I had a nightmare last night... I dreamed I was nine-years-old again, and I had just woken up, and no-one was home. I stepped out into the hall, and saw faceless black masses dragging two decayed, moldy corpses out from a room. One of the corpses looked up at me, and pointed its finger at me,accusingly. And I felt the chill fingers of death gripping my heart, even as I woke up from the nightmare.
I wrote that in my journal about two months ago. The image from my childhood has returned to me with a vengeance. I've have this same dream every night since then. It is horrible; I don't sleep very much, and when I do close my eyes, dread, terror and repressed confusion diffuse through my blood.
After a particularly intense nightmare, I found myself soaked in night-sweat and starkly awake at three in the morning. "What do these ghosts from my past want from me?" I asked myself again and again. Mom's old advice "don't worry about it" mocked me because I wanted to forget but could not.
If I just knew who these people were and why they died, I could sleep at night. It is like a fairly tale I once heard, in which a boy learns the secret name of a magician, and then has power over the magician. I was filled with a bizarre hope that once I knew the name of these two ghosts, I could dispel them from my life.
I got out of bed, stumbled to our sensorium cube, and locked into the net. My familiar room came into focus, comfortable in its simple starkness. I wove a fabric of a bogus identity around myself so that to the world my identity was a heavyset, 42 year-old-woman named Marge whose entire life was my concoction. Any person in cyberspace can craft their personality projection. Most people enter cyberspace looking like themselves; a few try to be cool and look like dragons or walking trees or other silly metaphors, but usually they're treated as freaks. It is a crime to project yourself as someone you're not, which was precisely what I was doing. But I am really, really good at computers, and I had carefully crafted every aspect of Marge to seem as dense and real as any citizen. Anyways, after I wrapped Marge around myself, I exited my room and flew into the city net. I skimmed over the nodes where people often meet to hang out, and landed in the city archives. It is represented as a giant, musty library filled with books and a few scattered reference desks. The metaphorical interface for the archive computer itself was that of a grey-haired man sitting behind a reference desk reading an obscure tome.
"Can I help you?" He/it inquired. "I provide access to birth dates, pictures, city maps, and the like."
"Yes," I replied, "I would like to know the names of the occupants of city block 20-10-8, floor level 31, rooms, uhm..." and I faltered, because I forgot the cube number that the corpses had been dragged from. Oh, yeah, they were three doors down from us, that would make them a double-occupancy, so they lived in "uhm, rooms 194ab, six years ago."
"Just a second, Marge..." he it said. "I'll just look it up." And he picked up a giant tome, and began flipping through the pages. I thought this was a cool metaphor for a search engine, and wished that my school projects looked so good. The seconds passed. I waited and watched that archivist. I wondered how their search engine worked. Most data searches are preformed in a divide-and-conquer fashion, which is neat because you can add tons of data and expect only a negligible increase in search time.
I grew antsy, waiting and waiting.
It occurred to me, this search shouldn't be taking so long. I was suddenly scared, but didn't want to show it.
Each of my net projections wears a wrist device that looks like a watch, but really links me to the controls on my sensorium cube. As discretely as I could, I tapped a code into this device that left my constructed Marge persona standing in front of the archival desk as I slipped away back to my home room. It's rather disconcerting to leave your shell and blur through the city. I heartily don't recommend you try it, except under dire circumstances. As quickly as I could, I transferred my subprogram that maintained Marge to a pay-per-use public computing account, and drew back to monitor what happened to her.
For about 10 seconds, her program ran smoothly. Then, it was as if a black velvet bag enveloped her program, and sliced it apart. It was the slickest search-and-destroy virus I had ever seen -- it left no remains. Thank God I had transferred her processes to an untraceable location. Had I stayed inside Marge at the archival desk, the virus would have quietly eaten away at her fake fabric, then suddenly ripped her apart, run a backtrace to my home, and have me identified and arrested.
I passed through the gateway from sensorium to reality, and found myself once again in my cold cube. I could hardly feel the concrete floor because of the adrenaline surging inside me. I stood up shaking, and went back to lay down in bed. What had happened?
Either:
Marge was a good disguise. I have been getting 'A's in all my computer classes, thank you very much. So it seemed like someone didn't like questions about these dead people.
I wanted to stop thinking about it, and after lying in bed for an hour, tossing and turning, I finally drifted into a fitful slumber...
I am in the net, but this time instead of flying freely across the city I am being dragged by a slender cord to a marble building. I look below me and see the archivist holding the rope in one hand, a bloody knife in the other. Three mangled bodies lay on the ground -- the unknown man and woman who were once my neighbors, and the sad Marge, represented as a broken robot's body. The archivist -computer laughs hollowly, mechanically, as it drags me towards him. I feel the first knife blow in my leg, then in my chest, and I feel myself dying as he chops me apart, and as I feel reality fade
...I bolt awake. I feel sick with fear and the disorientation that nightmares bring. I tell mom I don't feel well.
