ZEATUNA | Digital Dark Ages

Introduction:
I wrote a micro-fiction “Zeatuna | Enter the Dark Age” in the writing class of the 1729 community , and made a few illustrations with MidJourney. The following is the Chinese version of the novel.

Everything starts with a dream.

I hid in the dark and eavesdropped on their conversation.

They are planning to erase evidence that the NS1729 state once existed.

who are they?

I don’t have time to figure this out.

Everything is stored in the cloud and all I need to do is export the data on-chain.

I turn on the computer, and the screen light projected on my face is my only light source.

I know I have to hurry up.

“Who are you?”

They suddenly appeared in front of me from nowhere.

Before I had a chance to answer, they grabbed my computer and smashed it to pieces, then shot me in the head.

“Ah!” I woke up from a nightmare, gasping for breath.

Thank goodness it was just a dream.

I asked Alexa to open the curtains.

Alexa didn’t respond.

“Alexa, what time is it?”

Alexa didn’t answer.

I ripped off my blindfold, and it was pitch black. I reluctantly got up from the bed and groped in the darkness to the window.

I opened the curtains, and the outside was also shrouded in darkness like the inside of the house.

“What happened? Are the lights broken?”

Tonight’s full moon and a handful of stars are my only source of light.

I fumbled to the living room and turned on my phone.

A red charging symbol is displayed on the screen.

I picked up the computer next to me again: 17% battery, no WIFI connection, 12:19AM.

“Who cut the power?”

I lit a scented candle to help sleep and took it to the hallway of the apartment.

Deathly silence.

All I could hear was my own breathing and the sound of candles burning in the air.

I could feel the urge to scream deep inside, but the scent of lavender from the candles calmed me down for a while.

I don’t want to disturb my neighbors at midnight and wake them up.

The rational thinking in my head told me that I should go back to sleep and everything would be fine tomorrow.

But intuition kept yelling on the other end: Something’s wrong with this today, and you need to find out.

I gathered my courage and rang every neighbor’s doorbell.

Nothing happened.

I started knocking on their door again.

A few minutes passed.

Only one of the four doors was open.

“Who are you?”

A man rubbed his sleepy eyes and asked me impatiently.

My body felt like an electric shock because his voice sounded exactly like “them” in my dream.

“What’s the matter with you?”

He got a little pissed off when he noticed that I didn’t answer his question, but stood dumbfounded in front of his door.

I cheered up, told him I was his neighbor, and asked him if he noticed the power outage.

He said yes, that’s why it took him a while to open the door because he couldn’t see anything.

I asked him if I could borrow his cell phone to call a friend.

After he unlocked the phone, he showed me no signal, no network, and 19% battery remaining on the screen.

My neighbor doesn’t seem to be worried about the situation and just wants to go back to the house and sleep.

Just as he backed away to close the door, I caught a glimpse of a light in his background, exactly like the computer light in my dream.

“Bang” sound. The draught of closing doors blows out my candles and interrupts my thoughts

My Spider-Man intuition reminded me again that something was about to happen.

I shook my head, trying to get the annoying voice out of my head, and went back to the apartment in the dark, lying on the bed.

That voice still didn’t let me go, urging me to explore everything around me.

“shut your mouth!”

I screamed in fear and tried to go back to sleep.

I don’t know how many hours it took me to fall back asleep until a ray of sunlight woke me up.

“Alexa, what time is it?”

No one answered.

I got up from the bed and opened the window and saw that the street outside was full of people.

Some are trying to start Tesla, others are talking to each other.

I turned on the computer and checked the time: 7:29 AM, 12% battery remaining.

I walked from my apartment on the 29th floor to the street to join the conversation.

It was an unforgettable scene for all of us otakus and nerds who didn’t even know our neighbors to gather on the street today for the first time ever to talk to each other.

No one seems to know exactly what happened and how long this outage will last.

I looked around and didn’t see the neighbor I disturbed yesterday.

In the midst of the loud discussion, I remembered the only power outage I’ve had in the past 27 years.

That was also when I lost my parents and my country, Zeatuna.

A rare snowstorm completely destroyed the national grid, causing a months-long power outage.

Millions died of hypothermia, starvation, lack of water and social violence.

The official record for that catastrophic power outage was 129 days, but those who survived believe that officials still misrepresented the facts, whether it was the death toll or the actual number of days of disaster.

A few days after the power went out, the citizens of Zeatuna could no longer live in traditional wooden houses because of the cold weather, so everyone rushed to the city center to occupy the reinforced concrete buildings there.

Bloody violence occurs when all people crave the same scarce substance.

