Emma,

As I write these words I am sitting in the living room. Technically, it’s a porch but the easy chair, glass of afternoon beer, and somewhat stable net signal make it feel like more of a living room than the actual living room which consists of a TV too old for words and the folded mattress where I’ve been sleeping.

Technically, the porch is outside and the living room is inside, but these kinds of distinctions become academic in a situation where all doors and windows are kept as far open as they can possibly be in the hopes of promoting a cross breeze all day and all night. The porch/living room, kitchen, and living room/bedroom may as well all be pavilions in a gazebo. Only my hosts’ bedrooms are ever really sealed and only when they’ve got overnight guests. (Not that it matters, the walls are old and thin.)

photo credit: Idiolector

Some kind of mysterious transaction just went down in the back alley. I’m not supposed to have noticed it, says Aton. Best not to notice anything around here. But it was broad daylight and how could I not hear the low growl of the engine? It sounded like a gas engine, a real guzzler. Could have been a roadtone, I know, but it sounded genuine to me. I think I even saw smoke.

Last night, we went down by the canal and lit a bonfire. It was pretty nice, though I found it hard to get into at first – too nervous about cops showing up. Samantha laughed at me, said that there was nothing to worry about. Showed me how you can rewire a temp-permit and fix the dates with the right kind of data-paste. She says people leave expired permits all over. I didn’t ask where she got the paste.

In the end it didn’t matter. No one showed up aside from more friends and friends of friends. Late into the night a group split off to go to a place called something like WARHOGS or whatever, Samantha left but I decided to stay behind. Lay in the grass with a few of the quieter folk, trying to spy stars through the clouds. Had a long inchoate debate about whether the clouds or stars were moving and if it was the stars, were they really satellites or one of the stations? I tried holding my finger still as a reference but by that point everything was too wobbly to really achieve much in the way of scientific accuracy.

I wandered home in a pleasant haze.

Did I tell you? They’ve got real records here. Like antique ones, not the cheap retro ones that you can get in any old onDemand outlet. Aton says that the old ones sounds better, even though they can’t hold as many songs. They’ve got more character, he says. They last longer. I asked about their carcindex, but he just laughed. There’s a lot of really great stuff here. Bands I’d never heard of. I’ve taken some pictures and I’ll try to assemble a collection for you sometime this week.

This morning, Sam took me up on the roof to see the stills. It’s an astounding network of tubes and tubs. I tried to follow the line from rain collectors, through to the casks on the other end. I kept getting lost in the tangle. Sam says that if I stick around long enough, she’ll show me the ropes (pipes).

Pretty much everything involved comes from the rain (don’t worry, Sam made to point out their quadruple filtration and reverse osmosis system) or the freedom garden which is run by a New Organist collective just up the street. They supply the supplies and Sam supplies the resulting booze.

They’re completely illegal of course and the patchwork of tarps and scrap material can’t possibly be hiding them from Constellation. Sam says that out here we’re barely worth bothering about so they just don’t. Aton muttered something about a million eyed-god being blind.

photo credit: Dom Dada

We talked a little about tactics last night. Aton says that the privacy war is over and that the people lost. He says that our only real remaining resort is to inefficiency. It’s like when those guys flew those planes into America. Apparently, the echelons of power already knew it was coming but they knew so much other stuff as well that the information just got drowned out on the way to a decision getting made.

Aton says that when you get pick-pocketed, they get away with it because they put pressure somewhere else on your body at the same time, so you are too busy feeling the one thing to notice the other. He says the only path to freedom is to put so much pressure on the system all over the place, that it can’t notice anything at all.

Apparently there was an old philosopher who hated the government too, who used to say “starve the beast” but Aton says that’s all passed now. You could cut half the surveillance feeds at the swipe of a pen (as if!) and we’d still have more than enough information being fed into the echelon – it wouldn’t impact things at all. So he and Sam are taking the opposite approach.

We’re going out tonight, with bags and bags of sensors and cameras that we’re going to set up and donate to the public feeds. Some of these devices are faulty in all sorts of really interesting ways. We’re going to put them up all over the place, in the least interesting places possible. We’re going to do this for weeks and weeks, just adding more and more mud to the stream.

I also heard Sam say something to Aton about the Russians renting some time on one of their botnets. I think the plan is to put those spam engines to emancipatory use, replacing sex ads with Home Sec keywords. I heard a rumour that their analysis engines are already months behind in processing. They’ll stay that way so long as we can keep the heat on to deny them future budget expansions (all the more reason to ask our brothers and sisters in the capital to redouble their lobbying efforts).