"Oh, that explains why you got up in the middle of the night dear. Well, I hope you feel better," she mumbles as she bustles about getting ready to go out for the day. She absentmindedly keys in a code that signals her assent that I not log into school that day, and leaves.
I walk in front of our sensorium cube, and stare at it with mingled fear and anticipation. I have to know what is being hidden from me, but I'm scared of the damn cube, I'm scared of that amazing virus that construct to shreds, I'm scared of the people in black suits.
I sigh, go to the food dispenser, get some red glop, eat it without any gusto (hell, it's RED GLOP, it can't be all that exciting). I use up a few credit to take a real shower with honest -to-God WATER, put on some fresh clothes, and try to psych myself.
Finally, I lock into the sensorium, and pass from reality into the net.
I know I have to fool them, I have to attack them where they don't expect it. So I work as I've never worked before. I load another personality construct that I made, Edward, whose profile is that of a 37-year old born loser. But I unzip part of this construct, and sew in a two-part virus. This seemingly benign packet of information does nothing interesting. It merely insists that Edward's age is, in fact, 37 years old. And 42 years old. And 21 years old. Trust me, nothing is more annoying to an information collection-and-destruction virus than impossible facts.
I wrap the shell of Edward around me, again go to the city information desk, and request the same information. I leave his shell instantly, and remotely monitor what happens to Edward.
Soon enough, his outer layers are viciously torn away by the attacking virus, thus triggering my counter-virus. It bogs down the attacking virus with its wonderful stream of misinformation about Edward's age. I trigger the second phase of my virus to backtrace the path of the attacking virus, and subtly snake a probe along this path up to the highest-security levels of the archival computer system. Finally, I release my first virus and let the attacking virus rip Edward to shreds.
I breathe a sigh of relief, and tie off the path into the information archive. I send my projection along this path and enter the city archival computer through a very circuitous route.
The cyberspace representation of the database itself is an infinitely huge warehouse filled with millions and billions of boxes. But it is an elementary task to design a probe program that feels out how data is stored, and points me towards the box of data I'm looking for.
I briefly consult my console display; in real time, it is 2:36 pm. Good, mom won't be home for a while yet.
I open the box, and find a stack of the information one would expect a city to know about two married citizens -- pictures, criminal records, medical records, education records, personality profiles, daily habits, preferences, etc, etc. The couple are William and Jane Klunder. Their photos confirm that they are -- were? -- the corpses I saw six years ago.
What I'm looking for is blatantly obvious. It is a small note that glows a dull red, clearly intended to be seen and noticed by any search on this record.
Psychiatric Advisory 001030130152349
Klunder, William and Jane
Citizen Klunder, William displays increasing hostility to organized life. Displays resentment to work, anger at sensorium. Recorded seditious comments at public node. Wife, Klunder, Jane, sympathetic. Involuntary drug treatments fail. They represent a potential threat to civic stability and organization. Recommend humane termination, denial of existence.
I stare at it for several minutes, letting each word sink in. In a city where people are crammed as close together as is physically possible, it makes a cruel kind of sense that individuals who may incite unrest and riots be... removed. But I cannot accept "humane termination." That is unspeakable evil.
What about me? I think seditious thoughts all the time. In a panic, I seal the poor Klunders' box, and turn my search tool on my name, "JoAnn Walters."
I fly across the warehouse to my box. With trembling fingers, I grip the top of my box, and pull. But it won't open.
"DAMN IT!" I scream. "DAMN! DAMN! DAMN!"
And I feel fear, horrible fear. Someone, someone with a very high security level, is interested in my records, and has them sealed. Someone unknown is considering my fate, weighing out some psychiatric advisory about me. It's been done before, but this time I know my life is at stake.
I fly home as quickly as possible. I exit the net.
And I fall to the floor, sobbing. How much do they know about me? What of part of myself is private and safe?
I have one comfort, one friend; chaos. In a city of a hundred million souls, the sheer magnitude of monitoring every person is a staggeringly huge project. They clearly don't know about my journal, or else I'd be dead by now. As long as I don't stand out in the colossal torrents of data, I won't be noticed. As long as I don't follow any dangerous habits, as long as I don't do activites that place me in the category of a dangerous person, I am safe.
Sort of.
Even though I hide in the streams of chaos and information overload that is a city, they can still monitor me if they want. They can sneak into my cyber-room, and analyze every bit of my school assignments. They can look up my heartbeat last Tuesday night if they wanted to. Nowhere is safe; no data is private.
My God, I'm scared.