(This was a story I sketch two years ago or something like that to participate in NaNoWriMo… I never ended up doing it, but I wrote this intro, so why not publish it? Maybe I’ll continue it one of these days)
THE AWAKENING
by Petros Miklos
.
The wind blew gently past Neu Fawlk‘s long dark reddish hair as he kept running through the valley of information before his eyes.
He had just logged in and was just perusing his own local cluster for any recent alterations.
The field below was dense as a black hole, full of compressed and encrypted information just screaming for the right scalpel to peel they protective layers off and gaze in to the wondrous mysteries they hold, just what Fawlk enjoyed.
A blink flashed and Fawlk logged off with a grumpy noise returning back to the reality which held his physical existence.
***
The room where he stood was quite large given the value of real space those days. That’s not to say that he actually bought it. No, he just stole the money from somebody else and paid to have a reasonable apartment but not large enough to warrant any undesired attention to his income winning methods. The fact was the single room was most of the house size and hold most of the equipment within, serving as bedroom, living room and kitchen at the same time. There two other small divisions in the flat. A cranky tiny bathroom with the minimal facilities and a cubicle he used as a storage facility.
There was one large polymorphic window occupying most of one wall of the main room. The fact that it was a real window to the outside itself made the flat value rocket upwards, but Fawlk liked to consider it his little vanity. One window to the real world, thousands of virtual windows to the thousands of virtual ones. It was his moment of poetry, a touch of class and philosophy to what was otherwise a flat in dire need of a cleaning.
The fact that he himself didn’t liked to go outside his realm only made things worse. There were many reasons as to why he always stay at home. He didn’t liked to travel, he didn’t liked to walk, he despised public transportation, driving a ground car was just insane and inefficient and any non-ground vehicle required him to attend some sort of school which, undoubtedly, added people to the equation, and plenty of them, that of course was just not going to happen. The fact was that he enjoyed being alone, hidden in his refuge, surfing the information highways, watching the world, learning, experiencing, interacting but in the comfort of his lair. “What’s the point of going anywhere if you can know everything about it right here?” he kept saying to himself. All he ever needed was at a finger’s distance, and that was just the way he liked it. THAT was comfort, that was his pinnacle of evolution, that was his life.
But aside the dozen cores, memory storage’s, screens, interfaces, drivers of all kinds dating back to the stone-age of the internet, there was a peculiar fact about Neu’s life that elude the naked eye: a woman. She was no princess by any means, just a drug addicted vagrant that managed to find her way in to the hacker’s life. The two of them were outcast of society, one by choice another by consequence. She provided him help with menial tasks he abhorred doing, such as garbage disposal, cleaning his clothes, the occasional exquisite food that wasn’t home delivered and menial tasks as such. Plus, she served as a counterweight for him, preventing him from over abusing is time online; while he, on the other hand, prevented her from buying crappy and flawed drugs or succumbing to an overdose, as also providing her some economic independence so as to avoid further the humanity downfall. Fawlk saw her as his payback to human kind, sort of an excuse or perhaps a way to apologize for the ‘indiscretions’ that he may or may have not committed online. She was his project to save mankind (one at a time). Tanya thought similarly towards him. In her own way it was she who was saving Fawlk from ‘overdosing’ his own drug.
In the end, she helped him, he helped her. One hand washing over the other. It worked and that was enough for him.
Shaking his head, Fawlk stood up from his bed where he had been for the past hours connected with the massive interplanetary network know as IRNet, short for immersive reality network. It was the source of all information, the core of every system was connected to it, everyone who was someone was linked to it and you could literally see the World in one day there if only your brain could withstand the exertion. He looked around making his neck make cracking noises just before he tapped his console and turn the flat’s lights on and unlocked the door outside.
Tanya walked in looking as pale as usual, puffyness on her half-closed eyes, her clothes worn and battered and in her hands a light polymer box undoubtedly carrying some food and her new batch of drugs.
“Looking pale today…” Fawlk remarked at her, impatiently waiting for her to hurry up.
“Hmmm… Yeah… M’guess” she replied with her voice trailing off.
“Ya had your fix already?”
Tanya just moaned affirmatively, dropping the box next to him before crashing down on the bed.
Fawlk smirked and pondered for a second if it would be worth preaching her about his rules. It wasn’t, she was just too stubborn or to dependent to wait to get home to ice her brain up. He knew the drill and as long as she didn’t killed herself and kept her end of the bargain it was all he really wanted.
Dismissing any more thoughts about her he open the box and took a slice of the organic pizza taking a bite on it.
“Hmmmm, ish ghooth!” he commented aloud, even though Tanya had already blacked out in to her surreal trip.
He turned around facing the keyboard console again. He prided himself in being one of the few hackers that still dwell in ultra-low coding his routines for efficiency high marks. He was just about to finish his latest bot to aid him in his exploratory quests of the I-net. It was a necessity for anyone who wished to peruse the more fundamental layers of the network to customize their browser to fit their whims; there were of course millions of other pieces of ware already available (one way or another) to do this, but to have access to the very specifics of any given task one might want to achieve while hacking, one had to design his own tools or spend years learning to use someone’s else. Plus there was always the possibility of being hacked by using any of those tools as one could never really know what to expect for such hard-coded routines. So, evidently, as a proud member of an elitist and quite despotism society of hackers, he did it the hard way. It was after all the only way.
***
A couple of hours later Fawlk was still hooked to his console. The food had already cooled down but as Tanya woke up she didn’t mind it much. She said nothing, she knew how much he hated to be interrupted while parussing his own addiction. She didn’t complain, it was him and his long hours logged on that paid her addiction and food, plus the shelter in some way afterall. So she sat there quiet, still feeling the light effects of the drug on her brain, and watched as he digged deep on the many layers of information.
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