Cyberpunk course

Like most of the human race, Ralph Werner was constantly surrounded by an envelope of white noise. This was true even though he lived miles away from any heavily used road in what most people would term “the middle of nowhere.” In point of fact, he lived on one end of a very sparsely inhabited narrow mountain valley. Considering that his closest neighbors were more than a mile down the road, one would have thought that there should be very little noise pollution. The cause of all this white noise was the fact the Ralph happened to live in a house that had a tin roof. The sound of rain hitting the roof was loud enough to cause people who happened to be having a conversation on the second floor of the house to raise their voices slightly. On the days that there was hail or sleet it caused them to raise there voices more than slightly. When Ralph had moved into the house, with his parents at age 15, he had thought that the sound of the rain on the roof would surely drive him insane.

It rained a lot where he lived. It almost never stopped. This was not because the house had been built in an unfortunate climate, but rather that the climate had been made unfortunate by a corporation that was simply called W-Corp. W-Corp, with the help of large swarms of aerial nanobots, controlled the weather. The company primarily sold its services to cities and other large population centers. For a price, these cities could make sure that a ball game was never canceled on account of the weather again. Many cities had long term contracts with W-Corp, and in these cities it was always sunny. However, all that moister had to go somewhere, and inevitably it got dumped on rural areas about a hundred miles away from the cities. The house with the tin roof had the misfortune to be located in one of those areas.

It rained so much that now, ten years after Ralph had moved to the house, he was rarely conscious of the white noise that was his constant companion there. Therefore, it is not altogether peculiar that the silence woke Ralph Werner. It was one of those rare events, occurring only a few times a year, when it had stopped raining. At first, Ralph was not entirely sure what had woke him. He translated the glowing points of light from his binary alarm clock to mean that it was 11:00 at night. When his still groggy mind finally realized that it was silent in the house he sat bolt upright. If it had stopped raining then there might be a break in the cloud cover! He hastily dressed and hurried outside into the night. It had been over a year since he had last seen the stars. The clouds had indeed broken and had been mostly blown away by a stiff breeze. What’s more, there was no moon out. Ralph gawked up into the sky where he could clearly make out the Milky Way. After several minutes of quiet admiration, Ralph realized tonight was the perfect night for a little long distance communication.

Ralph pulled out his tablet and opened up his Onion Chat window. Onion Chat was an application that used a network of encrypted proxy servers to exchange messages. Not only did this prevent a network snooper from reading your messages it stopped them from even seeing who you were sending them to. What this meant was that the data packets coming out of Ralph’s tablet would bounce all over the world even though their final destination was Thomas’ house, a couple dozen miles away. Thomas was Ralph’s best friend, and they had participated in many a project before.

“Hey, you awake?” he sent.

Half a minute later the reply came, “Yeah man. Are you outside?”

“Sure am. It’s beautiful up there. How are the batteries doing?”

“Ha! You’re thinking the same thing I am. I plugged the last one in a couple days ago, so it is probably done by now. Get your butt down here and we’ll break some laws!”

“All right. I’ll just grab the equipment and head over to your place. See you in about half an hour.”

Ralph pocketed his tablet and went back into his house. In his laundry room there was a safe in addition to the washer and dryer. From this safe he removed a device that, if found, could land him a life sentence in prison. It was a maser. A maser is a device much like a laser except it emits a narrow beam of microwave radiation instead of visible light radiation. The reason why this devise was so illegal was that it had the capability to send strong radio signals over distances of thousands of light-years. Doing so had been deemed a threat to security. A few decades ago, scientists had begun to send these signals in an attempt to contact any possible alien civilizations that might be listening. This effort had been termed Active SETI or METI (Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).

These efforts had only been going on a few months when they started being investigated by various security agencies. Paranoid as always, there agencies argued that ET might not be friendly, and that actively trying to make contact with alien civilizations was risky. If these aliens were hostile, the very existence of the human race could be at stake. So they banned people from broadcasting to the stars and made possession of the equipment necessary to do so illegal. Of course, any violation of the mandates of the security agencies, who were only really separate in name, was deemed treason and carried a life sentence.

Ralph was pretty sure that the heads of the security agencies, whom he and others often referred to just as S, were not actually worried about alien invasions. After all, the signals would not reach most of the targets for thousands of years. Ralph didn’t think that these people really cared about the safety of someone that far in the future; he was pretty sure they only cared about power. They were simply using one of the oldest tricks in the book to get it. It was the classic FUD tactic, Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Make the people afraid of something, and make sure that they think you are the only ones who can keep them safe. Aliens were an easy bogeyman to point to and claim could come down from the skies and kill everyone unless S was given enough budget and power.

Since it was now impossible for METI efforts to be conducted in the public, they were now conducted underground. Through the use of encrypted anonymous onion networks plans for masers that could be built by anyone with a 3D printer were published, and star coverage was coordinated. The METI Experiment continued. However, the METI effort had a side benefit. If a bunch of dedicated amateurs could do METI work under the noses of S using only publicly available technology and software, it undermined the organizations that claimed to be protecting people by stopping such activities.

