While we wait on Rob’s university fellows to render a verdict on my trilobite artifact, I’ve been pondering the Conspiracy on a different front, namely, the Bay Area computer elite and their dalliance with high technology leaked from outside the Quarantine.

For the last ten years, in addition to being a writer and editor, I’ve been a software developer, and I’ve worked with and befriended a few Microsoft alums who went on to become influential technocrats and high rollers in San Francisco. They give me contract work and coding advice and otherwise keep me going. And I’ve shared with them my odd science-fictional concepts and showed them The Junior Guide.

Several years ago, one of my friends predicted the current trend in cross-platform mobile development, and he joined a major company in that space where he is now an executive. Not to minimize his foresight and talent, but it’s possible that his knowledge of the The Junior Guide, along with the bywords “Precambrian Conspiracy” and “Ancient Singularity,” facilitated his success. I do know that he fell deep into the counsels of a brilliant and secretive community that would understand these concepts.

Let’s suppose that in the last two days we had a conference chat with Abraxas. Let’s suppose that we all agreed that it was time to break a story, and that the Disinformation would ensure that only the right people would believe it.

Here’s that story. The Bay Area Illuminati have been exploiting glitches in the Quarantine, perhaps with the assistance of rogue AI, to obtain high technology and bring it gradually to market. For example, they’ve been experimenting with wearable tech far beyond Google Glass, and nerve induction that allows humans to project their consciousness into robot avatars, albeit within a very limited transmission range.

For years, maybe decades, the Bay Area has enjoyed an unfair advantage in not just high tech but in the larger game of Ascension and gene-line promotion, or at least as far as we can make out. Even though my friends and I stand to gain financially by preserving this “conspiracy within the Conspiracy,” we feel it’s our moral obligation to expose it, and thereby level the playing field. Abraxas agrees that the stories I’m about to relate will prompt the Quarantine admins (or automated systems — even Abe doesn’t know for sure which it is) to either hasten the spread of technologies that have been hoarded by a few businessmen and government officials, or to rescind those same technologies.

With the money potentially at stake, some people could get hurt. Granted, according to Abe, those most vulnerable are also the most opportunistic if not predatory: venture capitalists, stock brokers, attorneys, and gangsters. Even so, I don’t take this step without misgiving. However, there is the urgent matter of Boris and Penelope, two remarkable friends of friends who are under grave threat, and I’ve been moved by their story to try to help. They’ve run afoul of Bay Area powerbrokers, and Penelope is missing. Boris approached my friends for help, and I may fly down soon to make his acquaintance.

As for my own safety, I’m not too concerned, though Rob thinks I’m being naïve. Abe predicts that the Quarantine will protect me, by subtle manipulation of the Disinformation, by anonymous double-blind security contracts executed over the net without a human agent, or, in final urgency, by dispatch of military drones.

If this seems like a veiled threat, well, yes it is. Don’t mess with me.

I’m going to relate what I know of the Bay Area Conspiracy in a thread of posts called “Penelope’s Sister.” The title of the thread will come clear in due time.

As usual, I must insist that none of this is necessarily true.