It took a bit of effort to arrange for a conversation with Junior with what I judged to be the minimally acceptable level of privacy. Fortunately, I was a forward-looking prepper, and had done most of the necessary work before I'd even made the copy that had been activated and turned into him; some of it, I'd done before I'd even died.

After considering various approaches, such as signing up for one of those Faraday privacy motel rooms Peggy had brought me to, I rejected most of them for various reasons, many of which summed up to "The forms I'd have to fill out probably wouldn't be approved, and I don't want to get a reputation at this stage for trying to bend any rules I haven't already objected to". So, even knowing that there'd be at least three jail-run drones watching and listening to the whole meeting, I filled out my travel request forms to go to a reasonably isolated forested park, with the listed purpose as "Socialization: spend time with son and friend".

At said park, I rode on Lexx's shoulder, and exiting the bus, was easily able to see Junior's plushie suit riding on Peggy's black-feathered back, between her wings. The two of us already had certain knowledge in common; and when we looked around, we gained some further shared knowledge about our current environment. When we waved to each other, our forepaws were shaped into American Sign Language's manual alphabet, giving a sign and countersign based on all that information, signs which would be different for any meeting at any other time or place. This was just one part of the Improved Time-Traveller's Password System I'd invented before I'd died; it wasn't a perfect system, of course, but since I'd never spoken or written any of the details, then it at least significantly reduced the chances that either of us was a simple impersonator. Or, in tech-speak, it 'reduced the attack surface', meaning that if Junior wasn't really Junior, then whoever was puppeting his body had sufficient resources to extract this particular piece of data from one of our copies.

Given that both Junior and I had offline copies which weren't active, and thus couldn't know to securely delete themselves if they were at risk, then it was at least possible for somebody with only a moderate amount of resources to have stolen the details of this system. And thus the ITTPS wasn't the only trick I used, so that anyone who could figure out our conversation would have to have so many resources that they'd be able to figure it out regardless of how many clever tricks I tried.

Junior and I set our robot shells to run our forepaws on autopilot, while in VR, our hands rested on virtual keyboards, so we could touch-type while doing other things. We set our audio speakers to run some chatbot software, heavy on Monty Python Markov Chains, so we could keep up conversing by trading obvious in-jokes while we were distracted by other topics. Instead of using radio waves, as even low-powered ones could leak further than expected if some trees were growing in just the right patterns, we set our speakers to emit noises that were inaudible to the human ear - or to Peggy's - but that each other's microphones could pick up and run through some standard networking software. Through this impromptu, somewhat low-bandwidth channel, we started trading pictures, videos, books, and other such harmless media, protected through standard public-key cryptography. And using those harmless media as a base, we used a few steganographic tricks (ie, when a line of plaintext wrapped to a new line, whether or not there was a space before the carriage-return was essentially unnoticeable but could carry a bit of information) to include one further layer of data, which was encrypted using the one-time pad I'd generated before creating the backup which had become Junior. All of which resulted in Junior and I having what was essentially a private instant-messaging channel whose very existence was nigh-impossible to guess at, let alone decrypt.

("Nigh-impossible" was a far cry from "impossible", and even with a few fillips to the system whose implementation details I'm not bothering to write down, such as distress passwords, I was treating this whole system merely as a way to let us talk with a bit of privacy, not to talk /securely/.)

And so, while the two of us rode through the pleasant forest trail, and gabbed aloud with each other and with Peggy about various topics, and a couple of quadcopters silently hovered in sight, Junior and I chatted.

---

1: So, where've you been staying?

2: Inside Peggy, most of the time. She says she enjoys it, and it keeps me out of sight of the papparazzi-drones while travelling, without having to avoid all travel. I've picked up a few physical shuffling tricks; if you want, we can swap places, so you don't have to spend all your time in prison.

1: Moderately tempting, but with the training program I'm in, they'd probably notice you not knowing what I'm learning. Let's save that idea, though, in case something important crops up. Any problems with life as a minor?

2: Seems there's been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about differences between being a first-time, cis-minor, and being legally recycled into being a trans-minor. Ie, try to tell bunches of people who're physically and mentally adult that they can't be intimate for another 18 years, and watch the fur fly. As long as you're "Dad", I can cope.

