world. Hosts, those things that jealously guard the ac-cumulated secrets of mankind. Until very recently, we were barely scratching the surface of what we could do.
Turns out, there is more power in there then we could have ever imagined. And it also turns out that all of this is more frightening than we could ever have imagined.
It’s time for us to share what we know. It’s time for ev-ery one of you hackers out there to understand what you’re up against, and what you can achieve. I’m warn-ing you though: I won’t claim hackwarn-ing was ever a child’s game, but now more than ever, if you aren’t at the top of your game, maybe its best you find something else to do. Hosts are … well, you’ll see what they are. But they aren’t for those who doubt their skills.
I’ve invited a friend of mine to talk about all things host. His name is Sterling. He’s an ex-pat Brit making a living as a fixer and a hacker in Metropole. He’s a rare blend of upstanding and fun, so I recommend you look him up if business brings you down to Amazonia.
Through his business, he’s talked to more hackers than most of us will ever meet, and they have all told him their stories (Sterling has that effect on you). So listen to his experience.
WHAT IS A HOST?
What is a host? In a way, that’s a damn good question, and it’s going to take a while to really take a good look at it, but look at it we shall, my chummers. Hosts, more than any other single thing, make the world go round.
I’d say ever more so than people themselves. I’m con-vinced that if tomorrow we blinked and mankind dis-appeared from the world just like that, our cities, econ-omies and infrastructure would run by themselves for many months, maybe even years, before things truly came to a standstill. Hosts are half of why the Matrix exists, the other half of the reason being so we can communicate with said hosts. All that other stuff we do, that’s just nice to have.
So concretely, what are hosts? They are large Ma-trix constructs—envelopes, if you will—that contain data and operations on that data. Hosts are where scientists gather to develop new ideas and products, where en-gineers develop these things, and where sales and mar-keting gather to figure out how to get us to pay nuyen for their new geegaw. There is no science, engineering, manufacturing, banking, commerce or warfare—there isn’t anything humanity does—that isn’t handled by a host. They are used to manage human resources, to received and handle customer orders, and push orders through to actual cash reception, as well as the flip side of that, which is handling purchasing from suppliers. Cor-porations that deal in physical goods use hosts to figure out how many units of their products they have in their warehouses, while companies that deal with intangibles such as services use hosts to manage the people and projects that make them money. On top of all of this lies the accounting processes that underscore everything at all times. Figuring out exactly how much money one has is an extremely complex task, made no easier by the effort to discover new and inventive ways to bend or (if they think they can get away with it) break accounting rules to inflate or deflate the value of the corporation.
All this “business of business” stuff aside, many corporations also use hosts for R&D of some kind or another. Every company, no matter how big or small, needs to innovate. Some needs are more obvious, such as those of actual engineering or scientific companies, DATA TRAILS
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but everyone has something of those aspects to them.
Sometimes instead of innovating products, they just in-vest in marketing to find new ways to get the masses to swallow the same old trite bullshit they’ve been selling forever, but even that marketing needs to get inventive, right? Companies often need to invest in specialized hosts for their core businesses, because having a cus-tom-sculpted host is an important part of a brand image.
Custom sculpting isn’t cheap, or course, and that can get even more expensive if corporations want to sync data across hosts. R&D often needs to hook into inventory or accounting systems, so if that resides only on a second-ary host, the accountants get twitchy. And trust me, no-body likes nervous accountants. So the actual execution of hosts is often a compromise between the ultra-spe-cialized environments the doers want and the intra-con-nected panopticon system the bean-counters crave.
In sum, hosts hold humanity’s labor. It’s where we shape our evolution and destiny. Of course, unfortu-nately, we’ve decided that we’d rather fuck each other over fistfuls of cred rather than advance ourselves to a better place, but that should not exactly be news to any-one who has spent any part of the past sixty years awake.
As a willing pawn in the machinations of the cor-porations to rob and steal from each other, it should be dawning on you that hosts will often show up in your work in one shape or other. So by all means, let’s talk about them, shall we?
EVOLUTION
Hosts are cleverly designed to be seamlessly and in-tuitively used by people, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t complex little fraggers underneath it all. First thing I have to say is, all you old timers out there? For-get everything you knew about hosts before the new protocols came into effect. GOD’s little plan to make a new Matrix worked—perhaps a little too well. A lot of hackers have been noticing there is more to the Matrix than we were first led to understand. As a fixer and all around chatty kind of guy, I can confirm I’ve collated stories from many a hacker, and a disturbing story is emerging. I always thought of the Matrix as a large, rip-pling body of water with hosts as scattered islands and
rocks, but I never gave much thought, in this analogy, to what lay underneath the water. Maybe I should have.
Maybe we all should have.
While we weren’t looking, GOD created something … new. Something entirely new. Some of us have started calling it the Foundation. Frankly, none of us truly know what this is, and we certainly don’t have a full under-standing of how it works. The Foundation, in my watery analogy, would be the sand underneath the water. The Foundation connects every single island out there—every single host. It’s like the underlying infrastructure. If a host is a lightbulb, the Foundation is the power grid. When we log into the Matrix, we log into a grid. That’s fine. That is not what I’m talking about. The Foundation is underneath the grid. All hosts are made from the Foundation. If a host is a cyberarm, the Foundation is the chrome.
