It was probably about 6:00 AM when I woke up, about usual for me when we were in the woods. Also as usual when we were camping, Jane was already up. I crawled out of the tent fully expecting to see her fishing already, which I did. What I didn't expect to see was her fishing and glowing. It wasn't very bright, but she was definitely glowing.

Bringing my intellect into full action, I walked toward her and said, "Jane, you're ah...glowing."

She looked down at herself and then at me and said, "I do believe you're right. Probably because of a combination of the fog, the early dawn light, and a bit of phosphorescent algae. Nothing unusual."

Sounded good, except for one thing. What was glowing was her face and hands, and her hair. Nothing else, and it was slowly getting brighter.

When Jane noticed that I wasn't buying it, she said, in a very gentle voice, "Mama you don't need to know yet. Why don't you go back to bed for a while?"

Mama turned around, crawled back into her sleeping bag, and went to sleep. I just stood there wondering what had just happened, when SHE came. Not that I saw anything, but I felt her presence.

Automatically I tried to curtsy, but she stopped me with a laugh. "You probably don't want to do that when you're chest deep in water, do you?"

"Sorry My Lady, it's just automatic when I meet you. Can't help myself, don't you know."

She laughed again. "And you're in the middle of a stream fishing. That's hardly surprising I guess. You always did love to fish."

"You know me all too well don't you? But you know that no true Scot could pass by any stream without his hand itching for a rod, you ken?

"Oh, by the way, who are you exactly, and what's going on here?"

Another soft, tinkling laugh. Then she said, "You don't really need to know yet either. It's still a bit too early for both of you, so, why don't you go back to sleep for a while too."

I shook myself a bit and found myself staring at an eddy that I'd planned on working on later in the morning. I was absolutely sure that there was a big one in their somewhere. And there was...something else. I'd been talking to someone? Nah, not possible, the only person within a mile was Mama and she was still asleep. Guess I was still sort of asleep too.

I started another cast; long, slow, and gentle and let the fly kiss the surface of the water. This was going to be a very good vacation.

------------------

When I got up that morning my face must have shown that I was puzzling at something because Jane asked me, "Why're you wearing your thinking cap so early in the morning?"

"What? Oh. Yeah. Well I had this really strange dream. I was living somewhere in northern Italy and I was married to a priest of all things. You were there too, but you were so tall that people called you 'the tree woman'."

Janie laughed. "Maybe you were remembering a past life or something."

"Yeah. Right. Last I looked, priests couldn't get married."

"Oh, well, guess you're right Mama. It was a silly idea, but, now that you're awake, how about I make us some breakfast?"

Once we'd finished eating and cleaning up, I caught Jane right before she picked up her rod. "There'll be no more slacking for you on this trip. Get ready to start sparring."

"AH...MOM... Do I have to?" She had the whine down PERFECTLY.

"Much better Jane. You have the phrasing and intonation exactly. Now go put on your gi, it's past time for me to see if you're ready for your 3rd Dan."

"Geez Mama, why didn't you say so at the beginning?"

She scampered back into the tent and starting throwing clothes around. She came back out stood across from me and bowed to her sensei.

"Very well. Is the student ready?"

"Yes Master."

"Very well. Begin!"

She attacked, I countered, and then we just existed in the moment and did our best to beat the shit out of each other. I don't mean that we lost control and went wild. It was as controlled and precise as any ballet. It was just, potentially, exceedingly deadly.

As her instructor, I didn't go easy on her. I kept her at it for almost an hour before I called a halt. If I weren't already training her 3 times a week, it could have been 6 hours overall, but the whole purpose of the exercise was for her to realize how good she was. I knew already. If I didn't, it would have meant that I was unfit to teach a beginning student much less her.

"Halt!"

Jane stopped and stood at attention.

"Staff now. Go fetch."

She went to the car and brought out our staves. They were short, only 5 feet long, but they were solid oak, which made up quite a bit for their small size.

<>

Another 20 minutes of staff work and I called a halt again.

"Attention!"

Jane snapped to and waited attentively.

"I have assessed your performance. You are qualified for 3rd Dan. Congratulations."

