59 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
59 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
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Vortexia had already passed out on the floor of his office. Left alone, I
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sat up and opened the umm-teenth can of Cola for the evening, then sat
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down again and turned to face the ominous grey box which dominated so much of
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my life.
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I began to think back to earlier that evening, when Vortexia had been talking
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to me about how much he'd love to get into a 4x4 and spend some time
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travelling up the East Coast of Africa with some friends, void of any
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interruptions from his usual high-pressure lifestyle. I began to think about
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if he'd ever actually do it, if he would ever snap and leave computers for the
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rest of his life and what he would do if he did leave them - they were his
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life.
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I wondered how we had come to be the way we were, and exactly what sparked off
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the curiosity that ultimately made us the cyberpunks we had become. I pondered
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this for some time, pausing every so often to take another sip of Cola,
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carefully replacing it on the air conditioner each time to keep it cold.
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It eventually came to me that the Cyberpunk nation was in fact united purely
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by its fragmentation. We were united by the fact that despite we were all very
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different people, with different viewpoints and different cultural backgrounds,
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we could still co-exist and actually benefit from eachother, something never
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seen in the rest of the world.
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Coming from South Africa, most of us had gone through apartheid and all of us
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had experienced the common lack of respect for other people present in all
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races in our country. A Black friend of mine, Cache, has a crappy, handwritten,
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torn piece of paper as his birth certificate and although SA wouldn't accept him
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then, and expected him to be content with the zero respect they showed him from
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birth - the hacker community welcomed him with open arms.
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And yet, the outside world remains to distrust our nation - we are the malicious
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imbeciles continously plotting on new ways to erase their data and ruin their
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lives. And even now, *5 years* after apartheid, in the time of a new, so-called
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"enlightened" government, the negative image the world has given us continues to
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hound us. Why - you may ask - Let me tell you why...
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No government exists without internal corruption, such a thing would be
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impossible. The type of people who would want to be in a political party are
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generally power-seeking gluttons to start with. Sure, I am generalising on that
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point, but I would like to see some-one who can prove otherwise. And we, the
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cyberpunk nation, are a threat to our perfect little governments - Because We
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have the ability to, and will, expose government corruption at every possible
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oppurtunity because we are moral people who want to assist those who are
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governed and *not* those who govern. We are the TRUE servants of the people, and
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yet, they are the very ones who distrust us.
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But I can never expect our negative image to truly disappear, the government,
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ever becoming more corrupt and ever trying harder to cover up the truth, are
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simply too powerful a force to defeat. The cyberpunks will remain in the shadows
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and the truth will never be known. Perhaps the rest of the world isn't ready
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for it to happen anyway.
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Lost. The forgotten minority. The people with no hatred...
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--==--==--==--==--==-->>
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wyze1@xtc.za.org
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www.posthuman.za.net
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