The Boomertown Rats

"Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me,
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it's been."

— Garcia, Weir, Lesh and Hunter, 1970
"Truckin'" (performed by the Grateful Dead)

— Polyform, Gasmbeats and Funkwater, 2025
"Nowtown" (performed by Shakira Costello)

THE FARADAY CAGE

The Hybrid-SQUID room was really a trailer, just like every other room in this temporary hospital that looked like it might become permanent. Light was provided by LED tubes in retrofitted fluorescent fixtures, bathing the room in cold blue-white. To keep out interfering electric and magnetic fields the walls were lined with a sandwich of brass chicken-wire fence and mylar sheet, which showed silver and gold wherever there was no equipment stacked up, turning the room into a Faraday Cage that blocked virtually all electromagnetic radiation. On one side was the massive Hybrid scanner, part Functional Magnetic Resonance Imager (fMRI), and part Magnetic Source Imager (MSI) using a Superconducting Quantum Interference Detector (SQUID). Seated in waiting room chairs were the young man and the old man, each writing a confession. The only exit door door was blocked by a large Samoan in an ill-fitting security guard uniform, pistol in holster at the ready, and a mature Italian woman who sat knitting.

Before the gangster left he told them simply to write down everything important that had happened, entirely truthfully, starting first with the current location, date, time and name. He explained that afterwards they would each be scanned in the Hybrid-SQUID and asked if they had been completely honest. If the scanner caught them lying they would subjected to the most effective torture discovered by Saddam Hussein in Iraq back in the 1980s: the plastic shredder. The guard pulled out a tablet and showed them a video of a man being shredded. The Italian woman plugged her ears and closed her eyes for this.

Now they labored to capture in words this mythical whole truth, perspiring under the ashen light.

date and time april 15 2030 10 in the morning
place las vegas field hospital #4

good thing dm left me this tablet cause its harder 4 me 2 right without spiel check / i just wish they'd let me use voice recognition / this thumb stuff takes to long / he wants all the fax, ok / my name is logan eccles hernandez / i no its a funny name for a latino but my mom was a big fan of veronica mars witch was shot in san diego my home town and named me after a guy in the show / my name used to get me beat up a lot in school and i realized that i needed to either learn to street fight or get training for a good enough job to get out of the ghetto — i mean the low equity high density zone lehd / so i ended up in tech getting my wicd cert so i could provision big amounts of racks of blade servers at once and ended up working in server rooms / security is always pretty good in server rooms / so that's how i ended up in the it department at the navel hospital / i volunteered to work last new years eve cuz i had 3 girlfriends that wanted me to take them out and i had the excuse that i had to work that night / it was really quiet at the hep desk except they all kept sexting me from parties trying to make me jealous / i decided to dig into a problem nobody ever had time to look at witch was our disk usage / we were always having to to delete server logs to make room witch ellos cabreado the quants cuz they hadn't data mined them yet. well i found this one user had a terabyte of videos on the raid and it turned out to be porn skanky stuff i don't even want to talk about even snuff witch i hope to dios was shopped tho i no the isis stuff wasn't / i sent an email to my boss and my bosses boss witch turned out to be a big mistake cuz he was an admirals sun and i was the won who got fired / it was mierda / they put all these lies in my hr file and leaked it to darknets so i was follada — i couldn't get another job / i decided it was time to get out of san diego / besides these cholitas i was dating all seemed to have gangsta exes who kept wanting to mess me up especially after they saw the sexting / so i answered an ad on wsj classifieds for a shady job in a tiny town in arizona with no background check and that's how i ended up in quartzsite / but first i had to go down to the airport to this admirals club to meet this guy for an interview and tech testing / he said he was mr barty and he had a nice alligator suit and he pulled out a cigar and said i could call him shorty everybody did / the hostess came in and said im not going to warn you again mr barty about smoking in here / i offered to hold his cigars for the interview / he gave me a tablet with the tech tests on it on provisioning windows with wicd all kinds of security software cracking car locks jailbreaking phones and tablets and enterprise encryption

MON APR 15 10:08:20 MDT 2030 / FIELD HOSPITAL AT MCCARREN AIRPORT, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, USA, EARTH, SOLAR SYSTEM, MILKY WAY GALAXY, VIRGO SUPERCLUSTER, UNIVERSE

My name is Sidney Alfred White, Sid to my friends, soshmeed handle OldSaw1953. I guess technically Logan and I are kidnap victims at this point, unless we're under some secret citizen's arrest. A Venetian mobster named David Michael Gondolier has imprisoned us here, and instructed us to write down everything that happened. I should've known better than to join up with this outfit — "Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword," as the Good Book says.

Logan got me into this; he's a good kid, but a trifle foolish. He just had me read what he's written, punching into that tablet of his, and Good Lord is he nearly illiterate. Only spellcheck allows him to be readable, and it delivers him into Homonym Hell. I'm glad they found a pen and paper for me to use. I never got the hang of touch screens, even after all these years. But I did show him how to improve his settings. He had auto-italic on, but auto-punctuate off. I thought that was odd until I realized the hardware had room for a dictionary of world languages, but not a phrase list; it had to go to the cloud for that, and we were off the grid in this Faraday Cage. I did manage to turn on word-based capitalization, so for example "Faraday Cage" would be auto-capped to "Faraday cage."

More about how I got into this. I was one of those "losers" who stayed at the university after I graduated, in my case the beautiful Santa Cruz campus of the U. of Cal., set in a charming redwood forest. After getting my B.A. — not a BS (!?) — in Information Science, I got a job on campus keeping the computers humming, which lasted 43 years, when I was able to retire. Some of the younger guys weren't so lucky, when the school began replacing them with H-1B visa "guest workers" to save money on salaries and Obamacare. I sold my condo at a good time, bought a camper with a super-king over-cab bed, and went off to look for America. That's how I fell in with the Boomertown Rats, originally a camp at Burning Man consisting almost entirely of Baby Boomers, those of us born between 1946 and '64. We'd just gotten crisp-looking decals for our motor homes when Jeb managed to shut down Burning Man in 2029, and a bunch of us ended up in Quartzsite, Arizona, just off the I-10 near the Colorado River. We originally came for the mineral festival, but then some of us were stuck there, unable to afford charges for our vehicles to move on, due to the hyperinflation of the U.S. dollar that started under Hillary Clinton and slipped into high gear under Jeb Bush. Nowadays my $1864 social security check won't buy the breakfast special at the Flying J Truck Stop.

