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1* characters
2** Boon
3Robert Boon. Born August '21, grew up an ordinary life as a farmhand to his
4father. Of course, when United Tractors started locking their 'ware behind 4K
5RSA keys and performing some legal (with the help of a little lobbying Uncle
6Sam) extortion to get a nice young man to come out there with the private key
7and unlock them once every six months, being a farmhand wasn't as simple an
8occupation as it was in the past. Farmers breathe entrepreneurial spirit and
9self sufficience, so it only makes sense that they fit like a glove with the
10hacker community. He got into computer programming when he was eleven. By
11fifteen, he was one of the leading security experts this side of the
12Mississippi. By seventeen, he realized that cracking low-grade commercial DRM
13was small fries, and he decided to follow the action and head to dry Nelson,
14Texas with a few hackers he'd come to know through his time on the internet to
15set up what would legendarily become known as the Dude Ranch. Completely covert,
16one-hundred percent off America's grid -- he was at the core of a group of
17people who had all the skills to build a civilization. Mostly hackers, but the
18word doesn't really mean the same thing now as it did before the CRA[1] passed in
19'20. 
20
21Boon is a perfect mixture of laser focused practical skills, both physically and
22mentally. It used to be that he was just fit from working outside all the time,
23but after augs became mainstream (in no small part due to the FSF's meddling
24within the US government), it was ridiculously easy for anyone to become
25ultra-fit beyond the imagination of humans past. Combine this with at least a
26decade of experience working with his hands, doing tight electrical work, and
27playing tennis (the thinking man's game), and you got yourself a god damned
28secret operative machine. 
29
30He trained in parkour and other methods of speed and flow at the Dude
31Ranch. Usually, in any organization, the top dogs stop getting their hands dirty
32real quick, and the same could be said about the FSF -- fact of the matter is,
33minds like those don't need to spend their time digging trenches to route
34springwater to a nascent pseudo-anarchist community in the middle of the
35desert. Boon was different, though. He was completely apolitical, as far as
36anyone could tell. When asked once what he thought of an ideological dispute
37between fellow founders John Mack and Pop Evans[2], he famously responded, "If
38you keep digging, all you're gonna find is holes". Boon was the perfect mixture
39of physical speed and precision (to get to the dirty work), connections and
40insider intel (because who would expect Thomas god damned Jefferson to leak
41American plans to the British?), and raw ability with computers (because it
42doesn't matter if you can get to the site if you can't extract any information
43from it). A true freak, if you will. 
44
45** Wilson
46Only his oldest comrades are even aware of the existence of a last name. Wilson
47is at once divisive and unifying. He was born in the Sichuan province of China,
48and left school at the age of fourteen to pursue a modern day ascetic's
49existence of eating very little, consuming prodigious amounts of philosophy,
50and, of course, writing incendiary blog posts against the Chinese government. He
51became rapidly well known for his bastardization-cum-weaponization of the
52Chinese character system. His trademark was combining characters to create
53subtle mixtures of verbal, visual, and cultural meanings in a single ideograph,
54but he was also instrumental in standardizing the underground language of
55Chinese netizens in the late 30s and early 40s [3]. A man with such influence
56seems to need to exert great effort to avoid making friends (and enemies, for
57that matter), and Wilson wisely used his contacts to take a gamble on trying his
58disruptive hand at the already highly disrupted political state that was at that
59time the United States of America. He hopped on a small trade boat and made a
60trip to the port of Galveston, Texas (a trip upon which he almost died of
61malnourishment-by-extreme-seasickness) to join a couple of his buddies fron the
62net, along with a few evangelical followers, in starting a commune in the middle
63of the desert. 
