In his first monikered year, he'd made contact with a guy outside Hong Kong; oddball who laced the conversation with references to "banging 10s on the reg" and had a nervous tic, but he'd sold him good codes to the VERTANET and it'd allowed him to implement dynamic geographic sequencing on his logins.

A year later, following the Great Dorito Crisis of '14, he'd gotten spooked enough to make another contact for a new layer, this time through New York. Rain-drenched saunasteam summer night at Luger's, this fellow sitting across from him in a booth, decked out in a trench coat he'd refused to take off despite a nearly violent altercation with an overly insistent doorstaff--he went on for hours about the "parasympathetic implications of psychological unraveling in multiparts" and how he was only months away from his great breakthrough regarding "teleological emotive symphonic embracements as validated through the discursive medium of interactivity along Schopenhauerian lines"; too much talk, but he'd also been willing to give him his Codex Defabulator for a fair price. He'd added the module to the master server.

Then, this year, the board beset by the great cryptocurrency uprising and its influx of miners and coinsplicers: too many unknown influencers, breaching the quiet garden of scholarship he'd tended together with his brothers over the years. It made him anxious. So he made another contact. Out of all of them, this was the hardest. He knew the man from way back, before the outbreak of conflict. He was a gentle soul, not meant for this earth but cursed to live out his days upon it; he surronded himself with animals, dwelled his days scirbbling scared trexts. It'd taken a hefty bribe to the milsat guys to get enough time on their network to trace him down to an encampment in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He'd airlifted in, set down just inside the camp, the greeting no pomp or circumstance but a simple "you know I'm retired now" and a sly smile. He stayed there two weeks, drawing from the well of his knowledge. On the fifteenth day, cleansed and holy, he left with what he came for: the first quantum computing coprocessor.

All of this and he felt protected, but barely. The war between the poasters and the sniffers was constant and unrelenting. His every advancement was met by their own tooled evolution, leading to a fatalistic footrace overwatched by the Madding Crowd of the vast internens publica.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3844343&forum_id=3#35043021)