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.

Strider 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 Gets Frozen) left off.]

The walk to the Platte river took over an hour.  Most of that was spent actively creeping in broad daylight.  A skill that Mo had not cultivated prior to that day.  Darren, on the other hand, seemed a master.  He was constantly crossing streets at odd points, standing and staring at shop windows (mostly broken) for minutes at a time, and then running half a block just to do it all again.  When Mo asked him about it, he mumbled something about it being over one hundred years since Martin Luther King, but somethings still had not changed.  She dropped it and simply followed.

Their path went south through the public library to Thirteenth Avenue and then west past Lincoln Park.  Mo had forgotten how dusty the streets of Denver were.  Most of her pavement time was spent on buses where she collapsed into her own world, browsing or reading or not looking at anyone else.  When she was hoofing it, it was someplace more sheltered or cared for: the bus stop next to The Quiet Place or around Sandra's (probably no longer hers) apartment.  That or it was too dark to notice.  Now she was down on the sidewalks, putting footprints in the stuff.  It turned an ordinary, level sidewalk into a backgammon board of drifts and clear pavement.

Mo had heard others call the dust 'California Dust'.  Apparently, the major shifts in weather that had collectively been called Climate Change included the jet stream picking up what was left of California's central valley and spewing it all over Utah and Colorado; where ever the landscape caused the wind to slow down and unload.  Colorado had briefly considered putting dust fences up high on the western slopes of the Rockies in an effort to have the dust off loaded in more useful (or at least less populated) areas.  However, the expense was many multiples of what it cost to hire day laborers to shovel the streets, so no dust fences.  Of course, no one told the public works department it was now responsible for dust clean up, so the day laborers were not hired either.

When they reached Speer Boulevard, Darren held up his hand to halt Mo.  The combination of Speer and Cherry Creek was what he called a natural divider and a potential choke point.  As a result, they crossed north bound Speer half a block to the south of Thirteenth, rushing across traffic and trusting that the auto-cars would make space for them in the road.  Before they had run across, she had reminded Darren that all of the cars had not only dash cams, but also radar and IR 3D imaging.  By interfering with the projected path of the cars, each one would store as much data as possible about the incident, sharing it with the Colorado Department of Transportation and, potentially, with them.  He had reminded her, in turn, that crossing at the intersection, at the expected crossing point, had a higher chance of interception and that the data from the dash cams would need to be sifted, they would need to be identified and then shared to the any interested parties.  While all of that would certainly happen and identify them, the whole process would take at least fifteen minutes and he hoped to make the most of that time.

Once on the western side of northbound Speer, Darren led her down the embankment to Cherry Creek.  Then he headed upstream, next to the water.  They passed under the Thirteenth Avenue bridge and continued up to the Fourteenth Avenue bridge.  There, the water was shallow enough for them to cross between the bridge pylons.  On the other side, Darren peeked out from under the bridge up at the west side intersection.  He motioned Mo forward just as the crosswalk started to count down, getting them both to the other side just as the light changed.  This time she asked him why they had used the crosswalk instead of dodging cars.  He told her that the best tactic was to keep changing tactics, to not get caught in a pattern.

After a few more blocks, they headed back down to Thirteenth Avenue before heading west to the Platte River and Interstate 25.  They crossed the north end of Lincoln Park with its own clan of shopping carts and attendant pushers.  Mo checked her connection counter and saw that she was able to add another thirty or so to her botnet as they passed.  The total number of bots was now several hundred.  She asked Erics how many were now also part of The Whole, and it told her that forty-three percent of those infected with their code had reached a point where they had joined The Whole.  It continued that it was taking an average of sixty-seven minutes for each new node to go from infection to handshaking with The Whole.  As a result, it expected the other fifty-seven percent to make contact in the next hour.