64
65Wilson, above all else, brought passion. Surely he was savvy technically, but
66amongst the greatest technical minds of the era, his prowess was less
67needed. But one look into his eyes, one empassioned conversation was all it took to
68convert a weary soul. He had that once-in-an-age charisma, the kind of guy who
69you were more confident in (in your gut, mind you, not just lips) than God
70himself (because God hadn't done shit for you lately). But for all this, he was
71prone to bouts of depression just as he was bouts of mania. He was known to lock
72himself in a trailer for weeks at a time, never retreating save to procure a
73pack of pens or a bundle of notebooks. He wrote hundreds, thousands of pages at
74once, much of it gibberish, and much of that metaphysical. He
75claimed at times to communicate with beams of light, with small inanimate
76objects, and yet at the same time maintained the deep foundation of appearing
77completely sane while doing so. But by and large, these streaks of seeming
78psychosis aside, he was seen as a sane man, a passionate man, a man overflowing
79with ideas and compassion. He was the only founder to maintain first name
80basis with a mind-boggling number of the Ranchers. He adored the common folk
81because they adored him, yes, but mostly because he had a deep, deep core of
82empathy. He felt the pain of others as it was his own, and in exchange he made
83them feel his passions as if they belonged to them.
84
85Wilson was extraordinary, and not even his detractors could deny that, but it
86was this quality which made him despised by some. Hackers, by and large, are a
87very independent people -- sure, they grew up on the 'net, connected to a couple
88billion people, but those people didn't quite understand. One must have a
89certain obsessiveness to them to really dive into the inner workings of the
90computer, even more so than the legendary programmers of the 1900s. The cutting
91edge machines the old legends dealt with, their screamingly fast processors and data
92transfer rates, could run on any given toaster when this generation of hackers
93were born. And with power comes complexity. All programmers today have a
94specialty, an area in which they are truly knowledgeable, for each of these
95subsections runs as deep as the whole thing did sixty or seventy years ago. And
96the kind of people who are willing to mold their lives around one thread of one
97thread of human knowledge, these are not often people who succumb to wild
98leadership. And but so there was a fair portion of Ranchers who saw Wilson's
99revolutionary fervor and passion as a personal offense, an indicator that they
100even needed to be led at all, ultimately an intrusion and a sphere of power
101in the place they designed to have none.  
102
103It is said that no one truly knew Wilson. He was more a fountain than a man,
104like Jesus or Martin Luther King. And like all men who bear such passions, his
105life was a flash in the frying pan which ended, as these things so often do, in
106a terrible martyrdom.
107
108** Kang
109Kang graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2020 with a
110bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Regarded as bright (particularly so, but
111not overwhemlingly so) in high school, he found himself a bit overwhelmed when
112he moved up to university life. His life was flat. On some level he craved
113adventure, but not on the level of actively seeking it out[4]. Upon graduating
114college, he realized that his life thus far had been completely dictated by
115external motivations, and felt lost. He had a fairly prestigious job (for one
116recently graduated), but his work was strictly non-essential, and he felt
117difficulty rousing any excitement from it. 
118
119He is very observant. He is quick to notice the little patterns that people fall
120into, their habits, and also has a bead on the different lifestyles that people
121almost subconsciously fall into. 
122
123He is hopelessly in love with his coworker, Leslie, in whom he saw a certain mix
124of smart cynicism and a behavior that acted in complete and sexy defiance to
125said smart cynicism[5]. He desires her greatly, but perceives his lack of
126excitement with and direction in life as an indication that he is subnormal -- a
127fact which is at odds with his general view of himself as more intelligent than
128those who surround him, but coexists in his mind nonetheless. 
129
130He feels a bit uneasy at the world, but has long since (long being relative to
131the shrunken time span of the twenty-three year old mind) allowed himself to
132lapse into numb (not dissociative numb, much more resembling apathy) disinterest
133in the comings and goings of the world around him -- a fact which to him serves
134as confirmation of the aforementioned lack-of-excitement-and-direction, but
135a problem utterly impossible to solve due to his lack of power to affect change
136on a world exponentially changing. 
