The Future We Left Behind by Mike A. Lancaster Read Free Book Online Page B

one terabyte being transmitted to and from this room. That’s a
whole
lot of data. And most of you aren’t even trying.
    ‘I’d like to suggest that we engage in a small experiment. On the count of three I want everyone in this room to open up the Link and browse to one of your closest bookmarked channels. It doesn’t matter which one, but I want everyone to do it. OK?’
    He looked around for confirmation, saw it in a few nods and some grunted words of agreement.
    ‘One. Two. Three.
Open Link
.’
    I did as I was instructed, opening up a GameServer and navigating my way to a multiplayer fantasy game I’ve been dipping in and out of. Yeah, I know, GameServers are a waste of time and credits, but I sometimes need to escape from everything by pretending to be a hero in a virtual world. I don’t know what that says about me, and I don’t particularly care.
    The response from the Link was a little sluggish –everyone else was opening up their own channel – but I still completed the action within a couple of seconds.
    The ‘Welcome’ image from Last Quest XXII greeted me with a
?resume game?
query.
    My father’s voice cut in.
    ‘And now if everyone could leave the Link open, and bring your attention back to our graphic here …’
    Looking back at it, I saw the jagged line was now zigging and zagging wildly, with massive peaks and lows and no visible central line.
    My father pointed at it.
    ‘Here’s the Link when it’s busy,’ he said. ‘You can see quite plainly that data activity is now at incredible levels. From nearly 10,000 to 300,000 TB just by everyone in this room opening a single bookmark. You all probably experienced a slowdown in efficiency. It should illustrate my point: the Link uses enormous amounts of data to operate, and we are running out of the capacity to deal with all this demand.’
    My father put his hand into the graphic and pulled at it with his hand. The view of the peaks and troughs suddenly became an image of each individual Link transmission,hundreds of coloured lines in a web-like structure. He teased free a couple of strands and then expanded them.
    ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Someone’s been making holiday plans.’
    A ShopFront portal for a travel agency hung in the air.
    ‘An adventure holiday. With virtual tours built into the LinkData, all hot-linked to wikis and information databases, with geographical, climatic and historical data. There are multiple links to reviews and photo galleries; and to videos of people who have already been on the holiday.
    ‘One portal, but it contains a massive amount of information; information that has to
exist physically
as stored data. One portal out of billions.’
    He screwed the ShopFront up in his hand and stretched it back into a thread. Then he opened up the second thread.
    ‘Ah, I think my son is in the room,’ he said, exposing my GameServer page to everyone in the room. A muscled warrior stood in a verdant landscape, a biomechanical sword in his hand.
    ‘A simulated world in which millions of Linked playerscan live out digital dreams of chivalry and heroism in a world of magic and adventure.’
    I realised that the odds of my father finding my page were too vast for it to be accidental. He had pulled out that thread from the web deliberately, knowing already that it was mine. I felt sick and embarrassed.
    It wasn’t right that my father was using MY personal data as an example. It was an invasion of privacy, just like showing someone’s holiday plans had been.
    Perry was grinning again and I felt like reminding him that he and I met up in Last Quest just about every day.
    ‘We’ll leave debates about the necessity of such diversions for another time,’ he said, and I knew that he was actually talking straight at me. ‘What I would like you all to think about is the enormous amount of information required to keep a simulated world like this going.’
    He put his fingers into the image and drew out another skein of data