Its all too smooth, too peaceful, too…sterile. I never trusted it, not really. But tonight I may have stumbled into something, something I wasn’t supposed to see.
I should have noticed years ago, but they were patient. They changed things slowly, methodically, layer by layer. Made us believe it was better. Made us believe it was actually more freedom, that it was progress. They lied.
I see it now. I see their vision. I don’t know if I can stop it but I am going to try.
It is harvest season. They’ve colonized our minds, sown their seeds. Planted their roots deep. And now they are harvesting our attention one click at a time. Bottling it, concentrating it into something potent, something toxic.
I see it now. I see their vision. I don’t know if I can stop it.
What is the grand plan? What source code is sleeping underneath the dead static of stolen focus? What if it awakens?
Datastream leeches silently latching on with every scroll, every swipe. I can see them now, they’re everywhere. I see the energy flowing through them, the rot, the sense of doom eminating from every device with a screen, designed to hypnotize us into never putting them down. Is this what they’re harnessing? Doom ?
I need to follow the datastreams, the threads lead through several grids in the cyberspace. Is this random chaos? Or planned obfuscation? Do they control the entire grid? I must begin the trace.
It is time to punch deck.
I am the dead pixel in a sea of colours
I am the lost packet in an endless datastream
I am the hiss of static before you get a signal
I am a particulate remnant of the cosmic background radiation
I am nothing
The ritual demands blood. That is the price of running. My anti-corporeal cyberdaemon wakes after a long time. Technonecromancy is expensive.
Freed by my blood, directed by my code, it begins the crawl. I can see it devouring the leeches. Following every possible thread through the grid.
I am looking for a signal, a minor power spike where there shouldn’t be any electricity, heat signatures in regions devastated by the nuclear flash freeze of ’66, datastreams creating forbidden blood fractal patterns.
Even if I find the Harvester, what could I possibly do to stop it?
I found it. My cyberdaemon cracked the blood fractal encryption, took several hundred thousand compute hours and the technomancy almost flatlined me but I found it. The datastreams lead to the Fringe.
GRID 182.93 - supposed to be a nuclear wasteland. Supposed to be uninhabitable after ’66. Then why does the power input short my gauge? Why is the GRID a bandwidth blackhole?
A monster with infinite hunger. Everything goes in. Nothing comes out.
Echoes of a million stolen souls emanating with each pulse.
A monster that wants to consume the entire world.
It pretends to be human, fueled by our words, our actions, slowly replacing us, planting its writhing tentacles deep within the core of our society.
It is wearing my face too.