I always come around to the sound faint whirring sound of the processors and hard drives slowing down and stop working. Then there’s that uncomfortable silence where you know you have to get up, but you really don’t want to. There is something about disconnecting your brain from a computer that is disconcerting. It’s like waking up after a hangover. Your mouth tastes like you’ve been sucking on a bag of pennies, your legs and arms hurt, you’re sweaty and nasty all over, and your chest feels like it has a stone on it. The lights are too bright and the sounds are too loud, and everything seems blurry and distant. I’m told I feel like this because I haven’t been using my sensory organs for so long, and re-using them makes the sensations particularly uncomfortable. I, of course, believe it’s because god hates me. And hungry, did I mention that I always wake up hungry. I know that I the IV gives me all the proper nutrients, vitamins and minerals, but something about not eating real food for a week and a half just makes you hungry.
I disconnected myself from my deck. First I have to take off the IV, which itself kind of painful, but you get used to it. I then have to disconnect myself from the waste management system. My muscles feel like warm Jell-O and my fingers move like an arthritis patient. I then have to disconnect the hardline from my deck to my brain. This is the line that all the information travels on, so if I’m not careful I could, in fact, render myself brain dead. It’s always a comforting thought to know that I can regularly kill myself if I’m not careful. Slowly I pull the cords that are sticking a good three inches into my brain out of my skull. Unlike the IV, it’s not painful to pull out, but also like the IV, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. Now I can leave, assuming I don’t fall over like last time.
Today was definitely no different than most times I disconnect. In fact today was definitely worse than most days. I was particularly nauseas and I had a headache the size of Kansas. I’d have to run a system check before I dove again to see if I caught any of that corruption virus that those bastard angels were using. Well I’d just have deal with that later, I was fine for now. And more than anything I just want to take a shower and get some food. I’d go over what happened with Julie and see what kind of damage we both took when I met her for dinner tonight. In the mean time, I might as well tend to my body.
I got up from the seat in my deck and moved to the shower to start my decompressing ritual. My house wasn’t much to speak of. It served its function. It had a roof, water, electricity and a bed. Outside of the essentials it was pretty much of a shit hole. I owned almost no furniture, the carpet was unsightly colored in many places, and I had almost nothing to cook food with, neither appliances nor food stuffs. When I ate food in the house, I always got it delivered, or I was diving, which means I used the IV bags. Speaking of which, I needed to pick up a few more of those suckers. The shower was in the same state of disrepair as the rest of the house, except that I had soap in here. Really the only thing that I had in my house of note was my deck.
My deck was my prided and joy, I had four individual core systems, all programmed on a different root language. Each core system was like another brain, working on all the same principles of distributed computing/memory technology. Each core system had a complete buffer of every piece of information I ever got my hands on. I also have a complete second coder deck that is 100% separate from the main line deck. It even has its own core system so that way I can verify the integrity of the key system data from the four alternate systems before I go work with it. All the redundancies in the systems mean that in case my systems ever gets fried on the net, I don’t have to start over from square one, I can just load up the back up from my coder deck, and I’m good. Since I’m paranoid, I even back up my own personal memory, so even if my pattern is destroyed on a run, all someone would need to do is plug me back into my coder, and I would start from the last time I backed myself up. I wouldn’t know what happened, but it sure as hell beat being a tomato.
I lived in the old part of Waverly Kansas. Waverly is one of those small towns in Podunk County, right next to Nowheresville. It’s perfect for my kind of operation. The people were xenophobic and tightly connected, and I was on a first name basis with most of them. If anyone unusual ever came into town, I would know in a heartbeat. They also didn’t mind technology, and were happy to have someone around who could do the odd bits of programming and repair that I can give. They assumed I worked for some corporation and had to leave for the city for weeks at a time, but that I could work out of my home the rest of the time. Of course, I spend more time at home when they thought I was gone then when they thought I was here.
