Chapter 9 here.

Sunlight warmed Ivan’s face and he smelled a diesel scented breeze. He cracked an eyelid open, trying to get his bearings. Oh god. He was on the floor of Cyn’s car in a painfully contorted position and his back was screaming in agony. Ivan gingerly turned his neck, eliciting a sharp pain that nearly made him call out. He looked out of the open car door. They were at a roadside service station. He tried to crawl out of the car on all fours without turning his head. He held his head perfectly still and somehow managed to get out onto the pavement and get himself upright without incurring too much suffering. He was squinting in the bright sun until he fished out his sunglasses and put them on with relief.

His message queue had over a hundred unread messages, but he sorted them by priority.

We are in the diner. I’ve 86’d all the cameras. Come get eggs, read a message from Cyn. Ivan noticed that the car was charging, and its door closed behind him as he headed toward the diner, holding his head upright and facing forward.

There were many, many messages, text, voice, and video, from Bryce. He didn’t think he could bear to hear her voice or to see her right now, so he brought up the most recent text.

You’re being silly. You have to talk to me to understand what really happened. This jealousy is totally unfounded. You need to respond at least to tell me that you are OK. I heard your coworker was driving some kind of crazy tank, and they say she is like a total badass, but still, I need to know you are OK. Respond to my fucking messages! I swear to god, nothing happened between Jayson and I. Nothing. For real! I should be mad that you didn’t even check to make sure we got out of that riot safely. Luckily Jayson’s security staff is awesome. Lightning and his team are SO amazing. We are on the boat now, but Jayson is arranging a flight to pick us up. We are going to the desert to decompress. Meet us at Burning Man. I will explain everything when I see you. Love, Bryce.

Ivan tried to tamp down his jealousy, anger, and confusion as he entered the old fashioned diner. The air was thick and greasy inside and his stomach churned with hunger. He could go for eggs, actually.

Cyn pointed at Ivan as he walked into the diner and laughed conspicuously. “Look at you, do you need a neck brace or what?” she cackled. The place was empty except for some insolent looking teenagers in a booth toward the back. They looked like locals, living off of god knows what out here in the boonies.

Batou scooted over in the booth to make room for him, staring at ether all the while, and Ivan gingerly placed himself into the booth beside him. The springy leather cushions sank down unexpectedly under his weight and his neck moved a bit, sending a spear of pain between his shoulder blades.

Cyn laughed again at the wince of agony on his face. “Ha ha, I felt a bit sore myself this morning but nothing THAT bad. You need to take up yoga, my friend.”

“Yeah right, who’s going to teach me? You?” retorted Ivan irritably.

“I could teach you some positions you wouldn’t believe, soldier,” replied Cyn with a lewd wink.

Ivan stared at her stupidly for a second while Batou gave a grunt of laughter. “Think he could handle a hard woman like you after that soft little Bryce of his?” he asked, staring off into space as he worked his windows.

“Maybe not,” admitted Cyn, grinning significantly over the rim of her coffee mug at Ivan.

“I, uh, I need eggs,” stammered Ivan, caught off guard.

“Good luck getting service from this brat,” muttered Cyn, as she turned to wave for the waitress. Sure enough, the girl at the counter pretended not to see them for a moment before sighing and sulkily trotting over, tablet in hand.

“What can we get you?” she asked, obviously staring off at her feeds as she took his order.

“I’ll just put it in myself,” offered Ivan, taking the tablet tentatively from the girl’s unresisting grip. He didn’t understand why these places didn’t just fully automate at this point. Old fashioned values maybe? He typed in his order and then, just for giggles, opened a browser pointing at one of his compromised sites and loaded a backdoor onto the tablet before handing it back to the insolent young yokel. “Uh, thanks,” he said, as she absently held the tablet and gazed into the only world that mattered to her, the virtual.  

“Thanks!” repeated Cyn more loudly and the girl blinked in confusion for a minute before wandering back to the counter. “I swear to god, I’m going to go grab that coffee pot and pour my own goddamn refill with that space cadet serving tables here.”

“Get me some too,” suggested Ivan.

Cyn tisked and then climbed up out of the creaking booth, walked right past the waitress behind the counter, and grabbed the coffee pot and a cup for Ivan before returning to the booth. The young girl either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and her mouth hung open as she spun through whatever windows she was looking at.

“Here’s your coffee, honey,” teased Cyn, pouring Ivan a cup and then refilling her own before putting the coffee pot on the table between them and dropping into the booth.

Ivan blushed slightly at her familiar manner. Maybe one door was closing with Bryce, but another was opening with Cyn. He looked at her face as she lost herself in her own private interface, and she looked innocent for a moment, all of the hard cynicism drained away as she scanned and gestured.

“Danny, get this food here. Get out of that visor for a gosh darn second and take care of your customers, girl,” called an old man’s voice from the kitchen in back.

“Sorry, grandpa,” said the server. She swiped away her feeds and rushed to grab the food. When she got to the table, laden with plates, she gazed at the coffeepot sitting there in confusion for a moment. The smell of fried potatoes filled the air and it smelled good to Ivan. His eggs looked perfect, the hash browns were crisp and the toast was hot.

“Wow, this actually looks really good,” he admitted.

