Item Seed: The Apocalypse Trunk.

Apocalypse Trunk – Google Docs

The Apocalypse Trunk

 

The Apocalypse Trunk resembles an old-style steamer trunk, albeit one with wheels.  Trying to move it around quickly demonstrates why it has wheels: the trunk is heavy, weighing in at around 350 pounds.  It can technically be opened, but in that particular way that’s reserved for items that people are not really supposed to open unless they’re are specifically-trained technical personnel.  There are numerous data ports installed on the side of the Trunk, and a heavy-duty power cord attached to it, so it doesn’t need to be opened to be used anyway.

 

Anyone who does open it will discover that the inside is packed with the latest word in hard drives.  The total storage capacity of the Apocalypse Trunk is about 75 petabytes, which is insane.  That’s enough for Google’s abortive 25 million book library archive – which is convenient, because that’s what’s precisely on the drives.  Which means that this is already one of the problematical items: stolen merchandise that is priceless in both the positive and negative senses. That library is theoretically worth hundreds of millions if not billions, but there’s nobody out there who it could be fenced to.

And that’s just the mundane problem. The esoteric problem is that when Google scanned the contents of various public and academic libraries, the company inadvertently scanned entire collections of Forbidden Tomes.  You see, nobody actually ever keeps all the evil books in one room anymore.  As Miskatonic University library staff learned decades ago, all that does is just give cultists and other lunatics a tangible target to aim for.  No, what happens instead is that the books are misfiled and put in the most obscure, least-visited, and most unappealing portions of the stacks.  

 

The technique frankly works like a charm, bringing down the incident rate from ten or so unfortunate events a year to three or four in a decade.  But the technique also assumes that nobody’s going to come through and digitally reproduce all the bad books.  They’re all in there, at this point.  In high-resolution.  And some seem to be just waiting for some idiot or dupe to plug in a USB port and start looking around. Which seems to be anthropomorphizing, except that it’s remarkably easy to find the more unsavory needles in that particular twenty-five million volume haystack. Trivial, even.

 

But look on the bright side.  By 2040 or so petabyte drives will probably be in smartphones. And won’t those be fun to contain?

One thought on “Item Seed: The Apocalypse Trunk.”

  1. So .. just who’s behind the push to “cloud everything”? No, I know Amazon, I mean who’s *behind* Amazon’s push?
    .
    Because those petabyte hard drives will be available in 2040, but they’ll be specialty items, only for kooks who expect the internet to actually, you know, *crash* or something .. and weirdos who don’t want to share ..
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    “Sweep the cloud, log the bad books most recently uploaded, flag them for sanitizing, identify the upload point of origin, send a team” .. easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
    .
    Mew

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