...

2: So, what's the most WTF factoid /you/'ve picked up so far?

1: They've got genuine, honest-to-Klono reactionless thrusters.
1: Electricity goes in, unbalanced forces go out. No reaction mass, no exhaust.

2: Okay, yep, not something I'd have predicted. Figure out how they work?

1: Most of the math seems to be based more on info-sci than physics, but I've got the pop-sci gist.
1: Premise: There are 'info horizons', from beyond which no information is allowed to leak to a given object. One such horizon: at the Hubble distance, where the universe is expanding away at the speed of light. Another horizon: When an object accelerates, a similar "Rindler" horizon forms in the direction the object accelerates away from.
1: Theory: The universe treats these horizons /seriously/, and doesn't let you use clever tricks to extract info from beyond them.
1: One such clever trick would be to use long-wave radiation, part of whose waveforms extend beyond the horizon. So radiation with certain long waves is disallowed.
1: A common result: there is more space on the side of an object without the horizon than the side with it, resulting in more vacuum energy on the horizon-free side, resulting in a force pushing it towards the horizon. (Ala the Casimir effect, in which disallowed waves lead to lower vacuum energy within the space than outside it, leading to a pressure from the outside pushing in.)
1: This apparently explains what inertial mass actually is.
1: Another result: Because the vacuum-energy can't have wavelengths bigger than the Hubble radius, there's a minimum possible acceleration.
1: This apparently explains galaxy rotations without dark matter, and cosmic acceleration without dark energy.
1: Various other details explain the Pioneer anomaly, and the flyby anomaly, and predicted a few other anomalies that had gone unnoticed.
1: Tech: If you bounce light back and forth, the bouncing is acceleration, and creates some "Rindler" horizons fairly close. By some clever building of the thing the light bounces in, those horizons can be tweaked so that the vacuum energy is more unequal on one side of the object than another, leading to what seems to be an unbalanced force on the object.

2: If that's the best explanation you can give so far, you need to do more reading.
2: ... The reactionless thrusters. How powerful are they?

1: One of the first things I asked myself. I've done some modelling.
1: There's a standard, containerized thorium-cycle pebble-bed reactor which outputs 60 megawatts electric.
1: Apparently, a reactionless thruster that takes in 60 MWe produces about 3,000 Newtons of force. (I still don't grok Newtons either. That's about 675 pounds-force, or the equivalent of 305 kg in 1 gravity.)
1: Put together the pebble-bed and its magnetohydrodynamic generator, the heat-tubes and radiators, the thruster itself, a few misc pieces, and round up, and we're talking a minimum of 200,000 kg.
1: That works out to a max thrust of around 1.52 milligees, or 0.015 m/s^2. Nowhere near enough to lift off Earth, or Luna.
1: But /in/ space, Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation no longer applies. So it would have an annual delta-v budget of around 475 km/s.

2: !

1: Yeah.
1: To put that in perspective: One year of acceleration takes you 50 AU. Well, three years if you want to stop when you get there, instead of plowing into whatever's there with a kinetic energy of 25 petajoules, aka 6 megatons.

2: !!!

1: I know.

2: No, not that. How are we still alive right now?

1: Could you be a touch more specific?

2: You've been studying space - I've been studying anonymity, such as used by the trolls who sent that death-threat drone.
2: There are various ways to shuffle physical parcels around in ways to evade the ubiquitious surveillance and sousveillance, up to and beyond full-scale Slitherin-system onion routing.
2: And humans are still human, including trolls coming up with newfangled versions of SWATting and other deliberate, anti-social, occasionally lethal activities. Ie: Smallpox has to be vaccinated against again these days because the idiots keep using anony-mailed 3D-printed basement biolabs to brew up the stuff.

1: I'd been thinking more along the lines of the Fermi paradox - if it's this easy to send 200 tons screaming in to Alpha Centauri in 75 years, at 10%c, then any aliens out there who notice us could flatten the planet.

2: Trust me, there's no way aliens could possess anywhere near the depth of hatred for humanity that can be found in the current versions of 4chan.
2: You say the thrusters don't hit two milligees? So if they can't lift themselves into orbit, are there any cheap tricks to get them up?
2: Eg, smaller ones fired from a jet, or lifted by balloon? How small can they be made?

