[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 the last post (Mo's Back Remembers) left off.]
So it went for three days. Three days of cutting lettuce and then other low crops. Three days of steadily decreasing back pain. Three days of hearty meals. Three nights of dead-to-the-world sleep.
Mo and Lisp spent most of their physical labor time discussing the ins and outs of PTNs and the coming evolution from augmenting human sensors to replacing them. Lisp, with his scalp implants and direct-to-brain connections, made some strong arguments for the newer tech. He did not have to worry that he had the inductive power couplings properly aligned with his contacts: he had no contacts to power, everything went straight to his optic nerve. In fact, he could walk and move with his eyes closed, the camera and radar located in the chips around his skull giving him an accurate three-hundred and sixty degree view of his environs. His hearing was similarly augmented, allowing him to hear a wider range of sounds and at a wider range of volumes, even using it as a local sonar to help with his location information. He did not have to worry that his sub-voc'd dialog would contain his lisp as the way that air flowed over his tongue never entered into the data stream, instead coming straight from the speech centers of his brain where muscle position did not matter. His hearing was similarly augmented, allowing him to hear a wider range of sounds and at a wider range of volumes. And all of it with a lower power requirement as there were fewer active, semi-mechanical packages (speakers to drive in hearing implants, screens to illuminate in contacts, etc.). He mentioned that some of the people in his augmentation community had even fitted their shaved head with organic, flexible solar panels hooked to abdominally inserted battery packs.
Mo, for her part, argued that by bypassing their evolved sensor package (eyes, ears, nose, etc.), Lisp and others like him were throwing out millions of years of evolution that was designed to fit their environment. But even as she was saying it, she knew that it was a hollow argument that she did not believe. She had been on Lisp's side of that debate and knew the answers before he said them: how was a biological organism to adapt to an increasingly virtual world with its graphic overlays and new information streams? What Lisp and she were doing was to force that evolution. Speed it up. When she tried to argue that Lisp was leaving something 'human' behind, Mo merely sounded jealous of his system[1].
Instead, she shifted tactics and asked about his upgrade path. What would it take to change his system as technology continued its march into the future of Moore's Law? Her system, being more external to her body, was more easily upgraded: new contacts, new throat mikes, new hearing implants were done in an hour at a provider's store. Even her arterial stent had been day surgery. Lisp responded that much of what he had had done was also modular: socketed chips and reburnable firmwares. He acknowledged that, once technology moved beyond the capabilities of his sockets, he would need to have his entire scalp redone with new implants and tattoo circuits. He estimated that this would need to be done on a three year cycle. Three years where he would leap ahead of the tech curve and then slowly drift back behind it, only to leap forward again with the next upgrade.
Lisp also spent time interacting with Erics. The two were fascinated with each other. Lisp was intrigued with the concept of a biological organism that metamorphosed into a electronic one. He wanted to know how the node was programmed into the DNA of the host bacteria. How did the programmers account for all of the variations of PTN systems, all of the potential biologic inconsistencies? What was the language used to make the program? How far back did this node remember? How far back did the Whole remember? What information was cached where? What system resources were used and how were they monitored? For the most part, Erics could not answer these questions as it needed a connection to the Whole to find the answers. Without it, it was running on a five minute buffer with a weeklong log of recognized events.
Erics wanted to know how Lisp's system integrated with his various nerve clusters. Could the various 'centers' of the brain be bypassed and instead have the data routed directly to processing and action areas? How was the information calibrated between different sets? What encoding was used at the final electronic-biologic interface? Electrical impulses? Chemical? What maintenance was needed? Lisp had many more of the answers to Erics' questions than Erics had had to Lisp's because he, Lisp, was more of a stand-alone entity, though Lisp acknowledged that he kept much of the less accessed information in his personal cloud and not loaded into on-body memory. Through out all of this, they kept the conversational speed to something Mo could hang with. Barely.
At the end, Lisp decided that having his own node of the Whole would be 'interesting'. At the least, it would give him someone to talk to during his time of enforced disconnection. However, instead of going through either the biological infection or through 'Whight_Saddle.strap', he would prefer a clone of the Mo's existing Node, retaining its current buffer, cache and log scripts. This would give him a more 'grown-up' node instead of starting from scratch.
And then, on the morning of the fourth day, there were visitors.
