The wind whistles through the lines suspending Pablo in the air. He un-crosses his legs, causing them to dangle straight down below him, as he checks the phone strapped to his left thigh. The map on the screen shows that he should bank to the left right about... now.

He pulls on the left cord, and his parafoil dips and causes his body to swing to the right like a pendulum. He has an unobstructed view of the valley here, tan and brown and dark green from the sagebrush scrub, cropped by two ranges of snow-capped mountains, and just low enough altitude to see the burros.

Pablo's father was a shepherd, working a series of grazing permits between Winnemucca, Nevada and Twin Falls, Idaho that the same Basque family had for probably three generations. Those old families usually hired Peruvian shepherds like Pablo's father because they were adept at dealing with the mountainous, irregular terrain of this country. Pablo would sometimes spend summers with his father, moving with the herds aso scans the QR code on its side with his phone to connect to its diagnostics wifi, and gives it the authentication code the burro's owners sent him when they contracted him for this repair job.

He scrolls through the log messages that show up on his phone now, and he notices a long string of "DYNAMICS MISMATCH: bone_strut1_right k = 10.3, should be 1 :: dynamics out of tolerance, stopping". In english that means that the front right shock is ten times stiffer than it should be (or thereabouts, that number is a guess the computer made based on how the rest of the burro moves).

He walks up to the front right shock and leans down on it. It compresses a few inches and then stops, clearly stuck on something. He pulls a multitool out of its holster on his belt and pops the top of the shock off, slides the shock apart, and as he does something falls out onto the ground. Pablo picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Then he takes the seals out, re-greases them, puts them back, puts the shock back together. He leans on the side of the burro and it springs back with a satisfying squish.

He takes out his phone and tells the burro to do a dynamics re-cal. This causes it to drive forward, and then back, and make left and right turns at various speeds. Pablo checks his phone again, sees the recalibration was successful, tells it to resume the path it was on and marks the job as completed.

After a minute or so of pulling on cords and straps and a brisk jog Pablo is back in the air. He spies a cloud that looks like it might have a thermal under it, motors over there and it does. He rides the thermal up to about a thousand feet, swinging around the column of air like one of those carnival rides where you sit in a seat suspended by chains connected to a big disc and it spins the disc around, flinging the chairs out to the sides. He then levels out and looks down at the ridge that his house is on.

Pablo lives in a converted office trailer (the kind they use on construction sites) sitting on a flat clearing about 1500ft of elevation above the valley floor, totally inaccessible except by paramotor or helicopter or STOL plane. The office trailer is a remnant of a failed mining prospect in a shaft whose main adit as about a hundred feet away at the side of the rock face. Pablo was never entirely clear on how they got the trailer up here but he suspects they might have actually winched it up the side of the mountain, probably with strong steel cables and over the course of several days.

It might strike some as odd to choose to live at such a perch, but this is an ideal location for keeping track of the constant stream of burro traffic on the valley floor; line of sight for eyes and for antennas. Also there's a steady water supply from a spring the miners had unintentionally dug up (part of the reason why the mine didn't pan out). Fresh water is a rare privilege in this arid climate. It's probably full of mercury and whatever else so you have to distill it if you want to drink it but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing. Pablo often shares his trailer with other burro techs that come through following the herds, but today he has the whole place to himself. He makes a textbook landing on the little gravel strip in front of the house, unstraps and heads inside.

He opens the door, takes off his hiking boots, puts a liter of water in an electric kettle and switches it on, puts away his wallet and keys and-- what's this? The thing that fell out of the front shock of the last burro he worked on fell out of his pocket when he pulled out his keys. He picks it up off the floor and inspects it.

It looks kind of like a USB stick, but with a wire sticking out of one end that's wrapped around the outside and tied in a kind of knot. He unties the wire, following it with his thumb and forefinger to see what connector it has on the other end, but there isn't one. Maybe it's, like, a whip antenna? The kettle clicks off, the water in it at a roaring boil. He puts the thing down and makes tea.

Pablo takes his tea and his newfound gadget and sits down at his computer. He turns it over in his hand, running his finger over the USB port, then plugs it in. Nothing happens. He pokes around the operating system device tree to figure out what this thing is (is it a thumbdrive? a tv tuner?) and all it shows up as is a tty ("teletype", like the old stock market ticker tape machines). Pablo opens a tty console.