People started collecting as much food and water as possible from grocery stores and supermarkets, and after a few days, the streets were littered with corpses.

I followed my parents and their friends from place to place, looking for the next safe place to live.

I just remember one time they took us to a warehouse, told us to take care of each other and avoid the rioting crowd, then walked outside with guns in hand to find more food.

That was my last impression of my parents, the weak but firm back.

I don’t know how many days later, I and other children who had been placed here by their parents were found by a group of people in military uniforms.

They told us that they were peacekeepers sent by the United Nations to investigate the power outage in my country. And we children may be the only survivors among millions of citizens.

Even those soldiers who have seen many brutal scenes of war still cannot believe what is happening before their eyes at this time.

I could see their shock and fear in their expressions.

This is the last memory of my country before I set foot on the rescue plane: corpses, blood, darkness, chaos, tears, tanks, bombs, wounded land…

My country, Zeatuna, is in the southern hemisphere, an island cut off from the rest of the continent.

Steep cliffs, dense rivers, majestic waterfalls and golden-sand mangroves attract tourists from all over the world.

The tourism industry used to be the mainstay of our local economy, but a sudden global pandemic changed everything.

Prime Minister Zeatuna has issued a strict lockdown to contain the virus, and without the support of tourists from home and abroad, the local economy has been hit hard.

At this moment, several travel industry entrepreneurs on the verge of bankruptcy did not sit still, but came up with solutions on their own. They heard about bitcoin and blockchain technology, so they crowdfunded a few hydroelectric power stations and switched to mining.

Their efforts quickly paid off, attracting the attention of miners around the world. Zeatuna quickly digitally transformed with clean, cheap energy and stable internet connections, becoming one of the few countries to benefit from the global pandemic.

The vigorous development of Zeatuna lasted for more than ten years, until one day, Mother Earth seemed to be suddenly tired of the mischief of human beings on her skin, so she sent my country a blizzard that has never been seen in a hundred years.

My country was nearly wiped out in that disaster, and our land suffered from civil unrest and overexploitation.

The country that was once known as “God’s back garden” is now only a group of underage orphans who have no life experience and only swipe the screen and play on the computer.

After a series of meetings and discussions, the United Nations passed an agreement whereby the surviving Zeatuna orphans would jointly own Zeatuna’s land.

Because our country has just experienced a massive disaster, it is temporarily uninhabitable, and the orphans, including me, are too young to govern the country together and determine the future of the country. The solution the adults have come up with is to wait until all of us orphans are of legal voting age and then decide Zeatuna’s fate together.

After the UN announcement, journalists quickly surrounded us, as if we were cast in a reality TV show, and audiences around the world were eager to know our fate and wanted to see the 79 surviving 2-17 year olds. Where will the Zeatuna children end up.

Then please wait 19 years until the youngest child grows up to see the end of this reality show.

While the United Nations was busy discussing Zeatuna’s rescue and recovery plan, many bitcoin and blockchain communities who had used Zeatuna’s mining services began to organize volunteers to help us clean up dead bodies, repair buildings, and even set up FosterDAO (Foster Family DAO) , intend to jointly adopt our poor orphans.

At that time, there was an emerging national model that was being promoted in major communities. They were firstly built on the Internet, then crowdfunded land offline, and finally, on the basis of accumulating a certain population and capital, submitted new emerging technologies to the United Nations. Independent countries apply for international diplomatic recognition.

NS1729 is one of the closest communities to becoming the first emerging country. They have millions of members around the world and an astonishing number of treasuries. A task force has been set up and they are intensively searching around the world. The right land in order to be the first cyber nation in the world.

My foster family’s parents were core members of the NS1729 community, and many other Zeatuna children were successively placed into NS1729 members’ families.

Some journalists and content creators in the mainstream media and other online communities have put forward a conspiracy theory: Is NS1729 playing a big game? If you raise Zeatuna’s children now, you can brainwash them, subtly influence their future decisions, and finally get Zeatuna’s land in your pocket.

I was only 9 years old when I was adopted and didn’t understand the news that was going on at the time. All I cared about was a safe place to live and my foster parents gave me everything I needed. While the United Nations has adopted witness protection laws to hide our identities, in a digital world where everyone is a journalist, we have nowhere to hide.

The eldest of us orphans is N, she has created a channel on Tiscord so that we children who are housed on five continents can keep in touch with each other, she also proposes to come back to Zeatuna to reunite every year, but her beauty Wishes were not fulfilled.

N has been in my mind for as long as I can remember, her parents and mine were both tour guides and later retrained together to join the cryptocurrency wave. I grew up playing with N and learned how to code, write and draw from her.

