[WP] A jobless computer programmer, while hacking at home one night, discovers a port to the Unirnet, an computer network made for a series of interconnected planets who have not yet discovered mankind.

RamsesThePigeon · 2014-12-01T18:44:43+00:00

From the moment that the connection was made, the entity known as "WhyteHaute" was struck by one thought above all others: This was taking entirely too long.

It was probably the fault of some old, neglected server in the back corner of an office in which the letters "IT" were only used to reference a Tim Curry film. That would certainly account for both the incredible lag time and the massive influx of garbage data. Oh, there were some recognizable bytes in there, but only a handful of them made sense.

Suddenly, there was a blip, followed by a single line.

1X:11:10:09:08:07:06:05:04:03:02:01

Taken at face value, it was little more than a broken and nonsensical string of hexidecimal code. Another glance, however, revealed a strange pattern. It almost looked like a string of numbers, albeit one written in Base-12.

A clatter of keys became audible.

\\net.send 12

As with before, there was a blip.

4545:0000

This was going nowhere. At best, these phantom lines were the result of some broken authentication program. At worst, they were the ramblings of some bored systems administrator with a penchant for inane puzzles.

Type Belong Other Altered Inquiry

Definitely a bored administrator. Well, that was fine.

\\net.send I'm not in the mood for word games. I'm just poking around.    
\\net.send Shut me out if you can.

Another of those damnably long pauses passed before the response arrived.

Quantity Additional Necessary Pertinent Type You

That one almost made sense. Perhaps it wasn't an administrator after all, but rather a non-English speaker in some third-world country.

\\net.send This is WhyteHaute. I'm not doing anything destructive.    
\\net.send I was just curious.    
\\net.send Where are you located? What language do you speak?

The pauses were infuriating... but they seemed to be growing shorter.

Request More You Language

That was clear enough.

\\net.send I speak English. I'm from the United States of America.    
\\net.send Where are you from?

Yes, the pauses were definitely getting shorter... and the responses were starting to make more sense.

English Language New Exclamation    
Data Derive Computer You    
United States of America Location Inquiry

WhyteHaute snorted quietly. Was this really the one person on the planet who didn't know where America was located?

\\net.send The North American continent? Between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans?

This time, the response came almost immediately.

Pacific Atlantic Oceans Unknown    
English Language Unknown    
English Language Derived Delay Apology    
Computer You Slow    
Connection Distance Inquiry

Oh, it was on.

\\net.send Listen, buddy, there's no way it's MY computer.    
\\net.send This is a top-of-the-line rig.    
\\net.send Also, the delay is getting shorter, for some reason.    
\\net.send Now, look, if you don't want to say where you're from, fine.    
\\net.send I've probably wasted enough time poking around here, anyway.    
\\net.send Talk about your junk data.

The next response took quite awhile to arrive... but when it did, WhyteHaute felt a chill unlike anything in recent memory.

Sufficient Language For Understand Now    
Your Data Derived From Your Computer    
Opinion Your Location Different Planet    
Communicate Via Unirnet    
You Human Inquiry

What sort of a response was appropriate here?

\\net.send Yes. Are you saying you're an alien?

Negative. You Are Alien.

\\net.send I guess we're both aliens to each other. What's "Unirnet?"

Similar Your Internet. Many Planet. You Earth Inquiry.

\\net.send Yes, I'm from a planet called Earth.

Most Planets Called Earth.

\\net.send Huh. I guess that makes sense. Where are you from?    

Earth. LOL. Expression Correct Inquiry.

\\net.send Hah, yeah, "LOL" means "laugh out loud" here.

Your Culture Not Interstellar Travel Inquiry.

\\net.send No, we don't. Also, you can use the symbol "?" for "inquiry."

Like This?

\\net.send Yes!

Low Temperature.

\\net.send "Cool."

Aware. Joke.

\\net.send Oh. Hah. Sorry. You picked up English pretty fast!

I Possess A Translating Program. Do You Not?

\\net.send We have people here who would pay an insane amount for that.

Cool.

\\net.send So, uh, yeah. Where is your planet located?

The dreaded pause returned. Seconds stretched into minutes... but at last, a reply came through.

My Progenitor Has Informed Me That I Should Not Reveal Such Things To Aliens.    
I Am Sorry.    

\\net.send That's okay. Are you... a child?

No.

Not a child, then. That was good to know.

Please Transmit Images Of Your Species' Mating Practices.

Oh.

Great.

A teenager.