Initially it's totally blank. Often things have command terminals as tty devices, but they usually print something when you plug them in. Here there's nothing. He tries pushing the keys that usually get a prompt to show up in these consoles (enter, CTRL-c, etc) and they don't do anything. Unable to think of anything better to do he types "info", and nothing seems to happen, but after several seconds it prints: "strider: how about some info from you first? how's the cattle?", and then "gollum:".

Why does he have to be Gollum? Can't he at least be Bilbo?

"gollum: the cattle are", a noticeable pause while he thinks of something to say, "healthy"

"strider: are they still on their way? ETA?"

"gollum: ETA depends on you. how do you want to receive them?"

Pablo has absolutely no idea what he's saying at this point but curiosity won't let him shut up.

"strider: we already agreed on that. You tell me when to open the gate, they walk inside, I close the gate."

"strider: ETA?"

"gollum: waiting on bofa", so that when "strider:" asks what "bofa" is he can reply with "deez nuts".

"strider: we already agreed we're not paying fiat. xmr in escrow, just waiting on delivery"

"xmr" here is presumably the cryptocurrency.

Actually Gollum doesn't even make sense. Strider meets Bilbo at the inn on the edge of the Shire, not Gollum. Pablo is doubly offended now.

"gollum: can we talk in person?"

Pablo has no idea why he said this, some imp or trickster spirit possessed him in the moment and he typed it despite himself. Whoever these people were they were clearly up to something sketchy, and sketchy people are easily sketched out, and when they are you don't want to be close enough that they can reach you. Pablo is really letting his curiosity get the better of him.

A few minutes pass.

"strider: tomorrow, 9am, the little griddle. I'll be wearing a black hat."

Pablo only knows of one Little Griddle, a diner at the north end of the Paradise Valley complex.

Paradise Valley the geographic location is on the western side of the Santa Rosa range, north of Winnemucca, with Nevada Route 290 running up through it. Years of no maintenance means the actual road is a pock-marked, flaking, crumbling mess, little better than a cattle run, but it still exists on maps so people still use it as a landmark. In the old days Paradise Valley had been a little hamlet with a few alfalfa farms, the ones with center pivots where the crops are planted in perfect circles and they look from the air like Petri dishes or the wells in assay plates. Population: maybe a few dozen.

The Paradise Valley Complex started as a couple of homesteads in the BLM land to the east of the old Paradise Valley, run by an Instagram influencer who had a business selling feminine hygiene products made of moss. Like a lot of these Complexes, over a few years a group of her followers acquired a block of homestead parcels and joined them together into something between a suburb and a squatter camp. Big steel pole barns, the kind of building often used for big warehouses, spread out semi-randomly over the landscape with chicken houses and trailers filling in the interstitial space. Then over time as the place grew it swallowed up the old hamlet.

And like a lot of these Complexes over time it evolved into a kind of corporation when someone started doing something that made money and recruited more and more of the other people at the complex until essentially the whole place was engaged in that one enterprise. At Paradise valley that enterprise was growing new, genetically modified varieties of Mormon Tea (Ephedra Viridis), using modern biology to tweak the alkaloids it produces to make uppers, downers, mild psychedelics, tea that makes you hear differently, tea that makes you feel like your right arm belongs to someone else. Mormon Tea is native to this area and while the wild type plant grows pretty slowly the cultivars they grow there are like any other agricultural crop, planted in neat rows and fed water and nitrates by drip irrigation hoses.

Pablo's only two ridges over from Paradise Valley, so it's a pretty easy and short flight to get over there. He leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling for a few minutes, and then he's made up his mind.

It's the next morning. Pablo is up at two thousand feet, the brisk morning air hitting him in the face, a stream of grass and shrubs flowing below him. He's decided that the best way to get the most information out of whoever it is he's going to be meeting is to bluff the whole time. Give vague answers, talk in code. If they get frustrated enough maybe they'll just explain what's going on. Ahead is a stand of pole barns and underbrush of trailers, chicken houses, high tunnels. He sets up for final glide.

He touches down in a field about a quarter mile away from the diner and stashes his paramotor under a bush. As he makes his way over the morning frost crackles under his boots. Up a little ways is a building that looks like a singlewide that had fifty things growing out of it like mushrooms growing out of a log: an old airstream trailer, a room whose walls are old railroad ties, a sunroom with walls made of mud inset with old beer bottles and a ceiling of polycarbonate sheeting, a refrigerated semi trailer, a sailboat, a passenger rail car. Pablo walks along side it close enough that he can look in the front windows but far enough away that it doesn't seem like he is.

