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  Again, in theory. I hadn’t tested it yet. For all I knew it would fry my brain and my catbot would be left without a master.

  What was typically omitted from the pamphlets on the amazing ease of use that Persistence provided was the initial generation of said key. Oh sure, it's as simple as sequencing your DNA. Not a problem, it can be done within 15 minutes these days.

  All that is needed is a tissue sample.

  The first time somebody jacks in, they typically have an overseer. Some kindly doctor (or docbot, there were few human doctors left anymore) would slide a hypo under your skin and suck out a few blood cells. If you lacked that however, the system would have to...make do.

  All things are connected, so they say. The system will make do...

  > TISSUE SAMPLE REQUIRED scrolled across my vision, wrapping around my head and flipping into a rectangular glowing box off to the side. Two smaller phrases were underlined:

  AUTOMATIC RETRIEVAL | MANUAL RETRIEVAL

  I pondered this for a moment (nobody had told me about what happens after you jack in), and saw with somewhat creeping horror that AUTOMATIC RETRIEVAL began to glow in a ghastly purple. MANUAL RETRIEVAL faded to nothingness, and a feed of my living room was thrust in front of me. There had been a timer that I hadn’t noticed in the upper corner of my vision. I was not quick enough to give the system my input.

  Story of my life.

  I saw my catbot sidling up next to me, staring with those mechanical cat's eyes. Her tail began to shiver, and then I saw the tip disappear into blackness. A sharp needle protruded from the end and snaked up my arm. I could feel the cold metallic sensation as though it were a faraway dream, but once that needle penetrated my skin I could feel every ounce of pain that surged through my nervous system. After what seemed eons and yet had been only moments, the pressure withdrew and I saw my catbot lapping at the pinprick of blood on my arm, using the chemicals that had pooled on its tongue to hasten the scabbing of my wound.

  Surprisingly, the pain abated quickly. What mattered now was that a virtual cage had surrounded me while I’d been attending to my physical being. I was cut off from the digital world. A large marquee read [SEQUENCING DNA] with a large status bar underneath. It crept slowly along, and all I could do was wait. And wait.

  And wait.

  Chapter 3

  *WHAM WHAM WHAM*

  The front door shuddered under the powerful series of knocks being delivered.

  The status bar was hanging at 50%, barely moving. A button loomed just above my right eye. Next to it was a button. Options are always good. I hit and gently pressed the cable releases, slowly pulling the needle out of my skull. Relief from a pressure I’d gotten used to greeted me as the cable detached and unceremoniously plopped out.

  *WHAM WHAM WHAM* resounded again.

  "Patience, patience" I murmured as I made my way to the door. I always enjoyed the old sentiments. "A penny saved is a penny earned" was one of my favorites mostly because I just liked the ring to it. The penny hasn't existed for decades of course, and I couldn’t even remember what one looked like. I touched my jack as I opened to door, fingering the fresh hole in my head, still amazed I’d even gone through with it. Catbot was perched nearby, ready for action.

  "MAIL DELIVERY". A mailbot was personally delivering something to me. It was the size of a human, but moved on four wheels that were installed to a large square base. Atop the base was a smaller base and finally, an even smaller base that functioned as its head, resembling a cubic snowman. Two small blue lights provided the appearance of eyes and a mesh screen protected the speaker, forming a simple mouth. It was holding a package, waiting indefinitely for me to take it.

  A popular prank on the early models was to never take the package after you greeted it. The mailbot would literally sit there for hours before powering down and needing to be manually returned to a charging station. This, of course, meant many people were without mail delivery that day. Even in a technologically inclined world like this, if you wanted to send something, you mailed it the old fashion way: through a mailbot. Why the designers didn’t handle this fringe case of not taking the package was a huge debacle in the tech field. They produced and sold so many units before the ‘bug’ was discovered that the company claimed a patch was too difficult to deploy and to instead follow the proper procedures detailed in the vendor’s instruction manual. If you pretend hard enough, apparently problems simply go away.

  I took the package and shook it gently, but didn't hear anything inside it move. The mailbot's eyes flickered green and as it pivoted to leave my porch said, "HAVE DAY NICE GOOD MORNING.”

  Shit. Even the mailbots were starting to lose their minds. Sounded a bit like bleed over from one of its internal registers. I’ll admit, I had a little pity for the mailbot. It was getting old, and the pops and creaks from my joints indicated the same for me.

  That thought ended quickly though, because from behind the mailbot came a Sharper. He charged at me, arm raised with a blade poised to slice into my neck. I raised my own arm and connected with his, stopping its momentum. My eyes flashed grey and I kicked him square in the genitals. He doubled over, dropping the blade. I kneed him in the face and pushed him off the porch. Blood flowed from his nose and he turned onto his back, still clutching his groin. The attack was over in seconds, yet it had felt like minutes had gone by.

