Copyright by Mike Hayes 2012-2019. All rights reserved.

May 30, 2026, Thursday

Tommy’s basement lair

Albuquerque, New Mexico

The next day, Danny took a ride to Tommy’s house. Tommy’s Mom let him in, and then pointed him to a door leading down to the basement. He opened the door, and was hit by a dry, ozone smell, with the acrid, bitter hint of burned resistors. He looked at the glow seething up, and then noticed the big red sign.

“WARNING—NO ENTRY unless you place handhelds, tablets, computers and phones in foil bag before entering. Seal it. Put the bag in another foil bag. Seal the second bag. Then you may enter.” By the side of the basement door was a hook, holding what looked like silver shopping bags. He took his handheld and put it in one, then put another bag around it like the instructions said. He started down toward the eerie, flickering blue glow.

The glow trapped the dark and tamed it, as it shifted and pulsated. He started threading a path through row after row of shelves —laptops, notebooks and tablets, each one upright like the old shelves with books. Each machine had a spine label. He looked closer.

1998 166MHz Pentium, 32MB, 2GB, NT

2007, AMD, 2gb, 250gb, 10mhz, w7 

1993, 486SX 33 MHz, 20 MB, 120 MB HD, W3.1/Dos 6.0

2025, 2Thz, 168TB, Debian Linux

Under each label was a square barcode. On the floor was a six-inch layer of old keyboards, mice, small stuff, stuff that had toasted, and small stuff simply tossed. It reeked of burned resisters and blown capacitors and the smell of circuit boards and plastics. The only sound was his tennis shoes, crunching and grinding the stuff even further.

Major crunching was complete, though. The new floor was a homogenized layer of stuff from long ago, small, colored and sharp bits, mixed in with larger chunks, with a fragment of a cable or a wire harness, or a key. Fist sized black lumps once lived as power modules. Many keys had lost their keyboards, and randomly surfed the floor, looking for their home, only to be shattered under a boot. A place of headphones and mice, of parts still alive, and parts long dead, with only the bones of their circuit boards left to show they had ever existed, ever been touched by a human hand.

Then his foot hit a hard, heavy thing. He stumbled, and fell hard. It was a big lump, maybe once the core of a motor, and fell hard. A thousand sharp edges of broken plastic bit into exposed skin. He looked up and found himself staring at a raised platform, about a foot above the debris and junk. He was looking at Tommy flat on his back, with Sasha’s cropped black hair, and her long, slender body coiled on top of him, holding his arms down. He’d interrupted something.

Sasha looked up with an excited grin, and then saw Danny. She purred, “Hello, handsome!” In one motion, she rocked back on her knees, then forward, rose, and pivoted to the side.

Tommy cranked his head around, freed one arm, twisted half over, and raised himself. Then he got up on one knee, steadied himself, and heaved his body upright. “Danny!” he panted, with some difficulty. “Hi. Let me just get up.”

“What’s this about putting all the gear in a bag before coming down here?” Danny asked.

“So the gear can’t give us away, man. So it can’t talk upstream. Gear reports, you know? Approved devices are reporting devices — location, conversations, and actions. Not just what you do online, everything. They report everything to the judicial servers.”

“This basement is off net, private. If your gear weren’t bagged, your gear would be reporting.” Sasha sidled up and leaned against Tommy and rubbed his back, smiling. “I like our little cave. The kitchen’s really nice.”

Tommy’s eyes lit up looking at her, as she walked off. His eyes still glinting with excitement, he whispered, “Look at this. We hacked the damn keyboards.”

He walked over to the table with the mound of keyboards. Tommy showed Danny various styles of the government mandated AC-1Kybd keyboard, with the General Welfare and Safety enhancements. “My software acquires the physical and on-line patterns, then sends dummy packets upstream — synced with the movement of the user’s hands and fingers.”

Our little cave? Danny wondered. “How come you still live with your parents?”

Tommy looked up from the keyboard in his hand. “Hand me those wires, the red and black ones with the clips? See, this basement was the original house. We all grew up here. Back then, the concrete roof was perfectly flat and just had four feet of dirt on top of it. It blended into the hillside. But it was designed to be the basement of the big house. Now hand me the black coax.”

He pointed to a pile of hundreds of black coax cables that looked identical. Danny, bewildered, guessed at one, and handed it to him.

Tommy nodded, and attached them to the keyboard. “The idea was, while the family grew and Dad was making more money, he’d build a two-story house on top. Eventually we did, when I was in high school. Then I went off to college. Sophomore year, they couldn’t send money anymore. Okay, so I’m going to link this keyboard in and you’ll see what we just did.” He connected the wires to a box on the table.

