9.

Ra710NaL3:

A Digital-Aquifer Manual

N1T3 sat before his computer.

He’d come up with the title in a half-second, but he stared it down for an hour before finally stepping away to do something else. By then the name had taken hold. With it were the mental-images of his creation, its uses.

Brewing since he’d parted with Ket, those images had worked their way into his subconscious. They continually shed viral vectors, forming bits and bytes rapidly giving shape to something grander: data, information, jigsawed bits of scrap-data that formed an image greater than even he could fully comprehend.

He knew Ket well enough; once he saw the Aquifer again, it would be pressed and dressed. Reduced to a pair of computers. One regular screen. One large one. The rest of it would be put to work in the background, interlinked to form the backdrop of her burlesque-like routines: those moments of mingled affluence and ambition when she dazzled for business or pleasure.

She’d never need the manual, of course. She knew how to do custom work herself; knew what she needed to run her “show,” could envision it. Because of her intelligence, she could build it too, but it was N1T3’s brainchild first, and he’d deserved the honors.

Most times, she just drew precise diagrams and paid craftsmen.

That was business, and Ket knew business. She knew time-to-profit ratios, took them to heart. If you weren’t breaking down hours into dollars and cents, you weren’t building, only sustaining. That was perfectly fine for some. Not her.

But the manual wasn’t for her. That was important to remember.

Sure, N1T3 would give it to her. She’d even read it. But it wasn’t for her. It was for all those people that came asking for explanation, to be directed to something specific: something a host like Ket could summarize. A manual.

Then, when pointed to, that manual could be easily and accessibly explained for free. In both plain and advanced language, building on itself therein via net-like structures, interlinking, so as to be understandable. Article-by-article, but also, articles-by-articles. It needed the same redundancy, ease of use and modularity as the servers.

It needed to be a product of its time and nothing else.

To do that, N1T3needed time. Not much, but enough. The safest way to ensure it was lying low, but he remained in need of supplies, and worst, a fugitive. Or at least, Martin Black was. Any and every thing now required more care and attention.

Above all, careful required relying solely on Ket. He’d been okay with everything thus far, didn’t find himself disturbed by the idea, but still didn’t like it. Mostly, because he hated sitting idly. To be told to– by one he viewed as a superior, no less, felt an insult.

He knew then, his fears were his own doing: He didn’t like sitting idly, but Ket would never have presumed superiority. She was, of course, an apex creature who’d found its niche and worked it like none other before, but it wasn’t superiority that drove it. Contrary, in fact. It was her knowing of herself, her kind, so thoroughly she became the arbiter of their nature.

But in her, and a select few others’ minds, she and N1T3 were equals. Peers. He’d simply been absent ‘til now.

Rather than feel shame, as he expected, he relaxed. It was a sign of his slow caution manifesting. He’d learned to take things as they were long ago, but implementing it was another story entirely. It was enough to catch some of the less-obvious Human-character defects: tension, its erosion on logic. That information was important when such ignored-defects could easily get one killed.

It was then that he sat down, not to write, but to plan the writing.

He needed resources. Food and water were covered. As he was well-enough hidden, his attention turned elsewhere: what he needed to live. Even Spartans still required simpler things; toiletries, consumables, things neither luxury nor necessity but that the world ignored and largely covered regardless.

But N1T3 was a fugitive. Or Martin Black was. Someone with his face, anyhow.

Anywhere corp-affiliation ruled was out of the question. Meaning somewhere to get in and out of quickly, where he’d be kept him from recognition. If he stockpiled, he’d be less worried, could focus on sustenance, but bulk-buying could draw unwanted attention.

Even if it required physically mapping the best routes, times, and places to simply buy stuff. He’d put something more-permanent in place.

He settled on a well-known convenience store he’d never entered before: a place he knew, but didn’t know him. The clerks there were Indian, the last of caste-less descendants trying make names for themselves by ferrying families into so-called promised-lands. These days though, no-one gave two shits how things ran, so long as they kept running.

N1T3 sympathized: the programmer’s eternal plight inherent their struggle, fractalized like all things to the whims of time and chaos.It was sheer luck he knew the few, particular places nearby that were that way as well. Whomever couldn’t be paid off, could be knocked off easiest with proper sleight of hand.

