At first I didn't understand what I...

Writing Exercise - "IBM 1401 A User Manual" by Johan Johannsson

For this exercise I tried to think about the possible "secret" that the player has uncovered, that is causing him/her to have to hide from the government. I'm worried that this game is getting a bit heavy in terms of background information - obviously the format that I choose will have to be able to deal with a large narrative. This is where viral marketing will also come in handy - websites that belong to people who are jacked in, or to the companies who are selling contracts will help provide background information outside of the game.

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At first I didn't understand what I was seeing. My processors couldn't quite take in and analyse the information - it was so far outside of what I was used to, so far outside of what I had come to expect. I guess that's what you give up when you turn yourself over to the machines. Your imagination becomes lazy. It's ironic, considering that it's in the virtual realities that your imagination is supposed to be free-est.

I had been doing a routine data-sweep of the net, looking for any troublesome activities. Any data-terrorists that needed to be taken down, any revolutionaries that needed to be discouraged from targeting a server. It's an ironic thing that our world is now so wired that even those who disagree with how we use the net still need to use it themselves in order to communicate. There are always tremors on the net, before an attack is going to happen. It's just a matter of combing through the data and finding the discrepancies.

I found something, alright. But it wasn't by any revolutionaries or data-terrorists.

There has been a government initiative to encourage everyone to jack in. There are sponsorship programs that allow the poor to join up with government funded providers. The terms are longer, the conditions more strenuous, but it allows the poor access to the net. The idea is that in the four years that you're bound to the government provider, you offer up 50% of your brain power to government processing. You become a mobile server, in a way. But at the end of your term you should have built up enough data-revenue online, written enough blogs and tweets and commented on enough pictures, that you should be receiving a pretty good income in order to sign up for your own individually chosen plan with one of the major providers.

But some people aren't making it all the way through their contracts. In fact - I research user information on some government sponsored bloggers, easy to spot because of their required logos - over 3/4's of them are abandoning their blogs before their terms are up. I do some digging. They're all dead.

Over the next few days I do some more digging. I'm not trying to be subtle about it, but I am, simply be the nature of all the work that I need to do. The search gets pushed to the bottom of my priorities, but it's still there, niggling at my processors.

In the majority of these cases, the individuals died due to some sort of brain hemorrhage. And that's when I piece it all together - the government is using their sign-ups to test out deadly software and viruses. They're mostly contained in their own networks, away from the premium data sites that need to be paid for, so there's minimal risk of a spreaded infection to people higher up the economic food chain. Besides, most people can afford some sort of protection on their plans - an extra chip or addon that filters out the nasty stuff. These charity cases can't, and their brains are wide open to being ravaged by the programs that the government is testing.

These people's brains are literally being fried.