by Jose Moreno
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The following three days, after having signed the manifesto, they met at the park to pretend to be the Proud Zeros; however, they had also become secret functio-vandals. Because passing notes during the meetings was not the most efficient way to communicate technical information, they soon invented a way to communicate cryptically by sending electronic books through the functio-network containing secret messages within pictures and words of those electronic books.
In this way, in a more expeditious manner, little by little, a plan began to take form during night time. Every night, Barón sent a cryptic key in order to begin their meetings. Everyone used the same cryptic key to encode whatever message they wanted to send; they attached a decoy message about the book, containing the cryptic message, in order to make the functio-conversation seem legitimate. The same cryptic key was used to decode the cryptic messages that were received. After two weeks, they were able to establish the technical part of their plan which involved mostly Barón’s creativity.
They idealized a plan of attack during the rest of the month of January. First Barón was going to try to construct his high intensity electromagnetic gun (HIEG)—the device would be the essence of their functio-assaults. After building it, he was going to test it; if his device worked, they were going to go to the north of California to try to recruit people living near the west edge of the Northern valley of California, which was an area heavily populated by elderly man who did not want to live near people dependent on functiomatons; if they were successful in recruiting renegade adults from the edge of the valley [17], they were going to be the ones carrying out the operations; On the other hand, if the device did not cause the desired results, then they were going to put their plans on hold until Barón could build a device that could disable a functiomaton stealthily. One reason why they had planned to go to Edge of the valley was that it was an area that contained many tall trees which would facilitate hiding in case they were being sought by government vehicles—specialized government vehicles that were used to seek outlaws—and it was a rugged terrain that would make land vehicles or even humans move through the area with difficulty.
For the following three months, Barón and the other functio- guerilleros worked out the details for their plan—they turned their idealistic plan partially into concretion. First, Barón built successfully the HIEG stealing materials from the lab where he volunteered,—it was not a problem for his genius—putting all the crafty pieces together in his own room, and disregarding the fact that five milligrams of Uranium could have delivered a lethal dose of radiation to his lungs if he had inhaled by accident the powdery substance.
Another thing Barón accomplished during those three months was to convince his older brother Oliver to participate with their plan; Oliver, like Barón, considered life around functiomatons to be fastidious; In fact, Oliver told Barón, that he had sympathized with Barón’s attitude against functiomatons, when Barón was twelve years of age, and his Brother caught him in the kitchen muttering his anger at the functio- teacher: Oliver decided right there that his life in the United States was not worth it—Oliver had been dreaming for years about leaving the United States. One of the things that Barón and Oliver agreed upon was that Oliver was going to help Barón and the others leave Truxes illegally in his land vehicle.
But, not only Barón tailored the details of the plan; in addition to Barón’s contributions to the plan, Martin, who had aspired to be a leader for the Proud Zeros, but failed to become nominated by the other members, taught Carl, Mary, and Barón—the other two teen-agers were not interested in pursuing Barón’s plan—military strategies, which they thought could be useful in case of a confrontation with G. eagles—The famous G. eagles were specialized flying vehicles that were known by the average informed citizens to be used by the Federal Government when it was looking for high profile criminals hiding in difficult terrain—Martin showed them how to hide among trees in order to diminish the chances of getting spot by the infrared ODFs of G. eagles. The essence of Martin’s military strategies was to make sure trees covered their bodies, maintain their bodies as close to the ground as possible, and move quickly from tree to tree without losing from sight the other members.
They all decided that the bullet train was the perfect target to test Barón’s device given that half the people that had jobs used the bullet train; the goal was to turn off the bullet train by vandalizing the Central Control Functiomaton (CCF) which was on the tail of bullet train; they figured that they could alarm those riders by letting them know a few days later, that the act was deliberate, and that more of those functio- assaults were going to happened, if the city of Truxes kept purchasing functiomatons to substitute the human work force. If the device worked, Barón and the other teen-agers were going to leave Truxes, send a letter to the city authorities a few days later, inform them that the “functio-guerilleros” were responsible for disabling the bullet train, and make clear their demands for the future. They were sure that nobody was going to be sure how the assaults were done because nobody, to the best of Baron’s knowledge, had come up with such device, although the concerns had been raised esoterically by engineers [18].
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