1.5 The Library Job
- Location
- Earth
1.5 The Library Job
It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you, but in my case, I was pretty confident it was paranoia. The computers were on the ground floor of the library, in a back corner. I needed to find the switch though. The device that I could plug an ethernet cable into and have the internet consider it as it's own computer. I needed to run a cable from the switch to part of the floor that was part of the foundation. I was early, near opening, and before all the high schoolers with nothing better to do and no internet arrived.
There were 10 computers, 5 on each side of a divider. I was preparing to subtly check the back of a computer, to see how the cables ran alongside the divider, when I saw the switch screwed into the wall next to one of the the first computers. Nonchalantly going over to it, with only minor glances around the place to see if anybody was watching me, I could examine it out of the corner of my eye. The switch was blue, metal and with 20 ports. I carefully didn't look at it, in case I looked suspicious.
The next step was marking the location for the bore hole that eventually would have the cable fed through it. I needed to cut through the floor, without anybody noticing. Dad had rejected acid because it smelled. Instead I had made a specialty device. I shrugged off my backpack, and pulled a chapstick tube from my pocket. As I set down my backpack, I surreptitiously made a circular imprint of where I wanted the hole to be, before setting my backpack on top of it. Now, I just had to wait about an hour. Inside my backpack was a sort of arm on the end of a tube. Like an earthworm. It would smell my cherry chapstick, then bore a hole through my backpack and straight down through the floor, slowly. While quietly digging, it would pile the chunks of material in my backpack. It would only burrow down about 8 feet at most, which was why I had needed computers that were close to the foundation of the building.
I read the news, looked for new books, and anything else that wouldn't be interesting to a cape, unless it was big enough to make the normal news. I think mostly though, I fidgeted.
Eventually, enough time had passed. I kicked my backpack, waited a few minutes, then knelt down next to it as if I was fussing with it. Which I was, because I had put the prepared cable in the same pocket that was now full of concrete chips and some dirt. After getting the cable out, I plugged it in, and fed it into the hole. The cable was special. The end had a special little modification to help my units find it, and ensure the wires were spliced correctly.
Job complete, I discreetly made my exit, while carrying 15 extra pounds. That part actually felt pretty normal, I liked the library and books are heavy. On my way out, I stopped by the restrooms, and flushed a slow decay polymer pill for the next stage. Once I was a ways from the library, I managed to stop feeling like somebody was going to jump out and yell 'gotcha'.
At home, safe and sound in the basement, I dump the incriminating materials into the resource processor. Might as well make use of it.
After walking with a heavy backpack, I sag onto my chair at my workbench and examine my map positioned above it. I know roughly where the library is. My map of the city sewer pipes is about 4ft wide, and is a scale model of everywhere my gatherer ants and turtles had been. It even slowly updated from information pulled from my units after dad put them in for resource extraction.
The signal pill I had flushed in the library would anchor to a wall with about 15 seconds after contact with water. As it decayed, it would attract my gatherer ants, which would explore extensively, that area. All of my units were programmed to avoid contact with people, mostly by avoiding contact with air, clean water, and saltwater. No crawling out of toilets for them, also because that would be gross. Not that their current environment wasn't gross, but yeah, that's why dad had to transfer the returned units for resource extraction or replacement.
In a day or so, the local pipes near the library would be fully mapped. In 72 hours, at the bottom of the hole I had bored in the library, a timed decay from a thingy I hadn't bothered name, would begin releasing low energy photons that only weakly interacted with the ground. Or, as my dad preferred to call them, radio waves, but he didn't appreciate science and only used the radio for sports broadcasts.
The library pipes, at their low points in the ground, would have the newest version of my units work on them. I named then squiggles, before my dad could name them. They were like beautiful anemones and squids that had been merged together, and they were going to be my tool using units. Regrettably, they weren't disposable, and required almost all of my exotic metals, including harvesting about half my ant units. The disposable turtle units were unaffected though, so in a lot of ways, it didn't delay collecting more metals from the water. I'm pretty sure there was at least one guy in the Bay who was going to turn blue from ingestion of colloidal silver, if the amount that managed to actually make it into the sewers was any indication. Anyway, my squiggles would poke holes in the tops of algorithmically chosen pipes, plug the hole with a tool arm, and listen for the radio pings. Once the pings stopped, they would seal the holes with plastic, not much I could do about that evidence, and return home.
The map would be updated with the location of the signal, and then, my most complex unit yet, would find the closest pipe, bore an inch wide hole in it, and tunnel to the location of where the pings had been. The pings got weaker over time. The squiggles needed to see it from a long ways off, but the com unit only needed enough a signal to home in on it when it was close. Once at the radio pill, the squiggle arm would turn up and follow the the hole until it bumped into the frayed Ethernet cable. It would seal off the loose ends, cleaning them, and ready for a connection. Well, whenever I actually figured out how to make plastic polymers conduct electrical signals. I uh, hadn't lied about it, I thought I could make it work, but I had downplayed the importance having it ready when I got the go ahead from dad.
I had some ideas with carbon, plastic was repeating chains, and so were nanotubes of carbon, but the latter was conductive, unlike most of my materials, and none of my current ones were suitable, even if they weakly conducted.
I was on pins and needles for the next several days as the connecting process happened. Still, it worked. I didn't have an actual internet connection yet, but my units reported that everything up through to connecting to the ethernet cable was successful. I had carried out my next major step in being a hero. By, uh, stealing internet from my local library, or well, setting myself up to be able to steal internet from the library. On second thought, I won't celebrate this in front of dad.
