Roisin Kincade is a young, talented, full stack techie. Her mind is full of thoughts, ideas, film quotes and analogies. She knows and understands Flow, allowing herself to be in the zone when coding. That takes it out of her. Dropping out of Flow, as she did that night, means inattention. She is not a great fan of command lines, nor of systems admin, at the best of times. Finishing a long coding session she just had to do some minor file system tidying up. We have all done it, typed the wrong thing into the wrong window, deleted the wrong file, messaged the wrong person. This time she typed a Linux command in the wrong place. She missed the terminal window and managed to Tweet the World instead. She expected the public ridicule, the trolls and the bot responses, but she did not expect an automated Direct Message. Neither did she expect to spend the next few days using a game engine to help her talk to a new system. It seemed like she was hacking an old school text adventure game, by invitation, but it was much more! A world of Fractal Iterations, Quantum Computing and strange side effects opened up. It appeared to offer a programming interface to everything around her. Reconfiguring anything in the real world might attract some attention? It might attract attention from parties more interested in controlling the World themselves? She didn't know who they were, she had never heard of them. The corporate cartels have the world pretty much to themselves. They exist above governments and security agencies. She knew they dodged taxes but she didn't know they watched everything everywhere. She didn't know they kept an eye out for such things, such anomalies. A late night Tweet led her to be able to do things for real she had only done in game code and virtual worlds. Now she was alone, off the grid, with no signal. She had a plan, but it might, like those hated command line interfaces, be terminal!
About the Author: Epredator / Ian Hughes is a metaverse evangelist. He has worked in unusual and emerging technologies in both a corporate setting and out in startup land. He specialises in using game technology, such as virtual worlds to help people communicate and understand concepts. Being a techie, and working across many mediums he has used social media since before it was as social as it is now. Blogging and sharing ideas is a core part of who he is. Science Fiction is a natural genre and his first book was spawned from using and developing software for virtual environments. He was resident super geek on a UK TV show called The Cool Stuff Collective for 39 episodes from 2011-2011. He was able to share his enthusiasm for new technology with the next generation, as well as working alongside a monkey, a cave girl and a host of other characters. In the third series he got to relive his own saturday morning childhood TV memories by flinging custard pies at people too. His epredator handle is common across most games and platforms. It is part of his online persona, but heavily integrated with his real life one. Things may be digital but they are still real. He used to use just Predator because he was good at instinctively hunting down bugs. However, then the 20th Century Fox movie and characters appeared and it became a much more common name and handle. The Yautja offering an honourable and strong character to identify with too. In the late 90's everything was getting e put on the front of it, ebusiness, ecommerce. So in part a joke he added the e. It stuck. Epredator became a well known handle through the rise of virtual worlds such as Second Life in 2006-2009. By sharing his ideas with colleagues he became known as a metaverse evangelist. Travelling the world explaining why you don't need to travel the world when you can meet in a virtual world full of expression and fun. He is not all digital though, he is a Head Instructor in the self defence martial art Choi Kwang Do. His wife and two children (the latter are both now black belts too) all practice the art.