//------------------------------//
// WH4: MEM 
// Story: Rez: Eqstr[Tera] 
// by NiGHTcapD 
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	It's been a while since I ever had any real "free time", so to speak. Sure, I have plenty of time to do things I want to do, but there's always something going on, and the schedule of weirdness only got worse after being led to Twilight's form in the network. Not that I'm complaining, of course; but the feeling of total freedom can be slightly jarring, especially when you know that the world will still be going on around you...always moving into the future, bit by bit.
Thinking on that further, I ended up doing something I hadn't really done in forever: look the opposite way, towards my past. I haven't really questioned it before, but I realize that life is made up of an unending string of coincidences. I want to know which ones, specifically, brought me into being. The data's probably all there anyways, waiting for me to discover it. Shouldn't even need to hack for it.
First order of business, there's a pair of antique headphones and shoes...well, antique nowadays in the 2500s. Probably brand new in the early 2000s. The shoes have been in the box they came in, as they have a weird split-toe that I'm not exactly comfortable wearing. The headphones, I use on and off. They're not natively compatible with any of my sound systems, or maybe that's the other way around, but I keep them where I can get them because I get radio signals with them. Occasionally, I like being surprised.
As a sidenote, when I can get a bead on them some of those ham radio communities make excellent homebrew music. Nothing really polished, but quality melodies and lyrics. Campfire quality, I guess.
In any case, if I recall correctly they've been changing hands for a while now. Dunno if they're supposed to be family heirlooms or cool trinkets, I personally think they've been passed down and around because they're useful. Heck knows anyone can use them, especially as they seem to resist aging.
There are marks and text in various places on each, which hasn't faded in all their years. I ran an image search on the bottom of the shoes, and found multiple hits that call it a "Runner's Mark", common in a city that was known as Glass in the early 21st century. The headphones are one of many, many uniquely customized models whose internal tech was pretty much a carbon copy of all the others, common in Tokyo-to around the same time as the Runner's Mark.
Both the 'phones and the shoes, and any and all marking on them, seem to represent freedom. The two places they came from each had their share of corrupt practices and other distasteful methods of controlling citizens. In fact, some of those very same practices are being borrowed by our good friends Vesuvius, if recent decryption advances are to be believed...right, it's been a while since I've mentioned them, hasn't it? Well, we made the rudimentary super-Bombe open-source and people got cracking. We now know more of their plans, and it's not good. We're in the process of making counterplans now.
Speaking of plans, my area will be affected more than most. See, areas as we define them nowadays are more based on who lives there and does what. Just living there doesn't determine your destiny, though most of us who currently live on this planet have found it a lot easier to move to places which centralize and encourage our individual skills; such as creating new hardware for computing or robotics, farming for various food products and/or other organically producible resources (there's a lot more than you think), create mass media (or niche, depending on the zone), you name it. In my area specifically, we are as social as much as we are efficient. We share things, discoveries, mostly ways to make our own lives better and easier and thus the rest of our lives that much so just by sharing. This has led to a concentrated hacker base, though most of us are "lifehackers" instead of computers, even though there is no standard occupation across the board...which makes us seem decisively average at first glance.
Computer hackers (and a few other types of hobby) are actually a lot more spread out across the globe. We do have a significantly larger slice of the pie here, though only in comparison to other areas.
Of course, not all parts of the world are actually like this, mostly small countries and some islands but our state just so happens to have this setup.
Which is why it's rather stupid for our prospective governor (finally found it out, how high up he's willing to go to try and push his agendas) to try and rally here. Message boards already are buzzing about a riot or two, though I'm hesitant to join even after being specifically called out by more than a few people. Those troopers might be there; after reading up on my not-so-recently acquired artifacts, I fear a recurrence of the old November Riots. Although...
The shoes and headphones are symbols of freedom from oppression, freedom of expression. The original owners of these things would most certainly have gone in and fucked with the idiot here, who isn't even fully in power. It's not even a challenge to them.
Who am I to turn down a challenge?
I leave a post on the boards, with a picture of the shoes and 'phones. And a line with a link: "Who is he to take away our freedoms? I know what he's up to. I don't like it. Everyone who doesn't know in full thinks he's stupid. He's not. But I think he needs to be shown a rush of our freewill, to know what we want and don't want. I'll be there, with a plan...just be ready when I ask each of you to do something. I don't yet know what it will be, but I'm pretty sure it will be epic."
"Thank you all for caring, and for not being stupid."