Sitting at a booth by a window is a woman in a floral dress, wearing a black cowboy hat, drinking a smoothie. Fresh fruit is hard to get outside of socal these days, so smoothies are made from a puree of genetically modified potatoes that produce all the citrus compounds that you'd find in lemons and limes and mangoes. They don't have that much sugar raw but if you puree it and add a little bit of the right enzymes the starches break down and then it tastes just like Odwalla. Pablo walks along the length of the place to see if there's anyone else he can see from the windows and there isn't.

He walks in the front door. The floor is fake marble, like the kind they used in banks in the 20th century. The walls are lined with stained wood tongue and groove. Along the front wall is a series of booths with plastic-and-particleboard tables and green fake leather benches, and along the back wall is a bar (with no one behind it, though that's to be expected at this early hour). Above the ordinary pane windows, angled between the wall and the roof is a series of stained glass church windows that give the light in the room a multicolor tinge that mostly averages out to the dull glow of a tungsten filament in a lamp that isn't getting the voltage it should. The cieling is lined with old greenbacks, the old Fed money.

Pablo walks over to the woman, leans forward and says, "Strider?". "Yes, sit down," she commands.

"You're probably wondering why I asked to meet" he says. No response. "Do you know where the cattle are now?"

A hand appears to Pablo's right, puts a big coffee cup on the table in front of him, and disappears before he can see who it was attached to. Pablo takes a sip. He isn't surprised that it doesn't contain coffee, coffee is a ratified thing that has to be imported all the way from South America, but he is surprised that the tea has a little astringent bite to it, certainly more than the floral, syrupy stuff he's used to.

The woman speaks: "Actually I do. They arrived at about 1am last night. So I'd like to know what the fuck you asked me to come here for."

Pablo takes a ten second swig from the coffee mug to stall for time. "Well, uh," he drawls, "as you know, uh,"

"What I would like to know," said the living playing card (the queen of clubs) sitting in front of Pablo, "is who you are and how you got into our comms."

Pablo wraps his hand around the pumpkin he was drinking out of and takes another swig. "My nname is PPablo PPacccheo," he toots, his voice sounding like a cross between a kazoo and the "womp womp" noise the adults make in Peanuts. "I'm a burrrrrro tech in the bueeeena vistaa vaaaaley. I fooooound your raaadio in a burrrro ssshock."

The queen says "Shit, already?" or "Ship, ahoy?" or "Shop, aardvark?" She moves her head left and right and backward at the same time. Her voice comes out of the back of Pablo's head: "Where is it? Where's the conga line?" "Wwhat?", says Peanut. "What's the camber link?" Poodle angle bark bark. "Waffle fingle. sion of jaological a's powerful culturthrough the . sellintellates meetmurderger itinstehy of .All dangdog they hopped from mountain spring to mountain spring, and he often felt like tending his flock of burros was kind of the same thing. Looking down at them from the air like this is not dissimilar to looking down at a flock of white sheep from a mountain outcrop, when you're at a far enough distance that you can't see the wheels.

He flattens out of his bank and cuts the motor powering the propeller strapped to his back to start descending, checking his phone to make sure he has the right glide ratio to run out of altitude right at his destination. Five seconds... flare... three... Pablo sticks his right foot out in front of him and the ground comes up to meet it, and after a few seconds of awkward jogging he's stopped and his chute is floating to the ground.

There's no graceful way to unstrap yourself from a paramotor, not that Pablo cares. He stumbles forward, stretches, and surveys the land about him. At three o'clock and about a quarter mile away is the problem burro he came here to fix, the red light at the top of its frame flashing. Pablo unstraps his pack from the paramotor and heads over to meet it.

Burros (officially "Battery-electric Unmanned Rover for Remote Operations" or BURRO) have six wheels that look like they came off a fat-tire e-bike, arranged in a kind of A-frame configuratio scans the QR code on its side with his phone to connect to its diagnostics wifi, and gives it the authentication code the burro's owners sent him when they contracted him for this repair job.

He scrolls through the log messages that show up on his phone now, and he notices a long string of "DYNAMICS MISMATCH: bone_strut1_right k = 10.3, should be 1 :: dynamics out of tolerance, stopping". In english that means that the front right shock is ten times stiffer than it should be (or thereabouts, that number is a guess the computer made based on how the rest of the burro moves).

He walks up to the front right shock and leans down on it. It compresses a few inches and then stops, clearly stuck on something. He pulls a multitool out of its holster on his belt and pops the top of the shock off, slides the shock apart, and as he does something falls out onto the ground. Pablo picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Then he takes the seals out, re-greases them, puts them back, puts the shock back together. He leans on the side of the burro and it springs back with a satisfying squish.