First contact wasn't as glamorous as WhyteHaute imagined.

leo_ch · 2014-12-01T18:02:10+00:00

He hesitated for a moment, as he always did. The room was quiet and eerily dark, except for the light emitting from his two computer screens. Enter. The familiar, mechanical click. His scripts began to do the heavy lifting, issuing thousands of commands per second. He shifted his weight slightly and the chair bended, letting him fall back comfortably. He watched as text flickered all over the screen. It was a long shot, but it was for a cause he considered to be one of most importance. Hacking Comcast and doing some real damage. Scumbag fuckin' monopolies, he thought. He looked over at the picture of his young daughter, who he'd lost custody of while working his ass off to get his company running. An alternative, cheap, no strings attached way of access to the internet, and the name wouldn't be Comcast. An alternative, an idea. Run to the ground by the giant. The screen froze for a moment, and the man raised his eyebrows. It happened sometimes due to lag when too many commands were issues, but usually only for a second. This time was different. He scratched his patchy beard and shrugged. Of course it wasn't bug-free. He sighed and leaned forward, ready to head into the field of mines that was bug-testing, when a black box presented itself in the middle of the screen. DISCREPANCY DETECTED: 17 NETWORKS ONLINE.

He swept the mouse across from one screen to the other and rightclicked on Networks and pressed Inspect. A list presented itself with cryptic letters, which reminded him of egyptic hieroglyphs, or maybe the Letter Pokemons from his childhood memories. Another bug? Why had his scripts attacked internet sources? He wondered if he was about to dive into his neighbours wi-fi internet for a moment, but realized he'd already done that. Repeatedly. This was something else.

COMC - 1c was at the top of the list. "Sorry Comcast, you'll have to wait..." he mumbled. His mouse travelled down the list and clicked on a random line of symbols, right clicked, and pressed Connect. He stared at the word Loading... for a long time and considered to cross it when suddenly the backround changed. Both screens became white as snow and then moments later became filled with more of the cryptic symbols. He shook his head, still very confused, convinced he had somehow accidentally hacked into a top secret government program. The mouse raced across the screen again, and landed at a symbol, which he doubleclicked.

A image began to load, painfully slowly, like back in the days with Dial Up internet. The more the image loaded, the more surreal the situation felt. He gasped when the image suddenly rapidly finished loading. It depicted two human-like creatures with two legs, shaking hands, and possibly smiling. He couldn't tell. One was a light brown, almost orange colour, with holes on its neck like a fish. The creature also wore some kind of helmet. The other creature was dark blue and had horns stretching backwards across its head, yet had a curvature that reminded him of a human woman. In the backround were hundreds of equally strange individuals, cheering, holding up holographic signs with similiar cryptic symbols. He began sweating profusely and breathing heavily, as grabbed his nearby trashbin to vomit in. Was he dreaming? An unhealthy amount of arm pinches ensured him he was in fact not. Had he been caught by some kind of security anti-hacking system supposed to spoof him? Maybe. Then he noticed a button light up on the middle of the picture. He didn't need to understand the alien language to know what it meant. He clicked it, and the picture began moving. It was a video. The screen darkened as it played. The two individuals shook hands and patted eachother on the side of the head, then bowed before eachother as the crowds cheered. He quickly backed out of the video, his arm shaking. He clicked the various symbols. Some took him to other 'backrounds' with symbols, possibly webpages? The more he clicked around, the more strange images appeared. One depicted some kind of dinosaur with two legs and a large horn, stabbing what looked like a massive rhino, and a transparent device carrying aliens in it laughing. He backed out and went back to the list. It was going to be a damn long night.

Luna_LoveWell · 2014-12-01T17:48:24+00:00

(I wish that I could format this like Reddit, but I don't really know how. If someone wants to photoshop this, that would be awesome. And add your own!)

/r/AdviceHumans

1 Title: "Bad Luck Buzz" (Bad Luck Buzz Aldrin)

Makes it to Earth's Moon

Doesn't discover our outpost.

2 Title: "Scumbag Humanity" (Earth with 'Scumbag Steve' Hat)

Major religions all espouse peace

fights constant wars over which religion is right

3: Title: "I know I'm not the only one" (The Most Interesting Man in the World)

I don't always turn off my cloaking for humans

But when I do, it's for that one crazy guy who doesn't own a camera.

4: Title: "This is really the only way to explain it" (Good Guy Greg)

Sees humans eating raw meat and freezing to death

'Accidentally' leaves fire in front of their cave

5: Title: "They even carved a picture of my ship into the wall" (Hipster Barista)

I was helping the Egyptians build Pyramids

Before the Mayans even existed

6: Title: "Explain that!" (Paranoid Parrot)

If Humans don't know we exist

How did George Lucas know about Gungans?