“Don’t act so surprised,” replied the girl taking up the coffeepot and topping off everyone’s cup before returning it to behind the counter.

“I like these little hole in the wall places,” admitted Batou, as he dug into his own breakfast.

The trio ate in silence for a few minutes, savoring the traditional breakfast food, carefully prepared.

“So anyway, while you lovebirds were flirting over there, I was digging into the forums to see what the fuck was going on with our identities getting owned,” said Batou. He speared a potato, dipped it in ketchup, and popped it in his mouth.

“We were NOT flirting,” gasped Cyn. She seemed genuinely offended for a moment, and Ivan actually felt a pang of disappointment. “I mean I didn’t even take my shirt off.” Cyn broke out braying in laughter at her own joke.

“Har har,” said Batou.

Ivan for his part looked at Cyn’s chest and wondered what she would look like with her shirt off. She had a loose black t-shirt on with a big red A on it.

“I do have boobs under here, I just keep them strapped down with a tactical bra,” Cyn assured him.

“I didn’t, I mean, I wasn’t,” sputtered Ivan in embarrassment.

“Oh yes you were,” said Cyn smugly, before returning her attention to her meal.

“Okay, yeah, seriously you guys,” said Batou. He was legitimately annoyed at this point and glared at Cyn for a moment, but she scrupulously avoided his gaze and kept eating her french toast, dipping each bit daintily in the side of syrup before putting it in her mouth.

“What did you find so far, Batou?” asked Ivan. He swivelled his entire upper body toward his angry little compatriot so he didn’t have to turn his neck.

“Well, like I said yesterday before the riot broke out, the overall operation looks like an Anon Op, but I can’t find any reference to the shit that went down at your two apartments.”

“Just knowing it’s an Anon Op doesn’t tell us much,” complained Ivan. “Half the time they are fighting themselves.”

“I know, I know,” sighed Batou. “But at least I tracked down the courier that delivered the explosives to your place. Order came from a drugstore in Idaho.”

“Ha, Idaho! What were they running?” laughed Cyn. She was getting into the conversation now.

“Some old Windows, you know the drill. I got onto their system and there was a bunch of malware on there, mostly being used to fake painkiller prescriptions and stuff like that. Funny thing is the crew that sent the bomb to Ivan’s place removed their kit right afterward, but another crew’s software logged the whole thing, the sneaky bastards. And the c2 connections all trace back to the same ISP. Wanna guess?”

“What was it called, Double Six or something like that?” asked Ivan, swiping through his own command history files.

“Double Six,” said Batou.

“Yeah, great work, Sherlock, I could have guessed that one,” snorted Cyn. “Tell us something we don’t know.”

“Fuck, Cyn, these guys are deep,” said Batou, deflating slightly. He rubbed his chin, just sprouting a bit of wispy stubble. “We need more time. I want to go lay low somewhere for a couple of days and try to figure this shit out.”

“What about the Arkansas mission?” asked Cyn. “Rasmussen sent over a whole slew of docs on this front company that we need to go check out.”

“I’m not trusting Rasmussen much right now,” admitted Batou. “I’ve worked with the guy for years, but this whole Op is just too sketchy. I need some breathing room.”

“We could stop at Burning Man on the way to Arkansas,” said Ivan, thinking about Bryce’s offer.

“Burning Man?” asked Cyn. “You wanna party at a time like this?” She paused for a moment, thinking it over. “I like your style, Ivan.”

“Uh, well, Bryce said Jayson is taking her there and she wants me to meet her so she can explain what happened between them,” admitted Ivan, meekly. He suspected that Cyn wouldn’t like that idea, and he was right.

“Bryce!” shouted Cyn, pounding the table so loudly that even the spaced out waitress looked over in concern. “You are still chasing after that fucking slut? Are you a goddamn idiot? What does she need to explain to you, Ivan? How much richer and better in bed Jayson is?”

“She said nothing happened between them and that she can explain,” offered Ivan. He felt pretty lame saying it and half worried that he was blowing his chances with Cyn if things didn’t work out with Bryce. But he had been with Bryce for over a year now and he was still attached to her. He wanted to believe that he was mistaken about her and Jayson.

“Don’t go all ballistic about it, Cyn,” said Batou. “Black Rock City is actually a pretty good place to lay low. They keep bandwidth to a minimum there. It’s as close to off the grid as we can get and still have crowd cover.”

“You know what? Fine! Great! Let’s go there then,” said Cyn. Her eyes flashed angrily at Ivan. “Let’s go visit your precious Bryce so you can see once and for all what a cheating little whore she is and fucking get on with your life.”

“Well, if that’s how it turns out, then yeah, I’ll get on with my life,” Ivan told her earnestly.  

“Regardless of how the love triangle plays out, we need to lay low and figure out how to not get killed by some crazy ass hackers, Cyn,” said Batou.

But Cyn turned away from him and called the waitress. “Check, please! We’re out of here!” She turned back to Ivan and Batou with a grimace on her face. “Oh, and you two better figure out how to break this to Rasmussen, because I’m already on his shitlist and I don’t have any pull.”

“I’ll tell him,” offered Ivan. He sighed with resignation as he tried to open a voice channel to Rasmussen. He plopped the connection into their shared workspace, so Cyn and Batou could listen in.