1: Holdit holdit holdit.
1: Before we start calculating anything like the parameters of how to build a WMD with a basement 3D printer...
1: ... we should focus on the fact that nobody else seems to have already done this. There's no way that we're the first to come up with the concept, which means your humanity-hating trolls would already know about it.

2: They're not /my/ trolls. But... hrm. I'm not liking any scenario I can imagine so far.

1: Well, let's work that out. Scenario A: The trolls have already launched, and we were resurrected just in time to watch the planet get hit with some dinosaur-killers.

2: Solution to A: Get some copies of ourself the frak off-planet ASAP. And remind them to figure out how to get around the fact that There Ain't No Stealth In Space, so they won't be the next targets.
2: Homework for A: Look for any sky surveys capable of noticing reaction drives going relativistic in our direction. Open-source ones that are hard to tamper with.

1: Relativity itself isn't going to be an issue; at these accelerations, it'd take ~75 years to get up to 10%c. Not counting turnaround, etc.
1: I've already got a few space-program bookmarks; I can look up asteroid defense programs without raising any behavioural red flags.
1: BTW, have you established any non-anonymized search-history behaviour patterns to build on?

2: A couple. I've downloaded a standard apocalypse survival kit - sort of a combo of zombie prepping, time-traveller science, and a global village modular construction system - and related stuff. BTW, lemme send you the multi-bodyplan first-aid programs; turns out our chassises are good enough for meatball surgery, if need be.
2: I haven't implemented it, but I've laid the groundwork for an excuse for my anonymity interest. Ie: We're a closet pervert who is no longer limited by risks of STDs, pregnancies, or a lot of other 2010-era issues, and I'm building up a private VR porn library, acquired anonymously.
2: The locals may not share our era's urges for privacy in such matters, but they are aware that folk from our era preferred to keep such matters private enough to be able to claim plausible deniability, so by behaving in that way, I'll probably fall into an easy-to-recognize pattern, and the other things I dig up anonymously won't be noticed.

1: Well, if that's how we're going to play it, then they'll expect me to share the interest, even if we work on different tasks. Have we got the bandwidth for you to share some of that library?

2: Yep. I'll add it to the queue.

1: Anyway.
1: Scenario A1: There's some extra expenses involved in such a launch, so the trolls have only been able to launch enough thrusters to destroy some cities, instead of the whole planet.

2: Solution to A1: We need to spread out. How many backups can we afford, across the planet?

1: It's not the backups that are the major cost, it's the insurance to pay to make sure they get activated.
1: Not to mention, current-era laws mean we'd prolly need to pick backup guardians/families.
1: But it's not a /difficult/ set of problems to solve.
1: Scenario B: The anthropic principle. Out of all the possible universes which led to us with the memories we have now, we simply lucked out, and simply no troll has bothered trying to launch.

2: Solution to B: I don't think there is one, other than assuming it could turn into Scenario A, and prepping for that.

1: Which brings us to Scenario C. There is a /something/ which can get past the most sophisticated troll's anonymization measures, and which intervenes by doing /something/ to prevent the launch of a civilization-killer.
1: C might be a person, a group, a software program, an emergent behavioural property, something innate in the basics of how humans are built, or something else entirely.

2: I don't think either of us like Scenario C, in any variation.

1: Well, we /might/, if it turns out C is something we can end up as part of, instead of being merely subject to.

2: Are you thinking some conspiracy with TLA-level tech?
2: Or a standalone complex, ala "Ghost In the Shell", where the group emerges emergently out of the people who theorize its existence?

1: Call those C1 and C2.
1: And either way, we're going to need to up our game considerably before there's even a chance that we'd be able to do more good than harm at keeping the world from ending. Memetic Moody level paranoia, and memetic Skitter level competence. While ensuring that to any public or private behaviour-analysis algorithms, we're fairly ordinary people who deserve no special scrutiny.

2: Yeah, I think we're kind of past that, after the trial.

1: There's scrutiny, and then there's scrutiny.
1: Me wanting to keep a copy of myself safe, and being willing to stand up to the Powers-That-Be to do it? That's just regular old self-interest.
1: I'm not talking about hiding from the press; I'm talking about hiding from people who can find trolls secretly building WMDs.

