Tag Archives: Conduit

General Fiction, Science Fiction

Manufacturing Stars

There were so many lights flashing that it looked like a cosmic event. Haloes exploded over her as she walked down the red carpet-lined corridor, smiling at the flashing lights and the soft roar of fame. Hers was not a vocal fame and few opinions she shared publicly, so questions from the bots were ignored with polite smiles and waves while her lithe pace down the red carpet never wavered.

The moment she stepped inside, the roaring flashes faded away and she breathed a sigh of relief. These launch events were tiring. She blinked her eyes as she adjusted to mortal shadows of privacy and noticed her Chief Behaviorist standing there.

“Well done,” he cooed to her, “Well done, that was beautiful. Roger is going to plug you in now, are you ready?”

“Yes,” she lied, “I am ready.” She never was. These things took it out of her and she would spend weeks privately indulging in all manner of black market apps to recover. But that was fine. It came with the territory, and there were plenty of other girls lined up behind her. This was pretty much the production line of media.

“Great,” said Roger, her Chief Technologist said, “As planned, we are doing a Corn Belt date night simulation. Trust the coding and put on your most in-love smile. You’ll love it, anyway. I’ve done a surface dive in and it looks beautiful there. Jeff did a great job.”

Jeff was her Chief of Visuals. He stood by nodding furiously. She often thought that he was the only one of them who had any real actual talent.

She walked into a small, cool room. The aircon was a bit stronger here than elsewhere. There were cold blinking screens and a chair with cords in the middle. She shivered as she sat down and the chair interfaced with the online Conduit implanted into the base of her brain.

“You’re going to be great,” her Chief Behaviourist kept repeating like a mantra, “They’ll love you. You’re going to be gr–”

***

She blinked her eyes. Everything was dark, at first, and then slowly her eyes adjusted. Or, at least, her mind adjusted to the Conduit’s interface that was being projected into her mind and synching online with a million other paying viewers.

She was sitting on a small hill during a summer night. It was modeled on the old Corn Belt, or, at least, what the databases suggested the old Corn Belt was like. There were dark, endless cornfields surrounding them with a twinkle of a small town in the distance and a snaking national road leading into and out of it, cutting the quiet fields with the occasional lights of a car or a truck.

Glancing up, she saw the cosmos. A billion twinkling stars untouched by city lights and offering the potential of a trillion new worlds, hopes and dreams. A great, galactic bejeweled sky that took her breath away with both its beauty and its sheer scale.

She briefly wondered if this was what the real night sky had actually looked like? Had Jeff taken some liberties here for effect? She–much like everyone else–had never seen the residential planets’ skies and definitely never, ever sat under it at night looking at all the stars. She had been born on an outer-rim industrial planet and then been carted to the media-rim where she now lived in a streaming starship that beamed these feeds across the galaxy.

But, she was an actress and she was selling a personal role here.

“It is beautiful,” she breathed, sensually while softly squeezing the androgynous hand next to hers. All the paying viewers all over the world were cast into this supporting role. Their Conduits were also casting their consciousnesses into this Virtual Reality with hers, but they saw her and she only saw an androgynous being that was the focus of her role here.

The androgynous being said something. It was a million different somethings, one per paying customer. The program–with some help from her Chief Behaviouralist–generated a role-based, agnostic answer that she could say that would agree with almost all of the individual things each of the paying viewers had said. It was both personal and generic at the same time.

She smiled at the being and lay back in the soft grass. Had grass ever been this soft, she wondered? Were there actually entire planets covered in this wonderful stuff? She pulled the androgynous being back with her and snuggled up close to it, tucking her head into the crook of its neck and kissing it softly there.

“There is nowhere else I’d rather be,” she lied, kissing it, “than with you under these beautiful stars.” Her hand slid lower down the androgynous beings form and she leaned up and kissed it deeply on its plastic lips…

The simulation of the stars twinkled ever brighter far above the two of them on that quiet hilltop in the virtual recreation of the old Corn Belt back on some quaint planet no one could remember anymore.

***

“That was wonderful, wonderful,” her Chief Behaviorist exclaimed, as her Conduit disconnected with the program. Her eyes fluttered and then opened, immediately remembering how cold the room’s aircon was.

“In the first quartile of endorphins and some of the viewers even recorded a physical,” her Chief of Media–she could not remember his name–noted, scanning the feeds, “This one was very well received and some of the bloggers–both bot and natural–have posted positive reviews. Two stacks down, but you are starting to trend.”

She smiled and looked up. There was only a gray ceiling above her and a softly rattling aircon. Outside the media and their legions waited. She would soon be at the mercy of their views, both personal and generic.

“What are you looking at?” her Chief Behaviorist asked.

“I was just wondering if the stars actually do look like that–uh, at least how they looked in the simulation,” she asked, not expecting an answer. Her Chief Behaviourist turned to Jeff.

“Uh, yes, I believe that it is what they looked like,” began Jeff said, shrugging, “I think so–”

“But, it doesn’t matter,” her Chief Behaviourist, chimed in with his most reassuring tone, “because you are the real star, my dear. Now, let’s go speak to the media about this latest personal–”

She sighed as she got up. She was no longer listening as her Chief Behaviourist droned on. She had her prepared lines and her best fake smile. But, in the background, deeply hidden in her Conduit’s encrypted memory, she began scanning about the old Corn Belt, soft grass, and the twinkling stars. The black market often hacked her personals and offered them as replays. Maybe she would find one of those and disappear into it for a while? Maybe she would do exactly that?

