His friends called him “The German,” but they were all unimaginative drones anyway. Locked away in the altered version of reality that the corp-controlled government fed them. Vinzent was liberated. Vinzent had long ago seen through the beautiful illusions to the dirty grey reality underneath. The first step was when he dove into an underground server in the datasea that contained instructions on how to hack your own brain, to block wireless updates to your Angel’s software. Once he put those blocks in place, he stripped away the reality filter portions of his Angel and looked on the world with new eyes.
Angry eyes. That day, Vinzent became a crusader for right, an Unjacker. Every night, he dove into the datasea and looked for easily hacked Angel interfaces, quickly stripping them down and removing the filters, liberating their owners and then covering his tracks behind him. Once liberated, no amount of AR filtering would ever be able to hide the truth from those people again.
His target tonight was a corporate wageslave. One of the mindless horde, held in thrall by his corporate masters from birth to death. His viruses cut through the man’s IC with ruthless efficiency, exposing the Angel core. Vinzent’s hands twitched as his datasea avatar pinioned the ARC representing the Angel and cut out the portions of code that comprised it, rerouting basic implant functionality around the gaping hole in his target’s datastream. The Angel shattered into sparkling polygons and dispersed into the datasea. The implant retained the capability of accessing AR feeds and performing all the actions an Angel would do automatically for its owner, but they had to be accessed intentionally now. His target was free to see the world how it really was; a filthy, diseased police state run by corrupt corporations and puppet governments.
Years of experience had given Vinzent almost a sixth sense for when someone was homing in on his avatar. Instead of looking around trying to locate the hunter like a total newb, he activated a special code snippet he devised that created the digital equivalent of a squid’s ink-cloud and surfaced. He deactivated his VR overlay, bringing the old warehouse he was camping in back into view. A quick command to his Angel implant activated another, highly illegal code snippet that burned the AID he had been using, returning his wireless node to his usual identity. Whistling happily, he slipped out of the warehouse and headed off into the night.