137*** Plot Ideas
138- I think he will get swept into his company's play for power, and end up as
139  almost a refugee
140- Perhaps he will be a martyr of sabotage? Planting some long-lasting bug into
141  a piece of their system that improbably lives on until the time of the FSF,
142  who find it and use it as some tide-swinging maneuver? I think this is too
143  cheesy -- I don't think that I want the story to have an overarching
144  good-vs-evil, one encounter with the bad guy to make or break who wins or
145  loses. Not that I am strictly opposed to black-and-white morality, but rather
146  that this isn't supposed to be an action novel (hey!) and those kind of
147  encounters (reaching into the system at the last minute to crash their grid!)
148  tend to lead to pretty actiony sequences. 
149* shorts
150** intro
151[Begin with a series of sweeping shots, stitched together as jump cuts, of the
152crowded city of Shanghai, the tightly walled corporate fortresses, and the
153desolation that exists right outside]
154
155[Narration over the intro shots]
156
157I died for the first time yesterday. It's a new aug, called a Blink Module,
158installed right at the base of the spine. Activate it and your entire body gets
159deconstructed, atom by atom, only to be reassembled right in front of you. State
160of the art. Laz said it was some government shit or something, said the FSF got
161their hands on a primitive gov'rnment prototype a year ago and just now finished it up. He
162claims it doesn't do nothin' to you 'cept a little bit of pre-adjustment
163sickness the first couple times you use it, but I don't buy that. I felt myself
164die and come back to life. I mean, my own momma couldn't tell the diff'rence
165'tween me with my finger over that button and me fifteen milliseconds later, but
166I sure as hell can. 
167
168'ts'not like I had a choice in the matter. Years ago, the nanotech mods, those
169were nothin'. Worst thing a nano ever did to me was lay me up for a day or two
170on account of pushin' my muscles too hard. But the FSF's went wild-eyed these past
171few years. I s'pose it's what you gotta do to survive as an org'nization 'round
172these times. They started killin' folks they expected to be USAE agents. They
173started developin' stronger and stronger augs, ones that strangled up your mind,
174ones that turned you into...somethin' else. It's just gettin' worse. I miss the days when we
175were small, when you could go 'round and shake everyone's hand at the server
176farm and know you were doin' something. Back when we were jus' supplyin' the
177means to people to keep themselves safe, the tech to let their lives be their
178own.
179
180But now, I hardly feel like I know any of those people from the old days. Maybe
181they died too, but instead of fifteen milliseconds it took them the better part
182of a decade. Either way, they're just ghosts, and I feel like an old soldier
183jus' waitin' for his day to come.
184
185Robert K. Boon, June 16th, 2059
186** Kang's Arc
187*** 1
188"Christ, Les, did you see the e-mail about the armed guards?"
189
190"Yeah -- look, I don't know what to make of it either, but at least we're gonna
191feel safe at work. It's such a relief to come to work and know you aren't gonna
192come home full of holes that I...I almost think I like it."
193
194"Machine guns, Les, fully automatic, hanging out the windows like a fucking
195parapet in a castle. I don't work in a war zone, I'm just a sysadmin. How the
196hell is this okay?"
197
198"If you don't like it, no one's keeping you here."
199
200"All my money is holed up in stock options. I don't have anywhere else to go --
201I live on the company campus, I eat from the cafeteria, I even still sleep on
202that IKEA-clone mattress that comes with the apartment. They told me that all the free shit I was
203getting more than made up for the pay, and I believed them -- look, I've
204only been here a year and a half. My stock options are worthless until I hit four
205years. I don't have savings. Les, I don't /have/ anywhere to go..."
206
207"Stop being so dramatic," Leslie said as she stood up. "Nothing's going to
208happen except an extra pair of hands on your crotch in the morning. Anyway, I'm
209headed back to the office. I'll see you there." With that, she got up from her
210chair in the company's cafeteria, placed her emptied tray into a receptacle, and
211left the building.
212
213Kang watched her leave, a pang of anxiety jabbing at him. He felt he'd been a
214bit too desperate on his soapbox -- maybe Les was right, but the more nagging
215feeling was of her opinion of him. He thought he'd noticed some hint of contempt
216in her voice, one of those subtle sub-psychic pieces of language or posture
217which barely registers on the conscious surface and maybe doesn't even exist at
218all but nonetheless drives interactions. Kang found himself particularly
219sensitive to these kinds of things. He chalked it up to an analytical mind (the
220meta kind of self-evaluation in which you analyzes your own propensity to
221analyze everything). Sometimes you run into a person and, maybe
222out of depseration or admiration or just plain chemical attraction, who knows,
223they pull you in harder than gravity. Les was one of those people for Kang.
