Dalton walked in the half-moonlit night. The glow of the city off in the distance left him with enough ambient light to see. He felt assured that he could make it to a main road. He thought this road would dump on SR50 or something else he’d recognize. Then he’d just hold out some chips and someone would pull over. Someone would take his offer.

He tried on his sunglasses and perceived some blue light coming off of infrared heat being dumped out from the environment, but it did little to help his walk.

The sound of cars reverberated in the distance. Likely small electric vehicles that are tricked out to make vintage hotrod sounds, or possibly an actual vintage gas guzzler with one of those glasspack mufflers.

With no connectivity, he was alone with his thoughts. Was the Asian lady an actual spy and had gotten access to his phone? A wave of relief came over him. He could claim his errant code push was espionage. What a lucky break.

The gravel underneath was the triangular sharp edged rock that annoys someone wearing trendy thin-sole shoes. Dalton had on cheap dress loafers, but were only marginally better. He walked down the next turn and was greeted by the dim sight of the long road snaking out a half mile over a culvert, only to retrace back equal the distance before exiting to the main road. A trickle of headlights blinked erratically on that highway. He was close.

Throughout the walk, which continued to have a gentle downhill slope, the shoes would slip. He would catch himself and hadn’t fallen yet, but it was as if his interface with the ground was always somewhat deficient.

This should take no time, if not for these shoes. It was now very early in the morning. He could revert the code from his vehicle. The office would not have rebuilt the AI, that would take some time, and even if it was uploaded, it would take days to send it through a data pipe so small even his grandfather would’ve got better throughput via his vintage acoustic coupler modem.

Nothing to worry about, really…

He was pretty sure that was the interstate, which meant he was out somewhere by the Fernley Sink, but maybe he was out by Hazen, or north of Soda Lake. Close to civilization.

The drainage ditch was dry and steep. No sense in following the road to walk all the way up, only to walk back, Dalton thought. The Europa Project was going to land on another world; surely he could descend this slope and back up.

He surfed down on his faux-leather black dress shoes with their tread worn flat. The shoe you only wear to funerals, or the casino. Either way, they were so infrequently used that Dalton never got around to replacing them.

The slide down was faster than expected, and longer than he wished. He wanted to sit and slide, but knew it would shred his thin dress pants; and looking like a ragged person wouldn’t help snagging a ride. Even though the backside of the Sierras Nevadas was not far, he never hiked much. If he had, maybe he would have known this kind of light scree could act like a ball bearings. Dalton slid to a stop at the nadir of the ditch and yelled out: “Safe.”

Now for the hike back up. He aimed for the large rocks cemented into the hardpan. With his right foot, he put it on a secure rock and climbed up. He placed his left foot on dark dirt, then shifted his weight. Immediately, he slipped back down. He tried a few combinations, but could not go up. Some of the dirt was hardpacked due to the torrential rains and hot sun, but could not identify the difference at night.

At the bottom, he put his hands in his pockets to ensure his winnings stayed put. He did not want to lose them. But after another attempt, he walked up the ditch toward the culvert he tried to avoid. The universe wasn’t giving him any breaks tonight. Some paths have no solution, he thought. He did not dwell on that much, but it lurked in his subconscious.

He walked up the dry sandy streambed. Occasionally, when there was a plenitude of dried plants, he again tried to ascend, but the soil was loose and every pebble conspired to roll his ankle.

I’m landing a submarine on an ice-lake millions of miles away; you’d think we could make shoes to get me up this!

Finally, he gave up and walked to the bend of the road where it went over two silver corrugated tubes. They were larger than expected once upon them. Big enough to stoop in. The road was well-maintained with a drop of boulders around the pipes to prevent a washout.

“Finally! This should be easy.” Dalton said to the Universe. “You’ve delayed me, but not halted me!” He clenched one fist and looked up at the more manageable incline.

“And I still won!” He said, clutching the chips in his pocket. “Random chance can’t stop me.” He yelled. “You can’t stop me.”

After a second of pause, a voice echoed out from the culvert. “I won’t stop you, young man. Just please don’t stop me.”

Dalton sprung out of his cheap dress shoes. “Who said that?” He shot back at the drainage ducts.

A homeless man emerged from the rightmost hole. “Just me fella, you woke me with your chattering and sliding.”

