Welcome, 2015. The year of writing, editing, and polishing Connection Terminated.
I was talking to a few friends the other day about how terrifying I find the idea behind my novels. Being booted from the internet, kicked off, connection terminated, permanently and unexpectedly? That’s one of the scariest things I can think of. There are so many people I adore and care about that would never know what happened to me, that would wonder, and worry, and have no way to follow up on finding out. And I’ve been on the other side of that, too. I used to play a MUD back in the day, and we had two people disappear after 9/11. They didn’t log back on. Everyone speculated and worried about what might have happened, but we didn’t know. We didn’t get confirmation for months that they’d been killed. That they were never going to log back on. I remember every time I logged back on for months, someone would ask if anyone had heard from either of them. They weren’t even friends, in real life. Just two people who happened to work in the same building and play the same game online who both vanished on the same day.
To me, that’s terrifying. That’s lay up at night thinking about how easy it is to just vanish level terrifying.
Or maybe it’s cyber-stalking, instead of being booted from the internet. How easy it is to put together all the little pieces of your life and figure out who you are, where you’re from, what your schedule is. To find you, and you’d never know, because they could be anyone. That guy from your MMO. The girl on your Twitter feed. The kid you argued with on the forum the other day. The old man you laughed at for not being able to figure out Vent. Sure, they’re just digital. Until they’re not.
That’s scary, right? And maybe a little exciting.