224
225Kang sat at the table for a few minutes more. He couldn't push away the
226strange premonition that society had crossed some blurred line in the
227sand, and that there was no returning to the other side. He saw it like this:
228Comcast had, over the last two and a half decades, accrued more wealth and power
229than hitherto any non-governmental organization in human history. They, through
230the legal magic of parent companies and conglomerates which allowed companies to
231bypass anti-trust legislation, controlled a significant portion of America's
232most valuable piece of infrastructure: Cable lines. And they held such absolute
233power over these lines that it felt wrong somehow, it felt like the United
234States government had gone from just being a henpecked husband to one whose
235balls were in a steel vice, and like he was a single rock among the birth pains
236of an avalanche.
237
238He had to get back to work, though. His job was fair -- dull, maybe, but as a
239junior sysadmin all the shit storms inevitably got handled by those a pay grade
240or two above him. He was a step or two away in responsibilites from an intern,
241and he was fine with that. Low stress, more or less, except for the fact that a
242small militia was slowly getting assembled a block down from his current
243location. 
244
245As he walked back to his desk, he noticed that his coworkers seemed unfazed --
246which, on second thought, didn't strike him as so strange at all, because if
247there was one thing he had garnered over his short time here, it was that most
248people, like him, were quite content to let the waves wash over them. It was
249almost a defensive response to the world at large. The advent of the Internet
250brought, above all else, a flood of information of all kinds, and to some extent
251this is what saved humanity. The world became homogeneous. The nuances of
252different cultures -- their jokes, their rituals -- stayed relatively in tact,
253but as soon as everyone had access to the same information, the broader cultural
254context converged into one thing which at times seemed so firm that one could
255almost touch it. Things such as the English Premiere League, Microsoft Word,
256fast food, Nike, hip hop music, craft beer, going to work, playing the guitar,
257watching reality television, all spread throughout the world and became
258commonplace touchstones upon which the global psyche built a common
259understanding. But the broad and seedy underbelly of this was the ease with
260which one could turn on an informational fire hose, and the profitability
261thereof. For every advertising dollar made by an internet forum where users
262could discuss niche competitive video games, a news site which was incredibly
263optimized for commercial psychology could make a thousand, and this was largely
264thanks to the fact that there was never any downside to producing more
265content. If there was one thing this new linked global population was
266insatiable for, it was content. It took a while for publishers to realize this,
267but when they did, they began at a breakneck pace, first attempting to assign
268some quality to their pieces, some distinguishing factor which would make a
269consumer choose them over another outlet (which was how their fathers had done
270business, and their fathers before them), but it took no time at all for them to
271realize that it simply didn't matter. The market was so unimaginably vast that
272there was no need for them to produce anything resembling quality, and in fact
273in most cases it was actually lower quality articles that were preferred for
274profit. This was because you could produce perhaps a dozen easy articles in the
275time it took for a deep, journalistic investigation of a topic, and there was no
276chance in hell that the deep article would get a dozen times more clicks and
277but so the world became a cacophony of radio waves bombarding any receiver which
278would listen.
279
280The publishers also realized what journalists have known for hundreds of years:
281If you're playing to a big audience, you should just swing big and play the
282numbers. Whereas thirty years before a newspaper headline may have read
283
284[@note: this could be really funny]
285"TEACHERS IN COYOMA COUNTY THREATEN STRIKE"
286
287something on the Internet would read
288
289"REPORTS OF SEX SCANDAL UNDERMINE TEACHERS THREAT TO..."