2: For the sake of argument, we /could/ ignore the whole thing. Whatever C is, it seems to have worked so far, so we could just let it keep working and focus on our own interests.

1: If it's C1, sure, probably. As long as they never decide that emulated brains of cryonicists are some sort of security threat.
1: If it's C2? Are you really willing to leave the security of the future of all sapience in the universe in the hands of whatever weirdos think they should try?

2: As opposed to leaving it in the hands of a weirdo who's using unusual pornography as a cover for steganographic chatting.

1: I didn't say it was a /perfect/ plan.

2: Especially since we're starting without a lot of background knowledge the locals take for granted, ala the Aztecs not having access to all the history of warfare and trickery background knowledge of the Spanish.

1: On the upside, we were temporarily dead during a lot of the time that C may have been maniplating the noosphere, so might have a useful outside perspective.

2: On the downside, we were revived under somewhat questionable circumstances, with brain damage interpolated by algorithms created by people who could have been under the influence of C for decades.

1: ...
1: We may need to instantiate another copy of ourself, to focus on programming, to at least try and check for any such shenanigans.

2: Unless the reconstructed bits of our mind happen to include either a Ken Thompson compiler attack.
2: Or, even more entertainingly, if we've got some version of anosognosia, such that we will literally deny a piece of evidence that's right in front of us, ala the people who deny that one of their arms is paralyzed.

1: You really know how to cheer a guy up.
1: And here I was merely thinking on the level of possibly needing to spawn Dan.4 to focus on legal matters, such as jurisdiction shopping and loophole abuse, in order to figure out how best to spawn Dan.3 to work on software issues.
1: ... I'm going to call 'rent' on such points: if an idea doesn't pay the rent it costs in mental space and attention, particularly by offering some insight into how to improve our plans, then we'll need to set it aside. That's going to now include ideas that are fascinating and we can think round and round and round about without coming up with something to actually /do/ about them.

2: What, you want to completely ignore the possibility?

1: Nah, it's just we've only got so much time on this hike. Save the mind-bending stuff for when you've got more time to try to come up with an insight.

2: Ah, gotcha.
2: There is at least one relevant thought that might impact what decisions we make.

1: ?

2: We've been confused by the lack of a singularity, intelligence explosion, or other suchlike thingummy, when all the indicators suggested /something/ of the sort was likely to pass.

1: You live inside a woman who has arms, wings, legs, a beak, and a sapient brain the size of an ostrich's; that doesn't strike you as nearly strange enough to be post-Singularity?

2: Not particularly.
2: Which brings up the thought: What if there /was/ a Singularity, but nobody noticed?

1: ...

2: Pre-death, we missed out on the possibility of reactionless thrusters. There may be a few more interesting tricks hidden in physics. An intelligence that secretly boot-strapped itself to super-human intelligence may be able to do the apparently impossible, ala the magic tricks you play with your robo-bugs.
2: Heck, maybe super-human intelligence wasn't necessary, and we've got some purely human-level intelligence(s) playing magic tricks behind the scenes to keep anyone else from exploiting whatever loopholes let them figure out their tricks. I think that's an option deserving of a separate category for planning, say C3, yesno?

1: Yeesh. Yep, we're at least heading in the direction of Moody-level prepping.
1: But if I ever exclaim "Not paranoid enough!", give me a hearty slap.

2: Can do.

1: Should the simulation hypothesis be C3a, or C4?

2: Make it C4 - let's keep C3 for assuming we're at the same level of reality as we were in before we died.
2: 'Course, C4a can be "we're the only actual sapient being(s) in the sim", with everyone else as non-sapient NPCs; and C4b can have a sim populated with lots of other sapient people.
2: The difference being in which methods of hacking out of the sim to access the computer the sim is running on are likely to work; ie, if we in particular are the focus of whoever started up the sim, versus if we're just one small part of it.

1: Then don't forget, C4aa, only one of us is actually sapient, and the other copy is just a good fake.
1: So. Overall plan.
1: Save ourself/ves. Save the world. Cooperate with whoever or whatever else is also working to save the world, in order to achieve the first two. Keep an eye out for physics-breaking phenomena. Am I missing anything?

