Back in the Circa, I waited inside the dock. The place was still empty. Rows and rows of carved in grooves in the smooth metal all lined up and ready to fire one out into the skyline, like bullets in one of the old-model guns. The kind that used gunpowder and firing pins all timed with perfect precision, admirable much in the same way you would covet an old clock with all those spinning gears and wound up coils that managed to keep near perfect time. Amazing, all those years of practices and knowledge to keep track of an abstract concept. Now you can scarcely find a toilet without a clock built into it. You know, just in case you need to time how long your workers spend on the bowl so you can dock it from their wages accordingly. How all those old inventors would weep for the future if they knew how their advances were used to commit even the pettiest of oppression.
Personally, the old guns were always more reliable, Rail Guns overheat. The magnetic rails that power the projectile have to have a certain degree of friction which, after a few shots it starts to drastically overheat and wear down. To compensate some of the more determined proponents of the technology started mounting massive, cumbersome, heat sinks on the guns. Gauss guns sometimes are too powerful, firing through several city blocks depending on the size. Not exactly what you’d want to use on covert ops. An old gun though, was a perfect invention. Just raise the caliber, pack in better quality gunpowder, and you could shoot through a tank. A Gauss Gun is the weapon of choice by the police for civic suppression. Like a riot at a mall over a new product release, or god forbid, some workers decide to protest. The friction in the air can sometimes superheat the metal as it fires out, place some magnesium or phosphorous on the outside of the metal slug and you’ve got a high speed ball of molten steel. The results of impact are often rather unpleasant.
The seat pulls back and reclines. In this void of a place cradled in between the grooves of the railway system, cluttered with cables and electrical panels, the texture of the ceiling inside the Circa changes. The front projection is replaced by a 180 degree screen, perfect picture, gesture activated, internet connection. This is the type of interface people on the street have wet dreams about.
Bright lights, a login prompt, I say ‘Adamus Coerca.’ The world falls away and suddenly it’s spinning downward among digital towers, ads and light patterns arranged in perfect geometric patterns that serve as a grim facsimile of the outside world. One would think that the net would be much different from the outside world, perhaps looking like a laser light show made of vertex graphics. Maybe a forest, with each leaf really a portal or a remote server, the trunk composed of the various gateways and hubs. An ocean, that you dive into, and swim among the sea of floating servers and data ports, where things are fluid and smooth. When you’re greeted with a less gritty version of the current reality, the net becomes a much less exciting place. The frontier, the old internet, has long been incorporated into the Demer Enterprises interface scripting, forcing the internet to conform to a logical structure that most people can relate to and immediately interface with ‘for the good of commerce.’ The thing that they didn’t tell the few people left who actually cared about things like having independent information ports and feeds was that, the only compatible internet interfaces were those run by the corporations themselves. Private internet was locked out of the new corporate system and banished to the fringes, a place you could only access if you knew how to crack a five hundred and twelve bit encryption based firewall. Several of them.
That was my destination, The Fringe. The ghost sea of servers and fading protocols. Browsing the net, my Circa goes into auto-pilot jerking along the skyline towards the government complex in old D.C. Meanwhile, in the little bubbleworld inside the Circa the net spreads out, unfolding almost infinitely into it’s unoriginal imitation of the decaying skyline that, it appears, is so familiar to people that even inside a virtual reality of limitless possibilities they cannot imagine it’s nonexistence. Those who want an alternative to being forced to live in the Commission’s world, both inside and out, escape to the pod-games. Massive online worlds that you can plug yourself into and with the aid of an IV drip and a pittance in funds, live out the rest of your life. These places are like food processing plants where miles and miles of genetically grown chickens and cattle are slaughtered endlessly. Not that they are aware of what’s going on to them anyway, geneticists have seen to that little detail several decades ago. You don’t live very long of course, bedsores, infections, poor sanitation all ensure that once you jack in you’ll only be there for a few years. People who get disconnected or simply run out of cash are pulled out of the system, and quickly are brought back into reality. Stunned and driven insane from the shock, most of them wander aimlessly in the poorer sectors of the city, begging for scraps of cash and doing almost anything to get plugged back in, even for a short while. It’s rare to see anyone go into the game world and come back out normal, and even rarer for them to stay in reality and not kill themselves or fine some sort of alternative to get back inside.
