High Noon on Jefferson: Chapter Eighteen

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

We slagged, tagged and bagged the ro-bat and regrouped at the cottage. We didn't actually slag the Ro-bat. We just made sure it was so utterly incapacitated it could get away. We also ruptured the stomach and carefully removed the taxitos. We didn't need any living ones getting away inside the cottage and we didn't need those getting loose inside. Also the half processed bugs were not something we needed spilling out. Allergens from incompatible biochemistries are not something we needed smeared around. And it wouldn't be at all suspicious if we had taxito entrails smeared everywhere.

Nope.

Not at all.

Uh uh, no!

We also stuck the bot in a metal mesh bag so it would not be able to communicate with anything. We had not seen any EM, but one never knew. Truth be told, there were other ways, other technologies, that did not use the EM spectrum to communicate, but they were not likely to be present on Jefferson, at lest not in Shadwell. And if they were, we were not able to stop them: that was high tech, not what was available to 15 year olds.

After we "dressed" our kill, we went back to the cottage.

There, Dad and Khiara had thoughtfully put in a small workshop. That where we made a beeline for. But before we pulled the Ro-bat out of the bag, we swept the room for bugs and digital assistants. Which, y'know, are effectively the same thing: you have something listening for voice or other commands all the time, it's basically a bug. I wished more people realized that, but they've been around for a long, long time. I suppose the smart nobles of times past would have known not to talk around servants, at least on highly sensitive subjects, or else that information would leak like a....leaky pipe. Ok, sieve. sheesh. Metaphors.

There was nothing we could find. However, just to be sure, we fritzed out the network connection and I set up a temporary jammer: we drew straws and the loser got a self deleting program that lived inside a virtual world that would cause the connection to go nuts and act like a jammer. Tom, oh Tom, was the oh-so-lucky one. We knew once we turned it on, we might have had a whole thirty minutes before Dad or Khiara came looking to see what was going on. So we had to hurry.

And hurry we did.

Tom went fritzy. And , no, I don't mean like he was all the time.

I had Jackie kill the hardline for the network.

Veena, Rosa and I went to work hacking the Ro-bat.

There seemed to be look to the programming. It was supposed to fly around eating enough taxitos to power itself and then any excess it was supposed to fly back and deposit at a location.

And that location was not on Dad's farm!

YES!

That was wonderful news. It made it a lot less likely Dad was the culprit. My opinion of Khiara was still out as far as her guilt though: hey! Don't look at me that way! There's no Dad's GF-daughter issue here. Really! Seriously! Stop looking at me that way!

Neways, so we were going to need to snoop around more, just to be sure to clear Dad; however, we were not likely to solve the mystery this weekend. Which was a problem: we only had limited times we could have all snuck away. The problem with teenage life was that parents had long ago figured out the best way to keep teenagers out of trouble was to greatly reduce the time they had to get into trouble.

Homework and activities. They were not really meant to enrich our lives: they were meant to keep teenagers from triggering interstellar wars.

Really.

Veena, Rosa and I were chatting about what we had found and the interesting bits of code: all coders have styles, even the code generated by bots has the finger prints of their creators in the code the bots spat out. There seemed to be a single source for the repticulates and the ro-bats based on what we were seeing. That discussion had distracted us. ANd delayed us. And then when we realized it, we ran to the other room - since we couldn't tink to Tom, his booster being a jammer and all that - and saw him on the ground spasming.

We all freaked out, shut down his booster and then tried to hold prevent him from hurting himself. As soon as his booster we off, he stopped spasming. He lay there like a limp, pimply doll. All of us started to discuss what to do, when Jackie sat bolt upright and ran outside to reconnect the hardline. When she went out the outer airlock door, she screamed. A bucket fell down and landed on her: it was full of purple dyed oobleck. We didn't know that immediately and we were terrified we had inadvertently stumbled across another Jefflife lifeform, potentially predator. She screamed bloody murder and kept tearing away at it to try to get it off her.

We all ran, leaving Tom limp on the floor, to her help. She got a nice power washing when we dragged her back in the airlock: a safety feature installed in most. We all did, because none of us got out in time. Besides, we shouldn't have just in case. Some Earthlife harmless, but toxic to Jefflife chemicals were sprayed on us, too. We looked like drenched cats when we came inside.

And there, waiting, was Tom. Propped up on his elbows, wearing a grin that a cat would have worn had it got the canary. He'd been faking and tricked us all with a prank. The Merry Pranksters had been pranked by one of the Merry Pranksters.

Tom might have been laughing then, but let's just say he had to keep looking over his shoulder for months.

After we were done with our current adventure.

Right then though, he was lucky we didn't kill him right then and there.

Tom had improved our alibi for when Khiara and Dad came out to see what was going on with the jamming and no internet. In fact, that's what he said and Dad and Khiara bought it. They shook their heads and went back to the main house.

That was...clever, Tom.

Don't do that ever again, y'jerk.

hrmph.