Cyberpunk

I had been in charge of security for InterCore Express. After that, well, I fared better than a lot of people at ICE in that I still had a job, but with the i3Cee’s kinder, gentler approach to corporate intrigue (read: none), the ROI of a fully staffed Security Directorate didn’t pass budget audit. SecD got broken up—most went to SysAdmD, the knuckle-draggers given new uniforms and new offices (EnforD), and me and a few others were downgraded to desk jobs. I went from “Director” to “Theorist,” and had a few turns to really sink into a never-ending depression, a hole where I could theorize all I liked.
    I had a SysAdmD Section Manager, who really didn’t know what to do with me, and I was pretty sure he was hoping that I would EOE voluntarily, saving him the headache of doing my PIPe every turn. I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. He got back at me by never bothering to R & U any of my GPARs.
    It’s a very unfulfilling relationship.
    Which explains why I found myself leaving the office and heading out into the field to investigate the mysterious package. I should have walked it over to EnforD and let them go hit people, but that would have taken the matter out of my hands. Plus there was the issue of the stopdrops. Eventually, a doc audit would bring up the whole history of their use, and my Section Monkey would be thrilled to find my tag all over the documentation. It’d be all the excuse he’d need to WTF me.
    I went Out of Office. As much as I hated that three square, it was mine, and I had been there a long time. It’s funny what you’ll fight to keep.
    Depot 12-B4 was still inRing, next to a Baskin-Robbins Emporium 31 on the Malachite Layer. I took an express ’tubebus, and walked the few clicks from the depot. It was still ante-meridiem and the reflected sunlight wasn’t too bad.
    The Ring circled the planet like a lopsided halo, cleaving to the ecliptic. The outer edge was bubbled with a couple thousand climatologies where brain trusts kept trying to replicate moss and lichens in an artificial environment. InRing was home to humanity and we sprawled across every meter of space. By design, of course, regardless of the GoogleTube PR claim to the contrary.
    I wasn’t quite sure why they still maintained the conceit that the Ring was meant as a data structure and not as a habitat. Old corporate habits, I suppose, but after the GoogleTube Infrastructure Accords, it was hard to believe they hadn’t planned for this possibility. Especially after the white paper by the pair of GoogleTube Extrapolationists was leaked. Sure, they had been ostracized from campus for writing the document, but when your corporate mandate says you never delete anything, it gets hard for the rest of the world to believe you wouldn’t actually use your own data. Even the theoretical kind.
    Anyway, the GTI Accords opened up the Ring to the rest of the CorCongloms and over the next couple of clocks, the Ring went from a pristine packet landscape to a population density of a thousand per. The Retail Interregnum cleaned house, so to speak, and in the resulting economic vacuum, the SIX moved in.
    Basing their dispersal theory on the New Modality of the Chicago School Theory of Economic Rapture, the SIX remodeled the Ring into an economic web that took advantage of the population density by maximizing isolation variables while pushing separation anxiety to nearly zero. It was all high throughput packet flow—1PB/f optimization to each node cluster, delivering every sort of digital signal that a body could desire (for everything that was still meatspace based, there was InterCore Express, the official package delivery service of the Ring).
    Food, though, didn’t travel through the ’tubes all that well, and if you wanted to eat something that wasn’t extrapolated and reconstituted by the iChef in your iToaster, you went to a B-R Emporium 31.
    I entered the Emporium, and immediately blanked the notification option in my iView. The B-R network was updating my profile and d/l’ing several turns’ worth of advertisements and special offers. Blinking through the steady flash of subliminal messageboarding, I pushed my way to the front counter and flashed my ICID at the kid in the candy-stripe uniform. He googled the holostat on my card, and his eyes got big. He stuttered slightly as he asked what flavor I wanted.
    “Not interested in ice cream,” I said. “Not right now, at least. I need to talk to your Visual