14.

Planning Glory

N1T3 sat in the control room before a secure terminal rigged for access to the station’s servers but with no direct, external net-access. Riter would’ve set it up that way, forcing any extra-net-connections to be temporary, masked via dynamic, random, one-time addresses and connections.

Merely another level of security: a temporarily enabled function to ensure against intruders. Data rather than the machines, were what mattered. Machines could be replaced. Data could not. It could however, be backed-up. Infinitely.

Masking made sense for a static location. Dynamic addresses carried inherently more security. On one, digital-level, the servers always stayed put. On another, they never had a fixed address. Physically, of course, they were locable, but only accessible or identifiable to the properly skilled. Even then, there were no links, digital or otherwise, that one belonged in any way to the other.

Riter may have owned servers, but $trydr was an entity elsewhere. Living in a different world.

For now at least. Soon enough someone would track Martin Black here. Whether it was a simple conclusion, or a wafer-thin trail, something would lead corp-sec here to question, intimidate. Riter would tell the whole truth and nothing but….

For precisely as long as it suited him.

Like the rest of them, $trydr was a hacker. His status visible via his servers. True, you had to know the address, but if you did, you always knew where to find them, and thus him. Likewise, he needed to remain largely hidden through casual obscurity. The kind in a phone book; there, but gone in an instant, save to those seeking him.

Obscurity had first brought Martin Black and Terry Riter together as friends. That kind of youthful obscurity shrouded in the same, chaotic unknowns invisible to all but those momentarily living them. The friendship that endured two lifetimes, now looking to come to a close, would only do so in a way neither could avert nor regret.

N1T3 was being hunted. Likely due to his stubborn, fool-headedness, he’d be caught. Corp-sec’s trial-by-bullet would proclaim him guilty and sentence him to death in one squeeze. Whatever remained afterward was what he built until then.

The only way anyone could move past Martin Black’s failings to see the true moral of his life, they needed to see what N1T3 had done. Few could have helped him more than those few closest. $trydr’s honor-bound obligation ensured he helped. Not just because he was needed for it, but because everyone needed it; the concept of honor.

Digital honor. That was the importance of N1T3’s mission. The importance of the difference between Martin Black’s past and N1T3’s present: Humanity had changed, evolved, and could continue to. Change was finally possible, for the betterment of one and all, or not at all. Nothing between was allowable.

Like Ket, $trydr was committed, however currently indisposed. He’d let N1T3 have run of the control room. Somewhere Dru was sitting, dispatching calls relayed through from patient for doctor before ever seeing scrubs.

N1T3 took the opportunity to prep her proof for the net. He couldn’t release it yet, unwilling as he was to risk her or $trydr more of a target. By the end of the file, he wished he’d hadn’t bothered–however glad he was for his empty stomach.

The photos were captured with various changes in scenery and style, but formed the long, sordid details of a murder so gruesome and personal N1T3 wasn’t sure how anyone had survived it, let alone a whole world. He’d known Dru’s strength could be tenfold his, but never so viscerally. With it, was the reality of the world necessary for it to exist.

N1T3’s death, his life, mattered more to everyone else than to him. They felt what he could not. Not from incapability, but lack of opportunity that now looked never to come.

I loved Martin Black. I do not love N1T3.

N1T3 was a blank slate. He knew no-one and no-one knew him. The few that sensed the phoenix beneath the ash would help it rise, but the rest would wait. It was necessary. Eternally, the issue was time. Worse was the caveat of having no ideas to its remainder, save it was short and growing shorter. Time was the pulsing beat of a dying heart. Each rest longer and longer. Each pump slower. Until finally, those last breaths. Then, no more come.

The likelihood of those breaths being amid violence grew larger by the moment. Hope was making it worth every second until then. Only two paths remained available to that, but N1T3 would ensure he did all he could to allow for both. Both were important together. Duality was the core concept of binary systems, the shaft upon which the gear of the postdigital revolution would turn.