290
291upon which point the title fades out, not merely beckoning but begging you to
292click it and relish in the fantastic vicariousness of living out someone else's
293drama. If you were reading a page two newspaper headline, they had already sold
294their copy. If you were pushing your wares on the 'net, maybe some
295aggregator site where you were directly competing with every other schmuck who
296realized you could make a quick buck by shoveling content onto the 'net, this
297was the critical point of the sale, the point that was as intense to a publisher
298as getting shelled in the trenches at Verdunne, this was where your cash flow
299/lived/. And they knew it. But just like how your mouth gets used to a taste
300(the first sip of a cold foamer being the best), the brain is quite good about
301tuning out other forms of constant stimulus, and so after a while unless your
302headline was earth shatteringly juicy, you might as well not push it at
303all. 'Course, like all things profitable for one and not the other it was just
304an arms race, and the publishers quickly realized that the real thing that
305appealed to consumers about these bombastic headlines, the real honey on the
306flytrap, was not the desire to live out someone else's life (though no denying
307that one is pretty strong), but rather the good good dopamine hit upon getting
308smacked in the face with something. They craved the rush, not the long burn, and
309the rush was easy to get, just keep reapplying. By 2020, image macros, list-based
310articles, online quizzes, and clickbait comrpised about 70% of the traffic on
311the web. Unimaginable amounts of data being pushed through every
312already-bursting electron pipe that would take it, just to move around the most
313addictive drug mankind had ever created. 
314
315All of this, Kang reasoned, had dulled his coworkers' senses enough to the point
316that a fucking company sponsored militia didn't make them bat an eye.
317*** 2
318It wasn't so bad after all. In the days leading up to it, Kang noticed himself
319consuming quite a bit of coffee, which was a habit he had picked up in school in
320lieu of biting nails or toe tapping or what have you, a poor habit which he knew
321probably contributed more to his anxiety than helped it, but, hey, what can you
322do? There was much buzzing around the campus, just like when anything happens
323that sweeps up a nation for a while. A middle eastern regime uses chemical
324weapons on its own people, you can expect to hear about the exact neurotoxicity
325of chlorine in varying air concentrations. A tech giant decides to arm a
326significant part of a county in southern California, you hear about the usual
327constitutional debate for a few days and then it's off to the next thing.
328
329That was one thing he couldn't stand about the culture here. Everyone was young,
330grew up middle class, had had access to a constant and ceaseles stream of
331information their whole lives. He'd hear people talk about forcing transgendered
332people out of military one week and then never again -- and never before, for
333that matter, their interest seeming to spring from the woodworks, and Kang
334considered it a favorable property of his that he shied away from these kinds of
335conversations, more likely to head down to the Salad 'N Stuff on the far side of
336campus where the socially questionable security guys usually ate. At least they
337stayed in their domain, and maybe even though he thought that listening to 
338unkempt, flabby-assed men in dirty New Balance sneakers talk about cryptography
339was equally painful, at least he didn't have to engage with it.
340
341And but so they chatted as they usually do about the heavy armament that was
342incoming. Kang noticed that their tone bordered on optimism, which made
343sense. The United States in 2030 had one hundred and forty-six mass
344shootings[6], which rightfully had people scared. Sure, techie southern
345California wasn't at the top of the list (that was, in fact, Mississippi [per
346capita]), but there had been numerous incidents of technoterrorists, usually
347hyped up on the kind of neuroaugs that are shall we say unregulated, making
348their point in a rather bloody fashion on these big tech campuses. So it was
349only natural that people maybe saw the bright side in all of this.
350
351And when the day come, it was not so bad. It was exactly as strange as he'd
352imagined. He likened it to the time when he took Lauren Mandel to prom in
353eleventh grade, a day he had looked at with a knot in his stomach for at least a
354month, and when the day had finally come he had been too swept up in the actual
355existing part to sit and notice the experience, his memory of the whole
356thing amounting basically to his brain's two-days-gone crayon drawing of the
357affair. 
358
359On the day of, he walked in, was groped a bit by a man who looked like he was
360plucked out of Desert Storm, and went into his office as usual. Maybe the
361difference was like a potted plant in the corner where there wasn't one
362before. He walked past the coffee-and-snack room and saw Les fixing a fresh pot
363of coffee.
