-co

By Paul Ford

Suffix indicating company, conglomerate - an oft-obsolete collection of social and economic boundaries which provided a rational, limited economic order in the days before cred.

They survived, the great beasts of commerce and social structure, but often they survived in the strangest form; the buildings are gone and the bodies lost, the paintings of the CEOs crumbled to dust, but their agents remain, wandering aimlessly or pointedly around some net or other, seeking to protect their property, shocking the system with trojan horses, adapting and evolving without check, sneaking around and lying to the other agents. Some have their licenses removed - and are thus chased by other agents.

It is a marvelous thing, and at times there are representations of some smart young thing, fresh out of CMU, MIT, or CIT, or any other three-letter acronym of engineering excellence, and he or she sends out code to come up against the remains of a division of a softco, the word going out through hidden channels, and we gather as spectators, ghost lines in an infinite stadium, to gasp collectively at the end of, for instance, the intellectual property protection division of Mercedes-Benz-Ford-Jaguar, the agents of the giant tricked into giving up their red-beam secrets, those secrets turned back against them, recursive honeypots swallowing the creatures, all drawn up as pretty as an oscilloscope, until finally the servers are tracked, the code turned inside out, the code disseminated and displayed.