He takes out his phone and tells the burro to do a dynamics re-cal. This causes it to drive forward, and then back, and make left and right turns at various speeds. Pablo checks his phone again, sees the recalibration was successful, tells it to resume the path it was on and marks the job as completed.

After a minute or so of pulling on cords and straps and a brisk jog Pablo is back in the air. He spies a cloud that looks like it might have a thermal under it, motors over there and it does. He rides the thermal up to about a thousand feet, swinging around the column of air like one of those carnival rides where you sit in a seat suspended by chains connected to a big disc and it spins the disc around, flinging the chairs out to the sides. He then levels out and looks down at the ridge that his house is on.

Pablo lives in a converted office trailer (the kind they use on construction sites) sitting on a flat clearing about 1500ft of elevation above the valley floor, totally inaccessible except by paramotor or helicopter or STOL plane. The office trailer is a remnant of a failed mining prospect in a shaft whose main adit as about a hundred feet away at the side of the rock face. Pablo was never entirely clear on how they got the trailer up here but he suspects they might have actually winched it up the side of the mountain, probably with strong steel cables and over the course of several days.

It might strike some as odd to choose to live at such a perch, but this is an ideal location for keeping track of the constant stream of burro traffic on the valley floor; line of sight for eyes and for antennas. Also there's a steady water supply from a spring the miners had unintentionally dug up (part of the reason why the mine didn't pan out). Fresh water is a rare privilege in this arid climate. It's probably full of mercury and whatever else so you have to distill it if you want to drink it but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing. Pablo often shares his trailer with other burro techs that come through following the herds, but today he has the whole place to himself. He makes a textbook landing on the little gravel strip in front of the house, unstraps and heads inside.

He opens the door, takes off his hiking boots, puts a liter of water in an electric kettle and switches it on, puts away his wallet and keys and-- what's this? The thing that fell out of the front shock of the last burro he worked on fell out of his pocket when he pulled out his keys. He picks it up off the floor and inspects it.

It looks kind of like a USB stick, but with a wire sticking out of one end that's wrapped around the outside and tied in a kind of knot. He unties the wire, following it with his thumb and forefinger to see what connector it has on the other end, but there isn't one. Maybe it's, like, a whip antenna? The kettle clicks off, the water in it at a roaring boil. He puts the thing down and makes tea.

Pablo takes his tea and his newfound gadget and sits down at his computer. He turns it over in his hand, running his finger over the USB port, then plugs it in. Nothing happens. He pokes around the operating system device tree to figure out what this thing is (is it a thumbdrive? a tv tuner?) and all it shows up as is a tty ("teletype", like the old stock market ticker tape machines). Pablo opens a tty console.

Initially it's totally blank. Often things have command terminals as tty devices, but they usually print something when you plug them in. Here there's nothing. He tries pushing the keys that usually get a prompt to show up in these consoles (enter, CTRL-c, etc) and they don't do anything. Unable to think of anything better to do he types "info", and nothing seems to happen, but after several seconds it prints: "strider: how about some info from you first? how's the cattle?", and then "gollum:".

Why does he have to be Gollum? Can't he at least be Bilbo?

"gollum: the cattle are", a noticeable pause while he thinks of something to say, "healthy"

"strider: are they still on their way? ETA?"

"gollum: ETA depends on you. how do you want to receive them?"

Pablo has absolutely no idea what he's saying at this point but curiosity won't let him shut up.

"strider: we already agreed on that. You tell me when to open the gate, they walk inside, I close the gate."

"strider: ETA?"

"gollum: waiting on bofa", so that when "strider:" asks what "bofa" is he can reply with "deez nuts".

"strider: we already agreed we're not paying fiat. xmr in escrow, just waiting on delivery"

"xmr" here is presumably the cryptocurrency.

Actually Gollum doesn't even make sense. Strider meets Bilbo at the inn on the edge of the Shire, not Gollum. Pablo is doubly offended now.

"gollum: can we talk in person?"

Pablo has no idea why he said this, some imp or trickster spirit possessed him in the moment and he typed it despite himself. Whoever these people were they were clearly up to something sketchy, and sketchy people are easily sketched out, and when they are you don't want to be close enough that they can reach you. Pablo is really letting his curiosity get the better of him.

A few minutes pass.

"strider: tomorrow, 9am, the little griddle. I'll be wearing a black hat."

Pablo only knows of one Little Griddle, a diner at the north end of the Paradise Valley complex.

