High Noon on Jefferson: Chapter Eleven

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

To be honest, I really, really, really ought to have tinked to the others what I was about to do. After all, it was all for one and one for all in the Merry Pranksters. However, if I did and I accidentally tripped something, then they would have been implicated, too. That would have gotten them in trouble. Hacking your Dad's farm was less of a problem than a bunch of kids together going about doing it. The former could have been construed and probably would have been by my Dad as being teenage mischievousness and rebellion. On the other hand, if we were all doing it together or they were at least warned of what I was doing and they had said nothing after I had been caught, it was more likely to blow up. A lot. So, I ventured forth cyberneticly on my own.

You might think I had gone off and did this by lying back in my bed and doing some amazing mental ninjitsu with spiffy mentally imposed graphics that looked like some sort of Hollywood Immie. Or perhaps it had a song and dance number in there like Bollywood. That would have been more interesting and the Hollywood one would have been more exciting to watch with my mind's eye, but neither were how I hacked my Dad's farm. For one, he had hardened it pretty thoroughly and in almost everything did not have a single way in from the outside world. And then he set bots loose to patrol the cybernetic innards of the whole thing. He was a little paranoid and given his own daughter was trying to get in, it might have been a little justified. Just a little. Just maybe.

Getting in through the house remotely would have been easier, except the house was physically separated from the rest of the computers running the farm. And I needed to see the whole farm, not just the house. Besides, the house was still guarded by bots crawling through all the online systems and anything vital was separated from the outside world. Dad was more paranoid about that than average. That didn't mean it wouldn't be possible to jump the air gap, but it did make it a whole lot harder. It was a little pointless anyways. I doubted Dad would be building repticulates in the house. He had a workshop there, but it was a tinker place, not a factory and if there were at least two virtually identical repticulates out there, there were probably more and there had to be a factory for them. Of some sort. And it would not be in the house.

So, as I laid back into bed and closed my eyes, I did something you probably didn't expect. I reached out through my booster to the old fort we had hidden the repticulate in. The one we had hidden the tools we had used to hunt down the Indian soldiers in our first adventure. The one the BII and the Marines and adults had torn down to see what we had hidden there. The one we, the Merry Pranksters, had rebuilt secretly within the frame the adults had erected for a replacement. It might have looked like the old kids' fort the adults had rebuilt as approved and safe, but it was anything but.

The server at the fort responded and I told it to launch a drone. Yes, a drone. It popped out from one of the walls and lifted up above the trees and ziiiiiiipppppp off it went over the Jefflife forest. It zipped its way across land and water all the way to Dad's farm. Along the way, as it reached half way to its limit for radio contact, the drone dropped a repeater. Then it reached again half way, it dropped another. It was dropping twice as many repeaters as it needed. However, should half of them get eaten or broken, then I would have still been in contact. The repeaters were battery powered though and had a limited lifespan. At least until the sun came up.

And I needed to be long done before the sun came up.

My little drone zipped and bobbed and dropped repeaters and came on going. I finally made it to Dad's house in the interminable time of a whole 15 minutes. Drones were much faster than people, surprise, surprise. But I was breathing rather heavily and time seemed to stretch as I watched through the drone's camera and watched a map displayed into my brain virtually. I first flew the drone up and onto the cow dome. There I plugged into an outlet I had added.

I was a Merry Prankster after all and I never knew when I might need a way into something I was not supposed to get into. Now, the cow dome was pretty innocuous to get into, even for me, but I didn't want to damage it or alter its code. I wanted to get access to its cameras and snoop its systems for any bots that might be feeding false data to the data recorders. There were no bots hiding or corrupting information. There were no signs of repticulates. There was an anomaly: the cow dome had no cows and I knew Dad had cows. That was weird, ok, really weird, but it had zilch to do with robot lizards. Perhaps they were in another dome?

I flew the drone to another dome. The pig dome. Dad called it the Sounder Dome and would strangely chant: two piggies enter, some bacon leaves. I really wish I had an idea what weird ancient cultural reference that was to. And, yes, I had laid in a connection there, too. Look, if you have physical access to something, there is almost always a way in. I just happened to want to avoid getting caught going through something I hadn't put in, shielded and hidden myself. Sooo...no bots. No...pigs?! What in the world. One dome missing its contents was one thing. Two was something suspicious.

I flew to the chicken dome. No chickens.

I flew to the turkey dome. No turkeys. No, wait, they were coming inside.

Drones were actually herding them inside.

I flew back to the chickens. The chickens were being herded in as well. The same way.

The duck dome, geese dome, quail dome all had the birds being herded in from the outside.

I went to look at the goats, pigs, sheep and cattle. All were being herded back inside from the outside. Some by drones. Some by bots. Some by a combination of the two.

Mind. Blown.

As an offworlder, you probably don't realize what I had just seen. These were Earthlife animals that had been outside without protection. They had been outside where the taxitos were. Yet, they were coming in seemingly unharmed. There were no flashes of lasers to kill the taxitos. There were no signs of bites from the taxitos. There were no signs of distress by the animals either.

Clearly, I am not getting through to you. Jefflife and Earthlife were not compatible. Not completely. They had and have lots of biochemical incompatibilities. A bite from a taxito was enough to kill an elephant. The toxicity of the "numbing agent" that it injected was wild. It was not evolved to be that. For Jefflife, a taxito bite was mildly annoying, much like a small fly or mosquito bite back home in America. However, for a human or any animal from Earth, a taxito bite was lethal. Or it should have been. These farm animals were doing just fine.

Mind.

Blown.

I was at a total loss as to what to think. Clearly, something suspicious was going on at Dad's place. Two suspicious things at once in a small out of the way place like Shadwell was possibly a coincidence, but I doubted it.

Then, well, I need to explain something again since you are an offworler. I am aware Earther Americans don't have the hangups about nudity and whatever like Jeffersonians do. However, not wearing clothes here on Jefferson means death. And that rapidly became a taboo to be running around topless or whatever like I see in the Hollywood Immies. Going to the beach or a pond and swimming in just a swim suit is...insane on Jefferson.

And yet... as I pulled the drone up and away from the last dome I had just looked at, I saw something no Jefferson kid would ever expect to. And for that reason alone, I was scarred for life. I saw my Dad, shirt off and in shorts and work boots, sweaty, outside. My brain broke right then and I was scarred, scarred for life. Then...his girlfriend walked up, in shorts and a bikini and kissed him.

And I promptly crashed the drone.

I didn't want to. My brain broke in so many ways and the 'etch' and 'ewww' was so powerful it made me crash the stupid drone. They didn't hear, but it meant I had to retrieve the stupid thing as fast as possible. I snuck out early morning and marched all the way to Dad's and got it before he was up.

However, I didn't sleep well that night. Not just really because of the PDA by Dad and his girlfriend, but...

Remember what I said about the taxitos? And other Jefflife? And its compatibility with Earthlife?

yeah.

Exactly.

What that meant...caused me to lose a lot of sleep.