FINALLY the sovereign states take back what's THERES. DEath to the traitors and their FOIL king. Wha...
Tale:Ineluctable, Naturally
From Amaranth Legacy, available at amaranth-legacy.community
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The sun wasn't due to rise for hours, the only light Lothair could see was a single flashing underscore on his terminal. Twice a second, a few million electrons collided with the surface of the terminal, the resulting light hardly enough for Lothair to even see his hands. He did not need to see his hands to go through the commands he had been dozens of times before. As he entered his credentials, he gained access to the remote server.
He tabbed through page after page until he found the program. The computer ran slowly to consume power as it was nighttime after all. Lothair sipped on a cold silbermilk, bitter and miserable because it was cold. At least it fought back the worst of the exhaustion from work at this hour. Some of the juniors kept their cups in the server room to keep them at least lukewarm, but the risk of spillage was far too great. While Lothair waited for the terminal to load, he wiped the forming condensation from its screen. He shuddered and pulled on another layer, still not yet warm from the trek from his flat to here.
The terminal finally loaded the program and a countdown next to it. All he would need to do is load the program he and his colleagues had been testing for years. Lokira was among the last planets to legalize semantic dynamos, so most of their work was in implementation with local systems than in research. The time came, the program began, and Lothair wasted no time leaving the office. He kept to the middle of the hallway to avoid tripping on someone, but his foot caught on improvised blankets and scraps of fabric all the same. Lothair saw another glow, no doubt Reccared's terminal. Only further confirming the source of the glow, Lothair's foot crunched on some snack or confection left on the ground.
"You know when the lights are coming back on?" whispered Lothair. Like Reccared's large body was eclipsing a dim silver sun, his body hunched over the monitor. Four other round screens reflected the dim light.
Reccared grunted, "A few hours...," and he returned to what he was doing.
"Not worth going home then, huh?" Lothair finished his silbermilk in one gulp and dropped it onto the floor where it joined the dozens other like it. Reccared would surely not mind.
Lothair collapsed onto his chair and saw the servers had already began the program. Despite the recent purchases, Lothair could see the battery reserves depleting in real time. They were busy scraping information from across the loom, chat logs, forum posts, direct messages, anything Neith could get access to—which was quite a bit. Lothair found his own records and purged them long ago and, as new hires learned more, they began doing the same. Curiously, president De Jong's records were there for all to see. They had already been fed into the new semantic dynamo.
His pager had enough juice left in it to last until daybreak. Lothair sighed and opened Neithstring, the deck he spends everyday working on with his colleagues. The pager started up, took note of the time, and dimmed the screen accordingly. The room was bathed in dim red light as Neithstring's logo replaced the [booting screen]. The device, one of Neith's own creations, was a top-of-the-line pager fresh off of the assembly line. Its display had full access to the color spectrum, a modern miracle of so-called liquid crystal technology. The engineering team a few floors down called for numerous company-wide meetings to discuss their breakthrough. Coupled with a dim light from a filament [circumnavigating] the four corners of the screen, it was perfectly usable at night. What left more of an impression on Lothair was its sheer computational power—with nearly half a gibibyte of memory and nearly as much storage, the range of possibilities exploded. Most of the terminals in the room could hardly claim more than ten times as much power despite their large sizes. It was like the latest pagers were from the future, but the only thing the current primitive society could think to do with them was browsing Neithstring just as before.
Lothair muttered to himself, "what a waste" as Neithstring's decks compiled. Seconds later, a remarkable speed increase, an invisible string connected him to the Loom.
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It was the same content Lothair had always seen. He beheld his handiwork in silence, the simple algorithm that ordered this content selected for negativity. It was his idea to let the algorithm experiment with primitive semantic signifiers to determine which would create the most user engagement. Of course, the site ended up very negative and more popular than ever. What the company could do with a semantic dynamo, to perhaps generate content that is mathematically optimized. Record breaking profits then and a fat bonus in the mail for him. Even knowing how the trick worked didn't ruin the magic, and Lothair poured through the forums until the first hints of dawn [brushed?] the horizon.
The pager, now running slow to conserve power, notified Lothair that dawn was just about to begin. Seconds later, the lights flicked on and the dim terminals exited power saving mode. The battery reserves barely lasted until morning, now they greedily drew from the power grid. Lothair saw the city light from the window and heard the first honks of the morning. Drivers wasted no time clogging the streets. The next sound he heard were the groans of once-sleeping juniors in the hallway. Even their salary wasn't enough to afford passive heating and sleeping at the office certainly beat a night in the crowded [hot house? hot place of sorts. Homeless shelter].
To further herald the coming of dawn, a line of flickering lights streaked across the sky. First, the light they gave off was solely reflected orange light. One by one, they each outshone even Vode in the sky. Some of them had the fusion reactors meant to power this city in them. The sailors and marines in those ships did not have to worry about the cold despite being in the vacuum of space ironically enough. Perhaps they were related to that war.
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Neith is closely working with the federal government to make sure our soldiers won't miss anything here on Neithstring while they're gone. High bandwidth is the least we can do for them and is crucial for keeping up morale in these trying times.
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Lothair hated the marketing part of his job, but since Neithstring became the most trafficked site on the Loom, there wasn't a need for a marketing team. This left the work to him, but it was surprisingly straightforward once he got into it. At least De Jong liked Lothair's work.