Firewall

They have no inkling of what’s in store for them, he thought. All these hooligans who drive around damaging for ever their hearing with their obnoxious music. They don’t know. They know as little as that woman out walking her dog.

Was he going crazy? He forced himself to think logically. As he kept staring at his computer a picture was starting to emerge. A plausible sequence of events. It was horrifying.

Sometimes he thought about it for a long time late at night. During the past three decades a society had been emerging which he did not fully recognise. In his work he was forever confronted with the consequences of brutal forces that hurled people to the outer margins. The walls surrounding these outcasts were dauntingly high: drugs, unemployment, social indifference. These changes were accompanied by a parallel development in which members of society were being connected ever more tightly by new technological innovations. But this highly efficient electronic network came at the cost of increased vulnerability to sabotage and terror.