Paradise Valley the geographic location is on the western side of the Santa Rosa range, north of Winnemucca, with Nevada Route 290 running up through it. Years of no maintenance means the actual road is a pock-marked, flaking, crumbling mess, little better than a cattle run, but it still exists on maps so people still use it as a landmark. In the old days Paradise Valley had been a little hamlet with a few alfalfa farms, the ones with center pivots where the crops are planted in perfect circles and they look from the air like Petri dishes or the wells in assay plates. Population: maybe a few dozen.

The Paradise Valley Complex started as a couple of homesteads in the BLM land to the east of the old Paradise Valley, run by an Instagram influencer who had a business selling feminine hygiene products made of moss. Like a lot of these Complexes, over a few years a group of her followers acquired a block of homestead parcels and joined them together into something between a suburb and a squatter camp. Big steel pole barns, the kind of building often used for big warehouses, spread out semi-randomly over the landscape with chicken houses and trailers filling in the interstitial space. Then over time as the place grew it swallowed up the old hamlet.

And like a lot of these Complexes over time it evolved into a kind of corporation when someone started doing something that made money and recruited more and more of the other people at the complex until essentially the whole place was engaged in that one enterprise. At Paradise valley that enterprise was growing new, genetically modified varieties of Mormon Tea (Ephedra Viridis), using modern biology to tweak the alkaloids it produces to make uppers, downers, mild psychedelics, tea that makes you hear differently, tea that makes you feel like your right arm belongs to someone else. Mormon Tea is native to this area and while the wild type plant grows pretty slowly the cultivars they grow there are like any other agricultural crop, planted in neat rows and fed water and nitrates by drip irrigation hoses.

Pablo's only two ridges over from Paradise Valley, so it's a pretty easy and short flight to get over there. He leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling for a few minutes, and then he's made up his mind.

It's the next morning. Pablo is up at two thousand feet, the brisk morning air hitting him in the face, a stream of grass and shrubs flowing below him. He's decided that the best way to get the most information out of whoever it is he's going to be meeting is to bluff the whole time. Give vague answers, talk in code. If they get frustrated enough maybe they'll just explain what's going on. Ahead is a stand of pole barns and underbrush of trailers, chicken houses, high tunnels. He sets up for final glide.

He touches down in a field about a quarter mile away from the diner and stashes his paramotor under a bush. As he makes his way over the morning frost crackles under his boots. Up a little ways is a building that looks like a singlewide that had fifty things growing out of it like mushrooms growing out of a log: an old airstream trailer, a room whose walls are old railroad ties, a sunroom with walls made of mud inset with old beer bottles and a ceiling of polycarbonate sheeting, a refrigerated semi trailer, a sailboat, a passenger rail car. Pablo walks along side it close enough that he can look in the front windows but far enough away that it doesn't seem like he is.

Sitting at a booth by a window is a woman in a floral dress, wearing a black cowboy hat, drinking a smoothie. Fresh fruit is hard to get outside of socal these days, so smoothies are made from a puree of genetically modified potatoes that produce all the citrus compounds that you'd find in lemons and limes and mangoes. They don't have that much sugar raw but if you puree it and add a little bit of the right enzymes the starches break down and then it tastes just like Odwalla. Pablo walks along the length of the place to see if there's anyone else he can see from the windows and there isn't.

He walks in the front door. The floor is fake marble, like the kind they used in banks in the 20th century. The walls are lined with stained wood tongue and groove. Along the front wall is a series of booths with plastic-and-particleboard tables and green fake leather benches, and along the back wall is a bar (with no one behind it, though that's to be expected at this early hour). Above the ordinary pane windows, angled between the wall and the roof is a series of stained glass church windows that give the light in the room a an multicolor tinge that mostly averages out to the dull glow of a tungsten filament in a lamp that isn't getting the voltage it should. The cieling is lined with old greenbacks, the old Fed money.

Pablo walks over to the woman, leans forward and says, "Strider?". "Yes, sit down," she commands.

"You're probably wondering why I asked to meet" he says. No response. "Do you know where the cattle are now?"

A hand appears to Pablo's right, puts a big coffee cup on the table in front of him, and disappears before he can see who it was attached to. Pablo takes a sip. He isn't surprised that it doesn't contain coffee, coffee is a ratified thing that has to be imported all the way from South America, but he is surprised that the tea has a little astringent bite to it, certainly more than the floral, syrupy stuff he's used to.

