2062

Private ownership is a thing of the past. The year is 2062. The State regulates everything for its citizens, rations are doled out regularly at what were once large grocery store chains. Citizens are evaluated before they reach adulthood and are given a Government Assigned Occupation (GAO). Currency doesn't exist anymore, at least not in the physical world. In an unregulated part of the internet, the dark web, anonymous individuals use digital cryptocurrencies to buy and sell all kinds of contraband: Art, uncensored writings, unlicensed laptops, illegal programs such as TOR and TailOS, and even drugs and weapons. Kevin McAffee is a dark web vendor, he started out by selling just Third Eye, a psychedelic but has expanded his stock to include amphetamines, empathogens, and other mind altering substances. Kevin's GAO was at his local post office, which made sending out packages that had illegal substances hidden in them just a little bit easier. He was approached with the business idea on the Holo-net, a government run virtual space where people could connect with friends and family and even interact with strangers in the safety of their own home. For the past few years it has been illegal to leave your house with a Permit of Transit, approved by The State of course. More and more revolutionary factions had begun to spring up in opposition to The State, and at this point people only left their houses to go to their GAO or pick up rations from The State run superstores, so nobody really reacted when just being outside was now considered “suspicious activity.”

He had scheduled a dead drop with one of his regular suppliers underneath the Broadway Street Bridge. But when he arrived at the spot, a little hole in the concrete wall slightly smaller than the size of a hand, he found something strange there. A heart shaped locket that when opened showed an empty picture frame. Thinking it was probably just left there by a lovesick romantic, as a symbolic gesture or something, Kevin absentmindedly slipped it into his pocket and left the USB with the Bitcoins he owed his supplier in its spot. After ducking and dodging down shady streets and dark alleys, avoiding the regular police patrols did he notice what the locket truly was. The heart was able to be broken in half, revealing that the top half of the heart was actually another USB. Confused, Kevin messaged his supplier if they could meet on the Holo-net. Before he got the confirmation Kevin began to calibrate his Holo-net headset's electromagnetic waves to his brain frequency. His phone buzzed with an unread notification, “DejaView.” Kevin knew the virtual bar, it was designed like a retro mid 20th century diner on the side of a cliff with a digital city below it (hence the name). As he programmed his destination Kevin put the headset on and lowered the VR visior, a curtain of blackness descending over his vision. Then Kevin put in his wireless earbuds, his other senses becoming heightened as his sense of hearing and vision fading away. Kevin let his body fall backwards on his bed, feeling the impression in the mattress wrap around him. The headset made it's iconic startup noise and the logo for ASTRALLY, a government sponsored tech company, flashed in front of Kevin briefly. Next the Holo-net headset constructed a digital copy of Kevin's body around him. As it got closer to loading Kevin could feel his physical body drifting away from him. When it became almost like a pinprick on the horizon he tried moving his arms. His real ones didn't budge, he couldn't even feel them anymore, but the virtual arms attached to his virtual torso and legs reacted seamlessly with his thoughts. Now that he was fully integrated into the Holo-net, DejaView began to load around him.

Before Kevin was even fully conscious of his surroundings he felt his digital avatar grabbed. The room altered slightly around him from the barroom of DejaView to one of it's private backrooms. Kevin's supplier was sitting behind a desk, and his virtual face did not look happy.

“Where's my money?”

“In the dead drop spot, didn't you get it?”

“It was empty.”

“Well, that doesn't surprise me.” Even though the man in front of him was a hardened criminal Kevin's tone was familiar, no one in their right mind would make a move on someone on the Holo-net, not with ever watching State. “I think the spots been compromised. I found a strange USB disguised as a heart shaped locket there.” Kevin's partner growled.

“More artists and writers have been using that spot to trade their goods. They're usually not the type to steal, but there's a first time for everything.”

“I'll get the money to you tomorrow, at a safer spot, with a little bit extra for the trouble.” Kevin reassured.

“Good. So, what's on the USB anyway?” Kevin's brow furrowed.

“I didn't even think to check.” Kevin's partner's eyes twinkled slightly as he said:

“Well why haven't you? It's a mystery!”