Unfortunately, that’s about as clear as I can be. We just don’t understand it. Now, I know plenty of hackers out there that simply won’t stand for something they don’t understand. So yes, I also know plenty of crusaders that have gone out and performed, at great risk and peril, raids against GOD servers. I know a few individuals, who shall remain nameless, that have kidnapped, tortured, and interrogated GOD-affiliated Matrix engineers to get to the bottom of this. What emerges from this is chillingly disturbing: It would appear nobody understands the Foun-dation. Even the masters of the Matrix, the powers-that-be that supposedly control things, don’t seem to exactly know what’s going on. Nobody wants to appear ignorant, so they all pretend they know, but nobody ever goes into detail. Best we can tell is that the Foundation is the raw power of all combined devices in the world.
The very best (and most unfortunate) among you, may have encountered Ultraviolet (UV) hosts in the past.
These were hosts with so goddamn much computer power behind them that they got every single little god-damn detail right in their virtual reality experience. It was impossible for the human mind to distinguish a UV host experience from reality. There was thus no way to ever truly know when you had logged in or out. Even if you’d been in a UV host once, your sanity would never quite be the same, because you could never tell if/when you got out. The only saving grace of UV hosts, if you can call it that, was that they were exceedingly rare.
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Well, chummers, the Foundation is all UV, all the time.
I’ll let that sink it a little. Every single goddamn host is powered by this nebulous undercroft that, if you log into it, is a weird, dream-like UV experience that your mind can-not distinguish from reality. Now, what I said about hosts proper is still true: They are VR constructs that can look like anything, but you always know it’s virtual reality. This Foun-dation bit—nobody ever logs into that. It’s the plumbing, the wiring; there is no need for users to ever go in there.
They wouldn’t know how even if they knew it existed.
But the dirty little secret is that the Foundation is al-ways there, and it holds the host up. It runs deep back-ground processes that allow the host to exist and main-tain itself. So what we hackers have begun noticing is that if you can figure out how to log into the Founda-tion, you can gain unparalleled access to a host. You can sometimes access a corp’s darkest, deepest secrets by hitting the Foundation and digging around the roots of a host.
Of course, simply by logging in, you basically risk your sanity. You do that once, you’ll never quite know if you’re
ever out again. Do it repeatedly, and your mind might start snapping. And that’s just being in there—the Foun-dation has its own defense mechanisms to contend with.
Nobody said hacking was an easy job, chummer, but it takes a special kind of crazy to get into a deep dive.
But anyway, back to more comforting, concrete thoughts. A host’s “basement” is the Foundation. We don’t fully understand their relationship, point made, moving on. On top of this Foundation layer is the host proper, as we know it. A host, in VR, can be sculpted to look, feel, and act like anything. Almost every host is go-ing to be different, which is not really a good thgo-ing. Ha-bitual visitors to hosts will get used to the reality around them. The wisdom of the sculpting usually makes make itself apparent once you’ve been able to spend a good amount of time in a host. The metaphors and realities will reveal optimizations for the kind of tasks legit users perform. For hackers, though, it’s always going to be annoying. You have to be fast on your feet and figure things out quickly, though you can be sure you’re going to need to analyze icons a lot to figure out what they are.
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Sculpting a host is very difficult. It takes very know-ledgeable programmers and implementation consult-ants many months to set one up. What is interesting is that hosts aren’t computers. A host does not exist in a server. You can’t grab a computer and say “this is a host.” Hosts exist in the Matrix. So how do you “get”
one? Again, the Foundation comes up. From what we understand, hosts are molded—grown, some design-ers say—from the raw stuff of the Foundation. To ac-quire a host, you thus have to buy one from one of the handful of corporations that have the authorization from GOD and the rare expertise to grow a host—or you have to brave a Foundation and design one on your own without permission. There currently are two dozen or so corps out there in the business of growing and selling hosts. They do this pretty much non-stop, creating virgin hosts of various sizes and power and then selling them to buyers. Growing hosts is a lot of science with a little art, and matching the right buyer to the right host takes a certain touch, but there are hundreds, possibly thousands of hosts being harvested every day, so there isn’t really a shortage. Obviously the larger, more powerful hosts cost exponentially more, but small hosts remain affordable for mom-and-pop shops or policlubs. The major difference in how things work compared to the past is that if you want a host, you have to be on the grid. While GOD’s intention might have been to tighten the noose a little here for illegitimate organizations, in effect little changed. As buying any host up to the kind of power large corps require is largely an autonomous process (you register online, pay, and shortly a host is made available to you), shadow groups ranging from organized crime to shadow sites (including our beloved JackPoint, but also our friends like the Nexus or the Helix) have had no problem setting up shell corps with falsified records to obtain the necessary credentials to buy hosts. Danielle de la Mar may have gotten us on a lot of fronts, but at least she didn’t get us on this one.
For legitimate groups, though, buying hosts is a no-brainer. Sculpting it is a bigger investment than ac-quiring the host space itself. Corporations can have as many distinct hosts as they wish. The limiting factor is usually functionality. Host-to-host communication is certainly possible, but keeping data cohesively within a single host is much more effective. As a rule of thumb, most corps will maintain one host per physical office and legal entity. For example, Ares Entertainment Se-attle would be a single host, and Ares Entertainment Manhattan another—rather than a single host for Ares Entertainment as a whole or even Ares Entertainment North America. This isn’t a fixed rule and is entirely de-pendent on what the IT honchos of said corporation decide. Some corporations have multiple hosts per sub-sidiary, some have hosts that consolidate multiple of-fices in multiple countries. It really all depends on oper-ational needs.