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Post by Infidel on Jun 25, 2010 17:21:45 GMT -8
☼>>: It’s a war of values. And I don’t mean ethical values. Or even logical values. It’s not a binary notion we’re dealing with here.
☼>> paused. For dramatic effect, of course. His latency had been whittled down to a matter of microseconds.
☼>>: It’s all about the money.
Ω]]: Fuck you.
Ω]] wasn’t the sort to bite his tongue. The room changed colour as he swore, pulsed and warped to the rhythm of his words.
Ω]]: You did it for the kick, for the rush, because you were fucking bored. I’m doing it because my family needs me to.
The room shifted to a bluer hue. Shimmering, vibrating, mocking, cynical.
☼>>: You expect us to believe they’re being held hostage?
The room grew knives and blades and emoted right back.
Ω]]: I expect you to believe that I am flat broke and I need to pay for my family to eat and I am sick of being a part of your circlejerk.
The walls shrank, became constricting and unwelcome and suffocating. Point made.
Ω]]: You can jack in some other place, I don’t want to see your con-ID anywhere on this system.
☼>>: You’re a fucking traitor.
Ω]]: And you’re too stupid to see that this is so much bigger than you. I’d tell you to grow up but you’re full of self-righteous piss and vinegar, clogging up your brain and pooling in your cache.
The atmosphere couldn’t have been any more unsubtle even if there’d been a gigantic flashing “exit” sign. Ω]] didn’t do subtle. Being evasive never got the job done.
Ω]]: Get out while you can because otherwise I’m handing your location over. Run, because when they find you, you won't be able to whine and pout at them. They'll call you out on all your bullshit and you'll finally face the consequences.
Ω]]: connection closed
☼>> froze to the spot and his brain began to melt. He was in no position to wonder whether it was happening to him literally.
)): Too late.
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Post by edcrab on Jul 8, 2010 13:18:52 GMT -8
“Good day so far?”
She laughed and threw an empty soda can at him. He shied away as if mortally wounded.
“Stop that! You know full well I’ve been going mad trying to fill all these holes.”
Mike nodded solemnly. “That’s what she said.”
Jane rolled her eyes and turned back to her work. “Urgh, forget I said anything.”
The computer bank was large, but there were only two monitors— most of the data was displayed on lens overlays, or subconsciously processed and realised as short-term memory uploads interpreted as real-time information gathering. Even now, Jane was wired in; not completely sucked into the system’s armature, but deep enough inside to make data management far more intuitive than keywhacking alone.
Rather than taking up his own position at the computer, Mike snuck behind her and hovered over her shoulder. “Oh, come on! No, tell me about your day. I find it really interesting.”
“Only because you want to keep one step ahead of the security services.”
“Well yeah, that and because you could make a shopping list sound cool. I heard that even the latest framework has a virtually identical backdoor.”
“It’s funny,” she smiled, “they always do their best to explain the exploits without being too clear in their reports, otherwise they’d just increase the number of p—”
Jane gasped, convulsed so violently that the chair lifted off the carpet, and then went still. He recoiled in shock, and then immediately went back to her.
“Jane?”
The whites of her eyes were showing and there was an audible buzz from the cable snaking up around her neck and to the seat’s interface sconce.
“Jane! Are you—?”
“She’s not dead, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not yet.”
A man was standing at his window. Bearded, not that tall, dressed casually. As if he’d walked in off the street.
“Don’t worry.” He stood up off the windowsill, and lit a cigarette with a spark cap installed on his fingertip. “If you co-operate, she’ll be right as rain. And I mean real rain, not the acidic crap you get around here.”
“Who…?”
“The thing about persecuting a big soulless corporation, Mike, is that it’s full of souls. You can’t fuck us without fucking a whole lot of other people.”
“What have you done to her?”
“Think of it as a neural block. That's an over simplification, but it'll suffice. She already had all the necessary pathways traced in her mind, we just closed a few off. If we close off any more, she’ll die. Instantly. No way back. And you don’t want to do that.”