I don’t know if it’ll amount to much in the end, but it seems like the only path we’ve got left.

“Drown the beast.”

Ada

photo credit: urban_data

Is Tuesday becoming Microfiction Day? It might be. This is another of my nearly-award-winning pieces. This time for Icon Magazine’s Stories for the End of the Decade contest. The win went to Mimi Zeiger of Loudpaper. You can read it here.

Mine goes a little something like this:

“It’s cultural hedging,” said my guide, as we picked our way through the parking lot, “Think about survivalists in Y2K. If everything had ended, they’d have been equipped to thrive. It didn’t, so they lost out.”

“It still seems like a bad decision,” I said, pausing to aim my photo rig, “The collapse of America is hardly imminent.”

The viewfinder showed nameless meat hung to cure along a guardrail, framed by skyscraper shadows and spotlight by the setting sun. I was fiddling with the focus when someone racked a shotgun.

“This ain’t America,” said the bandit, “This is Detroit.”

Awhile back, Ballardian ran a microfiction contest. I entered. The winners are here (I especially liked 2nd place). But say contest-winning microfiction isn’t to your taste? Maybe you’d prefer honourably-mentioned microfiction? I’ve got you covered.

He bought the wine at auction. Included, was a certificate of authenticity showing the bottle’s lineage traced backward from auction house to warehouse to boathouse. Before that, the ocean floor. It had lain there for decades, wedged in the doomed ship’s hold.

He opened the wine at home. The bottle had aged gracefully, he decided. He admired the worn label and salt-textured glass. The cork was decisively intact. People had been dancing on deck when the torpedo hit.

He drank the wine alone. Exquisite. The last of his fortune was spent tracking down Löwenbräu from the Hindenburg.

The more observant among you might realize that the idea is shamelessly stolen from this fantastic Edible Geography post.

Are there any botnets that come from either public or private sectors?
“This is our public-sector botnet.” Boy, I’d like to see one of those.

Bruce Sterling in More Cyberwar Semantics at Beyond the Beyond

photo credit: Beverly & Pack

After years of rumoured increases in the number and sophistication of attacks on the nation’s public and private networked infrastructure, groups claiming to be from North Korea declare all out cyberwar. The U.S. government realizes that it needs its own, bigger, botnet to strike back. Rather than risk secure military computers, to say nothing of the hardware procurement and deployment time, the innovative Cyber Home Defence Initiative is announced.

Combining elements of Conficker, Folding@Home, and old fashioned American wartime patriotic spirit, the CHDI allows allows ordinary citizens to do their part by dedicating spare cycles and bandwidth to protecting the networked home front and striking back at America’s enemies. A quick download and completely automatic installation makes contributing to the defence effort as easy as leaving you computer on and online when it’s not in use.

Whichever political party isn’t in power decries the CHDI as yet another infringement on American liberties, a governmental land grab, and a violation of privacy in hearth and home. The other side leverages their extensive social networking capabilities to build support for, and sign-ups to, the initiative. Department of Defence officials decline to comment on rumours that Blackwater’s cyber security division is renting time on the Nucrypt botnet.

She rolled over and smiled at him, “God, why didn’t we do this years ago?”

He grinned, “Wouldn’t have worked years ago, you were still seeing Maria and I had some things to work out for myself.”

She propped herself up on her elbows, “Still, I can’t help but think about all that wasted time!”

photo credit: SnaPsi Сталкер

He laughed, “Not wasted at all! In order for things to work out this way, that time needed to pass.”

She traced the line from his ear to his chin, “You make it sound like you had a master plan.”

He smiled back, “I still do! It’s a twenty year plan. This is year seven.”

She kissed him on the cheek, “Ah, but now you’ve ruined you plan by revealing it to me!”

He raised an eyebrow, “Have I? You aren’t even going to take this seriously. I can continue with my plan as if nothing happened.”

Her eyes lit up and she began to laugh.

“See? Even now,” he said, “Even now as I tell you that I predicted that you would laugh when I told you about the plan, you’re laughing.”

She was still laughing.

“Even now, you aren’t taking me seriously. I can flat out admit that I have worked out a twenty year plan for the two of us and it won’t matter because there’s no way you’ll believe me.”

She kept laughing. He smiled and pretended to laugh along. Of course she wouldn’t take him seriously. She couldn’t know.

He knew.