You can see the gameworlds as you move through the net, they look like parks. Endless fields floating in the industrial clutter of the imitation outside world. Large, beautiful, inviting. Promising lifetimes worth of adventure and excitement. A beautiful perfect body. Sex beyond your imagination, so real that it will make real physical contact seem abhorrent. They call these places things like ‘Beautiful World,’ ‘Land of Conquest,’ and ‘Heart of the Universe.’ In some you can go to space, and not the orbital clusterfuck up in the real sky. Full of dead satellites, corporate space stations, and the old government’s moon colonization platform that is practically a free-for-all warzone that changes ownership almost daily. Sometimes, if someone shushes a large amount of funds you’ll see a very beautiful laser light show in the night sky amidst the floating bits of debris and old billboards that are pockmarked and sometimes shattered from space junk collisions. Of course, after the lights die down, it may be a good idea to watch the sky for anything falling. In some, you can go to a fantasy world, of elves and magic. Slay a few dozen dragons or so, before getting serviced by about six dozen handmaidens. Die with a smile on your face, never having to have faced reality. Some people have even turned it into a pseudo religion, arguing that since reality is subjective and relative to the observer, that these fantasy worlds and even fake paradises where you simply and hugged and coddled like a child and fucked like you would never imagine every single moment, are just as real as where I am now. Maybe even more so because they are experiencing it with ‘the mind’s eye devoid of the body.’ They claim that your orgasms are more real. Food is more delicious. The world is more beautiful. The reasoning is that you are tasting the pure essence, you are experiencing the full contact of intimacy with your mind alone. They don’t acknowledge the fact that these places are little more than intentionally set-up control facilities meant to curb public discontent by serving as a placebo to satiate their desire to avoid questioning the authorities. Since asking pesky questions is a good way to be declared ‘no longer economically viable.’ Meaning you are flagged, both in your credit account and in public directories as an individual that is not likely to buy. They call these people ‘negative economical persons.’ It means the same thing as calling someone a non-person. If you aren’t buying you’re a drain on the whole system, because the whole world revolves around the continual, never-ending, consumption of goods. Without people endlessly in debt, endlessly co-dependent, endlessly unhappy and desperate, they wouldn’t be able to sell anything to them. The whole system would crumble under it’s own weight. Thus, the Electric Dreams are born, a perfect world, for a fee. It’s not real, none of it is, it’s just a way of getting people to spend their last little meager scraps of cash till they drop dead, eliminating the possibility of them ever posing even a remote threat to the bottom line.
The games aren’t even that good, I’ve broken into one of them, outside the normal brain-jack entry method. It’s just a bunch of people wandering around endless fantastic looking landscapes killing the same enemies over and over again and occasionally stopping to have very awkward looking sex. A complete waste of time. The only line of reasoning that a user would be able to argue effectively is that the game worlds are probably better than the slow death of the outside.
As the game cluster’s ‘endless’ fields fade away the port to dead space stands ominous, the appearance of electricity crackling across it’s surface which, when viewed from a certain angle, can be seen to encompass the digital horizon like a giant black bubble. Containing the commission’s networks in virtual isolation from parts unknown. The security gate opens, a digital keyboard slides out of it’s black surface, which ripples and pulses looking like what could only be described as liquid shadow. The press of a few keys, my credit code, my full name. The keyboard slides back into the electric storm of billowing darkness beyond. Whoever programmed this still had some traces of imagination, especially when compared to the near-infinite stretch of floating skyscrapers and full-motion billboards floating behind me.
