“Too bad,” says Don, now back by the fire in front of the building. “I guess we’ll just have to keep being criminals.” The others nod. No career after all. Just staring at the fire, staring at the sky, and trying to come to grips with the fact that they’re nothing. A few dots on a little planet hurtling through infinity.

MARS

Which you can’t see. But it’s up there, up to the left. And soon people will arrive there. Yay, people.

Good luck. And

BEN

We may remember him as one of the Friends,

One of the nerds, who is sitting at his computer in the new hacker space, looking at what’s happening on Mars. Living environments are going in. A covered oasis is being built. Which brings up questions. The questions are: Can the will to survive defeat the gratification of shopping? There are, after all, no Dior boutiques on Mars, no electric limos, no gold cigarette lighters. Instead there are palm trees, lakes, pelicans. Why pelicans? Anyway it certainly looks more compelling than the little egg carton modules that had been planned for a bunch of idiots. The idea of staging a reality TV show with poor bastards running a dress rehearsal for the billionaires fell through. They couldn’t even line up some white trash willing to stagger around the craters in permafrost with no return ticket. So now it’ll have to be done without a test run, now there’ll have to be a way to get back, now it’ll have to be the luxury version. So people who were instrumental in the destruction of the earth can ruin a new planet. An exclusively male club. Based on what you hear, the first inhabitants should arrive soon, in the next few weeks. Musk will be there. Musk is always there. His leg begins to twitch. Ben can’t concentrate anymore. Of course, he never could for long unless he took Ritalin, but now he’s barely able to stay on one topic for more than ten minutes. They can’t fucking concentrate on anything anymore. Three years ago they had begun to rebuild the entire net. As a computer-to-computer network with no centralization. Peer-to-peer. A genuine alternative to Tor, which from the start hadn’t been prepared to fend off powerful intelligence services with global capabilities. So then, build a new internet with a few activists who are still nearly minors. Do it even though the other side includes highly funded secret services, the FBI, Homeland Security, Mossad, and whatever all their brethren are called, who are kitted out with the most expensive programs in the world. With budgets in the billions. Some days it seems hopeless, this idea of saving the internet. And barely anyone is even interested in it; people don’t understand how a mobile phone works, much less the internet. You push something and you can post a picture online. Cool.