The woman speaks: "Actually I do. They arrived at about 1am last night. So I'd like to know what the fuck you asked me to come here for."

Pablo takes a ten second swig from the coffee mug to stall for time. "Well, uh," he drawls, "as you know, uh,"

"What I would like to know," said the living playing card (the queen of clubs) sitting in front of Pablo, "is who you are and how you got into our comms."

Pablo wraps his hand around the pumpkin he was drinking out of and takes another swig. "My nname is PPablo PPacccheo," he toots, his voice sounding like a cross between a kazoo and the "womp womp" noise the adults make in Peanuts. "I'm a burrrrrro tech in the bueeeena vistaa vaaaaley. I fooooound your raaadio in a burrrro ssshock."

The queen says "Shit, already?" or "Ship, ahoy?" or "Shop, aardvark?" She moves her head left and right and backward at the same time. Her voice comes out of the back of Pablo's head: "Where is it? Where's the conga line?" "Wwhat?", says Peanut. "What's the camber link?" Poodle angle bark bark. "Waffle fingle. sion of jaological a's powerful culturthrough the . sellintellates meetmurderger itinstehy of .All dangdogon; a series of triangles where two of the sides are mountain bike shocks and the bottom side is about three feet off the ground and horizontal. Attached to that floor is four steel tubes that connect to a roof, and on the roof is the solar array that provides all the energy the burro needs to move cross-country over virtually any terrain at a steady 30mph.

Burros are usually used to transport goods to the remote homesteads dotted throughout the intermountain west, mostly on land that was BLM before the 2029 and 2032 Homestead Acts. The feds didn't have the money to bail out the state flood insurers in the gulf states and fire insurance in California after they went bust (at least without creating even more inflation), and they didn't have the money to bail out the economy after the 2028 crash, but what they did have was land that wasn't doing anything and a cottagecore Instagram propaganda army. Most of the people that took up homesteads didn't last a year. Most of the ones that did make a go of it are various kinds of cult compound (the word "compound" is unfashionable and they prefer the term "complex"), and the really big ones of those are quickly becoming the backbone of American industry and commerce. But they're still spread out enough that it isn't cost-effective to build road or rail links between them, so when people need goods or people to be somewhere fast they fly, and when they don't they send burros.

Burros all have different origins and destinations, and in the early days they would just take whatever route the lidar topo data said was fastest, but there are many things treacherous to a burro that don't show up on lidar and aren't legible to a shortest-path algorithm. So now they prefer to follow paths that many burros have taken before them, and that means along common routes they move like herds of animals. And that means people like Pablo can do a good business following the flock and taking jobs to fix any that get stuck or lost.

This one seems to be stuck. Pablo scans the QR code on its side with his phone to connect to its diagnostics wifi, and gives it the authentication code the burro's owners sent him when they contracted him for this repair job.

He scrolls through the log messages that show up on his phone now, and he notices a long string of "DYNAMICS MISMATCH: bone_strut1_right k = 10.3, should be 1 :: dynamics out of tolerance, stopping". In english that means that the front right shock is ten times stiffer than it should be (or thereabouts, that number is a guess the computer made based on how the rest of the burro moves).

He walks up to the front right shock and leans down on it. It compresses a few inches and then stops, clearly stuck on something. He pulls a multitool out of its holster on his belt and pops the top of the shock off, slides the shock apart, and as he does something falls out onto the ground. Pablo picks it up and puts it in his pocket. Then he takes the seals out, re-greases them, puts them back, puts the shock back together. He leans on the side of the burro and it springs back with a satisfying squish.

He takes out his phone and tells the burro to do a dynamics re-cal. This causes it to drive forward, and then back, and make left and right turns at various speeds. Pablo checks his phone again, sees the recalibration was successful, tells it to resume the path it was on and marks the job as completed.

After a minute or so of pulling on cords and straps and a brisk jog Pablo is back in the air. He spies a cloud that looks like it might have a thermal under it, motors over there and it does. He rides the thermal up to about a thousand feet, swinging around the column of air like one of those carnival rides where you sit in a seat suspended by chains connected to a big disc and it spins the disc around, flinging the chairs out to the sides. He then levels out and looks down at the ridge that his house is on.

Pablo lives in a converted office trailer (the kind they use on construction sites) sitting on a flat clearing about 1500ft of elevation above the valley floor, totally inaccessible except by paramotor or helicopter or STOL plane. The office trailer is a remnant of a failed mining prospect in a shaft whose main adit as about a hundred feet away at the side of the rock face. Pablo was never entirely clear on how they got the trailer up here but he suspects they might have actually winched it up the side of the mountain, probably with strong steel cables and over the course of several days.

