Firmware: Keylogger: Recent Episodes
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Isaac Sarason is a skilled hacker formerly employed by British Telecom-Sprint.
With his health failing, Isaac did the only thing he could think of: He ran.
He found a haven in a working class district of the City known as Little Russia.
There Isaac took on a new name: Ishmael.
Wounded, alone, and far from help, Isaac depended of the kindness of strangers.
One stranger, a burqa wearing doctor known as Fatima, took pity on Isaac and helped him make his way to the mysterious Star-X line and the slim promise that it could save him.
What do you do when those who saved you have recorded everything you are? What do you do when your every action is tracked by the Keylogger?
First Serialized by Colbyjack.net.
01-11-11 – Naamah and Lucifer witnessed by Simeon-RedSquare: I woke. I was in darkness. How was I in darkness?
01-11-10 – Ike: I entered Ishmael’s quarters with the key he had given me. I think he had given it to me in order to avoid acknowledging that I couldn’t be kept out of any place in the vCity or its connected domains.
01-11-01 – Inari: I sat upon the Ginkgo Throne and waited upon the Simeon. I existed, as I did on any day in which an ambassador from the Kaigai called on my court, in a body formed from a haha-kuma.
01-11-00 – Sam Noire: What took Yahweh a week to accomplish, I did in two. Though, he got what he wanted on the first go. I, on the other hand, took a few more at bats to create my first child.
01-10-11 – Samil: “You really might want to use an alias in public,” Professor Jinan Irrgarten said as zhe fumbled with a sewer pipe sized conduit.
01-10-10 – Ishmael: I always assumed that someone with my talents wouldn’t have any trouble finding a job in a world made of computers.
01-10-01 – Simeon: Servers were supposed to be indistinguishable once one got past the piddling details of physical architecture and processor limitations. When one was inside a server it shouldn’t feel any different from any other server in the world with the same processing power.
01-10-00 – Samuel: I obsessed over who Rama’s killer could be. I lived the details of the weapon. It was a single flechette gun. Or were there two weapons?
01-01-11 – Samil: Does nothing work the way I want it to? Is there a being, a god if you must, somewhere above me, staring down, and deciding nothing I want to do will ever work?
01-01-10 – Ishmael: Fatima sat in his boxers on the edge of his bed. I sat on top of a stack of scavenged computer parts on the floor next to his sense-net rig and chair.
01-01-01 – Simeon: I was moving through the network trying to find a clear path to Little Russia. I was not moving in the helter-skelter method of the first hours of our escape from BGM.
01-01-00 – Samuel: The evidence of Rama’s death was stored in a box in the ancient Erie Basin Auto Pound and Evidence Warehouse.
01-00-10 – Ishmael: For the first time in my life I saw who Fatima was. Not the shape he had been born as, but as the person she really was.
01-00-01 – Simeon: I received the news from Samuel we were too big to escape intact without comment.
00-11-10: I woke feeling a little fuzzy. Waking wasn’t something I had really felt in a long time, and had no idea why I felt it.
00-11-01: Nineteen seconds before the scheduled shutdown of my server I entered The Far Side of the Moon Scenario.
00-11-00: I was not happy with what was happening one bit. 11 was going all crazy about how we had to know what Star-X was, why they wanted us, what was the point of this whole endeavor.
00-10-11: We had an hour before shutdown. It was Friday afternoon. The staff responsible for the integration of new AIs into the farm had the weekend off.
00-10-10: All server rooms were the same. Raised floors and drop ceilings were the hallmark of a truly professional setup.
00-10-01: Knowing what I was made everything make sense. My wandering through the city, seeing things I couldn’t see, in places I couldn’t know about was just me wandering the camera networks.
00-01-11: The City, this beast we lived in, was just too vast to make sense. One in a million events happened every day. And yet there were people who never ventured more than a mile from the place they were born in their entire life.
00-01-10: The world was different than I remembered it. I thought I was supposed to be meeting Fatima for tea again. Instead I found myself in Roanoke Park.
00-01-01: I was on Tbilisi Avenue. It was nighttime. Something told me it was March. I don’t know why I knew, but I knew it with a certainty I had never felt about time before.
00-01-00: Artificial Intelligences are not a new thing. They have been around since computers were made of flint and it was thought that there actually was something one could do with the mass of data flowing through the proto-networks which first spanned the globe.
00-00-11: I tossed and turned in a nightmare. No, not a nightmare, more like a series of dreams. But the series were in parallel. How could I dream simultaneously of three, no make that four, different things?
00-00-10: “When did you first realize that things were not what they seemed?” Fatima asked, his voice pitched to a husky falsetto.
00-00-01: I woke to a roar. There was a scream of superheated plasma forcing its way into the world.