My real job is information trafficking. I’m what people refer to as a technowizard. I dive into the Supernet and collect information, which I then use or sell to the highest bidder. In a world of bits and information, the man who can get his hands onto the really good pieces of information is very powerful. I can my hands on anything for a price.
The last job I got was to grab some particularly tasty pieces of info from the angels, a group of artificial intelligences that control a vast network of systems and resources. They believe that they are the final evolution of consciousness in the universe, and are determined to bring as many humans under their control. Of all the guys I wrong by stealing from, I never feel bad about them. What I got was the root coding language to their network structure. With it, I’ll be able to alter their server’s directories and rooms. This would be like if someone were able to go into your house, the place you consider secure, and change the entire layout of everything to my whim and desire. I could place walls were they weren’t before, change where rooms go, a whole mess of fun things to do. They won’t have the home turf advantage anymore when I can change their own systems, the bastards.
I was done showering, and now clothed. Clothes feel weird after you’ve spent the last ten days naked. My legs were still weak from atrophy, so I figured I’d do a little working out, maybe some squats before attempting anything strenuous like driving a car. It wouldn’t be good to going out and wrapping myself around a V-board after such a big haul. I didn’t need to be in Kansas City for another 9 hours to see Julie anyways. I finished up my Workout and decided that I needed something to eat. I was thinking something as fatty as possible.
First, though I had to plug into my external. My external deck was like a mini core system that I kept with me all the time. While a normal core system might weigh some eighty to a hundred pounds, my external was a mere five, fuel cell included. By hooking into it, I got access to all my data and I could jack into my other adaptable devices. I can do things like drive my Volkswagen by just thinking about it. I also received sensory data from a whole battery of sources. The world just doesn’t seem right if I don’t see in 12 different spectrums and can hear a butterfly flap its wings a quarter mile away. It also lets me think faster, doing multiple things at once. The technology to integrate all the data into my head I invented myself, and is one of my own personal closely guarded secrets. It’s what first got me into being a wizard in the first place.
Upon jacking in, about two dozen little extra sensory windows flashed in front of me about a foot and a half in front of my face. These windows only exist in my head, but I can let other people see them if I let them connect to my personal net. It makes me sick looking at them though because the little windows move with my eye. They bob and shake as my eye twitches back and forth gathering data. I have to fix their position in the computer before I can read them with out getting a headache. The windows are old style e-mails. Most of them are junk, several of them are bills, but every now and then I get something from someone I know. It costs 50¢ to send an e-mail, so most people are reluctant to pay the surcharge. However, it’s reliable, safe, and secure, so it tends to be my main source of communication.
I got twelve ads soliciting a great new sex shop on the Derenda servers. I’d have to be a friggen tomato to be caught on the Derenda servers looking for sex. That’s a fast way to get a data virus. One of them I keep though. It’s an ad to see their hot new model Julie do nasty things to herself. It looks like a legitimate ad for a new site, and in fact it probably is legitimate. It’s also a coded message from Julie my partner telling me where we’re going to meet so that we can talk later. We use fake names so that way in case one of us ever gets caught, and someone mines are brain for data, we can’t give each other away. It’s hard to keep secrets when someone can dive into your memory and simply pull up the information they are looking for. I’m not saying its legal for people to do it, but it’s possible. Besides, considering the people I deal with, the legality of the matter doesn’t really play a part in it.
All except one of the rest of them were bills, ads, and catalogs. It was a message from Jimbo asking me to reprogram his combine. The thing was a piece of crap, old 20s relic that’s been modified and jury-rigged to work for 50 years. I have to go out and fix it every couple of months, otherwise he can’t work. It wouldn’t take long, maybe a five minute drive, a ten minute fix, tops.
The message was only about fifteen minutes old, so by the time I get there Jimbo is just getting off his old deck to talk to me.
“I’m telling ya Jimbo, you should get a faster immersion system. That old piece of junk you’re using takes fifteen minute to upload and download. Might as well be pounding on a keyboard and talking on a solar antenna” I spouted out to him as I pulled up.
