undergrowth hack

He’d hacked Dylan’s head through one of the upload ports that he was using to stream music from one of the indie float-bugs that was touring the area. He often did shit like this – pirating someone’s wetware to get camera footage through retinas, aural data through auditory pick-ups. Wherever he could see a way in through some loose or ragged bit of coding he’d take it. He was one of the best Bandwidth Pirates around and it was usually his friends that suffered most. It was hard for companies to chase bounced signals and so they would shut someone’s access gate down. Of course if you could bypass all the baffles and dead ends written into someone’s brain-cradle you could re-open a closed gate with no hassle at all.

He was compiling a documentary of city life; collaging it out of what material he could find in the universal mind. That concept had taken a massive leap into the real world once everyone had started to hook themselves into networks. He didn’t know why more people didn’t employ his methodology for creating work. You had to use what tools were available to you and what had been created to pin people down; to allow surveillance 24/7 really gave you an unparalleled freedom if you knew how to use it or were willing to learn. It was the same as any process – there were happy accidents along the way and you would take it all as it came.

He thought of the pieces as digital fugues – mashing together different creatures into a chimera. Sometimes the thing was incredibly beautiful and harmonious but he was not afraid to create something willfully ugly and dissonant. Guerrilla artfare was surfing that knife-edge between obscurity and mainstream because a few trendspotters had been seen feeding on the carcasses of older works – things that weren’t even part of the evolutionary conversation that most BP’s, beeps or bandwidth pirates, whatever you wanted to call them were having.

Pigmeant, as he called himself, had image-tagged several of those culture vultures and it seemed like it was harder to outrun them than it was to outrun the law. At least the law were easy to understand and deal with – they just wanted to stop you. Trendspotters thought they were helping you but they would expose your culture to the bright glare of regard and let it fade uncaring into nothing – they would already be on to the next poach.

Pigmeant fired his spark-gun at the man with the camera eyes stooped over one of his pieces. He had it set to snowcrash; could barely ever bring himself to em-pulse them. The guy looked up, sighted him, and tried to flash-burst some viral at him but his system was already in free-fall and Pigmeant was out of there. Grav-hitching on the mag-shuttles and surfing the kineticore sidewalks. He’d be safe at home soon. Good job he shut that guy down before he tagged him or he would have been meat.

He plugged the download wire into his head and sliding through the imagery he stopped at the guy he had disabled and uploaded him into the watchlist. Were there more of these guys out there? More of these parasites trying to process subcultures faster so that they were dealt with and had to mutate? Was it a good thing? A bad thing? A natural thing. When it was your own culture that was being threatened it was different – you wanted to preserve it. He wanted to preserve it. Maybe it was time to get proactive and stop waiting for the whole thing to come tumbling down around his ears.