Welcome To Hellville - Part 3 (2/2) By Rich Mills 22nd October 2040

Prev Page, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

About ten years ago I lived in a shared house with a load of mates. None of us worked at the time, in fact 99% of the country didn't work back then, there were no jobs. Anyway, the guys started hooking in, playing RPG games at first, which is the way a lot of people start. I could see that things were going wrong, tensions in the house had increased massively, and one particular lad had been staying on-line for days at a time. I eventually left and got a place of my own, as it was all getting too much. It had reached the stage were none of them ever left their terminals, they communicated with each other purely through an in-house jack-up connection they'd made themselves.

Jack-ups are a cheap method of linking a lot of people together in a small data-cloud foot-print. You subvert and by-pass the corporate safety nets, and piggy-back them. The danger of this is you are all totally open to viral invaders, usually sent out by the corporates to plug the glitches in the main Net frame-work that the Jackers exploit.

They all had been hitting it hard, and some of them had been using enhancers of one sort or another. They'd apparently missed the Trojan that'd had nipped in through a back-door someone had left open. HR#451 caused so much damage it was hard to tell any of them apart after it had finished with them. They'd have only been able to identify them by their dental records, if they'd have had the money to have any dental work in the first place.

No-one really knows what happened, as all witnesses and participants died. Either torn limb-from-limb by someone filled with The Rage, or found headless after their brains exploded from a viral loop-feedback filling their minds with huge quantities of garbage data. All a bit sad really, because they weren't doing anyone harm, and kept themselves to themselves.

Like I say, I prefer the keyboard, it's far less damaging to your health. I'd rather suffer from RSI than have my brain splattered across all four walls.

Continued Welcome To Hellville - Part 4 By Rich Mills.. Next Page

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