I remember when the riots first started, our parents all acted together, and N became my support as I waited for my parents to go out for food. But neither of our parents came back again, and N told me later that she saw rags of clothing belonging to her parents on her way out to find them.

“Probably died from a bomb.” N told me the bad news with an expressionless face.

I was so hungry and tired that I didn’t dare to cry out loud, I just let the tears flow down my face.

“S, you have to be strong. Everything will be fine. Trust me. Don’t forget who you really are, and don’t forget our country, and one day we will go back together and rebuild our country.”

That was the last thing N said to me, and I flew with my foster family to that country of the Stars and Stripes that I had only ever seen on TV.

Just two days before my 21st birthday, my neighborhood was already surrounded by journalists and online creators. According to the agreement, when Zeatuna’s children turn 21, they can leave the care of their guardians to decide their own future path.

The whole world wants to know my fate. After all, people have been following me on this reality show for 12 years.

Since I’ve been in foster care, I’ve always been surrounded by reporters and paparazzi who often ask me weird questions like did my adoptive parents tell me to vote for NS1729, or make me open with other Zeatuna Children’s conversation.

I listened to my adoptive parents and ignored the people who followed me secretly, only to find that they often lied about my story. So I started my own blog and podcast to tell my story myself.

I also love hearing my adoptive parents speak up about decentralized media and the internet state. They and other members of NS1729 have also been my subjects for writing and interviewing.

As I grew up, I saw more and more people abandon the 9-to-5 work style that prevailed during the original industrial revolution, and instead choose to become digital nomads and move into a highly flexible remote work model.

More and more sovereign individuals are beginning to question the existing social system and join the thriving decentralized organizations and communities to peacefully build emerging cyber states.

NS1729, as the first organization to implement the “Network National Program” proposed by Anonymous God B, has been under pressure from many parties. On the one hand, traditional countries are afraid that if this emerging country model succeeds, it will inevitably lead to a domino effect; on the other hand, other online communities also want to be “the first person to eat crabs”, even though they have imitated the founding of NS1729 in the past. experience, but now every community is ambitious to come out on top and become the world’s first “cyber nation”.

On my birthday, I still said goodbye to my adoptive parents and decided to go back to Zeatuna to reunite with N. I have been away from my hometown for 12 years and it is time to return to my hometown.

My hometown has been slowly restored to one of the largest nature reserves and ecosystems in the world during the years of being abandoned by humans. Like Chernobyl, I learned in history, that place became a haven for flora and fauna after the evacuation of the devastated humans.

To a certain extent, the natural disasters that Zeatuna encountered also truly revealed the significant human impact on the earth’s environment. Although the snowstorm that year devastated my country, it did far less damage to the local ecosystem than human overexploitation for survival, or the massive riots that followed.

As I grew up, I learned that after we were successively taken by foster families, 2 of the 79 children who survived died in accidents, 27 renounced Zeatuna citizenship, and 29 quit the Tiscord channel, I don’t want to have any connection with the past anymore. The remaining 21 kids, including me, are the only active users on the channel and a group of people with ambitions to rebuild the country. I am the 17th person to reach the age of return, and in another 7 years, when the youngest child in the Tidcord community returns, the final vote will be held.

I had expected the result.

N is a natural leader and she has spent all these years preparing to be the Governor of the new Zeatuna. Of course, she will definitely get all our votes. The question is, what is she going to do next to rebuild our country, revive the economy and forge a new national consciousness?

N told me that she had a perfect plan. She wanted me to join her as her assistant, like when we used to play games when we were kids, and I was like her little sidekick and little assistant who could always give her a helping hand.

I agreed. Because I wanted to report on N’s story and personally record the story of the new Zeatuna.

But things are far more complicated than I imagined. After so many years, although N and I have been communicating on the Internet, she has become no longer like the confidant sister I know who is very caring.

As I learned step by step of her seemingly flawless plan, I was struck by her ambition and dark side.

“Will you do anything to achieve your goals?” I asked her.

N firmly said of course.

I shook my head, pulling my thoughts back to the present moment.

After chatting with these neighbors I had never met on the street, I saw that everyone had no idea what was going on, so I went back to the apartment.

It’s just that every time I go up the stairs, I feel a slight chill, and that strange sense of unease reappears, and the nightmare from last night replays again and again in my mind.

What’s wrong with me? Maybe the power outage triggered my childhood trauma?

I shook my head, trying to figure out what I should do on a day without electricity or internet.

As if nothing can be done.

I can’t talk to my friends and ask them how they’re doing, and I can’t come to them without a GPS and a car.

The only thing I can do is pray for the power to come back quickly.

But who should I pray to?

