Starting the 2012 cyber revolution

One thing we do not have in London in 2012 is a housing shortage. The official population on the ID Register is just over two million, but that is probably an overestimate as people keep vanishing every day. The slow AIDS2 virus is taking its toll, and a lot of the GM food we are forced to eat is probably causing loads of allergies. Breathing difficulties are so common that nobody even talks about them any more, yet hardly anyone smokes. Tobacco would have to be imported, so like chocolate, it's one of the things that has vanished from our lives. One of the few pleasures left is marijuana. There are still people who grow it illegally using lamps indoors, and for some crazy reason cannabis is not one of the substances on the drug screening list. Perhaps that is because the Party is running a lot of the growrooms. Everyone only uses it on the weekend, so that they don't act stoned when they turn up for work. Heroin and cocaine are are non existent as they would have to be imported. Most of the drugs people use are official uppers and downers, and so called "conciousness enhancement" medicine. That's the stuff that keeps your dopamine and seratonin in good shape. The biotechnology sector of the economy is the one thing we are still good at. GM food, mood enhancing drugs, DNA manipulation, gene therapy, you name it, the Party is into it. It's the new oil that runs the wheels of the economy, and our major export.
Osiris told me some good news over lunch in the park. The resistance found an abandoned warehouse in the East End full of high end Apple computers, the MacPro stuff with loads of RAM, and terabytes of memory. He thinks that he can network the whole load of stuff together, to build a mother of a supercomputer. If he can get his hands on some satellite technology, he also thinks it might be possible to check if there is any international internet still running anywhere. It's exciting news. Maybe we can finally contact somebody out there, to see if there is a resistance anywhere else. For the first time in a long time Winston Smith is optimistic, and, together with Isis and Maya, I'll be getting one of the unibody MacBooks, so I'll need to find a good hiding place in my container appartment. It's not yet illegal to own old technology, but no point in attracting too much attention. Osiris is working on an alternative communication matrix, with its own encryption and protocols. He wants me to build Grail Warcraft masks, that will cloak our communication. If it works, we'll have our own independent internet and we will be able to start a cyber revolution.