Erics also suggested that, with this many new nodes, it was time to stop infecting new targets.  Its logic was two-fold.  First, The Whole needed time to assimilate the new nodes.  Since they had reconnected, Erics had discovered that, prior to their hacking, there had been a total of fourteen nodes to The Whole.  As the total processing power of The Whole was the sum of the nodes' processing, this meant that those initial fourteen were attempting to bring on the several hundred and running into bottlenecks.  Each new node brought in more power, but only after being properly connected.  Its second point was that their infections were a trail that 'they' could potentially follow as 'they' continued to track traces of The Whole on the 'net.  Mo agreed and shut 'Whight_Saddle.strap' down, keeping the VPNx connection open to the existing botnet nodes, using them as her communication cutout with the Internet.

By then, she and Darren were approaching the interstate.  He informed her that he believed that they were out of immediate threat from the group stationed at the conference center.  He did not think that 'they' would set up watches this far out, but they should be on the lookout for cameras.  Mo rolled her eyes: now he wanted to be careful of cameras?  She pinged Erics and had it start a search for any imaging equipment in the local area.  It said it would put the request in the processing queue.  Mo was not optimistic about a quick response.

Mo did a personal visual survey of the interstate overpass, hoping to spot a camera or two on her own.  The overpass was a three tier affair.  At the top was the I-25 Transport Loop.  This was two concrete tubes running side-by-side on pylons that hoisted them a hundred feet into the air.  They were used for inter-city travel, passenger and cargo.  Apparently, the auto-cars and buses and cargo containers were slotted into the tubes at stations located at major cities.  Inside, everything rested on sleds that used an air cushion to suspend them a few inches off the track.  Then, the sled was accelerated up to speed in an auxiliary tube before being connected to the traffic train in the main tubes. There, everything from the sleds to the cargo to the air in the tubes moved at a uniform speed maintained by fans stationed every fifty or so miles.  It was supposed to be very efficient and a smooth, cheap way to travel long distances over land[1].  Mo had never had the opportunity.

Below the Transport Loop tubes was the old interstate roadway.  This was still used to get around the greater Denver metro area, where getting on the Loop was more of a hassle than driving five miles to the next exit.  It was old now and looked it: the pavement and railings had the look of repairs instead of replacements.  Finally, at the bottom was Thirteenth Avenue in a tunnel running perpendicular to the interstate itself.  It was dark and Mo thought it was maybe one hundred feet from daylight to daylight.  That was their route.

As she scanned for surveillance gear, Mo caught a brief flash of movement.  Something had moved across the light at the other end of the tunnel before disappearing back into the shadows.  She looked for Darren, but he was already walking into the dark.  Mo slowed down, staying in the light for a few more seconds and listening, turning up the augmentation in her ears.  She had trouble hearing anything over the traffic on the other levels, so she moved to one side, trying to get Darren's silhouette against the light of the exit.  When she saw him, he was still walking, so she entered in after him.

Five steps into the tunnel, she heard a voice behind her.  "That's far enough.  Both of you stop and put your hands on your heads."

[1]  The airline industry had fought the construction of the Interstate Transport Loops for years.  They were slower, they said, going a mere three hundred miles and hour instead of over five hundred.  You could not look out, they said, as the concrete tubes (re-purposed culverts) had no windows.  But fuel prices kept climbing and, with them, air ticket prices.  Security at airports kept changing and demanding different documentation on a yearly basis.  Parking or otherwise getting to-and-from those airports was also a hassle.  Especially compared to having your own auto-car at either end of the Transport Loops with no schedule and minor fee that was included in the car registration.  People finally concluded that, if they had to pay for it just to have the car, then they might as well use them.  Air travel ended up being used only for crossing large bodies of water and occasionally for getting from one cost to the other if time was really that valuable.

Mo Gets Her Bars Back

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 (Homeless Mo) left off.]

When Mo woke up, the world was not as she had envisioned it in the dark.  They were not on grass, but on a section of what used to be grass, but was now scraped to dirt.  There were more trees and many more transients than she had thought were around her.  The night had closed in her perceptions; made her think that what was visible in the twenty feet that she could see was all that there was.  Now, at seven in the morning, the park stretched across three blocks from the old courthouse[1] to the still used capital building[2].  The mile-high sky stretched overhead, hatched by contrails and the park grounds bustled.

