Visions by Television

  • 1 Replies
  • 4712 Views
Visions by Television
« on: February 03, 2011, 03:28:21 PM »
This thread is all about small mental images from the Sprawl. Be they art, or written word. Part to keep the fire alive. Part to have fun with it.

Snapshots 01:
Ghost smirkes and scans the area. Hir wifi.3 picks up at least a dozen local nets. Half of them unprotected. Traps. Anyone with net access knows that. Memetic viruses, thought bombs or worse are paraded out there. Yet the 4.th tier, the unenfranchised, the SINless, the fugees, the poor and the downtrodden, the grime in the cracks of society, desperate for net access, they may chance an unprotected net. Ghost got milspec barriers. Sie need not fear the depravity of trapped netspace. But her code is hot. Why risk it when she slices through the barriers of the local supermart and rides the signal into the cloud.
Sie runs interface. This is what sie does. It takes 0.3 seconds and the local surveillance cameras give her a location of the missing CIP. .1 second later the team has the loc on their GPS. Before she logs out a masking virus begins battling the different vid-caches. That should delay the competition an additional 30 sec. The hunt is on.


Cage’s reflexes kick in. Hir system is flooded with milspec enhancers and cutting edge synthroids. Sie grabs the offending pistol and ducks left out of its kill-arc. Somewhere in hir hand it discharges, killing a random wall, then it jams. It’s of no consequence as sie jams his elbow into the gunners arm, snapping the cheap cy-arm in two. Cage then proceeds to beat the corp-cop to death with hir own arm before the ware lets him go.
For a second sie looks at the mess and considers a software upgrade.

Token is too slow. The chaingun catches hir in the alley. It is with clinical brutality it rips hir milgrade shell to pieces. Even SOTA creamics cannot stand up to 30 mikemike ap rounds pounding it at a rate of 1200 bullets a minute. Somehow hir braincase survives and bounces towards cover. There might be hope LazRUS thinks, before the gunAI corrects its aim and the disembodied head vaporizes in a concrete and red mist. As the 30 mikemike rounds begins chewing through the wall behind hir LazRUS legs it.

end transmission

Re: Visions by Television
« Reply #1 on: March 17, 2011, 12:26:04 AM »
Another braindump, unedited and bad prose and all. Enjoy.

Begin transmission:

The Brave New Order

The beginning of the 21st century saw the world reeling from capitalism gone bad, from fundamentalism growing in the cracks of a world inherently unfair. It had to come down. And the advent of digital immortality, the IBrain was the final straw. Emergent AI and increasingly automated factories, 3D printshops and piracy brought the whole thing down.
 
The world was collapsing in on itself. Rampant unemployment, exploding social cost, the whole 1st world civilization looked more and more like the third world, and to protect itself, they all went on a looting spree. Again the big boys against the small, I guess it is human nature. Which again fuelled the plausible promise of revolt and retribution, flaring a thousand small groups trying to protect themselves against the grand satan of capitalism.  Some people wanted this, hoping to create a Brave New World from chaos.

I guess those people never read Mazlow. I don’t expect you to know who the fuck that is, google it. As things went from bad to worse some smart little fucker in a formerly socialist country suggested the unthinkable. His company would provide a stable living environment and a basic paycheck. All sie wanted in return was your vote. And people nearly ran down hir gates.  And sie became a political power. Never underestimate the Have’s ability to remain on top of the foodchain.
 
Social unrest faded into the background as the first world sold its votes to the Pancorporations, and representative democracy just represented mammon instead of the people. It was quick and easy when it first begun. And to prevent any backbreaking competiton the big boys, the Orbitals and multinationals agreed to the maximum value of a vote. That is when they named it the Universal Wage.
The Brave New Order was here.

World within worlds.

You think it is unfair, no? Well that is a luxury you can afford since you are one of lucky ones. Yes, you may be a drone, accepting the UW and a place in an arcology, a modern serf. But you’re still modestly looked after, a part of the First World, and the 1W looks after its own. It’s always been like that. An be honest, you wouldn’t want to swap for some third world hell hole now would you. We stood on the edge of that abyss, and we chose this instead.

Now imagine, you’re on the outside and looking in. You do not care about fair and unfair. You just want a piece of this bright and shiny world. So you head out. Most likely you die crossing the border, or somewhere on the way, victim of some barely human predator. Another random casualty of the BNO.  Let’s say you make it, to the land of gold and honey, the City.

But when you are here you realize there is a Fourth world. The one of the Displaced, the fugees, SINless, without any rights, without any way of getting the UW you will sink to the bottom, to the District. Where beggars without legs pray for alms under holosigns advertising pirated French skillware, where the gangs rule and life can be just as hard as back home. If you are smart, aggressive, lucky or desperate enough, you end up with a lowgrade IBrain. And you get to see the Floating World. But you still live in la Sona, and there is no escape.

Unfortunatly there is a human failing called hope. And you will cling to this.

So yes it is unfair. But be honest, you wouldn’t want to trade now would you?

The topology of concrete.

The city. A sprawling, teeming mass of humanity. Arcologies rising from the crowded, smog filled streets like hives. Filled with drones living their lives submerged in the Floating World, or carrying out menial tasks to give their pointless lives meaning. This City is the 1world. Sure, there are others like it, but they are all the same. An aggregation of humans spread from one end of the continent to another.
It is just natural. The UW is easier to get back if the unwashed masses are kept close together. We are easier to control. The Floating World there to distract us, and enough small opportunities to spend our 30 silvers to keep us occupied. It is funny how this neon and concrete jungle is a balanced ecosystem of want and need. There is just enough of both to keep the drones pacified. And not enough to make them not ask questions or want something more.

I want something more. I am a predator in this jungle. Do not get me wrong. I am no social revolutionary. I don’t care about the drones. Now the feudal lords owning them. Now they I care about.

On top of all these UW drones sit the zaibatsu lords. A stratified hierarchy made up of an elect few. Living in exclusive small compounds, with enough to make them want more. Each one daily making decisions that affect millions to ensure a good weekly rapport. Always looking out for the claws of the ones underneath, and for the next opportunity to toppled the one above.

The lifeblood of the city   

The city is submerged in information. The Floating World lies like a layer atop everything. Everywhere is tagged, commented and have likes. ADbombs, viral memes and targeted marketing controlled by semi-AI lies atop the streets like fine dust, where ever you walk you stir it up. Everydrone is surrounded by their P.A.N sphere of information. It is omnipresent. Information is the lifeblood of the city. But the Floating World isn’t it. That is just noise.

Now, the true data, the vital one, exist off the grid, hidden in secure servers, in offline databanks and in the minds of an elect few. This information is power. This is what fuels the city. The pancorps and orbitals will go to war over the right bit of code. But war’s are expensive, and nobody wants to deliver a bad quarterly.
That is where we come in, the Operators. Freelance and SINless, deniable and hidden under the noise, our Ronin status our trademark. We steal, we move, we aquire and sell this information. Be it a chip with Paydata, a rumor, an ugly truth, a defecting asset’s IBrain or hir whole shell. We do it contracted, we do it because it drops in our laps, we do it to maintain our SOTA. But most of all we do it because we can.


End transmission.