LevelUP: an 8-bit novel by Micah Joel. Author's definitive online edition.

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Cutscene

Technology Re-launch Hits Stratospheric Heights—What’s at Stake

From the news desk of KQRM: Here are your latest headlines. It may be a distant memory, but before Damage, computers had been doubling in speed about every two years. After being at a standstill for over a decade, the march of technology was making up for lost time, avoiding the chaos that marked the original evolution.

In particular, LevelUP corporation, which many observers had written off when their CEO resigned in disgrace, has emerged again at the forefront of a new industrial revolution. The surprise appointment of Molly Matheson, unknown to the Silicon Valley elite, was widely panned at the time, though detractors didn’t have very long to gloat before they were proven wrong, even by pundit standards.

The “lost decade”—all the years of progress lost—wasn’t a complete write-off. Many important inventions, like the so-called zero-point batteries and mediated neural interfaces, had been in development before Damage. With the bottom falling out of the economy, it wasn’t worth finishing R&D that was months or even weeks from commercial readiness. Now, that’s all changed.

In fact, to a growing number of observers, the post-Reboot march of technology has seemed too good to be true—as if there were some hidden guiding hand pushing mankind forward. Meanwhile, every attempt to reinstate DRM has met with assorted, almost ill-fated failure. But that’s all a silly conspiracy theory, right?

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Copyright 2018, 2019 Micah Joel. All rights reserved.