We now live in this decentralized digital society, and it seems that we have never thought about where these necessary water and grid infrastructures come from, nor who should we turn to to solve the problem if there is a power outage one day. . Because in most people’s lives, this has never happened.

I sat on the floor meditating, and many questions came to my mind.

“Why haven’t people learned from Zeatuna’s near-destruction history to prepare for natural disasters and massive power outages?”

“Why is our world like a closed loop, countless historical events are always repeating, and it seems that human beings can never break this vicious circle?”

“Will there be another riot like the one I experienced as a child this time?”

Thinking of this, I immediately broke out in a cold sweat and got up to get a drink to try to suppress the shock.

Too bad there was nothing left in the fridge. I should go out and stock up on food and water just in case.

I went downstairs again and saw that people had gone from their initial conversational mode into a state of panic.

Many people began to gather outside supermarkets and malls, trying to break in to snatch food and water.

I shivered in the crowd.

Don’t do it again! don’t want!

However, everything is out of my control.

The riot finally broke out at night.

History repeats itself.

Once again, I stand alone in a sea of ​​fire filled with people.

But this time, there is no support from parents and friends.

The chaos lasted less than a week and power was quietly restored.

When the street lamps were lit up one by one, thunderous applause broke out from the whole block, and the celebratory fireworks suddenly lit up the sky, as if welcoming the new year.

Once people can get online again, things seem to be back to normal quickly.

I only managed to grab a handful of cans and drinks from the riots, enough to get me through this week of chaos.

When I checked the news online again, I learned that this massive outage came from a cyberattack.

“Network attacks?”
I immediately opened Tiscord and found that the NS1729 server had disappeared from the list.

“Damn!”

I grabbed my phone and tried to call my adoptive parents, but their information I had stored was gone.

I searched for NS1729 on MiGe. The result is not the content related to the “world’s first Internet country” that should appear, but some irrelevant product model information.

I rushed out of the apartment and desperately rang the neighbor’s doorbell.

Thinking maybe it’s my network problem and I should try someone else’s search engine.

I rang the doorbell for a long time and kept knocking on the doors of the neighbors, but no one came to answer.

I ran back to the apartment and tried to infiltrate the server to retrieve the data on the chain, when I suddenly heard the sound of the neighbor opening the door.

The boy with an impatient face at the time came out. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for many days.

“Can I borrow your computer?”

“What’s the use?”

“Can you please help me search for NS1729? Very important, please!”

I begged him, and his eyes suddenly lit up.

So he went back to the room and stepped into my apartment with the computer.

Same result. There is no information related to the country of the network.

“what are you doing?”

he ask me.

“Retrieve data from NS1729.”

“Oh? I want to see how you can do it.”

At this point, I felt something against the back of my head.

I turned my head and saw the man was pointing a gun at me.

“traitor.”

he said, and pulled the trigger.

Below is N’s plan.

Once she is elected governor of the new Zeatuna, she will make a deal with the NS1729 core team, sell them our land at a premium, and then use them to rebuild our infrastructure because they have better human and financial resources .

When the time comes, N will take the tech-savvy Zeatuna orphan army, including me, and the hackers she paid for to launch a cyberattack on cloud servers and satellite towers around the world, erasing all data related to NS1729, even her The transaction records of the year, thus rewriting history, let Zeatuna return to her hands.

I quietly left Zeatuna after getting to know her crazy thoughts. Before I left, I sent her a message. On the one hand, I persuaded her to stop this hacking operation that would damage human civilization. On the other hand, I confided to her that I would not betray her, but on the other hand, I also reminded my adoptive parents to pay attention to the digital war. .

In the next days of exile, I don’t know if N has listened to my advice or contacted my adoptive parents. I am just obsessed with my own world and started to create my own S universe in the web7 world.

Almost all of the world’s information is stored digitally in the cloud, so it’s easy to recruit top hackers to disrupt or disrupt server maintenance and management.

It only took N a week to do it, as expected of her.

I fell in a pool of blood, recalling the bits and pieces with N.

Human memory is always short, and history can only be written by the victors.

When Qin Shi Huang burned books and pit Confucian scholars in 213 BC, the Chinese people lost most of their records of the origins of Chinese civilization.

When N called for a cyber attack to destroy cloud servers in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 48 years, future generations will never know the story of the first cyber nation and its founding members.

While we have the technology to record everything on the blockchain in the web3 era, there is a lot of micro-history that can be preserved compared to previous eras. But human beings have never been able to get rid of the laws of physics. When the physical path for storing data is no longer, we inevitably enter the digital dark age.

I closed my eyes calmly.

In my short life, I did my part and wrote my history.

Although short and simple, it is real and important.

What about N?