6-28-31
Ground Wire
I woke up at four am; it was still dark out, and I could hear the neighbor’s dog barking. I slid open my frost-covered window to get a whiff of cool, fresh morning air. I don’t want to work today, ripping copper wire out of walls and old generators in the dead of winter. I want to stay inside where it’s warm. The media calls this place a homeless encampment; I just call it home. The founders, Phil and Susan Lockheart, run it. They were the first, an old, retired GenX couple who still serve breakfast to the locals every Saturday morning. This week, from the aroma coming through the window, I would say it’s vegan egg casserole with plant-based sausage gravy. Technically, our town is an unsanctioned RV park on the edge of BLM land. There are so many of us now they don’t even bother making us move anymore; they ignore us, so we ignore them.
Today, there are over sixty-five thousand of us, and hundreds more arrive each week. With the crash came the shortages, price spikes, bankruptcies, foreclosures, corporate bailouts, and hard times. Mom and Dad split when I was fourteen, and it seems like within the span of just two years, everything in our lives went completely to shit. We lost our home, the car, and now we’re living out of our old RV towed by a truck with a battery pack approaching its end-of-life.
I wish there was more I could do to help Dad. My AIs made a little money on the prediction markets; I haven’t told Dad about it, though, given his misgivings about AI. I make two, maybe three hundred bucks every couple of weeks. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. Once we finish rebuilding the truck’s battery pack, we’re heading south to New Orleans and the Gulf where all the good methane hydrate jobs are.
There was a knock as Dad poked his head into my nook.
“Eddie, wake up, son.”
I sat up, pulling on my bib and boots. “I am already up,” I said.
Dad stepped in and looked around at my tablet and papers. I moved to put them away, but he picked up the tablet before I could reach it.
“What’s all this?” he asked, swiping from screen to screen on the tablet.
“Nothing,” I said, hoping he would just let it be. “Just stuff I been working on.”
Dad looked more closely at what I had, bracing himself against the table as he read.
“Maps, floor plans, building schematics? What is this?”
“A job. A big one,” I said, tucking my hands into my pockets and looking down at the floor.
That got his full attention. Dad looked at me, then moved the lamp to look more closely at all my research on the abandoned data center. The place lost its funding before it was ever finished.
“So, you planning jobs now? Alright, son, show me what you got.”
I showed Dad everything. Multiple points of entry, security drone patrol routes, building layouts, empty racks with all the cooling infrastructure, but none of the chips. I looked up the company that makes the drones, and found they have an unpatched vulnerability in their visual system. If the drones see a specially crafted QR code, it causes them to freeze, resetting back to factory defaults after a hard reboot. I printed two dozen plastic cubes with randomized versions of the QR code pointing to scripts that leverage the vulnerability. The plan is to drop them at key locations along the way to keep the security drones from following us. I was already testing and preparing the tools and resources we would need to pull off the job.
“All these highlighted lines indicate copper wire, pipes and grounding plates,” I said, pointing to the red lines on the map. “It’s all still there for the taking.”
“Damn, you really have been planning,” Dad said, nodding. “Where the hell did you get all this, anyway?”
“The Seven Samurai, my sovereign AIs.”
“Jesus, Eddie,” Dad said, glancing over the map.
I looked into his eyes, and I could see it in his face. He knew it was possible, he saw the potential, and I think it shook him; he was hesitant.
“It’s too risky,” Dad said. “They got security drones and cameras everywhere. Besides, it’s too much weight for two people. This is more than a two-man job.”
“The Samurai say we need at least six: you, me, and four others. People we can trust. Here.” I flipped to a different screen. “I came up with a list. All locals. People we know.”
“And cut the take six ways?” Dad asked, setting the tablet down, as I sat back down on the bed. “No. One trip or no trip.”
“It’s ambitious, I will give you that,” he continued. “I see what you’re trying to do. I do. But I want to get us to a place where we don’t have to do this anymore.”
“You always said that without risk, there is no reward. I am tired of us living like this, like rats. We are better than that, better than this.” I waved out the window at the snow-covered, rag-tag RV city.
“We’re not rats, son. We are survivors of a system and a way of doing things that abandoned people like us a long time ago. Grab your gear, we head out in thirty.”
6-28-31
Dad and I rode snowmobiles toward the outer edge of the abandoned data center some thirty miles from the RV park. The facility was halfway through its construction when the downturn came, and like many large-scale projects across the country, everything was put on hold as sites like these were left abandoned. After riding for nearly an hour and a half I…
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Looking forward to a continuation, in any space or time.
Really good so far would love to read the rest!