2: As long as there's the two of us, should we specialize or overlap?

1: How about I focus on space stuff, working towards getting one or more of us off Earth; and you focus on anonymity, with us being a secret porn-fiend as cover?

2: Can do.
2: Speaking of which, Peggy mentioned that if and when you can shake your watchdog drones, she knows a few people who would be happy to meet up with you in a Faraday motel, for various consensual private activities.

1: ...
1: ... I'd rather not jump into any such scenarios feet-first. ... Even /if/ that's literally what one of Peggys' friends wants me to do.

2: Fair 'nuff. Ever want to make the leap from VR to RL, you know where to find me.

1: At least until you grab some data thinking you're anonymous when you aren't, and C drops a ton of bricks on our heads.

2: ... You do realize that we're going to be going to a whole lot of effort, based on the slimmest possible evidence? Ie, the /lack/ of a particular piece of evidence?

1: Eh, it's a strategy that's worked out for us so far.
1: Besides, have you got anything better to do with your time?

2: ... I was about to answer that, then recalled that the plan already involves me downloading as much porn as I can, and even without many of the limitations of biology, there's only so much time per day that can be devoted to that pursuit.
2: So, before we head our separate ways, is there a Scenario D?

1: ... Probably, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.
1: While we've got this private channel, we should work out a few comm protocols. Both private/steganographic, and "I care less about hiding the fact we're comming than I care about sending these words /right now/".

2: Eh, I've got some software to embed bits as the least-significant-bits for each byte in an image or 3D-file, which knows how to mimic the relevant noise patterns. We can use standard public-key encrypted systems to trade "private" porn, and that should cover most scenarios.
2: For the others... we can go by a stream to really ramp up the white-noise to limit anything that can overhear us, and trade some more one-time-pad data, for larger files, so we can save our maximally-secure one-time-pad for text data.
2: Oh, and say, is our old ham radio license still valid?

1: If it's not, I can work towards getting a new one as part of the Scouting program.

2: Mm. Okay, gimme a sec to go back over this chat, see if I mised anything.
2: Wait, reactionless thrusters.
2: Why bother with the pebble-bed reactor, instead of a perpetual motion generator?

1: Well, about that.
1: Remember, this thruster-thing works by carefully channeling the way light bounces to mold the Rindler horizons to be asymmetrical in particular ways.
1: If the thruster is stationary, the math is easy-peasy. If it's accelerating in a straight line, still easy. When it's rotating, though, with an acceleration that's not in a straight line, like going around in a circle to run a generator, then the math combining material properties, EM fields, and the Rindler horizons gets pretty hairy. Maybe not three-body-problem hairy, but still bad.
1: The general upshot is, the faster the thruster in a generator is spun, the less efficiently it generates thrust.
1: There are some people who have very good math saying that trying to extract more energy than is put in this way is quite impossible.
1: There are some other people who have very good math saying that there's no inherent obstacle to extracting useful energy from the vacuum.
1: And some members of the latter group are pouring gobs of money towards improving the efficiency of rotating thrusters, ala the Big Fusion projects circa 2010s.
1: And some members of the latter group are crackpots with basement supercomputers and machine shops, trying to gain recognition as 'The Guy Who Cracked Over-Unity'.

2: That's well and good for extracting energy rotationally, but what about linearly? Kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, while these thrusters apparently increase velocity linearly for a given power output, which means at some point, it should be worth putting a rocket in orbit, strapping some magnets to it, and accelerating it back and forth through some conductive wires.

1: There's an Elon-Musk-alike proposing to do just that, to prove once and for all whether over-unity is possible, even if not on Earth due to mechanical issues.
1: While it may take decades before either of us could acquire formal credentials that would make any such organization take us seriously enough to be willing to hire us...
1: ... there's always the left-hand path approach, of practicing in our own basement lab to the point where we wouldn't be a net negative if brought into space.
1: Not to mention, gaining experience at personal manufacturing and industrial self-reliance would be very handy at generally helping us achieve some of the standard convergent instrumental goals of increasing personal power.