Access denied, in big red letters. A lightning bolt shoots out. If I were plugged into a sensor interface or even had a NetJack in my head I’d probably be comatose and possibly dead by this point. Instead my screen merely fades out and goes back to that dark faded gray color that indicates the screens are no longer powered on. This should not be happening, there is no reason for my access codes to be taken or not work, either someone on the commission is sending me a message or … light again. The cloud is gone. The net pulls me through it so fast that for a second it feels as though I am being stretched much in the same way an object traveling at light speed would be torn apart by the gravity of a black hole. This is done to prevent someone from hijacking my connection and getting out too. The lightning, not so much. As far as I could tell that only meant one of two things. Option A would be that someone just made a really amateurish attempt to kill me. Option B would be that it was a warning. A way for someone who has access to Demer Corp’s internet protocols to say, ‘back off, stay away, you’re getting too close.’ For some reason that thought filled me with hope, that I was getting close. The threat didn’t scare me, if indeed it was one, nothing frightened me except the unknown. The mystery behind the headaches, the past, everything that I don’t know about myself. Seifer has given me one piece of the puzzle, but to find the rest would take some investigation. That’s the purpose for my visit to the legacy internet. The sky here was a mish-mash of different codes, different pictures. Appearing not unlike ceiling tiles in an office building. Stretching out in a virtual sky and ground miles above and miles below. Some ’tiles’ looked like how old radio signal television’s looked when they had no reception. A war of white and black pixels, locked in a fever pitched battle of which neither side could win. Others looked like space. Pink clouds. Pornography. A picture of a long-extinct species of animal. The images of all sorts of people collaborating and contributing to make, in the end, a giant mess. Not unlike life itself. The horizon wasn’t dark, it was foggy bright white, shifting with a static burst every moment or so to show what looked like a white wall, far off. Into the legacy system some distance I panned my screen around, to see the commission’s intranet, looking like a giant black ball sandwiched between the chaotic images above and beneath it. If you were to ascribe a human attribute to it, it would almost look defensive and frightened of a place beyond it’s control. In a way it probably was.
There is an old records server out here, amidst the many different and conflicting images. This is the old government’s server, it contains the information about most of the corporate-grade nanotech. Seifer told me about it, before we parted, slipping me a net address five lines long. He said all the specifics are gone, the specs, the details have all been stripped so that they could be used to replicate and improve on the designs. The difference between this info and one you could get from a Commission database is that the Commission’s don’t tell you what the nano was specifically designed to do. He also told me, that he is incapable of accessing the system, it needs to be hacked, and he lacks the skills, and he can’t very well ask someone to give him a hand hacking an old government server in the legacy system would arousing more suspicion. He said I could do a better job as a hacker, when my skills were rudimentary at best, and based upon using old techniques that only work on older systems. Techniques, which, would work because barely anything on the old internet was new. Those static screens and pockets of floating space are what happens when you make an independent site of any kind and the Commission catches wind of it. They don’t need to shut you down or corrupt your server when they can just as easily destroy it with a well-placed strike team or a bomb. Independent things also create a negative economy it seems.
The old government server cluster was decorated in the background with a waving image on the old flag. Don’t mistake the word ‘old’ as to imply there is a ‘new’ alternative. There is no flag for the commission, because they don’t need one. There was the server for the department of defense. There was one for the research and development branch. There was one that was locked deeper within, after about a hundred pop ups encouraging me to ‘enlist today’ and ‘never before seen sign up bonuses.’ After I closed them all, which was no small feat, a picture of a crying man with a beard and a tophat on asked me in a wavering and accusing voice, “Don’t you love your country?” To which I yelled “NO!” Causing the image to fade away after accusing me of being a ‘traitor.’ Then the security lock dominated my screen. Using the legacy system within the legacy system it wasn’t very hard break the pathetic ice that the government’s security protocols consisted of. Smashed to pieces using a telnet session and ten lines of commands, no wonder they lost control. The background is gone. I’m standing, or at least appear to be standing in a hallway full of doors. It’s hardly infinite, but from my vantage point it may as well be. A finger, huge, taps my screen. I’m greeted by a solider, dressed in a low-cut v-neck uniform that shows off pixelated cleavage that would put most porn stars to shame. Blonde hair, no pants, a skirt instead, that goes up way too high with stockings attached to camo high-heels.