WINDOWS IMAGING AND CONFIGURATION DESIGNER (W.I.C.D.)

Shorty said I aced all the tests except enterprise encryption, and they had a place for me in the staff at Quartzsite / I was really sweating the wicd part even though I use it a lot cuz it seemed like there was a lot of trick questions like what wicd stands for / I had to think about that for a minute / and where the executables get saved by default and I never use it that way / I finally remembered this utv I saw when I first started studying for my cert and how it talked about the defaults / they even wanted to know what version of wicd I used / I said whatever version ships with windows 20

Shorty gave me a ring he called it a Waverley ring which he said would identify me as an employee of dm / he sent to me off to pack and I stuffed a bunch of clothes into some boxes and then went to where my three aunts live and talked them into giving me a bunch of their tamales from Christmas, leftovers frozen in the freezer in their garage / they had these great flavors

• beef and Anaheim chiles
• chile verde pork
• teriyaki chicken & roasted peppers
• habanero pork
• carnitas & grilled pineapple
• steak & grilled onion
• pot roast & roasted carrots
• sweet & sour chicken
• sea bass & lemon asparagus

after that it was a long boring ride in the dark out i-10 east / I fell asleep for a while / the Samoan woke me up was we crossed the Colorado river / he told me I better be ready to meet dm / later I found out that was David Michael Gondolier tho Sid says his last name is really Rossi / next thing I no im sitting in this trailer staring at this guys cufflink while he explains his family background — Venetian — his business model — being a gangster — and his philosophy — make your friends rich and destroy your enemies

Later when I met D.M. he gave me a speech which he probably gave to Logan earlier when he first reported to the master trailer. Quartzsite has 2000 year-round residents, and 2 million annual visitors, mostly for the mineral shows and flea markets, so it's a Winnebago Woodstock in the winter. For organized crime it's a great place to hide contraband, undocumented workers, and especially server rooms. D.M. asked me rhetorically, what's left for organized crime to do? They can't do porn anymore, it's all free on the internet. Drugs are being legalized more and more. The internet and the Indians have gambling locked up. What's left is darknets, and what they contain: illegal data (corporate HR records, HIPAA protected medical records, sealed crime investigations and court records). D.M. was hiring up IT talent in Quartzsite to run the infrastructure for this stuff.

STAR BUCKS

one of my first problems in Quartzsite was that it was so jodidamente cold / I worked extra late one night and when I left the server room I started shivering in my light San Diego jacket / one of the techs told me to check out the bonfire at the entrance to the flea market so I did just to warm up / that's where I first saw Sid / I used to think these old guys were harmless grampas but a cop told me once to be careful with them / if a guy's pushing 80 he grew up in the tail end of the hippie era and went to college in the 1970s and did a lot of drugs and now that he's retired and has money coming in and doesn't have to show up for work so he's at risk of going back to the drugs he did in college

Sid looked like somebody called up central casting and said send over an old school sysadmin / he wore cargo pants and a tied dyed shirt and had long gray hair in a ponytail / he was standing by the fire ranting to somebody about politics how each president we'd had in his lifetime made the ones before look better especially in this century what with w then o then the knucklehead then hill and now Jeb / I pegged him as one of these guys who knows every shell command but is useless with a GUI and who knows every set list from every grateful dead concert but doesn't even know what nov shmoz ka pop is / he was the kind of guy who said Google when he meant bing / I wasn't paying him much attention until he started talking about WiFi networks using Pringles cans for antennas / you see dm had been asking around among his techs about some way to get a darknet along interstate 10, especially through new Mexico / I knew about these wave guide antennas made from chip cans but they were el diablo to aim in a static setup let alone connecting moving vehicles / but Sid was talking about a high-speed feedback system for automatic aiming / I thought it might work, so I started talking to him about it / he didn't seem to want to talk much business that night but he saw me shivering and said he'd help me buy a warmer coat the next day at the flea market

I remember that I'd just read on the web that Weird Al Yankovic died, and I wanted to smoke a joint. I hadn't smoked anything in over a decade, since I lost one lung to Marlboro Reds, but that night I was like, what the hell, this one's for Al. I knew I could find someone willing to share at the flea market bonfire.

I found an old buddy who shall remain nameless (Arizona never did legalize) and he was kind enough to share and listen to my bull by the fire. Somehow I'd gotten on the subject of national politics, and I was railing against the U.S. presidents in my lifetime. I mean, each one has made the last one look better. I didn't think anyone could do worse than O, but then when we got the knucklehead he invaded Saudi Arabia. I'll never forget the spectacle of our Joint Strike Fighter (JTF) F-35s being shot down by the F-16s we'd sold them thirty years earlier. CNN had to pull Wolf Blitzer out of retirement to explain it. Don't get me going. I was on a roll that night, and my generous buddy was being nice about it.

So this snot Logan buttonholed me at the bonfire and wanted to know about connecting moving vehicles with cantennas. But first he dropped some off-the-wall reference to a 1930s comic, The Squirrel Cage, and acted like I was clueless for not getting it. (I Googled, I mean Binged it, later. "Nov shmoz ka pop" my ass.) The irony is that he's got these Rayban Googles he wears everywhere so he's jacked into the matrix through high-perf VR, as wired as you can be outside a neuro lab, and he doesn't even use it a lot of the time. What I call willfully ignorant. But he had a Waverley Ring so I figured he was on the level. After we kicked around the WiFi question I asked what a young guy like him (25?) did for fun in Quartzsite. Had he seen the Beef Jerky Mine and the Gum Wrapper Museum? He had. Then he started talking really softly, and made me pinky swear it was on the downlow, and told me about drag racers using Honda Civic 2.5L Turbos, the last legal diesel passenger car in America before Hillary shut them down, racing out at the old closed airport on the runway. He kept shivering while he talked, and I said, "Can you believe we're in the Middle of a Maunder Minimum and they still are pushing carbon caps?" I think he had no idea what I'd just said. Finally I got practical and said, "We gotta get you a nanofleece jacket," and made a date for the next day when the flea market was open.

SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD INTERNAL NETWORK COMMUNICATIONS (S.P.R.I.N.T.)

I didn't get to show Sid my new jacket until the next morning when we both had appointments to see dm and we were waiting together in the lobby of the master trailer / Sid started calling it that and every body picked up on it / he started telling me how life is tough and keeps getting tougher and how he still hasn't gotten used to bing buying the Google search business after justice split them up even tho it's been 12 years / for a while he rambled about all the folks shut down by homeland, including Facebook, Mattel ThingMaker and some amateur rocket club I never heard of that used to launch near plaster city until they were put on a terror watch list / then he got closer to home / he said all his buddies his age have been wiped out by the hyperinflation not just social security but everything paid in us dollars every bodies retirement / there used to be enough of them voting to protect them but not any more / when working people demanded they be payed in Yuan, and the IRS started collecting taxes in the currency you earned the money in everybody with dollars coming in was left hanging in the wind he said / this was all sounding pretty severe to me and I was thinking about asking for the men's room key just to take a break from his ranting when I was called to go see dm / but there was one thing he said in the middle there when he was complaining about age ism and how they caught him putting two spaces after a period in his resume / I guess it proved he was old / he said, do the job you are paid to do / that stuck with me

so I was ushered into dms office by Ramona and she whispered to me not to mess around he was in a bad mood / shes from a small village called Pantla in Guerrero and I talked to her before about how my aunts used to live in Zihuatanejo so weir like buddies / and I was careful to remember to call him mr Gondolier / I remember people told me to watch out for the extra jobs that dm would give you / well this was mine / he wanted to track his daughters phone and he wanted me to get the phone from her and install the tracker software / I asked him why and he said there were things on the internet a 17 year old girl should not see / I reminded him that was true about 11 year old girls too why starting now? / he looked a little mad and said he wasn't starting now but the last person to do this job failed / that didn't sound so good

so I went to see the girl Gina Gondolier in her princess Barbie bedroom in a fenced and guarded trailer / I told her I needed her phone and the password so her dad could track it / I figured what the hell if the last guy failed then she knew what was happening / and then she asked me why/ you know why I said to keep you from watching porn / she said no to keep me from making porn / she looked so innocent sitting on her pink bedspread in a navy blue dress she could have worn to mass maybe a hundred year old style and here she was holding up her galaxy with a vid of her demonstrating a dildo/ I was shocked / but she gave me the phone / I installed the kraken app with password dildodemo and figured id finish the job remotely / I had to get out of there before I forgot the job I was being paid to do

The next day I met Logan back at the same spot, at the fire ring where the logs from the night's bonfire were reduced to charcoal. We grabbed some breakfast burritos on Food Truck Alley and then made our way into the vast flea market. Unless you were on Rockhound Row it was hard to believe this huge commercial circus evolved out of a mineral show. I remember there was a Robert Heinlein sci-fi novel, I think it was "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," that described a moon base settled by Chinese as surviving by selling each other rocks. Well, now we Americans surviving by selling each other rocks, crafts, RV parts, Starbucks gift cards, and obsolete electronics.

I introduced Logan to my friends Gladys, Helga and Inge of the Kraft Kabal, a loose affiliation within the Boomertown Rats. I was explaining to Logan how Star Bucks work, gift cards payable in yuan, and the current ¥5 price on cards fried in the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) terror attack on Las Vegas, but to watch out for fakes — there's a uTV video on how to spot them. In the middle of this Gladys said she heard I'd been lighting a joint with a dollar bill the night before. "What else am I going to do with them?" I countered, "I can't slip them into stripper's G-strings since Hill closed them down, and after the last surge of hyperinflation they're only worth about a penny in 1970 currency. It's like putting a penny on the R.R. tracks." She was aghast, and told me to sell them to her (or most likely barter) for her money-folding crafts projects. "What will you pay me in?" I wanted to know. She offered finished crafts — which I need like a hole in the head, living in a camper and all — and some other B.S. before hitting on Pinstagram "Likes" which she assured me are going 6 to the Yuan on iBay. I made a mental note to round up the one dollar bills I'd kept. Meanwhile the kid was getting bored, so I showed him the flea market app, with the index of items for sale, and he went off in search of nano-fleece jackets.

I went to see D.M. the next day in his Master Trailer as I liked to call it. Logan was there and we waited together. He was going on for a while about the drag racers, all young Hispanic men with outrageous girlfriends who had catfights to decide who got to drop her panties to start the race. He kept emphasizing that I couldn't tell anyone about this, and not try to sneak a peek either, because they'd kill me for sure. Well, he didn't say "kill" but he did the finger across the throat thing. I changed the subject and tried to give him some career advice, like get paid in yuan and don't work without a contract.

He was let in to see D.M. first, so I sat there with Ramona, his secretary, the one with the really big boobs that she's not shy about showing off. She was wearing one of those bustier tops like Shakira Costello wears, only on her it looked like a burlesque of the feminine form. I think she caught me staring because she gave me a really cold look, and later spilled hot coffee in my lap. I'd just managed to clean that up in the can — thank you nano-fiber — when she called me in to see him.

