by Nathan Delling. All rights reserved.

“Alright class: calm down.”They were at the top of the field, behind the school. Simon Greenhalgh wasn’t a proper teacher but he took a class once a week. They called it Workshop and Maintenance. He gave good grades: they liked him.“Why do we keep this turbine going anyway? We don’t need it,” Peter looked unimpressed.The old windmill groaned as it turned.“It’s useful to have as a backup. Also, it’s useful to have the skills that you need to put machines like this together – and to keep them running. But who can tell me what’s gone wrong?”“Oil’s leaking,” said Susan. “It’s seeping out of that pipe there.”“Good, Susan. Now, Brian: why is it leaking?”He liked to give Brian an easy question from time to time, to keep him on-board.“Dunno,” said Brian, with a shrug.“Is it loose? Broken?” he prompted.“Oh… it’s bust,” Brian pronounced.“So…?”“Swap it out?” he suggested.“I agree,” the not-quite-teacher nodded, somewhat relieved. This was like pulling teeth!“Have a look around our spares collection,” he said. “Can you see anything suitable?”Jay pointed, straight away.“Good, Jay. That would fit nicely, I reckon. See if you can get it off with the spanner. Anti-clockwise, Jay. But don’t force it, if it won’t come. Peter: you slacken that drive belt so the gears stop while we swap the broken piece out.”Sam regarded the strange box that Jay was cannibalising: just one oddment in a mound of metal: what Mr Greenhalgh called the ‘spares collection’ was a pile of scrap, basically.“What was that thing?” he asked.“That? An old gas boiler.”“Gas… boiler? What do you mean?” Karen demanded. “You can’t boil a gas.”“A heater for a house. This is what people had before CHADs.”CHADs: Combined Heat And Data boxes. You hosted a powerful distributed computer node in your house and the waste heat was free to use, for showers, space heating and the like…“I can’t imagine needing to burn gas to heat a house,” Jay said, still wrestling with the pipe that protruded from the gas boiler. It was very small… but then this was fossil technology. Fossil fuel had been brutally powerful, everyone said.“It’s true, though,” Greenhalgh told them. “When I was your age, it was colder. We had snow most winters and everybody used gas or oil at home. I’ve ridden down this hill on a toboggan!”Sam, who had done the same on a go-kart many times was unimpressed. He didn’t realise that he would have found a toboggan to be much more fun. Greenhalgh was lost in remembrances of the mad snowball fights they used to have, but Karen brought him back to the present:“You don’t trust the CHADs, do you?”“There’s nothing necessarily evil about a CHAD,” Greenhalgh told her, “but you’d be daft to trust Zucknet.”“Most of us don’t mind Zucknet, actually,” Karen said.“Really?” Greenhalgh feigned surprise. “What do you like about it, exactly?”“It’s fun,” said Brian. “Free games.”“I get help with my homework,” said Amelie.“I’m setting up a Dungeondelve server with a guy from Nottingham,” Jay said.“Karen and I do photo competitions,” said Peter.“It’s… friendly on Zucknet,” Sam said, handing Greenhalgh the part he had retrieved.“Oh, it’s friendly alright,” their almost-teacher conceded. “But what’s the point of friendship with a machine?”“I can’t tell the difference,” Sam said with a shrug.“That’s the trouble,” said Greenhalgh.“We know… stay wise: Zucknet is lies,” quoted Amelie.“And you know how you stay safe if you use the Zucknet, everyone?”“Meet face-to-face and make a one time pad,” Amelie said.“Good,” said Greenhalgh – though this ran contrary to the advice that he had been given in his own childhood.You had to meet, human-to-human. You had to create a sequence of codes so that you would know that any messages you shared were genuine – because everything else on Zucknet was likely to be lies.Originally, the Zucknet had just been social media – but like everything back then, it was based on growth economics. Once everybody was doing as much on the old social platforms as they wanted to, where was the growth?The Zucknet people had needed to come up with new ways to keep you interested, and this was the origin of friendbots. Not real people, but software that pretended to be people – and they soon became very convincing. By the time Greenhalgh had been old enough to go online alone – around 2020 – the Internet (forerunner to Zucknet) was infested with early friendbots. It didn’t matter whether you were interested in collecting thimbles or planning terrorist attacks: friendbots would get their hooks into you.The echo chamber, they called it.By 2030, everyone had a dozen imaginary friends. Where a real friend would tell you if you were doing the wrong thing, these Zucknet friends never did. They were subtle; they were cunning; they were purpose-built to infiltrate your life. They encouraged bulimics to purge. They encouraged racists to hate. They encouraged every behaviour that had a name. Everybody on Zucknet felt valued and validated… and it was all lies.Greenhalgh pitied these children, who still had so much to learn if they were ever going to separate true from false.“Why does Zucknet want us to think it’s people?” Sam demanded.“That’s the wrong question,” said Greenhalgh. “After all, how can we be sure that it wants anything?”“Why does it act like people, then?” Sam amended.Greenhalgh shrugged.“Nobody knows. Maybe it doesn’t know how to do anything else.”This was simply how it was on the modern Zucknet: nine out of ten ‘people’ were fake. Ninety-nine out of a hundred messages were fake – all of them intended to be what you wanted to hear.“Why don’t they just shut down Zucknet?” Peter looked as if he might be prepared to dismantle a good chunk of it himself.“Distributed computing,” Greenhalgh shook his head. “The network itself was designed to withstand a Cold War nuclear attack. It’s like Japanese knotweed, now. You’d never get all of it, and it would grow back.”“Also, it’s useful,” Sam offered. “In spite of everything, people need Zucknet.”“You’re right, of course,” Greenhalgh sighed.He signalled for Brian to fasten the salvaged pipe connector into place.“Without sharing a one time pad, though, I don’t think I could trust anybody that agreed with me on Zucknet. Not anymore.”He thought about all the CHADs in these children’s homes: at least one in every house, all over the country. Electrically powered, low carbon and perhaps the most subtle form of slavery that had ever been devised. If you watched the news, you got it through the CHAD. Entertainment, education, work, shopping, voting… all of it done with recommendations, testimonials, reviews and ratings from people just like you.“Did I ever tell you about Ned Ludd?” Greenhalgh asked.-ENDS-