I loved the production on this one, having a set of narrators each narrating a different character, a section to each works really nicely! Bravo!
And the premise of this was amazing, with the bone rum consciousness, but that was really the most interesting thing in the story and that was revealed very near the beginning. There's no real conflict throughout, and having 4 protagonists just makes it harder to relate to any one of them. There seemed to be an unlimited supply of rum, the group kept getting bigger and bigger and guzzling more and more rum and I was waiting for them to run out and then go through pirate withdrawal but that never happened.
But more than anything, the "hacker" aspect just bugged me. We're told occasionally that these people spend huge tracts of time writing code, but it never really gets to the point of telling me what code they're writing and why. To me that's like having a character who's labeled as a "writer" but then not saying what they write. A writer could write novels, or newspaper articles, or technical manuals, or fortune cookies, and there's a fundamental difference to the mindset and goals of each. It's the same thing with writing code--the act of writing code only conveys a fraction of what it could mean if we were told what they were doing.
And I think it's weird when malicious hackers are glorified in fiction. I add the word "malicious" because the word hacker doesn't mean the same thing in some circles as it does in mainstream culture. In some engineering circles, "to hack" is just the act of writing code, especially if you're finding clever unforeseen ways to make things work, so a "hacker" is not inherently malicious. In any case, I think it's strange when malicious hackers are portrayed as heroes. Would they be heroes if they wiped out your bank account while they were fiddling around or stole your identity and rang up thousands in credit card bills? Even if they only attack corporations, those corporations have real people who are customers and who will hurt much more by the destruction of the company's network than the faceless corporations themselves will.
And I know it's been said before, but I was surprised this was picked up by the science fiction podcast. Maybe I should try sending some of my fantasy stories here!
