Chapter 34/Filewall or Stop the internet I want to get off

561 96 13
                                    

Picture: The firewall now surrounding the cost of England protecting the English from foreign data invasion. Note Nigel Von Trapp was also a climate denier. 

I could tell you about the fantastic voyage from Paris and sailing between France and England. It began pleasantly enough but when we got to London a group of people came on board insisting that they search the ship for memory sticks.

The United Kingdom had declared itself free from the tyranny of the Internet. Unfortunately, the great British public had not thought about the bandwidth of a truck full of memory sticks. At first, nothing had really changed. This was primarily for two reasons. Firstly when a letter from the British government turned up to all the major Internet service providers they all thought it was just an advert for a local Pizza company and ignored it. Nigel Von Trapp complained and a bureaucrat then followed up with a very sternly worded email. This then got stuck in most Internet service providers junk mail box. Finally, the police came with a letter, actually more of a postcard. Nigel's idea was that the police would hold a gun to the Internet service provider's head and the postcard would say 'stop the internet or he pulls the trigger'. Actual due to a Siri dictation error the card read 'stop the internet I want to get off'. Unfortunately United Kingdom police don't carry guns, Nigel didn't know this for some reason and so the postcard was left with the internet service providers.

Even after the Internet Service providers switched the Internet off everything didn't stop. It turns out that companies like Google and Amazon how local copies of these people search for. This would mean that the British could still get u-tube videos but they never got updated. At first people like Nigel von Trap congratulated themselves. "look the Internet has hardly changed we didn't need the rest of the world after all" they said "and all these financial predictions about the end of the world were clearly wrong. We are going to trade better than the rest of the world by post."

Then slowly the internet diverged from the rest of the world and the shortage of cat videos affected the value of the pound, so some people began to act.

While the internet proper stopped people began to figure out ways to let the information flow. Some went over the straight of Dover and then used wi-Fi signals from the other side to reach the French internet.

The solution to this flocking was in Nigel's words to build a firewall about the UK. Unfortunately, they took the term had actually meant Firewall literally. You knew England was close when you saw columns of black smoke rising in the distance. Nigel or rather his supporters in the UK government had actually built a burning wall. The United Kingdom now doubled its energy bill and imported huge amounts of coal and natural gas to keep the wall is burning as a 'defence against foreign information' because the people had spoken 50.001% for to 49.99% against and the will of the people must be obeyed.

In retaliation, some of the population had formed pigeon net - attaching memory sticks to birds and sending them over. When data arrived it was plugged into the English internet 'routed' to the place that requested it. While a memory stick was slow the amount of information it carried was massive so the average flow was about the same but you could end up buffering videos for weeks. 

Some smugglers now drove trucks packed with hard drives from Holland to Kent

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.

Some smugglers now drove trucks packed with hard drives from Holland to Kent. Still despite the growing futility, the English tried harder to keep foreign information out of the Kingdom. Trucks were searched as were tourists in a luxury yacht ( i.e us).

So now everyone coming to the UK had to have a full body cavity search and XRays. Why we had to have both was still beyond me. So it was that we took a day to recover from the searches and then still got off Alexander's yacht and moved very slowly and stiffly.

"Let's get a famous London Cab," said Harvey as we got off the dock near the Tower of London ( I don't want to spoil it for you but it's not a tower it's more of a castle).

"Well can we walk?" Marta started walking stiffly "you can stand on a London bus, let's get one of them."

We walked to what looked like a bus stop. While we did, I heard machine gun fire and a dead pigeon falling from the sky. Finding  Aldwych tube station wasn't as easy as I thought. 

**** 

Bit of bumper week this week with lots of chapters !!! Big hugs to all our readers, voters and commentator. As always we will be dedicating chapters to the first people who vote or comment on them. Join us next week for Kaitlyn's big reunion.  

The Billionaire's Possession (Voted Best Reads for Cats)Where stories live. Discover now