By the ragged light before dawn, I drove the bike to the outskirts I orbited the ruins of the old city still wrecked from the war. I pushed on to arrive of the city of New Toronto. While  I did  passed a self driving Tesla car driving itself to a new city. This one was driving back empty to pick up more stuff while the owner moved house. I collapsed on the back seat and grabbed some sleep. A hundred miles later I woke up and sat in the lotus position to consider the optimal plan to approach R3configured.

It was still early in the morning. The roads were full of what the locals called 'ghost hour'. The streets were full of empty vehicles driving busily to the right place before rush hour. The larger automated trucks moving together like a herd of elephants began to leave the road after traveling all night.

After four hours I stopped at an outlet mall to get some more adult looking clothing and eat. Effectively I now had unlimited spending money. If I could tap a card to pay for something then I was able to look like I was paying for it. For purcha,ses less than the cost of a house I could could make digital money appear in the account from no where. There were some restrictions, but money was no long an objective it was only information. I could buy anything I wanted, somehow my current state being effectively infinitely rich no longer was as amusing as I thought it should have been.

Soon I approached New Toronto. New Toronto was the heart of the GovSys Operation. It was where the Administrators central trainman campus was. I approached the city cautiously. I was kneeling down and putting my head in the lion's mouth. It seems strange that a hacker like R3configured would choose to live so close to the government operation designed to find them. The process seems too dumb to be a trap. It did seem smart enough for a hacker who didn't want to be found.

As I approached It was hard not to be impressed by the synthetic city. After leaving the Tesla to recharge I switched back to the bike. I had driven over a large mountain. The road was narrow and winding but it served as a back route. I stopped for a moment to enjoy a spectacle of concrete n the valley below me. There was the high-rise super tall skyscrapers in the centre. This Was the new silicon valley. It was whether government Did all the digital creation. Around the tall skyscrapers were large blocks laid like huge fingers over the landscape. Most of these were used by the central technical support help-desks. They were effectively factories of frustration. To the west, I could see the low rise University campus. Here loyal party members were trained to maintain the software and build new technologies. Nearby where the exotic buildings of GovSys central management. The whole city was a tribute to technology. I smiled at the irony of having a geographic centre for something that can be done so easily over the Internet. The city was an exercise in power. With that, I pulled away to join the freeway into the city.

"Good morning" I texted everyone from the bike "how is it going?"

'OK Shockwave stable. No new sign of growth.' Zoe said.

'I think I can create a serum which might interrupt the growth.' Valerie added. 'it would buy us more time Frostbite and BitsMark had discoverd the first signs of the black scales on their extremities' Valarie added. I got the impression they hand't wanted me to know and be worried.

Later I got out of an expensive Party only self driving car which dropped me off at the Bar's entrance. This was the third time I had approached the bar. The first was a drive past on my bike. Second I had parked the bike away and then gone on foot checking for surveillance cameras. As I had done I confirmed what I had noticed the first time. Many of the cameras were broken or disabled. That wasn't totally suspicious there were many areas like this. Keeping the production of surveillance cameras up at the rate old ones broke was for GovSys. While this run down area didn't seem unusual, it was curious the bar was in such a surveillance blackspot.

The third time I had changed while I was sitting in a car I had just stolen. I say stolen. I can walk up to any car getting in like I owned it. When I finished it returned itself to the owner. Provided It arrived when summoned no one would knew it had been miss used. I think this one was used by someone who liked cherry chewing gum.

Getting out I walked casually towards the bar. I was wearing more adversarial clothing. Weaknesses in the classic algorithms used to identify bodies and faces meant that adding simple patterns to you would throw off any detectors. It would be Impossible to have people looking at all the cameras in New-Am. Instead, each camera ran a body detection algorithm and only sent Images when it noticed someone. These images were then flagged up for known fugitives in central compute centers. Images with known faces were sometimes shown to real people for action. With my adversarial camouflage I was effectively invisible to the digital state, but oddly not real people.

'wish me luck. I'm going into the bar now.' I said back to the clan back home.

'God speed' Zoe returned.