“Ivan, glad to hear that you’re still in one piece,” said Rasmussen in a raspy voice. It sounded like Ivan might have woken him.

“You heard about that, huh?” asked Ivan. “Well, in light of the increased heat, we want to take a short detour to Black Rock City to get the lay of the land.”

“Excellent idea,” said Rasmussen, perking up. “I didn’t know that you were working on that particular piece of the puzzle. Let me know if you can locate any of Ardenwood’s assets.”

Ivan looked confused and was about to ask what the hell Rasmussen was talking about, but Cyn made a cutting motion across her throat, and he recovered himself just in time. “Will do. Talk to you soon.”

“Don’t forget the dehydration tablets,” said Rasmussen, and cut the connection.

“What the hell was THAT all about?” asked Ivan in dismay. The waitress brought over a slip of paper and Ivan stared at it for a moment before he realized that it had no KaosKoin code on it.

“What, uh, where’s the KaosKoin QR?” he asked the girl.

“We don’t accept those devil tokens here,” she said primly. “Cards are good though, Visa, Uber, that sort of thing.”

“Give us minute, thanks,” said Ivan. “What kind of hillbillies are we dealing with here?” he asked Cyn, once the girl had gone. “We can’t use any of our cards, we don’t know how deep our identities are blown.”

“Don’t worry your pretty little head,” said Cyn with a gleam in her eye. She produced a handful of cash from her pocket, American dollars in multiple denominations.

“What are you, a fucking drug dealer?” asked Ivan in amazement. No one used that stuff anymore.

“Ardenwood is an investor in the fund, and there was some weird coverup of a scandal at a recent charity event, but I can’t see the connection here,” put in Batou.

The waitress came back to the table to collect payment, but when she saw the cash, her face blanched and she backed away in fear. “Grandpa, you better come out here!” she called. “They got cash.”

A skinny old white man came sauntering out through a swinging door. He was dressed in a white wifebeater and blue jeans with a clean white apron covering his clothes and a white paper cap on his head. He walked with determination directly up to the table where the trio of hackers was sitting and looked down at their money serenely.

“Well, well, well,” he said, squinting at Cyn with raw malice. “Cash money, with the all seeing eye and everything. Let me guess? You all don’t happen to be sovereign citizens, do you?” He closed his eyes dramatically and turned his head to the side, holding up one hand to forestall objection as the three customers sat there dumbfounded. “I can see with my eyes you ain’t. I would take such lucre from a proper sovereign citizen, provided it had the right signs. But you three couldn’t be such. I seen you come here, in that thing you call a car. And others might not see it for what it is, but I know an abomination when I see one. And others won’t see when their cameras overlook some activity in the restaurant, but this old man knows when his systems have been tampered with. And I see this strange crew, and I cannot unsee it.” He pointed dramatically at Batou and then at Cyn’s blue hair. “But I don’t want no trouble when the all seeing eye comes asking about you.” He paused for a moment after watching for their reaction. “Or whoever it may be. I know someone is going to come asking, and I want no trouble, and I won’t touch your filthy untraceables. I’ll take a card like any other HONEST citizen might. Don’t you try to put MY people in danger. Just pay up right and get on out.” And after delivering this deep throated tirade, the old man turned with dignity and strode back into his immaculate kitchen.

“Sorry, Grandpa’s a little crazy, but we do take cards,” explained the waitress.

Ivan suddenly remembered that he had hacked her tablet and he pulled up an interface and marked their bill as paid via Uber. He gave Cyn a wink. “You know what, we don’t want any trouble, Miss. I just paid with Uber and left you a nice tip. Let’s go guys.”

He slid himself carefully out of the booth and made his way stiff necked out the door, with Cyn and Batou close behind.  

“I thought you didn’t want to risk using any of your identities here,” whispered Cyn.

“I hacked the tablet when I put my order in,” replied Ivan under his breath.

Cyn broke out in a bout of braying laughter as the doors of her car snicked open. She slapped Ivan playfully on the rear. “I like the cut of your jib, son. I like the cut of your jib, you sneaky little fucker.”

Ivan felt flushed with pleasure that Cyn wasn’t mad at him anymore as they climbed into the car.

“That old guy did creep me out though, he knew a little too much,” mused Batou, as they headed off to that thing in the desert that never stops.

“We gonna follow em, Grandpa?”

“Now why would you think that, darling?”

“I ain’t no great seer, but even I know a sign when I see one.”

The old man smiled, drawing an ancient AR-15 from the cabinet. “You’ll be a seer, sure enough. You take after your grandpa. Gather the Sovereign Citizens. Use the CB. The All Seeing Eye has forgotten those channels.” A pause. “Did you see where they’re headed, child?”

“They SAID where, Grandpa. I didn’t need to SEE it. Burning Man, they said.”

The smile on the old man’s face grew wider yet. “It feels like the end times when the righteous rain down judgement on the sinners in the desert. Do you feel it, child?”

“Yes, Grandpa. I feel it.”

“It feels GOOD, doesn’t it, child?”

“Yessir. Yes it does.”

Chapter 8 here.