Embedding the knowledge that multiple solutions to problems always existed, into the social conscience, kept people from ever thinking they couldn’t exist. Ultimately, that was the point of the vision. The dream. The model society.

It would never be achieved.

That was also the point; have a goal to strive for, allow for healthy competition, level-fields, even dirty tricks, without also destroying the basis of all Human freedom: Unity. Such nuance kept a social society from devolving into a cannibalistic one.

Modern society was nothing if not cannibalistic. Corporations were a manifestation of the very necessity to safe-guard against it. Regulation had become so impossible though, that even the economies bidding off one another couldn’t see the next-level capability they weren’t utilizing.

Society had become global the instant wires spanning it interlinked. Up to then, geography had dictated cultures, but the utter lack of any, unified them all. Human-kind went with it.

The problem N1T3 and his ilk had encountered with it was greed. Manifesting unequaled fervor, it gorged itself on a new type of power. One that, by virtue of its own place before the power’s inception, allowed its individual components to obtain greater priority in its interior food-chain.

Businessmen become magnates and barons of resource. That money, gone by the fifth generation was now renewed on a new gold-rush: identity-theft. That, in itself, was the very darkness at the heart of all evil. The same, in fact, of someone willing to sell enchained relatives and rationalize it as skin-color.

But magnates were old-money types; didn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. Why should they? No-one ever gave a shit about them. They had what they wanted and came when summoned until others stop noticing if they didn’t. That alone was the story of their entire generation, their father’s, and grandfather’s generations.

Tycoons, so far distant from Earth they knew only clouds. They’d built fortunes now squandered until Titans no longer. By then the generation’s lazy complacency made them fine with the idea. By then, all survival required was fucking over the rest of Humanity, but what did they care? They weren’t human anymore. They were more.

Now, so was Humanity.

Old-money thinking had collided with reality, the result was a postdigital epitaph being written in gibberish. Not exactly a fitting start for an advanced species.

So, N1T3 would change things. With his digital plumbing. His postdigital aquifers. Built with the few, meager resources at his disposal the only way he knew how: through the indifferent necessity of the binary system. The True and False. 0 and 1.

Perhaps, if he lived long enough, one day the world would carry more color again. He doubted it would come to pass. No matter how much he embraced the idea, prepared for it, he wasn’t likely to see its reality. That was okay though. He knew from the beginning it was a possibility, had never begun to envision himself as anything more than the first reference level.

Which he wasn’t. Not really. N1T3 was just another freedom fighter. A guardian of Liberty. One whom watered its tree, whether with blood or water, but only his own. That which he himself would take or shed, but only as he saw fit.

For this, he would give the last drop to succeed.

He found himself at his safe-house later in the afternoon, uncertain how he’d gotten there. Sleep was needed, Riter’s hospitality notwithstanding.

First, he needed to get Dru’s intel out. No-one would know it was her, but they’d know the information’s importance. Even if it were linked back to her, $trydr had every intention and instruction to blame N1T3.

He would. What difference did it make, save maintaining his own cover or not?

The world was growing more dangerous by the moment. N1T3’s vision needed more allies than him. If that meant sacrificing himself for them, he would. It was that important. Already guaranteed to live beyond him, as all things digital, this could earn something more– immortality in an already postdigital world.

Humans weren’t quite there yet, but it would happen. One day. How and why were yet to be determined. So long as they continued to exist, they would one day reach it whatever the compromises along the way. N1T3 was merely doing his part to ensure their survival until that point.

Unfortunately those opposing him had numbers. Infinitely more, too.

Then again, N1T3 knew systems, that it was next to useless to attempt understanding any one component without fully knowing the whole’s purpose. In other words, the Human element was never predictable, could only be accounted for in so far as could any unpredictability. It still didn’t prepare him.

The post went live 23:00, +96 hours after Clockwork and An33$a’s deaths.

N1T3 couldn’t handle his exhaustion any longer. He collapsed into bed, completely unaware of the chaos he’d awake to.