From on top of and underneath every bench, people rose and stretched.  They stood up from leaning on trees, dropped out of branches and rolled out of bushes.  Many had tents, both actual and make-shift, that added nylon blues and reds and greens to the landscape.  As this community emerged, they scratched and patted themselves.  They relieved themselves with little or no regard for their own or others' privacy, and less for sanitation.  But mostly, they eyed their neighbors with suspicion and double checked all of their possessions.

Mo and her three acquaintances were scrutinized with particular care.  They stood out.  It was not that their clothes were too clean: after two to three days in the cage with the bucket, their clothes were far from fresh.  The same went for their bodies which had not be bathed in at least that long.  Their hair and make-up and general 'aura' should have fit right in.  And it would have if they had more of it.  As far as Mo could tell, they were the only four people wearing only one set of clothes.  They did not have a shopping cart or overloaded backpack or double hand full of bags.  It made Mo feel under dressed.

Melissa was the first to speak.  "What we need are antennas.  But I'm at a loss as to how to get them when we can't pay with them through the network.  I assume that all of yours were taken as well?"

Mo nodded, but Arthur looked away.  "You still have yours?" Mo asked.

"Yeah.  My glasses," he said.  "I raised bloody hell when they tried to take them away.  I can't see three feet without them.  I guess they figured that I couldn't fit them through the cage mesh like I'm told you did."

Mo gave him a hard stare.  "Why didn't you say something last night?"

"What would it have mattered?"  He took the glasses off and polished them with his shirt.  "Anything that I could have done through my connection would only have led them to us faster.  I've turned off anything I've got that transmits.  I'm still not sure that's enough."

Mo grimaced.  Arthur was right.  Transmission triangulation went back to the Second World War and packet sniffing started not long after.  She knew a few ways around it, but each required specific hardware tools that she kept in her local storage.  Arthur probably did not and there was no way for her to send them to him without her antennas.  Suddenly, she wished that they had invented a surgically implantable memory card port.  There were very few times that it would be more useful than cloud storage or P2P sharing, but when she needed it, she really needed it[3].

"Fine," she said.  "I guess you're right, but I still think it was important for the rest of us to know all of our available assets."  Then Mo glanced around.  "Hey," she said.  "Where's Darren?"  It seemed to her that, when she awoke, he had still been on the ground with his back to her.  Now he was gone.  Arthur and Melissa also glanced about for a few seconds before Melissa spotted him walking towards them from across the park.

As he approached, Darren held up a small plastic bag and grinned.  "Look what I found," he said.  Mo looked closely through the clear plastic and saw four small metal bars.  They were Melissa and her ear bar antennas.

"Goddam," said Mo.  "Where the hell did you find those?"

Darren handed her the bag while he explained.  "One of the more long term residents here was sorting through his trash pickings.  He was trying to decide whether or not to keep the bag as I walked by.  I offered him my socks for it and that was it.  I'll figured dry feet was less important than all of us getting on-line."  He looked at Arthur, "Sorry, but I don't think your antennas are in there."  Arthur looked at Darren and tapped his glasses.  "Ahh," said Darren.  "Of course."

"Where did you go, anyway?" asked Mo.

"I decided that I wanted a bit more privacy than seems to be the local standard for my morning ablutions.  I found a shady tree and did my business.  It seemed a shame.  I'm just old enough to remember this park when it was still a nice park and not a shanty town.  There were flowers in the beds and the walkways were swept clean.  I suppose that this is a better use of the space, but there's not much aesthetic to it anymore."

