DEEPGREY (9)

Posted on January 23, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, bitcoin, blockchain, City, creative writing, cryptocurrency, cyberpunk, DeepGrey, drone, dystopia, featured, fiction, gaming, gender, internet, LRAD, meme wars, mining, police, prose, science fiction, scifi, serialised, sf, shop, singularity, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, street, suits, thug, virtual reality, virus, writing.

by Rob Harding

(Part 9 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8)

I stay hidden while Adil opens up again, rates the police on their app, and sends them packing. Once that’s done, Adil’s daughter nods to me. ‘You’re welcome.’ She says. ‘Now, if you don’t mind?’

I stammer my thanks and head out the front again. Adil nods to me and lets me duck under a shutter, and back out onto the street.

There’s no sign of the police, or the hijacked DeepGrey workers, or anything particular. A Community Security bot has rolled into place at the far end of the street, but if I don’t go near it it won’t ID me and do the digital equivalent of the staring-eyed pod person screech. I’ve long since resigned to having to work around the damn things, and these days I only vaguely keep track of the forum posters who fight a constant arms race with their glassy-eyed developers out in San Francisco or Vientiane, or wherever the fuck has the most reliably gullible investors this week.Continue Reading

DEEPGREY (8)

Posted on January 10, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, bitcoin, City, creative writing, cyberpunk, DeepGrey, drone, dystopia, featured, fiction, gaming, gender, internet, LRAD, meme wars, police, prose, science fiction, scifi, serialised, sf, shop, singularity, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, street, suits, thug, virtual reality, virus, writing.

by Zoe Harding

(Part 8 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7) | CW: violence

The woman on the street is making those noises as the shouting starts again, the raw-throat all-out hate that only hysterical men can shriek. I barely recognise what they’re saying.

The woman coughs and sobs again, and I hear a fleshy impact, like the sound of a shoe hitting a stomach.

And then there’s the wail of a siren, right around the corner, and the burglar-alarm scream of an LRAD blots out all other sound. A huge armoured police car with tires as tall as I am comes grinding down the street, a pair of armed officers walking alongside it. The turret on top is swinging to bring a grenade launcher to bear against the fight. Hopefully they won’t fire it. I like this jacket, and the stink of chemical riot dispersant is designed with a half-life of about fifty years.Continue Reading

DEEPGREY (7)

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, bitcoin, City, creative writing, cyberpunk, DeepGrey, drone, dystopia, featured, fiction, gaming, internet, meme wars, prose, science fiction, scifi, serialised, sf, shop, singularity, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, street, suits, thug, virtual reality, virus, writing.

by Zoe Harding

(Part 7 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6) | CW: violence, language

1087

I push the shop door open, and nod to Adil. He smiles back, salt-and-pepper beard twitching, and goes back to watching an old taped football match on his TV. I like Adil, even though we rarely talk. He’s a paid-up inhabitant of the Real World, the proverbial Englishman whose home is his castle, running his shop and veg garden like the world around him isn’t going to hell. I imagine his sitting room’s a comfortable throwback to the last millennium, kettle boiling and football on the TV glaring off the brown wallpaper.

DEEPGREY (6)

Posted on December 12, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, bitcoin, City, creative writing, cyberpunk, DeepGrey, dystopia, fiction, gaming, internet, meme wars, prose, science fiction, scifi, serialised, sf, singularity, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, suits, virtual reality, virus, writing.

by Zoe Harding

(Part 6 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5)

955

Speaking of, I decide it’s time to go for a walk. Staying active is good for your mental health, which is why every single public park and footpath is perpetually rammed with DeepGrey drones trying to keep their brains stable enough to run the god-spreadsheet – in my case it also helps immensely with the dysphoria, which is useful because nothing else is going to any more.

I pull on a bomber jacket and a baseball cap, opting for relatively shallow heels in case I need to out-sidle a DeepGrey recruiter. For once I’ve got enough money for a solid grocery shop, and near me there’s still a place that takes cash, earned scandalously but (in my opinion, anyway) honestly. I feel a solid meal coming on tonight.Continue Reading

DEEPGREY (5)

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, bitcoin, creative writing, cyberpunk, DDoS, DeepGrey, fiction, gaming, internet, LinkedIn, meme wars, Nazi, prose, ransomware, Russia, science fiction, scifi, serialised, sf, singularity, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, suits, Ukraine, virtual reality, virus, writing.

by Zoe Harding

(Part 5 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.)

