I haven’t seen the sun since the scream hap­pened six months ago.

It’s funny, I can still re­mem­ber going to the doc­tor for headaches and com­ing home under the strictest or­ders for my par­ents to limit my com­puter time to no more than two hours per day, to pre­serve my eye­sight. Ha! Even be­fore the emer­gency duty, the six­teen year old punks around me often spent 24/7 wired in.

I have never told that story to my col­leagues aboard this ship.

They al­ready refer to me as the old man of the sea, de­spite the fact that 90% of the ill-read lot of them are un­able to iden­tify the Hem­ing­way ori­gins of this ref­er­ence in under three searches. Some parts of human knowl­edge are still as poorly or­ga­nized as they were in 2020, the year I started life on the ships.

At the time, full time life aboard the com­pany ships was al­lur­ing --- the best pro­jects, high pay, the finest fa­cil­i­ties, and a respite from the grind­ing com­mute from the ex­pen­sive city that had been los­ing its soul for a long time. We all al­ready com­muted back and forth to the of­fice aboard the com­muter for a few hours a day. Liv­ing on the ship was just a short scootch down the slip­pery slope, we still had shore leave in the city every week­end evening and days in the of­fice.

In those days a flotilla of these ships drifted out in the Bay. As more and more peo­ple in the com­pany started to live aboard, the cul­ture of se­crecy deep­ened around the wired pro­ject, and the com­pany began to cut its ties to the main­land gov­ern­ment. The ships got big­ger and began to op­er­ate ex­clu­sively off­shore. My ship sailed out under the Golden Gate bridge the same night we launched wired. We cel­e­brated the night with friends ashore that were ex­pe­ri­enc­ing di­rect brain-port in­ter­ac­tion with the in­ter­net for the first time.

Oh, sure there were lots of early glitches - we spent lots of time wiped, fix­ing bugs while wired. It be­came easy to for­get you were at sea, the younger folks took pride in how long they would stay in.

The world picked it up and ran with it -- bil­lions of peo­ple in the first few years.

No one saw the scream com­ing. The en­tire ship was wired in at the time it began. It built up like the thun­der of hate and con­fu­sion that used to roil over the old key­board-bound in­ter­net, but in­de­scrib­ably faster, higher and darker. And then it crashed, sear­ing pain and then mind eras­ing white noise, like being caught in an ocean wave and tum­bled for days.

After what seems to have been two weeks, the sense of tum­bling has died down to the ap­prox­i­mate tur­bu­lence of being in a wash­ing ma­chine and a few of us have es­tab­lished ten­ta­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The bod­ily sup­port sys­tems seem to have kept us rea­son­ably healthy and iso­lated from the phys­i­cal world. But our num­bers have been dra­mat­i­cally re­duced.

We poke around the flot­sam and jet­sam of our wired world, mak­ing small re­pairs here and there, search­ing for oth­ers but not find­ing many, and some­times get­ting lost in the churn for awhile our­selves. We de­bate re­build­ing wired, but in our hearts we know it is both a lost cause and a ter­ri­ble idea. Truly, we fear the day we must dis­con­nect and see what has hap­pened to the real world.