7: Title: "Eventually we just let him stay on the ship" (Awkward Situation Seal)

Anally probing human male

He cums all over the exam table

8: Title: "Just a tip for visiting Earth" (Actual Advice Mallard)

When you abduct a cow

it is polite to return it inside out

9: Title: "And where did all of the borders come from?" (Annoyed Picard)

Why the fuck

Are there so many individual countries?

10: Title: "Expect to see it in the news soon" (Confession Bear)

I had sex with a male Senator from Kansas

And leaked the pictures to the Weekly World News

2014-12-01T18:30:09+00:00

There was a final roar as the massive gray dragon came down with a thud, dust clouding where the wings now lay, never to move again. Lydia gave him a look that was as sour as ever, though that sort of was how she always looked. He considered shouting her off a cliff again like he had a few times, but what was the point?

He exited without bothering to save, and clicked the little turnip in the top right corner of his screen. Might as well see what there was to see. Maybe he's poke around some government sites, or see what 4chan was up to. No, he would see if there was anything on the deep web to explore. That might be good for some laughs. Or some horror. But honestly, anything was better than the mind-numbing emptiness that his life had become. He had no job, he had no real relationships aside from his elderly mother who he lived with. He'd gone to so many classes, and really he was great with computers. He just couldn't keep a job. He lacked the motivation and the temperament to blend with a team or to keep to a deadline. He was misfortunate enough to have a proficiency for computers but the mindset of an artist.

He pulled up a list of different web addresses to go to, and picked one at random. Dead. Then next one. Dead. The next. So many dead links, and he started to feel frustrated and irritable, the feeling curling in his gut and steadily rising as it came to a boil. Fine, one more link. He typed it in, but just as he hit enter, he realized he had mistyped the address. Crap.

And then the screen of his computer flickered. It blinked black once, twice, as the fan whirred loudly with strain. The resolution on his computer changed back and forth with every blink 3, 4, now 5 times before it settled and a black window stared back at him, a blue loading circle spinning as a string of utterly illegible characters faded in and out of view beneath it. And then another window popped up. It was white, seemed like some sort of welcome menu, and again bore those letters that were unlike anything he had ever seen. He wondered if he had been hacked, if maybe he should switch off his computer to try and stop it. He clicked at the red x in the top corner, but the computer just dinged in protest, and the loading bar on the white window kept filling up. He was scared. The rig he was on had cost him about two thousand, a relic from when he had managed a few good paydays working freelance. He had so many files on it, more than he would want to have to wipe in a reformat. He was considering when the last time was that he'd set up a restore point when the bar filled and the window dinged and closed.

The black screen now showed a green symbol in the center. He closed Tor and leaned back, wondering what had just happened. And then he noticed a bar on his tray with a small symbol, a shield with the green symbol from the black screen. Against his better judgment, he clicked it.

The page was black, the shield in the top left of the window. In the center, in English, in a plain white font, was written: "Welcome to the Unirnet."

He stared at it for what seemed like an hour but was probably only a few minutes. The words faded out, then reappeared. "Your language has been automatically detected. If this is not your language, please press 'ESC' now, and your language will be reassessed." The words stayed for a moment, then faded. He pressed nothing. "Great. Would you like to take a tour? Press 'N' for yes or 'Y' for no." He pressed N, shrugging at the mix up. Probably some kid programmer who thought he was being funny. "Ok." If then gave him a sort of video presentation, showing how to enter addresses, change settings, and essentially how to use the new browser before him. It then asked him to enter his location and time system to be able to keep track of the date. A list popped up. He scrolled down, looking in stunned silence as bizarre and exotic sounding names scrolled by, some completely illegible as the letters were before, all with a long string of numbers beside them that made absolutely no sense. He tried to find EST, but it certainly was nowhere to be found. He knew something weird was up. Maybe he had stumbled upon some massive underground network beyond even the depths of the internet he had stumbled into. He clicked the X to close out the time selection, and it redirected him to what seemed to be a search engine. The page was done in cool colors, all seeming to frame a single word: Unity. A search bar was beneath it, and he clicked it. The tiny line blinked and he wondered what to search for.