---

It was at that point in the private conversation that it, as well as our spoken conversation, came to a halt, as a silvery, head-sized, saucer-shaped flying drone, with a big camera-like lens on front and a couple of graspy arms underneath, swooped down from out of sight to hover just in front of us. Well, more specifically, just in front of me.

"You are the individual who has requested to be identified as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One?"

"Who's asking?"

"I am a process server. You are being indicted as an accessory to tax fraud."

"Er... what? I haven't even confirmed to you that I /am/ Dan One."

"Are you saying that you are not?"

At which point a second, apparently identical drone dropped down to hover next to the first, and it repeated the line, "You are the individual who has requested to be identified as Dan, Dan Senior, or Dan One?"

"Uh - who wants to know?"

"You are being indicted for illegal immigration."

The two drones faced each other and started waving their limbs excitedly, the few non-latinate words I could make out apparently having to do with jurisdiction and precedence.

While I couldn't squint anymore, I could run some image-enhancement algorithms which had much the same effect - and up in the air, these two drones had a few more twins coming.

"Say," I said aloud, not looking at anyone in particular, "we've been out here for a while, so you probably have to go powder your nose. This looks like it might take a while, so why don't you just not say a word and go do that. It's probably a ways to the nearest washroom, so you might want to run."

Peggy and Junior glanced at each other, then the latter took a good grip on the former's feathers, and she started putting her ostrichy legs to good use, vanishing down the trail. The drones I could see continued floating in my direction instead of hers, which I took as an interesting data point. I hoped that he'd be able to get back into hiding without either of them getting into whatever pile of bricks was currently falling onto my own noggin.

I made a mental note that depending on the nature of C, hypothesizing about C's existence over a channel which had several ways to be intercepted might have a causal relationship to being suddenly legally SWATted. And that performing any experiments to gather further data on such a link might be hazardous to everyone's health.

"... indicted for copyright infringement..."

"... trademark violation..."

"... patent infringement..."

"... child endangerment..."

"... child pornography..."

"... preliminary injunction..."

"... temporary restraining order..."

"... demand that you cease and desist..."

"... violation of the terms of your sentence..."

I raised both forepaws. "Holdit, everyone. I've only got one emulated brain in here. Why don't you all line up in order of arrival so I can deal with you one at a time. Who was first - tax fraud? Tax fraud, front of the line. Okay, I'm very confused, as I ran my incorporation papers through the most reputable accounting software I could find."

"Your commercial operations are irrelevant," stated the drone.

"Not to me, they're not!" shouted one from the middle of the pack, who was immediately shoved to the back of the line by the rest.

The first drone ignored the byplay and continued, "You were revived as part of an attempt to extract illegal quantities of negative income tax returns, also known as basic income payments, for the period of time in which you were deceased."

"... There's so much wrong with that idea that I don't know where to begin. I /do/ know that there's enough of you showing up that by the time I finish with you all, I'm going to be past my curfew. Not to mention, I don't know how long all your batteries are going to last. So how about I go inside Lexx here, use my phone to call for a ride big enough for all of us, get my lawyer on the line, and we can start clearing all of this up back in my nice comfortable jail cell? After all, right now, I only have your words that you're even who you say you are, and I've already experienced one drone that was sent to me maliciously. I'm sure everyone here is willing to acknowledge that having /this/ many process servers show up within a few seconds of each other, for entirely unrelated matters, is just a wee bit unusual, particularly when BosWash's legal system has already been kind enough to provide me with a mailing address and a schedule of when I'll be there?"

Some of the drones rotated to look at each other, perhaps sheepishly...

... but I'll probably never know what they said next.

Every so often, the CPU running the simulation of my brain paused said sim for a few moments, to copy the volatile RAM into slightly less volatile semi-permanent storage, the equivalent of a 2010-era hard-drive. Usually, I never even noticed the teensy gaps, in much the way people don't notice the blurs on their retinas as their eyes move. That moment, with the drones glancing at each other, was the moment when such a backup took place - and presumably, in the next few minutes, something happened to prevent any further such backups, such as, say, an EMP generator wiping my RAM.

And if I'd thought the world was weird the /first/ time I'd been revived, it didn't hold a patch to how strange things were the /next/ time I woke up.