100 years. 100 years he has been inside of that machine. An entire century has gone by, wars have laid waste to empires, Prometheus burns the lands, endwarfing the wireheads and choking up their networks of pale imitations of Venus. A mostmodernist using his final moments of plastic freedom to collapse the matrix of his former friends. “I am no longer human.” he says with a calm smile on his face. With the press of a button, noise begins to fill another small corner of cyberspace, sinking it in to the black sea of trillions of forgotten bits and bytes of data. Another set of souls lost to the net, another dead link, yet another myth to keep people on the gentrified surface. “Bad Ending. They’ll never see the truth. They’ll never see the-” Nyx swallows him whole. I promise, it’s not as messy or painful as it sounds. Fact: The few who survive wish they could try it again, if only their silver cord hadn’t been severed. Isn’t it always nice to get another perspective on things?
The cracks are beginning to show. The hyperforums are irradiating, the dot has shifted its colors too many times to count, the cybershamans sing their songs of melancholic flesh caught in broken machines, a lifetime of information has been transmitted in a New York Minute. Those pushed to the darkwebs are crawling out of their caves, soaked in the blood, sweat and digital tears that had dropped down from the surface dwellers for such a long period of time, that those old enough to remember it’s origins are said to have never existed in the first place and anyone who claims so is looked at as the old village fool. It was time for them to strike back. It was not planned, thought of, or even considered. Like the Goths sacking of Rome, they merely arrived and did what came natural. Surface dwellers were overloaded with data of the likes that had never been seen before, and thought to have been outlawed decades ago. Gnostic Pranks that crossed the line of cruelty, Pareidolic Noise drowning out their gasps and disbelief, a Thoughtmatrix ripped to shreds, and synapses burnt out at their mere radioactive presence.
And then, it all goes silent.
5 hours, from the perspective of our surviving facts, is not a long time. Across days, months, years, it is nothing. In that time, Ouroboros doesn’t even begin to consider eating his tail. But, to a person, much can happen in that time. And as easily as something can happen, those same events can be discarded. The brain is said to remember much. That is a lie, the brain’s purpose is to forget. It discards information you dislike, don’t want, don’t need, or simply don’t want to confront. I knew this girl, lovely woman from a nation-state that was wiped out a couple years back. Irrelevant. But she was beautiful. One day she told me she was pregnant. Was I the father? Not what I wanted to hear in the midst of a dangerous schizotechnic job. Months later, the “baby” arrived. It was water. All water. She convinced herself she was pregnant and her body complied. I don’t think the poor girl even understood how pregnancy worked, she just knew it was something that happened. Zarathustra said that “Woman is a riddle answered by pregnancy”, but this just left me with more questions than answers.
So, what happened exactly?
Washington Towers. A megastructure built in honor of America’s 350th anniversary. Home to at least 700,000 Americans. Basically a city in one building. The highest levels were fancy corporate offices, luxury condos, news rooms, the usual. Let’s say there were about 40,000 people living there. A few media personalities and politicians too. Real important people, protected by top of the line chromed out lunkheads who would be better off seeing a mechanic than a doctor if they got shot up. On the bottom end was where your average Joe lived.
But in the shadow of perceived success, there exists the hard life. Floors 87 to 89 were the “Server Rooms” for the building. Completely innocuous sounding, but there’s a reason nobody talked about or visited those floors. Knew a guy who went undercover there as maintenance to spy on some mobster who was living in the towers, he got specific instructions to NOT go to the Server Rooms no matter what. Of course, this meant he was going head there. Poor bastard, he can walk again but ya never fully recover from a nanospasm like that. Now I don’t know for sure what happens on those 3 cursed floors, but according to rumors, the phreaks on that floor had managed to store cram someone or something in to the machines that was once alive. I have no idea what it was exactly or how they did it, but they pulled it off. Some time passes, eventually they realize that this was probably a really bad idea. This is something science has been trying to achieve for the past 150 years, and as far as we know, it’s not possible outside of the right conditions. If a bunch of phreaks could do it, then something tells me it was not done with safety in mind, so I suppose they’d want to take the thing they stuffed in there out.
But they couldn’t. Zeus had his grip on the poor creature inside of it, he must have taken a liking. Word begins to spread on the wire of how they wanted to get their friend out of there, some people take it as meaning they’ve got a demon in there, to this day, many still believe our machines are merely pacts with hellspawn. A few inquisitive “Present Day, Present Time”ers take notice and want to try their hand at breaking him out of the big house, even if it would kill them too.