“Well I only use it once a week maybe, so I don’t really see the point” he said back to me as he trotted up to the car.
Jimbo was a portly fellow, with a darker complexion than most. He was wearing coveralls and a white cotton t-shirt soaked in sweat, his usual garb for a work day. Jimbo raised wheat on his seventy-five acres of land. He had a wife and kids, but the kids had long since moved out. His wife, Sara, spent most of her time working the fields, same as Jimbo. I ate dinner with them occasionally as payment for fixing their stuff. I didn’t charge them anything; it was too small to charge them for. I know it’s stupid to get caught up in the local area when you might have to ditch the area if someone finds out where your physical body is. I guess I justify it by saying its important contacts in the town.
I wanted to make this quick so I told him, “Look, Jimbo, I just got back from a week and a half long business trip to Old Moscow,” he though I worked in a venture capital firm that does international investment, “and I’m beat as hell. I’ll fix it, but I can’t really stay. Sleep calls.”
He gave me a half smile and shook his head a little, “No, No, I understand. Busy guy like you needs his rest. This shouldn’t take long; the old thing just won’t load the proper route program. I think it might be with the memory buffer.”
Jimbo might have been a farmer, but he wasn’t a hick. He knew enough to run 24 computerized combines and had the business sense to manage a multinational grain business that sold to twenty four different countries. Just because he didn’t understand all the ins and outs of these combines didn’t make him stupid.
I grabbed my tool kit out of the trunk, “Well let me take a peek at it. It sounds like the type of problem that that things been having.” Turns out he was right. When I opened up the deck compartment, which was conveniently placed next to the super hot engine, the magic blue smoke that runs all technology escaped. I caught a lung full of smoke and managed a couple of coughs before I could speak again. “Yeah, I think your memory buffers are toast. That thing was pretty bad last time I looked at. I bet it finally shook itself off its mounts and landed on the wall touching the engine block.”
“Well nuts, do you think you can fix it today?”
“No, this time I think you’ll just have to buy a new memory buffer this time.” I paused a second and looked down into the charged remains of his computer. “Tell you what Jimbo, I’ll order you a whole new deck for this old thing. I’ll install it myself and everything.”
“What. No, no, I couldn’t ask you to do that,” he said making a little gesture with his hands in front of him.
“Yeah, I will, and in return you’ll have me over for a barbeque next week with real beef burgers and brauts.” I grinned at him.
He looked down at his broken combine. The thing had been nothing but trouble for him for the last ten years. The machinery was good, but the deck on it was an ancient relic of the past that needed to be replaced. He knew it; I knew it. He chuckled a little, “You’re too nice to us Danny. If you ever need anything, and I mean anything you hear…” His voice trailed off.
“No, its no trouble, I won’t take me long at all. And seriously, who else but you can get real beef for a barbeque. I’ll send you a message when I get the parts. Probably won’t take more than a couple days,” my voiced dropped a little, “but like I said Jimbo, I gotta sleep.”
“Right, right. I’ll let you go then. You do us too good Danny. Take care now.”
“You too!” I managed as I got back into my Volkswagen. I waved a quick goodbye and peeled out of his driveway. Now it was time for food. Thank god too, because one more second in the hot sun and I probably would’ve been sunburned beyond belief. Spending all your time inside does nothing for your complextion.
For food, I was thinking I would go to Subway. It’s the only place in the whole town that serves anything with the fats I need anymore. My history banks tell me that at one point in America some 50 years ago there were numerous fast food places that served fatty foods beyond anything served today. However the food they served was so rich that eating it would eventually lead serious health problems. Several people even ate themselves to death right in the restaurants. Public outrage was so high that people stopped eating at them, eventually putting them out of business. Now all the fast food places serve healthy food that is perfectly balanced for a proper diet. Admittedly, the health problems in the country have decreased sharply, but I can only imagine what these foods of wonder taste like Only subway serves even remotely rich food anymore.
