Into the Network

In the background the 2020 computer geek film “Into the Network” played out on an antique flat screen TV, the then teen actor (who recently celebrated his 68th birthday) tapped a couple of keys on his keyboard and with the aid of computer graphics was literally sucked into the Matrix… Internet, Screech mentally corrected himself. He watched the film out of the corner of his eye, knowing every line and every scene inside out. As a child he would watch this and other films of the genre avidly. He was destined to take up a career with computers though his chosen route isn’t quite what his mother intended.

Watching the rushing effects of the actor zooming down the information superhighway Screech turned back to his own keyboard. He didn’t need the manual interface as he was also jacked in but there was something tactile about the keys that he liked. Letting his eyes fall to where his fingers danced across the keys he smiled. There was something entrancing about the keystrokes, and you could be more expressive on a keyboard that the standard mental commands.

With a flourish he stabbed at the Return key, and thousands of terabits of information flowed into his memory drive. He watched the flow of data for a few moments to ensure that no anomalies or nasty bits of code were being run, it all seemed clean so set his own analyze program to watch the rest of the transfer. He was getting paid for this chunk of data but that didn’t mean he should sit there like a plum doing the job a line of code was capable of doing and squander the opportunity of a broken node. He drifted off to have a look at what other tasty information sat in the datastore. He wasn’t disappointed.