Julie and Alex were the brains of the band. They said we needed different instruments. I figured three guitars was just fine, but they said the sounds would work well from different…things. They lost me on the music theory, but I was willing to give it a try. Alex learned bass guitar and Julie claimed the acoustic guitar. Me? Well, I got to play the field. Fiddle. Mandolin. Banjo. Sometimes I even played the violin. I played whatever the song called for and loved it.
By the early twenty-first century, most hackers had melded into one of two groups. Some worked for governments or corporations, while others did it for fun or other reasons. Many cut their teeth in the various cultural movements of the time and created the idea of hacktivism. Some did good. Some did bad. We only survived in the end because of those that did good.
All I cared about was girls and parties when I was young. Family too. We used to have the best get togethers. Then the Shang blew Yosemite Yards out of the sky and dropped its remains all over western America. Killed most of my family and friends. I volunteered so I could kill as many Shang as I could find. It was all revenge. I never thought I’d find something worth living for along the way.
The Chinese offensive pushed the American and South Korean forces into a long retreat down the Korean peninsula. They killed hundreds of thousands of South Koreans and only American naval superiority allowed the UN to evacuate two hundred thousand soldiers and civilians back to the south. The armies were far too depleted to keep the combined forces of North Korea and China from once again conquering Seoul, the once proud capital of Korea.
There aren’t a lot of bands with flutes and trumpets. Guitars though? Those are big in bands. So I taught Julie and Alex to play guitar. Don’t get me wrong. They knew how to strum a guitar before we got together, but there’s a difference between that and really jamming out a song on stage. And if I learned anything in marching band it was how to play to the crowd. That proved invaluable when it came time to start a band.
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