364
365"Hey Les, how was your weekend?" he called out to her.
366
367"Fine, went drinking at Smithe's with Ash. She got too drunk again and puked
368wine -- not vomit, pure wine -- in the rideshare. Hey," she stopped to pull
369something out of her backpack, "did you see this?"
370
371It was a glossy pamphlet, probably printed on one of the nice industrial
372printers on East campus, slightly bent. It said
373
374FOR YOUR SAFETY
375
376followed by a very flattering picture of a militiaman (or, more likely, a model
377in a set of bespoke fatigues), and then
378
379PREVENTION BEFORE INTERVENTION
380SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING
381
382followed finally on the bottom by a ghastly thin wire-haired man with paranoid
383eyes and a muzzle bulging from his company-branded tote and an on-campus address
384which pointed to a trailer standing in as the office slash headquarters of the
385militia contractors. 
386
387"Where'd you find this?" Kang asked.
388
389"More like how'd you miss it -- didn't they practically cram one in your pocket
390when you walked in?"
391
392"No, I guess everyone came early today and they were busy pushing people through
393the line."
394
395"Yeah, well, what do you think of it?"
396
397"Reminds me of those Nazi pamphlets from World War 2. You know, some British Joe
398telling you to save your butter and report any anti-Semitism to the local cops."
399* footnotes
400** 1
401The Corporate Rights Act. A natural extension of Citizens United, which
402granted corporations virtually unilateral rights of leverage. Their money could
403be used how they pleased, their power could be used how they pleased (and over
404who they pleased), and most importantly that had not merely tacit but explicit
405government support for doing so. The group of corporations behind this -- now
406known as the United Powers for the Advancement of Technology (the word 'power'
407used quite deliberately) -- Facebook, Alphabet, various
408underground-to-the-public-eye billion dollar data pushing firms -- realized with
409a jarring urgency that the world was no longer the same and that governments
410weren't so far down along the see-saw any more, if you will. The historian Agnes
411Carlin sums it up well in her seminal "On Statist Power in the 21st Century":
412
413"The public didn't see it coming. We know that the public didn't see it coming
414because all signs point to the fact that the agents themselves (i.e. Facebook
415et. al) didn't see the potential of their position until it nearly hit them in
416the face. The government relied so heavily on the infrastructure that they
417maintained that they had lost all leverage, the kicker being that the products
418these companies pushed (trendy media platforms, massive physical infrastructure,
419exobytes of personal data) were among the few things that the government could 
420not produce. They were completely dependent. And certainly no one saw it strange
421when said companies began investing heavily in their peers from the military
422industrial complex -- a business that the US government made quite
423profitable. And when they begain training a corps of armed guards to patrol
424their highly-sensitive user data, acres of server racks, and data processing
425centers, (a time when clearly in hindsight the falling rock had turned to an
426avalanche, so to speak) people thought it no more than shrewd business. But, as
427we know now, it was precisely this accumulation of force over a mere few years
428-- spurred on by the government's unfortunate lack of leverage in the matter --
429which caused us to enter the current political climate."
430** 2
431Said ideological dispute a hotly debated piece of FSF history -- the exact
432details remain dust to history at this point, but the general idea being that
433Mack was a firm believer in the classical incentive stuctures of ancient Eastern
434society, while Evans favored a more technocratic approach to goading the people
435into doing the freedom fighter's equivalent of removing one's dishes from the
436sink. This resulted in a schism which, though now healed, almost clubbed the
437organization in the knees before it had even left the womb so to speak, and even
438now leaves a dirty taste in the mouth of old timers who picked a side and never
439quite let go. Both figures being pseudo-evangelical in the lore of the FSF not
440helping vis-a-vis the whole 'letting the whole thing go' movement.
441** 3 
442Chinese humor and subtlty being very different from the Western concept --
443the language is fraught with homophones, homographs, heteronyms, you name
444it. But these traits which made it notoriously difficult for foreigners to grok
445gave the Chinese a certain cultural understanding which could not be attained
446otherwise. Each word carried with it (potentially) four to five thousand years
447of nuance, giving the Chinese unmatched powers of concision and expression. It
448is exactly these threads that Wilson quite beautifully pulled at. 