Evelyn was still disembodied, but her ego was slowly recoalescing. She recalled experimenting with psychedelics when she was young, and this felt a lot like a bad trip. Perhaps she had been dosed by someone. Was there a boy? A party? She couldn’t recall. There had been so many visions. She wasn’t sure which reality was hers. The Guy Fawkes mask loomed above her in so many versions of the world, berating her for her wealth and privilege. Then she was among refugees somewhere. Hadn’t she seen something about this on the news? A bombing at a religious site, people gathered up and put into camps. But how was she there among them?

This dust was so real, filling her mouth and nose, choking her. A soldier appeared and shouted. He was a man, not a bot, in a bloodstained uniform. But whose blood was it? Who was he shouting at? Evelyn couldn’t tell. She wasn’t sure which life was Evelyn’s anymore. But then the soldier raised the butt of his rifle. Some ridiculous old fashioned type, a kalashnikov. Pathetic. Her automated weapons platforms would make short work of such an unruly primitive. But there were no platforms here, and the butt of the rifle came down hard, cracking her forehead. She called out in pain, her ears ringing from the concussion. All went dark for a moment, but her face felt wet suddenly. Was that water, blood? Whose blood was it?  

She staggered along, her legs carrying her in line with the others. Everywhere the dust swirled and obscured her vision. Dogs barked and snapped at her. But then a patient voice emerged. Very soft at first, it was talking for a while before Evelyn managed to start splitting the sounds into words, then attaching meaning to the words, then realizing it was speaking to her.

“Many of us questioned whether a woman such as yourself would even benefit from this sort of training. It’s a hack, and I know it seems cruel, but that’s really all this is, it’s just training. Empathy training.”

“Are you talking to me?” she asked. Who was she, Evelyn maybe? She was a girl in Switzerland once. She remembered a party. All of the teenagers from the Swiss International School were there. Rumor had it one boy was the son of a vicious dictator, they were warned to watch out for him. He’d been accused of sex crimes.

A little boy was crying. He was missing a foot somehow. It was very sudden. There was a lot of blood. The mother’s face appeared before her, eyes streaming with tears, begging her to help, but what could she do? She grabbed the boy’s ankle dispassionately. The soldier was there and he kicked her in the ribs. Hard. But she knew what to do. She tied the filthy rag tight around the ankle. There was a stick to be had, so she used it and twisted. The boy cried out in pain. The mother raged against the soldier, buying Evelyn precious time. But there was another crack and the mother fell beside her son. Was she dead? Was she injured? Evelyn picked the boy up in her arms. Whose arms were these, carrying this poor boy? The line moved on.

“It’s sexist, isn’t it? I think so,” said the patient voice in her ear.  

Were these tears or blood on her face? Whose tears?

“Women can be just as sociopathic as any man. It’s a myth that they are naturally nurturing. And sociopaths are teeming among the ranks of you plutocrats. That’s how you get to the top and stay there. Some of us don’t even think we can change the rules, you know. That’s how I feel personally.”

“Are you talking to me?” asked Evelyn. The boy was growing heavy in her arms. His sobs had subsided and his breathing grew more shallow. She checked the tourniquet. The line of people moved through the dust, shadowy figures before her and behind her.

“We can’t change the rules. You will receive the training and your empathy score will go up, and then the wolves will tear you apart. But maybe you can spend some of those billions on something useful before they take you down. It’s a thought, who knows?”

“We need a doctor here immediately,” called Evelyn. Definitely Evelyn. Someone was going to get fired for this. Heads would roll, so to speak. This situation was totally unacceptable. This was definitely Evelyn now. But which Evelyn? Did a boy spike her drink at a party? She hoped it wasn’t the dictator’s son. This was a very bad trip, something he would enjoy putting her through, she was sure.

There was no doctor to be had. The boy lay still now. She was kneeling on the ground surrounded on all sides by others. A gate was closing and there was a loudspeaker. Was it a call to prayer? People around her demanded to know the direction of Mecca. What language was this? The gates were closing continually, a rattle of chains which never ceased. The boy turned his head. The sound disturbed him. He wasn’t dead yet. Evelyn would see about that. Her people would look into it. This gate business had to be dealt with. It was very loud, altogether too loud.

In another world, Matheson looked on sadly as Evelyn was transported to the helicopter. She was struggling on the stretcher, totally unaware of her surroundings. But he had to turn his attention back to the matters at hand. His AI agents had some leads. This business with the blood bank looked very suspicious. There was a homeless girl in Oakland who had seen something strange. He had deployed some assets to pick her up, but he was getting worried. The status updates were stale. The GPS circle kept getting broader and broader instead of zeroing in.

Matheson pulled up a supervisor thread. “What is the status of the Oakland operation?” he demanded.

“Assets offline,” replied the agent. “There is a lot of police activity down there.” The resolution of the avatar before him increased sharply. Matheson could make out the animated paisley of its necktie. “Ahh, I’m sorry, Mr. Matheson. We’ve lost control of our Oakland assets. There is a significant information security threat down there right now. This whole riot was triggered by a council truck being compromised by a local hacktivist group. But the action seems to have backfired and now the state is purging the camp. It might be that we lost our assets in a retaliation attack. We need to deploy more units to assess.”

“Do it,” assented Matheson. He steeled his nerves as he faced the creepily intelligent agent, but the resolution of the avatar smoothly reduced back to normal, its computing power redirected within Evelyn’s cloud infrastructure to where it was needed more. He sighed in relief, in spite of himself. He must have been awake for too long if he was getting scared of his own algorithmic agents. He would require downtime soon.  