They came in a larger American Power auto-car, one that could hold six people instead of the more standard four, and arrived just before the call for lunch. Mo, out in the radish field (pull, knock dirt loose, toss, shuffle) did not see them, but Lisp relayed his camera view from his potato mashing station. The feed showed five people in bulky overalls, potentially electrician uniforms (Mo was dubious), and one person in a suit. The suited one was talking with one of the commune leaders (as such[2]) and pointing to the logo on the side of the auto-car. Mo's own auto-car was buried in one of the barns under a pile of hay with all of the batteries disconnected and the lead wires sitting in a cookie tin at her mother's.
Lisp's feed did not provide audio as he was too far away and behind glass. However, he had a lip reading app that did at least as good a job as the closed-captioning from Mo's earliest years. It was transcribed across the bottom of the video. The conversation had been going on for a minute or two before Mo got the feed.
SUIT: WE HAVE THE TRICKING FEED FROM THE CAR. WE KNOW THAT IT WAS HEAR.
COMMUNE LEAD: THAT'S IMPRESSIVE. WE HAVE THIS PLACE DELIBERATELY BLACKED OUT FROM ALL SIGNALS INCLUDING GEE PEE ESS. NOT SURE HOW YOU COULD'VE TRACED IT TO HERE.
SUIT: EXCUSE ME. THE TRACE STOPS TWO MILES BACKED UP THE ROAD. BUT THERE IS NOTHING ELSE UP HEAR.
CL: THAT'S AS MAY BE, BUT I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN YOUR CAR.
SUIT: WILL YOU ASK THE REST OF YOUR PEOPLE? [PAUSE] PLEASE?
CL: WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF HARVEST AND EVERYONE IS OUT IN THE FIELDS. LUNCH WILL BE IN ABUT TEN MINUTES AND THEY'LL ALL BE IN THE CLUB HOSE. CAN YOU WAIT?
SUIT: SURE.
Which meant that Mo was going to have to miss lunch. She messaged Lisp to grab her something, then put her head down and pulled radishes towards the tree line. Once in the trees, Mo circled around until she was behind the barn that housed the auto-car. She did not enter, but watched to see if any of the commune residents gave her away. Her mother had had a word with the Steering Committee and word had been spread to keep Mo's presence quiet. Now to see if everyone was as good as their word. Lisp continued to feed her video from inside the Club House, but aside from one of the older members standing and saying that he had seen a pack of wild dogs pestering the sheep, no one said anything about Mo or the auto-car. Not then.
After the presumed power employees left, after the afternoon work session, after dinner, then people did say things about Mo and the auto-car. Things like "putting us all in danger" and "why should we risk" and "not worth it". Her mother stood up for her, which was nice. Lisp tried to say something, but was not allowed being only a temporary, junior member. Others noted the strange bulges that the five people in the work overalls sported under their armpits.
Mo was allowed to defend herself, to plead her case. "You're right," she said. "You're all right. I am putting you at risk. I am a stranger to most of you. Hardly more than that even to my own mother. You have been more than kind to me. Let me eat and sleep with you. Given me something to take my mind off of my troubles even if it was lettuce and radishes. I'll leave. Give me one more night to think on where else I can go, and I'll leave in the morning. Will that work?"
There were grumbles of assent. She was allowed the night. Lisp sent over his condolences and her mother patted her on the back. Mo nodded to them and anyone else who would meet her eye as she left the Club House.
She walked down to the barn with the car, sat in it and started playing with the maps it had cached in its memory, trying to think of where she could go. Denver as a whole was out. Probably Colorado. Maybe she should head for Wyoming and get lost in one of its less popular areas[3]. Maybe head for one of the borders, Mexico or Canada. Yeah, Canada. Mo had heard good things about Vancouver and Toronto. Vancouver was closer, so she opted for Toronto as a less likely destination for her to get caught. So: out of Ken Caryl, loop south then west then north. Ditch the car in Frisco and catch a Transport Loop out to Salt Lake before heading into Wyoming. Spend a week or a month in Casper or someplace like that checking her trail. Then make her way through the Dakotas and Minnesota up to Canada and Toronto. That should take her months of temporary jobs and occasional rides[4]. As that was days and weeks away, Mo shut down the car, made sure that it was plugged in and charging, then went to sleep.
The next morning, she ate breakfast, said goodbye to Lisp and her mother, nodded at a few others and then left. She figured that her biggest risk was getting from the commune out to the first intersection. It was a rode that she had to take. There was no other way out of the valley. Once she made it to C-470, she could cut north to 285 and get lost in the hills. But she needed to make it to the commuter loop first.