Ralph loaded the maser into the trunk of his car, and started off to Thomas’ house. He lived two mountains away, in an even more isolated house. As he drove he switched on the radio and listened to what sounded like that last movement of a Bach violin sonata. It had a nice quick pace and helped him stay awake. After a few minutes the music ended and the announcer came on. “And the was the lovely Sonata Number Three for Violin in C Major by J.S. Bach, performed by the great Itzhak Perlman. It’s 11:40 PM and your listening to Public Radio WPSV 94.2 your source for NPR and classical music. Now for the news.” A short jingle was played and as it was fading out a new voice came onto the air. “This is NPR news from Washington. The NSA has released a press statement stating that an one of the core organizers of the illegal METI broadcasting efforts has been apprehended. Though they have not released the suspects name they have stated that she is a low level employ of weather giant W-Corp. The suspect is currently being detained and interrogated in an undisclosed maximum secur-” Ralph snorted and turned off the radio. It was just more FUD from the incompetent S. An effort to look like they were actually doing something. Of coarse the media would never get a name and the suspect, if she even existed (which Ralph doubted) would never go on trial. This was not the first time they had claimed to capture “core” METI organizers, and it would not be the last. It was pure propaganda.

Ralph drove up Thomas’ long driveway and found him sitting on the hood of his beat up pickup truck. Ralph pulled up beside him and cut the current of his car. He got out and walked up to Thomas.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Almost,” Thomas replied, “Let me grab a few things and then we can go get the last battery.”

Thomas stalked back to his house and came back a few minutes later carrying two collapsible camp chairs. They usually covered one star from the time it rose to the time it set, which was usually about eight hours, so they would be out for a while and it wouldn’t hurt to have a comfortable place to sit and enjoy the view. Thomas peeled a tarp off the bed of his Toyota pickup to reveal several large cube shaped batteries and an assortment of kipple. He tossed the chairs in and covered the bed again with the tarp. They both piled into Thomas’ truck and about five minutes later they had stopped at an apparently random spot on the road.

They climbed out of the old Toyota and started climbing up the hill on the side of the road. It was heavily wooded and was technically part of a National Forest. After about a tenth of a mile the trees ended in an abrupt line and opened up into a narrow grassy strip that ran in a more or less straight line for as far as they could make out in either direction. In the center of the strip were power lines. At the base of the nearest box, Ralph could just make out another of the batteries. Thomas had managed to run a line from the top of the pole down to the ground to the battery. Thomas had carried a thick rubber mat from the floor of his truck with him and he placed it next to the battery. Standing on the mat he carefully disconnected one end of the wire from one of the batteries terminals. Then he disconnected the other end. After the battery was secure he wrapped his arms and legs around the wooden pole and started climbing up to the top. Once he was there he did something that Ralph could not make out and the rest of the wire fell to the ground. Ralph started coiling up the now safe cable as Thomas descended the pole.

“I guess working as a technician for the Power Company has its benefits,” said Ralph, as he as Thomas walked back to the truck. Thomas just chuckled softly. They peeled back the tarp one more time and Thomas placed the battery into the bed of the truck as Ralph put down the coil of high capacity insulated wire. They covered the bed again and got back into the truck.

In the cab they paused and Thomas asked, “Do you want to stop and grab some provisions before we go do this?”

“Absolutely,” Ralph replied.

So they drove to the edge of town and stopped at a batts station / convenience store. The battery that ran Thomas’ truck still had more than half capacity so they just went into the store. They picked out a couple four packs of PowerThirst Energy Drink (one pack of shockolate and one pack of rawberry), some hot dogs and and buns, a foam cooler and some ice to keep everything chilled and a couple bundles of firewood.

“I’ll pay for all this,” said Ralph, “and you can pay for breakfast tomorrow.”

“Deal,” his friend replied.

After they had put their newly purchased provisions into the back of the truck, they headed off to their usual broadcast position. As they came to the top of a mountain pass, they turn off on a gravel road. Branching off this road were several hiking trials on which motorized vehicles were prohibited. At this time of night there would be no one to stop them from driving on them, and even in the day these trails were hardly ever used due to the fact that it was almost always raining. So Thomas turned right onto one that ran all the way to the summit of the mountain where there was an old wooden fire tower. As they bumped and drove up the trail Ralph could hear branches scraping up against the truck. They stopped a dozen feet away from the tower and got out. After removing the tarp, they starting moving batteries and equipment up to the top of the tower.

“Man! This sure beats getting soaked by rain while getting all this stuff up here,” commented Thomas.

“No kidding”

They rigged the batteries together and attached them to the maser, which stood on a self-aiming tripod. He synced the maser to his tablet so it could communicate with meti.onion which was the network hub of the clandestine METI project. After scanning the horizon to see just what kind of line of sight of the sky it had (a rather good one from up here), it downloaded a work assignment from the network. According to his tablet, they would be transmitting to a star that was set to rise in four minutes and set in about eight and a half hours at ten o’clock or so. Ralph watched the time until star rise elapse and the red transmit light come on. The maser was now blasting a megawatt of energy in the form of 21 centimeter microwaves at some distant star, possibly to some distant alien civilization.