The first thing D.M. did was slide a nondisclosure form over to me along with a hundred Yuan note. He said the money was for my time while we negotiated my contract. It seemed like standard stuff, seven years for everything but "harmful secrets," which were for the life of the contractor. For some reason those last four words were underlined. I asked him why the nondisclosure now, and not when he told me his business plan. "That was just hot air," he explained. "I'm going to show you some serious shit." He took me outside, a few trailers down to a cargo container, what we used to call an Air-Sea-Land, and inside to see a server room filled with racks of blades and solid state drives, plus big exhaust fans. I'd seen pictures of these on the Internet — Google has a patent and was first to sell them, I think, around twenty years ago. Just plug in power and fiber and you have a major internet node. "With all this compute power and storage you'd need a lot of bandwidth," I said, trying to sound smart. I figured this was the job interview. Back in his office he started talking about building a nationwide darknet, out of reach of the NSA, the FBI, InterPol, foreign powers, and big tech companies. He said the hardest part was turning out to be getting over the continental divide to connect the coasts. He unrolled a black and white map of the Southwestern U.S, obviously printed on a large format printer, and began marking it up with color highlighters. He had obviously been over this terrain a lot. In purple he traced the divide through New Mexico, north to south from Colorado to Mexico, explaining that the passes were lowest in New Mexico, along the southern edge of the divide. As he searched for alternate routes, he found he was following in the footsteps of the great "robber baron" railroad magnates of the 19th century, especially Collis Huntington and E. H. Harriman. Well, I knew something about that. Growing up in Arcadia and around the Eastern edge of Los Angeles County, I was taken on many field trips to the Huntington Library built by Henry Huntington. While everyone else seemed fascinated with the "bling" he'd collected with some of his excess wealth, I got turned on to how he and his uncle Collis accumulated that wealth, and the network of railroads they built. So I injected some of that knowledge into the conversation. I mentioned how the modern 19 inch rack for computer servers evolved out of the railroad relay box and its 19 inch rack. I told him how once on a visit to a R.R. museum in El Paso I met a very knowledgable museum docent who explained that in the mid-1800s congress gave president Lincoln the authority to pick the route of the first transcontinental railroad, and experts agreed the Southern route through Arizona was better than the Northern route through Utah, especially because of reduced snow removal problems. We'd even made the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico for this route. Yet Lincoln chose the Northern route, from Council Bluffs, Iowa to San Francisco, California. Why? I said I didn't know. "Because he knew the civil war was coming in a few years," the docent replied, "and he didn't want to Confederacy to be able to transport troops over that R.R." The southern route, through the perfect pass at El Paso, Texas, would have to wait for the second transcontinental R.R.

"Yes," said D.M., "that's the same route I'm investigating," pleased that I understood the issue. He started marking up passes in blue. "The Union Pacific went through here," (marks Wilna), "the Southern Pacific went through here," (marks Hachita, Vista and Antelope) "and the Santa Fe went through here" (marks Campbell Pass). But what I didn't know and he had just recently found out was that Huntington started a practice, which Harriman continued when he bought out Huntington, of securing 99-year options for rights-of-way through every pass in New Mexico, just to block rail competitors. One of them near Abo Canyon (marks in red) hadn't been renewed, and D.M. had sent a sales agent to try and buy it. The poor schmuck got caught in a Homeland sting, accused of providing material assistance to a terrorist organization, unnamed in the indictment, and plea bargained for six months on an honor farm for failing to file mandatory Federal paperwork. D.M. had to pay to put his kids through college to keep him from flipping. He'd also recently figured out that SPRINT, the wireless carrier, started out as Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Communications (S.P.R.I.N.T.), which grew into a communications business unit. The railroads have been involved with telegraph rights-of-way from the beginning, and now license fiber to follow their rail beds. His latest experiment was with microwaves, between ranches, from Datil to Pie Town (marks in red), using off-the-shelf hardware from Ubiquiti Networks in the 5 GHz band. But he wasn't a licensed Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP), monitored by Homeland, and that threw a red flag. His experimenter got a visit from Homeland agents complaining "on behalf" of radio astronomers at the Very Large Array (V.L.A.) about interference with their radio telescopes, which sounded bogus to me. Luckily this time the schmuck wasn't jailed, since he had some legit radio hobby credentials, but he was stopped from proceeding, and now Homeland had two dots to connect. Then of course he came to the $64,000 question: could my friends and I build a mobile Wi-Fi network over I-10 one hundred miles from Deming, New Mexico to El Paso, Texas (marks in green)? I said "Probably."

OPERATION BAUR

checking on Gina was something I started doing all the time squeezed in between my other work / we were plying a game of the cat and the mouse and we both knew what was going on / as soon as I bugged her phone she got a second phone/ I found that one with a rf sweeper / she stopped letting me into her room / I found another one shed hidden on top of a trailer tire near her room / I cozied up to Lagarto the driver of that armored Lexus SUV / I guess it's a customized LX 770 / I got him talking about how heavy and hard to maneuver it is with all that armor / he agreed to text me when she went for a ride / I managed to ambush her when he picked her up to go out to a party in Laughlin / I found another phone in her car and she was really reventar but she tried to get all sexy with me to flip the situation / I knew she was using her friends phones and my strategy would fail so I was looking for a plan b / why are you doing this? she blurted out and I saw an opening / I told her your dad doesn't want you to do bad things like take drugs and get piercings / she grinned / "Too late!/ check it out! / she lifted her shirt to show me a jeweled crucifix maybe diamonds hanging from a navel piercing / id guessed right / I thought she had a piercing and I thought shed tease me with it / I held it in my hand and admired it / it seemed heavy for something that hangs from your flesh / I said it was beautiful / I asked some stupid question abut the jewels to stall for time while I superglued a nanophone to it / it didn't have a camera and it needed cell network access but it had a gps and a mike so I could track her and listen in and it was literally attached to her body / I waited till I thought the glue was dry enough / by that time she was saying I might have a pierced pussy too you better check! and I decided to hit the road

Sid pulled me into the Pringles project which he called operation Baur after they guy who invented the chip can / I mostly did procurement of some of the electronics old Heathkit packages on iBay for making the radios when we could find them and then the individual parts when the kits ran out / this was all stuff that was decades obsolete but for some reason is still out there / we also needed a boat load of washers / but the worst part was the Pringles cans themselves / at first we thought we needed enough for a vehicle every tenth of a mile for 100 miles having two cans each which is 2000 cans / Sid wanted them decorated like some kind of crafty deco crap to make them less suspicious so I was talking to the kraft kabal Gladys and her girls and they were saying 60 person-days minimum / the girls had me contact Ma a gray haired lady who looks like a gypsy / they said she thinks she's their leader / I sat down with her at a boba shack and explained what we needed and she said she could pull in some other craft groups and maybe get it done in a week

