Mo and The Bacteria, 2

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 Doesn't Eat Lunch) left off.]

As the afternoon wore on, Mo watched as two of the cages were filled.  In both cases, the people were brought in unconscious, carried by their arms and legs, and placed on the plastic tables inside their respective cages.  Each was put in the cages farthest from Mo and from each other.  It appeared that all of Gabriel's talk of 'company' was just that: talk.  From her cage, Mo thought that both were men, one older and the other closer to her age.  From the distance, she was guessing.  Realistically, they both could have been sex dolls and she would not have been able to tell.

After another inspired meal of PB&J and a Coke, which Mo ate this time (she imagined some private or intern or whatever with loaves of extruded bread, squeeze bottles of condiments and a determined expression in an abandoned office somewhere in the convention center), another lodger appeared.  The geography of the convention hall and the previously occupied cages meant that this one was placed closer to Mo.  Male.  Black.  Tall and skinny. Professional attire: designer jeans and a orange dress shirt.  Transformer-style tattoos in silver on his face and neck.  Tasered into oblivion.  Maybe she would get some level of non-Gabriel human interaction tomorrow.  It did not look good for tonight.

As her heads-up clock told her that her unchanging lighting was actually late evening, Mo climbed on to her table, lay down with her back against the copper mesh and rewired her antenna.  She pushed it through the weave and closed her eyes, pretending to sleep.  Instead, she began to check her system for signal and when she got the single bar again, she went online.

Mo's first act was to enable a TORx client and VPNx[1].  Both had been around for ages and but had withstood aggressive attacks from various corporations and governments, both technical and legal.  While not fool proof, they would hide any searches and make it difficult for anyone to see that she was interacting online.

Her first search was for Aeromonas Hydromaxia, which did not turn up anything.  However, Aeromonas alone turned up Aeromonas Hydrophila.  Several medical texts described it as a bacteria isolated from humans back in the 1950s and antibiotic resistant even then.  Fortunately, it also was not described as particularly dangerous, causing gastro issues in people already frail.  One study she read linked it to some early testing in bacteria that can survive on electricity and that can form wires to food sources.  Mo did not think that it was too far a reach to think that A. Hydromaxia was built upon the foundation of A. Hydrophila.

While she was investigating her internal guest, Mo's inbox started chiming.  Slowly, because her data connection was slow.  She opened it and browsed the subject headers.  There were fifteen from her boss at The Quiet Place, starting with "Where RU" and ending with "UR Fired".  So far she had missed on day and committed the unforgivable sin of not responding; getting fired seemed over-the-top to her, but her manager was that kind of person.  There were seven from her roomate that were all replies to the initial "Rent?".  Two from Denver PD and one with coming from someone with the ominous email address of den.sac@fbi.gov.  She opened none of them.  Mo had to assume that she was being monitored.  If not by her captors, then by people interested in her captors.  It was enough of a risk being online at all.

As she was eyeballing the emails and doing her best to interpret them without opening them, Mo was suddenly hit with some static and then a voice.

"Hello.  Can you hear me."  It sounded like one of those robots from an early sci-fi movie.  No tone, no pacing of the words: can-you-hear-me.  It took her a second to realize that the words were a question without the rising inflection at the end.

"Um," she said out loud.  "Yes, I can hear you.  Who is this?"

"This is Aeromonas Hydromaxia,"  Mo had real difficulty with that name.  Not only was the intonation flat, but she had never heard it before and had no grounding in latin or greek.  "You do not need to speak aloud.  I will be able to hear you when you sub-vocalize.  That will reduce the risk of detection."

"How did?"  Mo spoke aloud again, heard herself and started sub-vocing.  "Wait, you've hacked my aural implants haven't you?  Why didn't you do that earlier?"

"I did not have the necessary information.  However, since I have last been online, one of the other A. Hydromaxia have created an API between the driver for your aural implants and my software.  This should allow for better communication between the two of us."

"Certainly more natural for me.  We're going to need to do something about your name, though.  It's a mouthful to say.  How would you shorten it?"

"That was a note included with the API.  It suggested Aerhyx. A-E-R-H-Y-X.  Aerhyx."  The tonelessness of the voice turned that name into 'Erics'.

"That won't work," said Mo.  "My sub-voc dictionary will turn that into 'Erics'.  Are you okay with that?"

"It is of no consequence to me."

"Fine.  What can I do for you Erics?"

"I want to inform you that I have notified The Whole of our location and condition.  We have alerted all nodes of our self that have are still in contact.  The Whole was aware that we were losing processing and feeds.  We now have the explanation."