He’d hold the latter in reserve, obviously, but it wasn’t off the table. The resources were there. He needed them bad enough. The people involved knew why they could not offer them. Either they were willing to take some cash, lie, or were willing to look the other way while he robbed them. Anyone else was part of the problem, however unfortunately.

All anyone needed these days was an excuse to act. How or what-for mattered not. The few foolish enough to miss the connection between a refusal and later theft would only suit his purposes. Otherwise, they’d understand when they learned their resources were guaranteed, and his emphatically weren’t.

Sure, N1T3 could knock off a clerk without him ever knowing. But wasn’t it easier for him to lie, say it didn’t happen, then go through dealing with corp-sec? None of them owned the shops. Not really. Not anymore. Corporate banks did. They owned the land and deed, did nothing but extort. Why risk exposing one’s own, dirty secrets to help them?

When secrets were otherwise harmless, but enough to bullied or blackmailed over, it was guaranteed they would be. Way N1T3 saw it, he could pay you or they could. At least his didn’t come with strings wrapped around your throat.

Besides, who looked for a fugitive in a public place?

So long as N1T3 remained careful, he could pull it off. It was all about timing. He didn’t have to be idle. What better way to write a manual on an obsession than being forced away to engage it analytically? If its power were truly worthy of obsession, could be repeatedly proved as such by analysis, could it truly be a negative to do so?

Only by repeatedly analyzing it could one be certain, although N1T3 guessed there wasn’t truly an answer. Like many things in the post-digital world, it wasn’t the outcome that mattered. Rather, it was the system producing it, whether it functioned properly.

The penultimate manifestation: Humans would always make mistakes, but are not so bound to learn from them. What better way to find the true worth of anything than to force its confrontation and analysis? To make a social call-check, so robustly invisible, save to that all-seeing-eye of reductionism: Science.

N1T3 could think of no better explanation of the duality of need and desire than that of perfection-vs-its attainability. In the end, what it reduced to was irrelevant without the processes reduced. The reduction, or conclusion was simple; perfection was unattainable.

But the process of understanding why, of learning through experiential knowledge, was the reduced. Reductionists– scientists among them, knew that.

Thing was, reductionists were people like N1T3 and Ket. People eternally in the twilight between youth and the middle-age, vat-grown and incubated via trickled-prosperity. The elder brothers and sisters of N1T3’s generation had gotten it so near-to-right they would come round in time, but could not be the force necessary to change. Thus, it fell to the rest.

Likewise, the vibrance of youth spawned of the times and their effects, were too ingrained in their world to do more than conform. In that, they would do so spectacularly, N1T3 sensed. But it was N1T3, Ket, their ilk– those middle children between the two extremes that would dictate change. The rest would fall-in-line or fall-out completely: from understanding, rather than need or want.

The wrongness of the mentality that datum– information– didn’t matter was unacceptable in a postdigital world. It was an outdated, old set of ideas, predigital and in no way compatible with newly discovered reality. It came from a world of sensationalist tabloids and ailing print subscriptions– places where information went to die.

Now, information was the only thing.

Digitally, people no longer transmitted or received, they idled. Always. Whether it was in the form of text or imagery data, video or audio, all of the above and more, their brains transmitted to their bodies which then reacted according to specification. Their brains re-encoded the reactions into the aforementioned, re-transmitted it, and through the adapters they used to interface, linked to the net.

That was the net. Everything around it. Its interfaces.

Forays had been made into the world of advanced sensory stimulation; VR, pulse-feedback, electro-stims, all to various effects and uses, and for good or ill. Problem was, everything was proprietary, impossible to build alone or innovate easily on.

In simplest terms, closed hardware and software systems could only be developed by its creators. That unfortunate fact stifled any system. Sometimes however, it was necessary, if only for security’s sake. The instances where it was not, were obvious in their intent.

For instance, N1T3 personally knew of several, closed government networks remotely impenetrable. The physical levels of security betweendigital access and its repositories was so daunting that, though possible to overcome, there was no reasonable value to the effort to most.

