by Gabi Moore
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” he replied, looking at me with a sidelong glance. He sighed, as though letting me know that he wasn’t happy about it, but that he would comply.
I smiled.
“You know I like you, though,” he said, reaching his hand out to stroke the hair behind my left ear.
I waited until he had forked over whatever cash was in his pocket before replying. He handed me four hundred dollars in large bills. With that money, I would be able to find a place to stay for a couple of weeks, maybe crashing with a friend or something of the sort. I had a friend in mind, while I looked over the bills, and back to the man whose temperament had changed so drastically due to subtle cues in emotional manipulation.
“If you liked me, you wouldn’t lose your shit and slap me like that.”
He laughed bitterly and walked away.
“If you don’t come up with the goods inside of the next week, you’ll have to deal with a lot more than that.”
“Burn in hell,” I called out,
Though he was walking away, I swore I heard him say, “Already there.”
When dealing with a man who has a chip on their shoulder that size, a person should always be wary. He was an unstable fucker, with a vision, which was exactly why he was so dangerous. Most of the time, people who were unstable had a sense of disorientation and confusion about them and were no real threat to society. The way Maurice operated was to take that anger that most commonly would have been internalized and to focus it on the world around him. His world-view had been constructed and calcified. The hardening process gave him a vision of a society where leaders were put in their rightful place, and the working class was free to be as they wished — essentially controlling the means of production themselves. He was a Marxist who had turned to black hat anarchism as a matter of course, a means to an end.
Initially, I had been persuaded by his charisma and his vision. I think we all were, but when the stakes are high, and people aren’t sure if things are going to pan out how they hoped, people tend to show you their true colors.
Turns out Maurice was an abusive, scared son-of-a-bitch. While initially, I thought he was someone who I could count on to right the wrongs that so many of us felt on a sub-conscious level, regarding our society, and how the political and social system was organized, I was beginning to realize that I may have been wrong.
Nobody treats me like that, I said to myself, as Maurice walked away.
The truth was that far too many people had treated me that way over the course of my life. All of them had been men of similar character to Maurice. I had a bad habit of being seduced early by rhetoric and visions, only to find the ugly truth about a person when times got rough. Fortunately, the experience had given me a keen insight into both who I was as a person, as well as how to deal with men of that caliber. The unfortunate reality of the situation was that my experience hadn’t apparently done me enough good to be able to successfully discriminate against dealing with the same types of men over, and over again.
“You think you’d get it right, eventually,” I said, while I walked out of the alleyway in the opposite direction as Maurice.
I didn’t have a plan immediately, but once I checked my surroundings, I found that a dear friend of mine didn’t live too far away. Her name was Angela, and she was both a tech guru and a hemp fiend.
I had to level my head, which was why I went over to her place initially; that and I didn’t have too many other places that were safe to go. Her other interests ended up being crucial to my current predicament, but all I could think about at the moment was finding a place to relax and clear my head. Dealing with Maurice had been emotionally taxing in a severe way, and I could barely function now that the adrenaline had left my body.
With a long sigh, I made my way the remaining four blocks to her flat.
Angela didn’t have a doorbell.
“I hate the sound,” she told me once. “Here I am busy doing something, and someone from the outside world has something to do that demand of my time. Honestly, Its a pain in the as that the rest of the world might have to deal with, but I don’t.”
To a certain extent, she was right, except it was kind of a pain in the ass when you were a part of the rest of the world that wanted her attention.
I knocked, and then waited a solid ten minutes for her to get around to answering.
Angela wasn’t a flake, and when she came to the door, she opened it like I was an old friend she had been expecting. I never failed to feel welcomed when I was in Angela’s presence, no matter how long it had been since the two of us had spent time together; that was one of the primary reasons why I enjoyed spending time with her so much.
She was like a second home to me, and now that my primary home was no longer a viable place to rest, I was hoping she would actually be a first home to me.
I didn’t waste any time in letting her know exactly how much of a burden I was hoping to be on her; that was how you did things with Angela. Never beat around the bush.
“I’m in a bad way right now,” I started off, “and I might need a place to crash for a couple of weeks.”
“Good to see you too, hun,” she replied, blinking and staring at me with an obvious unspoken question on her lips.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I have a bit of cash to help pay for rent for the time that I’m going to be spending with you.”
She seemed to relax a bit once she knew that the most she was going to be put out from having me around was a bit of solitude. I knew well enough not to bother her when she didn’t want to be bothered, but you can't avoid all contact when you're crashing at someone's place.
Angela and I had the type of relationship where we didn’t want to step on each other’s toes, and if I treated her well, and respected myself, everything would end up just fine; that was what was so beautiful about our relationship. Co-dependency was not a part of it, even if we came to one another for favors every now and then.