But first, just a few more loose ends to tie up. The windows and feeds flicked back and forth before him as the copters carrying Evelyn and the feds shrieked off toward the north, and the cars that had picked up Ardenwood and his security entourage drove off toward the city. The streetlights flicked off one by one as the sun rose on the horizon.

Chapter 10 here.

Chapter 7 here.

The tents and shanties of Mira’s camp were huddled together along the sidewalks of a dozen consecutive blocks under the 580 overpass in Oakland. Junk was strewn everywhere: blue plastic tarps, shopping carts, baby carriages, white five gallon buckets, horrendous mattresses and couches, a stream of refuse that was dredged up by the inhabitants and periodically swept away when the various city and county agencies got enough complaints. Huge empty lots under the freeway were securely sealed off with chain link fences, forcing the homeless to erect their tents and shanties on the narrow sidewalks and often on the streets themselves. Whenever the denizens of the camp tried to knock down a fence and claim the unused real estate, drones appeared, firing rubber bullets and beanbags. Mira never could understand why the state guarded these useless lots so jealously. It was stupid.

Mira was feeling surprisingly energetic and vital after the transfusion. She was normally crushed physically after a blood donation and often needed to recharge immediately with juice, forced to spend some of her precious Koin just to make it home again. But she was practically skipping along as the sun began to set and the air around her became cooler. She adjusted her filthy neckerchief, ignoring its stench, totally oblivious to the stark difference between her fabulous, flowing virtual rainbow feather boa and this stained and moldy handkerchief she used to keep from swallowing too much dust.

Everyone knew she had gone to give blood, so she logged out and tucked her visor into her bag before going to pay her tax to the enforcer in charge of her camp. Rolo was actually a friendly fellow and always welcomed Mira warmly, but she knew that he would punch her face in if she ever filmed him with her visor, so she made sure to log off before she approached Rolo’s tent on the corner. He was sitting alone on an overturned bucket with his rifle at his feet and a vape pen in his hand. Mira approached him with her hands up, as was the protocol for paying taxes.

“Wazzup, Mira?” said Rolo, expelling a cloud of vape smoke that smelled of meth. “People sayin’ crazy shit ‘bout you.” He made a signal with his hand and Mira suddenly noticed the little ten year old kid they called Hefe, standing in a dumpster behind Rolo’s tent. He’d had a pistol trained on Mira, but he pointed it skyward and gave her a chilling smile, his eyes dead. Mira’s blood ran cold at the sight of the tiny sociopath. The rules were always the same for every gang. You had to earn your gun with a kill. Mira was afraid of a child who could kill so effortlessly.

“Yeah, shit was crazy, but I got to the clinic, and I gave my blood. Here to pay my tax,” said Mira. She kept her hands up out of respect.

“Cool, cool, you can relax,” said Rolo, giving Mira a gap toothed smile. He pulled out the special hacked together rig he used to generate KaosKoin addresses. Mira held out her hand and he stamped the back of it with a QR code in cheap ink that would rub off easily.

Mira gasped and nearly jerked her hand away. “Three Koin? How come?” Her mind was racing. That was as much as a normal blood bank would have paid her for one visit, but Rolo had no way of knowing that she’d gotten much more. She knew it was dangerous to complain, but if she didn’t then he might suspect how much she really had.

Rolo gave her a shrewd look and took a hit of meth. “You don’t have to pay it if you don’t want to,” he said softly.

Mira froze in her tracks. She knew damn well that she had to pay it or they would hurt her badly. “It’s just all I got, you know, seems harsh,” she whispered. She could feel the tears welling up. She hated getting shaken down like this, even if she could afford it now.

Rolo actually seemed guilty for a minute. “Yeah, well, you know,” he leaned in closer. “You got too much attention. People saying you rollin’ in Bliing. My boss would figure that’s good enough for you. Keep the Bliing, hand over the Koin. I would go soft on you if I could. But I get too soft, I end up in the dumpster and Heffe over there is collecting taxes, you feel me?” Rolo tried to smile, but his cheek was twitching madly from all the meth he’d smoked. He flicked his tongue involuntarily a few times, reminding Mira of a tattoo-faced lizard.

“I’ll pay it. I know how to stay alive,” promised Mira. She made a fist and held up the code to show Rolo.

“Good girl, you’ll be okay, rations coming today.” Rolo looked around nervously. “Now get.”

Mira scurried away when he dismissed her and quickly logged back into her visor. The filthy camp was obscured by the virtual structures her neighbors had created to spruce up the place. Colorful mushroom houses and fanciful castles surrounded her now, as the chatter of her social groups resumed and her view was filled with status windows and alerts. Mira sighed as she reentered this virtual world.

The real world sucked. People trying to kill and hijack you, shaking you down all of the time. Nothing but poverty and garbage everywhere. Mira thought she would go mad if she didn’t have her ChatTime, her friends, and the AR skins that hid the ratty tents and debris all around her.