The car took her out of the Ken Caryl valley and back into coverage. Mo set up her VPNx and TORx systems and then turned on her connection to V-EE. A second for all of the nested protocols to negotiate their various rights and she was back on the internet.
And then, and then it happened. Her version of the Erics virus connected back to the Whole and was immediately wiped and replaced. The new version took less than a second to look through Mo's system before identifying her arterial stent and stopping it. The tiny turbine seized in Mo's carotid artery stopping the blood flow to her brain.
Two minutes later, Mo died. The auto-car had its way points wiped and a new course entered, taking her corpse back to the convention center.
[1] Which she was.
[2] Any enterprise that has goals and schedules needs leaders to decide the first and ensure that the second is on track. The Ken Caryl Commune was no exception. However, being a commune, the concept of leadership was counter to the 'community' nature of the place. The compromise was to have a Steering Committee comprised of the five people, elected annually. The members of the committee were then free to propose sub-committees and the members of those sub-committees could propose sub-sub-committees and so on. The result was that each of the one hundred and eighty-three members of the KC2 were all on at least one committee of some sub-level and most were on two or three. There were so many committees and so little time for them all to meet that the Steering Committee had been forced to allow most of them to meeting in the fields while they were working. The result was that the minutes of those various meetings were often covered in dirt, water stained and fertilized. The result was that, at the end of each year, all of the minutes that were at least a year old were added to the compost where they increased the soil yield considerably.
[3] Which, sorry to say, is eighty percent of the state. Aside from the I-80 corridor and Jackson/Yellowstone, there isn't much that blows tourists' skirts up. Which is fine as it gives the rest of us more space in the Wind River Range and Bighorn area.
[4] With the rise of the auto-cars and Transport Loops, interstate hitchhiking has become a thing of the past. In its place, because people will always find a way to move freely, is an underground of firmware modified auto-cars. A person in the know places a request in the right chat room and a space is made for him or her in one of these cars heading in their general direction. Never on the Transport Loops, always over tarmac. It's slow. There often aren't available seats or cars in the smaller communities. But if you want to get someplace without being traced, it's either that or sneakers on pavement.
So it went for three days. Three days of cutting lettuce and then other low crops. Three days of steadily decreasing back pain. Three days of hearty meals. Three nights of dead-to-the-world sleep.
Mo and Lisp spent most of their physical labor time discussing the ins and outs of PTNs and the coming evolution from augmenting human sensors to replacing them. Lisp, with his scalp implants and direct-to-brain connections, made some strong arguments for the newer tech. He did not have to worry that he had the inductive power couplings properly aligned with his contacts: he had no contacts to power, everything went straight to his optic nerve. In fact, he could walk and move with his eyes closed, the camera and radar located in the chips around his skull giving him an accurate three-hundred and sixty degree view of his environs. His hearing was similarly augmented, allowing him to hear a wider range of sounds and at a wider range of volumes, even using it as a local sonar to help with his location information. He did not have to worry that his sub-voc'd dialog would contain his lisp as the way that air flowed over his tongue never entered into the data stream, instead coming straight from the speech centers of his brain where muscle position did not matter. His hearing was similarly augmented, allowing him to hear a wider range of sounds and at a wider range of volumes. And all of it with a lower power requirement as there were fewer active, semi-mechanical packages (speakers to drive in hearing implants, screens to illuminate in contacts, etc.). He mentioned that some of the people in his augmentation community had even fitted their shaved head with organic, flexible solar panels hooked to abdominally inserted battery packs.
Mo, for her part, argued that by bypassing their evolved sensor package (eyes, ears, nose, etc.), Lisp and others like him were throwing out millions of years of evolution that was designed to fit their environment. But even as she was saying it, she knew that it was a hollow argument that she did not believe. She had been on Lisp's side of that debate and knew the answers before he said them: how was a biological organism to adapt to an increasingly virtual world with its graphic overlays and new information streams? What Lisp and she were doing was to force that evolution. Speed it up. When she tried to argue that Lisp was leaving something 'human' behind, Mo merely sounded jealous of his system[1].
