Prologue:

This is the way the world is: much like it was yesterday, only a lot more like tomorrow. This is not a world where everything is nice and sweet, like your friendly neighborhood Star Trek commune. It is complex and troubled and real. People get sick, they die and they don’t always know what’s going on, much like their parents and their grandparents before them. It is an imperfect world, a work in progress, like a warped painting by Dali. You can watch the mechanisms of complexity and chaos slip through the order of everyone’s life, like the unexpected tremble of God’s hand tapping on your shoulder and saying, “Hello.”

Technology exists, almost too much of it, and it stretches throughout the planet like a sinuous plague. Nothing is left untouched by technology, including the kitchen sink. The Internet is everywhere, but it has become something that defies true description or mental grasp. To keep the Internet from folding in on itself, like an ever-expanding and chaotic universe with its center suddenly dropping out, it has been given a sort of lynch-pin: I-Net. I-Net and the Internet are not exactly the same thing, make no mistake. Saying that they are is like saying that the human brain is the only thing that makes humans, well, human. There’s more to it than that. I-Net gives the Internet order and structure. It helps to define the borders of the countless nation-states that have erupted onto the Internet, maintaining imaginary boundaries in an imaginary universe. Because of the omnipresence of I-Net, the need for hackers and AI’s has grown a thousand-fold. Hackers know better than to try and tamper with I-Net, but they all itch to get inside it and see what makes it tick. Because of this innate desire to know, hackers no longer work solo. Instead, they affiliate themselves with hacker groups, like information-based zaibatsus, clans or something in between. These hacker groups are both businesses and havens from federal prosecution (despite the need for hackers, they are still largely considered outlaws in most countries). One does not anger a hacker group without regretting it and if one does and is so lucky as to not be visited upon by countless digital plagues, they will undoubtedly end up looking over their shoulder for a long time indeed.

AI’s, on the other hand, are a different story. They are not illegal, at least most of them aren’t. AI’s are what makes it possible for you to drive around with that bumper sticker which reads “My computer is my friend.” Keep in mind, however, that not all AI’s are friendly. You see, there are two major classes of AI: security and social bugs. A security AI, which is more often than not developed by Star Net, is a nasty, rude, angry and volatile thing- it likes no one largely because it is programmed not to. If you happen to run into a Sentinel AI that likes you (Star Net’s most popular ware), then the best advice is this: run; a Sentinel that likes you is a Sentinel that wants to do very ugly things to you and your digital avatar. A social AI, though, is perfectly charming. They are helpful, timely, congenial and rather dumb (unless you pay the extra credits for it to be smarter than, say, a dog). Usually made by Star Net’s only serious competitor in the AI market, SynTech, a social AI is mankind’s answer to the household pet that doesn’t make a mess… much. AI’s are not perfect, no more so than anything else in this world, but they are fairly reliable. The biggest mess an AI can make, if it’s polite, is to mix your mom’s old recipes with your tax information- accidentally. An important note: every home appliance you can think of has an AI matrix built into it- even your electric razor (after all, who doesn’t like to be serenaded with “It’s a Beautiful Morning” while shaving?).

I-Net is not an AI, not by a long shot. Some of its components are artificially intelligent, but the greater whole of I-Net, while autonomous, doesn’t have anything like sentience. It defends itself, it maintains itself, it updates itself and it isn’t really owned by anyone, but it isn’t self-aware. It had originally been created by some brilliant networking engineers in the United States, back when Internet security was a serious problem. The inventors of I-Net wanted to create something that would police traffic, regulate dataflow and keep things as up to date as possible with virtually no human input. They wanted to make the Internet self-reliant. What they came up with was I-Net and it was more (and less) than what they’d expected. Much to their surprise, they’d created a networking powerhouse that could not only offer balance to the American online citizenry, but it could do the same for the entire world- a few times over. They put the word out that they wanted the UN’s best software technicians to look at it, approve it and then set it loose on the Internet. The review process took a year, during which time every politician and technology corporation under the sun vied for control of I-Net, and then it was approved with flying colors. The UN declared I-Net its own nation-state, a sovereignty in its own right, and made it clear that anyone who tried to attack it or tamper with it would be declared a global enemy. To help in avoiding such a disaster, I-Net was hidden somewhere on Earth, far and away from anyone who might suspect where it really is and those who put it there were hypnotized into forgetting it permanently. In a desperate attempt to at least look altruistic, the United States created GovDev (The United States Governmental Development and Technologies Department), which was to sort of help I-Net police the Internet. GovDev’s original charter served well and with distinction, but it turned, over time, into something different entirely. But we’ll get to that later.

Most of the world’s currency has moved to credit, but not the Visa and Mastercard kind of credit. Cash is still used, in rare cases, but if you’re using it, you had better be prepared to get some strange and dirty looks from the guy on the other side of the counter. Cash means that you are either up to no good or nothing good has happened to you lately, which still equals out to a negative in the eyes of most businesses. A business wants its money, pure and simple, and credit is the purest, simplest, fastest way for them to get it. What with so much international travel going on, exchange rates eventually got everyone confused. Companies, large and small, lost so much more money paying accountants to figure out exchange rates than the money they lost on the exchange rates that they finally petitioned to do away with them altogether- exchange rates, not the accountants. Credit, which is represented as a simple electronic bit of binary code, finally got its due and everyone turned to it. The major credit companies, of course, hollered bloody murder when the governments started up their own credit systems and the Euro (remember that?) folded under like a house of cards, which made all of Europe look pretty foolish after all the trouble it went through, but that’s what they get for not thinking long-term. There was an old biblical prophecy about everyone being marked with a number, right? Well… guess what?