To say that Angela came to me for favors is honestly a bit of an overstatement. She was a recluse, and by her nature, a very independent woman. There was very little that Angela needed from other humans unless of course you count emotional presence. Angela was notoriously manic and had an intensity about her character that was not normal. I personally wouldn’t have had it any other way. I loved Angela with all of my heart, and if she wanted to spout some of her genius in my direction while I was around — which inevitably, she would — I was more than happy to accommodate that process.
As a matter of course, immediately after she invited me in, she offered to smoke me out.
To call Angela a frequent marijuana user would be a gross understatement. There was very little that Angela did on a casual basis. She was the type of woman who if she did anything at all, she completely integrated it within her lifestyle; this level of intensity was actually one of the reasons that Angela believed that she never held any long standing relationships.
“I can’t be bothered to deal with fickle people,” she would say. “Honestly, it just bums me out. A guy will pretend to be interested in me, and then within a matter of weeks, it turns out that he has no sack at all. You’d think that there would be someone out there who would be interested in hooking up with me — and there are, but they just aren’t interested in me as a complete person, and that is a total turn off.”
Conversations about her dating other people inevitably ended up with a bit of cuddling, and some more marijuana. When she was feeling amorous, she wasn’t exactly someone who you would call productive. Her proclivities toward the sensual seemed to overtake her body, and she would put all of her projects on hold until the feeling passed through her. In a sense, she was vulnerable to the type of romantic possession one might attribute to a Don Quixote or some other fabled romantic knight. I would say that it was brutal if it weren’t so damned endearing.
“So,” she said, “why the hell did you show up this time? I know you only come over here when you’re in
trouble, so what the fuck happened to your house? Are you still fucking that guy? How’s your dad?”
The questions were an immediate onslaught, as she was in a hyper-manic state of being at the moment. I was absolutely fine with her current temperament, as I wasn’t really feeling cuddly at the moment.
We shared a few bowls, and she actually talked to me rapidly for longer than usual, though I was able to share the basics about what had transpired earlier that day. I covered a few of the other questions she had for me in short answers, but they weren’t short for any lack of transparency on my part.
Angela clearly just had a lot she had to get off her chest.
“Nobody’s come by in a while, to be perfectly honest with you, so I’m glad to see you,” she said, talking a mile a minute.
“You’re pretty chatty today, are you on uppers or something?” I asked, casually, the herbs working their magic on my state of mind.
“Naw, I gave those up months ago. Couldn’t fucking handle the comedown. The problem is that they really help you out for about eight to twelve hours, and then they leave you nothing more than a burnt out husk for the entire rest of the day.”
She shook her head, just recalling the pattern.
“Naw,” she continued, “this is just my regular energy level these days. I’m working on a new project, and you know how I get when I’m onto something that I can give my complete focus toward.”
Indeed, I did.
“You going to show me?” I asked, knowing that there was no way she could refuse, and in fact, it was likely the very thing she wanted to do most at that moment.
“Hell yeah,” she said, and then she paused for a moment in reflection. “Actually, this is the sort of thing that you’d really be into right about now, we might actually be able to use it to help you out some.”
“No shit?”
“You know I’ve got better things to do with my time than lie to you.” She gave me a hug and smiled like a manic pixie.
Chapter 13 - Piper
I followed her through her living room toward the basement.
Angela was a regular mad scientist, with a bit of a paranoid schizophrenic streak. The weird way her brain was wired only made her more interesting in my opinion, though for sure it put some people off.
The moment I entered her flat, I was assaulted on all sides by things. The strangest part about the whole experience was that she wasn’t a border so much as she knew exactly what she needed, and she happened to need a lot of things in order to get her projects off the ground. She also operated on a budget, which usually meant that she had to acquire her equipment second hand, and then make modifications as necessary. Sometimes, when she was able to manage it, she would get some top of the line piece of tech that would be the pinnacle of whatever she was focused on at the time. Usually, she didn’t splurge on something that was fancy and new, simply for the sake of it; she was a pragmatic woman, in that way.
“Everything has a function,” she said “and if it doesn’t, then it’s just taking up space. I’ve got no use for things that just take up space unless of course they provide conversation or rent money.”
She turned around and gave me a wink while she lead the way downstairs.
All the way down the stairs, I was surrounded by strange, archaic radio equipment. There were meters behind small glass portals that offered information that I’m sure Angela knew how to read, but I had no idea how, or why they operated. To me, her environment looked more like a classic science fiction fairy tale. I realized that because I didn’t understand how these things operated, I had imparted a type of reverence to Angela that may have been beyond her station. In all reality, she may not have been a wizard, but she never ceased to amaze me.
The lab itself was a room densely populated by all manner of electronic devices. It seemed as though one might dissect them into segments, according to project. The largest project took center stage and had a gigantic mainframe structure.