“They couldn’t make the house payments and put me through college. That was after the second bank failure and that Strong Dollar fiasco. College was over for me. I’d already figured out the game, and decided, screw all that. Look, for this keyboard test, we’ll use Lucky Punk — he’s a fake virtual person we use for testing. Lucky is always getting in trouble. They’ll be watching him from the moment he logs in. They’ll let him make a couple moves, then he’ll be cuffed. Not very lucky.”

Tommy finished hooking the wires up to the box and looked over. “Our Man in the Middle box listens to all traffic both ways, and replaces some traffic.”

He pointed to the table with the newer keyboards, stripped of housings, a rat’s nest of wires and cables surrounding them. Tommy explained how he’d decrypted transmissions from the AC-1Kybd, commingled data streams, and then re encrypted the data stream. The result was the keyboard AI never noticed felony count exceeding the statistical averages.

Felony count was a predictive pre-assessment based on the National Pre-Criminal Felony database. It flagged persons whose count exceeded two standard deviations from the norm for the person’s profile, geographical area, and genome makeup. Naturally, adjustments were added in for past racial injustice, inequities in socioeconomic status and social justice qualifiers.

Modern prosecutorial discretion routinely disregarded the dozen or so felonies which each citizen committed each day. The Suspect Felon database was functionally complete as of 2020. Legacy crime investigation, arrest, and prosecution become mostly things of the past.

Since everyone committed felonious acts and their actions were all logged, the only issue was figuring out who the troublemakers were and picking them up. Before they caused trouble, of course. Subjects rarely realized when they committed serious infractions, given the millions of laws applying to consumers alone. That was just the baseline noise of the population’s illegal behavior. Law enforcement then could focus on the important cases. Those with implications for social and environmental justice.

The AC-1Kybd was a phenomenal advance, allowing the keyboard to arrest the individual. Most car chases, no knock entries, and search warrants were things of a barbaric, primitive past. Society had advanced. Of course, this had displaced many workers. The process of selection, arrest and incarceration of the optimum percentage of the population for prison was a major industry.

Today, the lower keyboard edge, in addition to its ergonomic and healthy anti-Carpal Tunnel design, was a four-claw Internet aware, remote activated automatic handcuffing mechanism.

Once activated, the Suspect Felon was handcuffed securely to his keyboard or notebook. It would take authorized law enforcement personnel to remove the cuffs.

Authorized meant Homeland Security personnel. Issues dealing with Internet access usually disregarded state and county lines. They had to be dealt with by the appropriate federal agency subsection or task force. These included the federal judicial, the environmental division, equal opportunity, and many others. Then there were the international agreements. Reciprocal cuffing protocols allowed nations to work to their mutual interest in enforcing laws, fines and penalties against offenders halfway across the world. The reciprocal payment procedures allowed a fast and efficient exchange of income streams, less the percentage retained by the local agents of collection, of course. At any time, real time data from individuals keyboarding was being simultaneously monitored by a hundred agencies.

Generally, offenders were simply fined. While cuffed, the audio interface could be used to arrange payment for the fines. The suspect felon would be uncuffed after he made his payment arrangements.

Automated keyboard integral handcuffing with positive ID was one of the great advances of the twenty-first century. It was comparable to the innovation of fingerprinting in the twentieth century. Not by any means was fingerprinting obsolete. Fingerprinting was an integral part of any keyboard use. Fingers being willingly presented at every keyboard every moment of online activity.

There were further protective measures in case an auto cuffed individual tried to escape his fate. Should the suspect smash the keyboard or otherwise use physical force, the unit would auto deploy the Electroshock Mobility Suppressor. The EMS incorporated the full capabilities of the portable stunner technology. Stun Klaws were built in. The governments had shown the public many times, over and over, the dramatic and peaceful solutions to conflict resolution induced by the EMS Stun Klaws. They had come to be called Peace Klaws.

Yes, the AC-1kybd with the EMS option had brought law enforcement into the twenty-first century, and given Homeland Security the tools it had needed to properly fulfill its designated tasks. As the Chief of the National Police Association had said when the AC-1kybd was rolled out, “America is now safe from foes inside and out. It’s quite stunning.”

Tommy brought up a weather map on the wall, and picked an area of intense storm activity near Akron, Ohio. The radar showed flashing lightning bolt symbols, and the map showed hook shaped splotches of red and purple. Underneath the text read, “Tornado Warning.” He clicked on the video window to the side. The sound came on, a sound like freight trains. The wind and rain slanted sideways, almost horizontal. The camera switched to a street view. A trashcan was cartwheeling down the street.