After I got subway and managed to rejuvenate my will for working, it was time to work on my deck and process the information I grabbed. Since I was out, I also grabbed a new case of 48 IV bags to hook up into the rotary. The rotary holds a good 120 IV bags, with proper nutrients to keep my body going. I go through one bag every 6 hours or so. I always keep my rotary stocked though just to make sure that I don’t end up getting stuck in some barrier maze set up by a Trazierian for a couple weeks and suddenly run out of food. I also have a reserve stack of another 100 that I never plan on using, but its there just in case. Loading the bags is time consuming but not hard. Lots of the thing I have to do is time consuming, but not hard, that’s the nature of the computer world.
After Loading the IV bags, I cleaned out the interfaces before sitting down and doing any more work. The interface is basically a very comfortable lounge chair, very much unlike the ones that you see in a dentists office, with all the cords and cables connected to it. The system itself has an extremely precise cooling and particulate regulation system. The interface however is a sickly warm and stuffy area. It has a smell that reminds me of fried chicken: sweaty, musty and unclean. I can never do any work knowing that I’m sitting in that. I wipe the seats out and I take an air cleaned in there to remove the smell. It’s still warm, but it’s definitely better after being cleaned.
Now I could get to work. If I’m just going to be doing work on my coder, I don’t bother to undress or hook up the IV. Although I still have to connect the hardline to my brain. If it’s disconcerting pulling the hardline out, it’s down right awful sticking it in. When you pull it out, your brain is still used to receiving signals from it, so it’s more natural and smooth. But when you put it in, your brain isn’t expecting the intrusion; you can get random synapse firing in unusual ways. Your brain naturally trigger the flight or fight mechanism and you get very nervous and unsure, even though you’ve done it hundreds of times. You hear sounds that aren’t there and see faces of people long dead. If you aren’t expecting it, you might think you’ve done something wrong and pull the hardline out fast, which has a small chance of simply killing you. No, you take a couple of deep breaths and slowly push the rest of the cables up to where they belong. I connected myself and lay down, so I could do my work.
I loaded myself up into my coder deck. My coder deck is a private space away from the rest of the net. On my closed network, I can do all the programming and testing I want with out having to worry about interference from outsiders. I have my coder deck programmed to look like a laboratory, mostly because it seems appropriate to the kind of work that I’m doing.
Every interface on the net involves all 5 senses. Every executed piece of programming is represented in a sensual way. Every little application can be heard; every little string can be seen; every little program can be licked. The actual representation of it is determined by the user when it’s created. Many people who are lazy simply have the program download the global design and use its setting. That way, if the global settings are for a laboratory, then your program would take on the appearance of a laboratory. Your pattern separation programs, the simple programs that make sure that your information and thought patterns don’t interact with the rest of the system unless you want to, would look like the lab coat you’d be wearing. The programming tools that you would use to build a program would look like tools in a lab. Even if you don’t know how to use that particular tool in real life, you would still be able to use them because you can simply download from the global their proper use. Just because the program changed appearance doesn’t mean that the actual program changed.
Although if you wanted to spend the time and effort, you can make the programs look and feel like anything you want. Indeed for many people though, this is a requirement. It’s considered very low brow to simply download the global settings, and in fact many domain controllers make the global settings something ridiculous, like bright pink clothing, to discourage its use. Being able to create high quality graphics is a very desirable skill that takes not only a high quality system to do well, but actual ingenuity and artistic talent. Julie is much better in this department that I am. I however can build a much better spell and executable. It’s a good team, because I can give her the spells she needs, while she can design me a good set of clothes to wear out on the net. It’s not like I couldn’t making something decent, but she does it better and faster than me. Plus it allows me to devote my time to building these programs.
