Follow-up: Tower Defender
Recently I wrote a short story for Futurism, Tower Defender, about an unnamed network engineer reinstating the network after a string of attacks and during a fire. The name "Tower Defender" comes up when he shows up to defend one of the networking towers around his village. I wanted to expand on some of the things mentioned in that story, so I'll write about some of them here; but there are a few things I'd rather expand on by writing them into future stories.
Welcome back to Futurism, still the reigning champion of gemlogs about solarpunk speculation and stories.
FAQ (not really)
The section below is formatted like an FAQ, but I haven't actually received any of these questions (and I don't expect to, at this point).
Why did you call it "the network," instead of something like "the Internet?"
I wanted to give a little room for breaking innovation. The existing Internet can probably continue to evolve for some time, but we might end up switching to something that isn't quite the Internet, like maybe a mesh network. Or maybe the name Internet just kinda went away, or it took on the generic name as the Internet just became the long-distance part of the Network.
What do you mean by "the App Era?"
At some point, the ecosystem of "apps" as we know it today collapses, and it ends up becoming a lot like package management on Linux (although probably with improved and interoperable package management systems). Software in his era is a lot closer to following the Unix Philosophy: in particular, "do one thing and do it well," and arbitrary interoperability.
Actually, that's the reason he can have his map of the Network infrastructure! The program which composes the map for display doesn't care where the map data comes from, it just takes it in and displays it (well actually, it lists the layers it knows about, too; graphical applications are a little harder to build for the Unix Philosophy, so compromises have to be made).
Gaze controls!?
Well, that's not actually a question, but anyway yeah, gaze controls like you see in the Apple Vision Pro end up becoming commonplace, at least for VR. Some computers got gaze controls to replace mice as well, although eventually the utility of readers and comms largely replaced personal computers. But the keyboard is immortal (even if it is partially replaced by speech-to-text or even voice notes).
The end of the App Era
I guess I don't exactly follow the Unix Philosophy but I find my views are pretty close to it. Simplicity does matter, but putting things into one coherent binary really does make things perform better and generally be streamlined better. As much as it makes sense to, I also strive for and value extensibility, modularity, composability, and accessibility.
My command-line programs, genid and inbase, are designed to do one generic task in multiple ways: generate IDs and translate numeric bases, respectively. genid can generate multiple types of ID, including several versions of UUID and Discord and Twitter style snowflakes, and a new type of ID I created called a generic anonymous identifier (GAID), which was intended for verifiable timestamped identification based on a "real ID". inbase can translate between bases 2-62 and base 64 out of the box, but if an alphabet is supplied, it could use much larger bases. That tool includes a few "special" alphabets for bases that don't use an "extended hex" alphabet, such as base32, base58, and base11, and whether in-built special alphabets are used or not can be set with a flag.
Graphical programs don't have the same affordances that command-line programs do, though; they trade those off for a convenient user interface that even a computer amateur could use. Maybe we've been spoiled by GUIs, a little bit, but they do serve some purpose (particularly viewing media, and high quality maps).
For a map viewing program, let's say it sources its map data, base layers, and data layers from other programs, or maybe just from somewhere on the file-system. It could bundle some with it, and keep it in a /lib directory or something, let other programs add their layers to /usr/share and /usr/local/share, and let users add to ~/.local/share. But standardizing the layers, so that multiple map viewers could use the same data, would be the real challenge. Freedesktop did this for a lot of things, but not for maps.
To be honest, something based on OSM formats would probably be a good idea.
From the cutting room floor: Fire
This scene takes place just after the hole scene. It was scrapped because it was too jarring and did not fit with the overall tone of the story. It also had some kind of "invisible savior" which didn't make sense.
If you want to skip the deleted scene, use your client's "outline" feature to find "The next chapter" (which is the next section).
He dismounted as he went into the smoke. He got a mask from his bag and put it on eagerly. He noticed, thanks to the tip from earlier, the skin color of all the people running, wheezing and coughing, away from the fire. Not many were White. One of them did catch his eye, though -- wearing a bandana and sunglasses. He turned around and tripped the guy, who promptly began running, knowing he had been caught.
The fire brigades were working tirelessly to contain the blaze. It was eating the grass, the trees, and parts of some houses. The insides of various homes had smashed windows and wide-open doors. In the middle of the road, there were a few people struggling to walk on.
This is not what he thought he would do as a network engineer.
His objective was now gone. The new one: get these people out of the smoke and into safety. He handed out what few spare masks he had, and carried people out of the smoke as best as he could.
As he returned to the clean air outside of the dying fire, he noticed about three White men, with dark vests, bandanas, and sunglasses (despite it being night), carrying long, black objects in their hands, approaching him steadily. He took a defensive stance, before two of the men aimed their weapons at him, and the third spoke up.
"We need you alive but the network has to stay offline for a while," the man said, slowly and cryptically.
"Who are you and what do you want?"
"We want what's rightfully ours. This land belongs to the Whi--" Bang.
Instinctively, he dropped to the ground, avoiding two gunshots that would have hit him in the head. He heard two more ring out, and a few panicked screams, before all was silent, apart from the crackling of the fire, which was almost comforting now, like a fireplace or campfire.
He stood up, hands raised to show he meant no harm, and lowered them once he realized nobody could be seen.
He returned to his bike and went through the firebombed neighborhood to the micro-node that was in the middle of it -- which had been torn off the house and burned. A new one would have to be installed, but not today.
He turned around and went home for the night.
The next chapter
I haven't decided the premise of the next Futurism short story yet. As usual, I'll write a few of the normal tech and speculation style articles before publishing it.
Maybe it'll be about overcoming a natural disaster. Maybe it's one of the first of its kind in the region (say, an EF5 tornado in England!), maybe it's an entirely new category. If I do that -- is it in bad taste? -- how do I want to play it? Should I take inspiration from disaster/superstorm movies (and books), should I play it based on the news and things I have experience with, such as Helene, Ian, tornadoes? Should I try to pull from currently-rare phenomena like the heat dome, or a wet-bulb event (when the WBGT gets to about 95°, so hot you can't sweat, and therefore pretty much everyone will overheat and die by just stepping outside)? Something normal, but that I don't have experience with, like a blizzard or a duststorm?
A Hackaday article about these so-called "wet bulb events"
Or what about combinations of those?
What about a story about a high-WBGT fueled hurricane, universally agreed as a category 6 or even 7, spawning mass floods, a massive continuous outbreak of tornadoes, incredibly large hail and freak lightning everywhere, which merged with a Saharan sandstorm, and it's slamming into Portugal and into Spain, but the effects can be felt as far out as Italy and the UK?
Okay maybe not, let's let the disaster movies have that one.
Or I go back to the Solarpunk Prompts podcast listings and get inspiration from there.
...No, I think I have an idea. You'll just have to wait and see.
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