Paper
Of course, by then no one really used paper. Almost every city library had gone virtual and become a warehouse for dataterms. Even the local governments had switched to e-record keeping. So when the Net became, well unusable is the polite term, that was it. No records, of anything.
I mean the Gov doesn’t have a record of your tax payments. Which is good. But, your local doc doesn’t have a record of when the battery on your pacemaker runs out. Which isn’t.
People were just starting to realize that the problems in the ‘Net were a bit more persistent than some infowar attack. Starting to wake up to the fact that the data is completely untrustworthy and, even worse, that pretty much all the backups are completely fubared. Then there was the Nuke.
*sigh* We lost the Night City Hospital research library in that. One of the finest cybernetics libraries in the States. Ok, all electronic but isolated and clean. Gone now, a minimum of a 5 year crash program to even start to recreate it. We can reverse engineer but there were some genuine new principles involved and without the data…
Hmmm? Oh sorry, it’s something of an…occupational…hazard.
Money was on pretty shaky ground even before then, no reliable records at the bank and the only people who had cash were shady from the start. So the cash that people had it was good for a while but then people saw sense: “Yeah your plasticized cloth says $10,000 on it but, mine’s a tent and its raining”
Other priorities you know?
Then when the camps were set up and even later during the move into the Froth people didn’t really think about moving a huge number of books. And the Froth eats what it finds. Some stuff got picked up later but, not a lot and what did was in a hurry ahead of the bow wave. Small town libraries and schools, places like that.
The sad truth is that 90% of the paper anyone thought was worthwhile carrying back then were either holy books or kids books. That means they’re about 60-70% of whatever we find now. I’m not saying that they’re unimportant but there’s only so many copies of “That’s Not My Cow!” I can greet with enthusiasm.
- Kolya Ibramov, Conservatory Archives
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