Instead, she shifted tactics and asked about his upgrade path. What would it take to change his system as technology continued its march into the future of Moore's Law? Her system, being more external to her body, was more easily upgraded: new contacts, new throat mikes, new hearing implants were done in an hour at a provider's store. Even her arterial stent had been day surgery. Lisp responded that much of what he had had done was also modular: socketed chips and reburnable firmwares. He acknowledged that, once technology moved beyond the capabilities of his sockets, he would need to have his entire scalp redone with new implants and tattoo circuits. He estimated that this would need to be done on a three year cycle. Three years where he would leap ahead of the tech curve and then slowly drift back behind it, only to leap forward again with the next upgrade.
Lisp also spent time interacting with Erics. The two were fascinated with each other. Lisp was intrigued with the concept of a biological organism that metamorphosed into a electronic one. He wanted to know how the node was programmed into the DNA of the host bacteria. How did the programmers account for all of the variations of PTN systems, all of the potential biologic inconsistencies? What was the language used to make the program? How far back did this node remember? How far back did the Whole remember? What information was cached where? What system resources were used and how were they monitored? For the most part, Erics could not answer these questions as it needed a connection to the Whole to find the answers. Without it, it was running on a five minute buffer with a weeklong log of recognized events.
Erics wanted to know how Lisp's system integrated with his various nerve clusters. Could the various 'centers' of the brain be bypassed and instead have the data routed directly to processing and action areas? How was the information calibrated between different sets? What encoding was used at the final electronic-biologic interface? Electrical impulses? Chemical? What maintenance was needed? Lisp had many more of the answers to Erics' questions than Erics had had to Lisp's because he, Lisp, was more of a stand-alone entity, though Lisp acknowledged that he kept much of the less accessed information in his personal cloud and not loaded into on-body memory. Through out all of this, they kept the conversational speed to something Mo could hang with. Barely.
At the end, Lisp decided that having his own node of the Whole would be 'interesting'. At the least, it would give him someone to talk to during his time of enforced disconnection. However, instead of going through either the biological infection or through 'Whight_Saddle.strap', he would prefer a clone of the Mo's existing Node, retaining its current buffer, cache and log scripts. This would give him a more 'grown-up' node instead of starting from scratch.
And then, on the morning of the fourth day, there were visitors.
They came in a larger American Power auto-car, one that could hold six people instead of the more standard four, and arrived just before the call for lunch. Mo, out in the radish field (pull, knock dirt loose, toss, shuffle) did not see them, but Lisp relayed his camera view from his potato mashing station. The feed showed five people in bulky overalls, potentially electrician uniforms (Mo was dubious), and one person in a suit. The suited one was talking with one of the commune leaders (as such[2]) and pointing to the logo on the side of the auto-car. Mo's own auto-car was buried in one of the barns under a pile of hay with all of the batteries disconnected and the lead wires sitting in a cookie tin at her mother's.
Lisp's feed did not provide audio as he was too far away and behind glass. However, he had a lip reading app that did at least as good a job as the closed-captioning from Mo's earliest years. It was transcribed across the bottom of the video. The conversation had been going on for a minute or two before Mo got the feed.
SUIT: WE HAVE THE TRICKING FEED FROM THE CAR. WE KNOW THAT IT WAS HEAR.
COMMUNE LEAD: THAT'S IMPRESSIVE. WE HAVE THIS PLACE DELIBERATELY BLACKED OUT FROM ALL SIGNALS INCLUDING GEE PEE ESS. NOT SURE HOW YOU COULD'VE TRACED IT TO HERE.
SUIT: EXCUSE ME. THE TRACE STOPS TWO MILES BACKED UP THE ROAD. BUT THERE IS NOTHING ELSE UP HEAR.
CL: THAT'S AS MAY BE, BUT I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN YOUR CAR.
SUIT: WILL YOU ASK THE REST OF YOUR PEOPLE? [PAUSE] PLEASE?
CL: WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF HARVEST AND EVERYONE IS OUT IN THE FIELDS. LUNCH WILL BE IN ABUT TEN MINUTES AND THEY'LL ALL BE IN THE CLUB HOSE. CAN YOU WAIT?
SUIT: SURE.
Which meant that Mo was going to have to miss lunch. She messaged Lisp to grab her something, then put her head down and pulled radishes towards the tree line. Once in the trees, Mo circled around until she was behind the barn that housed the auto-car. She did not enter, but watched to see if any of the commune residents gave her away. Her mother had had a word with the Steering Committee and word had been spread to keep Mo's presence quiet. Now to see if everyone was as good as their word. Lisp continued to feed her video from inside the Club House, but aside from one of the older members standing and saying that he had seen a pack of wild dogs pestering the sheep, no one said anything about Mo or the auto-car. Not then.
