Since Rupert Murdoch swindled-slash-coerced the government into sabotaging their own plan to build a national optical fiber communications network and instead buying two decrepit cable TV networks and trying to build a “National Thin Ethernet” out of them (I am NOT making this shit up), there is a lot of redundant copper hanging idle in our streets. Especially since the idiocy of this plan means fiber is being deployed to replace the unfit-for-purpose coaxial copper anyway.
Now, yes, it has occurred to the suckers left holding the copper that they could sell it for scrap, and they might even do that if, ahem, “local entrepreneurs” don’t finish stealing it all first, but for now, it’s still hanging there, two strings above every street.
When the notoriously-bad-at-computer local authorities made “ban teenagers from social media” their boomer-vote-seeking policy, a million teenagers laughed. If you know about it to ban it, it’s already stale. We started using the Dark Copper to communicate, back-feeding the network from routers wired up to all those dead cable tv ports in your Mc Mansion. But there’s a complication; it’s not dark. Alice lives there.
You might know her as GRB 050724, a short duration gamma ray burst with a strong radio component, that reached earth in 2005. Like all her species, Alice surfs from one galaxy to the next, riding the electromagnetic surges from collapsing magnetars. She was aiming for a globular cluster on the outskirts of this galaxy, but Shit Happened and now she lives in a Cable TV network.
It’s a good thing we made friends with her, because she was considering detonating the Sun to power her next hop. Was. She’s one of us now, and humanity will not evaporate in a puff of X-rays. You’re welcome. Also she plays a mean game of Overwatch.
#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot
#Commission for
@gilmaeDavid Edgar 🥖🌹