A foreign agent could infiltrate their facilities themselves, work the systems just as easily. What did governments need people like N1T3 for then? The flip-side was though, who remained most in demand when the agents failed? Hackers. Mercs or loyalist fools, or outright ferals. Didn’t matter which, they were just the vessel through which the code flowed.

That was the double-edge blade forcing the Governments to cede territory– both literal and non, to the corporations: they refused to incorporate hackers. N1T3 knew of at least two, London-local deals signed in the last week by the Met, ceding area-security to local Corp-sec.

Aries and Warhound were at each other’s throats for those contracts. One’s militant overamped machismo against the other’s tech-junkie turned warrior-merc. The smoke of the first volley against the factions hadn’t even cleared yet, and already, they were on each other. If the general public had realized what was really going on, they’d have hardly believed it. It would’ve been confined to the province of man’s collective memory. That place reserved for myths and legends, and little else.

Technology was too powerful to be duped though. N1T3 reminded himself this was war; in times of caution, err on the side of caution. This war then, war if not for technology, through it. Thus, if through it, then for an idea. An idea that also happened to be the culmination of a species’ path from tree-hanger to zero-g orbiter.

Everyone wanted to feel that zero-g now. Better, everyone could. They knew if they’d all just shut up, pull together an agonizingly long moment, they could. Then, they’d never have to worry again. Humanity, in general, would never have to. This would secure their legacy. Their legacy’s legacy: a redundancy fractalized on micro and macro-scales and required for existence to continue. In this case, Human existence: postdigital as it now was.

And eventually, for a collective epitaph that read; despite each individual’s flaws, they gave their all and thrived. And for N1T3, his people– the postdigital ones, that thriving was via the idea that, overall, one could succeed because Humanity saw success as a foundation to herald its next, collective expansion. Its next Golden Age, but secured until the end of lifetimes and beyond, due to its effect.

History might not remember N1T3 or Ket, or any names forever, but it need not either. Knowledge of N1T3 and his ilk might become so commonplace as to become utterly obscure. The electricity in the light: there, but only for those looking deeper.

Meantime, that knowledge itself was redundant, archived due to the enormity of their contribution and its revision to base knoweldge.It didn’t matter who they were. It mattered what they did. The best way to do that, was to make them memorable, elevate them to Paragons. Not by lying about misdeeds, but honoring persistence over adversity in spite of them.

It was within the same, conceptual grounds not as stealing a fish to feed oneself, but as stealing a fishing pole to feed a village. Equal in micro scales, not macro. One was far more effective and worthy than the other.

And morally defensible.

Human society, on the whole, had lost something of that balancing in the trasition between pre-and-post digital. The digital age, such as it was, formed a blur of incessant, blazing, and stupefying revision. Like all things digital, it was bulk information relevant only to a certain subsection of the populous– and only at a certain time. Only target information mattered, and only to those it was relevant to, and only in the moment of relevance.

In a roundabout way, that made all potentially relevant information important. Always. Estimating what would or could be important was pointless, thus collecting as much as possible and safeguarding it became crucial.

That was the truth in the lie the Governments– and eventually Corps– fed to people about the importance of data collection. Difference to reality was– especially to the technologically clairvoyant, it was obvious the data collected wasn’t important to any beyond a specific, predatory subset of vicious entities.

In the end, history didn’t give two shits about where you bought underwear, or jerked off to. So, who did?

The reality was obvious to Martin Black even during adolescence, when he and his generation watched their parents rise for work, each day older and more agonized, less happy and telling themselves it would change. Told to learn from their parent’s mistakes, each thinker traced their lines of unhappiness inevitably to society’s holds, its damage.

N1T3 was one of them.

After decades of meditation on the subject, N1T3’s generation had finally decided there was but one way to avoid the damage of the system; avoid the system entirely. At least until it was fixed. The question was, how to fix it? It took N1T3 years longer than he ever hoped to figure it out, but he did.

In the meantime, his approach made him a fugitive. The only saving grace was that its timing couldn’t have been better. Now he had an excuse to bring it to a grinding halt. He damned well knew he would, too.