“Why hello there, sir.” She puts her hand through her hair in, what I can only assume to be, an attempt at being sexy. She bends over to show off her digital assets. “I am subroutine Alice, here to assist your search through the archives, and you are…” She takes a look a clipboard she’s holding, programmed to be a lifelike gesture, showing just how out of touch the designer of this script really was. “You are, General Adamus. Five star general, clean service record. Businesslike. Serious.” The girl fades out, replaced by a more serious looking version. Hair tied back. Hat on. Pants. Uniform. Just a mild hint of the bust that was present before beneath her top. The sexy overtones in her voice disappear, replaced with one that is both crisp and precise. “What can I assist you with on your trip to the research archives today, sir?”
“Inquire.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who last extracted data from this server?”
“Data corrupt, sir.” She says, well, it says.
They must have covered their trail, whatever corporation got o the tech research first after the collapse.
“Estimate.”
“Data corrupt, sir.”
“Are you capable of operating beyond your subroutine parameters?”
“Yes, sir. With some difficulty. I am not A.I. based.”
“Scripts.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop calling me ‘sir’.”
“Understood.”
“Name last login name.”
It looks down to the clipboard. “General Stesson. Now flagged deceased.”
“What year did he did he die?”
“File not found.”
“So, you have no date information available?”
“Not exactly, the file’s last modified date reads: Time 18:22 Date June 23rd year 2055; but that only reflects on the date that it passed into record, which could have been months or years after the event.”
“How long have you been operational?”
“Data corrupt. If you continue along this line then you may cause a fatal error in my scripting and you will have no assistance in your search.”
“Very well, what percentage of file integrity is left in the archives?”
“Ten point five six three four percent.”
“Why so little?”
“The files have been stripped, left with only the original project aims while almost all actual schematics, research data, and other miscellaneous information has been removed or corrupted.”
That’s what Seifer told me, so the old bastard has been here after all. That means he must know what the nano was used for. Either he wanted me to see for myself or this was a setup. I knew better than to fully trust a cop, even off the record, but best not to jump to conclusions yet. Not when I was this close.
“So,” I begin to say, my heart rate begins to rise. I wasn’t interested in dates or the state of the archives really, not that the information garnered from asking wasn’t mildly useful in it’s own right. It’s funny how so close to a real breakthrough I’m almost too nervous to ask for fear of what may happen as a result of my gaining certain knowledge; however, now isn’t the time for second-guessing. Inside my circa, which is slowly rocking back and forth, I ask for the information on the nano they used on me.
In a blink there is a doorway in front of me. It reads a serial number that flickers and fades, corrupted or damaged probably. Alice, inserts a key, and leads me inside. It is a room with several floating file folders, electric blue. Alice grabs a file and holds it in front of the screen. Heart rate quickens again, the sensation of being close to vomiting greets me like an old friend that somehow keeps managing to worm his way back into your life in spite of your best efforts to get rid of the bastard. Deep breaths, the file stares me in the face, Alice’s fingernails showing in the header as she holds the document to the screen.
FILE HEADER INFORMATION CORRUPTED OR INVALID
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET
Project Date:
Project Serial: 2549893- -NT60
Project Team Members:
Initial Project Goals: .
Secondary Project Goals: To .
Results of Initial Research:
FILE MISSING OR CORRUPTED
Another puzzle piece, not an answer. In truth, I didn’t really expect things to be so simple. To think I got myself all worked up just to hit another dead end. What a foolish thing.
“Alice, remove top secret classification.”
“No. You are not authorized.”
“I’m a five-star general, what trumps that?”
“You are not authorized.”
“Yeah, yeah you said that before. Well then who is authorized?”
“You are not authorized.” Sexiness leaks back into the voice.
