1.4 (4 page)

Pros: Frantic and fun.

Cons: Real world implementation is calcium hungry, so stock up on supplements.

Overall: ****

3. CrowdMap

Like FaceSpace, and MyBook, CrowdMap is a social linking program that brings all your bookmarks and LiveFeeds into one easy-to manage app.

Pros: Cross-posting between social connection pages.

Cons: Geotagging still a little buggy. 

Overall: ****1/2 

2. LinkHangers

What can I say? A perfect filing system for all your templates, file by colour, style, material. There’s even a place to put your embarrassing CosPlay purchases, but I would keep quiet about that if I was you!

Pros: Simply the best there is. 

Cons: None.

Overall: *****

1. Last Quest: Diamond Dust

OK, it’s just a shrunk down version of Last Quest, and is a series of smaller campaigns that don’t devour huge chunks of your free time, but its vast number of mini-games will keep you busy on slider trips and between lectures.

Pros: Those addictive mini-games.

Cons: The graphics are a lot less convincing than in the full game, but then I think they’re pretty cute! 

Overall: *****

File:
113/44/00fgj
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

On the way back from college, the northbound stretch of the city slideway was snarled up around New Lincoln Heights.

Outside the slider’s window, a forest of huge, sparkling, milk-white towers rose up from a seedbed of jewel-like structures.

Inside the slider, people were getting agitated. I reluctantly stopped reading
Gulliver’s Travels
on my LinkPad and connected to the Link by thinking
Open Link
and then
News. Local
. The information started to flow into my mind and I narrowed the stream to concentrate on news relevant only to my GPS position.

It was reporting that a crew was clearing another leaper off the tracks.

It was the third one in the city this week.

It was going to take a whole lot of time for the authorities to sort out, so I grabbed my college bag from the seat, stuffed my Pad into it and made for the slider doors. I was still a couple of klicks away from Amicus Park, my station, but I started to walk anyway.

I passed a group of onlookers who were trying to see over the medical cordon, to catch a glimpse of the person who had let gravity solve their problems for them.

I shook my head. I have no idea what it is in human nature that makes people want to see sights like that. The world was falling apart and there were people craning their necks to see its final collapse.

I stopped.

Whoa
. I thought.
Where had that thought come from?

I quickly opened a media channel on the Link and shopped for some music to shut my brain up.

All, literally, in the blink of an eye.

I downloaded something with old-fashioned guitars and a pounding – almost industrial – beat.

I set my stride to the rhythm and tried not to do any more thinking.

Within five minutes I’d reached the foot of the crystal towers I’d been looking at from the comfort of the slider.

New Lincoln Heights rose up into the sky, a crystalline neighbourhood that had literally been grown from minerals seeded into the earth.

Where the sun struck its angled surfaces rainbows were formed, making the buildings seem less than solid.

I slowed then stopped, just to take in the wonder of the sight close-up, but I was holding up the flow of the pedestrian walkway and people started grumbling.

The city’s planners were growing the Crystal Projects to house the rising number of Strakerites who, it seems, have decided that they need to live separately from the rest of the population.

My father calls the new developments the
diamond ghettoes
, and the Strakerites superstitious primitives. He blames all of society’s problems on the Strakerites, as if they were deliberately making his life harder. His opinions are reinforced daily by LinkStreams transmitted by people who already agree with him.

I’ve started to doubt the wisdom of drawing one’s opinions from the same data well every day. But my father refuses to acknowledge that there
is
another way. You either agree with him or you are wrong.

My walk had taken me around New Lincoln Heights and on to the Middle Beltway that served as a dividing line between the ordinary and the Strakerite neighbourhoods. Rush hour restrictions meant that the beltway was reserved for solar gigs and battery carts, but even taking all other vehicles out of the equation there were still four solid lanes in both directions standing at gridlock.

We came down from the trees, built cities over paradise, and suddenly we’re all sitting in traffic.

It seemed absurd, as if the more we progressed as a race, the smaller our lives actually became.

Maybe that was why I was turning to English lit. To try to find something larger for my life.

Or maybe it was simply that my mother loved to read.

She had owned a small collection of
real
books; wondrous, old things that smelled of dust and vanilla and almonds and wood. Some of my earliest memories are of her, sitting by the side of my bed, an impossibly old volume held in one hand, while the other turned the pages as she read to me.

Wonderful memories, but they always left me feeling sad and bewildered: tainted forever, I guess, by the fact that she is gone.

My father must have disposed of her books. I remember him disapproving of her reading.

I carried on moving towards home and I thought of Lemuel Gulliver making his way through lands that made no sense. Before long I was smiling.

Strakerite

From Linkipedia, the everywhere encyclopedia

A Strakerite is a believer, practitioner or follower of Strakerism, a movement of people who believe that human beings are, at crucial points in human history, upgraded by alien programmers.

The term derives from the Kyle Straker Tapes, a set of audio cassettes believed to have been recorded by Kyle Straker, a fifteen-year-old boy, in the early years of the 21st Century. Much controversy surrounds the tapes themselves and their later transcription, which was published in book form as
0.4

More>>>>>

File:
113/44/00fgj/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

I walked and the people of the city flowed around me, lost in their own interior worlds. Faces passing, eyes open, but distant. Most of them were surfing the Link while walking.

The Link, we are told, is our friend.

