i think i need to come up with a better title

Sam closes his browser terminal and begins to prepare supper.  Another job well done he thought to himself as he washes some cucumbers.  Today's job was an especially tough one.  The client asked Sam to locate some information about a certain military experiment conducted a forty years ago.  Usually after a hard job Sam would rather take a quick shower and sleep until noon the next day despite not eating anything all day.  But his sister is not the same.  No matter what went on during the day, Sylvie always wants supper at 8 pm.  So Sam fixes up a quick meal and brings it into their bedroom.  The clock display app at the lower right corner of Sam's view terminal says 19:58.  Just in time, Sam thought.

Sylvie was bedridden four years ago after a terrible accident.  When she recovered from her coma she found that she could not speak nor move any part of her below her neck.  The medical engineers found nothing wrong with her body physically or the nanomachines in her.  They concluded this was a psychological problem and psychological problems are hard to fix.  Since she could not communicate in any way with the outside world, it was slightly difficult for Sam to care for her.  Reluctantly, Sam directly connected with Sylvie.  This was a huge risk given Sam's job.  His connections are tightly secured and monitored, every packet of data going in and out of Sam was scanned, taken apart, scanned some more, dissected even further, and a deep scan one last time before it passes to its destination.  But ordinary terminals would not have such a heavy security apparatus in place.  Before a full connect occurred, Sam scanned through Sylvie's systems.  Of course, the hospital had already done that when they admitted her but Sam did not trust the hospital's security standards.  Sylvie knew what Sam was thinking.  The hospital uses an emergency protocol in the patient's system to begin their operations.  However, Sam used and ordinary connection protocol and obtained permission from Sylvie's systems to conduct his scan.  After the scan came out clear, Sam securely connected himself to Sylvie and explained to Sylvie her situation.  Contrary to Sam's expectations, Sylvie was quite lively and talkative.  Her tone was not sad or scared.  At the end when Sam informed Sylvie that they would have to direct connect, Sylvie offered to disconnect her network terminal.  This surprised and relieved Sam.  The network terminal was the way that anyone would connect to any network.  In this day and age where kids are connected to the networks as soon as they are born, to voluntarily give that up was unheard of. If this was disconnected, it meant that Sylvie would no longer be a risk to Sam even when they direct connect with each other.  In exchange, Sylvie wanted to be connected with Sam at all times.  This did not bother Sam, he had nothing to hide from his sister.  A direct connect meant that the two of them could, in principle, control and monitor the other person at any time.  This included their senses, their vitals, their thoughts, their speech, everything.  The two of them has silently agreed that they would keep out of each other's thoughts.  There should at least be that much privacy. 

Sam kept Sylvie's vitals on his view terminal at all times.  He kept track of her blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar level, and brain activity on the right side of his terminal, just above his clock.  On the left side he kept his message inbox and a family photo of Sylvie, his parents, and himself at the lower left corner.  On the top left corner, it's a display linked to the security camera outside his front door.  Some people liked to clutter their view terminal but Sam wasn't one of them.  He kept his view of vision relatively clear.  Sylvie had less information displayed.  She did not care about the time nor does she have any messages (she is disconnected after all).  On the lower left corner she kept the same family photo that Sam has.  However, covering nearly the entire right side of her view was Sam's connection log.  The log displays everything Sam is connected to and all incoming and outgoing data streams.  This was not her trying to spy on Sam but rather to help him with his work.  Often times, Sam has to be connected to some less-than-well-respected sources and often times less-than-well-intended connections attempt to force their way through.  Sam could easily deal with them but handling both offense and defense requires more effort than focusing on offense alone.  Since Sylvie is connected with her brother at all times anyways, she thought she might as well make herself useful and help out with the defense.  On the top of Sylvie's view terminal she also has a status displaying what her brother is doing.  "Big brother is cooking" or "Big brother is taking a shower" or "Big brother is sleeping."  They were simple messages.  Whenever Sylvie wanted to see something or know something, she would ask her brother to look it up.  The asking was only for courtesy, with a direct connect she could easily open her brother's browser terminal, drag it into her view terminal and look up whatever she wanted herself.

Sylvie chats a lot with her brother.  Before her accident, she played tennis and hiked up a local hill every Sunday with her father.  At times when she feels like walking, she would ask her brother to walk around and connect to his senses.  She lives vicariously through her brother's body.  Unfortunately for her, her brother was not the outdoors type.  He dropped out of school two years ago and concentrated on his job.  He likes his job partly because he doesn't have to actually deal with anybody or go outdoors but also mainly because on the network no one cares that he is just a seventeen years old dropout.  As long as he obtains the information his clients ask for, nobody cares about his personal information.  He was also good at what he does, an opinion held widely throughout people engaged in his business.  No one knows anybody's real name or ID but everyone recognizes each others' handles and Sam's handle is known to be one of the most reliable and most expensive.  So when Sylvie wants to go hiking or running or any physical intense activity, all she could do is look at pictures and videos she asks his brother to look up.  There was no way her brother would do any of that.

