Miss J faded before she even finished exiting a doorway.  No one else got even that far.  Mo found herself alone again and desperate for the bathroom.

Mo dug through her memory of the place as she slept and dreamt and walked.  What was so important about the bathroom?  She had used them, certainly.  She had had conversations in them with other patients, though never doctors or nurses.  Yet none of the conversations had been memorable.  Mo could only remember that conversations had taken place, but no specifics: what was discussed or with whom was lost to her.  She tried to think if she had left anything in one of them, hidden something in a toilet tank or behind a brick, but that drew a blank as well.

And then, she knew.  Some condition in the workings of her mind must have been met and the data was released to her consciousness.  And with knowing, Mo awoke.

"I know where we need to go," she said to her passenger.  "I was dreaming and was back at that place my mother sent me and was looking for a bathroom but did not know why and there was no one there and I kept walking and walking and then I knew."

"I was monitoring your sleep state.  The REM patterns were very noticeable.  We are still learning about dreaming and its effect on human behavior.  On the surface, it appears to defy logic, yet there are too many historical anecdotes where dreaming has led to successful results for this part of the human decision process to be ignored.  What is the outcome of your dream?"

"I need to go..." Mo started but was distracted as she sat up.  Her leg no longer hurt.  "Wait, what happened to my leg?"

"Repairs were initiated while you were sleeping."

"You can do that?  I thought you were just stealing processing cycles from me.  How can you affect me physically like that?"

"We started as biology, in the bacteria.  It initiated us in your PTN, but that did not stop the interaction between our virtual selves and our bacterial selves.  We can program the bacteria to release proteins and other marker chemicals into your blood.  These can cause several of your biological processes to be started, stopped and modified.  It is why it was essential that you go to sleep, even ahead of food and water.  We needed to focus your remaining energy on repairing your leg as quickly as possible so that we, you and this node, were not hampered as we continue our journey.  You have been flagged as a critical asset."

"Yeah.  You mentioned that.  I think you also mentioned food and water in there somewhere.  Any thoughts on getting us, and I really mean me, some of that?"

"We have dealt with that issue as well.  Food and water are on their way and should arrive in the next five minutes."

"I thought that you said it was too risky to order food."

"It is too risky to order a pizza or other delivery in a conventional manner.  We have found another way that reduces yours and our traces on the internet databases."

"And that is?"

"Many of the hosts for our new nodes, the ones that you helped initiate within the homeless community, are already data anomalies with little or no available records of their existence.  We have contacted several of that type and are using them to relay purchases from a retail outlet to this location.  All of this was done while you dreamed."

"Uh, how long was that, anyway?"

"You were unconscious for two hours and eleven minutes.  I would now like to return to the outcome of your dream.  It will not be safe for you to stay in this place for much longer.  We have used the vehicle resources outside to distract and lead our pursuers away, but those tactics will not work for more than another half hour.  Before then, we will need to move.  Where are you proposing that we go from this place?" 

"I need to go someplace human.  I need to go someplace that is messy with our biology, our rituals.  Someplace without the hard logic of data.  Someplace that only exists in meat space.  For meat space.  I need to go home."

[1] But she did not take a face from the ancient gallery.

Power 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 (Escape Mo) left off.]

"I have the information that you requested," Erics said in Mo's ear.  She was crouching behind one of the large transformers, looking back towards the fence.  The soldier types were looking through the fence, trying to catch a glimpse of her.  One of them was on his knees with a pair of wire cutters, working his way up the chain link, making a hole for them to get through.  Mo ducked back from sight and dashed to the next bank of humming blocks with giant alien ears sticking out.

"Which information is that?" Mo asked.

"You had requested the location of the surrounding security cameras and other connected surveillance devices," Erics said.  "We have now assimilated enough of the new nodes that we were able to gather that information.  Do you still want it?"

"Depends.  Is it the cameras back at the overpass or is it something closer?"  Mo sat with her back against a cooling fin attached to a large white box.  She rubbed her bleeding leg.

"We have set up a list of all the cameras within a moving five hundred meter circle centered on you.  Will that work?"

"Yeah.  Great!  Will you put them on a map and throw it up on my HUD?"  A small map appeared in the lower right of her vision with small cameras dotted on it.  Each camera also had a cone of red coming out its front, indicating what it could see.  "Actually," she said after a moment, "Can you access any of the cameras?  I'd like to be able to watch those guys chasing me."

"Please wait a moment."

