Anatoly awoke with a grunt. His lips were parched, his mouth fuzzy. How late had he been up last night? Natalia was in London?? for a work conference, so he'd stayed up hacking on DENT*?? tapping out code against the kitchen table with one hand, and against a large glass of whisky with the other.
He flipped his glasses on to check the time: 7.12am, Wednesday. "SHIT, already?". Anatoly hated Wednesdays. Wednesday was the only day he had to turn up at the Zygex office. A day of meetings, reviews, politics, whinging and all the other crap he got for working for a big corporation. Most people were required to attend the office everyday, but Anatoly was such a good hacker that he managed to convince them he would be productive from home - the one concession being that he had to show up once a week to check in.
He gathered his senses and trudged to the shower. Flipping his hearing circuit off, he closed his eyes and leant against the shower wall. The water against his dehydrated skin and lips felt good. The shower was the one time he felt completely disconnected from the world: he couldn't hack in the shower, as his wrist sensors got messed up by the running water. As much as he wished he could hack in the shower too, he had to admit that the downtime felt good. There was something cleansing about being forced to do, and think about, nothing. Even if it was only for ten minutes a day. It somehow felt, real.
Clean, he raked through his wardrobe for the most recently cleaned shirt that he didn't completely hate wearing, and pulled it on along with the closest pair of slacks to hand. Closing the wardrobe door he saw himself in the mirror and shuddered.
"Ugh. So. Fucking. Corporate"
He wondered how long he could hack this job. It was getting harder and harder to convince himself that it was a fruitful exercise to "spy" on one of the main SILOS corporations from the inside. He didn't really learn anything about the organization that would help him bring it down from the inside. The pay was good, but for what. No amount of money could cover up the fact that he was doing dirty work for the devil.
He made his way to the metro station. Their apartment was in a neighborhood out west of downtown, and the business district where all the megacorporations' bastions of steel, glass, money, and evil were located. He had his audio circuit flipped to the computer in his pocket so he didn't have to hear the drone of the city.
At each crosswalk, while waiting for the lights to turn, he flipped his glasses on to check in on the net. On the public newsfeed, it was being announced that yet again, one megacorporation was launching a massive patent attack on another, billing it as "essential to protect their intellectual property and shareholder value".
Meanwhile on one of the private channels he followed, a financial hacker he knew, who had been analyzing the finances of the world's megacorps, was concluding that the only thing these back and forth patent attacks did was to shift money from the companies coffers, to the hands of lawyers and accountants - who were frequently close friends of the various CxO's in the companies involved. So much for "protecting shareholder value".
He made it to the metro station. Anatoly hated the metro. First you had to descend the worlds slowest escalator, past blaring advert after blaring advert lining the corridor. Advertising booze, fashion, movie, booze, fashion, movie. Trying to make the whole world look desirable and fabulous in the way that you, commoner, are not, but could be! At least he could flip his audio circuit off, unlike most people. So he just had to suffer the glowing, video ads, and try not to get sucked in by their temptation.
In the last few years, advertisers had mastered the art of human persuasion. Everyone working in the ad business these days had a psychology degree of some kind. The advertising industry were among the biggest funders of research into behavioral economics - spending millions on running experiments to learn how they could squeeze another 0.1% conversion out of their ads. Even more worrying to Anatoly was that a lot of the ad companies were part of megacorporations that also included drug companies. Almost everyone was using some kind of nootropic these days - antidepressants, beta-blockers to reduce stress, GABA blockers and cholinergics to enhance memory, melatonin to induce sleep. Nobody seemed particularly concerned that the same companies that were researching how to reach into our minds to sell us things, were also developing mind altering drugs.
After descending the escalator of temptation, Anatoly boarded the overly warm, crowded train, and readied himself for his weekly 30 minutes of rush hour hell. The trains were so deep that he got no connection to the net whatsoever, so he just had to be.
Everyone else on the train read the city's free newspaper - The City Independent - which was anything but independent. Couldn't they see that it was little more than government propaganda disguised as a giant collection of adverts, disguised as a sensationalist rag disguised as a quality newspaper? Maybe they knew it, but read it anyway. He couldn't decide which was worse. The "news" today was that unemployment was down by a whole quarter of a percent, and the cost of housing was almost back to pre-crash levels. Woop-de-fucking-doo. He felt like shouting, explaining how they were all being duped into feeling good by the government, but decided better of it. He would probably look like a madman. Maybe he was?
- DENT - Distributed Encrypted Networked Telecoms
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