Mo glanced at the scenery again and shook her head.  She had never seen this or any park without a homeless town on it.  The federal government had declared all spaces like this as open places for people in need after the bio-tech bubble burst in 2021.  Many hospitals and other care facilities had shut down because they could no longer afford the malpractice insurance, the health-care professionals (who all had to pay off under grad and graduate schools) and the medications.  Especially for those without insurance.  It had made a bad situation on the streets with the existing transients, illegal immigrants and low-level criminals worse by adding a large group in serious medical need.  Those closures had included many of the therapeutic schools.  If Mo had not been able to talk her mother into taking her back, she might well have been one of them.

Mo shook her head and tried to refocus.   She looked at the antenna bars in her hand and then from one to the other of the three people she found herself colluding with.  "Okay," she said.  "Before I put these back in and unleash my virus passenger on the world, we probably need a plan.  Any ideas?"

[1] As the middle class retreated to virtual space and kept their meat bodies locked in rooms locked in houses locked in gated communities, government bureaucracy followed suit.  Now all of the county clerks and court administrators handled everything from their breakfast nooks in the pajamas.  Even in those rare instances where the infraction could not be plead out or dismissed, everything was handled through Grype, the secure government video conferencing service.  More than a few churches and other communities followed suit to the point where a couple could meet in a singles chat room, have virtual sex in a porn simulator, get a county clerk to issue them a marriage license, have a wedding ceremony and then a divorce all without leaving the comfort of their respective abodes.  This not only happened, but happened often.  Sometimes all of it in a single day.

[2] Even though nothing in the state constitution kept the state house and senate from conducting their business on-line, by unstated tradition (fetish?), all votes were still held live in the state building chambers.

[3] 'Johnny Mnemonic' took off as well IRL as it did in the theaters back in 1995.

Mo and Co in Denver at Night

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 Out) left off.]



Standing near the Colorado Convention Center loading docks after one AM had never been a good idea, even when the center was being used and maintained regularly.  Now it was wasteland of broken security lights, trash bins and bottomless shadows.  Mo and the other infected inmates were free, but far from safe.

Without her antenna bars, Mo was unable to run any of her usual area scans.  She could not see who else was around trolling, phishing or war driving.  She could not infiltrate their systems and start using them as offensive shock troops the way she had two days prior with Gabriel.  Not that that had been particularly effective.  On the other hand, without antennas no one else could do the same to her.  And that included the three other people out in the dark with her.

"All right," she said.  "My infection tells me that you are Melissa."  Mo pointed at the women in the blouse and skirt.  "You are Arthur."  She pointed at a man wearing jeans, an "A Dick Ted"[1] t-shirt and wire glasses[2].  "The scrambler was someone named 'Ed Lin,' and you are my old and dear friend of twenty-four hours, Darren.  I'm Mo.  I'm the first one that got caged.  As far as I know, I'm not patient zero for this infection.  More like patient one.  Patient zero is still out there.  We all know this much from the throat singing back in the cages, right?"  There was general head nodding.  "So, now that the intros are a bit more formal, does anyone have a ride?  The buses aren't running down here at this hour and no taxi in their right mind is coming in here either, even if I could connect enough to call one.  We all need to get as far from here as quickly as possible."

Melissa raised her hand.  "I've got a car at my work garage.  It's about five blocks from here, on the other side of sixteenth at the IRS building.  I'm not sure you all will fit, but it's what I've got."

"Thanks, Melissa.  Anyone got anything closer?"  Mo got two other head shakes.  "Then, Melissa, you're in the lead."

The four of them headed out, sticking close together.  Mo found herself in the middle, between Arthur and Darren.  Darren tapped her on the shoulder as they were walking.  "I would not have pegged you as the take-charge type after our conversations inside."

"I'm not." Mo turned her head slightly and tried to direct her voice over her shoulder.  "I'm scared and, like I said, I need to find a way to feel like I have some control.  I don't really care who's doing what as long as there's a plan and I have some say."

"It wasn't meant as criticism, I was just surprised.  Any thoughts on what's next, after we all get to the car?"

"Not really.  We need to find someplace safe.  I'd go to my apartment, but that I'm sure that's going to be watched.  Same for all of our homes and workplaces.  We'll need to find someplace else.  Someplace that they won't know to look."