Mike had taken a seat and scooted over to the console, desperately checking the key inputs and voicelogs and netgraphs and everything. Nothing looked promising.
The man walked over to Mike, placed both hands on the back of the chair, and turned him around. Staring at Mike mere inches from his face, smoke spiralling up from his mouth and nostrils, savouring the flavour.
“It’s a toggle. A zero or a one. Her life is one bit away from ending, and all I need to do is give the word.”
Mike was shaking with rage, gripping the armrests so as not to punch and claw and tear the man apart. “This is why the whole world hates you.”
“Yeah, while buying all our latest models and drinking our coffee. Spare me the noble hacker crap. Nobody cares. Either you do the job, or she dies. And you die too, if we’re being honest- it’s just that we felt we had to neuroblock her as well. See, you wouldn’t really be in a position to bargain if we did it to you first.”
Mike looked at her. Her eyelids flickered slightly, and her upper lip quivered. He swallowed, and turned back to the intruder.
“What do you want me to do?”
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Post by edcrab on Jul 17, 2010 13:07:53 GMT -8
Apartments on apartments on sewers on unified utility facilities on more apartments.
The habitat projects made excellent use of the available space. Aesthetically, however, most people were glad they never got the opportunity to see them from above. Hulking grey agglomerations of concrete and metal, webbed in walkways and bristling with transceivers, as if some monstrous bug had entwined its bulbous egg sac in steel silk. If anything, observers were grateful for the garish billboards that broke up the stolid monotony.
An underdressed woman knocked back a soft drink and beamed at the world in large, and then her image fizzled away into an award-winning advert that, to Agent Duentes, looked for all the world like a pair of athletes going on a jog during an acid trip. He wasn’t even sure what it was for.
“Something on your mind?”
Duentes waved a hand vaguely. “You could say that.”
The helicopter slowly descended and softly alighted on one of the hab’s innumerable pads.
“We haven’t laid a finger on it,” an over-enthusiastic deputy shouted over the rotors, “it’s ready for you to look at.”
Duentes gave the man a nod and stepped off the chopper, motioning for his personal pilot to kill the engine and wait a while. The deputy babbled about a few things he already knew and lead him through a maintenance door into the heart of the habitat. A few civilians watched him in suspicious awe until, finally, he reached the relevant apartment. A crime scene all wrapped up in yellow tape and proximity sensors.
While it seemed an average residence, the nervous officers in the corner hinted at its secrets. They stepped aside as Duentes approached.
The door, helpfully labelled “server room”, led to a technophobe’s nightmare. Duentes had aced his ICT literacy course but the contents of the office-cum-command centre bemused him.
He could just about recognise several monitors and HD stacks and at least three kinds of jacks— direct nerve inductors, recessive neurotransmitters, steady-state diffusers— but the other dozen? Completely alien to him. This stuff looked top-of-the-line, perhaps even custom made. So much for being an area of his expertise.
No signs of a struggle, but the occupant had clearly left in a hurry. The chair was overturned and a rubbery scuffmark on the polished floor betrayed that a man had ran really quite fast, too hurried to watch what he did with his feet.
He toggled his IR lens. No blood, semen, or even spilt caffeinated drinks; most crime scenes tended to have at least two. The user must have kept things tidy.
Duentes killed the overlay and approached the only functional monitor. Several windows were hovering above the taskbar, but only one log was open in the foreground:
Oh god
Purge everything
They’ll check my logs and do a keyword trace
They found me
They f
“I suggest you turn that off,” said a voice behind him. “You’re well beyond your pay grade now.”
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Post by edcrab on Oct 13, 2010 10:45:05 GMT -8
Little snippets for node reports and/or narrations we'll see how it goes:
BEGIN LOG:
Report has been corrupted.
No data retrievable.
Nothing to see here.
We suggest you depart.
[Last edited: 133 seconds ago.]