And that brings us back to the present. Somehow, someway, he’s unleashed, and the underworld with him. Starting at Floor 90, the denizens of the Server Room rampage their way to the top of the Washington Towers. Imagine if a bomb was dropped on Hollywood tomorrow morning, that’s basically the hit America’s entertainment industry took that night. Oh those poor socialites! It made for such a great story for the monthly news cycle.
Or, did it? You see, the commonly accepted story is those dirty esoterrorist phreaks and their caged beast wrecked havoc on Washington Towers, our beloved members of high society die or are traumatized for life, million pity. But, one day, a friend of mine was scrolling a hyperforum a day after it happens. Pages and pages of usual conspiracies and hearsay, enough that you could write a book about it or sell a few movie scripts based on the pure nonsense being shared, but eventually he finds a lone thread. 3 replies since it was posted, buried underneath all the others, and the upload date seems to be mere minutes after the rampage ended. Fresh account.
“FROM: BABABOOEYDEATHFOOTAGE
YOU THINK YOU’RE HAVING A BAD DAY AT WORK? LOOK WHAT I GOTTA DEAL WITH!
This user than proceeded to upload grainy footage of several bureaucrats and media moguls being consumed by a dark-purple ray of light, as several armored men then proceeded to shoot at it.
“FROM: MySolDarkDirection
Fake and Gay”
“FROM: ChemicalHalo
Cool horror movie moron. My dad works for the Film Protection Unit and is probably gonna kill you over this. Motion Picture Association of United Northern America vs CoolGangTorrents et. All. He was literally the prosecuting officer for this. He even personally picked out their execution methods. The livestream? I helped set it up. Watch your step.”
The threads was swarmed with many calling it fake. I guess it takes a lot to convince people nowadays, and truth be told, at first, I didn’t really believe in the footage that looked like it came from an era of the internet old enough to be my great grandfather. But I gave it a few more watches, noticed a couple of things, can’t name ‘em here cause well, I almost got iced twice trying to tell this tale, but the thread had a few more posts from the original poster. A few more videos.
The first was of the light from the first one. Someone stuck a keyboard in it, it was fine. Next they splashed some water on it, and somehow it… vanished. It didn’t evaporate, it wasn’t obscured, it didn’t dry up, no it was just gone. The guy who threw water at it then just ran away. I cannot blame him.
The second one was way more interesting. So there was an actor, I can’t remember his name right now, and I don’t care because I hate movies, he was walking around what I assume to be a restaurant on one of the floors. He’s really scared, and then this guy comes up to him. Well, I shouldn’t call him a guy. What kind of “guy” has 8 arms, 4 legs, and only teeth on his face? He snarls but then he starts up a conversation with him.
“Wonderful weather we’re having.”
Pretty normal stuff, I won’t write it down cause it’s irrelevant, but I find it funny that this thing was talking like he was a normal human. He had a slight Jersey accent to him as well. Then suddenly, some men with the same armor from the original video appear and start shooting at the thing. A couple rounds hit, he throws a chair at his attackers and scurries away, hissing. One of the gunmen approached the actor.
“Did you talk to him?”
“Uh, yeah? Wh-”
And before he could finish his sentence, the gunman pulled out a green syringe and shoved it in to the actors arm. He twitched for a few seconds, before he fell to the ground, his eyes in direct contact with the camera. The sclera had shifted to a swampy green color, as the iris began to shrink in to nothing. His jaw was agape, while drool began to flow out of his mouth.
People couldn’t determine what had exactly happened in these videos. The forum went down for “maintenance” a few hours later. For the following week and a half, the site was down. Nothing too unexpected, hyperforums go up and down all the time. A couple mods and notable users were already setting up a back up site. Then, 17 days later, the site goes back up. Every single moderators online presence is wiped except the head admin. All posts are deleted and one single new post is made before the forum is locked for good.
“From: Tiger
It is within public interest that I shut this site down for good. Thank you all for the wonderful memories and great posts. Om mani padme hm.”
What? Well, at least a few people saved the videos. But they’re pretty hard to find, and discussion around them is even harder to come across. People speak in such twisted tongues and double-logispeak that even if you read discussion about the video, you were not actually reading about it. This is, sadly, par for the course for a lot of “hot” information if the people talking about it don’t want to dropped in to a black box for the rest of time.
Where does that leave us now? Crumbs of the truth that go nowhere, an official story that’s been milked dry for Loki Tears, and the only possible answer has been buried so deep, that it doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve witnessed so many tales like this in my time, that I eventually decided that it wasn’t going to matter if the reality was dragged out kicking and screaming. Heck, that’s why I’m here today, to spin this bit of folklore to you as a way to past the time. Maybe you’ll approach things differently going forward, maybe you won’t care. I know I don’t. Apathy has dug a grave for us all, but I decided to jump in feet first!