"Thank you, sensei!"

"Dismissed!"

Then we collapsed on each other laughing. We walked arm in arm to the stream and jumped into a lovely, still pool.

<>

Later when we we'd draped our gi's over some rocks and were letting the sun dry them and us while we wrung out our hair I said, "I think I'm ready for 7th Dan. Next time I'm near Seattle I think I'll drop by and let Master Oh beat the crap out of me and we'll see if I'm right."

Jane gushed, "Awesome! Cool!"

"How much of that was real and how much acting? You're getting good enough that I can't tell for sure any more."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"About half and half. I'm really proud of you Mama. Now, can I get back to fishing?"

I doubled over laughing. Didn't say anything. Didn't have to. The disgusted look on her face as she stalked away was more than enough to satisfy me.

Five days later, on the 14th, we drove back down the hill toward Salem and turned our phones on.

Isn't it surprising that the tiniest of actions can have repercussions that affect millions of people?

----------------------

I'd had four calls while we were gone.

"Jane, how many calls for you?"

"Three."

"OH SHIT!" Simultaneous, or close enough, from both of us.

Before I go on, I guess I'd better explain.

My people were under strict instructions -- no, not just strict, but threat of death strict -- NEVER to call about something more than once.

From the way Jane reacted, her instructions were similar.

All my messages were variations on the same theme, call RIGHT NOW.

Checked with Jane, hers were the same.

"Damn. They really are after us." Again that eerie synchrony.

Pulled off the road. We made our calls. Our messages were about the same business, just different aspects thereof.

Mine was that there had been a break-in and an enormously valuable, and, unfortunately, quite compact item had been stolen. Said business was, naturally, a branch of my largest and most lucrative customer. They wanted me to fetch it back for them.

Jane's seemed to be about the same break-in but only mentioned the theft of a singular flash drive with half of the security codes for access to what was a large segment of said business' new project development data.

"OK, they, whoever they are, are after us. Figuring out who they are and why they want us are our first priorities, agreed?"

"Right Mama. Then we need to recover what they stole."

"You should...now wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. You can just rewrite the security codes, can't you? Why would they steal them in the first place?"

"Unfortunately not this time Mama. The idiots in charge insisted that they wanted hard-wired security with the only access being over their air-gapped intranet. I can't redo it without traveling for about two weeks to their various branches to reset the codes manually. They can't do it. Part of their security protocol is a stipulation that only I can. And we can't shut down the company intranet as over 90% of their day-to-day traffic travels over it.

"They CAN shut down access to the new project sites easily enough, so that the codes can't be used, but then they can't access that data either. It's a pretty good delaying tactic if there's a competitor working on a similar project and wants some catch-up time. The only fast way to get things up and running again is to recover the current codes -- and make sure that whoever stole them can't use them. That's what's puzzling me. The thief can't use the codes unless he or she walks into a site and accesses the network from there. There's no access over the internet. With the increased security at all those sites now, getting inside would be almost impossible."

"Hmm, you're right Jane. But that doesn't explain my side of it. As the Chinese would say: 'Coincidence is the meeting of two things that were already heading toward each other that you just didn't see'."

"Then we're back to the first hypothesis, aren't we Mama? Someone out there wants us. But they did reveal something important. They don't know who we are."

"Right. If they did, they'd have come after us directly. Looks like our use of proxys has come in pretty handy."

<

Every time I do a special delivery, I do it as a different person and in a car that fits my current persona. I buy a different make, model, and color each time. They may look really scruffy or quite well taken care of. The only requirement is that they run well, that they cost under $2000, and are being sold by a private individual, not a business. You'd be surprised at how many cars fit that description.

Anyway... Somehow, none of the cars are ever registered or insured after I buy them, at least not by me. Once I've completed my run, I donate them to some local charity. I'll hand them the transfer papers -- already signed by the previous owner, and then I just walk away, change my looks in a quiet public restroom, and take my own car or some sort of public transportation home. Since it always happens within two days of my buying the car (cash only of course), nobody ever notices, except maybe the accountant for the original seller.

