Chapter Ten - Gloryless

I found myself in a... predicament.

All my years of personal training, facing challenges, testing myself, and succeeding where others had failed... it all amounted to nothing.

This was it.

This was how I died for the second, and maybe the last time.

Without glory. Without dignity.

"Baroness Biscuitblanket?" Sharp asked as she entered our shared bedroom.

I wasn't even sure I wanted to call out to her, but needs must. "I'm here," I grudgingly admitted.

There was a shift as she climbed onto the bed, then I saw her above me. She stared, then started to smile.

"Don't laugh."

She failed to listen, which really brought to question her abilities as a pupil if she couldn't even follow such simple instructions. "You're stuck!" she said past some giggles. "How did you even get squished in there?"

Sharp reached down and grabbed me. Somehow, while sleeping again, I'd ended up rolling a little and then fell down between the bed and the wall. There was nothing to grab onto once there, just a slippery wall and the bed's mattress, so I was stuck with nothing to do but wait.

"I suppose I move in my sleep now," I grumbled. "What time is it? Is your shift over?"

"Yup. Just finished. I should get changed, huh?" She placed me down, then tugged on the front of her shirt. "Do we have plans for today?"

"We should always have plans," I said. The more time Sharp spent training, the stronger she would become. "We don't quite have enough for some of the ideas I've cooked up. We might want to do another lost and found run. The walk across the city would make for good observation practice and cardio."

"Oh!" Sharp said as she seemed to suddenly remember something. She leaned way to the side and tugged something out of her sock. It was a small phone. "I found this in the lost and found today. Look, it's got no lock, and it had internet. I think it's a burner, like the one Jenny gave us."

She set the phone down and I padded over to it. She was right. It was a pre-bought burner phone. Nothing too special, the kind of thing that could be picked up at any number of kiosks across the city and preloaded with a few hours or days worth of service. This one had a quarter battery charge left and a weak internet connection.

"Good find," I said.

Sharp smiled. "Thank you!"

"Do you know how to use this kind of thing? It could be a way to level up your Tech stat."

"I do. I never had a phone of my own, but the orphanage had a weekly secretarial studies class. It was all about net safety, using word processors, emails... how to turn a computer on and off. That kind of thing."

That seemed... like a pretty decent set of basic skills to have, actually. It was like teaching someone to drive a car. Not the depth they'd need if the car was ever broken or if they needed to drive in a precarious situation, but good enough to get from A to B. "Another initiative to turn you into good workers?"

"Yup!" she said.

I nodded, then tapped the screen with a paw. I managed to open a web browser, then cursed and mumbled my way into entering the name of a site in the search engine.

"What are you looking for?" Sharp asked.

"It's an old forum client," I said. "For tech support for modems that came out about twenty years back. They're quite common, and get a lot of issues, so the forum is very active."

"Oh," Sharp said. "Does this have anything to do with us?"

I glanced up to her. "So, you know how I wasn't always a cat."

"Uh-huh," she said.

"Well, I had a job before all of this." I hadn't yet gone into all of the details about what that work entailed. I think Sharp suspected I was some sort of edgerunner, which was fine. "My last job ended in my... demise, but I was still successful, which means I should have been paid."

And I found it, right on the page it was meant to be on.

Thread Title:

[Help Needed] Modem keeps resetting randomly - Model: LinkSurge 500

Original Post:

Posted by: TechTurtle123 | Posted on: 2111-09-23 14:32:09

Hey everyone,

I've been having an issue with my old LinkSurge 500 modem. It keeps resetting randomly every couple of hours. It's been fine for years, but now it's really getting annoying. Sometimes it works fine for a day, then out of nowhere it'll start resetting again every 15-20 minutes.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I've tried the following so far:

Power-cycling the modem.

Factory reset.

Checked for any firmware updates (none available).

Nothing seems to be helping. Could this be a hardware issue? Any advice would be appreciated!

TechTurtle123

Reply #1:

Posted by: ModemMaster98 | Posted on: 2111-09-23 15:04:37

Hey TechTurtle123,

The LinkSurge 500 has a known issue with overheating over time. Check if the modem is getting too hot to touch. If that's the case, you might want to open it up and clean out any dust that's accumulated inside. Sometimes the thermal paste on the chip dries out, and that can cause random resets.

ModemMaster98

I scrolled down, which proved to be a pain to do with paws which didn't have anywhere near the same dexterity as a human thumb.

Reply #17:

Posted by: RhymingVerse4578 | Posted on: 2124-03-03 15:04:37

The modem is confirmed down.

Good work.

I'm going to hit the gym until it's ready to work again.

And there it was! A little more conspicuous than was ideal, but the message was clear. The cash was at one of my dead drop locations. "We have something to do tonight," I said.

"We do?" Sharp asked. "Uh, does it have to do with modems?"

"No, not at all. It has to do with picking up the earnings of my last job. And perhaps hitting the gym. How much money do you have now?"

"Uh, just a little over two hundred dollars!" Sharp said. She sounded proud of that.

I tsked. The gym was in the northern end of Cambridge, close to the edge of the city. Mostly it was there because I could drive into the city, pick the dead drop up, and be off to my home in just a couple of hours. Less if I scheduled things just right with the train or a hover car service.

Not that I was stupid enough to pick up my own dead drops. That was an easy way to get nailed. I usually hired a respectable courier service to do that for me, they'd move it to a bank who'd take care of things for me. The more steps the better, really, and I wasn't usually in a hurry to get paid.

Each dead drop location was different, but there was a code to it that was easy enough to follow. In this case, the numbers in the username pointed to the district, and the hint about a gym filled in the rest.

Right... two hundred might get us to that end of the city and back. It wouldn't pay for a subscription to the gym though. And what would Sharp even do with a duffle full of cash? Get mugged, probably.

"Damn, we are not ready for this," I said.

"Ready for what?" Sharp asked.

"To cross the entire city for a moderately-risky task. I think we're going to need to raise more money."

"Aww," she said.

I tilted my head to the side a little, then glanced down at the phone. This thing would let me communicate to others. Which... might mean calling in a few more favours. I owed a minor one to Paris already, but as soon as I had access to my accounts again I could wire her a few thousand and it would all be well. Who else would be willing to help if I asked?

"Sharp, did you like that delivery job?" I asked.

"It was okay, for the most part," she said. "My legs still hurt a little."

Grinning--or the closest kitty approximation to it I could manage--I hopped onto the phone and started to navigate the web again, this time to an entirely different forum. Soon, I was creating a temporary account in one tab while working through the other site

Sharp kept watch as I mistyped the same things over and over. Eventually she started to help by typing for me. "So, we're sending a message to a delivery company?" she asked.

"A courier company," I said. "It's different. And we're passing ourselves off as me."

"Uh..."

"Don't think about it too hard," I advised. If we got a reply quickly, then Sharp would have a second job, one that was guaranteed to pay significantly better than being a waitress. And if that job was a little bit more dangerous, then that would just mean more opportunities to grow some stats, wouldn't it?

The phone buzzed as we received a reply, and I got to practice my cat smiles again. "I guess that means we're heading out again."

***