There was no chance of seeing the blink of the satellite. I had to trust it heard my plea. The two of us, me and that alien structure whose home was darkness, were partners in a quest to take back control. I had to have faith.
But my eyes did not scan the sky for stars or satellites, they were fixed to the black screen of my laptop. I saw myself reflected in that screen - large blue eyes that were too far apart. They made me look like a fish. My wide, straight lips made my fish-like appearance even worse. My pale, gaunt face, with dark under-eye circles, my black hair with the white-blonde roots grown out more than an inch. I didn’t look like a hero. I looked like the one who needed to be saved.
I waited for my quantum photon detector to get a response. I waited for a blip, any confirmation the signal wasn’t lost in space, that everything B4ruch promised was true.
“They have access everywhere, while we are barred from entry. They hoard knowledge - knowledge that should be ours. They wield the power we gave them against us. They steal power and control us. They can never have enough power. It’s never enough. We’re never poor enough, scared enough, dumb enough, for them. I saved up to buy my first computer, saved and saved. I thought it would be a portal to a world of knowledge. And it was, at a price. The price wasn’t just on the tag, but a higher, secret price. The price of privacy. The price of everything I thought and did and wanted. Tracked. Recorded. Watched. My prized possession was a traitor. I paid for my own undoing.”1 I said to Sprout.
The little biobot sat close to me on the floor, the bioluminescence of the fungi in the glass dome on his head stood out even against that eerie neon light that drowned us. It looked like a brain. It pulsed with blue light. He was my little miracle. My best friend. My only friend (other than the plants).
My equipment laid around us - corpses on the battlefield of an army’s last stand. “Why shouldn’t I take back what they stole from us? Why shouldn’t I spy on them back? They’ve been irresponsible, reckless, abusive.”
Do you want to know history? Politics? Math? Science? Breach the ivy walls. It will cost you. Will it be true? Don’t ask. (And don’t ask who wrote the books.) Or you can learn on the internet. Learn from other people who couldn’t breach the walls. You’ll be a loser all your life. You don’t have the golden paper from the ivy-covered institute? You’re a nobody. Free knowledge is worthless. You can’t build a life with it. Nothing is valuable unless you can prove it with papers cosigned by the machine.
I have no credentials. I’m not impressive in the ways that matter. I scraped together a living from what I taught myself. From strange places on the internet where people still told the truth. From rage at owning nothing. From the desperate need to be free. From the defiance of wanting to teach others how to protect themselves from those who claim to protect us.
We are stronger together. We are fractured.
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I tucked my hair behind my ears and waited. The years of dying it black made it feel dry. I should have tied it up. It was long and in the way. I jiggled my legs - they stuck out of my shorts all pale and skinny. I spun the ring on my finger. I strained my ears for a sound. I held my breath every time I heard someone walk the hall outside, though I knew, of course, the real threat wouldn’t announce itself. The real threat destroys you before you even know it’s there.
They would get me if I failed. That was certain. Not come for me, get me. They were too powerful to fail. Was I? I was just some girl. Just some angry girl delusional enough to think a risk this big was worth it. I couldn’t keep living in the world as it was. Death is not a threat. A cage is a threat, and I would be in one if I didn’t try. I would be in one if I failed. The only path to freedom was for this crazy idea to work.
I probably wasn’t the right one to do this. Someone else, someone who knew by 8-years-old what I knew at 26, would have been a better choice. Or a scholar? One of those ivy-covered people? Certainly someone with a brain that worked right, not me with all this static in my head. Static only quieted by obsession. I could barely take care of myself.
There were people out there who had been hacking since they gained consciousness.Why choose me? I wasn’t anything special. Yet it had been me who received that message from someone else who saw the light was going out of the world, someone else who heard the frequency of the slow death of this reality.
Sprout said, “The response will come. You did everything right. It never should have come to this, but it has. You will win. The world will be righted.” His voice came through the speaker of an old toy I’d ripped apart to build him. He was mostly made of spare parts, but nature existed in his gaps.
“They need to be reminded power does not lie with the one who wears the crown, but with the ones who crowned them.” Sprout continued.
“What about the ones in the shadows who were never crowned, but took power anyway?” I responded.
“It’s time to remind them stolen power can be stolen back.” He answered.
We stared at the silent screen and waited.
1 Lucilla told me the first computer she bought was a Northern Spy (a brand that doesn’t seem to exist in this world). The first one I ever bought was a Mac. I loved that computer. It made me feel cool. I loved how easy it was to use, and how I could finally play with all the cute little apps.
I started learning about cybersecurity with it. I learned more about Apple. I learned about the frequency with which their apps (including Safari) “phone home”.
See for yourself. Open the terminal on your Mac and type the following commands.
Snapshot of network connections:
lsof -i
Live network traffic:
nettop
To kill a process:
kill
To stop my Mac constantly pinging its mothership, I installed - a free, open-source firewall that blocks outgoing connections. LuLu allows the user to configure permissions for each process that tries to use the network. Meaning, you can tell it to never allow certain applications to call out, or tell it to allow network use for the process lifetime, or to always allow.
Check out all of ’s tools - such as , which will alert you if your webcam or mic are activated.
does something similar to LuLu, but is closed source and paid. It does, however, allow for more granular control.
*This is not an ad. I have not been paid or asked to promote anything.