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Full Disclosure

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A priority notification gets through his filter and blinks in his peripheral vision. The incoming message is from his kid, probably wanting something. He mutes it and puts his Conduit’s inbox on ‘busy’. He needs to focus right now.

The man sitting in front of him at the restaurant wears an expensive suit. His bodyguards standing on either side of him are also dressed in expensive suits, but that does little to hide their size. They each probably have military-grade bio-enhancements making them deadlier. His Conduit scans them and he–on reflex more than on a conscious decision–begins to file their personal details away for later use.

“Please, sir, I have a family and kids,” the man in the suit is pleading with him, his security guards looking on awkwardly; they have probably never seen such a man grovel before. They probably will not again, either. “I have fixed everything, so can we please let bygones be bygones, sir?”

“Yes,” he says leaning forward and sipping his glass his wine, “Yes, you have. One last favour and then we’ll be square the two of us.”

“Yes, yes, anything. Now, what can the Saturn Mafia do for you?”

The well-dress man listens intently while nodding vigorously. Most of life is now online and most people have no idea how vulnerable that makes them. This man has just discovered that out, and he will be more careful next time. But, you always remember the first time you are hacked, and so will he.

Later that solar cycle, the blogger is on another planet. The VIP starship from the hotel he is staying at shuttled him there after the gang meeting. His online following reaches in the billions and spans the galaxy, so the unwritten expectation is that he will geo-tag or mention where he is staying. If he does, he knows it will be worth the hotel’s while. Forget rock stars or movie stars, app’s and AI made those professions redundant aeons ago. Bloggers are the pinnacle of the celebrity world now, and pornstars. But, mostly bloggers, as tech cannot replicate a witty opinion.

“Incredible what they did there, don’t you think?” says the beautiful lady next to him, referring to a newsflow beaming from some media-pod orbiting Saturn.

He turns around, a drink in his hand, and smiles. She is absolutely gorgeous with a low-cut dress, caramel skin and dark hair. He can pick up faint traces of optical enhancement apps running in the background of her Conduit. But, even if her appearance is being airbrushed, she is still incredibly beautiful.

“Yes, incredible,” his smile disappears and voice gets serious, “But you know who I am, so what do you want and who sent you?”

She does not lose a beat and smiles, reaching out and touch his hand. Her touch is light and warm. She is very good. She has done this before.

“The hotel sent me. They just want you to have a good time here. Can I get you another drink?”

She leaves quietly after they have sex. He is married, but that is not important now. Only later, when she replays the stream will she find out that her recording of their intimacies was blocked by him. He also put a small Multi-tool Virus in her, which will track her movement, record her communications and offers him a backdoor for later use, adding her to his botnet.

While she did register in the hotel’s employee lists, he was pretty certain that someone else had paid her for those services.

Outside, a red horizon is meeting the three sunrises this planet experienced every full solar cycle. The horizon was flatter than most planets, given this planet’s size, but its core was relatively light and thus the gravity was not a probably for his biology.

A priority notification blinked in his peripheral vision. It was his kid. He sighed, sat up in bed and answered it.

“Dad, Dad,” his kid’s voice rang in his mind, through the VPN Voip app that they were communicating through, “where the hell are you? I’ve been trying to reach you for over a day!”

“Sorry, kiddo,” he thought and the words flowed from this mind across the VPN and into his kid’s mind many millions of miles away on a neighbouring planet in their living room, “I had an urgent meeting for the blog, and then I had to do a site visit at a hotel on this planet. What’s the matter? Is Mom there or can I help?”

“Dad, Mom’s dead. She died like two days ago.”

Over a week later, he was walking away from the funeral. He thought it was strange that despite all the world’s scientific advances, people were still buried in a box in the ground. His kid was at his side, his gaze cast down and silent. He softly probed his kid’s Conduit, but the firewalls were firmly up and he felt a bit bad about using the backdoor apps he had there to find out what his kid was thinking.

“Hi-hi, I’m sorry. Excuse me, sir, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

A media pod with a woman’s face beaming on it was floating just above them. It was a priority media pod, thousands of the others could not get this close and where hoving like flies just a mile or two up. This pod’s camera was pointing directly at him and a ‘LIVE FEED’ banner scrolling over its front piece.

“Sorry, kiddo, give me a moment here,” he said and turned to the camera with a beautifully haunting look on his face–a picture perfect look of grief for the camera’s, “What do you want to know at my wife’s funeral?”

The journalist was unperturbed by his act and shot a single question back at him, “Can you please confirm that you gave the Saturn Mafia the order to murder your wife? Their gang leader came forward to us with recorded testimony to this fact. How do you respond?”

He was startled. That was quick! He thought he would have a few days before someone would approach him directly.

He took a deep breath, looked at his kid. He did not know how this would affect their relationship, but it was worth the risk. He then turned back to the camera and smiled: “Yes, I did, but let me tell you my story.”

Inside, he was smiling. With each rehearsed word, the hits on his blog were skyrocketing. Each well-written sentence of his tale was pushing up the search results. He was now trending across the galaxy, and notifications were beginning to flood in and meme’s popping up everywhere. He might have been a minor celebrity blogger with some hacking skills before, but now he was a media god.

And gods never go to jail.

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Narrative

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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!”