They called her Ma Fern because no one ever dared ask her real name.
Some said she used to be a botanist. Others said she was a fugitive from a patent war in the ’90s. All I knew was she ran a quiet, back-ridge grow in the Yuba hills and brewed a tea so strong it could make a narco-lord weep.
She only called me when wires went weird.
“Cosmo,” her voice crackled over the AM band, “something’s sniffing me.”
“Sniffing how?”
“The kind that drives a white SUV and asks about ‘fire risk mitigation protocols.’”
That was code for non-agency federal contractors. Probably a subbed-out data collection crew with forged CalFire badges, feeding GPS logs into a predictive enforcement algorithm. They don’t knock. They log. And they don’t show up unless someone upstream already sold your coordinates.
By the time I hit her property line, the solar was still warm and the goats were louder than the radios. Fern stood at the edge of her porch with a scoped .22 and a calm fury in her eyes.
“They came twice,” she said. “Didn’t touch nothing, but one of the plants died after they left. Like it knew.”
The network node in her shed had been running hot—too hot. Something was querying it on repeat, burning cycles like a panic attack.
That’s when I saw the problem.
Her local mesh gateway had been spoofed—replaced with a clone node that accepted queries, responded with clean data… but also sent a ping to a remote server in Butte County every time someone accessed it.
“They’re feeding on your logs,” I said.
“Can you stop it?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Let’s feed them back.”
I built a phantom node.
Cloned her real data—strain IDs, watering cycles, sunlight logs—and introduced just enough error to make it believable:
- GPS offset by a few degrees
- Harvest weights inflated by 11%
- Two ghost users injected into the access log: user_hollis and vibrato37
I let the clone sit there for eight hours, pulsing like bait. Meanwhile, we shut down the real node and rerouted local controls through an old analog timing system powered by a bike generator and a tape deck.
That’s when they came.
White SUV. Parked just past the ridge. Two guys in gray contractor polos and boots too clean for this kind of dirt. One held a clipboard. The other held a tablet and a smile that felt practiced.
“Just checking comms performance in the zone,” he said.
“Strange spike patterns out here.”
“Must be the goats,” I said. “They’ve been real chatty.”
They logged their data and drove off—straight into a dead zone triangulated with three jamming towers built into bird feeders. The phantom node fed them coordinates to a slope we’d already cleared.
By morning, they reported a “false positive” and went back to Sacramento with nothing but a corrupted cache and a note in their file that read:
“Subject node appears clean. Possible local interference from soil sensor feedback loop.”
We toasted their failure with Ma Fern’s mushroom tea and a little pressed hash from a pre-legalization strain called “Gravity’s Out.”
She handed me a wrapped package before I left—inside was an old digital scale from the early 2000s, cracked but still blinking.
“Used this back when barter was real and the law was far.”
“Ledger’s still inside it. No one’s cracked it yet.”
I didn’t ask what was on it.
Some legends should stay encrypted.