The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 6 - SYDNEY

With her new Internet connection, Sydney found her herself facing an unexpected problem. It was so fast, she couldn't find enough things to download to keep the pipe full. Yesterday, before her new high speed connection had been installed, she had started downloading an off-line copy of Wikipedia, more than a hundred gigabytes of data. It was only half downloaded when she got up this morning. After switching to her new connection, it took only minutes to complete. She then set her laptop downloading all of Project Gutenberg, an archive of tens of thousands of public domain books including countless classics. It was finished in less than an hour. She created a script to crawl her favorite tech forum websites, creating a local copy of every page. After the website blocked her IP address because of the excessive traffic, she had to reduce the script's speed. She created scripts to download from multiple sites in parallel, and her network utilization improved, but she was still far below maximum.

Thirty years. She was going to be alone and cut off for more than thirty years. She needed to download every scrap of information, every bit of entertainment that she possibly could before leaving Earth. She couldn't know what she might need during that time, so she should be as broad as possible.

Sydney began making web searches with terms like 'isolation' and 'loneliness' and 'solitary confinement'. It was after finding a medical journal article titled 'Mitigation Factors of Extreme Social Isolation' that she began to adjust her downloading priorities. It went into frightening detail about the kinds of mental health problems that could arise from social isolation, but it also offered techniques for surviving it. The research suggested that hearing the conversations of other people could influence the brain in nearly the same way as engaging in conversation. People who just spent time around other people, even people who just left the television on as background noise, reported a reduced level of emotional stress compared to those who spent long periods with no verbal stimulation.

She began downloading podcasts and archives of old radio shows. Video content also became a higher priority. She configured a stream-ripping program to grab a copy of the movies and shows she streamed over the Internet, starting with the Korean dramas she'd been watching on Netflix. Stream-ripping could only record shows in realtime, which meant only twenty four hours of video per day. That wouldn't come close to recording thirty years worth of video. Sydney could only see one solution.

She would have to become a pirate.

Years ago she had dipped a toe into the murky seas of BitTorrent file sharing, but with modern music and video streaming services, she didn't really feel the need anymore. Netflix alone provided more than enough options for her modest television needs. Other services like Amazon and YouTube could fill in any gaps. But when it came to rapidly downloading huge amounts of data, you couldn't really beat peer-to-peer file sharing. With BitTorrent, you don't download a file from a server that can get overwhelmed under heavy demand. Instead, you download different chunks of the file from the many different people that have already downloaded it before you. As a result, files shared via BitTorrent become easier to download the more popular they are. This, combined with the lack of a central server for authorities to target, made BitTorrent a popular tool for digital piracy.

It was exactly what Sydney needed.

She surfed a few popular file sharing web sites, reading the latest news and browsing the forums. Things had changed since her last foray into file sharing. Torrent files had been mostly replaced by something called magnet links, and there was lots of talk about using virtual private networks and private trackers to avoid being sued for copyright infringement. She was also surprised to learn that the BitTorrent protocol was being used by companies to distribute a wide range of legal content. Video game makers were even incorporating it into their game clients to deliver software updates.

After a bit of comparison shopping, she decided on a Virtual Private Network provider and installed their VPN software. This would encrypt her Internet traffic and obfuscate her IP address, making it near impossible for any copyright infringing behavior to be tracked back to her. With that in place, she swam deeper into the dark parts of the web. Zoe jumped into her lap and head-butted her hand while she was navigating one of the more popular torrent search engines. Her mouse slid off-target, causing her to click an advertisement instead of her intended link.

"Settle down," she admonished her while closing pop-up windows promoting a hentai themed video game, "Dread Pirate Sydney has important work to do." She typed in search terms with her right hand while stroking Zoe with her left.

Jackpot. A list of popular movies filled her screen. Alongside each title it listed the number of peers sharing the file, a community ranking of the user who had initially uploaded it, and the size of the file. She clicked on a few magnet links, then marveled at how fast each file downloaded.

Sydney continued scrolling through the torrent list, noticing a lot of repeats. Often the same movie or television show had been uploaded by more than one person. Some had no peers, meaning the torrent was effectively dead. Others were uploaded by people with an abysmal community rating. Finding the things worth downloading would take some effort.

"This is crazy. It will take forever to wade through all this stuff. I'll never queue up enough to keep it downloading overnight."

Zoe seemed unbothered by her dilemma.

She scrolled on, then stopped upon finding a torrent named 'My Favorite Movies Collection'. It was 85 gigabytes. The torrent's description page gave a listing of several dozen movies all bundled together in the one torrent. Unfortunately it only had two seeds, so it would probably take forever to download. Still, it gave her an idea. She put the word 'collection' into the search field. A list of similarly large torrents soon spilled onto her screen. She sorted by seed count and began browsing.

It was a treasure trove. It seemed many file sharers had made a hobby of organizing files into themed collections. Not just movies, but music, e-books, video games... basically anything that could be copied electronically, someone was curating a collection of it to share with the world. All the movies from a particular director. All the books by a particular author. Every season of a favorite television show. A personal archive of hip-hop and dance music. She continued searching, finding other useful terms like 'bundle' and 'archive' and 'season'. Sydney clicked on links until she had queued up more than a terabyte of downloads. She would have continued searching for torrents late into the night if she had not been interrupted.

Someone was knocking on her door. Loudly.