Predator (29 page)

The day had started out great. She passed by her favourite local coffee joint and found the queue stretching into the lane around the corner. She was running late and didn’t really have time to wait. Although a bummer, the new guys across the street immediately sent her a text for a ‘free’ latte with check-in. It was amazing how the stores were getting really good at figuring out exactly what she wanted and when. She SMS’d her name and placed the order.

She was greeted by a warm swath of roasted Arabica beans and the heavy yeasty smell of artisan baked goods as a pale man came by with her order and asked her if she’d like a scone. He had jet black hair, a chiselled face, and a name tag that said Patrick. Patrick seemed bashful and smiled awkwardly. She cautiously said yes and they waved their devices over each other. The bill was settled and everything taken care of. Her mind wandered into a dreamy state. The warm liquid and the scone combined into a blissful mélange of caffeine, fat, and sugar.

She was jolted out of her reverie by a snap chat notification. ‘Oh boy,’ she said to herself. It was already 7.30 a.m. Not wanting to be late for class, she hopped onto the bus.

She looked at her vest and noticed that her fare was running low. She was out of credits and probably wouldn’t have enough to make it back. Her vest was also running low on power. No worries she thought, Allie owed her money from the shopping trip and she could top it up on her way back. She easily found a dock on the bus and charged her vest. The bus was strangely empty. It was as if everyone had gotten on to the car pools. She really needed to get her driver’s licence or find some older friends.

She hopped on Trackme and found Kyung. He was on the bus ahead of her. She’d catch up with him later as he had her homework. The blue LED lit up as Allie snap-chatted her and told her to meet her at the next stop. Perfect!

As she drifted into a reverie, another SMS came through. ‘Ugh!’ she thought, another spam from the Otte folks. She had remembered scanning their catalogue two weeks ago, and, almost every day ever since, Otte had sent her offers that were way over her budget. She kept deleting them. SMS and Twitter were where all the spam offers came from. She had intended to block them, but today, she finally got a sale price of $100 with free shipping or local pickup. The Tsumori Chisato Strap Midi Dress was just in time for tonight’s party. She fired back an SMS and told them she’d pick it up after school.

As a bus pulled up in front, she remembered why things were a bit run down on the west side. You could see the vestiges from the last global riots. Privacy paupers had protested and torched the homes of the digerati. During the economic collapse ten years ago, they were forced to trade their privacy information in order to pay for food. The digerati had exploited their data and took away everything they had. In fact, many were blackmailed into slavery, stripped of their privacy, and worse, their dignity.

Folks from the weakened Electronic Frontier Foundation, now known as the Digital Privacy Foundation had come to their rescue. Kamran Rautenberg had led the charge and the march on digital freedom, only to be assassinated three weeks later. This led to several months of social unrest, protests, and riots. The mainstream media were too scared to cover the protests. The courts strangely never heard their cases. Five years ago, a rebel band of Canadians had broken into the White House and taken the president hostage. This had put an end to the riots.

Strangely enough, the digital divide was not about who had more money; it boiled down to who had more control over their privacy. Privacy was a luxury and those who had the most control over their data were the most privileged. This shift in societal castes came about in the post-Facebook era. During the second decade of the twenty-first century, the true believers, who had declared that privacy was dead, found themselves exploited and exposed. Governments around the world were toppled in efforts to restore privacy rights.

This third wave of social media transformation was a result of greedy corporations, information brokers, and data collection companies who had abused their power and exploited the poor, the weak, and the ignorant. The bait was the sharing economy where folks were tricked into believing they could live in an asset-free world. The freedom of dis-ownership led to mass poverty as those with assets kept increasing the divide between the rich and the poor. They knew how to target the poor and soon owned their very souls. Armed with the personal data of those who shared data and traded privacy for the sake of convenience, the digerati expanded their power base and began to take over all aspects of society.

On the bus, Lindsay looked around at the scenery flashing by. The buildings were still blackened with soot in places despite the clean streets and modern exteriors. A man on a scaffolding was busy scrubbing down some of the exteriors. Meanwhile, her best friend Allie, dressed in a purple vest and jeans, hopped in. She had her trademark baseball cap with the twentieth century icon, Bart Simpson. Allie was busy studying for her economics quiz in the third period so she just gave Lindsay a quick nod and went back to her surface text.

As they got off the bus and walked through the school gates, she could feel that slight burning sensation as the scanners profiled them in. You could still see the vague flicker of green lasers but, in general, it was inconsequential.

School had not let out when they decided to head over to Otte’s. She really wanted the Tsumori Chiasto Strap Midi Dress and they had shut down all their trackers so they could skip classes. Allie had told her that in the good old days, prior to digital domination, one could just sneak out – there were no scanners, trackers or sensors to monitor one’s movements.

She remembered they had gotten to the store at 3.30 p.m. and not a single patron was in sight. They walked into the store and were immediately sent to the fitting rooms. Allie had wondered how they knew they were coming. Duh! Lindsay had not switched off her phone! Oh well, at least they had gotten away from class a bit earlier without being caught.

As Lindsay took off her dress and unbuckled her bra, the room went dark. She heard a scream and fumbled for the door. The changing room door was open but the corridor was locked. She heard another shriek and it sounded like Allie.