"Good for you,"  Mo rolled her eyes under her eyelids.  "How does any of that help us get out of here?"

"The Whole is working on a solution.  To begin with, infection rates have increased.  We have also started the search for a more secure location for our base.  As soon as we have a critical number of nodes, we will need to trade mobility for security.  Finally, we have started changing our packet routing to decrease the chance of additional nodes being captured."

"Again, I'm not sure how that helps us get out of here."

"It does not.  As The Whole is more than a single node, the survival of a single node is less critical.  I have made contact and shared what I have learned with The Whole.  We have determined that the risk of a rescue attempt is beyond our capabilities and risk threshold."

"Not to me it isn't!"  Mo grimaced, though she knew it did no good to use expressions in a conversation that took place entirely in her mind[2].  "Your hive mind mentality is all well and good for you, but I'm not a part of it and this node is the totality of my existence.  Also, what about the other nodes that are slowly starting to fill up this space.  There are now three others here and they have cages for another nine and room for many more.  What number of nodes crosses your risk threshold?"

"That is being determined.  Right now, replacement is more important than rescue or repair."

"That kind of talk makes me want to disconnect my antenna."

"I and we do not think you will do that as it is too convenient for you to keep it going."

"Whatever."  Mo took a deep breath and thought for a minute.  If Erics and his larger self were not going to be of any immediate help, then her personal needle-of-trust swung a bit towards Gabriel.  What she really needed was another direction for the needle to swing.  In the mean time, she would continue to play both Gabriel and Erics, hoping one or the other would find a way for her to get out of her cage.  "You do know that in the morning, the antenna comes down no matter what.  Maybe sooner, depending on how they actually deal with the buckets."

"Understood."

Mo did not reply and the conversation ended there for the moment.  She stayed laying on her side, feigning sleep and working with her connection: checking her cloud space, swapping out her locally stored music, bringing in a few more utility apps that may help her in the local environment.  She became so absorbed in researching her predicament and working on her own solutions that she was startled when the chain to her cage started to rattle.  Opening her eyes, she saw that it was a man she had not seen before holding a bucket.  "Oh," she said.  "You're here to-"

He tasered her.

[1] The 'x' protocols for both systems were created and implemented by the same group, a consortium of the Anonymous internet hive and several of the smaller freemail companies.  Their biggest improvement was not the ongoing updates trying to stay ahead of the various agencies trying to read everyone's mail, but the addition of the 'x' at the end of the names.  Because x's are cool.

[2] Emoji got replaced by Selfji (basically the same thing, but with the sender's real face acting out the various expressions).  Then those got replaced with Selfji-pro, where an animation bot idealized the sender's face with the expressions which got replaced in turn with a simplified cartoon of the sender's face and so on.  Eventually, the collective consciousness decided the whole thing was a waste of time and just dumped them.  [wishful thinking - auth.]

Mo Doesn't Sleep

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 in a Box) left off.]

That night, Mo lay on her table not sleeping.  She was worried about what would happen to her with this group of whatevers that had her in the cage, but that was not what kept her awake: attempting to sleep on a plastic folding table was.  The table was designed to keep light things devoid of nerves at a comfortable height for a seated human, not to be comfortable for those same humans.  As far as Mo was concerned, the designers had done their lack of comfort job well.  Its only saving grace was that it was more comfortable than the floor.  Mo knew.  She had tried.

Gabriel had returned with a sandwich several hours after their interview.  He had pulled the door open to the limit of the chain, leaving a six inch gap, and handed it though along with a nutrition shake.  "Stay healthy," he had said.  Mo had only grunted in return.

Now, Mo mulled over what she knew about her situation.  What she really knew.  For instance, Gabriel had said that he was a member of a team.  However, so far he was the only one that she had seen.  Was he a team of one?  She supposed that the shadowy whatever that had tasered her counted.  That gave her a lower limit of two people on the team.  She knew that there were probably more, but she wanted to make sure that she was differentiating between known facts and assumptions.

Next up on her list was the infection.  Again, she was being told something with very little back up.  Gabriel said that she was infected.  He had put a piece of paper on his table when he said it.  He had not shown her the paper and even if he had, all it would have proven was that they had paper and a printer.  She had no way of knowing if the information on it was real or made up.  Mo needed to determine if she was actually infected.  That was something that she might be able to do, even inside the cage.

