The Gypsy - Introductory Monologue

        The sunshine-stained chrome on the legion of cars in front of me would have been blinding without this flipping win of a new stickerscreen stuck to my windshield. I bought it last week with my extra cash from a downtown deal; a deal that almost ended in smeared me across the speedway tarmac. When sunglare and klutzy fingers combined in a mission to switch my pod into manual, lady luck decided to drop her fairy wings in dismay and gave them a mission success. Thank the software gods for retina tracking and heart rate monitors. Before the surrounding automobile mob could turn my panic-filled pod into just another meat and metal salad, alarms washed through my earbuds and prompts were OKed to set me back on the safe course: the autodrive mode. 


        The windshield just happened to be on sale through exclusive manufacturing centers offering advertising incentives for early buyers. Fit nice and snug over slim Venus' entire windshield spread, too. 75 luscious inches. The action flicks will look amazing. 


        Exclusive because I'm a hardware gypsy. On sale because they're too expensive for anyone to buy. Manufacturing run by cousin subsidiaries of our gypsy brothers' blanket corporations. So, it's a little help from up top; some water poured from one glass to another to even out the pitch of their little glass choir. Yeah, I know, “Slow down, tweak-freak!” What's a hardware gypsy, you ask? 


        A hardware gypsy (or plus pitcher, electron pusher, fry fixer, or silicon slinger) is the perfect exemplar of the modern American generation C worker human. Stuck with his nose to the screen of the Almighty Net just like everyone else in the world, except he is the one that gets paid to smooth out the glitches when you've screwed up. I'm not talking software; the technological priesthood is an elite force so prestigious as to be invisible. I'm talking straight hardware glitches: you accidentally leave your phone for junior to suck on, microwave it, or send it through the laundry; you decide to put your finger in a socket, get struck by lightning, or decide it's your laptop's time for a bathe; stepped on, dust-ridden, buried, bent, battered, or chewed. You call our humble kiosk. Gypsies are dispatched and spat like a surprised geek’s rice out of our huts uptown. We filter through the streets in pod cars on three wheels going 185 miles per hour through traffic. And you can leave the stupid face you're wearing in your nightstand, because we'll mock them off you if you bring 'em to the door. 


        Where was I? Oh. Yeah. Hardware. The other end of the Netside world is the realm of the priesthood and the gods: software. If the gypsies represent the man, the software realm is the church. Sometimes a rare few of us will enter that sacred realm (from whence doth all glory and honor sprinkle) and make attempts to 'ware out a feeble answer to the power rock gods of entertainment (the in your face awesome of technical genius that you can access for pennies a day through the Net). 


        Even a simple attempt to program anything that requires digging into the simple functionalities of your blanket OS would be like deciding you want to race the moon. Naked. Across the ocean. Same precaution applies to submitted code and programs: Throw it on the net - even if it's just on your own private sites - and you had better debugged, redebugged, acclimated, processed, beta, and alpha tested, or else you'd be blacklisted and blocked. Harsh. The real problem is the explosion of franchises built around ads these days. Pageviews and access time explode software earnings by a good 20% usually. At that percentage differential, the software seminaries (populated by hyper-intelligent mathematical savants trained from birth to rock harder than anyone at what they do) are making so many billions that there's hardly any competition. When it comes to software, the church has limited the entirety of the software market to the Five Superpower software companies and what's left of our government. 


        In case you've been out of touch for the past 80 years, perhaps you hadn't heard. The government collapsed shortly after the Internet broke truly free, and the American populace did not. Overtaxation combined with the software revolution, building deficit in the federal government, and the currency crisis as digital currencies robbed the economy of the dollar plunged the entire government system into a big heap of hoohah. 


        So, here's the short version: the military said, “Screw that noise,” and went private, buying itself up into a myriad of varying security companies to serve the American Corporation instead of the decrepit dinosaur. The judicial courts melted down into local systems, establishing laws for corporate properties - selling out to the new arbiters of private property - and established stable local law systems available publicly on the Net. These in turn were enforced by the private security companies suddenly in abundance all over the country. 


        The executive branch went the way of the King and Queen. Legislation no longer exists, although it was rumored that the vestiges of representative governments are actually behind the strongest segment of what's left: the software security agents doing the real James Bond work behind the Net. Their work – the last work of government - is keeping out viral 'ware with security juggernauts, logging software rating services, spitting out quality programming languages, and creating documentation up the sphincter. All funded by a fat .05% sales tax willingly paid by users of the Net bit. 


        Keep your microfiber shorts on and I'll get to the point. Consider this speck on the massive superstructure that is the interstate webwork of commercial highway: traveling with his back to the pads, ears in the Net and eyes on the net, piddling away at the latest interactive environment suite, roving the dark places of the Net or streaming the latest films over the ineffable bandwidth. Company franchise communities – self-sustaining and independent organisms in and of themselves - zip by his peripheral vision as the pod squeezes through on its slim path. Here, a manufacturing plant, there a power facility; here, a farm tower, and there a interstate shipment depot. A narrow sliver of seething humanity winks by as we move at a third the speed of sound, and we ride the wave of their residual energy with the potentiality of a seed carried by the surf.