the man from valle

strife

debt is a serious crime in this brave new world. miscreant debtors get locked up in the Stacks and become part of the Overmind, the enormous combinatorial supercomputer that uses human neurons as logic gates.

you hear about the whole 10% thing, how most people only use 10% of their brain. morgen bioware decided to exploit this phenomenon. they hooked up people to the net, but not in the usual way. in theory, the conscious 10% would be free to roam around the net like other free peoples (subject to the customs and mores of the net, of course. netiquette, the OGs used to call, but that was another time, another place.)

[vox: in this context, OG means original geek.]

the rest of the soft, pliant mind would be clustered with other minds. if two heads are better than one, what about 2 million?

so all the planning and design of the new colony on ACA4 occurs in the stacks. sometimes literally. the grand design committee uses the brains of the few hundred thousand debtors, murderers, and rapists as their own private endonet, running simulations and projections, alternate histories, experimental designs.

they say if you get plugged into the stacks, you basically go insane.

so sang guerrero found his parents locked away in the stacks one day. sang, having just graduated from the university of alon ginto at berkshire, never knew. never knew where all those thousands of flashes came from or went.

there was a point where he worried they had a gambling problem. always spending time in vallereal. free nights in the grand casino. who gets free nights there?

the total number of flashes his parents were in debt had way too many zeroes for sang not to at least gasp in distress.

he visited them in the net from time to time. they weren't big net zenners. they got homesick. they got weirded out by the whole alt.net crowd. and then it was hard to find them. sometimes his dad would just drop into his feed, completely unannounced. or just open up an audio pipe, and whisper something nonsensical while sang was whiling his time away.

at least sang stopped hanging out in the pr0n sites.

his mom, it was like she disappeared. he tried asking his dad about it, but his dad would go off on bizarre tangents like treatises on masturbation and what life was like growing up on earth before everything got fucked up.

sang had always known she had a sensitive psyche.

and then it all fit into place.

in the economic bubble of the late 2400's, sang easily found a job. a dream job, if there was such a thing, working for morgen bioware. code. biology. consulting. traveling all over ACA4. but then the nationalistas took both the senior and the junior consulate by 2504, the economy tanked, and all hell broke loose.

sang was one of the fortunate who still had a job. but it had all turned to shit.

his folks were clinically insane. working for morgen, the marketing flacks would always pooh-pooh his "theoretical" anxieties. the mental breakdown. the complete dissociation of personality. has anyone ever come out of the stacks? sang asked. the marketroid would bat him away with some unnecessary marketing gibberish that he, as a engineer, didn't have to know. and when a more senior member of the company would walk by, the marketroid would yell at sang: don't you have any work to do? the senior person would give them both a dirty look, the marketroid with a shit-eating grin, and sang would look away and hurry to his cubicle.

it is said that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.

so there were the terrorists, who got promptly locked into the stacks.

then there were the hackers. the networms. the codecrackers.

and of course the bioagents.

but somehow alon ginto didn't get hit. the eastern provinces had a few "incidents." the economies of the central provinces become non-existent. and while the corporations in orbit of the consulate's assholes screwed alon ginto out of trillions of flashes, alon ginto was probably still one of the better places to live on ACA4.

or so the nationalistas proclaimed.

and then there was the one little communique sitting in sang's VQ. it looked like a piece of pr0n spam that his sifter somehow managed to miss. he opened it, and group anal sex broke out in polyphonic glory. goddamn it. of course he opens up his VQ at work, in metaspace. just as he was about it junk it, an encryption engram flew at him, zoom x 100, then minned back onto his docket. then encrypted gibberish, glyphs in dayglo yellow, in orderly rows, on a virtual plate of glass standing a foot from his face in metaspace. he marqed it and minned it to his docket. then he took out his cryptkey, faced it with the engram on his docket and then threw it at the minned gibberish.

the twenty five rows of dayglo glyphs merged like liquid mercury into a single word.

dark archon.

then the virtual plate glass shattered, and sang covered his face, forgetting that it was all metaspace. he even had to stifle a high-pitched scream.