Cat and Mouse

Long long ago in a timeline far far away, I was a young adolescent feeling
cooped up at home during the hot desert summer nights in a (then) relatively
small city.  Too big to be called a "town" though.

My older sister was, at that time, into CB radio.  This is something her
boyfriend got her into.  She had a CB radio next to her bed and would fall
asleep with it on.  Let me tell you, a few nights of doing that and she had
a mouth that would make a sailor blush.

On a couple of nights, including this one, she invited me along with her BF &
CB buddies to play a game of cat and mouse.  This is how the game goes:

The city is mostly asleep, except for some radio controlled cars driving
legally but also eratically.  Stopping on street shoulders, moving in strange
ways in parking lots.  Going up one street only to stop, turn around in a
driveway and go back.

Also in play are a few bored nighttime cops who occasionally pull one of the
radio controlled cars over to take a sniff of the driver's breath and see if
they can score a DUI.

You might be confused by my usage of the term "Radio Controlled Cars" at this
point.  They're cars being driven by a person, in the driver's seat, as normal
but they also have big whip antennas (CB antennas) and, ultimately, the
choice of where the car goes, if it goes, and how it goes, is generally
determined by what is happening over the airwaves.  So I call them Radio
Controlled.

The "Mouse" is a single participant in this game, one car who has to hide from
all the others, the "Cats".  The cats are searching the city for the mouse and
if one is lucky enough to find it then that cat gets to be the mouse if they
want.  Once the mouse is parked and the game begins the mouse cannot move
until it is caught.

The cats can ask the mouse to describe their surroundings and can generally
ask most questions except for "where are you?" and questions that are too
specific.  A question like "are you north or south of the river?" might be a
judgement call, the mouse might decide to answer and might not.  But the
mouse never lies, not if they want to stay on good terms with the community
anyway.

Aside from verbal clues like this the cats can also rely on signal strength.
Well, if the signal was stronger in this direction then the mouse is probably
in this direction.  However, the mouse is wise to this and can manipulate
their signal strength by laying their antenna down across the top of their car
instead of sticking straight up as antennas normally do.  Or they can park
their car under an overpass or bridge which might weaken the signal along
the axis of the bridge (the bridge partially blocks the signal) while either
having no effect or possibly amplifying the signal along the perpendicular
axis.

Also there's these things called linear amplifiers or "linears" for short.
These boost the signal strength, sometimes well above what the FCC allows for
citizen's band (however being mobile you're probably safe from the FCC).  The
mouse can tweak the level of amplification with one of these and make their
signal seem to get gradually stronger or weaker thus confusing the cats.

I'm sure a game like this couldn't exist in this timeline.  Not with everyone
living out their lives through screens, not connecting in person, and certainly
not with today's gas prices.  But it was a fun distraction from the angst of
youth.

I have one particularly clear memory of us sitting on top of one of the
mountains that overlooks our city and its neighboring cities while the game
was going on.  With some binoculars you could look down through the heatwaves
of the cooling desertscape and if you had an idea of where people were could
spot some of these radio controlled cars zipping around,
sometimes followed by police.
.