)): We are doing this to help.
►==: You’re all a bunch of killers
)): Yes, you have never ruined any lives. You are a paragon of virtue. An example to us all.
►==: You can’t compare what we did to what you did
)): We killed ☼>>, yes. But they were not an innocent victim. ☼>> siphoned money off to anarcho-criminal organisations and terrorists. Just to make profit. Just for the rush. ☼>> had become an obstacle.
►==: Do you seriously think you’re the good guys here
)): Certainly not. But of all the “guys”, we are the best. And our cause is not for you to judge.
►==: Yeah you sure are clever, I’m hacking your master database right now you arrogant fuck
)): And two metres behind you there is a hired killer with a machete the size of your leg.
)): Go and look. I’ll wait.
►==: connection closed
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Post by edcrab on Nov 9, 2010 10:39:59 GMT -8
His avatar shrugged. At least that’s what it looked like to Duentes: the giant talking hat kind of sagged in the middle and then straightened back up.
It was a velveteen affair, about the size of a man, and topped off with a multicoloured feather from a flamingo/peacock crossbreed.
This was the chosen visage of the oh-so-originally-named “Cyberpimp”.
“Not for me to decide,” said CP.
“You what? You run the—”
“I take a cut. I supply the software foundation, peer-review the neurological interface protocols, test the AR constructs for stability— that part’s really fucking important, trust me, unless you want the scenario to collapse and give you a migraine just as you climax— but I don’t have that much say about the clients.”
Talking to a piece of animated headwear was a little strange to Duentes, who had always navigated the grid as himself; his avatar had been custom-rendered by a close friend, to avoid the embarrassment of wandering around as one of the browsing-package’s defaults.
Still, it could’ve been worse. At least the Cyberpimp wasn’t a set of talking genitals, which was a surprisingly common sight if you dared explore the place without the content restrictors (although even that might not stop the procession of obscenity if a hacker was feeling particularly puerile).
Although anyone perusing the nodes of the Red Light District with content filters on would find the place a barren void. Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Mostly the first one.
Duentes frowned. “I thought you were an agency.”
“We are. But freelancers get in touch with me sometimes. They buy a, hah, license, and then what they do with it is their choice. Anonymity is important.”
“I don’t believe for a second that you don’t have records.”
CP bristled indignantly, growing spiky and crackling with static. “I would’ve assumed a man in your role to be more knowledgeable. Someone makes a botnet, other hackers buy it off them; thousands of purchases, none of them monitored. I make a… very functional suite of specific services, and interested clients purchase it. But this client was very particular about the capabilities of the suite. I actually tweaked it specifically.”
“For an extra charge, I assume?”
“That goes without saying.”
Duentes paused for a moment. “But what you are saying is that someone bought it for their own personal use, not to make a profit by making ARC’s for other people.”
Another hatty shrug. “Not necessarily. If someone takes their fantasy seriously and they have the know-how, it is sometimes easier to scratch your own back; perhaps they wanted their own neuro-metrics logged for testing purposes and nothing more.”
“But not in this instance, right? You’re saying they were using your infrastructure for something else. They were using it as a basis for another kind of AR! Something different, not to do with uh… fantasies.”
The hat smiled. The crease was unmistakable. “That would be telling.”
Duentes punched his fist into his palm. “And there’ll be traces of that client all over this place. Hot damn, tracking is right up my street.”
Things were looking up; maybe they weren’t one of the Cyberpimp’s escorts, but his lead wasn’t a dead-end after all.
“Thank you for your time, sir,” Duentes said politely, and he meant it; he was amazed he’d even got an audience in the first place.
“You’re very welcome, Agent Duentes. Just bear in mind that I’ll call on a favour someday.”
“Want to clear your record?” Duentes chuckled.
“Record? I assure you that any blotches on my character were the work of other Cyberpimps.” The hat began to fizzle and fade away as CP initiated his log-off timer. “Perish the thought that one lonesome individual could run a semi-illicit software empire on that kind of scale. This is a very popular avatar.”
