High Noon on Jefferson: Chapter Five

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four

Chapter Five

A High School Cybernetics Lab is a dangerous place. Even with the cumulative knowledge of humanity at the tips of our, um, neurons, high schoolers were not always the wisest people on the planet, um, in the galaxy.

Old idioms. They need updating to reality.

Sometimes there was an outbreak of a robot gone rogue. Not rouge. But that did happen once.

Sometimes there was a fight between robo geeks that got out of hand...and into their robots: Jimmy and Jenny Jackson are still banned after their robots half destroyed the lab over a sibling fight. And I thought twins were supposed to know each other's thoughts! Or was that the problem?

Once someone made a self replicating robot. That was another shadstorm. Fortunately, it replicated itself badly. Unfortunately, at some point the replications were going to be actually good and good at replicating. They borrowed the Jackson robots to smash the replicators. Benny Bezos and his family had to move to a different town. Parents. What can you say?

And all of this was under both the supervision of adults, real, live ones, and AI bots to watch for what we might have gotten into. Funny thing, teenagers. They're more slippier than orangutans. You see, a very, very long time ago, before people went to the stars, an orangutan was placed in a cage with five different ways to escape and the researchers studying it were waiting to see which one it took to understand it better. The orangutan found another. Teenagers were worse.

Now, if the adults didn't watch us. If the bots didn't keep tabs. I had to wonder: would teenagers actually be worse? Get into more trouble? Or would they end up getting into less? Because now they were not assumed to be in trouble and get into trouble for being in trouble, so trouble would be too much trouble to get in to? Did the observer affect the experiment. I think we all knew that. But the question was ... how. For better? Or for worse?

Here's the funny thing, by taking the repticulate to the cyberlab, we were infinitely increasing the chances of getting caught. However, it was us, the Merry Pranksters, and we rarely got caught. That incident with powered armor now! We turned ourselves in! That one doesn't count!

By going to the cybernetics lab, we were going to greatly speed up the time it took to figure out what we could from our newly smashed robotic reptile. If we dinked around at home, at some point, even with our best efforts, someone was going to notice something. I wasn't brave enough to keep a repticulate at home with Mom and putting it out with Dad at his farm was going to be problematic for us to work on it . Besides, all of us going out there all the time would be suspicious. And then there was Dad. He would have figured something was up. Mom would have skinned us alive. Dad would have done something that involved dark rituals at midnight with a moonless night with black candles and a black goat. And I doubt the goat would have survived. Or we would have.

And if I was unwilling to put a repticulate in one of my homes, I couldn't have asked one of my friends to do that. Tom would have, but that would have been an even bigger disaster. He might have been flippant and then...We'd be the Merry Spanksters instead.

We went to the lab after school. We knew Ms. Crawford rather well and despite our collective reputation, we had always been well behaved in her lab. She had viewed us as needing a bit of shelter after our insane adventure at age twelve. We had appreciated it and never exploited. At least until then. She had granted us access after hours. And...we went in.

Tom joked with Jackie when we went in and kept enough of a ruckus to make sure to distract anyone for the moment. I plugged myself into the lab network and set to work. When your world was only data, data could be faked and if the fake was really good, how could you tell if that data was fake? So, I faked the data the bots were seeing and then they'd log there was a glitch, but everything went back to normal in milliseconds. For good measure, I inserted some power glitch data as well, so it looked like the bots all glitched from a power mini hiccup.

Yes, my skills as a hacker had improved.

I exhaled and smiled. Veena and Rosa calmed down then. They were worried, somewhat rightly, about getting caught. They'd set themselves up to watch to make sure no flesh and blood adults or students showed up.

I went to my favorite work station and plopped myself down. And then Rosa all but climbed onto my shoulder. It was more than a bit annoying. She was going to have to move or I was. I let it slide for a moment with a glance over my shoulder though.

I pulled out the smashed repticulate. It was not in great condition. Rock beat robot beat finger. Not sure how fingers would beat rocks though. I could have still heard the rock's gleeful victory cry though: I win again, R. Lewis Daniel Steele! Ok, so I mashed up a good couple things there. Kinda like I did the repticulate. Badly, so it might not be understood.

I commanded the work bench to extrude some interface cables and they rose up out of the surface like it was a bad horror movie made in Japan. I think they were horror movies...at least. They reached out and began searching for connections on the repticulate. Slowly but surely, they did find interfaces. Power. A network. Stops they could tap the electronics.

I closed my eyes, shared my experience with my friends and...told Tom to physically disconnect the bench from the hardwire network and I disabled the wireless to the outside world...and then I dove in. They dove with me, but were observers. I asked the bench to try to boot the repticulate. That was semi successful: we got a safe mode, but not the whole thing. The repticulate was badly damaged. Even the central core chips.

Rock had really, really won. Yeah?

We got a safe mode. That worked. Not ideally, but it worked.

I bobbed and weaved and navigated through the strange OS this thing had. It was like others, but not. I tripped over my own assumptions multiple times. Unfortunately, there was not a lot of data here. The chips were damaged, but there was also a conscious effort to try to prevent anyone from finding out too much about the makers of this little silvery beasty or what it was doing or where it was.

That was not quite as successful as they had hoped.

Iwas able to extract where it had been for the last two days.

Oh...that was .... interesting. As in Chinese curse interesting. It wasn't really a curse and wasn't even chinese. weird.

The beginning of the repticulate path to Shadwell had started, or at least the data started, somewhere near Dad's farm. Very near Dad's farm. And that made me uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.