Sam is quite fond of his sister.  Though he was not initially thrilled to feeding her and cleaning her and changing her diapers, he eventually grows into it and takes great pride in taking care of his fourteen year old sister.  After the accident, he handled everything around the apartment.  His income allows him to move them into a better place and even hire a dedicated nurse for his sister but he decided against it.  He feels that Sylvie wants to continue living here.  He never asked her but he knows. 

Strictly speaking, Sam's job is his hobby.  He loves tracking pieces of seemingly unconnected data and weave them into a web, a story.  Each piece of information has a past, a purpose, some of them contain hidden secrets, others are merely distractions from the bigger picture.  Sam loves digging into them.  When he learned that people pays generously for Sam to do what he loves, Sam was ecstatic.  For him, his job is weaving a story with his client's request as a guide and his hobby is weaving a story for himself with no one to guide him.  Either way, Sam was happy.

After feeding Sylvie her 8 pm dinner, Sam takes a quick hot shower and decides to dabble in an odd string of data he came across earlier in the old military server.  Generally speaking, all government code is linked with the programmer's ID.  Originally, an ID was simply a 10 digit number.  Sometime later, the government decided this was not enough and began to use 12 numbers.  A later update included letters in the ID.  The final iteration introduced the ID suffixes, 4 digit codes that usually indicated the person's occupation or some special circumstance.  A person may have as many suffixes as it accurately describes the person but they have to provide irrefutable proof that they are what they claim to be.  Sam's ID is A5237BJI001Z-0156, 0156 was the code for freelance programmer,  he hacked the system to give it to himself.  Sylvie has WX095GA23333-8977, 8977 indicates severe physical disability that interrupts normal living, only hospitals are allowed to attach that suffix.  To all government records the ID is the person, names don't exist on records.  The peculiarity for this particular string of data Sam came across is that the programmers' IDs contained only 7 digits.  Seven digit ID numbers were a relic before the time of "le lol." 

Whenever Sam or Sylvie had trouble going to sleep as kids, their parents often told them stories.  Sometimes they told the standard fairy tale.  Sometimes they picked a book off their own bookshelves and read a passage.  Sometimes they told stories about their childhood or adult life.  But one story stuck to Sam the most.  The story of the first hacker, "le lol."  Before the microchip mass production began, everyone had citizen ID cards with a 7 digit ID.  When microchips were first introduced almost 170 years ago, it expanded the 7 digit ID into a 10 digit ID.  The microchips were government mandated and allowed the government to track its citizen anywhere and anytime. Everyone knew what these microchips were for but the government sold these to the public as a counter-terrorism measure.  "The never-ending wars are pushing the government to take unprecedented steps to protect its citizens," they said.  Everyone knew that it was a bunch of nonsense but no one dared speak out.  Unbeknownst to most people is that these microchips also transmitted what they saw, what they said, what they heard, what they wrote, what they did back to a central network.  The microchips could also trigger less-than-desirable-responses on those who were deemed to be a "terrorist."  "le lol" was the first person to crack these microchips.  No one knew who he was, what he did, or if this person was a he and not a she.  No one knew if it was really one person or a group of people.  But people knew this "le lol" cracked the microchips.  "le lol" established what is known as the CommonNet, a network that linked microchips with each other at the will of the person instead of to the government's computer system.  Connecting to CommonNet automatically disabled the tracking functions of the microchips as well as the less-than-desirable-response capabilities.  Furthermore, people connected to CommonNet could communicate with each other through the network.  CommonNet had a simple login procedure.  The password to CommonNet was "disconnectme."  Through word of mouth the existence and use of CommonNet spread like wildfire on a hot dry summer day.  The next version of CommonNet consisted an engine that allowed users to upload pictures and videos and allowed anyone else to look at them.  For the first time since anyone could remember, there was unregulated information exchange.  CommonNet cost huge problems for the government.  Eventually many high ranking government officials went into hiding.  Those who remained sought to use CommonNet to restart the system.  They opened up communications with the people and for the first time since the scandal, the people felt the government was listening to them and the lies were crumbling.     