It allows us to work, chat, swap data, study, shop, play games, watch films, listen to music, connect with friends, take a virtual vacation or augment reality with filters, menus and even animations – the same things we have been doing for thousands of years – on the go. The Link is there in our heads – there’s no onboard hardware and the software that runs it is external, carried through the air.

It works, we’re reminded, because of our marvellous capacity for filament networking. Yes, we’ve always been able to swap data through our filaments; the Link just provides a constant connection without the need for physical contact. It’s not actually as intense as doing it by filament networking, it is a lot less immersive, and that’s why people can be plugged into the Link and go about their daily business.

The Link helps by screening out the unnecessary details of the environment.

Like, well, the environment.

It makes us more productive.

More useful.

I rarely use it for anything but listening to music when I’m out and about. That and keeping my LinkDiary, but that takes no effort, or even conscious thought. LinkDiary just happens when you turn it on. You don’t even realise you’re making an entry, most of the time.

Like it’s second nature. Or habit.

I can’t remember a precise moment when I decided to stop using the Link for everything, all the time; I’m not even certain that there
was
a moment where I consciously
chose
to cut down on my use.

It just got so exhausting to have all those voices and images, all that data, in my head all the time. So I experimented with spending time off-Link, a little bit at a time.

You know, I’ve been thinking that my life is getting a little weird since I signed up to study literature, but I might as well be honest with myself and say that it actually started some time before that.

There’s something about the Link that scares me, that makes me wonder if . . .

? ?

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?Error Report? =

Wow . . . that hurt . . . a headache . . . diary crashed . . . it’s never done that before . . . has it?

What the hex was I . . .?

Ah, yes.

Walking.

Home.

Headache.

I used my filaments to increase my endorphin levels and to block the pain. It was a crude job, but I didn’t want to use the Link to get a proper painkilling package. I didn’t want to use the Link at all, but after a few paces I could no longer remember why that might be.

So I just kept walking.

It’s weird but the simple act of walking distances has become alien to us now. My legs started hurting after ten minutes of walking; my knees and my feet starting to protest my decision to leave the comfort – and laziness – of the slider.

‘. . . your MEMORIES.’ Someone suddenly shouted, and it made me flinch.

I looked around me.

The human river flowed, upstream and down, tuned into the world, but no longer seeing it.

Had I imagined the voice? It seemed disturbingly possible, a lot more likely than one of the Link-tuned crowd suddenly shouting something out.

I was about to carry on walking when the voice tore through the air again.

‘MEMORIES!’

Just then the crowd parted a little and I saw who was making the noise.

On a street corner, a man was standing on some kind of box or crate, shouting at people as they passed him.

‘If all that you REMEMBER is all that you are: who are you today? And who were you yesterday?’ The man demanded.

But no one was even looking at him; to the passers by it was as if he wasn’t even there.

He looked wild, with a long black mane of hair plastered down on top of his skull. His face was lined and creased by age. And his eyes blazed with what I could only describe as ‘madness’.

I was staring, but I couldn’t help myself. It was such a weird thing to see; to hear.

‘YOU!’ he roared, and I realised he was pointing at me.

Don’t look at him; pretend you haven’t seen him
, I thought.

There was a scuffling noise, then a thud, and when I looked up again the man had leapt down from his makeshift platform and was standing in front of me, blocking my way. Those mad eyes of his were wide and staring.

Staring at me.

I suddenly remembered an odd poem that my mother used to whisper to me when I was small. Something from a long, long time ago. It used to scare me when I was small. It scared me now, too.

We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits. Who knows upon which soil they fed Their hungry, thirsting roots?

I shuddered. If goblin men ever really truly existed, then surely this was one of them.

‘They can rub away our memories,’ he said as I stood there trying to figure out how to get out of the situation. I angled myself to go past him but he stepped in my path again.

‘They can change them into any colour or flavour they like,’ he persisted, putting his face close enough to mine that I could feel his breath.

I thought:
humour him
, and nodded, enthusiastically. ‘My memories are blue,’ I said. ‘And butterscotch.’ 

The man’s face went from ‘insane’ to ‘enraged’. It only took a widening of the eyes and a tightening of the jaw. ‘HOLES!’ he screamed. ‘They dig them in your brain and things fall into them. Things crawl out of them. The answer’s under your feet and it always has been, you’re just too brainwashed to look. Haven’t you seen the symbols? The new . . .’

I was backing away, getting ready to run, when the man’s eyes suddenly went blank and his face seemed to sag. He stood there, almost immobile.

In fact the only sign that he was still capable of movement was his hands, clenching into fists then unclenching, at his sides.

I took my chance and stepped around him, afraid that those hands would suddenly reach out for me, that they would grab me, clenching and unclenching around my throat. I made it ten metres from him before I realised that I was actually running. Slowing to a walk I looked back over my shoulder. The man was still there; still motionless; still doing that thing with his hands.

I looked away from him and hurried along the bands of the slideway.

File:
113/44/00fgj/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

At the end of the long walk: home.

The mad words of the strange man had finally stopped ringing around in my head and I was thinking about Alpha again, trying to work her out.

I’d genuinely never met anyone like her before. She was clever in a way that I wasn’t. Not a learned-by-rote-in-aclassroom clever. She saw
through
the surface of things. I liked that.