Still, success!
It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you, but in my case, I was pretty confident it was paranoia. The computers were on the ground floor of the library, in a back corner. I needed to find the switch though. The device that I could plug an ethernet cable into and have the internet consider it as it's own computer. I needed to run a cable from the switch to part of the floor that was part of the foundation. I was early, near opening, and before all the high schoolers with nothing better to do and no internet arrived.
There were 10 computers, 5 on each side of a divider. I was preparing to subtly check the back of a computer, to see how the cables ran alongside the divider, when I saw the switch screwed into the wall next to one of the the first computers. Nonchalantly going over to it, with only minor glances around the place to see if anybody was watching me, I could examine it out of the corner of my eye. The switch was blue, metal and with 20 ports. I carefully didn't look at it, in case I looked suspicious.
The next step was marking the location for the bore hole that eventually would have the cable fed through it. I needed to cut through the floor, without anybody noticing. Dad had rejected acid because it smelled. Instead I had made a specialty device. I shrugged off my backpack, and pulled a chapstick tube from my pocket. As I set down my backpack, I surreptitiously made a circular imprint of where I wanted the hole to be, before setting my backpack on top of it. Now, I just had to wait about an hour. Inside my backpack was a sort of arm on the end of a tube. Like an earthworm. It would smell my cherry chapstick, then bore a hole through my backpack and straight down through the floor, slowly. While quietly digging, it would pile the chunks of material in my backpack. It would only burrow down about 8 feet at most, which was why I had needed computers that were close to the foundation of the building.
I read the news, looked for new books, and anything else that wouldn't be interesting to a cape, unless it was big enough to make the normal news. I think mostly though, I fidgeted.
Eventually, enough time had passed. I kicked my backpack, waited a few minutes, then knelt down next to it as if I was fussing with it. Which I was, because I had put the prepared cable in the same pocket that was now full of concrete chips and some dirt. After getting the cable out, I plugged it in, and fed it into the hole. The cable was special. The end had a special little modification to help my units find it, and ensure the wires were spliced correctly.
Job complete, I discreetly made my exit, while carrying 15 extra pounds. That part actually felt pretty normal, I liked the library and books are heavy. On my way out, I stopped by the restrooms, and flushed a slow decay polymer pill for the next stage. Once I was a ways from the library, I managed to stop feeling like somebody was going to jump out and yell 'gotcha'.
At home, safe and sound in the basement, I dump the incriminating materials into the resource processor. Might as well make use of it.
After walking with a heavy backpack, I sag onto my chair at my workbench and examine my map positioned above it. I know roughly where the library is. My map of the city sewer pipes is about 4ft wide, and is a scale model of everywhere my gatherer ants and turtles had been. It even slowly updated from information pulled from my units after dad put them in for resource extraction.
The signal pill I had flushed in the library would anchor to a wall with about 15 seconds after contact with water. As it decayed, it would attract my gatherer ants, which would explore extensively, that area. All of my units were programmed to avoid contact with people, mostly by avoiding contact with air, clean water, and saltwater. No crawling out of toilets for them, also because that would be gross. Not that their current environment wasn't gross, but yeah, that's why dad had to transfer the returned units for resource extraction or replacement.
In a day or so, the local pipes near the library would be fully mapped. In 72 hours, at the bottom of the hole I had bored in the library, a timed decay from a thingy I hadn't bothered name, would begin releasing low energy photons that only weakly interacted with the ground. Or, as my dad preferred to call them, radio waves, but he didn't appreciate science and only used the radio for sports broadcasts.
The library pipes, at their low points in the ground, would have the newest version of my units work on them. I named then squiggles, before my dad could name them. They were like beautiful anemones and squids that had been merged together, and they were going to be my tool using units. Regrettably, they weren't disposable, and required almost all of my exotic metals, including harvesting about half my ant units. The disposable turtle units were unaffected though, so in a lot of ways, it didn't delay collecting more metals from the water. I'm pretty sure there was at least one guy in the Bay who was going to turn blue from ingestion of colloidal silver, if the amount that managed to actually make it into the sewers was any indication. Anyway, my squiggles would poke holes in the tops of algorithmically chosen pipes, plug the hole with a tool arm, and listen for the radio pings. Once the pings stopped, they would seal the holes with plastic, not much I could do about that evidence, and return home.
The map would be updated with the location of the signal, and then, my most complex unit yet, would find the closest pipe, bore an inch wide hole in it, and tunnel to the location of where the pings had been. The pings got weaker over time. The squiggles needed to see it from a long ways off, but the com unit only needed enough a signal to home in on it when it was close. Once at the radio pill, the squiggle arm would turn up and follow the the hole until it bumped into the frayed Ethernet cable. It would seal off the loose ends, cleaning them, and ready for a connection. Well, whenever I actually figured out how to make plastic polymers conduct electrical signals. I uh, hadn't lied about it, I thought I could make it work, but I had downplayed the importance having it ready when I got the go ahead from dad.
I had some ideas with carbon, plastic was repeating chains, and so were nanotubes of carbon, but the latter was conductive, unlike most of my materials, and none of my current ones were suitable, even if they weakly conducted.
I was on pins and needles for the next several days as the connecting process happened. Still, it worked. I didn't have an actual internet connection yet, but my units reported that everything up through to connecting to the ethernet cable was successful. I had carried out my next major step in being a hero. By, uh, stealing internet from my local library, or well, setting myself up to be able to steal internet from the library. On second thought, I won't celebrate this in front of dad.
Still, success!
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