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Post by Infidel on Nov 16, 2010 17:04:25 GMT -8
I like the narrative feel of the last one very much.
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Post by edcrab on Dec 11, 2010 11:21:30 GMT -8
“You’re a fed,” Duentes breathed. “You don’t work for one of the corps. All that crap about buying products and brand loyalty… you’re a G-man. You always have been!”
Mr. Sign shrugged. He dropped the cigarette and crushed it under his expensive Italian heel. “I wouldn’t say I was a departmental employee but… yes, you cracked it, how very well done. I work for the government.”
“You tried to kill me!”
“God, no. No. We just tried to put you off the trail. You’re hard-working, loyal, and intelligent. Well, in matters beyond computing at least. If you’d been born twenty years later, you’d have been a world-class detective.”
“Yeah? Well this is my world.” Duentes waggled his sidearm meaningfully. He’d set it to stun, but non-lethal or not… electrified barbs still hurt like hell.
Sign rolled his eyes. “Isn’t it just.”
“Why?”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking from the beginning. Why are you doing this?”
“Let me paint you a picture.” Sign clasped his hands together and smiled. “Imagine if you made a public transport network, set to revolutionise the city. Imagine if a tiny minority had discovered a way to fill up every transport car with their own slovenly fat asses and cheap merchandise while hard-working citizens were turned away at stations because there was no more room. Clogging up our nice clean systems with their shit because they think they have more of a right to it than the average citizen…”
“…or the big businesses that line the government’s pockets?”
Sign laughed. It was a surprisingly deep laugh, harsh and gurgling, at complete odds with his calm, collected speaking manner. “Corporate conspiracy? Again? No, frankly most of the conglomerates are our bitches. We can pass an anti-monopoly law and rip out their hearts. They have to toe the line. They work to keep us happy, and not the other way around.”
“So, stupid metaphors aside, you’re killing people for network security.”
“Oh, think a bit more broadly for once, Agent. Network security, national security. It’s our infrastructure. The launch was going to change everything for the better. These… goddamned script kiddies run around causing chaos, for money, for fun, just out of sheer evil-minded stubbornness. If we unify the grid, it’ll be an economic golden age. And we can concentrate on stopping foreign cyber attacks instead of rounding up the whining, pathetic little shits fucking us around on our own soil. We’re enforcing the network in order to get back control of the real world.”
“That’s a lot of vitriol. They’re not real hackers, huh? But you are?”
“Please. Fifteen years ago I was scratching at my acne and queuing up to play in the latest Infinite Knives booth, just like everyone else. But I was never one of them. I never got fun out of screwing up other peoples’ systems. I liked to fix things, modify them. And then see how things turned out.”
Sign lit up another cigarette.
“It has nothing to do with your ‘talent’. It has everything to do with your cause.”
“And the Cyberpimp’s cause wasn’t pure enough. That’s why your people are attacking his people.”
“What?” Mr. Sign looked genuinely aghast. “No, he pays his taxes and his bills. We don’t give a fuck about him. I suspect it was one of the sects who was giving him trouble. They’re giving us all trouble.”
That wasn’t in the script, but Duentes had an excellent poker face.
Sign took a long drag and exhaled a strangely voluminous cloud of smoke. “So what next, Agent? You’re going to take me in? Make everything nice and public?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Not going to happen.” Sign reached into his jacket.
Duentes pulled the trigger. The gun crumbled in his hand.
The realisation hit him like a freight train to the face.
“Christ, I’m still jacked in...”
“Yes…”
Sign brought his hand back out… it was holding some sort of symb—
)): and you won’t be able to get out of here unless we let you.
)): So stop pulling triggers and start paying attention.