  Sharpers are hired hitmen that use a very, very lethal blade. It is so sharp it can cut through flesh, simple armor, and some metals with incredible ease. They are often dispatched for small jobs like this because the kill is clean, simple, and gives bloodthirsty killers a quick and easy job. Everybody must have a purpose, even the degenerates. Fortunately, by and large they’re idiots. They have one skill and that is to stab. Or slice. Either tends to work.

  I watched him finally stand and attempt to run away. He lumbered heavily on one leg, still clutching his balls, blood trailing as he stumbled away.

  I was excited though, I’d received a package!

  Looking down, the glint of the Sharper's knife caught my eye. I brought the knife inside along with my package. Hell, I thought, it's always good to have one of these babies on hand. It'd hurt like hell if I slipped and nicked myself, but it'd make a great box cutter.

  I put the box on my kitchen table and stared at it expectantly. To be quite honest, I had completely forgotten that I’d put in an order. It wasn't until the mailbot squeaked up to my door that I even remembered that it was supposed to come...that's how wrapped up in my new installation I had been. Silly me. I touched the blade ever so carefully to the neatly and expertly applied packaging tape over the opening of the box. It slid through like butter and the flaps parted.

  Buried under a nest of packaging peanuts were my new specs. I picked them up, my hands shaking slightly. I'd never had specs as fancy as this. These had set me back nearly as much as the port installation had, but were totally worth it.

  Trembling, I lifted them to my face. I heard a slight "bzzt" noise, and knew that it had sensed the electric field my body generated and hijacked some to power itself up. I put the specs over my eyes and felt them immediately auto-adjust to the contours of my head.

  Neat, now I had a fancy-schmancy heads-up display, a nifty little HUD. All kinds of real-time information flowed in and out of my field of view. This was an offshoot of the reality provided by Persistence. A nicety for the overall user-experience.

  Flicking my eyes from side to side allowed me to page through the menu that had appeared in my periphery. I blinked to the option for camouflage, and the glasses seamlessly blended in with my face. It was as though I wasn't wearing anything. The stream of data had continued, however, to pelt me with information regarding my immediate surroundings.

  Turning around, I faced my easy chair, excited to get back online. I plopped in and readied myself for the jack. Oddly enough, it was much less traumatic the second time as the needle
slid into my head.

  Swirling around me were the and buttons transitioning from red to blue, then back to red. PAUSE had a glowing green ring around it. It tapped it and the marquee shot ahead to 99% then disappeared. The login images faded out and I was sitting once more in the black void.

  This time there wasn't any data flowing by me...no binary values, no images and no sound. Just pure and complete blackness. I couldn't tell if I was moving or not, nothing seemed to change. I tried moving in different directions, or at least perceived myself as trying, but the darkness remained unchanged. At about the eighth attempt, a vision of blue materialized. It was a woman in a fiery sapphire-blue dress. She had long brown hair and a very slender body. She blew a kiss at me and then duplicated into two. Small captions appeared under each: "[ENTER NETWORK]" and "[RUN SALDAGEN13]".

  I assumed these were programs that had been preinstalled for me. The [ENTER NETWORK] was probably general network access. [SALDAGEN13] had to be the program ran by the initializer for collecting my data. It is a lingering program that remains until I remove it. An artifact tied to me that created my online presence. I considered for a second about running [SALDAGEN13] again for kicks, but decided against it and tapped [ENTER NETWORK] instead. The first woman clapped her hands together and smiled, happy to be chosen. Suddenly, my surroundings changed. The darkness seemed to contract into a singularity then exploded into a cacophony of color and sound.

  Data swirled everywhere. Interconnected nodes appeared as different images with text. The nodes probably indicated network locations where I could further view their content. I could move as fast or as slow as I wanted through the space. I tried this out a few times, dodging nodes and various data dumps. The movement was not accompanied with any sort of resistance, but images and sounds would brighten or dim and change in volume as I approached or departed.

  So this is the experience Persistence created and why everyone loved it. A false sense of traveling, triggering the simple feeling that the person wasn't wasting time just sitting around. You ‘physically’ could visit anything, anywhere. I was amazed that I’d avoided using it for so long, rather stubbornly clinging to my local terminal in my house to navigate the network.

  I decided to try out a bit of searching. Moving through my local space, I didn't see anything I could use as a method for finding what I wanted. Most of the nodes seemed to represent physical destinations or quite possibly other users. I grew frustrated and stopped moving. Was it even possible to search the network?

  I perched my hands on my hips, and it seemed that it was, in fact, possible. Looking down at what I touched, I noticed I had on some kind of silly fanny pack. Unzipping it, I reached in and found a small ball covered in tiny protruding tubes. It actually resembled a miniature version of Sputnik, the old Soviet satellite. There was a small red button recessed in an otherwise blank area, and I pressed down. The ends of the protrusions all lit up and it spoke, in an otherwise robotic voice, '.’ Exactly what I needed.