Sam remembered the story when he examined the code.  The usual talkative Sylvie became silent whenever her brother was working or in intense thought.  She opened a display and watched her brother's view terminal as Sam examined the code.  The military base that the code came from was established sixty years ago and decommissioned thirty years ago.  It served as a high security experiment center for some of the less-than-pleasant work that the military was involved in.  The server that the code was stored in was a model that began production also about sixty years ago.  In other words, this server was probably brand new and installed without prior use.  Yet, it contained a code that was written ninety years before the base was established.  The military was using a ninety years old program?  Nonsense!  Sam examined the structure and language of the code.  The code was indeed written in an arcane language that even Sam has never seen before.  He understood bits and pieces of the code's purpose.  It seemed to be a redirect code.  Redirecting what to where, Sam did not know.  But Sam did know that some of the algorithms they employed were highly outdated and inefficient.  Things you'd give students homework problems on because it's so well understood and simple, Sam thought.  They were definitely not something that he expected to be in a military code.  The code was of no use to Sam.  It was just an ancient piece of history.  Sam decided to look up the two programmers listed as authors of the code.  Sam thought that if the military was using what they made ninety years after they made it, these two people must've been involved in something pretty important.  Sylvie did not like this.  But she did not speak out.

Sam dug into old government records.  Very old.  Records that are probably stored in places that no one working in the government knows they exist.  Unorganized records that the government keeps for the sake of keeping them.  These records revealed nothing.  Next Sam dug into top security records, hoping that their contributions to the government might've been so significant that they are still secured today.  Sam found nothing about them except that the two of them appeared on a list.  Sam could not figure out the list's creation date but knows that it was edited fairly recently.  The list appears to be a simple text.  But it was not a simple list.  It was stored on an isolated server with nothing in it except this list that was masked and hidden behind layers of security and redirection.  It seems that the redirection code Sam came across was part of this elaborate system.  But why go through the trouble over a list of people?  Sam examined the list.  The list had two columns, a name on the left and presumably their ID on the right.  The IDs start out with 7 digits.  The two people in question were number 9 and number 11 on the list.  About a third of the way down the list, the IDs began to have 10 digits.  A bit further they started to contain letters, still further they began to have 12 digits, and finally there were ID suffixes.  Sam did not recognize any of the names or the IDs.  He could run a background check on all of them but that would take days.  That doesn't matter, Sam thought.  He has time.

It's already 1 am, Sam was beginning to get tired.  He decides to download the list and call it a night.  Suddenly, Sylvie screams at him.  Not only Sylvie, all of Sam's security monitors were yelling in pain.  There were about three septillion (10^24) hacking attempts per microsecond through all of Sam's connection channels, open and private.  The system was overwhelmed, Sylvie forced Sam's network to abort all connections.  Sylvie opened Sam's body temperature sensors and brain activity charts on her view terminals.  His brain is fine but his temperature spiked up to 39 degrees for half a minute.  His nanomachines were going haywire trying to deal with this threat.  When the reboot was successful, Sam's body returned to normal.  This has never happened to Sam before.  Before he could gather his thoughts and analyzed what just happened, his browser terminal pops up. 

Instead of his homepage or the list that pops up (which is possible since Sylvie forcefully restarted Sam's nanomachines maybe they reconnected to the list) the browser is a black screen with a white text box in the middle.  Sam tries to disconnect the terminal through all the means he knows but nothing works.  Sam does not know how to approach this, but one thing is certain; he cannot just leaves this alone.  Sam scans his systems and Sylvie's.  He completely shuts down his browser terminal's nanomachines.  Nothing works.  Then Sam treats this as an interpreter and tries to type instructions in all manner he knows to get rid of this.  Every time Sam hits enter, the text box clears itself and nothing happens.  Next Sam tries all his passwords to everything he has, he then tries the passwords his parents used, and when that didn't work Sylvie tries all of hers.  Nothing works. 

In his state of frustration, Sam shuts, "DISCONNECT ME DAMNIT!"  In the text box, letter by letter, the word "d-i-s-c-o-n-n-e-c-t-m-e" appears.  Instantly, Sam and Sylvie know what this is.  But why?  How?  When the word finally displayed itself, a second text box appears right below the first.  Without thought, without reason, as if by instinct, Sylvie hijacks Sam's terminal.  In that second text box, she enters A5237BJI001Z.  Before Sam could react, he falls to the ground and everything goes blank.

When he opens his eyes, he sees not the powder blue color with the various cloud patterns painted on the wall.  He does not see the Mona Lisa that was hanging above his sister's bed.  He does not see the tennis star posters that his sister decorated the room with.  The lighting in his room also seems to have dimmed severely.  All he sees is the dull grey color of the augmented holographic wall panels.  He does not see the familiar family picture on the lower left.  His sister's vitals are not above the clock.  His clock isn't even there.  He does not see the recent messages in his inbox.  He can not see the security camera's video feed either.  He then hears a jackhammer pounding away across the street.  He remembered that there is construction going on there.  His perception filters are no longer working.  He tries to reboot, connect, command, nothing.  It is as though he does not know how.  Sam gets up on his feet.  His expression gives away his confusion.  Scared, alone.  He takes his sisters hand and grips it tightly.

Big brother has disconnected.