The first thing I did upon loading up into my deck was check the integrity of my brain system to see if I caught any of that corruption virus. A corruption virus is a program that attacks the actual bits of data, changing random values, which can cause havoc with the systems. Many work on a single program, but the nasty ones spread out before causing damage, infecting anything that comes into contact with them. The really nasty ones, the kind of ones that get you fried on sight if someone catches you trying to transport them, lay dormant for days, sometimes weeks, slowly attaching themselves to many programs across your entire system, and then strike on a coordinated effort. The way to cure them though is you can go have a back up of your data and see if there are any changes in it, if there aren’t then the data can’t have any viruses.
My brain was clean so I then ran a check of my four primary core systems. It took a couple minutes, but it is always worth the wait. It never pays to get a corruption virus. You might get fried out on the net, but that can be repaired. System corruption is permanent. After the core systems were checked and passed, I ran a system back up. Its tedious, but again its good to have a couple of back ups to make sure that you never are caught with a dormant virus like I was talking about. I once was caught with out a back up about 3 years ago. I was sloppy and I lost almost three months worth of solid data that can never be recovered. Now I do back ups every week, and I keep complete records for a year. It requires a lot of space, in fact it requires 150 buffer systems to hold all the data, but it’s worth it in the line of work I do. I never know when an angry client might find me and inflict his “righteous justice” on me. I say let him, it’s easier to do this than to try to stop him. Plus once they think I’m dead I’ll just come back, alter my virtual appearance a little and they’ll never know the difference. If I try to stop them, they’ll just come back till I am dead. No, this is better, a little more time consuming now, but so much better in the long run.
Finally, with the routine done and the entire pre-check list checked, I could get to work on the data we ‘recovered’ from the angels. In my lab the data was represented as a large metal safe with a key lock. The data was encrypted with a strong encryption and needs the other half of a key program to open it. I couldn’t just rend the program, rending means you just erase individual strings, executions and tasks of a program, which won’t kill the program but is bad for it never the less. Rending the safe would destroy the contents of it, kinda like blowing up a real safe would destroy the contents of the safe in real life, especially since the contents were probably scrambled, the data would never be recoverable. I could’ve tried to brute hack the safe, which would involve making my own program to try all possible keys that might fit to the safe. A quick scan of the key told me that there were 1046 possibilities. That means if all five of my core systems and my own brain worked on the problem, I would likely still be working on it when the sun exploded and consumed the earth in a ball of fire in six billion years. No, I would have to try a different way.
There was a better way though, and I already knew it from looking at the first time. I recognized the method of encryption they used. They used a mathematical elliptical sphere asymmetric encryption tool. By reverse engineering the program they used to encrypt the program, I simply have to brute force the seed values for the program, which reduces the amount of work to about 4-8 hours of dedicated time with my five systems, a much more reasonable amount of time. I set that up to run as well as my scrubber over it to make sure that there were no Trojans, little buggers waiting to be executed when you open a program. I had a good record of that corruption virus they were using, so I made sure that it’s a priority on the inspection, but of course I checked for everything.
Most of the work done on computers is tedious like this. All anyone ever sees nowadays is the high glamour stuff out on the major servers. All the real work, and all the profitable work, is done like this, in lab in a private space away from the rest of the world. I could go out and sell digital indulgence to my hearts content, but that doesn’t earn me anything substantial. Hard work like this is how you gain real power. Today I just got a little rich, a little more powerful. Now I have leverage over the angels. I can use it against them, which I fully plan on doing, but more importantly I can hold it over their head. They can’t mess with me though, because I could just send what I stole from them today to their biggest rival. They’d be royally screwed if I did that. It’s that kind of power that makes the tedious work like this enjoyable.
With all that set up, there was no more need to be connected. I still had to meet Julie for dinner, but that wasn’t for another 6 hours or so. The only thing left to do then was catch a couple hours of sleep. Sleeping after spending so much time diving on the net is like the silence just after watching a car wreck. There was so much turmoil and excitement of watching several tons of steel and flesh barrel into each other, your brain needs time to deal with it. All the victims just stand around, going over the events in their head, but no one talks, no sounds can be heard, just a silence. And in my head, for the next couple of hours, silence.