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.