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    Stolen Dreams
    Stolen Dreams
    Stolen Dreams
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Stolen Dreams

    By Jamie Alan Belanger

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    About this ebook

    It is the near future. Most people have a cranial implant for connecting directly to the Net, brain-first. When people die, all of their thoughts, hopes, dreams, and memories are extracted via this interface and encoded in the Soul Bank. Every person is stored indefinitely and made available for anyone to visit. Many partake of this opportunity to learn from the lives and mistakes of others.

    But the memories are just data stored in a computer system, and one day a hacker learns how to steal those memories. Implanting them into the brains of interested buyers is just as easy, and quite profitable.

    Meet Jeremiah Jones: visionary, entrepreneur, sociopath.
    Name your dream.
    Name your price.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLost Luggage Studios, LLC
    Release dateMar 29, 2020
    ISBN9781936489299
    Stolen Dreams
    Author

    Jamie Alan Belanger

    Jamie Alan Belanger started programming computers when he was about six years old. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of South Florida in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. He currently devotes all of his time to Lost Luggage Studios, where he is a programmer, writer, editor, publisher, graphic artist, photographer, and more. In short, Jamie is a workaholic who is rarely more than two days away from having a meaningful conversation with his toaster. His hobbies include WW2 and computer history, artificial intelligence theory, cooking, beer, nature, photography, and designing worlds he'd rather live in.

    Read more from Jamie Alan Belanger

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      Book preview

      Stolen Dreams - Jamie Alan Belanger

      Overture

      If there's one constant in human history, it's that every new thought is followed closely by someone finding a way to twist it into a profit. In a way, it's like a bit of ingrained capitalism. Most people stumble through life, content to trade their time for money. They work for some other person, or a corporation, and spend all day building someone else's dreams. Every so often, though, someone comes along who realizes there's money to be had. A better, easier way to live. They construct a new dream, a new genre, a new industry. These people are hailed as visionaries, geniuses, exceptional paragons of business and finance. Intellectuals and journalists place these people on pedestals for years, or decades, and sing their praises loud.

      Sometimes, these ideas for turning a profit are so vile and cruel that these people are vilified in all the same ways, for all the same reasons.

      Jeremiah Jones was a member of the latter group.

      I

      Jeremiah Jones had spent most of his life in a programming sweat shop outside Dallas, plugging canned bits of code together, creating strings of programs for clients who were little more than numbers on work orders. Most programs were trivial in design, and piecing them together was a mindless exercise. Occasionally he'd stumble upon a challenge that required stitching pieces of programs together to create something new. Those were the moments he relished; the few rare days he got to hack together something original. In moments like that, he rather enjoyed his job. The rest of the jobs were annoying, but he had bills to pay. He'd talk to the clients every now and then to ask or answer questions, and since they were clients, he had to listen to all their ramblings.

      There was Su, from Thailand, who often told him of her dreams. She had wanted to be a dancer, a ballerina, like when she was young. But she never got the big break, despite many years of practice and training. When she reached her early twenties, she had to abandon the dream for something more practical. Now, she was in her eighties and could barely summon the strength to leave her chair. She'd tell this story repeatedly, and usually end in tears.

      Thomas from Seattle always wanted to be a rock star, like the ones from the twentieth century who spent years in a cocaine daze surrounded by naked, writhing groupies. He'd go into great details about what he'd do to those groupies, and Jeremiah Jones had to listen to all the sordid stories and plans.

      His favorite, however, was a hacker who went by the alias Cho Magnon. Jeremiah always guessed he was a kid, probably in his late teens. He talked a lot of shit but was probably all talk. He talked the talk, as they say, and had money to burn on menial scripts. Jeremiah listened to the kid ramble for hours one day, all about how he wanted to be a gangster who could run around the city killing people. All the kid wanted in life was to know what it felt like to kill a man.

      Sometimes, Jeremiah got chills from some of these fantasies. Sometimes he found he was enjoying them as well. So when the details on the Soul Bank started leaking out into the Net, Jeremiah Jones immediately saw an opportunity. Most people on the planet had cranial implants—Turina Jacks, or T-Jacks as most called them—to allow connecting to the Net brain-first. Jeremiah used his daily for work and leisure, as did many others in the world. Using that interface, some scientists had figured out how to pull data out of a brain, and how to encode that data in a way that allowed storing it in a computer system. By the time details leaked to the general public, the vast majority of people were already being stored in the Bank shortly after their deaths.

      The novelty wore thin fast. At first, people flocked to the Bank to talk to the souls... until it became widely known that none of the souls remembered the moment of death, nor had any insight into an afterlife beyond having a constant Net connection. Jeremiah Jones continued to visit long after others had stopped. Large-scale encoding of people's hopes, dreams, memories, fears, and thought processes... there was definitely a chance for profit. He just had to figure out what it was. Eventually his visits tapered off, but he still would go at least once a month to see who was new. He visited random people in the Soul Bank over the course of several years, listening to their stories. After all, he was getting good at listening to people, and the so-called souls inside the Bank were eager to have someone—anyone—to talk to. Jeremiah made mental notes about all the souls he met.

      Then, one day, he met a dancer.

      She was a career dancer, one of those lucky few who was chosen at a young age to tour with a prestigious Russian crew. Jeremiah Jones listened as she talked about all the shows she did, all the cities she visited. As she talked, her memories coalesced in the air around them, rendered in real-time by the Soul Bank. He watched her dance in Prague, Berlin, Shanghai, Tokyo... all the major cities of the world. She danced for twenty years before she was suddenly and tragically killed in a plane crash. When she hit this point in her personal story, she grew sad, stuttering as she tried to reconcile her current existence with that last memory.

      Jeremiah Jones seized the opportunity the distraction provided.

      He used a little script he'd been tinkering with for Cho and connected directly to her data stream. She didn't realize what was happening. Jeremiah took her memories. All the training. All the dancing. All the shows. Her entire career. There was no way to make a copy of the data, so he just took it, leaving her with a twenty-year void in her memories. He compressed her data stream and, as far as she could remember, she was a student in a high school and then she died in a plane crash. He talked to her for a little while, and that's all she could remember.

      He disconnected from the Soul Bank's visitor lobby, double-checked his newly acquired data stream, and placed a call.

      Hello? Su asked, her avatar appearing before him in the Net's common chat room. Mr. Jones?

      Su, he said. Let's get a private chat. He flipped through his list of scripts and chose a simple but effective firewall program. He waved his arms and pulled what appeared to be flickering flames around

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