I worked with her for the next month meeting almost every day at the boba shack, as the whole plan fell apart / luckily the length of the test run was reduced from 100 miles from Deming New Mexico to El Paso Texas down to 60 miles from Deming to Las Cruces / we also decided to space the vehicles every quarter mile, so our need dropped to 480 cans / but the work was proceeding slower than we thought / the nice thing was I got to know Ma pretty well / shes a special lady / shes from a place called Laurel canyon in la famous for its crazy ladies / on a hunch I asked her one time what Laurel canyon and Santa Cruz had in common / she said serial killers first then thought for a minute and added cafes with more kinds of tea than coffee and dogs wearing bandanas in the backs of pickup trucks and women wearing ankle-length Indian print skirts because they haven't shaved their legs in weeks

when Sid started filling my ear with stories of dms gangster sins I worried I was messing up by working for him / I talked to Ma about it / she reminded me it was all just rumors but encouraged me to stay alert / I guess she decided I was an ok kid because she started giving me little presents — flowers and a tea ball and other crafty things / the weirdest one was a cell phone jammer / she said someone bartered it to her and she used it a few times for fun at Starbucks but it was illegal to sell illegal to use / funny its not illegal to possess / I added it to my tool belt

It turned out that the biggest headache in procuring parts was the servos to aim the antennas and keep them aimed as the vehicles drove / the prototype used servos from an old Betty Ruxpin doll / you know the ones that were hyped a few Christmases ago / we bought up all of those we could but then after that when they ran out we had to build our kits from scratch like with the radio parts / it drove me crazy

What a nightmare the first cantenna test turned out to be. I asked for some "picked men" to help me, and all I got was a fellow Rat named Card I knew from working on our camp network on the Playa at Burning Man. Logan did my procurement, which was huge job well done, and then I was assigned three of D.M.'s goons who all claimed to be named Trayvon. Luckily D.M. brought in a whole Chinese electronics factory for the assembly, in its own trailer, and a liaison everyone called Jensen who made it all work. He was a straight shooter, and I liked working with him. He told me to look him up if I ever wanted a job, or Logan for that matter.

Each pair of cantennas needed a router between them, and I decided to DIY, using Boysenberry Pi mini-Linux systems, which I coded myself in C to emulate a limited, primitive router, just forwarding packets back and forth and logging stats. I put the Trayvons to work testing setups, 2 cantennas and a router, having them loop back to connect with themselves. All they had to do was point the antennas, push a button, and wait for a red LED. They worked faster when I was there than when I was running errands, which was annoying.

I originally thought I'd be able to ride along on the first test run, to monitor events on the scene, and I wanted to take Logan with me, but for some reason D.M. told me to stay with him in a server monitoring room in Quartzsite and watch everything from there. It had taken us over a month to get everything built and tested, and to recruit all the Rats for the test run, but we still weren't really ready. The servos didn't work right to keep the cans aimed, the routing software I'd written had bugs in downloading the log files, and our drivers weren't following directions, which was the really big problem. There were also some Rats who had rigs that weren't up to date on their robot ratings, and we'd had to pay for their upgrades and wait for Sacramento to send new pinks. Everything didn't show up on time so on Game Day we didn't have enough complete rigs with cantennas and robot ratings to even field 60 miles of RVs every quarter mile, so we dropped down further to start at the Akela Flats Native Casino east of Deming, since they have a lot of charging stations there, and that dropped it down to 40 miles, requiring 240 working cantennas.

To make things worse D.M. sent the three Trayvons to "help us" and I really didn't know what to do with them, so I gave them each an emergency response frequency to monitor, in case of calamity. But they kept pulling out their earbuds so they could crack jokes, and so when there really was a calamity they missed it. We kept having other high-profile vehicles enter the Private Robot Lane and block the lines of sight between our vehicles.

I guess I'm dancing around the real issue because I don't want to sound racist, but these three black kids seemed to be trying way too hard to sound like gangsters. One night early in the prep work there was an explosion we could hear from our work trailer, and they high-fived each other. Later we found out the propane heater for a trailer had exploded. "Those things are pretty unreliable," on of them said, grinning. I was pretty creeped out, so I changed the subject. "Why are you all called Trayvon?" I asked. They explained it was all three of their middle names, and when D.M. hired them he liked the fact that they were all juveniles, and also looked alike. They aren't twins but except for a slight height difference they do look close to identical. They thought it would be funny to all use the same name, to confuse people. "Do you know who Trayvon Martin was?" I asked. They had no clue. I said to Google it, and when they looked at me with confusion I remembered to say, "I mean, Bing it."

ROLLING ON THE RIVER

operation Baur was nearly a failure / the longest time when we had continuous throughput at max speeds was about 53 seconds in a 90 minute test / Sid said he'd study the log files more in the morning but he was going to a party to unwind / he ended up inviting me and he drove us up to Parker where he had a friend who lived on a houseboat on the Colorado river / his name was Matt and he was a retired physicist even older than Sid / hed just gotten back from some clock in a cave where they had a funeral for a guy named Eno / I'm not sure I got the whole point but I knew Matt was no bueno and maybe sorry hed scheduled this party / I left him alone for a while and mingled

the three Trayvons were there I don't know how they got invited and somebody gave them some Mollie because they were rolling hard / there was this outdoor deck on the houseboat and we went out there to get some air and look at the stars / after all the things Sid had told me I felt like kicking the beehive / I asked them so are you guys assassins or what? they looked at each other nervously, and then one blurted out no man we failed at that game / I tried to look non-judging / dm tested us he sent us to off his ex but we couldn't do it / plus we got paid twice, because we sold her to a Saudi harem / but we got busted / that's when he burned us

I was confused / I asked what he set you up? he ripped you off?

no he actually burned us / he said it was jammin his groove or some shit that we all looked so alike so he burned dots into our back with a cigarette 1 2 3 so he could tell us apart. / he lifted his shirt and there were two dots burned into his lower back / he said I got to be thing two

I remembered my binary arithmetic and said why didn't he go with 0 1 and 2?

oh he wanted us all to suffer, bro / and apparently that's when I said something that made a difference later on / I asked why do you work for someone who wants to hurt you? / and I left them to think that over and circled back around to see how our host was doing

