The Revolution Will Be Tokenized by Christoph Brueck

Author:Christoph Brueck [Brueck, Christoph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: X23
Published: 2021-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Daedalus rising

Damian had taken a day off, and by off, he meant off the grid and off the net. He had put all machines into offline mode and had stayed in his flat, thinking about the events of the last few days.

The AI had disturbed his self-image on a level he hadn’t believed it could. He was more than tempted to log in and explore why. He knew this temptation was the reason why. The AI knew he considered this a challenge, and it had provided him with one to keep his interest. It probably knew already how long he would resist the call of it and waited patiently online for him to renew his subscription. One day he had resisted, and it felt like a small victory.

When he finally returned to the digital world, he read a lot of congratulations to Wu, who had been promoted to the station chief of their Manila offices. He hadn’t known they had offices in Manila. Jessica had been gentle with her killing move. She had terminated the danger he posed, nevertheless, effectively. Damian wondered if Wu understood it had been him.

The other messages were unspectacular. One was of high priority. He was asked by Jessica to join a meeting today. In Wu’s absence, he was interims leader of the Barcelona hardware security team.

****

It was a straightforward customer acquisition meeting on paper—a German company called SIF with a large and sprawling digital infrastructure, providing remote access to drones for customers. It relied solely on artificial intelligence and automated security protocols and was suddenly struck by someone who had found a way to get around those. So, they turned to the experts in custom-made solutions, hoping to avoid any attention before their shareholders got wind.

Then again, the meeting took place in person, and that was highly unusual nowadays. It also was taking place in a black box, a room with no outside connection to the world. Which meant the matter was delicate. What was truly special about this meeting was, of course, the nature of SIF itself. Damian knew the company well. His brother had organized several protests in his youthful idealism. Usually, Damian considered his attempts to change the world more or less naive, but what could one do if your younger brother turned to left-wing idealism but let him have his way.

When it came to the SIF AG, he understood the concern, though. The company had basically privatized border control, originally organizing hunting parties for immigrants on the Eastern European borders. By now, it had grown its operations to considerable size. Business news called it a scale-up miracle.

The “hunts” were done from the living room by logging into a drone, and the services had expanded to 37 countries all over the world. Everyone could register, enter a drone, and earn a little extra by providing his services and hunting down illegal migrants through the interface of a highly efficient drone. The victims were tranquilized and brought back to their camps, or so-called safe zones, but it wasn’t a secret, things went wrong sometimes.

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