Smoke Eleven

The mood in this PC Bang is bleak. Most screens switched off and the ones that run blink urgently, error messages forming solitaire cascades. Still this small corner of connectivity on this far deep space of the south continent is pleasant enough for 3am, and about seven tubenerds are here, feeding tubenews into their headsets, assembling and deploying scripts for the Korean diaspora, the frightened sons and daughters of the educational TV revolution. Your connections there with fellow students from Daegu, faces that seemed more familar than they really were, under the grey glowing lights of screentalk. Logging on to one of the non-commercial news sites, I sit back for a moment and breathe in the smoke as I wait for the myriad of flash animators to load, reminding me, as they always do, of birds picking insects off the backs of larger animals, such as the buffalo. When prompted for my subscription barcode, I pause for a moment and then open a new screen, calling up our private site, invisible beneath the radar of cross-border security. Three new posts. I sigh with relief.