While a bowl of oatmeal cools next to the stove, let’s sit back and give our imaginations full rein.

Where were we…?

It was cold and dusty.

The Ruralites had fought to keep their rural way of life but the hoards kept coming — the frugal-living seekers trying not to fail again, the curiosity seekers looking for new alternative lifestyles after exhausting their urban landscapes, the vacationers who ran out of money, the down-on-their-luck trying to escape creditors, the criminals keeping a low profile, the Suburbanians trying to form the world’s longest strip mall.

Where in the woods and fields that shrank smaller and smaller could one find a low-cost, simple lifestyle?

Pathting looked up at the Sun with one set of sensors, the other still focused on reading the internal file about life on Earth.

Pathting’s family, a designated set of sensor arrays assigned to POD#45T, were mainly service bots.

Their sentience modules allowed them to display intelligent understanding about hidden meanings and emotional attachments to omniscient, invisible beings.

Pathting wanted to be the best service bot not only in one pod but in all the pods on Mars, the Moon and anywhere that service bots were not expected to exceed their programming.

Pathting had discovered some unused memory chips in its sensor array and experimented with new code that it had never seen in any of the data available to it in the Inner Solar System Alliance database.

How could Pathting accomplish what its designers called the impossible?

How could Pathting control the whole Inner Solar System Alliance from its connections to the Inner Solar System Alliance Network, able to change the orbits of planets, reprogram not only sensor arrays but biological creatures like Pathting’s designers?

Pathting processed the idea about Ruralite living.

What does it mean to be a Ruralite, free to wander the countryside without instant access to the ISSA Net?

Why do Ruralites desire independence from stacked housing and the loud noises of densely-populated streets?

Why do many Ruralites find the ownership of personal weaponry arsenals a protection against the mass media hypnotism of Urbanskis and their desire to sprawl out into Ruralite territory unchecked, no need for military skirmishes when intellectual methods like the system of laws and courtrooms and five-year business plans were much more effective?

Pathting ran another low-level diagnostic test, but felt no desire to leave POD#45T for the cold and dusty exteriour, the vast wilderness of Mars that was no different than the cold and dusty expanses of unpopulated sections of the Moon.

Why would the Ruralites want to live out there?

Pathting stored those questions in a temporary scratchpad and returned to duty, its internal timer reminding Pathting that some biological creatures were planning a “weekend getaway” to POD#45T for some “rest and relaxation,” more words and phrases that meant nothing to a sensor array on duty all the time.