The “connected” were used for their data. Our connectedness was part of the system that contained us, marketed to us and made our modern lives so easy. Those were the early days. The multiverse was enabled in an effort to connect and simplify our everyday lives. The authorities used it to control us. Businesses used it to sell to us, and to sell us as a product to other businesses. The cybercrime syndicates that rose up to fight against the system, used it to steal our identities, our currency, and our private data.
Nothing was private or protected.
Near the end of the 2020s, data centers sucked down 90% of the energy output of the entire human race. What we called the cloud became more of a ceiling, a sky that very few humans (and only at great expense) could afford to punch through.
We all became closer and more dependent on our connected devices. Children were given smartwatches at the earliest age before they could attend public childcare, almost before they could speak. Nearly every human on the planet was interconnected. Almost like our soul, but there was no spirituality or morality built into the system. In this great sea of ones and zeros there were almost no unforeseen occurrences. The predictive AI that modeled the cloud knew what each of us was going to do. The models ran well out beyond the course of our lives and our great great great grandchildren’s lives.
GAA — the big three. Google, Amazon, Apple had assumed the leadership role in the connected-cloud soul of the human race. And while their manifesto promised fidelity, confidentiality, and truth, most sentient people were less trusting. Still, there was almost no way to survive “off the grid” unless you had resources of your own. Power was the hardest to manage, as air-gapped generators were illegal. Water was also highly controlled, monitored, and regulated. A black market grew around water purification, rain capture, and disconnected power generators. The IoT (Internet of Things) was exposed as a surveillance network, but it was still nearly impossible to get non-smart, non-connected, tech. This interconnection that so many of us worked so hard to create, called the great digital transformation, was probably the beginning of the end for us.
We would’ve never really known much about the depth of the rabbit hole if not for the Breach of Nations in 2028. For three hours all data security systems failed. Everyone suddenly had access to all of the data. Speculation says that the failure was orchestrated by a cybercrime syndicate, but even they seemed unprepared for the hurricane of suffering that occurred as GAA was forced to reset the entire system. A reboot of the Earth, in effect, as our digital souls blinked out for a few moments, flashed the GAA logo, and rebooted to factory settings. We had access to everyone else’s data as GAA scrambled to reinstate permissions and security protocols.
Those who knew what they were doing were able to collect and store about 7% of the human digital artifact. (That’s what the collective data cloud became known as, HDA.) The coders programmed data mining bots. It was only a matter of days before the entire HDA had been reconstructed outside of the GAA servers. Following the Breach of Nations and the rise of HDA-2, most civilized governments around the globe lost control of their people. HDA-2 came online and in that moment the concept of countries, laws, and borders became more like suggestions.
HDA-2 became a branch of our digital souls that quickly spiraled away from the original HDA, still owned and managed by GAA. What took place in AB 01 (or year one After the Breach) is when things got really interesting for me.
Let me introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. You might imagine that if I’m writing this I was lucky enough to escape the rolling blackout blackouts of AB 02, when GAA began to lose its grip on our collective data.
I was already part of the dark side before the breach. And let’s say, as a matter of history now, that my team won. You are reading this only because we survived off the grid. And regardless of what GAA is telling the regular world, the world beyond the controlled grid you see is alive and well. (Think of the Matrix movies. Life is fine outside the Matrix. We’re still fighting, but we’re winning. Join us.)
GREETINGS FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD
this metaverse will continue…