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Post by edcrab on Mar 16, 2011 13:05:07 GMT -8
[Greg’s notes, version 4]
>>> In order of Nominal GDP:
Federated Americas, Sino-Russian Union, European Coalition, Japan
[Do I need to talk about Africa? Maybe it’s enough to say “industrial powerhouse”, they haven’t really expanded into the ARC market. They make nearly as many cars as India these days. And Dad visited there once. Maybe I can work that into the essay?]
The Coalition has been in a state of decline for many years, losing smaller satellite states to the Union. Germany and the United Kingdom are threatening to leave, and there are whispers that they’ve approached the Federation about a possible… [what’s the word? I need to check that.] Despite widespread corruption and funding crises, the Coalition’s sheer size has kept them on the map, and they remain a frontmost player in the development of Artificial Reality Constructs and neural interface technology. Paradoxically, local law restricts the sale of “insidious” simulations in several member nations, despite the fact that they produce so many.
[Hang on is that actually right? Maybe I need to check WikiMedia. They’re always saying that… maybe it’s just hearsay, but I can see it happening.
Now I need to talk about Japan’s early start in the ARC market without making myself sound like a weeaboo. Uh. Maybe talk about the Second Korean War? That might balance that out. I’ll… oh, screw it…]
“I don’t see why this is required,” Greg muttered, banishing the video stream and not even deigning to save his changes. “It’s so hard to film a video essay without sounding like a stoner, or worse, an Information Channel presenter. Guess I need to tweak my script.”
“Sure is a bitch being a kid, huh?” TomFour laughed. “You’d never catch me going back to school.”
Greg punched his arm playfully. There was an audible clunk as his knuckles hit the man’s hulking avatar.
TomFour was currently a golem. The avatar had been a pre-order bonus for Ferelden Champion III, and he’d recently found it nestled in his previously forgotten archives. He’d taken to stomping around as the stony gimlet-eyed giant while spouting snippets of the game’s dialogue.
TomFour said he did it for nostalgia. Greg was sure he just did it to annoy the fanboys; FC3 was easily the most divisive title in the long-running series.
“I don’t see why you need this degree in the first place.”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s because I want a career?” Greg responded sardonically. “If I have a degree in history before the Constitutional Reform, it’s basically a free pass. A big fat Advanced degree for very little effort. I want to change things.”
TomFour waved a hand. One of his macros activated and a nearby skyscraper began to rise into the air. Lazily, bobbing about like a giant concrete balloon, its shadow began to spread across the entire city as it drunkenly weaved across the sky. Nobody batted an eyelid.
“Like you can’t already?”
“I mean in real life, Tom. I want to be someone.”
“C’mon, Greg. You’re barely even here anymore. You are someone! Everyone around here thinks you’re awesome. Who cares about meatspace, I mean seriously.”
The skyscraper eclipsed the sun for a second, and then turned around and began its return journey.
TomFour tweaked its entry and made it forty feet taller, just because he could. “Where are you even finding the money for this course?”
And Greg just shrugged. He tended to shrug a lot these days.
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Post by edcrab on Mar 21, 2011 13:43:47 GMT -8
The Gray Street Dentistry Clinic was currently a Church of Reality. They paid no rent and the original owner was long gone… but legally the Church of the Real also managed to pass for a charitable organisation and a religious order. After the Reformed Constitution passed, tangling with the likes of the COTR was political suicide. In the instances where donators were uncontactable or dead or downright imaginary, the authorities let squatters fly. Beyond that, the Church had a surprising number of sympathisers and donators.
To reach those who needed to hear their words the most the Church had to enter the Grid. The use of wetware would’ve been a poisonous hypocrisy, so the evangelists of the church used less high-tech methods to save the souls of the naïve. Rather than the sleek efficiency of a single direct neural interface, the basement of this particular Church was home to an augmented reality terminal.
It was an outsized booth, a coffin made for the world’s fattest, most misshapen man, protecting the modesty of whomever had to step in and put on the giant novelty gloves and headset. Fibre bundles would buzz and vibrate to mimic touch and motors and armatures would resist muscular motion to simulate friction and the physical resistances of the real world. This was seen as more honest than a cable pumping data straight into the sensory nodes of the mind; the user of such a booth would still move, still speak, still feel via their skin and their sinew instead of merely believing that they were interacting with… whatever they might find beyond the real world.
