Tag Archives: space between the ages

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Down(load) Time

The Sanctuary was on an Outer Planet on the edge of a chilly galaxy. This did not seem to bother the monks who lived there. Bot-deliveries from various benefactors across the galaxies kept them going with things like food, water, and clothing.

The Sanctuary was started by Thera Simon after his near-death while using illegal apps for kicks during a deep run in the Web. The rest of the monks all had tales like Simon. Everyone had lost some brother, sister, parent, friend or relative to technology. Most had nearly lost their selves.

That was the real reason the Sanctuary was on an Outer Planet. With no one around and nothing for millions of miles in any direction, the Sanctuary had only enough bandwidth to barely communicate with the outside world. Other than that, they were disconnected and the Sanctuary was an oasis of silence in a world of noise, news, technology and temptation.

And into this Sanctuary walked a man who also called himself Simon. His body was covered in tattoos and circuitry from many bio-hacks. This was not uncommon at the Sanctuary. Simon said he was lost. He said he needed sanctuary. He said all these things and more, so the monks brought him in.

He was initiated and became Nen Simon. And, for a while, he went to meditation, helped clean the Sanctury, cook the food and practise martial arts with the rest of the members.

Then the members of the Sanctuary began to disappear. At first, Thera Simon and his eldest monks thought that they were leaving. This did happen. Some came lost and broken, and then left when they felt whole and fixed. Sometimes they did not even say goodbye.

But this was normally one or two members every once in a while. This was a steady trickle of members who were all disappearing without saying goodbye. Almost one a month or a month. Thera Simon felt uneasy. Something dark was happening here.

Late one night, after meditating long and hard on what was happening, Thera Simon went for a walk through the quiet, stone halls of the Sanctuary. There, amidst the shadows and wreathed in white electronic light, he saw Nen Simon passing a lit device to a student. Thera Simon could feel the bandwidth flowing from the student, but then something happened. The student stopped moving, his head slipped back on his neck and his eyes rolled into his skull.

Nen Simon actually chuckled at this. Thera Simon could feel the anger swelling inside him. It was a burning from a previous life he had led. It stirred dark memories in him that he had long forgotten. His hands slipped into tightly clenched fists. He found himself walking towards the electronic light. His heart was pounding and the anger was trying to burst out. He had no idea what he was doing.

And then the student stood up and looked at him. Thera Simon froze in mid-step. No, the student was only looking in his direction. The student’s eyes had rolled forward, but they were blank. The student’s face was expressionless and his body limp, but somehow he stood up and began to walk to the far door.

Thera Simon watched the student walk out the room, and out the door that lay beyond there. He was frozen. The hair on the back of his neck was raised and the raging anger was replaced with something else. Something cold and prickly: fear.

“It is a virus,” a voice spoke next to him, or was it inside of him? “It is actually quite an elegant virus that hijacks a host’s mind and connects it to a very specific network that we control. Back in the day, they used to call it Zombie Botnets. At least the first part is still relevant.”

Thera Simon’s eyes opened wide and turned slowly. Nen Simon was still sitting there bathed in electronic light, but he was looking straight at him. But his mouth was not moving. Circuitry in his old bio-hacks flickered, and that was when Thera Simon realised that his Conduit had been switched on and this was the voice being patched directly into him.

“Students go wandering off and it is fine, but questions will be asked if their teacher wanders off. Unfortunately, this virus cannot be injected, it has to be installed with permissions, even if they are misguided. Thus, I love these collections of Web-junkies. Once a junkie, always a junkie. Easy enough to slip a virus into a hit for them. Their ‘last one’, it is always their ‘last one’. But you are different, aren’t you, former Special Agent? I suspect I won’t be able to convince you to take a hit of data…unless I can?”

Thera Simon stood up and walked slowly to stand directly in front of Nen Simon.

“H-how can you do this?” Thera Simon stuttered at his face, his anger turning to rage and his rage making his body shake.

“Economics. This is just a business,” Nen Simon stated flatly, seemingly quite calm, “But here is the deal: you willingly download this virus, and I will leave the students alone? Deal?”

“How do I know that once I become a zombie, you won’t just do that to the students too?”

“You don’t, but–”

“Then I suggest that we do this back on your planet. We leave now. That way, at least, if you have lied to me, you will be far away.”

Nen Simon narrowed his eyes in thought before nodding in agreement.

“Sure. You leaving will raise questions, but we will be gone and won’t have to deal with them.”

Special Agent Simon nods grimly. He steps back and indicates for Nen Simon to lead the way. Quietly, though, before he steps out of the Sanctuary, he uses his re-awakened Conduit and the last of the bandwidth in it to activate the Sanctuary’s server.

The next morning, the students and the monks wake up to a Sanctuary that is devoid of both Simons. The highest ranking monk steps up to take Thera Simon’s duties and, in the process of moving to his room, the Server emails to him a set of instructions.

“Once a junkie, always a junkie”, mutters Thera Simon many galaxies away in a Black Hat Hacker hole in an off-grid planet. Back in the Sanctuary, the head monk is emailing out all the downloadable, neuro-learning modules from his Server to all his students: hand-to-hand combat, sniping modules, firearms, vehicle training, in-field meds, technology hacks, and on and on… Every single module and application is military grade with self-installation and neuro-muscular interfaces patched in. When the downloads are all installed and they will raid the hidden weapons cache under the Sanctuary, and then the monks and their students will be a very dangerous group of people.

“What you say?” asks Hacker Simon absentmindedly while priming the virus for injection.

“I said, ‘once a junkie, always a junkie’,” says Special Agent Simon. He can feel the virus on the brink of his mind. He buries the GPS tracking app that is linked to the Sanctuary server deep inside a VPN, and then lets the virus come in. A tingle runs down his neck as he feels his head slumping backwards and the world goes dark.