Despite what you might have heard about the future, there are no bloody lunar colonies here, so you can put that right out of your mind, okay? Sure, there’s one or two resorts nestled up on the moon, but you’ve got to either be rich or uninsurably sick to stay in one. The insurance agencies realized that by sending their clients to the moon, and thereby kicking their biggest financial strains off Earth, they would end up saving more credits. The moon’s lower gravity tends to make people a tad less uncomfortable- the only hitch is that once a client goes to the moon for good, they thereafter forfeit all insurance benefits. You’d be amazed at how many people actually use that. As for the rich Lunies, they’re mostly sight-seers and more eccentric than your normal garden-variety financial elitists. The larger number of rich people who go to the moon tend to have weird fantasies inspired by Robert Heinlein. The Church of All Worlds runs rampant on the moon, which is funny because for the better part of a half-century it was the Church of Scientology that had cornered a quaint market in crackpot religion on Earth. For those of you who don’t know, the CoAW was created by Heinlein and the CoS was created by L. Ron Hubbard- each started as a fictitious religion found in each writer’s own books. Go figure.

The best vacation is still limited to orbit around Earth, where creating an artificial gravity field is easy and living without one is more fun than kittens. People can enjoy weightlessness for upwards of three months without experiencing any appreciable muscular damage, set their space cabin to spin for a month, work out in an artificial gravity and then go back to weightlessness. What’s even better is that it costs less than going to the moon. Solar panels gather the sun’s light for an unlimited supply of electricity, so a client only has to pay rent for the cabin itself, water and supplies. While renting a space cabin is by no means cheap, it is cheaper than you might think. Of course, you would still need to have a sizable chunk of money socked away to rent a space cabin even for a month, let alone a year, but rumor has it that an orbital vacation is one hell of a good experience. You can get catering without ever seeing another human being (if isolation is preferred, then robots or androids can do all the work) or you can link your cabin to others to create mini-orbital communes and throw some pretty interesting parties while sharing resources for an amazingly long period of time. Because it’s in space, an orbital cabin is a great place to wiggle out of any single government’s jurisdiction and Internet connections are 300% faster. Hackers, those who can afford it, take refuge in orbital cabins for years on end without ever having to answer to anyone but their landlords. For a hacker, “vacationing” in space can be like a self-imposed exile with perks- until the statute of limitations runs out on them, that is. The governments almost never bother trying to track such runaways down. Space, even the space around Earth, is a big, big place and finding a single cabin in space is a hard thing to do under even the best of circumstances- and the landlords would rather sell their mothers than release the coordinates of any of their rented cabins. The general attitude towards people who put themselves in exile is: let ‘em go, we’re better off without them anyway. Such exiles are rarely permanent unless someone who is on the run happens to have committed a capital crime or two.

Here’s the good part: capital crimes. Capital crimes are still punishable by death, with a new one added just to keep things interesting. This new capital crime isn’t what you’d expect it to be- it’s not cloning (that just lands you in the federal pokey for a few years). No, the newest capital crime is transferring one’s consciousness into an android body, which effectively makes a person immortal and far too powerful, considering that most of the planet has fully embraced the digital age. Think about it. An android with human consciousness is little less than a god in the digital age. Don’t worry about the boring details of how an android transference is done, just know that it is not done anymore. A few people tried it, unwittingly created some vicious monsters and paid for it with their lives at the hands of some very unhappy international governments (for this fact alone, anyone guilty of doing an android transference is automatically considered a digital terrorist).

Now we come back to GovDev. To police technological crimes, a certain U.S. President updated GovDev. Its new charter is simple and clear: Big Brother is not only watching, he is in a bad, bad mood. The hacker zaibatsus and GovDev are almost always going at each other’s throats, fighting like naughty kids. If GovDev isn’t trying to squelch x-hacker group, then y-hacker group is trying discredit GovDev. And make no mistake, GovDev has its hands plenty dirty. It makes the CIA look like a kindergarten playground and the NSA is still trying to figure out what to make of it. GovDev can make your sweet old grandmother, the one who doesn’t know how to turn on a computer or program her microwave oven by voice, look like Patty Hearse on speed. If they need a patsy, you are urged to hide your grandmother away somewhere safe- they always try to make it look like the most unbelievable person imaginable is responsible for untold acts of digital terrorism. To keep it in perspective, they even managed to frame a congressman’s son for an android transference, which was funded by GovDev. Of course, the truth of who’d paid for the operation never saw the light of day, but that kid won’t be seeing the light of day anytime soon, either- forget that he’s in a coma, he’s been sentenced to total isolation for the rest of his natural life. If you’re an American, marvel at your tax dollars (credits) at work. Not to put too fine a point on it, GovDev is the only organization that will pursue a digital hacker, legitimate or otherwise, beyond the ends of the Earth and even to the next star, if necessary. On the floor of GovDev’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., emblazoned in the tiling, is: Vigilance, Diligence and Security.