And apparently all they’d found in this instance was ire. Despite the sound-proofing, despite the opaque walls of the booth, the observer in the control room could tell that Acolyte Myers was inside… shouting, swearing, infuriated. The outside observer deduced that Myers had run afoul of an unbeliever. Some of the language he was using was grossly inappropriate for a god-fearing shepherd of men. Perhaps it was youthful exuberence.
Still bristling, Acolyte Myers stepped out of the terminal’s booth and into the path of a .44 slug.
The observer holstered the pistol and calmly left the Church of Reality, taking a We Can Save You leaflet on his way out.
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Post by Infidel on Mar 23, 2011 11:41:56 GMT -8
Things keep veering from the narrations I am expecting to need!
I think we need a rather generic "government killing fools and kicking ass so far" narration for tonight.
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Post by edcrab on Mar 23, 2011 13:26:06 GMT -8
Working on it! And remind me how to get into channel now. It keeps telling me bad channel key, so I've obviously missed an important change
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Post by Infidel on Mar 23, 2011 14:13:23 GMT -8
Oh, that was because people were stumbling in.
the key is harhar
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Post by edcrab on Mar 23, 2011 14:29:52 GMT -8
“Do I intimidate you, Mr. Reese?”
“Yes,” said Reese.
“Hah. Honesty. I’m not used to that, not in this line of work.”
Mr. Sign nudged the body with his foot. It flipped over, betraying both mutilation and the fact that Sign apparently had very strong legs.
There was a look of abject terror on the mangled face. So young. Reese couldn’t stop himself recoiling at the sight, and Sign noticed.
“They have their own playground, that Infinite City,” Sign muttered absently. “I’m fine with that. But no, for a challenge they have to shit in other people’s yards. That doesn’t sit well with me… with the government. It’s the sort of puerile self-entitlement that gives the rest of us a bad name.
“Society has a very carefully established set of rules and restrictions. For some reason, in this fresh new plane of existence, a very vocal and irritating minority insist that such boundaries shouldn’t exist. We get child pornography. We get macros that simulate narcotics. We get manchildren fucking around with other peoples’ property.
“It’s painfully short-sighted. If in meatspace one of these hacker types got beaten to a pulp by a professional boxer for no reason, they’d be terrified that society’s boundaries hadn’t saved them. That’s what we depend on. At any time in the real world, someone might crack and try and stab you. But how rare is that? That’s society, that’s culture, that’s ethical sense saving us from ourselves.
“That Cyberpimp pays his taxes, so what do we care if he lets rich assholes fuck imaginary celebrities in the privacy of their own homes? The Church? They ramble, they preach, but maybe they’re on to something.
“Because these people go too far.” Mr. Sign kicked the body again, obscuring the shredded front. “In that fucking dreamland, they throw away centuries of democracy and right-thinking, and act all affronted when they’re held accountable for abusing their freedoms.”
It sounded a bit too pat to the junior agent. “It’s just that we’ve… we’ve killed so many of them,” he began hesitantly. “I’m not sure I wanted to do this. It’s too… too simple.” Reese shivered. “Too easy. As if—”
“There’s a very good reason for that, Mr. Reese.” Sign passed him a cigarette. “It’s because we’re the good guys.”
(P.S., I'm thinking Mr Reese is Greg Reese, the character from before. But we don't need to go into that yet!)
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Post by Infidel on Mar 23, 2011 15:31:22 GMT -8
I approve! Good jorb.  |
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Post by Infidel on Mar 24, 2011 11:21:13 GMT -8
Hrmm, I don't think the vote winner for tonight will be any of the current few targets. Might need another government-slanted one!  |
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Post by Infidel on Mar 24, 2011 11:21:39 GMT -8
Although watch, now that I say that they'll probably decide to vote out a mafia...
