Though you don't know it, at the heart of the Internet's magic is a router that can manage TCP/IP over destiny. It can send packets where they will fulfill the truest desires of true love, where they will turn
farce into tragedy, where truth is weighed in the balance and whence inspiration comes.
Not all the packets pass through that router. That would be insane. Its backplane can only handle a modest petabit per second, a tiny fraction of the net's total communications. But it's enough. It's always been enough.
The mandatory filters were installed on January 1, 2015, though secondary legislation following on from the Digital Economy Act. They sieved each packet leaving or entering the UK and its undersea cables,
the deepest of deep packet inspections. Anything amiss went straight to /dev/null. Where it belonged, after all.
That was the day where everything on the Internet that was not mandatory was forbidden. The moment of perfect control. And no packet ever reached that router again, from any of the British Isles.
No one ever wrote a song worth a damn after that. Though they never knew why.
YOU ARE READING
Eastercon Flash Fiction
General FictionHere's the four pieces of flash fiction I wrote in 5 minutes each, at Eastercon 2013.
