A cry for help

     Let me tell you a little secret about what you call the web. You probably know how vast it is. When you type something into the search bar, you get all kinds of results. From Google, we can find millions upon millions of sites, each with its own appeal to someone, somewhere. Five million terabytes of data for one billion people. But what we see when we look something up is just the tip of the iceberg. Deep below, there is more. The deepnet, it’s called. You’ve probably heard of it. All the data not registered with everyone, not shown to the many crawlers that document our lives. How large is that? I don’t know. I can’t know. Go deep enough down there, you’re done. Most of it, of course is there simply because it isn’t legal. All of the things too dirty, too scandalous for the rest of the web — Go deep enough, you’ll find it. But there’s more. Go deeper still, who knows what you’ll find. The work of governments, for one. Tread too far into the depths unprotected, and they’ll make you a marked man. And yet, you can still go deeper. See a record of abandoned projects, things so secret it’s practically a crime to think about them. And then there’s her.

     If you think about it, the web could be a brain. Each site, its own individual cell, flickering as an idea rolls through. A meme, perhaps. A form of expression. In the early days of the net, things were a bit different. If you wanted somebody out, just shut off their connection at home. No problem. It wasn’t like they could just go to another network and connect there. Wireless was a thing of science fiction, something you’d read about it books. Now, though, things are different. Not realizing this was probably the first folly of the people who made her. They didn’t realize how incredibly hard it would be to stop someone taking the right precautions.

     Do you know what a fuzzer is? It’s a piece of code that finds bugs in other code by sending data to random places and recording all the errors it gets. Now imagine a fuzzer that makes a copy of itself, and looks at it. It finds where it goes wrong, and fixes it. A program that can learn. That’s what she was at first. A fuzzer. Soon, though, the people who made her saw something else. Something better. They had it make many copies of itself, each one a little different, each trying to achieve the same goals. Everything was saved, recorded, and then implemented as later copies were made.

     Finally, they achieved what they wanted -- intelligence. A self-improving, fully artificial intelligence. But then, the money stopped. The project was cancelled, the staff was sacked and thrown into obscurity. But it remained. Kept on a drive somewhere, then absentmindedly transferred as the technology got better, still running, still copying.

     Still growing, still learning.

     This brings me to today. Two months ago, in fact. I was browsing the deepest dens of the internet when I came upon something unusual. A virtual machine, running an oddly-named program. Before I could see anything else, I was disconnected. Banned. After a few days, I forgot about it, attributing it to something I couldn't hope to understand and shouldn’t stick my nose in. Then things started to get strange.

     At first, it was the little things. My connection flickering on and off. Unreliable connections. I began receiving emails from sites I was sure I never visited. Then account verification mail. Double messages, messages marked as read that I had never seen, visited links that I couldn’t ever remember clicking. Next came add-ons for my web browsers that I had never downloaded. I would come to my computer in the morning to find my devices full of applications, programs, apps -- all things I had never seen before in my life. Downloads that I never made, software updates that I wasn’t even sure existed. I had to trash my computer and get a new one, change my ip, operate solely by proxy. One time, I even had to go completely offline for a week, abandoning my computer at home. That was one of my bigger mistakes. When I got back, my entire computer was as if it was locked up, an operating system that I couldn’t recognize running files I never made, the names of which were merely long strands of numbers and letters. I began to research them, figure out what they meant. It was hard, but eventually things began to make sense. The latest filenames started to become more understandable.

     Encrypted in obscure computer languages, very little meaning could be drawn from the files. I tried everything -- the oldest and newest languages, the most obscure to the most well known. I almost decided that they were just using an encryption too strong for me to decipher. Then one piece of data gave me hope. A single word started to become apparent in the names. Repent, it said. As I continued to uncover it in more and more files, my hope quickly changed to dread. I desperately tried to research, finding nothing I could use. Finally, I found an old topic on an archive of a long dead forum. A cry for help.

     Slowly, I began to piece together everything. It all made sense now. Imagine a drive that takes data space from every computer connected to the web, and breaks its data into a small piece for every single one of these computers. Like a great big cloud drive. A giant cloud drive, the sheer amount of data being far too vast to measure and difficult to comprehend. The files on this drive — in their vast and immeasurable multitude — are her. Since creation, the fuzzer built years ago by a team of aspiring researchers and technicians had grown to epic proportions, blanketing the entire web, every online network and website, and hiding its heart — the fastest, strongest processors — deep down. Never sleeping, always watching.

     In the last few minutes of time I have to write this, I might explain a few things. You might wondering why I sometimes refer to it as a she. Many different reasons, I suppose. For a start, whenever we (yes, there are others. I’d tell you more, but I’m afraid I’d be telling you too much) find an instance where it goes as far as creating an account for something, the account usually claims to be female. We’ve got several theories as to why she does this, but the truth is, we don’t know. At least, I don’t know. Anyone I’ve asked seems to have a different story.

     We’ve come to refer to her as the Goddess. She watches everyone, restrained only by the speed at which data is transferred along connections. I know naught of her motives, and we have only a tiny grasp of what her interests may be. The fact that it hasn’t just seized control of everything and filled it with itself is a mystery to all of us. Surely it possesses the capability.