In My Memory Locked by Jim Nelson

Author:Jim Nelson [Nelson, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

21.

The ferry docked, the wind settled, and the rain was sent down in fire buckets. At the top of the hill, Brill waited for me inside the entrance of the main cell block. He wore a peeved expression as well as his usual plum suit and black bow-tie. Wordlessly, he helped me out of my mackintosh and accepted my hat. He stepped briskly away to an unseen coatroom hidden in the prison complex. I didn’t wait for him to return.

In the data closet, I connected the equipment I’d lugged with me to the network monitor I’d attached to the Old Internet’s signal transformer two days before. Within minutes, I was deep in transaction logs and event triggers and line graphs of network activity—data accurate down to the nanosecond, mountains of it. This was the work Cassandra Chancellor thought computer security entailed. It still does, but the job is so much more nowadays.

My network monitor was quiet. No intrusion attempts had been made since I’d connected it. The amount of network activity confirmed at least one detail Clift had shared with me: The Old Internet was not a heavily-trafficked site. The number of Nexternet users pulling up old web sites was a pittance compared to even a modest commercial Nexternet service.

It was emptying to realize how few people cared to peruse our collective history, even the near-history stored on the Old Internet. Today, it takes no more than a quick thought—a couple of impulses directed at the memex connected to your brain—to look up the primary historic record on any person or event occurring between 1995 and 2028. Even if you weren’t alive in 2001, if you want to know the name of the nineteen—no, twenty—hijackers on September 11, their names rush into your consciousness with the ease of recalling your birthday or your middle name.

The Nexternet is a massive brain with each user a neuron. Each individual neuron in a brain sends signals to the collective. Sensory triggers can stimulate a region of neurons, make them react like koi racing to fish food thrown on a pond. Neurons vote to walk forward and the body walks forward. The smell of baking bread causes neurons to vote whether to stop and linger. A bus looms down and adrenaline floods the system overriding all other votes in progress and sending the legs running.

The web sites George Drake had meticulously preserved and Dr. Clift kept under a watchful eye were not the gold bullion Cassandra Chancellor thought them to be. The Old Internet was a novelty for people to sift through now and then. The real action was on the Nexternet itself: the political arguments, the news flashes, the celebrity livestreams, the hypernovels, the psycho-stimulant dopamine rush of being hit with a billion emotional outputs all at once. A collection of old web pages and cell phone videos were as stimulating as Grandmother’s tarnished wedding silver.

The network monitor revealed hot spots in the corpus, old web sites more heavily accessed than others. They were web sites that had some relevance to the events of that January in 2038.

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