Matt was sitting on the same stool in his kitchen area where id left him / he looked stuck / I remembered something I saw on utv called a trance induction for creative breakthrough and I thought I would try it / I just asked him a series of questions about unsolved problems in his past and unused resources in his abilities connections and possessions / it turned out his unsolved problem was cold fusion a cheap clean energy source he was working on at Los Alamos when they shut down the energy labs / his unused resource was something called chaos theory / he pointed out this really trippy wallpaper he'd pasted up in the houseboat that looked like a flaming leaf or something in rainbow colors / he called it the mandible set I think / he got all excited about this idea he had for using the chaos to make the fusion cold enough or something / he was really grateful / he kept shaking both my hands with his and then he felt like he had to give me a gift / he rooted around in his stuff and came up with this shiny thing he said was a radar corner reflector / it was made of brass plated titanium and small enough to wear as a pendant / he had to explain to me what it was / he used a laser pointer to show how any beam going in was reflected out in the opposite direction / it was just three intersecting squares forming 8 corners / he explained that it reflected radar to and told me a story abut this voyager spaceship that had a cd or something for aliens to listen to / they asked this sci fi guy hine line what he wanted to put on the record and he said he didnt care but be sure to put a corner reflector on the spaceship so the aliens can find it with radar! / but they didnt

When we got to the party I found Matt tripping balls in his kitchen zone (open plan), having eaten something someone called a Mollie. He said he'd tested it and it was psilicybin with some LSD, but he thought what the hell and took it anyway. He'd just come from the memorial service for Brian Eno at the Clock of the Long Now near Ely, Nevada. He told me the last time he saw Eno was when he was producing that big memorial for Bono that was webcast out of Joshua Tree. Matt couldn't get tickets, even though he was Eno's friend and helped with setup, but he watched the webcast at a party thrown by Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde fame at her home nearby. I guess he was feeling like I had the night I found out about Weird Al. I could relate. I told him to stay calm and carry on, but also assured him I had some Niacin in my bag in case of freakout.

A little while later I observed Logan talking to Matt and running some kind of NLP trip on him. I mean, I couldn't live in Santa Cruz all that time without running into Neuro-Linguistic Programming and all the crazies buzzing around it, but I wondered where this squirt found out about it. Whatever, he got a positive outcome. A few minutes later Matt ran up to me and started ranting about how he'd solved the cold fusion problem. "It was the scratches in the palladium electrode!" he kept saying. "They can't cross. They have to be really long, and they can't cross!"

"Calm down, Matt. Take it slow." He took a breath, chanted, "Ommmm," and resumed his rant. "A fractal would work, Sid! And we have the nanobots now to make the scratches!" He tried to convince me to leave that night with him and go to Los Alamos, where he had some buddies with some old lab equipment. "Where did this come from, Matt?" I asked, trying to slow things down. He waved his arms around. "The Mandelbrot Set! On my damned wall! Too big to see! Here all the time!" I finally convinced him to sleep it off first, and maybe I could get away soon, but I had to finish the analysis of Operation Baur.

Logan found me at this point, and asked a very interesting question. "I know a woman who's from a place where there's more kinds of tea than coffee in the cafes, the dogs wear bandanas and ride in the backs of pickup trucks, and women wear Indian skirts to hide their unshaved legs. Would you like to meet her?"

"She's from Santa Cruz?" I asked.

"No, Laurel Canyon, L.A.," he answered. "Why are looking at me like that?" I guess I was showing astonishment on my face. He took me up a ladder to the roof of the houseboat and introduced me to Ma. I knew who she was, we had mutual friends, and I'd been following Logan's progress with her can decorators, but we'd never actually spoken. We sat on the roof looking at the stars and talked. Her real name was Gypsy Rose Leibowitz(!) and she seemed like an old friend. I think she might have invited me back to her place that night if the shit hadn't hit the fan.

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

I got a freaked out text from Lagarto that he'd lost Gina in palm springs / he took her to the Starbucks megastore to shop and she ditched him going to the ladies room / my tracker said she was northbound on i-15 near Victorville / he said hed chase her if I kept him updated on her position / I started sweating and when she passed Barstow I figured she was heading to Vegas and I needed to head her off / I talked Sid in to taking me in his camper even though he had his own emergency / the Chinese factory had all quit and Jensen was towing them back to la / but he said there was nothing he could do until the next day anyway and then it was a bunch of phone calls and emails he could do from anywhere

As we were packing up the Trayvons showed up and beg for a ride to anywhere but Quartzsite / theyd decided to quit working for dm and they wanted to get some miles away before they let him know / it was Sid's truck so I let him make the call / he was very up front: so you're guys who rub out people who try to quit dm and now you want to escape from him?

no man we never offed anybody one of them said / we don't kill people we scare people another added

the grapevine says you blow up peoples propane tanks

yeah but after theyre dead! / somebody they call Liz comes in first and uses propane gas to snuff them / check the death certificates! / its never the burns it's always the gas

I guess that was good enough for Sid because off we went / I sat in the cab while Sid drove us up 95 which is a scary road any time / the sheriffs say they have the record for head on collisions in Arizona / Sid was ranting and raving about stuff / first he tried to tell me for about the tenth time how Fredric Baur who invented the Pringles can in 1966 had some of his ashes buried in one in 2008 / I said do you know how many times you've told me that? / you get this funny look on your face and im thinking oh no hes gonna tell me about Fredric Baurs ashes again / he apologized and shut up for a while but then he was telling me how all his boomer burner friends got screwed by the electric car thing / for a while you could get a hybrid kit to upgrade but they turned out to be scams and then they were banned / the folks with motor homes had to buy new ones / he had to buy a Chevy volt truck but he got to keep the camper / he said it ate up most his savings / then he got on a tear about how the 18 wheelers still used diesel and people still used propane and it was all just politics / I was starting to get a headache / by the time he was going on about how long it takes to charge and how coal plants still provided most the energy I couldn't take any more and excused myself to nap in the over-cab bed / but I couldn't sleep / Sid had a bookshelf next to his mattress and five books:

• a hard cover book full of numbers from some rubber company
• a book on the Perl scripting language with a camel on the cover
• a big picture book called sensitive chaos that had pictures of jellyfish I think
• a book called bleeding edge
• a book called death march

then he changed the subject / who do you think this assassin they call Liz really is? he asked / could be Lizzy?/ he was referring to this big clumsy Irish woman who chopped wood for the flea market bonfire and sometimes did odd jobs for dm

When Gina took a powder I gave Logan a ride to Vegas to try to retrieve her, and the three Trayvons came along because they thought it was getting too hot in Quartzsite. They bailed out at Five Mile Road and the cutoff to Kingman. They thanked us profusely, and said if they ever needed anything to Tweet the hashtag #obstreperous3 from an anonymous account, along with a location, and they'd respond with a time when they could be there, using the same hashtag backwards.