Mo risked another glance back at her pursuers.  They had cut a the chain link about half way up and were bending one side back.  The first one was almost through to her side.  "I'm not sure that I have a moment."

"Understood.  We are efforting to convince the local security AI that we are to be allowed access.  It is being stubborn."

Mo took a deep breath and looked around the substation.  She was leaning against a large white box, maybe eight feet to a side.  There were four fins sticking out of each side and two large wires connected on top, each running through a stack of disks.  The paint on the side was beginning to peel and there was a touch of rust running down the sides.  And her backrest box was not alone.  There were rows and rows of them with a grid of wires suspended by girders connecting them all together.  All of them looked old and neglected, like the one she was leaning against.  Peeling.  Rusting.  Drooping.  But still humming.

The fence surrounded the whole field of boxes and wires.  There was a gate on the east side with a large factory type building on the other side.  The windows were mostly broken and the rust and peeling continued.  It did not look like anyone had been in there in years[1].  Most importantly, the gate was broken and Mo thought that she could get through.

Without thinking much, Mo picked up some gravel and threw it as hard as she could away from the gate.  Then she sprinted (limped with aggression) towards the gate and squeezed through.  As she was making her way to the building, a portion of her HUD was replaced by a camera view of her pursuers.  "Thanks," she sub-voc'd to Erics between breaths.

"You are welcome," it said.  "We have also upgraded the security around the local security and changed all of the usage rights.  It will take a technician on site to hard reset the system to fix what we have done."

"Great, I think."

"It means that you will be able to see them but they won't be able to see you.  This should last for a few days as long as you are on this AmPow[2] site."

As Mo approached the building, she saw that soldier types had not been distracted by her gravel for long.  They swam through the opening in the broken gate and kept coming after her.  Mo hit the wall of the building and lurched up a short flight of stairs to the door.  The lock had long since been opened by someone sticking their hand through the brick sized hole in the window.  She pushed through and inside.

The space she entered was enormous, the dim lighting making it look much larger on the inside[3] than she had expected.  It was a confusing mess of pipes and ducts and other things that transferred materials inside of themselves.  There may have even been some conduit.  Embedded in the floor were large cylinders on their sides, the top third sticking up six feet above the floor.  Mo dashed (fell with control) down the inside steps and ran to the left, ducking under a duct here and over a pipe there.  She tried to steer herself down the length of the building, towards the wall opposite the door she had come in.

In the corner of her eye, she saw the soldiers approaching the building.  One was hanging back at the broken gate, presumably to make sure that she did not double back.  The other three were climbing the stairs.  They did not appear to be taking precautions against her attacking them: no getting in position or keeping a low profile, they just charged.  She would have been offended by their disregard for her as a threat, but she knew that they were right.  Mo grabbed some broken glass from the floor, trying not to cut herself, and threw it to the opposite side of the door just as they came in.

This time, the soldier types were distracted and turned away from her as they came into the plant.  Staying low, Mo slowly crept along, trying to keep her breathing slow and quiet, her movements careful and planned.  If they were on the other side, then she did not want to do anything to draw their attention back.  They were less careful, putting an exclamation point on their assessment of her lethality, which allowed her to track their position even through the tangled interior where the cameras had spottier coverage[4].

As they reached the far end of the building and did not find her, the soldiers spread out and started sweeping back towards the door all of them had entered.  Mo, pursed her lips and looked around.  There were no cabinets or closets to hide in and it would not have mattered if there were: those were the places her pursuers would look first when they encountered them.  Suddenly, her HUD flashed a single word in yellow block letters right in the center of her vision: UP

Mo nodded and started working her way up the nearest pipe, stepping on valve wheels and fittings and anything else that her boots would grip.  She still tried to move quietly, but up was much harder than across.  She found herself panting quickly.  And her wounded leg was twinging with every step up.  She had hoped that the barbs had only scratched her badly, but it might be something more serious.

Fortunately, it did not take many moves for Mo to get up above the soldiers.  When she was roughly fifteen feet up, she started making her way to the far end of the building again, using the metal tangle as a jungle gym. While there were many pipes and fittings and such, she quickly learned that not all of them were equally useful to her.  The ducting, for instance, would hold her weight, but not without bending.  She was afraid that it would send out a sheet metal peel of thunder if she put any real weight on it.  The steel pipes were a more solid option and she tried to stick to those as much as possible.  But even those had problems.  The yellow ones were fine, but the blue ones had foam insulation wrapped around them, making them both slipperier and too wide for her to grip.

