[This is a short story because of the recent Net Neutrality vote by the FCC, and discussing government if it switched to Agile. It is not part of the other ongoing stories, nor in the same timeline.]
I waited until the surveillance drone passed before I pulled the Faraday blanket off my computer again. Thick clients were heavily audited in this current economic climate. Depending on how this sprint's elections went, there may be relaxed costs next cycle, but since each week the power could shift, I stayed in the habit of hiding my computing node.
I had a good 3 hours before the next audit sweep would occur, and I planned to get some more programming done during the window. I hooked up a power converter to my machine. It's voltage signature masked the computer, so my power company wouldn't charge me more. For the three hours, it would appear like a crock pot instead.
The compute node was black market, now. Decades ago you could have bought one in thousands of stores, but now these machines were hard to come by. They didn't have TMs, or Trust Modules, like they do now. My communicator had one. If there was any tampering, it would sever the connection and brick itself, and snitch on you. Jailbreaking was a criminal offense now, especially if the communicator were tampered with enough to bypass paywalls.
The paywalls kept the SegmentNet auditable. Each week they'd tally and bill you for the segments accessed, and the volume. Calculated bundles would be applied to the account, rollover credits, various buzzwords designed to make it sound like features were applied to the bill. Usually they'd coincide with the latest election sprint, to help favor particular policies and votes. Or when a topic was detrimental, they'd cut all access and you'd have to hear about it word-of-mouth from others.
I smirked. 'They.' it was a term I'd come to use more lately. Like a shadowy syndicate, they were the SegmentNet Providers. SNPs we're the unofficial monopolies. There were four of them now, dividing the country up into regions. Antitrust when the SegmentNet was first passed kept them from unifying, so they made an agreement. They withdrew from competing markets to minimize conflict. The arrangement worked well for them because with the sprint governance, no formalized suit could cover collusion on price setting, and by mapping their variations to the cycles, they kept the populace at rest. So yes, when I say "they," I really picture a dark smoke filled room of shadowy figures conspiring.
But this compute node, it was my escape plan. Most of the tech giants moved offshore when SegmentNet went live. They became their own independent non-nation organizations, with representation at the United Organizations, which rebranded when it was no longer just nations. And when those tech companies moved, they built their ocean data centers with massive uplinks, broadcasting to peering points. I lived too far inland for direct access, but The Mesh is what I've built this to access. NeoARPANet, more often just called The Mesh, is the new interconnected network. It's peer to peer, anonymous, and antiTrust Moduled. Part of the connection assertions look for TM signatures and avoid it if present. Much like how SegmentNet only replies if the handshake is proper, The Mesh won't respond to a TM handshake.
Getting online was difficult. With audit machines scanning for rogue access, I had to study the routes and connect only when it was safe. But with the last update I got from The Mesh, there is a new program that let's you monitor the patrols and go silent when a scan comes. Tracking the trackers is trivial, it turns out, especially for some of the other data giants. At one point leaflets were smuggled into our city, sponsored by one on them, to inform us of how to connect to The Mesh. The leaflets were made with a special ink that was uninterpretable by cameras and scans, due to printing a veneer of metallic ink across the whole sheet. Human eyes could decipher it, though, and that's how I got my first connection to the outside.
After lots of covert communications, I was able to buy a 1NPH, "one node per human," and get connected. Since then, I'd learned programming and how to integrate and improve my systems. My node was a heavily augmented one, using the original model as a foundation for expansion. I got interfacer goggles and gloves, and the power modulator to accommodate it.
The programming tonight was to get my node synced up with the drone sweeps. I couldn't be a full mesh relay until that was resolved. Throwing a Faraday cloth over it every 3 hours worked when I was just a consumer, but now I was a distributor. An enemy of the hegemony, and a symbol to the oppressed people.
From the Mesh, I learned about the Segment vote, the alignment of the peering points, the death of IP, and the birth of SNP. It was sad to read this and learn everything I was taught was the false story made up by the Victor. Accessing cryptohistory was incredible, seeing authoritative bodies outside our oligarchy attest and sign for these events was like having the veil torn from my eyes. And I saw the real world.
So now I distribute the leaflets after a government SCRUM, I attest to new nodes, and I subvert the monitors to bring information to my peers. Because we are not human resources to a machine, but individuals that use machines. We just have to squeeze out from beneath the current power to get ours back.