She came to a big red and white spotted virtual mushroom house that was, in reality, just a brown tent with a tarp over it, but it was where Mira’s friend Zazoo lived. Zazoo was an older woman who Mira visited when she was feeling down, when she needed a mother figure. Mira’s own mother was down in LA, hooked on pills and not very communicative. Zazoo allowed Mira to see her location status and Mira knew the old woman was inside, but she called out with her voice out of politeness.

The door of the mushroom hut opened and Mira saw Zazoo’s familiar avatar, a green haired earth mother in a flowy, tie-dyed rainbow dress.

“Ohh, so pretty, so pretty,” chuckled Zazoo, welcoming Mira into her hut. “What Bliing, so fancy!”

Mira surreptitiously scanned the code on the back of her hand with her wallet and began to thaw out three Koins so she could pay her rent and forget about it. Then she ducked into Zazoo’s tent. It was a shame that AR couldn’t cover the smell. The old woman worked hard to keep her place clean, but without running water it got pretty rank inside the little tent.

“I’ve just been sitting here and watching my little Mira’s adventures, oh so many hashtags, poor Zazoo can’t keep up,” chatted the older woman. The avatar presented Mira with a sunny smile, literal suns emanating and diminishing in a geometric pattern. It was a custom animated emoji that Zazoo had bought years before, but Mira never tired of it. The avatar glanced slyly around and then leaned forward, as the woman whispered conspiratorially to Mira. “You must be hungry, but you don’t have to wait for the relief trucks. Old Zazoo still has some rations tucked away. Even on delivery day, Zazoo keeps some food saved.” The avatar produced a silver tray with a crystal dome, which she pulled away to reveal a steaming, stuffed turkey. This represented a plain turkey MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat), Mira knew.

Mira didn’t feel nearly as hungry as she normally did after donating blood, but she accepted the old woman’s precious offering. Partly to be nice, and partly to not raise suspicion with anyone who might be watching or listening nearby. Everybody was always hungry when they returned from the blood bank. No one would refuse food at such a time, especially on ration day when everyone was out of food. The turkey meal assumed its real proportions as Mira received it, so that she could eat it properly, and she took a bite.

“Your boa is so crazy, I’ve never seen such a thing,” commented Zazoo, inspecting Mira’s new AI with fascination.

“It’s mostly a DJ,” said Mira. She paused in her munching to gesture and wake up the assistant. It oriented itself immediately toward Zazoo, noticing her interest.

“I know what you like,” hissed the snake, flicking its tongue as it sampled Zazoo’s public profiles.  

“Oh yeah, pretty snake?” asked Zazoo. But then she gasped as music came forth, emanating from each visor handle into their ears. Zazoo was stunned into silence by the tune. It was some kind of really old fashioned rock with lots of echoey drums and guitar, and a chorus of men and women singing together. Mira was utterly bored by it and secretly turned down the volume. But Zazoo was smitten and tears were rolling down her cheeks as she was carried back in time, perhaps far away from this filthy camp, to a place where she was young and life still had promise for her.

Mira chowed down quietly, respectful of the emotional moment her friend was having, but a little impatient as she scanned her feeds and watched with disappointment as her notoriety slowly ebbed away. Her traffic volumes were falling a bit more with each passing minute, as new bright and shiny events drew the attention of the masses, and the story of a little girl dropping off the grid and then witnessing a gangster incapacitated by drones became less and less fresh.

The snake noticed both Zazoo’s intense emotion and Mira’s disinterest and morphed the tune subtly into a new piece, with beats and melodies from a current top ten hit that Mira loved, but mixed with an upbeat psychedelic countermelody that drew Zazoo out of her ruminations.

“Ah well,” sighed Zazoo, unaware that her emotions were being manipulated by a semi-autonomous algorithm. “Those days are long gone, aren’t they?”

“Huh?” asked Mira. “You know those cholos really fucked me hard on the rent.”

“Oh yeah, so sorry baby, but you had to see it coming.” The older woman took the empty meal package from Mira’s lap and slipped it into a compost bag. “You can’t get too famous in the camps. The spotlight brings the sharks out.” The avatar stared off into space. “Ahh, see, look, the trucks are here already, they’re parked down on Brush today. Let’s go stock up! Having a full cupboard will cheer you up.”

Mira and Zazoo emerged from the little mushroom hut and joined the crowd. Everyone was staring at Mira’s snake until she frantically toggled its privacy settings down to a much tighter social circle. No one else around there could afford such a fancy assistant. In fact, most of them were wandering around as is, without any avatars at all. This always amazed Mira. She couldn’t understand how anyone could fail to take a few simple steps to set up even a basic avatar. But some people were just too slow or too preoccupied with drugs and poverty to care about their virtual appearance.

The homeless formed an orderly queue, policed by a swarm of aggressive drones from the Social Stability Council. These drones would deliver a nasty electrical shock to anyone who tried cutting or crowding in line. People learned that pretty quickly and it was usually only the really drugged up denizens who incurred the wrath of the drones. There were some bandwidth problems with so many homeless gathered in one place, and Mira’s AR kept freezing and dropping her back into default reality, where she was confronted with the piles of garbage lining the barbed wire fence that blocked off the empty lots, forbidden to the likes of her. The homeless were complimentary subscribers and didn’t get very much bandwidth allocated to them. Paying customers rarely ran into these problems in crowds, even at big sporting events.