Why? All of them get letters from the charities I gave them to, usually just before Christmas, thanking them for their donations and also usually with something in the letter implying that they wouldn't mind getting another donation please, it being the "Holiday Season" and all.

I've noticed that most people are a bit greedy. When looking at hundreds of dollars of tax deductions, it's a very rare person who will turn it down by insisting that they'd never made the donation, especially when the paper trail proves that they did. By the time they get those letters, even the faintest memory of who bought the car is usually long gone. Besides, they didn't see ME anyway, they saw some other person.

Yes I know, to run those kind of expenses and still make a profit, my fees have to be high. OK extremely high. But, I'm the best, and the customers all know it. Whenever they hire me, they KNOW that it will be a quick, safe, and rapid delivery. Nobody is going to entrust something that may be worth millions to just anyone. Besides, if your fees aren't high enough, they don't take you seriously. They figure that if you don't charge very much, you aren't very good. Idiotic but true.>>

-----------------

OK, my turn. Mama can be a bit long-winded at times, but I'll have to admit that, just this once, her explanation was about as short as it could be...

Anyway, I use a similar, but MUCH more complicated system. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING my people do is encrypted. Passwords are a minimum of 30 characters and must be changed every 4 to 5 weeks. (It varies randomly.) In addition, any access to truly important data, such as sensitive employee records (like those showing who my hackers are), requires both a retinal scan and fingerprint scan in addition to the password. Nobody has access to that but me.

We farm out surveillance on the homes we protect. The ah...special sites...we monitor ourselves, over the internet of course, there's no other way. But, if there's a situation, we encrypt all data and it can't be decrypted until it is hand carried to a system that is NOT connected to the internet. Whatever drive the data is on is scanned for viruses, worms, rootkits, trojans, etc. before the data is copied onto the transport drive. After it's copied it's scanned again, then once again at the delivery site by a separate stand-alone system, then finally again just before it is decrypted by yet another system.

(I'm sure that you realize by now that my fees are substantially higher than Mama's.)

Every time we need to physically transfer data, a courier is called to the office, from a different courier company each time. They're sent to either Seattle, or San Francisco, where they hand their packages to one of my employees, who then takes the package home. Once they get there, they shred it.

Of course it's a dummy package, geez!

The real data is hand carried from the actual monitoring site, which is nowhere near our official office in Eugene, and eventually delivered to me, always by one of four employees. Somehow, each employee would swear that the person that they deliver to is different from the one the others see. Imagine that!

When it comes time to disburse funds to my hacker network, it's sent at the direction of an employee who lives in a rural area of Africa, via a satellite link. (Some people LIKE living way out in the boonies -- fortunately for me.)

Nobody knows that I'm the boss. The most anyone knows is that I'm another hacker who was involved in recruiting them. I get paid the same as anyone else. Nobody knows my real name either. Just as I don't know theirs. (Or so they think....LOL.)

Say what? You don't buy all that BS? Whatever could you mean?

Nobody in their right mind would put up with that kind of password length and frequency change except for a truly paranoid and unstable person?

(Mental batting of eyelashes.)

All right, you meanie. You win. I insist on at least 16 characters, and they're changed every 2-3 months. I mean, really, nobody could get into our system from an external source. If a password were to be entered incorrectly 3 times there'd be a 15 minute lockout. If there were another 3 errors, that person's access would be cut off until they came in to the office and reset their password there.

If it turned out that the employee wasn't the person trying to log into the system, we'd switch our private system over to a different web address. (We have 4-5 parked and waiting for use at all times -- all quite different of course.) That's never happened, yet, but a bit of constructive paranoia is not a bad thing. That's one thing Mama taught me that's engraved in my DNA by now.

The 30 character and 4-5 week garbage is just to impress the rubes...ah...customers with how tight our security is. It works too.

Every time a customer asks about it during an installation or a service call, whomever is out there complains long and loud about how freaking paranoid the CEO is about security and the insanely long passwords required, and so on.

Very impressive. Wows the customers every time. Figurative giggling here.

Hey I'm only 19. I'm still allowed to gush.

Right then, back to the other world.