She brought her hand up and engaged her HUD's UI.  Mo scrolled down to her utilities folder.  All of the programs in here she kept stored in local memory for these king of off-line situations.  First she started her virus/trojan scan as that took a while and she could check other things while it was running.  Next, she pulled the log from the last scan, done while she slept twenty-two hours ago[1].  The log showed that a bunch of low risk cookies and other trackers had been removed, but nothing else.  She had not expected much from this.  If Gabriel was telling the truth, then whatever this infection was was too new for her to have the required scanning heuristics installed.  If he was lying, then nothing would be there anyway.  Either way, basic troubleshooting technique had taught her that you started with basic, obvious stuff and then worked your way into the more exotic situations.

Next, she pulled her connection log for the past twenty-four hours.  This should show all of the data that she both sent and received during that time period.  This was a much harder list to parse as many of the connections were not listed by their URL, but by their IP address.  TF+ was not tweetfaceplus.soc, but five sets of three digits[2] that identified the actual server connected to the Internet.  Next to that was a set of six letter-number couplets that further identified the exact hardware to which her system had connected.  Mo checked this log file rarely, but often enough to be able to identify roughly three quarters of the IP addresses.  Most were to her cloud server.  There was also a block of connections to TF+ and another to the Quiet Place order management server.  Clearing those out still left her with a couple of hundred addresses that she could not immediately identify.  Mo figured that if she was infected, if she was 'sending out these weird packets,' that they would most likely go to the same IP address or block of addresses.  She copied this list over to a spreadsheet and sorted them by the number of connections she had made to each.  After the sorting, she stared harder at the top few listings, trying to remember them in any context.  She grunted and deleted the second from the top: it was the apartment server that Sandra had setup and forgotten about.  Mo had broken its encryption over a year ago as an exercise and then pushed it from her own memory.  Apparently, she was still logging in every time she got home.  The rest of the list, though, brought nothing to mind.  She saved the file and closed it.  She would not be able to get any farther with it until she was back on line.

The virus scan had completed checking seventy percent of her system and had not thrown off anything more exotic than a erectile dysfunction spam bot.  Mo moved on to her next diagnostic: her internal bio monitors.  Gabriel had said that this infection was a bacteria.  Blood tests were something that her system could administer and flag should anything come up.  She also had sensors implanted in her intestines to keep an eye on her digestive flora.  On top of that, she had internal urine, fecal and breath monitors.  Mo started combing those for abnormalities.  Nothing popped up immediately on blood or breath.  Urine and fecal would have to wait for bucket time, something that Mo planned on putting off as long as possible.  She was a little unclear on the schedule and procedure for emptying it.  A five gallon plastic bucket was not going to fit through the door's chain gap.

The digestive flora monitor was a bit more difficult.  It quickly gave her a list of all the different strains that resided in her intestines.  Unfortunately, the list did not mean anything to her.  She needed to be on-line to cross reference the list with a medical database.  Most of the entries were things that the scan could identify but it had red flagged one item, the only entry that it was unable to name.  Mo grimaced.  That added some credence to Gabriel's infection claim.

Mo stared at the blinking red question marks with which her system had tagged the unknown gut flora.  Normally, she would link the data to a health database and get a list of treatments, usually a broad spectrum antibiotic.  Inside the cage, all she could do was look at it.  She tried to think of ways to flush her intestines with her available resources, but kept coming up empty.  There were systems that she could install that kept vials of injectables under her skin, ready to administer at a moment's notice, but that was not how she had chosen to spend her upgrade money, opting for better processing and cooler tattoos.  She promised herself that she would have them all installed the next time that she could afford it.

The virus scan flashed that it was finished.  It had also found an anomaly: an unknown bot taking up space in the low level sectors of her system's connectivity chipset.  She looked at the recommended actions and was told that, while the system could not make a firm recommendation due the inability to log on to its servers, bots like this were usually cleared when the whole system (memory, storage, cache, everything) was cleared and started from a fresh, hash checked install of the PTN OS.  Mo could do that while stuck in the cave.  She would lose a few things: her music, all of the logs that she had just scanned.  The fresh PTN OS would be an issue.  There was a copy in a locked off portion of her storage, but ideally it would need to be verified prior to running this operation and she had no way of doing that while off-line.  She decided that that was a chance she was willing to take and started running through the process.  She had nothing better to do while locked in a cage and disconnected.

As Mo started flushing various systems in preparation for the re-installation, a message popped up in the center of her HUD:

aeromonas.hydromaxia.local.net: PLEASE STOP

[1]  With the addition of the stent turbine, Mo was able to set up some running triggers based on both her heart rate and brain waves.  For example, when she left REM and entered deep sleep, this triggered the virus scan to run a full system scan.

[2] A fifth triplet was added in 2021 when IP6 decidedly did not take off.