Suddenly a door opened, and she felt a large hand cover her mouth with a wet towel. She tried to scream but all she could do was see the little colour pigments in the darkness of her eyes. She could feel her device slip from her hand, as she struggled again to scream – she couldn’t remember what happened next.

She felt sore. She also felt cold. In fact, she was naked. She remembered that she was at Otte’s, but why was she there? Her vision was blurry, her mind foggy, and … she seemed to be strung upside down. She passed out again.

When she woke up this time, she could see. Her phone was on the floor, but it seemed broken. Now she remembered she had come with Allie. ‘Oh my god!’ she thought. They had kidnapped Allie. She passed out again.

‘CRACK!’ A cold sting cut across her thigh. It felt like she had been whipped. ‘CRACK!’ Another sting cut into her leg. She was being whipped. A pale man was holding a whip and yelling at her to shut up.

Allie, despite her plain clothes, and girl next door looks was from a prominent digerati family. Allie was a geek and a hacker. She had learned how to code from her father when she was just eight.

Allie’s dad ran a company that was the arms dealer of privacy information used by the digerati to oppress the weak. In fact, Equi Union was the merger of the largest data brokers from the last century. They had started out as credit reporting agencies and had muscled their way into collecting all the big data that the world had churned out in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

Despite being upside down, the store appeared to be a complete mess. Allie seemed to have put up a good fight, but she was obviously missing.

She looked up again and saw a chiselled face and bashful smile. The man was Patrick from the coffee joint. How did he get here? She was confused. Wait, she was naked too. She tried to scream but realized she had no voice. Something was tied to her mouth. She had been gagged.

Patrick, laughed at her, ‘You thought you were getting a deal on a dress today didn’t you?’

Lindsay slowly nodded.

‘I’ve stripped you, posted pictures of you naked and tied upside down. Right now all your friends have seen you. You are a laughing stock.’

Lindsay tried to cry but couldn’t. She was enraged and about to explode.

‘You digerati must pay for your sins!’ He put his device next to her vest and swiped. He then went to her device and swiped over it. She had 10 credits on her device. He now had access to all her accounts, profiles, tracks, and secrets.

Within 10 seconds, he had stripped her off her money and identity. More importantly, he had taken her dignity from her. She had been plundered and violated.

Patrick put his right hand over Lindsay’s mouth and untied the gag. With his left hand, he put another wet towel over her mouth. Lindsay felt dizzy again and passed out.

Patrick untied her and put her against the wall so no one would see her. He opened the closet and found the shop owner still passed out as well. As he locked up the store, he knew he had gotten what he needed. With Lindsay’s identity in his hands, he could expose everything about her to the highest bidder. Identities were going for 100,000 credits and this was an easy steal.

Allie remembered the pale man who had offered a drink of water. Then the power had gone out and she had passed out. When she woke up, she realized she had to escape. Another man had come into the store and they got into an argument which had turned into a fight. She found a whip on the ground and managed to clout the pale man hard with the handle. The man fled but had dropped his device.

She quickly picked it up. She couldn’t find Lindsay anywhere, so she made it out of the door as fast she could. It was 4.30 p.m. and there was not a single cop in sight. As she headed further out to the street to flag down a cop, she realized that all her credits had been stolen. At least she still had her identity. She switched on the attacker’s device.

‘Damm!’ she yelled. It was locked. She quickly hacked in. As she searched the device, a familiar log popped up. It was an Equi Union phone, an employee in her father’s firm. Something didn’t add up. Did Equi Union extort the data of the digerati as well? She quickly hid the device in her pocket when she found a police officer.

Allie rushed back to the store with the cops. Hopefully Lindsay was still there and safe.

H
OW
S
AFE ARE
Y
OU
: A S
OCIAL
M
ESSAGE

By Ray Wang

From the horizon emanates a ray so nascent

Enveloping the sleeping world in its embrace all pleasant

Slow and steady after a profound perusal

It kisses the eyelids with affection deeply filial.

A beastly world, so they say

A wrong click of a mouse can take it all away

Fast moves the world, you need to sprint

Stay safe online, control your basic instinct.

I’ve followed the ‘HOP’ (Horn Ok Please) movement since the very beginning and I strongly believe in what it has been trying to say and do. When ‘Blook’ 6 – Predator came up, it touched a chord in me. The topic could not have been more tailored to my personal passions had I chosen it myself.

I was asked to share my thoughts, ideas, suggestions – what you might call ‘best practices’. But before I do that I should give you a bit of background about who I am and why you might want to listen to me.

My name is Craig Cmehil and I am, first and foremost, a father of two; second, I am a software professional and have been actively involved with the online world for many, many years.

In the late eighties, I made my first forays into the online world over telephone lines with modems. This continued for several years with the help of Compuserve, AOL, and many more, until the invention in the nineties of HTML and the World Wide Web (WWW) when our access to media, content and more boomed. With cable modems and fibre optic cables a person can easily sit at home with download speeds over 100 MBPS. What can be achieved with speeds like that? Basically, anything you want – be it massive picture uploads and downloads to streaming a full-length movie.