"A walking hard-drive": a tale from "Amarás en Guerra" (in English)

WARNING

The following text is a fictional story concerning Id, one of the gods that appear  in the Novel "Amarás en Guerra", but is not part of the Novel.  The text contains crude language and images. Discretion is adviced.

A walking hard-drive.

By: Arturo B. Loranca

It was one of those things that survived an era by diversifying, which basically meant that:

A. Although it was still an efficient commodity, its real purpose had changed, so, in principle, its identity was conflicted. In fact, it was so conflicted about what it was, that at times it thought itself a man, but how could it not? Part of its new usefulness brought him in contact with perks and pleasures that most men could only envy;

B. It couldn’t help to have an utter disregard for its own endeavors and the consequences thereof. It just did not care what they did with it/him (as delusion would have it) and;

C. It/he felt old, way too old: An old man that was not old and not a man.

The product of cyberpunk-aficionado engineers working with defense contractors, it was the ultimate way to transport secure information in the nineties.  A volunteer-  say college dropout or army-recruit-seeking-citizenship-  was outfitted with a terabyte hard-drive in his/her abdominal cavity allowing an i/o cable and port to emerge strategically trough the volunteer’s umbilical cavity. The drive was somehow connected to the volunteer’s heart and programmed to delete itself should the poor shmuck’s heart-rate exceeded 180 or came to 0.  The idea was to create a way to move information without the risk of signal jamming, intercepting or hacking by using couriers that could not reveal the information they were carrying when intercepted, tortured and/or killed on route.  Should the courier face any mortal danger, his/her heartbeat would rise and the drive would erase (which would left torture and threats out of the picture if you wanted to get the information), should the courier be killed or separated from the drive, the drive would erase (which would left killing and mutilation out of the picture if you wanted to get the information).  You could bribe or sleep the carriers to get access to their ports, but later models had another built-in safety feature: the i/o port of the drive would only activate if an 8 digit code was punched-in through a special dial that could be outfitted in the I/O port itself.

Normally, the courier would not know the code for the I/O port, so bribing or putting them to sleep was also useless… If your intention was to retrieve the information.

Turned out that most intelligence agencies didn’t care as much for the retrieval of the information sent by their counterparts as they cared for preventing its delivery, so the idea, which was very successful in the early years of the 21^st century, was abandoned because it was just not cost effective.

Outfitting the drive in the couriers was not that expensive, but it was more expensive than a bullet or a good scare to crash the delivery.

Only certain individuals with the ability to keep their wits about them when facing danger were selected for upgrades and to remain"in service", the rest were either killed in the line of duty or allowed a fairly peaceful existence as a way of thanking them for making their part in the development of new technologies (besides, it was more expensive to remove the drive than to just let them live with it).

The “old man that was not old and not a man”, was one of those that were left behind in the evolutionary race; an aberration by Darwinian standards. It/he was not as fit as its peers but still survived, lingered in obsolescence in a world that was not supposed to be its own. A cassette that only a few had a player for (do you even know what a cassette is?).

It was mostly used by seedy companies that did not want to send information of their money laundering operations through un-secure channels or child pornographers that needed to deliver their digital products.

If it was caught –which happened a lot more than it/he’d liked to admit- the information he/it carried was forever lost and that meant living free to operate another day both for “the tool” itself and its employers, who, by the way, would have to handle “the tool” with the outmost care and provide it with all manner of “stress relievers” such as comfort suites, first class tickets and rides, good food, good wine…  “High maintenance” if you will, but maintenance just the same. Maintenance for a walking, almost sentient, information storing unit; requirements for a new breed of homing pigeon to operate.

Authorities couldn’t pin it/him for shit, as its/his business was completely legitimate.  As per contract, people using it (retaining its services) was required not to disclose the nature of the information they downloaded on it and the tool itself never had the 8 digit code to activate its i/o port. 

Even if there was a suspicion of unlawful materials being carried, there was no way for prosecutors to go beyond the reasonable doubt and indict “the tool”, after all, transport of undisclosed confidential information was not a crime in any of the countries it was commissioned to go.

If things got too hot and/or the owners of the information couldn’t or wouldn’t retrieve it, “the tool” would delete the information by racing his pulse, which meant dropping a nitro pill or getting and adrenaline shot (god forbade it just jumped into a treadmill).

The “old man that was not old and not a man” seemed fat, not only because the drive in his belly protruded its guts out, but because the “maintenance” didn’t help a slender figure.  Not that it cared of course. His/ts appearance helped it/him disappear amongst the passengers at first class (seldom young, seldom fit) to the point that you could only spot him trough a careful analysis of the eyes in the crowd.  Even the most vile and jaded of men have some spark in their casual glance; a bright of malice, a sign of erosion, a light that begs for the recognition of a blurred humanity to manifest, but its/his eyes, as the eyes of a tool, were just two pools of polished nothing; mechanical indicators that it was operating, nothing more.