Tommy typed something. He looked at Danny. “Here we go. Right now, the keyboard geolocated our imaginary friend in Akron, Ohio. Big storm hitting right there. Our imaginary friend is named Lucky Punk. Now, you use the console to look up something bad. Try doing an Ask about — how about ‘White Power skin heads’”.

Danny put on the gloves, velcroed them tight at the wrist. He waved his fingers around and laughed. Each of the glove’s fingers was ridiculous, ending in nine-inch aluminum nails. Construction nails. “Nice.”

Tommy nodded. “Good. Now look up ‘hero Snowden’. That will really piss the AI off. And keep your hands clear of the keyboard — use the nine-inch nails.”

It was slow typing with the nine-inch finger nails, but he got it done. After the Snowden Ask, the Klaws immediately snapped shut, two per wrist. At least, what the AI thought was a wrist. Danny slipped his hands out of the Long Gloves, and carefully extracted the gloves from the Klaws. When he pulled the gloves out, the Klaw electrodes lost contact, and the Electro Mobility Shock option activated. Inch long electrical arcs bridged the two pincers of the Klaws as millions of volts raced between them. The razor-sharp pincers attempted to bite into flesh and shock a keyboarder foolish enough to try to escape. Then the snapping sound of the arc stopped, leaving just the acrid smell of disassembled air molecules.

“Stay clear. It will try again every minute or so.”

Danny nodded. “Don’t worry.”

Tommy nodded. “Normally, they’d send one of the Homeland buses around to the site the keyboard reports and pick up the felon, but Lucky here seems to be in the middle of a bad storm. And communication was dropped. See, it’s all based on continual reporting. TSA’ll assume the machine went offline because of the storm. We sent garbled data packets for the GPS info. They don’t know the exact GPS coordinates, so they can’t just go pick him up. They figure he’ll wander around cuffed for days before he finally flags down a patrol bus to take him to jail.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “Voluntary compliance?”

Tommy didn’t answer. “Okay, so you asked about the basement. After college ended, I came back home, and they gave me the whole basement. It’s perfect. I pay my parents for it, we’ve got a separate entrance, and we’re shielded from tracking.”

“Look, you’re here to talk about your Moon schemes. I sketched out a plan for Moon Real and Moon Sim games. I used the console operating system for Vengeance, put a new game rules set in, and added the keyboard hack. You won’t have to worry about snoops watching what you’re doing.”

Danny hit the final key on his handheld to start the video chat, and saw Alex’s face appear. He looked up. “You put illegal hacks in the game gear?”

Tommy smirked. “Every Moon Sim or Real package downloaded will have the hacks. When the system boots into Moon Real or Moon Sim, it’ll dominate the keyboard operating system and take it over. They shouldn’t have anything to worry about. Why would they care about monitoring or regulatory cuffing for in game behavior? And they don’t have the manpower to go after one in a hundred.”

Alex’s voice came in through the video link. “But the Moon’s real!”

Tommy picked up the handheld and addressed the small image. “Hey, you made it. Good to see you, Alex. Right, it’s real. And would you like to be cuffed for something you did off Earth?”

On the monitor, Alex in miniature looked angry. They saw his face contort with anger. “No way!”

Tommy nodded. “Right. And the UN thinks they own the Moon. UN members who signed the Moon Treaty have reciprocal rights with the US. You could get cuffed and taken to jail in the USA. For violating the Moon Treaty as viewed by some cubicle cop in Brisbane, Australia.”

The little image of Alex said, “I can see that. You have a White Hat hack — it protects Game players worldwide. Otherwise, Moon Sim would work, but Moon Real could be shut down by one wacko loose cannon cop on the other side of the world.”

Tommy came down from his rant for a moment. “Or by a shakedown from some third world country. Look, it’ll be a cool game. I know games.”

The little picture of Alex was still, and then started speaking, hesitantly. “Tommy, what’s in it for you? You’d have organized Sim for the real Moon. You’d have built a new game — You aren’t planning to do this for free, are you?”

Tommy’s eyes lit up, like when he saw Sasha. “Moon Sim’ll take care of itself. Like Vengeance, there are all kinds of ways to work a profit even when the game’s free. For Moon Real….” He thought for a bit, then looked up. “How about if we win, and you guys get actual working rovers, give me one? Not sure what I’d do with it, but there must be something. Then I’d know the land and the machine. That’d help me develop the advanced game play. We’ll set up rules to allow staking claims, mining claims, and recording land changes, for people who are developing the Moon.”