When I view Alice she is leaning forward, her cleavage is almost hanging out, but she’s still wearing the uniform bottom and the hat, she, it, whatever, is frozen in place. Occasionally she appears naked. So this is what the old government spent it’s money on. Some old generals getting his digital jollies off to a subordinate script. Old programs take a while for the crash to register, so Alice could very well not reset itself for days, not enough time to wait. As I go to copy this meager scrap of intelligence, the server kicks me out. First I’m in front of the archive door. Then I’m in front of the archive server login. Then I’m out among the server cluster with the waving flag and the patriotic slogans and hues of red white and blue. Then I’m outside entirely in the legacy system, watching the old government servers slowly turn into that familiar pattern of warring black and white. Either the whole server just happened to take a dump after all these years or someone just shut them down physically. My money’s on the latter.
Doing a quick rundown in my head of the current situation the facts point towards two truths. Someone is actively ghosting me and may possibly be trying to kill me, and I have learned approximately jack shit. The Circa chimes in at this delightful moment of clarity to inform me that in a few short moments I shall be docking in the government complex. Then something else interrupts the Circa’s automated message, or rather someone. Whoever or whatever it was, it was using a voice alteration program, a really good one. It sounded like a woman, mature, maybe mid thirties. It struck me as a lonely voice, commanding but sad.. It said, “You don’t want to go there.”
Pondering the situation, I decided not to ask who they were, odds are with a voice mask on they weren’t going to tell me. As a matter of fact, there was a good chance that it would be in my best interest to tread lightly until the threat could be better assessed. So I merely asked, “what is it you want from me?”
“Giving in so easily?” It laughed, almost mockingly.
“Cut the shit,” I said. “You’ve shut me out and tried to kill me once tonight. Which shows you don’t know me that well because I never use a brain port to connect to the internet.”
“I know that. You always go for the low end tech. You’ve got the wrong person. I’m a friend.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“You may want to reconsider that line of thinking, you need me right now.”
“Like hell I do! I don’t need anyone, especially not backhanded anonymous help from someone broadcasting on a pirate signal.”
“Cut the tough guy routine, you’re small potatoes and you know it. You’ve tread on some big toes in the last hour or so, and you may not be fully aware of that. Jump off the rail line you’re on right now, don’t go to the government complex. Take any bypass you know and stay on the free rails, they won’t follow you there.”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah and I suppose you think I’m safer trusting someone who has to hide who they are from me. I’m not falling for whatever you are trying to pull and you can…”
“There’s no more time, do it now you idiot!” It sounded like genuine concern. I hesitated over the vehicle controls, and then decided to ignore what the voice was saying. Connection severed.
The Circa chimes in again, “arriving at destination, have a pleasant….”
Spinning, the world was spinning. The Circa’s inner controls all go black, the internet is gone in a blink, there is a faint smell of smoke and out of the small side windows I see the docks on fire burning then the sky then the ground then a tower nearby. The Circa tries to use backup power to latch on to one of the rails. Then when they fails it informs me to tuck my legs in, take deep breaths, brace for impact. Another rail reduces my decent slightly, and also causes me to swing into the side of the building, metal and glass scrape along for a few seconds. Then more spinning. Getting dizzy. The funny thing was that here at the end I wasn’t scared. Just a little dissapointed, but that feeling doesn’t last for long, another rail catches and slows me again, again I scrape the building then hit something. Hard. Airbags deploy, surrounding me a cocoon of white and air. At least the front end of me, I feel a sharp pain in my neck, in my right arm, in my leg. Then a the world begins to blur, and fade out, everything an echo of an echo of an echo fading out till it’s little more than a fuzzy dot far in the distance. Fading out like the last electron running through the circuits that power the online world of electric dreams.
This delightful nugget of information was brought to you by: The site's wanna-be author, professional jerk, monster who's dead on the inside and semi-proud owner. More from this authorPopularity: 1% [?]
I found this really interesting to read.