Silencing her alarm, Natalia slowly dragged herself out of bed and into the bathroom. As always, Anatoly remained motionless, seemingly unaware of the fact that another morning was here already. His glasses were still on, he probably fell asleep hacking again. She tried to be annoyed at him just laying there, uncaring, but asleep was the only time he ever seemed to be at peace with the world, so she couldn't bring herself to be angry.
Their pathetic shower washed away her dreams, but not as quickly as she would have hoped. She had noticed her dreams tending more towards nightmares recently. In fact, her sleep was a lot more restless of late. Anatoly seemed to be awake later and later each night, restlessly rolling around next to her in bed reading or hacking or fidgeting. She never dreamt well when she her sleep was interrupted like that. "I guess it's not his fault I'm a light sleeper", she thought.
Clean, dry, and naked she walked back through to the bedroom, Anatoly was predictably motionless. Carefully she climbed on top of the duvet, straddling his waist. She kissed him on the cheek, and in return received a small smile, but little else. After a few minutes of slighty exaggerated fidgeting, and petting, she sighed, climbed off of him, and started getting dressed for work.
Anatoly opened his eyes. Darkness. But he could hear birds outside, so it must be close to morning. He pondered rolling over and going back to sleep, but the problem he had been wrestling with late into the previous night was still bothering him. He quietly picked up his glasses from his bedside table, slid them over his eyes, and turned them on. He flipped his hearing circuit over to hook it up to his phone??. Partly because he might listen to some music, partly to block out the incessant birds' tweeting.
The code he had been writing the night before, before he gave up and finally went to sleep, appeared in his glasses, hovering in the darkness. "Really?" he thought. "I wrote this? Ugh". He stared at it for a few minutes, confirming that he knew what the code was trying to do, but that he had no idea how it was meant to achieve it. He deleted everything, took a few deep breaths, and with a clean slate started over.
Anatoly had been working in his spare time on a new encrypted peer to peer communication tool. In recent times, the corporate silos (including the one he worked for) had been growing more powerful (and to Anatoly's mind, dangerous), and were forming closer relationships with international governments. In exchange for government contracts, secret tax breaks, and a blind eye turned to many corporate practices; the corporations were funneling their customers' data directly into government servers.
Privacy violations at a massive scale, bought and paid for with the common tax dollar. The public at large didn't seem to care. Government propaganda had them convinced that it was in their own interests. The threat of communism, terrorism, whatever the latest malevolent, omnipotent boogeyman was had them convinced it was worth it. If they were doing nothing wrong, they had nothing to fear, they were told. And they believed it. "Fucking shmucks", Anatoly muttered.
Anatoly told himself that, by continuing to work for Zygex??, just one of the corporations making up the wider legion of silos, he could keep an insider view on them, and maybe even sabotage them from the inside. The reality was they needed the money - they could probably just about get by on Natalia's salary alone, but she wasn't overly excited about him quitting to become hack on his "pet projects" full time.
Anatoly's peer to peer system was to be a first volley at the silos. A way for two people, anywhere in the world to talk to each other by video or by text without any risk of corporate or government intervention. But he had to get it fucking working already.
As his brain slowly woke up, he started to build up the pieces of the problem in his head. He was working on the encryption protocol, and had been battling with it for days. Thankfully the protocol itself had been designed by smarter people than himself at the Internet Engineering Task Force. By now he had the relevant RFCs (3711 and 5764) all but memorized, but he still had to actually implement it in his system. He hit play on his current favorite coding mix (a fast paced dubstep mix) piped directly into his ears via his hearing aids, and dived in, attacking the problem from a new direction, hoping to find a nicer (and working) solution.
An hour passed, maybe two. Anatoly was almost motionless when he was at work. His wrist sensors meant he could "type" by simply tapping his fingers on any surface (currently his thighs). Different combinations of fingers tapped at the same time would print different keys to the screens in his glasses, meaning he could type any key he needed with just his ten fingers. Anatoly loved the wrist sensors. Regular folk still used keyboards, as learning the combinations required to type with the sensors was overwhelming, but for a hacker like Anatoly it was worth it. He didn't need a keyboard, so he could type anywhere, there were no keys to miss-hit, and after a while he could type almost as quickly as he could think. It was as close to a direct connection between his brain and his computer he'd ever had.
He felt Natalia's lips on his cheek. He couldn't help but grin a little, but he couldn't let himself get distracted, he felt like he had almost cracked it. He pretended to sleep as she tried to rouse him, quietly tapping his fingers against his thighs, his open eyes masked by his glasses. Eventually she seemed to give up and climbed off him, leaving him in peace.
This was written as part of NaNoWriMo - an attempt to write a 50,000 word novely before the end of November, and will fit somewhere into the novel.
If you enjoyed it, (or if you didn't but want to support me anyway) you should totally sponsor me for charity! It's going to a great cause, the Scottish Association for Mental Health.
<3 Phil