It might strike some as odd to choose to live at such a perch, but this is an ideal location for keeping track of the constant stream of burro traffic on the valley floor; line of sight for eyes and for antennas. Also there's a steady water supply from a spring the miners had unintentionally dug up (part of the reason why the mine didn't pan out). Fresh water is a rare privilege in this arid climate. It's probably full of mercury and whatever else so you have to distill it if you want to drink it but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing. Pablo often shares his trailer with other burro techs that come through following the herds, but today he has the whole place to himself. He makes a textbook landing on the little gravel strip in front of the house, unstraps and heads inside.

He opens the door, takes off his hiking boots, puts a liter of water in an electric kettle and switches it on, puts away his wallet and keys and-- what's this? The thing that fell out of the front shock of the last burro he worked on fell out of his pocket when he pulled out his keys. He picks it up off the floor and inspects it.

It looks kind of like a USB stick, but with a wire sticking out of one end that's wrapped around the outside and tied in a kind of knot. He unties the wire, following it with his thumb and forefinger to see what connector it has on the other end, but there isn't one. Maybe it's, like, a whip antenna? The kettle clicks off, the water in it at a roaring boil. He puts the thing down and makes tea.

Pablo takes his tea and his newfound gadget and sits down at his computer. He turns it over in his hand, running his finger over the USB port, then plugs it in. Nothing happens. He pokes around the operating system device tree to figure out what this thing is (is it a thumbdrive? a tv tuner?) and all it shows up as is a tty ("teletype", like the old stock market ticker tape machines). Pablo opens a tty console.

Initially it's totally blank. Often things have command terminals as tty devices, but they usually print something when you plug them in. Here there's nothing. He tries pushing the keys that usually get a prompt to show up in these consoles (enter, CTRL-c, etc) and they don't do anything. Unable to think of anything better to do he types "info", and nothing seems to happen, but after several seconds it prints: "strider: how about some info from you first? how's the cattle?", and then "gollum:".

Why does he have to be Gollum? Can't he at least be Bilbo?

"gollum: the cattle are", a noticeable pause while he thinks of something to say, "healthy"

"strider: are they still on their way? ETA?"

"gollum: ETA depends on you. how do you want to receive them?"

Pablo has absolutely no idea what he's saying at this point but curiosity won't let him shut up.

"strider: we already agreed on that. You tell me when to open the gate, they walk inside, I close the gate."

"strider: ETA?"

"gollum: waiting on bofa", so that when "strider:" asks what "bofa" is he can reply with "deez nuts".

"strider: we already agreed we're not paying fiat. xmr in escrow, just waiting on delivery"

"xmr" here is presumably the cryptocurrency.

Actually Gollum doesn't even make sense. Strider meets Bilbo at the inn on the edge of the Shire, not Gollum. Pablo is doubly offended now.

"gollum: can we talk in person?"

Pablo has no idea why he said this, some imp or trickster spirit possessed him in the moment and he typed it despite himself. Whoever these people were they were clearly up to something sketchy, and sketchy people are easily sketched out, and when they are you don't want to be close enough that they can reach you. Pablo is really letting his curiosity get the better of him.

A few minutes pass.

"strider: tomorrow, 9am, the little griddle. I'll be wearing a black hat."

Pablo only knows of one Little Griddle, a diner at the north end of the Paradise Valley complex.

Paradise Valley the geographic location is on the western side of the Santa Rosa range, north of Winnemucca, with Nevada Route 290 running up through it. Years of no maintenance means the actual road is a pock-marked, flaking, crumbling mess, little better than a cattle run, but it still exists on maps so people still use it as a landmark. In the old days Paradise Valley had been a little hamlet with a few alfalfa farms, the ones with center pivots where the crops are planted in perfect circles and they look from the air like Petri dishes or the wells in assay plates. Population: maybe a few dozen.

The Paradise Valley Complex started as a couple of homesteads in the BLM land to the east of the old Paradise Valley, run by an Instagram influencer who had a business selling feminine hygiene products made of moss. Like a lot of these Complexes, over a few years a group of her followers acquired a block of homestead parcels and joined them together into something between a suburb and a squatter camp. Big steel pole barns, the kind of building often used for big warehouses, spread out semi-randomly over the landscape with chicken houses and trailers filling in the interstitial space. Then over time as the place grew it swallowed up the old hamlet.

