Hemispherical Flow

He pulled his 35 ft single masted schooner up next to the floating device. He hoped that it was still intact but feared that the cracked radomes, and bio mass that he could see when the system crested a wave told him otherwise. When he got closer though and hooked the platform in the center D-ring with his davit hook, his hopes were buoyed a bit, he saw that the pressure vessel still looked in-tack. He winched the system up onto the transom behind the cockpit where he used to deploy systems like this, but it had been several years since he turned from ocean researcher to data wrecker.

He thought that he was safe when the threats of cancellations started coming in. He knew that if his contract with the Institute dried up with all the other public science funding, that he could always get odd jobs for the corporate networks. He styled himself as a bit of a global network vagabond who could easily slip between the regional stacks, travel between the digital ecosystems, and cultures that had years ago walled themselves from each other. Despite the physical severance of the key connecting open-internet links, there were still pirate submarine lines, there were still the slow but nearly always up satellite links. The red lines that served the world’s corporations much like they once served the global superpowers; a last ditch attempt to avoid all out nuclear war. Now though it wasn’t physical nuclear war these back channels prevented, rather it was the HF lines, the pirated satellite links, the moon-bounce that the daring few used to communicate between these corporate walled gardens that the corporations wanted to detect, find, prevent, and terminate. They all recognized the risk of letting their respective networks blend, and they did what was needed to prevent it.

He dealt with a bit of a slower form of communication now though. Despite the geographic, ideological, and network distance between the global isolated stacks, they all still relied on what the high seas provided. The world’s oceans, stripped of the rich biodiversity that once permeated at every depth of the water column, still contained a multitude of creatures, ever evolving in a changed but still habitable globally connected water world. Plastic pollution and temperature increase in one part of the world, affected all of the big 4 by virtue of them being connected by the water. Not only that, a fraction of the once rich zoological and plant life in the seas still held many genetic secrets, and platforms like this one were deployed to mine the information of the oceans.

This one didn’t have any markings and because of this he assumed it was one of the ocean faring company’s surface drones. The old research ones would be plastered with logos, sponsoring institutions, “call this number if found” placards, and a bunch of other university, research institute, and government symbols. The companies however, wanted anonymity, deniability, if they lost a drone, they didn’t want anything tying it back to them - even the innocuous ones.

He opened the vessel housing what he knew were long depeated batteries, and dead or fried circuit boards but what he hoped would be intact and full solid state drives. If the satellite antenna was damaged before the dna sequencers and microfluidic pumps, this one might still have some data. If the bio kit was broken before the sat links, all of the data would have been relayed off this one, and hence the drives would be empty. Heck, he even allowed himself to dream of a crypto key, or networked AI token being stored on the drive. After the dozens of cap head screws were unthreaded and rattling around in the tin on the afterdeck, he lifted the lid. The circuitry still looked pretty functional, he set the lid down next to the drone, pulled the drives (only 2 drives totalling 100 TB, this one must have been out here for years), and plugged them into his server connected computer. He mounted the first one on his laptop and - damn encrypted, he will get pennies for this one in the market, or he could discover the owner and return it, earning maybe network credit, but also maybe network banishment. He unmounted it and mounted the other one, unencrypted! But… also a tiny amount of data. He checked the dates on some of the files, looked through the root directory. This wasn’t a company float, he didn’t recognize the usernames on the files, or the names of the code repos as coming from any of the big corporations, this was something else. He took a look at the data directory, it wasn’t pharmaceutical or narcotic lab bound DNA sequences, it was … everything else. It was salinity, temperature data, cloud cover and air temperature, years (wait years!) of position data, current data. This was a modern….science float! It did have bio data, but it was whale sounds, and microscope images, and dna sequences, but not in bulk and not serialized according to similarities to the human genome. This was something different, something new. He looked to the small waves breaking the horizon in the east. This was new, this was hope.