Jack of Harts

The open networks of the early twenty first century were defended by the best human minds and coders humanity had yet created. But humanity has never been as open with each other as our best minds wished we would be. Religious, racial, and national identities waged battles of closed minds with each other. And if there were many who made friends across the globe, there were more who made enemies. Words became their weapon of choice, and when those who disagreed refused to surrender, the imposition of silence became the next.

Russia’s Quantum Curtain. The Great Firewall of China. All over the world, those networks that survived only did so because of the firewalls that closed them off to the other networks. By the time we returned to space, humanity’s networks were riven into over a dozen separate systems. No American computer could talk with a Chinese system because the physical and software links no longer existed. It has been over three centuries and our networks are still divided.