Listen to the free Deep Dive Podcast Discussions of hyper-soul
We stumbled into the wind turbine farm as we were making our way across the Texas landscape, putting distance between us and the city. Most of them were stopped. The three or four still turning in the light breeze wobbled a bit, but we were amazed they were still standing. I guess, the tech inside them was not worth stripping for parts. And when the AI demand for power and cooling went up due to quantum computing, the nuclear industry was reborn. Green energy, as it was called, was no longer viable. Besides, we’d pretty much wrecked the environment after the 2025 government arrived.
Underneath the turbines, we unlocked a bunker that led us to the control room. The turbines that were running still generated enough power to light up the room and the control system. Json stepped up and began pushing the red/stop buttons and they flipped to green. A small indicator began to register additional power being added to the system.
“Power!” Json yelled. “We’ve got power.”
The team began unpacking some of their gear. They had been walking for three days after the last golf cart died. There didn’t appear to be food in the bunker.
“Two of you go uptop and see if you can get us a deer.”
More of the turbines came online. The power indicator showed 42%. Several of the buttons pulsed yellow, indicating a problem. Json turned them back to red.
“We’ve got to get a look at these data discs,” Json said, pulling the small thumb drives out of his pocket. The Lady in Black had said, “Whatever you do, don’t lose these. They are the key to crippling GAA.” Json remembered the last time they spent the night together. She was agitated. Unable to get off. Frustrated. Accommodating. And then gone…
Json pulled his dead laptop out and routed the power cable to one of the plugs in the floor of the bunker. The small power indicator came on. In a few minutes he opened the laptop and it was working. The first thumbdrive was neon orange. He’d noticed The Lady in Black carrying this one at all times.
“What’s on the drive?” he asked once.
“My playlist, silly. I use FLAC files to get the highest fidelity. These, (she’d help up the orange drive) are my babies.”
The only file discoverable on the drive was the last image Json had ever seen of her. It was a short from social media. This was only a static image. He jumped when he saw her smile again, for the first time in a week. His body called out for her. He had to stay focused on the mission.
Json talked to himself, “There’s got to be encryption on this drive. Where is the music? All I see is this one image. The drive has a 200 GB capacity.”
He couldn’t focus his thoughts, all he could see was her smiling face, in her happy place, mixing music for her followers.
“What’s your secret?”
He examined the metadata for the image. Nope, just a 375 k gif file. He launched one of his tech tools to see if the files where merely hidden. Nope. He could see the 200 GB label on the drive. When he examined the drive, however the finder described a 1 GB drive. “A partition!” Json exclaimed to himself. “Wait, and some OS she used. Lexus? Nexus? Crap! What was it called. Cinnamon?” He studied her picture, the cleft of her abs heading down into the black leather hip huggers. Damn. “Ubuntu? Debian? It was something called a frame, or a theme, or a container. Shit.”
Her shape was perfect. He idolized her physical form. He knew how to make it sing as well. Except on that last night. She’d known something was about to go down. Why did she vanish? He would’ve wanted to keep her safe with him. But now, he didn’t know if he could keep Astrid and the others safe, or the entire world for that matter. GAA would not stop hunting them.
“FreeSpire,” he shouted. “That’s it, that’s the one she loved.” Json used an internal search to see if he had a copy of Linux or FreeSpire. There it was. A new file on his harddrive. One he didn’t notice before. It too had a bright orange icon. AntiX.dmg “What is AntiX?” he said aloud.
“Here goes nothing.” He double-clicked the dmg file and a typical installation window came up. He clicked on the Instal button, and a password prompt appeared. “Fuck.”
He typed in FUCK. No. A small question mark near the prompt revealed a the password hint, “What’s my name, asshole?”
Oh crap. Yes, her name. Damn. Lex? Alex? He really had no idea. He’d always just called her what her fans called her, The Lady in Black. He typed in her DJ handle, and a satisfying ping occurred as the install began installing.
A small icon was added to his desktop. AntiX. “Here goes nothing,” he said, opening the file.
Nothing happened. A series of windows flashed and went away. It looked like the app had crashed. “Damn,” Json said. He noticed a new icon on the desktop. DHA-REBOOT-PART-7332-0001 (checksum)
This is what she was hiding. He’d heard of the DHA-Reboot project, but he had no idea she was involved. Rumour had it, they were trying to hack up pieces of the LIVE DHA into fragments that could be reassembled later. She was part of the RESISTANCE. How is that even possible?
Json’s mind reeled as he sat, again soul searching in the photo of this mysterious and now dangerous woman. “She knew I would join up,” he thought. “She was protecting me from something.”
Json’s dad had just begun his CR8V.AI program. His book had been a success and he had begun training people using techniques from The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. A cult classic in the 90’s that spawned study groups, art holidays, and a reinvigoration of human-generated art. The generative-ai tools had wiped out the “artist” career path. His dad was convinced that creativity was the antidote to the robot or GAA uprising. He wondered if she had been aware of his famous father. “Duh,” he said, playfully tapping his own head. “She was the talent at one of my dad’s book signings.”
She got this drive to me on purpose and then escaped or was picked up. Or killed.
*image jmac + dall-e