“Hey, the maser is hot, so don’t step in front of it,” said Ralph.

Thomas laughed and asked, “Worried that I’ll get fried?”

“Not really, I just don’t want you to block the message and interfere with the search for alien life,” Ralph quipped back.

“It’s nice to know that I have friends that care,” said Thomas in a sarcastic tone, “Now, do you think you can help me get this fire started?”

Before long they were roasting hot dogs around a nice camp fire enjoying the rainless night. They stared at that stars and thought their own thoughts. Ralph wondered what an alien being might be like if we ever discovered any. What would they look like? What would their culture be like? Would they even be biological or would they have uploaded their minds into computers? Thomas thought mostly about the some porn he had torrented the other day.

After awhile Ralph got bored and brought up the meti.onion website to see just how much credit they would earn tonight. Meti.onion had a simple credit system based on how much time you were transmitting. The credit wasn’t really worth anything, it merely provided a competitive aspect to the project. No one was really quite sure how meti.onion verified transmission. The creator of the site (someone who went by the alias devstar) claimed she had invented a method of triangulating transmitters using the tiny amount of photons that were refracted by Earth’s atmosphere. A feat that S had apparently not been able to replicate, or they would have caught most of the people transmitting by now. Devstar claimed that this was because they were incompetent idiots, and everyone on meti.onion had a laugh. Now there was a news update on the site.

“Did you hear about that new S FUD?” Ralph asked.

“No, what are they saying this time?”

“I heard about it on the radio on the way to your house,” Ralph said as he cracked open an energy drink, “The NSA is claiming that they got some high ranking METI organizer.”

Thomas shook his head. “Do you think it might be true?”

“No. I logged on to meti.onion and they posted a news update about it. I’ll read it to you.” Ralph cleared his throat. “S is spreading the bullshit pretty thick tonight. They claim that they have apprehended some big METI organizer. I’ve checked with all the people who help me run the site and they are all fine. So, considering that we are the only big METI organization that I have heard of, I can only assume that S is up to its old tricks once again. I would hope that nobody is alarmed and that this doesn’t scare people away from transmitting. Lets get out there and show them they can’t intimidate us!”

“Here Here!” cried Thomas, and they both raised their cans.

“Well,” said Ralph, “thats just what we are doing. We are transmitting on the very night they tried to scare us off. You know, devstar might award a credit bonus for transmitting tonight, she usually awards them to people who transmit on holidays so maybe we will get one for tonight.”

“That would be really cool,” replied Thomas.

After that the conversation died down a bit. Thomas went to his truck and pulled out a copy of “Contact” by Carl Sagan out of his glove box. Ralph had given Thomas that book for his birthday last month. He had purchased it at a yard sale. He suspected that the elderly woman who sold it to him was unaware that it was a book banned by S. After a few minutes of watching the glowing embers of their dying campfire, Ralph turned his attention back to his tablet and began perusing the meti.onion forums. After awhile, Ralph noticed a faint bass throbbing noise that was Dopplering up in frequency and becoming louder in volume. What ever it was, it was getting closer. Thomas had heard it to and was looking around trying to determine where the noise was coming from.

“Sounds like a chopper,” Thomas said, in a confused tone.

The sound had become almost deafening but they still couldn’t see anything. If it were an aircraft, it wasn’t using the requisite running lights. They stared in the apparent direction of the noise which Ralph could tell by its Doppler shift was slowing down. All of the sudden they were blinded by massively bright flood lights.

The Voice of God proclaimed, “FCC! You are under arrest. Do not try to flee.”

They tried to flee. Of course they did. They knew what being caught meant. It meant disappearing into a secret prison. It meant interrogation. It meant becoming a statistic that S used to scare the population into submission. Fleeing didn’t do him much good though. His night vision had been devastated by the floodlights. He tripped over a rock and started tumbling down the mountain. He hit a tree with a sickening crunch, and he was pretty sure he had cracked a rib. While he had been falling, agents in black insignialess jumpsuits had slid down ropes from the helicopter. Before he could get back up the floodlight was on him again. He felt his arms being yanked behind his back and cuffed. Someone pulled a black fabric sack over his head. They pulled him into the helicopter and flew away.

Some indeterminate amount of time later the chopper landed, and he was man-handled into some sort of motor vehicle. As the vehicle started driving everything fell into place in Ralph’s head. The news about S apprehending a big METI organizer who worked at W-Corp wasn’t FUD after all. They had probably somehow caught devstar. She had probably been some programmer there who had secretly installed a subroutine into W-Corp’s nanobot swarms that was able to detect maser transmissions in the 21 cm band and detect which star the transmitter was pointed at, and therefore where it was pointed from. That is how she was able to verify the transmissions and award credit. That bullshit about using diffracted photons had been misinformation meant to eat up S’ time on a hopeless radio technology problem. They had probably “interrogated” her passwords out of her and posted a bit of misinformation of their own.

After what seemed like hours of driving, the Adrenaline rush left Ralph. He was exhausted. As the vehicle jostled he drifted off to sleep. Sometime later the vehicle reached its destination and the driver cut off the engine. The silence woke Ralph Werner.