![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Everyone laughed when they built the first net reef. Why bother with a biotechnological architecture when they'd finally breached 100TBs etched on the inner curvature of a carbon quantum bubble? It was like trading in your hybrid car for a steam powered cart. Miles Yu had the money, obviously, and he was certainly deep into that borderline behaviour that only the rich got away with as 'eccentricity'. Still, everyone pointed out the initial cost, the expense of the upkeep, and his ambitious idea of growth as simply an idea ten years too late. Yu just smiled his little smile, like when he launched the first adaptive OS or the RFID spime aggregator that built his fortune, and said nothing.
When you're worth more than a dozen African countries combined, you can get away with dumping multi-billions into a saline complex stuffed with electro-reactive jelly and lined with nano-processors.
When the reef went active, it drew the weird and the wonky; the fringes of the net that looked for the razorthin sideways cracks to populate. A technomantic Bedouin who roamed the settlements of others, brought art and science in microsecond bursts and disappeared just as quick. The reef was a hot vent; soon crawling with information tubeworms, flourishing crimson in minute measured life cycles. And where they crashed, they became fuel for new ideas.
It wasn't as fast as the normal servers. It didn't support technology as a rigid architecture, and the NASDAQ bemoaned it every making back the substantial investment.
But then, something changed.
The first sign was to the spam engines. Specially adaptive coders who had made a business out of outwitting every block, filter and firewall the rest of the internet could throw up suddenly found themselves locked out of the reef. They tried every trick they knew, but for no reason they could determine, their messages would not get through. A few tried direct retaliation, with DOS attacks and every cracker trick they could cobble together. The lucky ones were frustrated. The unlucky found themselves fighting back against their own programs, still recognizably theirs, but changed.
The programs used to create the ordered structure of the rest of the net were subsumed by the reef. Programmers found themselves stuck talking to former colleagues who had gone into it early, and now claimed that they could 'talk' to it to make things run, rather than brute-forcing code and patches. Polyps grew out of the reef, infesting on other servers and services, colonizing the net. Soon, science provided a second explanation to the confounded programmers.
Terraforming.
The reef was shut down by an Executive Order, and Yu arrested, but it was too late. The spread went through security and over firewalls like mist past a garden fence. China attempted to shutdown the internet entirely, but their economy was too intermixed. Virus protection became worthless as the reefs fought them like an organic disease, adapting and changing to remove weaknesses. Before long, the net had been replaced with the strange luminance of the reef. Companies hired users who could 'sing' the reef, building their stores and programs anew. The hard electronic media had been killed, leading to a stranger thing; an electronic community built on itself and out of itself where every component was vital. The crimson flourish of a minute as key as the biggest site and the largest store, which they needed to protect to keep themselves whole. The online engine was driven by art and weirdness, without which, everything would slowly wither.
In his cell, Yu smiled his little smile and said nothing.
When you're worth more than a dozen African countries combined, you can get away with dumping multi-billions into a saline complex stuffed with electro-reactive jelly and lined with nano-processors.
When the reef went active, it drew the weird and the wonky; the fringes of the net that looked for the razorthin sideways cracks to populate. A technomantic Bedouin who roamed the settlements of others, brought art and science in microsecond bursts and disappeared just as quick. The reef was a hot vent; soon crawling with information tubeworms, flourishing crimson in minute measured life cycles. And where they crashed, they became fuel for new ideas.
It wasn't as fast as the normal servers. It didn't support technology as a rigid architecture, and the NASDAQ bemoaned it every making back the substantial investment.
But then, something changed.
The first sign was to the spam engines. Specially adaptive coders who had made a business out of outwitting every block, filter and firewall the rest of the internet could throw up suddenly found themselves locked out of the reef. They tried every trick they knew, but for no reason they could determine, their messages would not get through. A few tried direct retaliation, with DOS attacks and every cracker trick they could cobble together. The lucky ones were frustrated. The unlucky found themselves fighting back against their own programs, still recognizably theirs, but changed.
The programs used to create the ordered structure of the rest of the net were subsumed by the reef. Programmers found themselves stuck talking to former colleagues who had gone into it early, and now claimed that they could 'talk' to it to make things run, rather than brute-forcing code and patches. Polyps grew out of the reef, infesting on other servers and services, colonizing the net. Soon, science provided a second explanation to the confounded programmers.
Terraforming.
The reef was shut down by an Executive Order, and Yu arrested, but it was too late. The spread went through security and over firewalls like mist past a garden fence. China attempted to shutdown the internet entirely, but their economy was too intermixed. Virus protection became worthless as the reefs fought them like an organic disease, adapting and changing to remove weaknesses. Before long, the net had been replaced with the strange luminance of the reef. Companies hired users who could 'sing' the reef, building their stores and programs anew. The hard electronic media had been killed, leading to a stranger thing; an electronic community built on itself and out of itself where every component was vital. The crimson flourish of a minute as key as the biggest site and the largest store, which they needed to protect to keep themselves whole. The online engine was driven by art and weirdness, without which, everything would slowly wither.
In his cell, Yu smiled his little smile and said nothing.