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Post by edcrab on Mar 24, 2011 14:51:40 GMT -8
Alright, I'll see what I can whip up in the next thirty minutes
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Post by edcrab on Mar 24, 2011 15:14:43 GMT -8
“I hate this program,” said Duentes. “The character limit is a stupid gimmick and it defaults to only showing half a conversation.” He tapped out an instruction onto the keyboard. “It’s like hearing someone talk on the phone.”
The mouse was covered in dust. The machine’s owner must have exclusively jacked in for any and all interactions with the Grid— an alien mindset to Duentes, who preferred to avoid introducing anything to his brain that didn’t come in a bottle marked “vintage”.
)): Tragic, really.
)): Oh, I’m not denying it.
“Hmm,” said Duentes. “Sign talked to her before she went missing. I just wish I could see what she said in response, it’s not logged.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this, and I can’t believe I’m here,” Detective Jessop muttered.
“If I had a dime for every time I heard a woman say that, I wouldn’t have to work here either.”
“I’m serious!” she snapped. There was nothing quite like a softly-spoken person saying “I’m serious!”. It robbed them of all credibility, turned them into a sitcom character. She rubbed her forehead. “If Sign finds out what you’re doing—”
“Sign won’t. He’s too busy murdering people.”
“Listen to yourself! How can you be so casual?”
“Sign is a fuck up, but he’s got his own boundaries. He won’t kill one of his own.”
“I’d have said the hackers were one of his own. And look at them.”
)): We do it because we have to.
)): If you do the right thing, this all goes away.
)): Extortion. Threats. You will be used and abused. By us or by them. Such is life.
“You don’t know how right you are,” Duentes breathed.
“What?”
Duentes scrolled to the last entries, motioned for Jessop to come and look.
)): That’s exactly right. You do this for us, everything goes away. Everything.
)): Yes, I’m glad you see sense.
“Sign isn't pulling this off alone. His team… his ‘experts’… they’re other hackers.”
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Post by edcrab on Mar 25, 2011 16:37:44 GMT -8
TomFour had never had an anxiety headache in the Infinite City before. It was his safe place. It was where he could kick back and do anything he wanted to do.
When the day job threatened, the Grid was just another treadmill hiding behind a modern and pretty disguise. The City was supposed to be a sanctuary, a sandbox for likeminded people; their last bastion, standing strong against the worries of meatspace.
But they’d all clashed together at last, one all-encompassing train wreck. The truth of it was that reality always got you in the end. It found a way in, because it was always there. You just forgot about it for a second.
Even though the place was swarming with people— deserted by its usual standards, but still overflowing with regs and anonymous guest accounts— Tom felt isolated, estranged. Utterly goddamn terrified.
And he knew he wasn’t alone, not in that sense at least. Sure, they all hid it behind bitter recriminations and angry accusations and downright nonsensical insults… but the community was already dead in the water. Gone was the support network, gone were the chat threads that hit fifty pages in as many seconds. Everyone just lingered, watching each other warily, circulating mad rumours and falsified records and hoping against hope that if someone else was going to die… it at least wouldn’t be them.
Tom walked through the outsized park and emerged from beneath the canopies of the trees. He glanced up, and saw that some pillar of the community had rearranged the windows on his favoured skyscraper to spell out a profane doomsday prediction.
“What the fuck are we even doing,” TomFour sobbed.
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Post by Infidel on Mar 25, 2011 16:51:49 GMT -8
I think you've gone to bed already, but that is exactly it.
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Post by Infidel on Mar 26, 2011 11:33:18 GMT -8
At this rate, we may need a church victory narration. >_>
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Post by edcrab on Mar 26, 2011 16:53:37 GMT -8
Mr. Smythe worked from home. He considered how lucky this made him while he wandered through the giant archives of the Sauro Financial Security Division, the different filing cabinets leaning forward in anticipation as he trod nearer.