His final thought before the nothingness takes him is that he hopes that none of the students will get hurt when they arrive here.

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Narrative

Leave a comment

After we have sex, she sits upright in the bed and I see her transferring most of my Units somewhere.

“It’s an app my pimp forced me to install in my Conduit,” she says over her shoulder, “It’s some behavioral mod that makes me pay him his cut. Sorry, I have to do this.”

I lie there and watch. It is over in seconds. It is a smart system. Her pimp has probably overridden her Conduit’s controls with the app, can track her and has the password for the uninstall or disabling. He probably recorded us moments ago and will save it somewhere for potential later use, or sell it as porn to voyeurs on the other side of the Galaxy.

Civilisation is rotting, but we have an app for that too.

I mentally check my Conduit. The neural paths in my brain that connect to implanted device and the Web find no new messages, but a bunch of spam and some toxic viruses that they have blocked.

A bit later that night–it is almost always night on this wretched planet–I am walking through the bustling, neon streets when an advert flashes into my mind. A beautiful woman is asking to sleep with me by name. My metadata from earlier has obviously already been sold or shared, and the scanners in this location have profiled me.

I block the alluring images simulated in my eyes and keep walking.

A bunch of deep space miners stumble by with women in tow. The women register in my Conduit’s search as prostitutes. The miners are drunk. Miners are always drunk, but their shifts out in the asteroid belts can last decades so I suppose they have to make use of civilisation when they are back in it.

“A drink and download?” blasts into my ears. Arrows flash in my mind and a light display showers down over a dingy pub tucked into the back of an alleyway.

I mute the push app from the place, and the light show disappears too. Overhead a starship is flying low to dock at the city port. The starship’s burners are growling blue fire as its anti-gravitation kicks in to slow it down post-orbit.

A quiet drink would be nice and I’m short of bandwidth.  So I decide to wander down the festering alley and into the shady establishment.

“What poison will you be having,” a skinny, tattooed bartender asks me, his body mod circuitry softly flashing, “and will you have a drink?” The small pub is absolutely empty, save for the two of us and a cleaning bot humming in the background.

I briefly wonder what his body mods actually do, but then answer, “Gimme a clip library and ten Unit’s worth of whisky.”

He nods and almost instantly I have a link appear in my inbox in my mind. He pours some cheap-looking whisky into an unhygienic-looking glass and slides it my way. I flick a thought his way and eleven Units flow out of my mind and into his. He barely acknowledges it and turns away to replace the bottle behind him.

The whisky is foul, but I have an app for that. The app rearranges the neural paths from my taste buds and suddenly I am tasting this liquid as the finest, single malt. Although the taste is simulated, the alcohol is real and I can feel its fire trickle down my throat and into my belly.

I lean on the bar and follow the link in my inbox. A library of sordid videos appears in my mind. Sex of all sorts in all forms that I could ever desire.

Sipping the illusion of the fine beverage, I filter through the endless gutter library and then stop.

It is not even the most recent addition despite happening little over half an hour ago, there it anonymously is: “POV_prostitute banged in hotel room“.

I recognise her face in the clip. It is the prostitute from earlier. And then I see myself walk into the hotel room. God, I look old and weather. I do not want to see what I look at during sex.

I try to stop watching, but something is wrong. The clip flickers off and I am staring at the tattooed barman, his bio-circuitry lighting up. I cannot move. I start panicking, but it does nothing. There must have been a virus in the clip I watched! Or…?

“…sure, and no one ever scans the whiskey. Tastes so bad, they never know what’s in it,” the barman is saying to someone behind me, “Yeh, OK, we’ll just move him out back where you can start–wait! Cops coming! Didn’t you turn the push notification off? OK, just do it now!”

And then my mind explodes. Searing, unbelievable pain shoots through the back of my brain to the front like a white hot lance. I can hear myself screaming, but it is getting dark and I am losing consciousness. The last image I see before the darkness takes me is the same girl that I am now seeing three times within the last half-hour: she is leaning over me, kissing me as the bio-circuitry man is laughing in the background.

***

“Fuck!” the detective exclaims as he comes back to reality, “the death parts still get me when we watch these cache clips.”

“You get anything from the clip, sir? What did he see just before he died?”

The question is met by silence as the detective pinches the bridge of his nose with his eyes closed. He then sighs and nods.

“It’s the same guy-girl pair as we found before. The one marks the target and the other sets a trap to disable him physically so that the Units and whatever-else-they-take can still be extracted while he is still alive. They jack knife the victim and then disappear to another district and eventually another planet.”

“But why bother marking him beforehand or doing all the recon work and so on? Why not just do it all upfront? Or even remotely?”

The detective shakes his head and stands up to leave.

“Because they are running a franchise, kid. It is all part of the fun, and the fun is being recorded and broadcast to millions of twisted fucking clients dotted through the Galaxy. It not about the Units they get when they jack him, it’s about the rush of the hunt and the take-down of the prey that entertains the millions of adoring fans out there…”

The detective’s rant falls quiet. He starts to walk out of the room, but then pauses at the door clutching its frame. He turns around slightly and begins to softly talk, almost to himself.

“It’s all just good streaming, kid. I have a hunch that if we catch this guy-girl combo, we’ll find high-grade behavioural mods in their Conduits forcing on them their roles in this story. And if we then follow that code, I have a hunch that we’ll eventually wind up in the studios of some multi-national media agency where some suit is narrating this very story to entertain his VPN clientele. And, kid, that is the scary thing here, our overpaid bosses are probably customers of this very crime,” he turns, starts walking away and shouts back before he is gone around the corner and lost into the maze of the Precinct, “Civilisation is rotting, kid, and we ain’t got an app for that!”