I remember on the drive he made a nice effort to engage me in conversation. I was telling him about the Unix millennium bug. So I returned the favor by drawing him out. "Why don't you have a girlfriend?" I asked. "The ladies seem to like you. Don't you like them?"

He explained that he had a hard time dealing with these porn-star wannabees. He was freaked out by the cholitas that the drag racers were hanging out with, who distracted truckers at the Flying J by engaging in prostitution in the truck cabs, while their boyfriends stole the truckers' diesel fuel.

"Well, not all women are like that," I offered.

He told me he had a nice girlfriend in high school, named May Camerera, who was Chinese-Mexican, a good Catholic/Buddhist girl, but she moved to L.A. after graduation to seek an acting career.

We hugged the Colorado River up to Hoover Dam and then took the winding Boulder Highway through Boulder City and on into Las Vegas. We followed Gina's GPS to the old Excalibur Hotel which was now a homeless camp called Fantasyland. (I still wonder what role the Native Casinos had in stalling the rebuilding of casinos outside the city limits.) The audio feed from the nanophone was a garbled cacophony so that was no help. We wandered around asking questions and bugging people until this old lady in a torn waitress uniform, probably from the Tropicana, came up to Logan and asked for him by name. "I have a message for you," she said, and handed him an envelope. It was a note from Gina which said, "I CAN USE A RF SCANNER TOO ASSHOLE." We knew we were in a mess of trouble. At about the same time Lagarto showed up in the Lexus, and a Tesla Continental town car arrived driven by the Samoan security guard with D.M. riding shotgun and a couple of tough looking skinheads in the back.

"It's very convenient that I caught up with you here," D.M. told us. "I need to take you to a facility nearby." And so Logan and I were manhandled into the Towncar and driven off to the field hospital at the airport. Two of the skinheads took Lagarto and the Lexus someplace else.

And that's how we ended up in this Hybrid-SQUID room. Under penalty of a painful death by torture, with a state-of-the-art lie detector, we are now writing these true accounts of events, so help me God.

Having completed their confessions, Logan and Sid read over each other's work. There were a few cross words about the insults they had heaped on each other, but they quickly realized they needed to cooperate to deal with this situation. They began passing notes to communicate covertly. Sid wrote on strips of paper and then ate them, while Logan typed text on his tablet and then deleted it. Logan wanted to try to bluff the guard into to thinking he'd rigged a propane tank outside to blow. They couldn't figure out how he'd trigger it from inside a Faraday cage. "You're a lover not a fighter anyway," Sid wrote. That gave Logan an idea. Old ladies always seemed to love him. He needed to work on the old lady.

It worked. The boy had skills. He asked her name. She said, "Sofia." He asked her to pray with him. They said a rosary together. He started asking her how it felt to work for a man who had people killed. "He's not my boss," she said. "He's my son." Then Logan brought up the story from the Trayvons about how he wanted his ex-wife killed.

The guard decided he'd had enough of this. He asked if the confessions were complete, and said it was time for the scans. "How does this thing work?" asked Sid, when he was selected to go first. He looked at the face plate on the machine, which had a cartoon squid and the words "Calamari Mark II Hybrid-SQUID General Electric Fairfield Connecticut" and thought it looked menacing. It gave him an idea.

"It shoots magnetic fields into you. It's harmless, but very sensitive."

"Don't put baby in a corner," said Sid, glancing at Logan and winking. "I get claustrophobic."

"These aren't as bad as the old style," said the guard. "You'll be fine." He coerced Sid into lying on the gurney, and then began to roll him into the scanner.

"Upon reflection, I don't want to do this!" said Sid, starting to thrash.

"Let me talk to him," said Logan. He leaned over Sid, muttered a few encouraging words, and slipped him the corner reflector that had been hanging from his neck. Sid let the guard finish sliding him in. The guard called in a candy striper, a young woman with a blonde ponytail, to assist him, and began powering up the machine. Sid thought about a puzzle he'd years ago: if your car is stuck on railroad tracks and you must flee an approaching train, which way do you run? The answer is towards the train, parallel to the tracks, because that's the one direction debris probably won't fly. He held the corner reflector up to his eyes, hoping all the radiation went away from him. When the guard pushed the button there was a loud "pop" and smell of ozone and burning plastic. At that same instant the lights dimmed briefly. The scanner shut down and an electronic alarm began to beep. The guard let Sid climb out. "What did you do?" he asked.

"I prayed for it to fail," said Sid. When he got a chance he palmed the corner reflector and passed it back to Logan.

Now they had to wait for technicians, and it gave Logan a chance to talk to the old lady again. She'd thought about what he said, prayed on it. Sid assured her there was stuff in their confessions that might get them killed by D.M., so they had nothing to lose in an escape attempt. She assured him D.M. wouldn't have her killed no matter what. "I'm an old guy, I've lived a full life," said Sid, "but think of the kid here, just starting out, tried to do his job."

Sofia said. "Okay. What do you want."

"Should we try to get his gun?" Logan whispered. "It's got a fingerprint lock," she hissed back. "If he sweats enough it won't work," mumbled Logan. She put her fingers to her lips. "Would you ask that bionda girl to bring us some tea?" she said loudly. When the candy striper returned, the old lady whispered to her, handed her some kind of gift card, and then the young woman sat on the Samoan's lap and began to unbutton her red and white striped scrubs. He began to sweat profusely.

"Hey," he said, "I'm not allowed to do this on duty. If you'll give me your number maybe we can hook up later."

"Jump him now!" shouted Sofia.

"But's he's huge!" said Logan. Sid just shrugged. The Samoan pulled his gun, sensing trouble on the way, and as he juggled it with his sweaty fingers it began to beep and say "biometric ID error" over and over in a machine voice.

"Oh, for crying out loud," said the old lady, struggling to her feet with her cane. She shooed the girl away and slammed the cane into the Samoan's crotch. "Sorry, Gonzo," she said. As he doubled over she broke his nose for good measure, allowing them to escape. As they departed she gave Sid a locket, with a picture inside of D.M. as a baby, in a tub. "I keep this to remind me he wasn't always this way," she told him, and kissed his cheek. "Maybe it will be useful to you."