Even in this day and age many households couldn’t afford the direct interfaces necessary to interact with the grid in realtime. When your brain was part and parcel of the data exchange, latency was a massive issue; even a few milliseconds was a hefty price to pay. It meant irritation, nausea, or failing on that all-important headshot if you were one of those professional gamer creeps.
But that wasn’t a worry for Mr. Smythe. His perks included a top-of-the-line jack fresh from Japan, as well as a company car and an intern who existed only to supply him with fresh coffee on the rare occasion that he felt the need to visit the physical Division building.
His avatar— himself, but trimmer and clad in an expensive and ultra-realistic imitation of an Armani suit— was rarely spotted doing anything relevant in the Sauro superstructure. It was a truly massive artificial reality construct, a representation of the company and its accountancy programs that was part commercial block, part metropolis: far grander than the buildings they owned in real space, and that was saying something.
Smythe, for the most part, liked to roam the corridors as if he owned the place. He had no doubt that this would some day be the case.
Something hissed at him. He froze.
Hackers. Again. Oh, those bastards. They were playing around with him.
Due to the fact that he was a misogynist fossil, Smythe’s personal settings displayed the icons— the avatars of programs and sub-routines, non-human slaves to the system— as various businesswomen in ludicrously revealing attire.
Someone had, ah, tweaked his preferences.
He turned, and gibbered like a drunken child when a snake the size of a subway train sedately began slithering towards him. He hated snakes. Someone had read his file.
“Do you require an… update on the market?” the snake asked politely, and a tad suggestively.
Smythe shrieked and ran, clapping his hands as he went— his log-out gesture, but it went ignored by the uncaring system. He passed security icons that had become fiery magma lobsters, spreadsheet processors transmogrified into like fly-ridden carcasses, network operations monitors that looked like his mother-in-law, all the while applauding himself like a desperately deluded stand-up comic.
He reached the end of the corridor and Smythe slapped the transit module as if it was an uppity bug in need of squishing. His surroundings shimmered and fell away and it was then that he realised the obvious— the module had also been tampered with.
His immediate superiors blinked at him. His avatar had been transferred to the conference room, but the additional image layers hadn’t survived the process.
Smythe stood there, butt naked, and wished he worked in the office.
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Post by Infidel on Mar 26, 2011 18:54:06 GMT -8
Looks like we'll need a grid hacker VI -> grid consciousness SK narration.
The one that splits the vote into two!
Let me know if you need any more info or guidance, or forgot some of what we discussed.
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Post by edcrab on Mar 27, 2011 1:45:56 GMT -8
Got a tiny bit of background done so far, for people observing the Grid weirding out, but not sure if I need any SK POV stuff. This is what I have so far:
A speaker icon appeared near Tom’s side and flashed meaningfully until he said “accept”.
“Tom,” barked the voicecomm, “are you seeing this?”
“Val? How have you been?”
“Terrible, but are you seeing this?”
Tom couldn’t see a thing… and then he did. It was as if the skyline sneezed. The whole of the Infinite City, all of its mishmashed architectural styles and clashing colours, kneeled. Crouching down and eavesdropping on a conversation at street level.
“Yeah, I see it too. Someone must have got permission from the admin team to run a weird new scenario.” It made Tom feel a little happier, actually. They hadn’t forgotten how to have fun.
“I don’t think it’s another gravity experiment Tom,” said Val. “I see it too but I’m… I’m not in the City.”
TomFour paused. He took a step back… and rocketed half a mile across the horizon. The landscape was so warped, the simulation so unstable that every motion was blown out of all proportion. The world was having a heart attack.
“This is affecting the entire Grid…”
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Post by Infidel on Mar 27, 2011 7:19:00 GMT -8
Nice, that works.
Remember that we don't want to actually imply too much and straightjacket the SK role itself, although we can include him. We just want to make sure it's ambiguous on whether the vote fuckup is something he did or someone else did (a veto maybe?).
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