The average user would have thought a text transfer was ridiculous, since the bandwidth required was so tiny compared to visual or audio streaming. But that was also its great advantage; the amount of data was so tiny that it was easily lost–or hidden–among the exabytes streaming to personal terminals day in and day out.

Crisis was attracted to that kind of anonymity thanks to her innate paranoia. Her personal server space was hosted in Liberia, ostensibly in an inspection-free system, but it had dozens of security precautions linked up, designed to conceal or delete the bare few megabytes of text stored there. If a shareholder in Shanghai got too frisky about what was on their servers, they’d find an empty room.

Serial was online that night–well, given his location, it was actually morning–and they resumed their correspondence via text transfer.

serialCabal: Have you heard about Scuzzy? He was arrested last night.

existentialCrisis: He never was careful enough. What’d they get him for? Trafficking in classical music again?

serialCabal: No. They caught him with a 100-exabyte drive.

existentialCrisis: Well beyond the legal limit. They don’t even make them that large, do they?

serialCabal: Homebrew. And that’s not the half of it. He was trying to make a local copy.

existentialCrisis: I knew he was stupid, but…did he actually manage to download anything?

serialCabal: Everyone I ask gets really quiet really fast. Local copies are always asking for trouble, but this…this is something else entirely.