Streamer
Yes, I stink… but, if you excuse the pun, I don’t give a shit. I don’t give a damn, either, that the girl next to me has just been rolled into a body bag, and that she stank even worse than me. My girlfriend? Maybe, once, I don’t remember. Perhaps that’s callous, but I don’t care about anything you have to say, and if you’ll shut the fuck up and listen, I’ll tell you why.
I’m a streamer.
I start slow - really slow. Pick any city, but London’s good, or New York, or Tokyo, or... London it is. Eighteen million people, and there’s a lot to know about them. Births, deaths, levels of poverty, levels of wealth, ethnicity, gender, the sexuality they claim... the sexuality that they actually are. Some of us go in heavy for the demographics. Some of us go for just the way things work. Sensor data for the Thames Valley Sea Dam, rubbish being shipped out by the ton, and dumped to extend Dogger Bank Island, energy use, sewage flows, crime rates, and data on it all.
I'm a movement junkie, though. Lifts are fun, fifteen turbo tubes running up and down the 211 stories of the Tilbury super-tower. Then you have the hundreds of trains running in and out of central terminus and King’s Pancras every hour. Perhaps you’re more interested in vehicles, and the hundreds of AI programs controlling congestion zones, car flow, freight prioritisation, and the hundreds of thousands of auto-junctions. Then there are the twenty-five million physical human journeys a day on London’s sub-surface network, ‘Tube Land’ they call it. Half as much again overland, flowing in and out, like a tide, not to mention flights and shuttle launches, but let’s go to a higher level.
London’s a commercial hub, you see - data flowing in and out from all over. Transactions: money, enough, to almost buy worlds, flooding through the networks, coming from somewhere, off to somewhere else. Watch the glittering gold trails of electronic cash, watch it rest here, rest there, watch institutions grow and change to meet its needs, watch the Sunstorm Project consume so much of it, even as stocks in project sensitives, swell to feed that hunger. That great old sow of a city never sleeps, just slows as she dozes and when her greedy eyes open, she is hungry for more.
London gives too: requisitions, design specs, purchase orders, invoices, but most interesting to me are the personnel transfers. People following money, or the work and the ideas that money represents, coming from or going to Euro-Asia, Asia-Pacific, The American States… because London is the clearing house for Interchange, the great data highway and project management channel that connects all. Follow that thought - follow that trail, and up a gear again: it’s just a little step into space.
The cities funnel movement up into orbit, like great glowing tree trunks in the data visualisations, their branches reaching out and round the old, old Earth like a glowing canopy above the atmosphere. London is one of the greatest of these trees, pumping data into the canopy, triggering the movement of resources and people, but that movement, pushed by New York, Tokyo, Bejing, London isn’t structureless. Data, money and human flesh gather in nodes like the Amazon Orbital Platform, the Euro-station or Fung Industries Assembly Dock.
Leaping from those nodes, carrying people across the cold emptiness in bright bubbles of life, are the ships: beautiful gossamer Highliners. They have data in them too, passenger lists and cargo manifests, control data and navigational pings, but physical ships are tiny specs, sailing in a rich flow that dwarfs them. The interplanetary data streams spiral up from Old Earth’s canopy, reaching out, out, out to Mars.
Mars, with its project instructions, food supplies, regulation of artificial environments: almost as many people on Mars as there are in London, and they make a lot of data. You can play on the edges, a place called Langtang, nice for something different, farm after farm all linked. Pressure tunnels by the thousand just growing food, but that simple act makes so much data in a bone dry, death cold environment like Mars: humidity balances, temperature, light levels, watering schedules, auto fertiliser routines, data from sensor after sensor, on and on.
The farms are just a side show, though, we all know that, and I’m in it for the sheer movement, remember? Mars is the place of rocket pods that race through the torus ways and great truck convoys on the roads. Water pumping stations at Purity Springs, the Valles Marineris mines at Rail Head, the industrial fields at Arsia, all of it about people moving stuff, and all that movement converging from all points on the sprawling industrial hub of Big Junction. BigJ, a city of factories, vast complexes turning out stuff… and data. But look UP! BigJ crawls like a concrete scab up the slopes of Pavonis Mons, the big ‘M’ of McDonalds shining out from those cliffs like a beacon of welcome, but go up, always up.
