Sentence

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

This is the opposite of solitary confinement. It’s called ‘tearing down the firewalls’. They’ve removed my filters. I am plugged into the raw datafeed now for the entire world.

The receivers in our heads are tuned to accept the messages of friends. They are tuned to receive only the transmissions of the channels we’ve subscribed to. Our lives are spent testing, trying, and then sculpting and whittling our channels down to a comfort level that allows us access to friend’s emails, VHBlogs, and current local news, whatever we’re interested in.

My data crimes have been numerous. Previous punitive measures were unsuccessful.

My headcase was cracked after the sentence and my CPTU was infected with probes far beyond my capability for defense.

They brought the noise.

I’m stumbling through the streets with a rage of static in my head. Every trivial conversation is mine to overhear. Every phone call. Every voicemail. Every e-mail. Every h-mail. Every advertisement in the midst of every show on every one of the millions of the 24 hour-a-day channels. There is no rest. There is no pause. I have learned to sleep with this noise.

From every major network down to every teenager’s pirate station. From every bot programmed to spam to every fanatic with a grudge for the whole world to hear. They removed all of my illegal codebreakers so every encrypted message hisses like static now. There are a lot of them.

In front of my eyes, pictures overlaid on pictures flicker past in an endless barrage of logos, news feeds, and entertainment.

I am blind and deaf with data. My own thoughts are only one layer amongst billions.

They will turn it off by remote three months from now.

Or I may turn it off before them. The only way I can.