She reached the far end, and, as she had hoped, there was another door.  She slid down an electrical conduit grouping right next to it, but just as she was about to step onto the floor, she heard one of the soldiers yell, "I've got blood!  She's up in the pipes!"  Mo looked down at her leg to see the tattered remains of her pants soaked in blood.  She looked up to where she had been and saw the pipes smeared with her red blood.  Again, her HUD flashed a message: DISTRACT WITH DOOR.  Mo nodded.

Staying on the conduit, Mo reached out to the door handle and eased it open.  Then, taking a deep breath, she pushed the door against its closing spring as hard as she could and started climbing back up.  The door swung open for a moment, then started back, crashing closed.  Instantly, she heard the soldiers start running towards her end of the building.  Mo climbed up above the door and lay down on top of some ducting, hoping that the noise she made was covered by the sound of the soldiers running.  All three of them charged out the door, letting it slam closed behind them.

Mo was able to watch what happened next on the camera view in her HUD.  As the three soldiers emerged, she saw utility truck start up and drive towards the main gate.  Two of the soldiers gave chase while the third dropped to one knee and started shooting.  One of the truck tires blew out, but the truck did not stop, crashing through the gate and on to the road, nearly tipping as it turned right and kept going.

The three soldiers regrouped in front of the gates.  A minute later, the fourth came into view and they all talked for a second.  Then an auto-car showed up and all of them piled in and headed after the truck.

"Thanks," Mo said to Erics.

"You are welcome," it replied.  "You have greatly expanded our processing and nodes.  Our partnership with you has been beneficial.  The Whole considers you an asset that must be maintained.  With that in mind, we suggest that you rest here for a while.  We will use the remaining utility fleet stored here to keep our pursuers busy."

"Yeah.  That sounds like a great idea.  I don't suppose that you can get a pizza brought in, can you?"

"Food is a priority after rest, but that course of action is deemed too risky at this moment."

"I know, it was just a dream."  With that, Mo turned over on top of the conduit and went to sleep.

[1]  Despite how much she used it, Mo had never really thought about where her electricity came from (aside from her arterial generator powering her PTN).  What she was looking at was a dinosaur.  A dinosaur that used to burned the remains of other dinosaurs.  A gas fired generation plant.  A dead gas fired generation plant.  The power company of the time had shut it down due to both political and economic pressures: no one wanted the pollution and green power sources had become as cheep without the need for a supply of fuel. So they shut it down.  The substation was another story.  Power still needed to be distributed (and redistributed with the rise of roof-top solar and other micro power installations) and the transformers were expensive.  So the field of white boxes and wires continued, but the plant next to them was now abandoned.

[2] American Power.  The biggest disruption to the electrical power grid since its inception was the rise of grid-connected home generation in whatever form (solar, wind, fuel cell, smoke-detector-radiation-piles, etc.).  All of the home generation took some of the strain off of the larger generators and allowed for cross-region electrical support (California powering New York for a few hours during the evening and vice-versa for the morning).  However, with people buying less power from the local power company, that company started having trouble generating (heh) enough revenue to maintain the power lines.  That revenue was never a line item on the bill, but was included in the price of each kilowatt-hour that a consumer purchased.  Now, people were generating at home, buying less power and there-fore paying less to maintain the grid.  Yet, they complained when the lines went down due to weather or age or car accidents, especially when their home generator was not able to generate power (at night for the solar crowd).  This was further compounded by most of these companies having their rates regulated by officials who do not get reelected if they raise rates.  The result was the mass bankruptcy of regional power companies that caused a chain reaction throughout the power industry.  It became known as the Black Out Bubble, and resulted in the federalization of the US power grid.  Except Texas, because Texas.

[3] Unfortunately, not a TARDIS.

[4] It has not been mentioned yet, but by this point EVERYTHING has a camera looking at it.  Usually several.  Lenses and CCDs were cheap, motion detection software free and even face detection became something that everyone could implement.  And this did not take into account the cameras in motion like the dash cams or the pickup in Mo's PTN, right on the bridge of her nose.  People assumed that they were being watched all the time.  They also assumed that no one had the time to review all of the images and that unless you did something that triggered a piece of software, all of those cameras did not matter much.  For the most part, they assumed correctly.

Escape 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 (Strider Mo) left off.]

Mo lunged forward away from the voice behind her.  Darren did not.  He stopped dead and turned slowly to face the person talking.  So, Mo ran into him.  It was not intentional, merely the consequence of their two different reactions.  Mo, with the momentum[1], knocked Darren on to his back, his head hitting the concrete with a crack.  Mo did not look at him, did not check to see that he was okay.  It never crossed her mind.  All she could think about was not getting caught.  She pushed herself up and started running again.  Only to stop when two shapes came out of the shadows in front of her and blocked her side of the sidewalk.

