April patreon bonus -- Tal's Life Advice

The thing they don’t tell you about riding the wires, right, is that there’s always, ALWAYS a way back to you. Stands to reason. I mean, you’re in your meat; can’t escape it. So riding the wires, there’s always that line, back to the meat. And if you make that line – and you gotta make that line – then they can track it.

There’s ways, of course. The obvious way is to be too boring to pay attention to, which is what most people do. Be boring, and the Man doesn’t have time for you unless you catch them on a bad day, or someone there takes a dislike to you, or you’re an easy target anyway and they’ve got a quota to fill. Being boring and invisible and not too easy a target is the way to stay mostly safe from the Man (you’re never entirely safe). But being boring has one huge downside, which is that it’s fucking boring.

So there are other ways. Most people swear by shielding and obfuscation in the wires themselves. Virtual proxies and high-sec passwords and bouncing your signal through a few private satellites, some recommend the pirate Elvirian satellites but that’s amateur hour, any traffic from Elviria is considered suspect these days and you want to stay at least a little bit invisible on the wire end. And yeah you do need that stuff, the track obfuscation, but you also need to move the meat around. They’ll find the end of the signal eventually if they can be bothered looking (and if you’re not worth looking for, are you even doing anything worth doing?), and if your meat’s still there when they do, they can lock it up, and the best hacker in the world isn’t worth coyote shit once kes wires are cut.

Anyway, I like disposeables. The kind of data top-ups that you can buy and plug in freely without ID. Then you do your work in public spaces, off your own network, and you’re fine, right? Wrong. They have cameras, of course. Everyone has cameras. You go in and you buy your disposeable, bam, you’re on their camera. You go to a cafe to jack their free network access, bam, another camera. The Man knows what your meat looks like and he’s a big step closer to finding it.

That’s why most of us use A Guy. The best Guys barely go online themselves, and they definitely don’t do anything criminal. My Guy was ‘named’ Savannah (fake name I assume, I never asked), and she’d go to the stores with a few thou and spend it on disposeables and spare drive mods (did you know that the hardware inside your device sends an ID signal? Smart users don’t trust the software overrides, you gotta get in there with a screwdriver and physically replace parts if you don’t want your equipment to be tracked), and she’d sell them to us for cash so there was no connection between our money and hers in any way that the Man can track. And she had this cool trick, right, where she’d by 20 or 30 disposeables at once and stick them in envelopes and shuffle them up, and then you pick an envelope at random and she sells it to you. So if the Man ever comes calling, and says ‘hey, who did you sell data pack EV-96623844 to’, she doesn’t know. The Man’s never come calling for her, so far as I know. Savannah was great because she lived in a van and moved around a lot, so she had a ready excuse for why she’d need the data packs and would be slightly hard to find anyway. If you’re going to do interesting stuff, you gotta make every step in finding you as hard for the Man as possible, because the Man’s a parasite who wants easy money. That’s why real criminals don’t go to jail. Their crimes are too confusing and their massive amounts of wealth makes them hard to catch.

I don’t live in a van. I sometimes live on a boat, but right now I live in an illegally sublet ‘apartment’ that I got stupid cheap because it doesn’t have hot water or the minimum legal requirements for ventilation. It’s considered unfit for habitation by The Man so I don’t need to pay market rates which is great since I not only save money but I’m not legally in the system. Makes the Man’s job harder if they come looking. Almost thirty per cent of New Houston lives in this kind of accommodation, so any boar who wanted to come looking wouldn’t be able to find my address on a computer, they’d have to actually come out and get mud on their boots. Or shit. Maybe someone could push them into a sewer. I can dream.

“Oh but Maize, don’t you have like, Batman level money?” No, a certain other individual has Batman level money and rents a penthouse upstairs, and illegally lets this space, and illegally sublets it to me. A certain other individual who has committed SO many crimes. Kes name is Tal Smithson, which is a totally real name of a real person who is definitely still alive.

Let me explain to you how to steal an identity sometime.

Anyway, Tal is loaded because of various complicated foreign investments, sure, and by loaded I mean ‘comfortable’, not ‘fatcat who the Man actually listens to’. I mean ‘four square meals and a hot tub and a great view of the New Houston harbour’ kind of loaded, where I – where ke can see the boat I used to rent. And maybe I do go up there a lot, because the recluse needs someone to do housework, right? But any record would show that Maize lives down here. Except any record wouldn’t show that because any record doesn’t exist. But any neighbour’s eyeballs would show that. And Tal’s digital footprints are clear; ke mostly watches publically available and publically approved subscription broadcasting with like, just enough piracy and weird porn to not be considered weird, because nothing is more suspicious than a completely spotless digital footprint. Ke’s upstairs watching some modern nonsense right now, actually. Fuck I love bots.

If you want to be invisible enough to do anything fun, you need a back exit to your illegally sublet apartment, which can be made quite easily with a small hatchet and hidden behind a cheap wall decoration. The boars will find it of course but you should be long gone when they do. Only an amateur goes out the window; they could have snipers out there. The best holes go into the neighbour’s illegally sublet apartment. Mrs Kennedy has been complaining for a while that the weird breeze sometimes comes from behind her bathroom mirror but Tal (who sublets that apartment too) never listens, so when I hear the boars at my door it’s a matter of seconds to lock myself in the bathroom, slip through the hole and pull both mirrors into place behind me, and clamber up onto her vanity and up through her air vent.

They’ll search her place too if they look hard enough to find the mirror thing. But they never post anyone on the floor above. Idiots.

Another thing about being invisible enough to have any fun is that you can’t get too attached to your trappings. Once that first boot hits the door, I know that Maize Tangero is dead. Tal Smithson might still be salvageable; I need to see how the Man found me to be sure. I hope so; Tal has almost all of my money.

I think I’ll try the name Janicia next. Maybe she can live on a boat.