Jessie wakes up, Friday morning, time for school. She gets dressed and hops on the train. An announcement comes on, warning about track problems at Hal Finney station, potential delays. She is in grade 12. Goole runs the trains. Half hour later she arrives, shows up for finance class, tunes out. Her boyfriend shows up half an hour late, hair messed up and out of breath. Says he was caught up at Finney stn. Teacher glares, he smiles sheepishly, and pulls out his laptop. Plugs in a usb drive, opens up an openssl terminal and starts typing. The prof is lecturing about decentralized currency systems and their history. School ends, they head to her place. Her mom serves chips or something ``demurely'', the boyfriend comments that she's odd. Jessie defends her, saying that everyone's different. And she's a scientist. Later, boyfriend takes off, saying he has homework to deal with. Before he goes, she asks about the openssl shit. He says he's not really sure yet. Later Jessie's dad comes home, kisses the mom, talks a bit about his day at Goole. Reminds her a few times that this is confidential, he isn't saying it, etc. Basically, an agent got into the lab, they poisoned it with a buffer overflow and all is fine. But that hadn't happened before. Now everything is airgapped. They'll figure out the overflow trick, Jessie's mom warns. Jessie listens quietly, doing homework. A week later she goes out with her aunt, shopping or something. it is established that the aunt and the mom don't really like each other. jessie asks what an agent is (for the reader's sake), and her aunt explains. also, that is what her aunt does, study emergent agent behavior. It is established that jessie understands cryptocurrency technology. also established is that the train system is actually run entirely by agents, the first such system in the world. this is very secret information, by the way, and even most employees are not aware of it. they take the train, which goes everywhere these days. they pay in satoshi. jessie mentions the port 1 traffic, and wonders if she should ask her dad about it. the aunt says she will, one of these days. they eat, and head home. When they arrive, the aunt sends jessie to help her mom with dinner. The aunt asks dad about the port 1 traffic. he says that it's very strange, as far as he knows, port 1 is for debugging traffic, and that shouldn't be running all the time. but it's been a long time since he looked at the train code. it's an agent too, and they do weird things sometimes. Next day boyfriend gives her the drive, asks her to back it up quietly. This is the last time she speaks to him. He is hit by a train. She is distraught, runs to her room, drinks, etc. Looks at the USB drive. There is a snippit of Ada code, which does a couple of SSL handshakes to pull a MITM, and folders called 'dump-2045-03-02', 'dump-2045-03-03', etc. There are hundreds of files. She looks through a few to find a lot of gibberish. She goes back to the Ada code and sees a note -- "heinlein on #vox, usual onion". The usual onion is a darknet IRC server that the boyfriend would frequent. also a file called msg.pgp with junk in it. She logs on as him (username Case from neuromancer), says that case is dead. heinlein think's she's a cop, won't speak. so she uploads a couple of the dump files, says she thinks it's train traffic, what does he make of it? after a few minutes, heinlein says he sees digital signatures (i.e., ticket validation stamps) for four or five tickets from various stations, which is weird because why would there be five and not 0 or millions? he says he's gonna checkout the addresses.. ...finds a shitload of 500-satoshi transactions, looks like definitely train sales. then mostly they go to the train accounting system and get lost..he asks leinster to check them against the silk road db. leinster says yeah, there's some pretty serious weaponry being bought but he won't say where it's going with "the cop" online. heinlein points out that these weapons are being bought waay too fast for a human to be doing it, so it's definitely code. heinlein asks, leinster, sounds like joe (an agent that leinster wrote a few years back, whose job was to find and sell code exploits, for lulz and profit) leinster laughs, then says "it might be". heinleins asks if he's serious, and leinster says funny story -- he was showing the bot off on 4chan, some /b/tard showed it how to control sex dolls to kill people, pointed it at a paid hit list, and let it go. the fbi caught the sex doll thing pretty quickly, but it was weird .. the bot went apeshit on it. ten people dead in a week. the thing had been self-hosting for months, so leinster couldn't be tracked to it, but nonetheless he walked away from it. didn't want to know what it got up to. can we confirm that this is joe? heinlein asks. leinster replies with a pubkey, suggests talking to the train with that. jessie encrypts "hello, joe" with the key. she recognizes the output .. it is exactly msg.pgp from the drive! 'i think joe killed case,' she says. fuck, they reply. so this is how it begins. [todo ...they go off and investigate this train business] [todo ...jessie and her aunt wind up on the train's hitlist, they try to cancel it, but the translink police show up, the end, just 1984 this fucker]