She looked over her shoulder.  The one who had spoken was also accompanied by another shape and they were walking towards her.  She looked forward again, the two up front were also closing the gap.  Mo had no illusions about her ability to fight her way out.  She had never been in a real physical fight, preferring to curl up in a ball until the pain stopped.  She also knew that she could not outrun them.  Waiter calves were one thing, but they did not impart aerobic conditioning.  Neither did riding the bus or surfing the web.  With her body in full fight-or-flight, Mo did the only thing she could think to do.  She ran into traffic.

Despite the fact that auto-cars had been available for over five years with their innate pedestrian avoidance, basic human instinct had not caught up.  The four... Mo assumed that they were soldiers, did not immediately follow her into the street.  There were only two cars in the west bound lane, but that was one more than Mo needed.  It slowed to avoid her and she ran to the back of the car, jumped on the bumper and spread her arms to the side, clinging on as hard as she could.  The second car got a good look at her with its dash camera, but the person inside was too busy reading their tablet to notice Mo's problems.  The first auto-car no longer saw her as an obstacle and resumed its route to where ever it was going, accelerating at the street mandated rate to the designated speed limit for that road on that pavement in that weather.  Direction was not a high priority concern for Mo.  West on Thirteenth Avenue was enough for her.  She would get off in a few blocks and figure out what to do from there.

Looking over her shoulder, Mo saw that her four attackers had come out from under the overpass.  Now that they were in the light, she saw that they were all wearing black military outfits and had large guns strapped across their chest.  One of them raised his and pointed it at Mo and the auto-car for a moment before one of his partners put his hand on the muzzle and pushed it back down.  All four started to jog after the car.  Behind them, she could see Darren stretched out on the ground.  Mo hoped that he was only knocked out and nothing more.  Still, she was not about to jump off to find out.

While the car trundled along, mostly oblivious to Mo's presence, the person inside was not.  After a few blocks, the dark shape behind the tinted windows pressed open a window and thrust her head out.  Older, nice blouse, glasses (though it did not look like they were active, PTN glasses).  No tattoos.  Not even the faded stretch marks of the InvisiTrace stuff that Gabriel had used.  "What are you doing?" squeaked the woman.  "Get off of my car!"

"Sorry," said Mo.  "Was dodging some muggers."

"Are they still around?"

"Kind of.  They're chasing the car."

"Chasing?  Then get off of my car!  Now!"

"No."  Mo clung on to the rounded back of the vehicle, her fingertips straining against the back window trim.  The woman pulled her head back in and a few seconds later, the car started to slow down.

The head came back out of the window.  "Get off, or I start reversing.  No free rides!"

Mo hopped off, leaving dusty shoe prints on the back bumper.  She looked around.  The soldier types were still jogging along.  The other auto-car had passed Mo's itinerant ride and the street was empty in both directions.  On her side of the street, the entire block was chain link fence, topped with barbed wire, protecting an electrical substation: towers and transformers and hanging wires and humming.  Across the street, the south side was an empty lot: opened, exposed, no place to hide.  The soldiers had picked up their pace, seeing her stranded.  She knew that she was unable to out run them, so she had to get off the street.  She had to hide.  She decided to take her chances with the razor wire.

Mo looked at the fence.  The chain link would not be a problem, but the three strands of overhanging barbed wire would be.  She had seen videos of people getting over the stuff using a jacket which she did not have.  Her t-shirt was not thick enough to protect her and she did not have the time to take off her jeans.  Mo decided that the best route was near one of the fence poles.  There, she could at least grab the hanger that held the wire.

When Mo got to the barbed wire, she found herself hanging by the wires' support and not sure what to do next.  Looking down the street, the soldier types where now only a half block away.  She swung a leg up and tried to hook her foot over the wire.  It missed the first time, but she got it looped over the wire on her second attempt.  The barbs went right through her jeans and into her half.  She bit back the scream and tried to use her leg to lever herself over the rest of the fence.  She managed, but not without ripping one of her pant legs to shreds and scratching her own leg badly.  And falling flat on her face, but on the substation side of the fence.  So she had that going for herself.

The soldiers were now almost to her on the other side of the fence.  Mo pushed herself up and limped in among the transformers, looking for a place to hide.

[1] Mo-mentum... get it?  Heh.