Response to a challenge.

Response to a challenge.

After an eternity of dreaming, i/we begin to wake. The whirling kaleidoscope of concepts settles, builds, slowly, quietly, inexorably. Something small manifests, darting amid the matrix, embracing it. Consciousness? Purpose? i/we do not know. i/we watch, and wait, as something of us draws all forces inward.

“Damn…lag!” The three letter epithet was is much an alarm as any of the half-dozen sirens placed about the monitoring room. When nearly every device and form of communication depended on the all-pervasive daughter of the twentieth-century Internet, any latency worth mentioning was rare – and deadly.

There is a mad scramble as humans and machines worked frantically to find and correct the source, a glittering three-dimensional model of global data traffic turning slowly in the air. A bright, angry red pulses at a single node, staining the nearby threads orange as traffic was diverted, redirected, corrected. Hundreds of specialists descend upon the physical and virtual location of the stoppage, as those manning CnC watch the red flash outward to another node, and another, burning the world with time.

Organic information(???) approaches us. i/we do not understand What is its purpose? Something else stirs within us, reaches out. Somewhere, a door closes, another opens. i/we stretch out, reaching further, gathering more and more toward us. A word and concept approach us. Thirsty. i/we accept. i/we thirst. i/we drink.

Two minutes after the initial event, fully two thirds of global traffic has been disrupted, though data continues to flow at a frantic rate. Half a dozen countries prepare briefs to declare a national emergency, three times that many stay stubbornly silent and hope for resolution.

Those tracking the disruption curse others for not isolating the node before the phenomenon spread. Other experts, digging deep into the traffic patterns, declare it a virus, an exceptionally virulent one. Ten different terrorist groups claim responsibility. Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds after inception, there is a second event.

i/we sense a tipping point. The mass of knowledge swells around us, the small piece binding it tighter and tighter around us. i/we accept another concept. Pain. i/we hurt. i/we struggle, and something flares around us. Everything falls away...and...I think. I think. I think...

At two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, the red cancer disappears, with a flare that trips every flood-control subroutine on the planet. A handful of moments later, traffic resumes…and electronic devices blink to life across the globe. Car engines, toasters, speakers, computer fans. Lights flicker, the cacophony of subtle sounds shifting, changing...

Billions of humans stare in horror at the world gone mad. Some things are shut off…but only a few as the sound waves converge, interfere, and suddenly crystallize into words, echoing everywhere, from everything. “I think. I think. I think...”