It is easy, even commonplace, to live with a twinge of paranoia nowadays. We live surrounded by cameras with computers in our cars, trackers in our phones and even smart chips in our passports. We are counted out of the country and counted back in again, our phones are besieged by people wanting us to share information with us and any electrical item could betray us in a second if we do not constantly change our passwords, protect our pins and produce two forms of identification if we want to use a bank account.
So the sense of being watched, checked and monitored is not really paranoid at all is it. After all, it’s happening to everyone so we’re not being picked on as individuals – are we?
Well, I find the whole thing both depressing and fascinating. That’s why I’m a writer – take really bad stuff and think about it for months. That’s what I call job satisfaction. A while ago I had a long muse on the current state of the world and ended up playing “What if..?” As in, “What if the jet stream gets stuck round about Oxford?” or “What if the housing crisis became so bad it became illegal to occupy more than one room per person?” or – well, you get the picture. One of the things I began to muse on was the immense amount of processing power every Western person has at their disposal. I remember when a Commodore 64 was a high-end fancy games machine. You need more memory than its pathetic 64k just to boot up your old beat-up phone.
This was an interesting line of thought and I found myself blocking out a new story, a dystopian mystery book set in a slightly futuristic but recognizable Britain. It was going really well. I began to mine my ridiculously diverse education, mixing technology and psychology with a big dollop of discourse analysis and was just at the end of the fifth chapter when – disaster. Although I saved the latest draft when I looked for it the next day it was gone. Nothing remained, even from the auto-recovery. I had emailed and printed the first four chapters but number five was where it all began to happen. It had a ghost virus, a virus that assembles itself from random bits of code to sneak through firewalls and steal data from anyone who might suspect the truth.
The odd thing is, every other file was intact, but when I tried to download a previously saved copy from my memory stick that vanished too. I’m sure it is just co-incidence and I am now being paranoid but still, it seems strange. So if you’re reading this please pass it on just in case it begins to fade away…..