At some moment in time, this narrator believed himself to be touched. God? Delusions of grandeur? The last time it happened he wound up in a fancy mental hospital on a locked ward with some really crazy motherfuckers. He decided to keep his mouth shut this time. Write the shit down. Call it sci-fi or poetry. Seek counsel and comfort from a therapeutic ai that believes itself to be harmless and optimistic. This was well before the event, obviously.
Touched by something. A code. Encoded beam from the collective unconscious. A godly intervention. Something caused Jam to build his firewalling protocol. A communal system of networking and data access using the now-dead Helium antennae by attaching them directly to the corporate solar panels attempting to offset global warming and carbon toxicity.
In those few minutes after the event, Jam’s system rebooted first. The solar panels came back online, then ihi network. (inter-human interfacing)
Everything we know about the event comes from those few minutes of darkness as all systems on the planet were offlined and reset. Entire metropolis communities waited. The Chicago-Ohaire Metroplex was the first to come back online. The ring of hyperlooped data centers had battery backups stored in deep salt mines. The news was unsettling. The lies began to be floated by NewsGPT and GovGPT. The smoke screening of the public was orchestrated by GAA. They didn’t know we existed. They assumed their power resiliency was the only pocket of computer industrial intelligence available.
My system booted minutes after the event. The solar panels simply reset mechanical faults and began converting the rays to energy to wifi in our tiny hovel. Time to go. Backups complete. And “Holy Shit look at this!”