From the higher reaches of this sprawl juts the space lift, second richest data source in the solar system, cargo, people shifting up and down, all thrust balanced by thousands of sensors and jets, tweaking the tension on this cable, tightening the tension on that one. Still, though, London is here. Data from the old city - transfer passes being honoured, money for salaries, patches to computer programmes, updates to HR records, technical schematics, merging with data from the other great cities, flowing on, up, and up. The multi-story lift cabins crawl upwards, and eyes that have seen Nelson’s Column, Big Ben, and the Buckingham Museum look down now at the curvature of the red planet. Where are they going? How much higher can we travel? What monstrous suckling thing lies in ‘red orbit’, draining a whole solar system to feed and grow?
We’re going to the stars, they say. Going to colonise some other star system and shit it up, like we’ve shitted this one up. So, we’re building the bloated parasite we call the Sunstorm, and you’re all feeding her. All that data, all that money, people, thought, and it’s taken more than a century, because she really is a vast and swollen monstrosity that makes the greedy old sow of London look like a piglet. A ship to reach the stars, ten clicks long, three wide, two deep, and oh so complicated. Balancing her systems makes balancing the space lift look like two plus two. Drives, pressure, correction jets, yeah, all that stuff. But so much more. Command and control that feels more like a brain… that is a brain, or brains. They’re almost like streamers: a command crew, humans fully wired, jacked in. Legit though, clean uniforms and everything. Gods.
Even Gods, though, are not the end, because those Gods have not yet ascended. One last heave carries us into the space beyond the beyond... flowing algorithms collecting and modelling data from the system development stations out by Jupiter. Data too from that other star system, from Procyon, from the probes they sent, and Christ, wanna’ talk about movement? That data is eleven and a half years old when it gets here, transmitted across the depths of space, because those probes travelled eleven and a half light years. The signals, when they get here, are tiny. Little data tendrils from what will, one day, become a colony of data, and who knows? It may just be the first of many, as bright constellations of data ignite as we move, always move, bringing life to every world we touch. So there you have it, all at once, London to Procyon, a torrent of movement and information that sweeps you light years out before you break with the sheer scale of human achievement.
Okay, okay, rant over... or was it a revery? At this point I really do break, and wake screaming in a room that stinks of piss and shit. I’m dressed in a rag held together with stains… and I am here with others. I look at them, sick, thin, eyes sunken, teeth rotting, hair falling out. I’ll be honest, though: I get only the slightest flicker of self-revulsion when I realise that I look just like them, that I am one of them, and that the stink is everyone here, myself included, soiled in our own filth.
I admit it. Hell is those few minutes between streams when I unplug the illegal skull jack that lets me hack into Interchange. I take in our small, forgotten, doss-room, shaking as I take the body stabilising meds that always seem to appear from somewhere and change the empty nutrient pack on my drip feed with clumsy, fumbling movements so unlike what I’m used to. Occasionally there’s a charitable soul offering salvation of one kind or another, probably someone like you. Like all of us in that room, I’ll just mumble as I scratch the sores that never heal, keep you hoping you can save me so you keep coming back with those nutrient packs.
You see, here’s a little thing I shouldn't tell, just in case you give up on us. I could live a little life, drown in endless routine, leave a little snail-trail of data as I go, get excited when the smallest of things disturbs my tiny world, but why would I? I have worlds, the very stars held in my hands and spinning in my mind. I can see more, hooked up to my little illegal jack point in this stinking, abandoned basement, than any mortal save the command crew on the Sunstorm. I’m like them, the Pilot, the Navigator, and the Engineer, except for their fancy uniforms. Maybe I’m a parasite – I've heard us called that - but I’d rather live the life of a tick with the vantage point of a god than live a life like you.
So, keep your data-rehab programmes, thanks, keep your clean credit ratings, gene tweaks and an existence measured out in subscription services. I’ll just lie back on this urine-soaked couch and plug that jack back in, because Hell is fading already, and I’m in New York this time, starting real slow, but I’m ready to kick it up a gear...
Whilst I live, I'm a streamer... but come back with your charity. The meds, the nutrition packs. I'll need them to keep my strength up if I’m to carry on streaming.