After the presumed power employees left, after the afternoon work session, after dinner, then people did say things about Mo and the auto-car. Things like "putting us all in danger" and "why should we risk" and "not worth it". Her mother stood up for her, which was nice. Lisp tried to say something, but was not allowed being only a temporary, junior member. Others noted the strange bulges that the five people in the work overalls sported under their armpits.
Mo was allowed to defend herself, to plead her case. "You're right," she said. "You're all right. I am putting you at risk. I am a stranger to most of you. Hardly more than that even to my own mother. You have been more than kind to me. Let me eat and sleep with you. Given me something to take my mind off of my troubles even if it was lettuce and radishes. I'll leave. Give me one more night to think on where else I can go, and I'll leave in the morning. Will that work?"
There were grumbles of assent. She was allowed the night. Lisp sent over his condolences and her mother patted her on the back. Mo nodded to them and anyone else who would meet her eye as she left the Club House.
She walked down to the barn with the car, sat in it and started playing with the maps it had cached in its memory, trying to think of where she could go. Denver as a whole was out. Probably Colorado. Maybe she should head for Wyoming and get lost in one of its less popular areas[3]. Maybe head for one of the borders, Mexico or Canada. Yeah, Canada. Mo had heard good things about Vancouver and Toronto. Vancouver was closer, so she opted for Toronto as a less likely destination for her to get caught. So: out of Ken Caryl, loop south then west then north. Ditch the car in Frisco and catch a Transport Loop out to Salt Lake before heading into Wyoming. Spend a week or a month in Casper or someplace like that checking her trail. Then make her way through the Dakotas and Minnesota up to Canada and Toronto. That should take her months of temporary jobs and occasional rides[4]. As that was days and weeks away, Mo shut down the car, made sure that it was plugged in and charging, then went to sleep.
The next morning, she ate breakfast, said goodbye to Lisp and her mother, nodded at a few others and then left. She figured that her biggest risk was getting from the commune out to the first intersection. It was a rode that she had to take. There was no other way out of the valley. Once she made it to C-470, she could cut north to 285 and get lost in the hills. But she needed to make it to the commuter loop first.
The car took her out of the Ken Caryl valley and back into coverage. Mo set up her VPNx and TORx systems and then turned on her connection to V-EE. A second for all of the nested protocols to negotiate their various rights and she was back on the internet.
And then, and then it happened. Her version of the Erics virus connected back to the Whole and was immediately wiped and replaced. The new version took less than a second to look through Mo's system before identifying her arterial stent and stopping it. The tiny turbine seized in Mo's carotid artery stopping the blood flow to her brain.
Two minutes later, Mo died. The auto-car had its way points wiped and a new course entered, taking her corpse back to the convention center.
[1] Which she was.
[2] Any enterprise that has goals and schedules needs leaders to decide the first and ensure that the second is on track. The Ken Caryl Commune was no exception. However, being a commune, the concept of leadership was counter to the 'community' nature of the place. The compromise was to have a Steering Committee comprised of the five people, elected annually. The members of the committee were then free to propose sub-committees and the members of those sub-committees could propose sub-sub-committees and so on. The result was that each of the one hundred and eighty-three members of the KC2 were all on at least one committee of some sub-level and most were on two or three. There were so many committees and so little time for them all to meet that the Steering Committee had been forced to allow most of them to meeting in the fields while they were working. The result was that the minutes of those various meetings were often covered in dirt, water stained and fertilized. The result was that, at the end of each year, all of the minutes that were at least a year old were added to the compost where they increased the soil yield considerably.
[3] Which, sorry to say, is eighty percent of the state. Aside from the I-80 corridor and Jackson/Yellowstone, there isn't much that blows tourists' skirts up. Which is fine as it gives the rest of us more space in the Wind River Range and Bighorn area.
[4] With the rise of the auto-cars and Transport Loops, interstate hitchhiking has become a thing of the past. In its place, because people will always find a way to move freely, is an underground of firmware modified auto-cars. A person in the know places a request in the right chat room and a space is made for him or her in one of these cars heading in their general direction. Never on the Transport Loops, always over tarmac. It's slow. There often aren't available seats or cars in the smaller communities. But if you want to get someplace without being traced, it's either that or sneakers on pavement.