A BAT OUT OF HELL

Sid and Logan had been off the grid for most of the night and half the morning, so first thing they did was check messages. Sid pointed out that they needed to ditch their electronics soon, but since D.M. knew they were currently at McCarren Airport it didn't matter if they were tracked, and now was a good time to use them one last time. It turned out Gina had been spotted at the Coachella Festival, heading backstage to see a rock star named Johnny B'good. Meanwhile, Card had been put in charge of Operation Baur Phase II, and everyone on the project was now routing around Sid. "I think we need to start looking for a means of escape," said Sid. That gave Logan an idea. Now it was his turn to tell Sid a long, shaggy dog story, about the drag racers in Quartzsite. First of all, the cars weren't theirs. They stole them out of containers at the cargo yard on the edge of town. The owner didn't actually mind because he couldn't sell them legally in the U.S. and he'd run into export glitches, and at least he got insurance money for the the thefts. But anyway, Logan knew a maintenance man for the town of Quartzsite named Lupien, who drove around in this little 4-passenger golf cart, and he found out about the drag races. He bragged that no gasoline car could beat an electric with the governor off in a quarter mile race, and ended up racing one of the dragsters in that little golf cart. They were racing for "pinks," sort of, since Lupien didn't own the golf cart and the drag racer had stolen the car, but when the cart won the drag racer turned over the keys and muttered something about killing Lupien. So Lupien traded the car to Logan for a bunch of Nike ripoffs Logan had won in a poker game, along with most of his remaining frozen tamales, and then took a new maintenance job with his cousin in Miami. Logan knew the car would be double-hot in Quartzsite so he loaded it back into a container, and hacked the cargo manifest to get it shipped to Las Vegas, McCarren Airport to be precise, by wild coincidence. Logan had some friends who did racing on the salt flats near the state line at Primm, and figured they could use it in return for unspecified favors. But now he had another use in mind. They waited for dark in a coffee shop. Logan started thinking about the situation, and said "Jesus, how am I going to find another job?"

"You found this one," said Sid.

"Yes, but they didn't know my background," countered Logan.

"Are you kidding?" said Sid. "They run a darknet. They sell stolen HR files. They know everything about you, that's why they hired you.

Logan did one more thing with his phone: send a porno Gina made with Lagarto to her father, D.M.. "I figured out who the assassin called Liz was," he told Sid. "Do you know what Lagarto means in Spanish?"

"Uh, not exactly."

"Lizard. And if you were a gangster with a wild girl underage daughter, and you had a choice of bodyguards for her, wouldn't you wan't your deadliest man on the job?"

Then tossed their phones, and Logan's beloved Rayban Googles, into a moving garbage truck, except for the tablet he'd used to type the confession. Sid insisted he take out the battery and keep it, along with his own paper confession. "It's history, man," he explained. "When you get to be my age you notice when you're present at a historic event, and you learn to keep good records. The time will come when you know it's the right moment to put this stuff out there. Meanwhile, keep the battery out." When the light of dusk was gone from the overcast night sky they moseyed over to the cargo terminal and Logan signed for the container, which they unloaded and sold the empty to the freight company for credits they could never use on the hacked account. The car wasn't street legal but they chanced it on the 45 mile drive to Primm, which they were able to cover on frontage roads all the way to Jean, and just take I-15 the last 13 miles.

Witnesses saw the car heading off in full flaming turbo across the salt flats, visible from I-15 and elevated bullet train, before exploding in a fireball. Later forensics showed a propane tank had been rigged to explode inside, but there were no bodies. Meanwhile, our heroes made their way to the Primm bullet train station, and Sid pulled out two fake passports to get them through TSA, for Ward Bond and Frank Faylen. Once when he'd had to fix a fake passport machine for D.M. he'd made them as a test, and thought they might be useful later. But they'd never been activated. Waiting in the train terminal Sid noticed they TSA agents were all using smart phones to run their security software. Logan tried activating the cell jammer from Ma, and everything stopped. If it had been an airport they would have shut it down, but since the TSA was fighting to stay in the railroad system they just reverted to manual document verification. Problem solved. Logan headed west to Los Angeles, to find Jensen and his Chinese factory and ask for a job. Sid headed west as far as Barstow, to change trains the Southwest Chief to Albuquerque, aiming to end up in Los Alamos to help Matt and his lab buddy with their cold fusion project. As they said goodbye on the train in Barstow, looking out tinted windows at the Moorish architecture of the old Barstow station building, Sid suggested they do like the Treyvons had done and pick a Twitter hashtag to use to communicate. "Kind of like using the personals in the paper in that Madonna movie, 'Desperately Seeking Susan,' did you ever see that?"

"There you go again with the old stuff nobody cares about," said Logan. They ended up picking the hashtag #desperatelyseekingseuss, because Logan knew who Dr. Seuss was. He used to have the Dr. Seuss English/Spanish Dictionary as a kid.

"Last words," said Sid. "Remember that the rules can change in a flash. All it took was one Russian mathematician, Smirnoff's Theorem, factoring large primes is not NP complete, and 'boom!' it killed dual-key encryption and all the technologies that depend on it: SSL, PGP, Bitcoin, but it helped the motorcycle messengers when people went back to physically delivering long keys."

"There you go again with the old stuff nobody cares about," said Logan.

"Well, you should. It's going to happen again, trust me."

ENTER THE DRAGON

Posthumous Weird Song in Works In a follow-up story to the death of comedy music artist Weird Al Yankovic in January, his label, Starbucks/Rhino, released a statement from long-time Yankovic collaborator Steve Jay, confirming that the artist passed away at the Los Angeles recording studio where he has done most of his recent work. "He died working," Jay said, "I'm sure it's the way he would have wanted it." The label also confirmed that Yankovic's latest unfinished project was a parody of Adele's "Your New Cookie" from the album "40" which just dropped. Called "Your New Wookie," the song is about the recently released "Star Wars Episode XIII: The Battle for Kashyyk," featuring the exploits of Chewbacca's son Lumpawarrump, also known as Lumpy. Since Yankovic's vocals were essentially complete, the label has decided to finish production and release the single posthumously.

Sid looked up, into her eyes, and smiled. "I've got a happy surprise too," he said.