Mo Leaves

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 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.

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.

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.