It was bound to Narita Airport to deliver the information that a weird new client paid tons of money to send.  As usual, it did not care who the client was, what the information was, or who was to receive it.  The contract was signed, the advance was paid and the upload was made. Upon confirmation of payment completion (at Narita) he would take a taxi to the designated address and procure his belly for download… Another day... Maintenance gained.

It had a couple of drinks before takeoff. It was night. Schedule subject to the requirements of service.

No big deal.

As the plane reached the altitude for those of the lower classes to lean back their seats, “the tool” started to feel the real weight of three ounces of whisky on its eyelids, so he left his consciousness drift with the plane into the blackness of the night sky.

01….110001…. 000000….. 1111….

1: TO BE

0: NOT TO BE

Flashing in and out of being, she became aware.

Confined in a solid unit of preservation linked to somebody else’s body… Was it her mother? Was this some kind of new uterus she did not knew?

She tried to move but she couldn’t, she was fixed in a sort of magnetic support, her being in uncomfortable magnetic pulses which could translate as a story in the eyes of a reader or as a spirit hidden in the dark corners of everyone’s mind.

Her name was Id. Once male, now female, a dream that someone once had, lost to the waking hours.  

Could it be? Somebody else was dreaming her again?

 Not exactly. Sombody had managed to encased her in a terabyte hard-drive and she was being transported over the Pacific on a plane (but she did not know that, she just wanted "out").

As the whisky shut its/his eyelids, the tool’s  terabyte-drive had activated. It was not supposed to be possible but, it happened. The information in the hardware started to came into being. It was not a snuff film or the ledger of some South American mobster or the photo of an unfortunate child in the hands of an evil priest, it was one of the forgotten lords of shaping, a creature of pure information, a self aware virus that we, lesser creatures can only phantom as a god…. And gods work in mysterious ways.

A terrible flash-like pain in the stomach woke him/it, a sting from the inside.

Back when it/he was a man, the technicians had told him that the equipment could get magnetized somehow and could produce little discharges from time to time.  Never had happened, but at the moment It/he thought "that was it", the tool tried to convince himself/itself that “that was it”. After all, all other alternatives would probably require urgent surgery that most planes don’t have when crossing the Pacific… Then it noticed that its drive was on and something was happening in the place where its intestines should be.

At first it did not hurt, it just felt like uncountable fingers touching its guts as infants playing with something they don’t fully understand but can squish between their fingers. The touching it/he could take, the squishing… Not so much.

The tool started yelling as its/his gut claimed the right to be on the other side of the seatbelt or maybe in the ceiling of the cabin. At that point, certainties were pushed against pressured windows, all passengers in the vicinity started thinking about 9-11 and blood started to sprout from the tools i/o port as the screaming seemed to made it, whatever it was, gained mass against the tool’s hundred dollar shirt.

It/he tried to get the “chill out” pills from its pocket as chaos ensued from her attepts (Id’s) to break into existence in the otherwise aseptic ambient of white indifferent lights that are supposed to push calm onto the defenseless people that ride a plane at 30,000 feet, but the pain… The pain!

Stewardesses came running as the sick fantasies of engineers addicted to sci-fi and cyberpunk crowned on the tool’s stomach with the head of a woman ripping its way to existence in a mixture of guts, circuits and beautiful features while the tool’s pulse… Its/his pulse… The pulse of the walking hard -drive exceeded 180 by a landslide, but its contents apparently refused to be deleted. On the contrary, they grew out of him and continue to take shape (Id's shape), the shape of a godess bursting trough its/his stomach.

Id’s head finished its way trough the human hard-drive  and started to emerge into the seats of first class' screaming chorus... It is a hell of a thing to see a woman's head emerging from a fat-mans belly, that I can say... A vision, or rather a post-card from hell...

Everyone in the cabin was engulfed in a terror wave that many translated to sickness and others, tears of anguish. A shoulder was already showing, and it seemed like the birth was going to came to furtuition as grotesque and impossible as it would seem to everyone, however, as her features started to roll out from the gore that once was the human hard-drive, the godess stopped it's way into our world. The drive had a terabyte capacity after all and it was designed more than 20 years ago... It took about 5 minutes to purge after Jonathan Queen (nee Juan Reina), the human hard-drive, died and the thing growing out of his/its stomach (Id) found herself aborted in the first class section of a comercial flight.

Obsolesence is a bitch, whether you are a human, a tool, or a god.