Hayward's Reach

NaShoStoMo #4 - Paper

"Why you got to be like that?" Nicolas was half Russian and half Mexican, so he was a giant in tan.

"Be like what, you are always mooching. Why don't you run out and find something to eat for us today? You could always go back to work." Nicolas' exotic appearance made him a hit with the ladies and all of the screaming meant they liked his... assets. Dezy despised him most of the time, when he wasn't wanting to be him. Nicolas went back to his room and a few minutes later, giggling could be heard through the closed door. Dezy grimaced, shook his head and picked up his Nakatomi 3270 integrated OS datadeck. Sleek and tiny, Dezy may have shoes with holes, but it was clear this piece of state-of-the-art technology was his real priority.

Dezy pulled out his oversized rig from under the sofa and plugged his deck into it. His rig was twice the size of a standard unit because of all of his extended non-standard adaptations. Numerous cards of different colors were clipped onto his primary databoard in an unsightly, and precariously balanced array.

He looked at the series of readouts and saw with the amount of water he had on the roof, he could run his deck for about eight hours. He set up the piping so he could redirect water to his bathtub and to his internal storage containers in the apartment. He would be able to capture nearly half of the water from the roof. He tapped on the pipe in a series of warning tones that he would be opening his water supply to anyone downstream and to let them know in thirty minutes water would flow until it was gone and for them to be ready. He received three taps back from three different people, so he knew most of the water would find a home.

The deck's internal battery was already nearly fully powered and he did his best to keep it that way, because he never knew when he would have work and wanted to always have the option to work even if there wasn't any water or electricity where he might be staying. The deck, in power-saving mode, might last twenty hours, but it took half that time just to find a buyer these days. Paper is lucrative, but the fines and penalties were high if you were caught trafficking in paper products or infodrops of paper from older magazines from the last century.

His initial diagnostic of his deck said the software was up to date as it could be and there was no traffic that resembled los ángeles at his current connection. That would change, the more suspicious his traffic got. Los ángeles, low Turing AI's monitored the NewerNet kept track of any packets whose pedigree they could not easily identify. Dezy's greatest hack was his ability to make his packets look completely innocent and resemble the multitude of datastreams out there already.

The NewerNet was not like the old Internet that collapsed in 2027 in the media explosion of the late 2020's. It was designed from the ground up to be completely under the control of the founding governments of the United States and Europe, the primary investors. As other countries were allowed to buy their way in, strict regulation of the traffic and content was established. Since media crashed the Internet, there were multiple control systems on media, ensuring smoother traffic and better management. This also meant the worldwide internet agency chartered by the United Nations became the impromptu police of the NewerNet. This new stricter internet was one of the most policed and controlled systems in the world. Using pre-turing AI's, the network was constantly patrolled, regulated, data managed and operating system upgraded piece of technology to ever exist.

And the most souless, thought Dezy. Once the NewerNet was established three years after the collapse of the Old Internet, big money kept the network the playground of the elite and the superwealthy. The OlderNet was restored as a shadow of itself but because so many people were forced to use it, it was very unstable and unfriendly, not to mention filled with a variety of spyware, malware and rogue viruses. The insecurity of the Oldernet allowed Dezy to use it to enter the NewerNet and meet his clients using specialized hacks Dezy had created when he was just a child of nine or ten.