449
450More importantly perhaps, his work was instrumental in bypassing the Great
451Firewall of China. Certainly his characters couldn't be integrated into the web
452without support from developers under the stranglehold of the CCP net-police, 
453but by using their stand-in components as a liason, it gave the growing
454anti-government movement in China a language to communicate with that seemed
455innocuous to censors, but was overflowing with passion and desire.
456** 4
457A well documented psychological phenomena, particularly present in people of
458Kang's age group (18 to 25). One that has almost certainly always existed but
459has been exacerbated by mainstream internet culture. One study notes that media
460consumption was consistently the highest correlative factor in young adult
461anxiety, depression, and self-sabotage, next to drug abuse. 
462** 5
463If only she were Japanese, the hearts of smallish white men everywhere would be
464ablaze as never before.
465** 6
466'Mass' not being a nebulous term either -- the official US government position
467was that for a shooting to be filed in the 'Mass' manila folder, it had to be
468performed by a lone gunman (or else it was likely to be categorized as a
469terrorist attack) with a casualty rating of at least five. However, this number
470is heavily disputed by civil liberties and anti-gun rights activists, as the
471extraordinarily influential OSUSC (read: Organization for the Stagnation of the
472US Constitution, a sort of supergroup that formed from the remnants of the
473thoroughly-exploded NRA, the tobacco industry, and other purveyors of
474particularly sinful goods) pushed heavily to restrict this definition in
475numerous ways, such as:
476
477The term 'mass shooting' is defined ot be acts of killing which were carried out
478using a fully-semiautomatic weapon with a magazine capable of firing for at
479minimum twenty seconds from full capacity. This explicitly excludes weapons
480modified to behave in a semi-semiautomatic nature (such as those augmented with
481'bump stocks' or similar aftermarket tools to convert a non-semiautomatic weapon
482into a semi-semiautomatic weapon). (US 2023 revision of the 'Firearms and
483Citizens Document', page 47, paragraph 5)
484
485
486
487
488
489
490* ideas
491- is there a point when people's tolerance of invasion of privacy will break?
492- how much power do citizens really have over their government? is it possible
493  for an entirely dissatisfied group of citizens to break and form their own
494  republic (in any sense of sovereignty, from total to half)?
495- maybe the FSF turns into some kind of rogue organization -- it starts when
496  hackers/computer people realize htat their privacy has been so viciously
497  compromised that it's actually negatively affecting their lives. anyone who's
498  ever heard of C gets off their ass and begins contributing to a heavily open
499  source 'undernet'. it builds off of ideas like free operating systems and free
500  software -- people doing things entirely not for profit, but instead for their
501  own love of the craft and providing things that benefit humanity. and then
502  thye begin laying their own cable, slowly. 
503- Peering into the lives of a group of people doing something special -- a group
504  of people who are almost evangelical and otherworldly in their stature now,
505  but doing the things that elevated them to that level to begin with. Maybe
506  capture the feeling of Jesus handing some poor guy a fishing rod and letting
507  him have at it
508- the specialization of society and the services it offers to people. the
509  refinement of interests, hobbies, and products down to a science. commercial
510  psychology. marketing, analytics -- everything being completely eked out to
511  optimality. everything designed to be maximally pleasurable.
512- numbing of the senses from information overload
513- Interleaved chapters of different characters, the threads that connect them
514  being particularly long and not revealing themselves for a while, but their
515  ultimate joining (maybe triumphantly so)
516- Keep it less preachy -- explanations of the way the world works should be a
517  bit fey, a bit foreign, something like looking into a mirror where everything
518  is distorted. Explanations of systems which already exist in our world are
519  less interesting and are forced to be more factual, and they don't evoke that
520  queer feeling of reading about how some organic system which feels so close
521  but still so twisted operates.
522- people comparing themselves to their parents