Angela saw me looking at the structure and began to elucidate.
"What you're seeing there is a data storage mainframe. Essentially, this is something that's very similar to the types of storage facilities that the national security agency uses for mass data collection, in their civilian spy program. There are lots of different varieties of information which can be collected, and most facilities are massive in scale, much larger than anything you see here."
The two of us walked together toward the gigantic storage mainframe, and I noticed the bundle of cables that was coming out from the back of the data storage locker. The circumference of the bundle was about the size of my thigh and stretched into a hole that had been bored into the ceiling just below ground level.
"I don't think I'll be getting my deposit back," she said, her eyes trailing my own vision. "The cables go through an underground tunnel which I had to specifically dig in the front yard. There was no other way to get around it. It was quite the Mission Impossible experience, installing something like this while maintaining a covert status. I had to plant a series of shrubs, which meant I had to take a break from my normal routines and learn a thing or two about planting drought tolerant, self-maintaining perennials."
I looked at Angela incredulously.
She demonstrated such attention to detail which she invested in her plans. Without my understanding what it was that she was collecting data from, the conversation had already transitioned into supplemental materials that she felt the need to research in order to adequately complete the task of setting up the thing.
"How many other non-related tasks do you have to get a basic understanding of just to achieve the thing you're trying to do?" I asked.
Usually, thoughts like that stay inside of my head, but I was in good company. Angela and I made it a point to not censor ourselves well in front of one another. This didn’t mean that we were unaware of when to have conversations, and when to not have conversations; it only meant that the conversations that we did have tended to be very straightforward. Neither of us enjoyed dealing with the emotional friction that one tends to find in conversations with people who are less honest.
“You don't even know the start of it," she said, proudly.
"I'm basically operating a microcosm of ‘Big Brother’, except I'm focusing on law-enforcement and government officials in the area."
It took me a minute to understand exactly what it was she saying, and how it related to my previously described predicament.
"So, what kind of information are you gathering?" I asked, with no small amount of curiosity.
"All kinds. Government email servers were the first because I didn't need particularly strong reception equipment in order to secure them. All I really had to have was this mainframe set up, and that was less of an initial investment and more hardware tinkering to get that to work."
She walked around the back of the box, and I followed.
The mainframe itself was the size of the chest freezer stood on its side, and reached up toward the ceiling. If I had to guess dimensions, I would say 12 feet high by 16 ft.² at the base. Like all of Angela’s equipment, it didn't look new. In fact, it looked a bit beat up. However, there were signs of care in the reassembly of the thing. The wires were all neatly bound together. The input-output jacks were also cleaned off, so it was clear which components were linked together.
"Can't you get in trouble for this kind of thing?"
"Only if you get caught," she replied. "The way I see it, I didn't personally offer the government any permission to conduct mass surveillance on my life, and our government is primarily based on a social contract system. The social contract is that I give up some of my rights so that the whole can be more collectively operated. If I don't consent to give up these rights, then all I see going on here is the collection of information, which might be used to benefit myself or others."
I smiled at the obvious rationalization for a dubiously criminal act. The real beautiful thing was that the legalities for mass surveillan
ce were gray while operating on a national level. Angela had not differentiated herself much in the end result of her plan. Naturally, if she were caught, her entire operation would be seized. If she was lucky, they would realize her genius and then hire her, but for Angela's sake, I hoped that would never happen.
"The cables,” she continued, “are what really transforms this whole thing from low-level hacking into a formidable tool against the surveillance state. I mentioned to you that the cables go out at the ceiling level, and into the underground current located just outside of the building. If I had to pay for the amount of power this sucker produced… well, let's just say the city is helping me out.”
I had to laugh, but she continued uninterrupted.
“Anyways, the cables also go up to a satellite dish which I have installed on the roof. The satellite dish has been modified so that I can pick up local signals. The combination of the satellite dish as well as classic CB radio tools essentially enable me to get free access to phone records police scanners emergency radio systems, and patrol car radios."
"You're amazing," I said, totally in awe of the type of brain necessary to come up with this kind of system and make it work.
"I know," she said dismissively. "As our government has already demonstrated, the primary issue with scraping this much information on a regular basis is not only storage, but also organization. Without organization, the data tends to appear like a cluttered, undifferentiated mass. Fortunately, I was able to mitigate this problem slightly by ensuring that different sources were automatically routed to specific servers. Even after the bulk of the sorting has been done, in order to sift through this data, you have to have either something that you're specifically looking for or you need a national security budget."
“I need a minute,” I said, leaning up against a dusty tower of electronics.
This whole thing was way too intense for me to piece together all at once. It seemed to me that what she was proposing was impossible, but if there was enough data here, and we were able to search through police radio logs…