And like a lot of these Complexes over time it evolved into a kind of corporation when someone started doing something that made money and recruited more and more of the other people at the complex until essentially the whole place was engaged in that one enterprise. At Paradise valley that enterprise was growing new, genetically modified varieties of Mormon Tea (Ephedra Viridis), using modern biology to tweak the alkaloids it produces to make uppers, downers, mild psychedelics, tea that makes you hear differently, tea that makes you feel like your right arm belongs to someone else. Mormon Tea is native to this area and while the wild type plant grows pretty slowly the cultivars they grow there are like any other agricultural crop, planted in neat rows and fed water and nitrates by drip irrigation hoses.

Pablo's only two ridges over from Paradise Valley, so it's a pretty easy and short flight to get over there. He leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling for a few minutes, and then he's made up his mind.

It's the next morning. Pablo is up at two thousand feet, the brisk morning air hitting him in the face, a stream of grass and shrubs flowing below him. He's decided that the best way to get the most information out of whoever it is he's going to be meeting is to bluff the whole time. Give vague answers, talk in code. If they get frustrated enough maybe they'll just explain what's going on. Ahead is a stand of pole barns and underbrush of trailers, chicken houses, high tunnels. He sets up for final glide.

He touches down in a field about a quarter mile away from the diner and stashes his paramotor under a bush. As he makes his way over the morning frost crackles under his boots. Up a little ways is a building that looks like a singlewide that had fifty things growing out of it like mushrooms growing out of a log: an old airstream trailer, a room whose walls are old railroad ties, a sunroom with walls made of mud inset with old beer bottles and a ceiling of polycarbonate sheeting, a refrigerated semi trailer, a sailboat, a passenger rail car. Pablo walks along side it close enough that he can look in the front windows but far enough away that it doesn't seem like he is.

Sitting at a booth by a window is a woman in a floral dress, wearing a black cowboy hat, drinking a smoothie. Fresh fruit is hard to get outside of socal these days, so smoothies are made from a puree of genetically modified potatoes that produce all the citrus compounds that you'd find in lemons and limes and mangoes. They don't have that much sugar raw but if you puree it and add a little bit of the right enzymes the starches break down and then it tastes just like Odwalla. Pablo walks along the length of the place to see if there's anyone else he can see from the windows and there isn't.

He walks in the front door. The floor is fake marble, like the kind they used in banks in the 20th century. The walls are lined with stained wood tongue and groove. Along the front wall is a series of booths with plastic-and-particleboard tables and green fake leather benches, and along the back wall is a bar (with no one behind it, though that's to be expected at this early hour). Above the ordinary pane windows, angled between the wall and the roof is a series of stained glass church windows that give the light in the room a an multicolor tinge that mostly averages out to the dull glow of a tungsten filament in a lamp that isn't getting the voltage it should. The cieling is lined with old greenbacks, the old Fed money.

Pablo walks over to the woman, leans forward and says, "Strider?". "Yes, sit down," she commands.

"You're probably wondering why I asked to meet" he says. No response. "Do you know where the cattle are now?"

A hand appears to Pablo's right, puts a big coffee cup on the table in front of him, and disappears before he can see who it was attached to. Pablo takes a sip. He isn't surprised that it doesn't contain coffee, coffee is a ratified thing that has to be imported all the way from South America, but he is surprised that the tea has a little astringent bite to it, certainly more than the floral, syrupy stuff he's used to.

The woman speaks: "Actually I do. They arrived at about 1am last night. So I'd like to know what the fuck you asked me to come here for."

Pablo takes a ten second swig from the coffee mug to stall for time. "Well, uh," he drawls, "as you know, uh,"

"What I would like to know," said the living playing card (the queen of clubs) sitting in front of Pablo, "is who you are and how you got into our comms."

Pablo wraps his hand around the pumpkin he was drinking out of and takes another swig. "My nname is PPablo PPacccheo," he toots, his voice sounding like a cross between a kazoo and the "womp womp" noise the adults make in Peanuts. "I'm a burrrrrro tech in the bueeeena vistaa vaaaaley. I fooooound your raaadio in a burrrro ssshock."

The queen says "Shit, already?" or "Ship, ahoy?" or "Shop, aardvark?" She moves her head left and right and backward at the same time. Her voice comes out of the back of Pablo's head: "Where is it? Where's the conga line?" "Wwhat?", says Peanut. "What's the camber link?" Poodle angle bark bark. "Waffle fingle. sion of jaological a's powerful culturthrough the . sellintellates meetmurderger itinstehy of .All dangdog