The man shone a small pen light at Dalton, and then, seeing him unarmed and well dressed, wagered he would not rob him of his few possessions. “Please don’t tell anyone I live here. I got kicked off the sidewalk in Fernley and landed here.” The homeless man said. Each ‘hear’ sounded more like heah.

Dalton gazed at the ragged man. He might have been the same guy who was begging at the exit earlier this evening. Thin as a rail, and tanned to a wrinkle. “I’m not here to rat you out. I got dumped here—” Dalton stopped mid-sentence before he could say ‘by the Lucky Lady.’ The ragged man looked harmless, but Dalton thought the razor edge of extreme poverty might change one’s values. “By my, uh, friends… as a joke or something. And I’m trying to get to the main road and hitchhike back to town.”

The man looked at him in disbelief.

“And my phone broke when I fell. Or else I’d call them to pick me up. Heck, they’re probably on their way back to get me… those jokesters.” Dalton remarked with a weak ha-ha.

“You might need to invest in better friends, fella.”

I don’t have many friends to invest in, Dalton thought quickly, until he pushed that sad idea far away. “Thanks for the advice. Hey, I need another tip. Is this a suitable spot to climb up the road?”

“Anywhere’s a great spot if you got the shoes for it, right?” The homeless man showed his shredded up old tennis shoes. He thought about the airless, low-G, low-friction, high-grip tires that were on the lander.

Dalton laughed. “You got that right, mister.” Maybe it was only the exhaustion talking, or the warm air working, but he was tired of the mess he had walked into that night.

“Let me show you.” The man grabbed his backpack and jumped up sprightly as a pronghorn. “I was gonna walk up to the exit, anyway. Gotta stake out my spot for the morning commuters.”

“I imagine so.” Dalton said. “I guess we can walk together.” He was fairly sure the man was only trying to curry favor.

A well-dressed person in the middle of the desert needing help should be some kind of payday, right? No way the homeless man’s a Chinese spy.

“What’s your name?” Dalton asked.

“I go by Bean. What ‘bout you?”

“Dalton. Bean, is Bean short for something?”

“Nope.”

Dalton left it at that. Ordinarily, he would have been wary of such a person and going over the incessant calculations that afflicted his intellect. Was the probability of being murdered higher with this man than anywhere else? Probably not.

The two men walked off into the growing heat of a Nevada morning.

They chatted a bit while they walked down the road on the shoulder in the opposite lane against the flow of traffic.

Eventually Bean revealed he had a job with one of the trillionaires’ companies, and was even promoted to supervisor once. One day, the firing algorithms detected and classified him as ‘Psychitectural Imbalance: Other Unspecified Category’ and the HRAI laid him off.

Since the trillionaires shared employee performance data between their companies, Bean was effectively excluded from most legitimate employment. His wife left for Vegas as soon as his worth in the system evaporated.

Dalton felt sorry for him. For a moment, he thought about giving him the stack of chips he still had in his pocket. Bah, this is just a sympathy ploy. Dalton thought. As more of the story unfolded, Dalton softened.

They walked along the shoulder as vehicles roared next to them at seventy-five miles per hour. The semis plowed through enough volume to batter them with a wake of high pressure air. Each vehicular AI registered them and took no evasive action.

“So, Dalton, what kind of work do you do?”

Dalton revealed his job to Bean as they walked.

“Wow. A scientist.”

“Well, sort of. More of a data engineer. I manufacture bad data to fool the scientists and AI developers into making better software. AI Hardening. Like those bad HRAIs, and all that stuff last decade ago about the mass-automatic layoffs. With too much ‘good’ data, the AIs think anything ‘bad’ is actually bad. This method tries to teach them a little grace.”

“If something’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t?”

“Eh, kinda.” Dalton explained how he liked to walk the AIs into narrow local minima of high dimensional place to trap it into doing something stupid. Make the mistake so obvious, the engineers had no defense but to fix it. The hope was to forge better AI, but Dalton had succeeded to the point of perfection. Dalton did not mention the nasty batch of bad data that he needed to revert.

“Even today, you can still fool video by putting a watermark of the word ‘cat’ over any video feed, and many cheap AIs will still classify it as a cat. I try to walk the AIs into stupid-land.” Dalton said.