Arthur turned his head and said, "I can't do that.  I've got to get back to work.  Missing today was bad enough, but missing tomorrow would be really bad.  I've got to present a budget.  If it doesn't get approved, then my whole division might get cut.  That's like forty or so people who will lose their jobs.  I've got to be there."

Mo looked down at the sidewalk and shook her head.  She had never been someone in charge of other people or had a job where the lively hood of others relied on her.  What she did know was that their time in the convention center had changed all four of their lives.  "Plan on missing that meeting," she said to Arthur.

"You don't understand," he continued.  "I can't miss it."

"No," Mo looked up at Arthur, her brow furrowed, the silver traces of her celtic butterfly glinting in the sparse street light and making her face look angrier than she might have intended.  "You don't understand.  If you go-"

Darren put a hand on Mo's shoulder.  "I think what Mo is trying to say is that, if you show up at work, they will be waiting.  They will have you back in custody before you make it to your desk.  Either you don't go to work and you stay free or you go to work and get recaptured.  Either way, you're not going to be presenting your budget."

Mo nodded and tried to relax her face.  She needed to remember that others might have more to lose than she did.  So she got fired from The Quiet Place.  She needed a pay check, but there were plenty of other places paid minimum wage.  She had not talked to her family in years and had already lost whatever there was to lose with them.  No boy or girlfriend to miss her, at least not in several months.  The only thing that halfway mattered in her life was her friendship with Sandra and she would understand after Mo explained.  And after Sandra sold all of Mo's stuff to cover rent and found someone else to sublease Mo's old room.  Again, nothing much to lose there.

As they approached 16th Street, Melissa stopped and ducked into a doorway.  The rest of them piled in after, though only the darkness kept it from looking ridiculous in Mo's opinion.  "There's some people up ahead," Melissa said in a whisper.

"Probably bums," said Mo.

"I don't think so," said Melissa.  "Too upright.  Too clean looking."

"How can you see how clean they look in this light?" asked Arthur.

"I don't know." Melissa shook her head.  "The silhouettes just doesn't look like homeless people."

"So what do we do?" asked Mo.

Melissa looked around.  "We can go back to 15th and head toward Broadway.  If it is them, and I think it is, then they probably have people all the way down 16th."

"Makes sense," Darren nodded.  "Most of the hotels and such are on the other side.  It keeps us closer to their base of operations."

"Look at you," Mo said to Darren, "Sounding all military and stuff."

"Two tours."

"Then maybe you should be leading."

"No thanks.  I was just a grunt then and I'm glad to stay a grunt."

"Okay," said Mo.  "We can head for Broadway and then up to Melissa's car.  Other options?"  There was a general round of head shaking.  "Then back down to 15th it is."

They all turned around, putting Darren in the lead.  He headed off, but as soon as they were at a gap between street lights, he crossed the street to the other side.  Then they turned left onto 15th, heading to Broadway.  A few minutes of walking and they were at the intersection, across from Civic Center Park.  And the homeless community.  Which gave Mo an idea.

[1] A band that started their life in Lincoln, Nebraska playing college gigs.  After several years, they finally had a song that went viral, "Light Her Fluid."  The video was a basic stage performance, but they convinced a fan to pretend to urinate gasoline on stage and then light it on fire.  This brought in the initial traffic.  The song itself had enough of a hook to keep it in people's heads.  From there, they were able to book a few gigs and tour.  During that first (and last) tour, there were no end of female fans trying to climb on stage and light their own mixture of pee and lighter fluid on fire.  This culminated in the Frog Spot fire in Lubbock, Texas which claimed the lives of three hundred and fifty-seven people including all members of the band and their road crew.  Afterwards, no one wore their shirts as fans but as statements about the stupidity of viral band wagon jumping.  Which was itself a band wagon on which to jump.

[2] There remains a set of people who are uncomfortable with inserting and removing contacts.