Personal protection

Leibowitz contemplates the advert, speed printed through the box this morning because he’s frightened of Dataminers, especially seeing as a group had got Franklin just this last Wednesday.
Franklin was a data sink for some company down In the bay and that was why he’d been targeted. He was a big guy, regularly exercised and had once boasted about how he had mylomar implants throughout his musculature, to make his tennis serve better. He, like everyone else, was security minded, so it must have taken some degree of professionalism for his attackers to intercept the order for shopping and deceive the house security.
Upon opening the door, rather than being faced with the week’s groceries, Franklin had found himself on the receiving end of an airhypo filled with synthesised Platypus toxin. His Dr.Knowitall™ had mistakenly taken the results as a heart seizure and instantly sedated him, laying him out in his hall. The attackers just hammered the probe straight into his head, taken a snapshot of the carbon datafilaments in his brain and taken off. Franklin died from shock where he’d fallen, the Dr. Knowitall™ continually trying to dope him out of the massive pain he was in.
Leibowitz had told him it wasn’t worth going for a cheap mediplant, but it seemed a shame to be right about it.
Of course the owners of the advert know about this, his house has been targeted for adverts regarding defence against datamining since the incident, but despite the ire he feels at the having had his faxbox hacked, resulting in this 3 second print, he finds himself interested. For $3000, Homewar inc. promise to hard encode an airborne Ebola variant into the data in his head, disguised as a prototype for a hydrogen cell. Put in a basemaker, it should do a good, if not messy job of sorting out anyone who decides to dig him. Of course, the pattern will get recognised within time, and the Dataminers will adapt accordingly, but there’ll be offers of upgrades, or pattern revisions. It’s a small price to pay. If you can’t get justice, you can always have vengeance.

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