Once you write off the shambling hordes of DeepGrey-infected marketing consultants who make up most of the population, what’s left? The Nazis, of course. That persistent yet cannibalistic and insular sub-species, still reeling from the swift and brutal Consequences that followed their atrocities during the Meme War. When the War began, the tech industry was on the verge of realising what human society took several world wars to realise: fascists are poisonous to any system they’re allowed to root in, and should be rapidly expunged with fire and extreme prejudice. Continue Reading

DEEPGREY (4)

Posted on November 14, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, adware, bitcoin, Brexit, creative writing, creepypasta, cyberpunk, DDoS, DeepGrey, fiction, gaming, gender, hasthag, indoctrinated, internet, LinkedIn, meme wars, military, prose, ransomware, Russia, science fiction, scifi, SEO, serialised, sf, shitposting, singularity, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, suits, Ukraine, virtual reality, virus, writing, zombie capitalism.

by Zoe Harding

(Part 4 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here.)

1003

This thing that’s now installed on the brains of nearly three billion people, across pretty much all but the top levels of every single first-world government (and even then, one wonders if MPs have always been this weird and robotic – oddly, history would seem to confirm yes). What does it do?Continue Reading

DEEPGREY (3)

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, bitcoin, creative writing, cyberpunk, DDoS, DeepGrey, fiction, gaming, internet, LinkedIn, meme wars, prose, ransomware, Russia, science fiction, scifi, serialised, sf, singularity, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, suits, Ukraine, virtual reality, virus, writing.

by Zoe Harding

(Part 3 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.)

1058

I kind of like the attack map. It’s nice to visualise the whole thing, even if perhaps ten percent of what I’m seeing is actual data derived from a fearsome net of analytics tools and keyword tracking.he rest is pretty colours and lines for the cheap seats and the press. It’s a nice reminder to stay on my toes, as well – that grey blob that covers three-quarters of my screen would love me to let my guard down so it can eat my brains and make me sell insurance.Continue Reading

DEEPGREY (2)

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, bitcoin, creative writing, cyberpunk, DDoS, DeepGrey, fiction, gaming, internet, LinkedIn, meme wars, prose, ransomware, Russia, science fiction, scifi, serialised, sf, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, Ukraine, virtual reality, writing.

by Zoe Harding

(Part 2 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour. Read part 1 here.)

1057

I do the digital equivalent of slipping off the main street down a back-alley, activating two spongy ‘legal’ VPNs at once to provide the paper-thin security necessary to sneak an actual functional VPN into life without precipitating a time-delayed ISP shit-fit. It’s a sort of rite of passage, at least for British free-internet users, to accidentally break the vestigial mess that is the remains of the Snooper’s Charter and get a whiny message in the actual mail six months later complaining about it. The word ‘terrorism’ was almost entirely inflated to meaninglessness well before Meme War propaganda began labelling the entire world simultaneously with it in white-hot strobe-flashing GIFs, so the strident accusations and threats that are all the government can do about you breaking the rules aren’t particularly punchy any more. It can be another strike towards losing your net neutrality privileges, though. Besides, much nastier things lurk in the same patch of those particular legal waters, and the absolute last thing you want to do is thrash about and make a fuss.Continue Reading

DEEPGREY (1)

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged adblocker, bitcoin, creative writing, cyberpunk, DDoS, DeepGrey, fiction, gaming, internet, LinkedIn, meme wars, prose, ransomware, Russia, science fiction, scifi, serialised, sf, social media, spam, specfic, speculative, Ukraine, virtual reality, writing.

by Zoe Harding

(Part 1 of a serialised prose fiction endeavour.)

Download the attachment, click the link and whoah hang the fuck on here.

It’s not easy to properly rip a headset off your head. They tend to tangle on your ears, or else there’s a cable somewhere that gets in your hair and insta-knots itself until it might as well be glued there. When I had long hair it was even worse, but even my current slightly-longer-than-a-buzz-cut approach still manages to trap the occasional stray wire in its velcro-like hooks.

Still, I manage it, because when you’re the sort of person that I am, you develop a pretty impressive set of reflexes for certain situations. Part of that is down to the still-can’t-quite-believe-that-happened bullshit that was the Meme Wars leaving its scar on our collective psyche. Some of the shit the Russians worked out how to do with flashing lights and the Mark 1 Eyeball remains impossible to describe, both due to of its design and because of the gag limitations of the human stomach. But it’s also partly down to my own situation which is sadly far from unique but also far from common.

I feel the sort of revulsion you get when you accidentally stick your hand into something dead. In the first few hyperventilating seconds after I rip off the headset, it dawns on me that what I’ve just witnessed indicates that that, metaphorically, is pretty much what’s just happened.Continue Reading

meme wars

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