  I pushed it again and the lights switched off. I realized that I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to look for. I mean, I knew what I had come in here for...why I had the damn jack installed in the first place. There were things I needed to know. I couldn't just dive in. Chances were I'd end up with a smoking hole in my head, my brain fried to a crisp. That was a fate I'd rather avoid. I'd seen what happened to jackers who lost their way, who went into the deep end of the pool without the proper safeguards in place. They just turned into vegetables, unable to care for themselves, unable to feed themselves. Most had to have tubes permanently installed just to keep them alive. And the smell...ugh. Not for me.

  At last, I knew how to start my search. Not for a what but rather for a whom. Rimer.

  He was not the first of us, or even necessarily the best. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or was that even true? He was the reason for the state of the world today. One person had changed the face of humanity overnight. As with all bad things, it had started with the best of intentions. Such was told in hushed conversations around barstools and pints of shitty, watered-down beer. In those places where neon lights provided most of the ambient lighting. Places where people such as I gathered to speak in quiet tones about what was wrong, including our armchair, pie in the sky methods for fixing it all. For dreamily saving the world. For making life as it was, better and more safe.

  Rimer had been an experiment. The first of us to fully integrate into Persistence. Or whatever it was called back in those days. I didn't really know, it may have just been the Web. He created it all, the visualizations of the data flows and the ability for normal people to become jackers with a simple hardware addition. Rimer was what his artificial name had been, it was his handle. Rumor had it that he had been an engineer working for SALDA, the point man in the project. Whoever he was, he had the knowledge I needed to pull off my score. To say I needed to find him would be an understatement.

  He had been dead for roughly a hundred years, give or take a few, but his essence still lived on within the flows. I just had to ride the right one to find him. The problem was that I needed to know which way to go.

  I fired up my little Sputnik and waited for its tiny robot voice to click on.

  Chapter 4

  ''.

  Without hesitation, I said "Rimer. Story"

  '' it said in a clipped voice. It hovered above my hand, lights playing over my body as it spun around in place and then zipped off along a freshly created wave of light.

  '' it said. Its little protrusions then lit up, projecting small holographic cubes in front of my face, each playing short movie clips of the results it had found. Each video was similar and mostly dealt with varying angles of his execution. That was what every good little child in our country was subjected to at the start of their education, assuming they were in a technology-based track. It was a sobering point that had left many in tears, wondering why they had to see a man blindfolded, forced to kneel, and then beheaded. The video typically would be stopped well before the blood sprayed the wall behind him, but the point was that if you are bad, the consequences were dire. Naturally, everybody has seen the video in its entirety.

  I figured that if I watched more on Rimer’s story, of why he did what he did, that I could pick up a few things. I selected a video that was longer and didn’t show a brief clip of the execution. The documentary, narrated by someone with a slight lisp, turned out to be a collection of video clips of Rimer during his rise and fall. Most of clips were from unimportant events like him working in an engineering lab staring at a terminal.

  "As you can see, Rimer was a hard worker and very intelligent". The narration droned on, with very little insight to his life. I began to grow bored and started looking at the other search results when something caught my eye. In one of the clips, he was seen meeting foreign nationals and shaking their hands. Now this wasn't unusual, engineers sometimes left their small boxes to deal with foreigners as their products were often desired on an international scale.

  Rimer was shown in the video as receiving an award from one of the nationals. The award wasn't important; what was important was that the person in the video wasn't Rimer. It was someone that looked quite like him, but was definitely not him. Proxies weren't uncommon when dealing with untrustworthy foreigners. The problem was that the foreigner was one of the creators of Persistence.

  I paused the video. Rimer had played a major role in the creation Persistence. But in this video, he’d had a proxy receiving an award for something he had helped create. Why would Rimer send a proxy to someone he probably spent thousands of hours with? What was Rimer worried about?

  The video was dated to about the time he went missing. That is, he went off the grid. It was possible he was already gone at this point during the video, hence the need for the proxy. There was something not quite right about the situation, though
. Had he made some mistake and was afraid the show his face? Why else would he avoid this scenario?

  I closed the video and fired off another query: Rimer's enemies.

  A list of names of known activists showed up that were anti-Persistence appeared in front of me, however none of them stuck out. The creators of Persistence did not appear on it. I tried another query: Rimer's friends.

  The list was empty except for the creators of Persistence. He was alone in this world. Whatever he had done, he’d lost any friendships he’d ever had, meaning he’d royally screwed something up.

  What did he do to Persistence and his 'friends'?

  I whistled for Sputnik and activated it.

  "Pre-Persistence net" I asked, and it whisked away without even acknowledging me. It was a cheeky little bugger, manners having obviously been ignored in its programming. It came back nearly instantaneously with several results. I cycled through them quickly. More fluff pieces...nothing with any meat to it. I gathered all the little windows into a neat little grouping and flicked them away, causing them to go spinning and disintegrating into a spray of tiny particles.