The Social Stability Council trucks were fully automated, of course. Each citizen was scanned and then presented with a fresh box of MREs and a visor of the latest revision, fully charged, which emerged from one of several chutes on each side of the container sized trucking unit. One box per citizen, but multiple citizens serviced at once. The process was very fast and efficient and the line moved along quickly until it was Mira’s group’s turn. She approached the nearest chute and a green checkmark appeared before her, confirming her eligibility, but then the checkmark froze and shattered in the strangest animation Mira had ever seen, let alone in any animations associated with government programs. Everyone else was seeing the same thing and a collective gasp went up from the crowd.  

“Oh shit, something bad is happening,” cried Zazoo.

But then the chutes started chugging wildly, the entire container swaying back and forth on its suspension, as box after box of rations came pouring out of every chute at once. There was chaos as people started shouting madly, grabbing up as many boxes as they could carry. The drones buzzed in angrily, trying to keep some semblance of order, but several were knocked right out of the sky by flung chunks of concrete.

Miraculously, Zazoo produced a fishing net and spread it gracefully before her with a flick of her wrist. Mira immediately understood their good fortune. Of course it was nice to get a little extra food, but these council trucks NEVER malfunctioned. She was streaming a crazy, unusual, and chaotic event to her social channels and her traffic volume was soaring. Mira was giddy with excitement, she would probably get a reality show gig from all this publicity. She helped Zazoo pile a bunch of boxes onto the spread out net and, when they had collected as many as they thought they could carry, they grabbed the edges of the net and tried to scurry away, crab walking sideways with their bulky load. There were already sirens in the distance and the heavy thrum of big security copters en route to restore order.

“We can’t go back to my hut, the cops will be here soon and they will be searching everyone’s tents. In fact, they might purge everyone’s stuff again for this,” panted Zazoo. “We need to get this down to the port. I have a secret spot.”

“No-no, no-no,” scolded a youngster’s voice. Mira’s blood ran cold as the little gangster called Heffe suddenly appeared before them. He pointed his huge gun at Mira, no particular expression on his face at all, as he threatened her life. “All this loot mine, chica.”

“Heffe, my visor is streaming this,” whined Mira in exasperation. “You know how many followers I have right now? Besides, you can’t carry all of this stuff, you are too little.”

The normally cold blooded little killer started fidgeting, shifting his weight from foot to foot in agitation. “Well, fuckin’ turn it off then,” he said. “You too, old lady.”

Mira and Zazoo hurriedly removed their visors, but it was too late, and the kid should have known that. He had already been witnessed robbing them with the gun. He’d broken a cardinal rule of the gangs around here, namely to stay the fuck off of social media streams. Especially hot ones like Mira’s. Mira thought she detected the slightest sign of fear when Heffe saw Rolo and a couple of the older members of the gang sauntering over.

“I didn’t do nuthin,” yelped the youngster, training his gun on the approaching gangsters. Sweat was beading on his brow.

“Hey, hey, we know that little man, we just here to talk, okay?” said Rolo, holding up his hands to placate the youngster. But Heffe wasn’t fooled, and he gave a cry as he fired off a few rounds in the direction of the older boys, making them duck for cover before running for his life.

Several of the boys with Rolo produced guns, but then thought better of it as the heavy policy copters approached, clearing the crowd by spraying some of the older bean bag projectiles, as well as some of the new immobilization foam.

“He’s just a kid,” said Mira to Rolo, as his companions chased after the fleeing child on foot.

Rolo’s tongue shot out and back, but he seemed completely unaware of his signature tic. “You know that ain’t true, Mira.” He took a hit from his vape pen and looked on dispassionately as the choppers dispersed or immobilized the crowd behind them. “He would have done me in in a second if I fucked up on protocol like that.” The gangster looked at the pile of ration boxes on Zazoo’s net. “And for what? A pile of fucking MREs? That’s poor impulse control, even for us crazy bastards. Ah, he wouldn’t have lasted anyway. Don’t cry. Go put your visors back on, you’ll get crazy Bliing from this wild shit.” And the vicious boy walked away casually.

Mira eagerly put her visor back on, capturing the turmoil that surrounded them as the security forces moved in. Her blood ran cold with the realization that Heffe was as good as dead. If the gangsters didn’t catch him that day, they would eventually. And they would kill the little boy. Just like that.  

But then Mira sobbed even more deeply as she saw the garbage trucks arriving. CalTrans was coming in for another purge in response to this incident, even though it wasn’t the camper’s faults that the council truck had fucked up like that. The state was coming to gather up the refuse and dispose of it in the garbage trucks. But that refuse included the tents and ramshackle structures assembled by the homeless in this camp. It wasn’t an official camp, after all.

“The fates are against us, child,” cried Zazoo in distress. “Fly to your tent and gather up your things before they vacuum them away. Such a shame to lose these rations, but we can’t carry everything at once.”

The homeless around them were abandoning their windfall rations and rushing to salvage whatever they could carry of their meager possessions, before the automated trucks started sucking everything up to be hauled off to the dump.

Mira was about to rush off to do this herself, forgetting even her wildly expanding traffic share for the moment, when her interfaces crashed again and a big, middle aged white man appeared before her. His avatar was the super-realistic kind that she had only seen on shows.

