High Noon on Jefferson: Chapter Twenty-four

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
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

The right thing to do. The correct thing to do. The smart thing to do would have been to head back to the cottage with our newly caught repticulate and then hack into it. That would have been awkward though with Veena and Rosa back there. And if anyone should know anything about teenaged Americans, avoiding the awkward is really, really high on the list of things to do.

So!

Yup!

We didn't go back. Instead, I sat down and attempted to commune - as I jokingly sometimes called hacking via my booster - with the repticulate. It was ten times harder. It was ten times dumber. Who knew if it had a defensive subsystem? Who knew if it carried a virus that might infect my booster and even potentially my implant? That had happened once.

Not to me!

Geez!

It was back on Earth, in America, in the city called El Paso. It was in the early days of implants and boosters. The virus released was a terrorist attack: the American Nativist Front loosed their strike in the city due to the high levels of nonAmericans coming and going: El Paso is right on the border with Mexico and in the border zone. When combined with Mexico's very open visa policy, foreign nationals of all stripes from all over the world came there to do business and El Paso, in the border zone, made it very easy for those foreign nationals to do business in America. The foreign business people would fly into Mexico, get a day pass into America, then do their business and then leave. El Paso and San Diego were the centers for this, but Nogales, Arizona and Brownsville, Texas also into that sort of arrangement.

Some people, stupidly, thought America should be only for Americans. They were what it properly called 'nativists.' Hilarious part? They were descended from immigrants and foreigners. There are no true natives of America. Even the Native Americans' ancestors immigrated. They didn't evolve in the Americas: they migrated from Asia.

What was not so hilarious was the cyber attack that the ANF conducted in El Paso. Thinking they were going to stem the tide of foreign nationals coming and going from the US, they unleashed the virus. It infected the boosters and the implants of people exposed. The ANF had found a 'zero day exploit' of those systems: meaning a way to hack into a device that was undiscovered by others and there was no protection from. The virus was meant to kill or send a person into a coma they might not come back from. After all, human beings had attached computers directly to their brains. That made them vulnerable. So, kill all the foreigners with a computer virus! RAH! or so they thought.

The really funny part - in a "I laugh lest I cry" sorta way - was almost no foreigners at the time had boosters and implants. The only people to embrace the technology at the time were Americans and the Japanese. And the Japanese didn't use the border cities for business: they could come to the US without a visa. So the people attacked and harmed, even killed?

Yup.

Americans.

By Americans claiming to be trying to prevent foreigners from draining wealth from the country and keep the foreigners out.

The total number of foreigners harmed by the ANF virus? About one hundred.

The total number of Americans killed? Forty thousand, including ten thousand kids whose parents had not kept up on their software inoculations because who would harm kids? Right? Right.

The attackfinally highlighted the fact that most terrorist attacks on Americans were by Americans and a lot changed. Schools regularly checked software updates on kids' boosters and implants. How implants interacted with boosters were changed. There were attempts at doing similar attacks, but none harmed more than a couple dozen. However, there were successful assassinations against singular people with booster/implant exploits since.

And I didn't want to be one of them.

Yet, the awkwardness of Rosa and Veena needing privacy somehow overcame the common sense level of safety of just going back to the cottage and using the equipment we'd brought was overruled. Ah, teenage priorities, right?

I sat down, crossed my legs and placed the disabled repticulate on the ground in front of me. I closed my eyes and reached out via my booster. There was no hardline between us, so it was through the EM spectrum my booster's antennae could handle. I probed and prodded. Different frequencies. Different modulations. Different protocols. Until I found I got a response.

I actually got several across the spectrum, but only one really seemed promising. I unleashed my private arsenal of hacking tools and pet artificial intelligence. They punctured the security of the repticulate in what seemed like forever. However, it was actually a pretty short time. When connected this way, I always felt each heart beat was a millennium. Each breath, an eternity. The brain ran at incredible speeds. Some people ran faster than others. Some ran slower. I was a hacker par excellence and I ran at light speed. Or so it felt. The time passed before I exploited the repticulate? 3.1415926 seconds.

I was in.

Then I tread carefully. The best analogy, but wildly inaccurate for the reality, was that I was an adventurer entering a dungeon. I had an army of familiars and guardians. They protected my back, scouted ahead and block side passages I was not interested in. I was after the location map of this things travels. I didn't need its recharge protocols. or its enemy detection algorithms. I definitely didn't want to mess with this thing's cyber defenses.

I finally found the data I wanted and started to withdraw. However, one of my bots flagged me on a the enemies list: the Merry Pranksters were on it. Whomever had designed this thing had gotten wind of us and our little quest. Interestingly, Maven and her Derplicates were also on the list. Interesting.

Then another bot screamed at me, proverbially, and abruptly disconnected me from the repticulate. The poor instantiation of the bot was destroyed. It lived in a sandbox, so I was safe. However, some deep part of me felt bad. It was only software, but it had 'died' saving me. If you can call an instance of software crashed dying. That would get a bit too deeply philosophical for me at that moment.

My eyes snapped open and I grabbed the repticulate. I threw the robot lizard as hard as I could. When it landed with a bounce and a flop, it burst into flames.

The programmer of the repticulate had tried to kill me. Or at least maim me.

I was not going to forget that.

It also meant we needed to be more careful going forward.

There was good news from my hacking foray though. This repticulate was relatively new compared to the one I found in Shadwell. That meant its location logs were not rolled. That meant I knew where the repticulate had come from. We knew where we were going.

There was one problem though.

It was 100 kilometers away and walking that without roads would take two days.

Mild problem.

Just a bit.

I might have had a solution though.