CM1.09 - The Techspecs of Tyranny

An editorial continues.

"Besides that, you say, you'd have to have your own GPS system in place to even get started on any global tracking project.

"Let me ask you This: Who owns a controlling interest in the most recent generation of satellites now being launched?

"And if you've really stayed with me so far, you're saying, yeah, but RSC would have to have gained access to 'Net protocols so old, so fundamental to the origins of the stuff that wilderspace is made of that they can't be recreated unless they had the original ARPAnet protocols at hand, and those were lost long ago in the Netastrophe that occurred during the war.

"Let me ask you This: If you wanted to rebuild those protocols (bear with me, let's just say that you could), where would you start? Wouldn't you start with archived government hard copy? And wouldn't you have to pull those archives from several different scattered bureaucracies? I leave it as a practical exercise for you, Dear Reader: Decide which agencies you would search in, then go find out who controls those privatized agencies.

"It sounds like a grand conspiracy, I know. I dismissed it myself at first. But the more I look into it, the more I find missing information or data under seal. Whose seal? RSC's of course.

"We've grown complacent, 'Runners. We've got to kick it into high gear. I'm calling here and now for an all-out offensive on Roar-Sol and on any commericial or government entity that traffics with those hubristic traffickers of tyranny. Elsewhere you'll find a list of their best customers (those who know what to do with this list will know where to find it). We have to take them down now. NOW! We can't wait, or it will be too late.

"Just to get the ball rolling (and to prove my point), I&D will give double the standard data bounty to anyone who turns up detailed techspecs or blueprints of those satellites.

"Betcha can't. We've grown complacent, and we've let Roar-Sol get too far ahead of us.

"I'm calling on you, decker, on you, cowboy, and, yes, on you, sysop. Raid Roar-Sol and expose it to its customers. They lack any sort of principle at all, and they are out to control Every Single One Of Us.

"And that's the same as destroying Every Single One Of Us.

"Just ask our young teenage friend. He's already learned the only thing that Roar-Sol cares about is ReSults. By the time, Roar-Sol gets its ReSults, it will be too late for the rest of us.

"ReSults Count."

"Roque I&D Editor-in-Chief"

In several locations (those that supported more than a text display), the editorial was followed by vidclips that showed a digital avatar being engulfed by a large black shadow with teeth. The teeth clamped onto the avatar and shook it around aggressively until the legs parted from the torso and were flung away into the void. The clip cut away to a scene in a hospital room, a teenage boy, his face swollen and bruise-blackened--his mother crying at his bedside.

No one thought much of the patently false (and, worse, overly melodramatic) bit with the avatar (no self-respecting corp would emblazon a piece of black ice with it's own logo), but the mother was so distraught that you had to feel something for her.

Unless you're made of stone.

Or, of course, you just don't care.

And most people, to be honest, just didn't.

It was mere rabble-rousing, built on paranoia and conjecture, and it was badly done (and some of it surprisingly accurate, I must say). But it did show that, after all, ReSults do Count. In the next few days, seventeen of RSC's "best customers" were hit by major intrusions.

Every single one of them turned to RSC for updates to their contracts.