“Ah, so like those spoof shirts I see the kids wearing?” Bean asked, referring to t-shirts that tried to make the autonomous vehicles think you were a child and give you more ‘avoidance points’ than your neighbor should the car AI make an emergency decision. No individual design was proven to do that—it was just another pop-AI superstition.

“Yes, but I work over longer timeframes. Imagine that over the course of your entire drive. I change all the signs and slap enough adversarial stickers on your route to change where the car takes you.”

“What are adversarial stickers?”

“Yeah, you know, those white and black boxes or gaussian blurs punk kids throw over stop-signs to get autonomous cars to wreck? I do that sort of thing, but generalized against any AI.”

“Shit, sounds like I could have used someone like you.” But it came out like she-it. “Might’va made me look good to the machine. I know some guys would GPS spoof the last miles back to the warehouse to lower the overall route time. Others would use phone-multipliers to get them to overestimate actual traffic.”

Dalton had heard of those before. Some traffic multipliers were simple stacks of twenty phones placed in front of the delivery truck to generate fake traffic data. Most of these tactics evolved to give the delivery drivers a fighting chance to evade the firing algorithms.

Their walk came to a natural stopping point, and Bean dropped his bad. At this exit, he removed a small three-legged camping chair and unfolded his sign. It was a different one than Dalton had seen last night. White cardboard with a huge crease in the center and scrawled lettering. “Anything Helps! God Bless the People. Screw the AIs,” on one half, then a vinyl QR code to his giving site on the other.

“Here’s where we part ways, pal. Not going to lie, me standing next to a well-dressed fellow won’t gin up sympathy. You gotta split. Your best bet is standing over there a few yards down.” Bean pointed to the other side of the road.

“Thanks.” Dalton said. “Here I have a few chips for The Lucky Lady. I hope you can exchange them.” He handed Bean $10,000 worth.

“Thank you! They won’t let me in, but don’t worry, if I can't trade them out, I know someone else who can.” Bean said. He had a smile on his face and pocketed the composite plastic coins.

Dalton crossed the two-lane highway. The heat was growing, but he didn’t break a sweat. He held a thumb out with one hand and a large stack of chips in the other. Within a minute, Dalton had flagged down a newer Honda EV.

The window rolled down, and a white-haired man asked where he was heading.

Dalton could feel the cool air conditioning wafting out. “Back up to Fernley. I was on a party bus with some friends in Fallon, but they left me last night when I went to take a wiz.” Dalton almost bit his lip. He knew immediately he had oversold the whole situation. Anyone willing to take casino chips from some rando on the highway wasn’t interested in answers to unasked questions.

The driver sized him up and spoke. “Whatever man. I’ll give you a ride for some chips. Where are they to?”

“The Lucky Lady.”

“Sounds good. I ain’t banned there and they have a good buffet. Hop in, stranger.”

The older man talked the whole way down the Reno Highway into Fernley. All about the economy, and how both parties had screwed America over decades ago, and now it was up to the oligarchs to change the system. He gave plenty of suggestions for the organization of USA 2.0: rank-choice voting for representatives, quadratic voting in Congress, expansion of representation to one per seventy-five thousand inhabitants (instead of citizens), and elimination of the Post Office of all things. He was especially mad about the Chinese projection of power over the world, which he alternately called Chi-Com Threat / Communists / PLA or other names.

Dalton felt he was getting the worse end of the deal, and that maybe walking in the heat would have been better than listening to this guy. Dalton watched the time on the car’s screen flip every digit. Soon, the talkative man dropped Dalton off at his car. Dalton gave a hefty ‘donation’ of $30,000 of his earnings. Twenty Gs more than Bean. Enough for a small down payment on a new car or a month’s rent to a nice place.

“Wow, kid. Thanks!” The man replied. “Hey, if you need a ride in the future, let me send you my ride-share ID.” He showed him a QR code.

“Thanks, but I can’t save it.” Dalton showed his broken phone to the man.

“Jeez, son, looks like one of those old flip-phones. Well, you take care.”

Dalton waved back. Then he jumped in his car. From the information console, he logged into GitHub and reverted his changes. Nothing happened. No comments on his pushes, no forks, no nothing. With luck, corporate code security wouldn’t even interrogate him.

What a relief.