Well that was anticlimactic. Just pictures and spreadsheets, nothing interesting. But, regardless, Kevin found himself staring at it for hours, occasionally getting up to make coffee, use the bathroom, or surf the Holo-net for a little bit. But he kept coming back to the open files on his laptop. Something about them didn't feel right to him. The pictures were generic artsy photographs, but not of anything in particular, kind of like the Windows XP default wallpaper. You'd think the spreadsheets could be interesting but they seemed to be nothing more than data presentations and expenses. It was strange to see the pretty and frivolous pictures next to the practical but, cold, impersonal data. That's when it struck Kevin. One of the lower resolution pictures was almost a megabyte of data. A picture of that size should've been, at max, 3 kilobytes. That's 0.03 megabytes. There was something extra in this picture, nothing you could physically see, but in the metadata itself. Kevin had heard of this technique in history books, it was called Steganography. Kevin quickly got to work unzipping the images.

As his computer uncompressed the files Kevin went to go make himself a coffee. He had to admit, it was pretty fun decoding these strange files on a disguised USB he found, unexpectedly, at his dead drop pick-up location. By the time the coffee maker poured the black liquid in his favorite mug the files were able to be properly opened.

“Okay. Here we go.” Kevin said to himself, mug warming his hand and the aroma of black coffee swirling around him. Kevin didn't know what he was expecting, maybe an experimental virus he unwittingly opened on his computer, or maybe it's footage from one of the dark webs infamous red rooms, or maybe they were just someone's personal files they wanted to protect with an additional layer of encryption. It was just a bunch of little squiggles, they looked like equations. They looked like: “ih a/at” with a weird combination of a U and an I next to a “(x,t)”. This is well above by pay grade, Kevin thought. Then the door bell rang.

Kevin walked up to his front door, and peered through the peep hole to see who was outside his house. On his front porch was a young man, probably only a year or two younger than Kevin, his unshaven appearance gave Kevin the impression that this man lacked any sort of job with a required grooming and dress code (and most of them did). Kevin was silently weighing his options in his head, these days just letting someone into your house could label you as a potential subversive, and Kevin could always play dumb if a police patrol happened to see someone standing on his front porch. Then again it might be safer to just let this individual in before anyone even saw him, unless he was already seen. Almost as if he could sense Kevin's presence the young man looked Kevin in the eyes through the peep hole and held up the USB Kevin had replaced with the heart locket at the dead drop.

“You have something of mine, and I have something of yours.” Kevin unlocked his door and quickly ushered the stranger in. Sensing his urgency to get him in the house the man spoke.

“Don't worry, I have a forged Permit of Transit in case any cops happened to see me.”

“How did you find me?” Kevin asked. The stranger threw his USB at him.

“Wasn't that hard, you didn't even tumble your bitcoins so it led me straight to your cryptocurrency wallet. But that's beside the point, you have a very important decision to make.”

“What do you mean?”

“The files in the locket are kind of like a PGP key, I have one half of the key and you have the other half. They were intended to hide State secrets.” Kevin cut him off.

“Fuck, I should've known you were a revolutionary. You have to leave now.”

“Kevin.” Kevin was shocked into silence by the stranger knowing his name. “I'm so sorry you got wrapped up in this, it wasn't supposed to happen this way, but this bigger than you or me. For decades the State has denied that their surveillance of us, both in the physical world and Holo-net, has not been recorded. This is evidence that they are compiling all our information to make...something like a social credit score.”

“What's a credit score?”

“It's a 20th century term.” The revolutionary described to Kevin the concept of credit and the implications of this State-wide ranking system. “The people need to know. But unfortunately The State is going to come after anyone that had anything to do with this leak – and the includes you now.”

Kevin didn't know what to think. He didn't like how The State ran things as much as anyone but for years he had peacefully co-existed, even thrived, under The State. But deep down he knew he wouldn't be able to live knowing what he knew now. Together, with his new found ally, they got to work decrypting the evidence of the State Social Credit Score and uploading it to the Holo-net for all to see. The media called it “The Wikileaks of the second half of the 21st century.” But there was still much of the 21st century left to happen. Kevin completely abandoned his old life, joining his new found compatriots for protection from The State. He wasn't the last to join the good fight, though, not by a long shot. Kevin became a recruiter for his revolutionary group, jumping between identities on the Holo-net faster than The State could keep up with. With his help, and the knowledge that citizens had of the secrets The State was actively keeping from them, the ranks of revolutionary groups began to swell to the point that they actually began to challenge the imminent domain of The State. But there was still a lot of work to do.