“Mira? My name is Matheson. I want to talk to you.” As the avatar spoke, an expensive Tesla autocar pulled up and the door opened. Its cool interior offered a surreal haven of luxury amongst the milling madness under the blazing sun.

“Great Zeus, what’s this?” gasped Zazoo. She stared open mouthed at the tooled leather seats of the extravagant autocar.

“Can’t you see him? Maybe he’s here to offer me a reality show deal?” offered Mira.

The avatar seemed to freeze for a moment, before presenting Mira with a wry smile. “No, Mira, we can’t offer you fame. But my employer has many resources and we can compensate you well for your assistance.”

“What’s he saying, Mira? We need to get our things, child!” urged Zazoo. She grabbed Mira’s arm and shook it.

“He says he isn’t with the networks. Shit, mister, can’t you show yourself to Zazoo too? This is stupid, they’re gonna take our stuff!”

Matheson appeared to Zazoo and was about to speak to them both, when Zazoo interrupted, her eyes alight with a plan. “You know what? I don’t care who the hell you are. If you’re offering us a ride, we’ll take it! Just swing by and let us grab our stuff first,” said Zazoo. “Mira, help me get these rations into the car.”

“Wait, what is all this?” asked the avatar. It was clearly disturbed by the pile of rations.

“Rations, fool,” snapped Zazoo. Meanwhile, Mira snatched the net from the ground and awkwardly backed herself into the car as Zazoo pushed from the other side.

“You don’t need these; we can get you all the food you want,” protested the avatar, as the two homeless women stuffed the interior of the expensive car with boxes of rations and visors.

Mira had swept her social feeds aside during the crisis, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw her friends making jokes about how silly it looked to pile poor folk’s stuff into such a fancy vehicle.

“Yeah, well, a bird in the hand and all that,” muttered Zazoo, as she and Mira climbed clumsily onto the boxes piled everywhere. “Now we need to go get our tents. Get Mira’s first, the trucks are nearly upon it!”

“What are you talking about?” complained the avatar. It presented a brow darkened with confusion and annoyance.

“Here’s my GPS, hurry, they’re going to purge my stuff,” pleaded Mira, sending the avatar the coordinates of her tent.

The avatar paused for a moment, gazing into the internet. “Oh, this is a Caltrans purge. I see. Okay, we can help with this.” The car doors slid silently shut and the car leapt forward, flinging Mira and Zazoo to the back of the cab, where they crushed a few cardboard boxes of rations.

The car whipped around a slowly advancing garbage truck with inflatable fenders that pushed the frantic homeless people aside, so that the huge, articulated vacuum tube could hoover up all of their worldly belongings. Tents and shopping carts were unceremoniously grabbed and deposited into the massive storage container on the back of the truck, while the poor, filthy denizens wept with impotence and frustration. Yet these purges happened all of the time in these unregistered camps. It was a fact of life for the rootless and dispossessed.

The car arrived at MIra’s tent just as a truck started clearing her block. She and Zazoo rolled out through the open door and began hastily tossing her things into the front trunk, which had sprung open upon their arrival. Mira did feel foolish loading such paltry junk into the expensive car: her torn blankets and pillows, her smelly old stuffed animals, so much junk. But it was all she had. It didn’t take long for them to load up her things, while Matheson’s avatar kept insisting that they could easily be replaced.

They insisted on picking up Zazoo’s modest belongings next, and soon the back trunk of the powerful autocar was loaded with more random refuse of the sort collected by an old homeless woman, desperate to extract value from the trash that could be found on the street. It included her clothing and dust masks, a baby carriage, and her drug stash, all lodged comfortably into the spacious trunk.

When the two women, one old and chubby, the other young and slim, finally crawled back into the cab amongst the ration boxes, Mira turned to the avatar of Matheson and said, “Okay, Mr. Matheson, if you aren’t with the networks, do you want to tell me who you ARE with?”

But the avatar seemed to crash, fuzzing out freakily around the edges before reassembling in a much lower resolution form. It pulled a Guy Fawkes mask from within its jacket and put it on. “Oh, you don’t want to go see that nasty Mr. Matheson, do you Mira?” asked the masked figure.

“Oh dear,” gasped Zazoo, who had witnessed the transformation.

The car swerved off the road and came to a halt. The interior lights dimmed, then turned dark red for a moment, before resuming their previous soothing orange hue.

“Uh, I don’t know,” stammered Mira, feeling a little frightened. She had never been hacked before, but she had seen plenty of shows about it. Hackers were always a wildcard, not evil exactly, but you never knew what the heck they would do. “Matheson said he would give me Koin if I helped him.”

“Oh, Koin is so easy to get,” laughed the masked figure. “What you need is fun. You’ve been too stressed out lately, we’ve seen your rise to fame. You need to kick back and relax. Let’s go to Burning Man.”

Before Mira could answer, the car jumped back off the curb and started speeding eastward.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Burning Man, Zazoo,” admitted Mira. “Do you think they will really take us there?” She noticed that her feeds had gone grey again, and she suspected that the hackers were filtering her internet connection.

“I don’t know, child. But I’m not sure what choice we have now,” admitted Zazoo. And the older woman began busily restacking their ration boxes, so that they would have a comfortable place to sit on the long trip to the desert.

Chapter 9 here.