It's 1am. Jake Cipher drains the last cold dregs of coffee from his mug, and taps send. His followers have been waiting for his latest technology blog entry to come out for over a week. Now it's out in the cloud and the tweets will coming back within minutes to pass judgement on his latest work. He's hoping for at least 1,000 likes this time. Any less and his employer might replace him with one of those Generation Z kids who've grown up with Mind Connect implants, and can stream their every conscious thought into the Cloud in real time. He'd refused to get one. Jake's old school; he still likes to type straight on the screen or use a holographic keypad projected onto his desk.
For this week's post Jake thought the punters might like to know what computing was like in the digital dark ages, the late 20th Century. Before the Cloud. Even before the original Internet. It would blow most people's Bio Chips just trying to think about it.
Jake needed a drink. Something a bit harder to help him wind down. He grabbed a bottle off the shelf and sloshed some of the contents into his mug. As he leaned back in his chair and sipped the liquor, he started to reflect on his Career. He'd begun a number of them... In college he'd started out programming Avatars. He had a real talent for coding, and this didn't go unnoticed in the hacker community. Jake had been offered a few "special coding jobs" and found it to be very lucrative, but he was a bit unnerved about the possibility of getting put away by the CyberSquad. That would be... bad.
Jake closed his eyes and after a second he noticed a pulsing symbol on the inside of his eyelids. This meant he had a message. He was wearing Digital Contact Lenses with Integrated Heads Up Display. Normally his avatar "Sy" would have flashed this up earlier but he'd said he didn't want to be disturbed until he'd finished his blog.
"Sy, show me the message." Jake said.
A strange symbol flashed up. At first, he couldn't make it out. But once his eyes adjusted, he recognised the Kee-Oo-R code.
"Sy, run this through my Kee-Oo-R interpreter. What does it say?
A message scrolled on the inside of his eyelids. It was from Krank.
Jake leapt out of his chair. "Sy, I'm going out. Something's going on."
Find the cache. Record the clue...