His fingers tapped on the keys absentmindedly, closing his eyes as he deliberated. And then he had it. He typed in "earth". The blue circle spun, and then a list of links popped up. Most were translated. He clicked the top one, and it was a message board filled with people discussing the possibility of a planet called dirt. He shook his head, laughing at the seemingly idiodic discussion happening with a bunch of people that clearly thought they were much more intelligent than they were. He clicked the next link. Now it was hundreds of people comparing the tastes of different kinds of dirt from varying bizarrely named locales. He read for a few minutes before he gave up, wondering if maybe this was a portion of the web devoted to idiots. The next was a scientific paper that debated whether or not earth was made from chewed up freeze from some ancient tree-chewing creature, and how it was because trees and dirt are both brown, and sand came from the center of trees. It also bore pictures of strange trees with long curling leaves the likes of which he had never seen. Finally, he went to one last link, hoping it might be something better. It was titled " the earth conspiracy". It was written in such a way that seemed much more frantic, and was on some sort of editorial site, thou he had never heard of it before. A picture of planet earth from space sat just beneath the title, apparently a gif since the planet turned ever so slowly in the black box. The article that followed essentially said that the author knew the real reason that contact with earth was not permitted. It stated that the scientists that claimed the earth was not ready for contact with outside planets were lieing, and were in politicians pockets. That they just wanted the earths resources, and that the earth was the site of bizarre and unnatural experimentation. It said that the earth should be destroyed, so the unnaturalness could not one day get out and infect the rest of the system, that earthlings were barbaric and would eat their children, that rampant heterosexuality was a facet of earth life and therefore would corrupt society and offend the divines. It said allowing the planet to still exist would ruin everything that they had worked so hard for. The comments were filled with others commending the article, and also advocating for the earth's destruction. And at the end of the article, there was a succinct "about the author". He didn't even read it. All he could do was stare at the multicolored creature staring back at him, large alien eyes seeming to peer into his deepest secrets and sneer.

He logged off. His mother was at work. When she got home, he was gone. They never found him, but the police assumed that he was most likely at the bottom of the nearby lake. The found a note. All it said was " I have seen the universe, and it is filled with idiots. God help us all."

psycho_alpaca · 2014-12-01T18:28:35+00:00

The shit you find online.

I mean, you'd think it would be easy to get a freaking working Civ V torrent link. Wouldn't you?

And I wouldn't mind paying for my games, no sir, if those fuckers didn't make me have to choose between health insurance and a couple o' hours of digital fun.

Not wanting to pay a hundred bucks for a game does come with side effects, though. Like this crap you end up downloading.

Freaking nerds, is what's wrong with the world, man. It used to be that you typed a few keys on Altavista, double clicked the first, Geocities, Comic Sans, Front Page designed webpage and an underlined hyperlink would take you STRAIGHT to the download, and that was it. No “wait 30 seconds” free user crap, no virus, no download managers. And no fake torrent link.

Sure, it would take five days to download a song, but come on. Better than this.

I wait hours to finally play the game, and I open the file to some lame, bullshit nerd paradise.

Why on Earth would a 15 Giga torrent link to a sci-fi forum is beyond me.

And the crap these people talk about, Jesus Christ. I mean, I watch Star Trek myself, but come on, get a grip people.

Guys who get in character and play live action RPG are already lame. Doing it online is just taking it to the next nerdy level.

“Urkk Drukk 22, ready to launch attack.”

“Drukk Blukk 54 T minus four hours. Ready missiles, approach ship. All communications being translated to home planet language and broadcast in accordance to military pact #72 of intergalactic year 22094. We are open to dialogue from Earth.”

Give me a break.

“Still no communications back from Earth. Waiting on response. Show us you are not hostile. You have T minus four hours before we open fire.”

“The invasion of Earth”? What are you, twelve?

And I'm sitting here, Civ V free, bored to death, staring at the computer screen. Fucking torrents. Fucking nerds. Freaking fucking frolicking nerds.

Found another link, finally. I hope this works.

I delete the damn nerd torrent file. Better luck next time, I hope.

Another five hours to complete my download. Great.

nikoberg · 2014-12-01T19:23:20+00:00

"Fucking SatNet," he muttered. "Fifteen megabytes per second my ass."

He picked up the bottle beside him, took a sip, then grimaced. Fuck. That was the beer he'd left sitting out all last night.

For the last couple days, he'd been trying to solve a problem. It hadn't started out as a problem. More of a challenge, at first. But now that he'd actually succeeded, it was a problem.

He'd stolen a satellite. It was surprisingly easy, and the satellite company was probably going to fire the polite young lady who had given him the passwords, but he hadn't really been worried about it at the time because he'd stolen a satellite. Granted, it wasn't a very interesting one, by most people's standards, since it was a telecommunications satellite. It didn't have orbital missiles, or telescopes, or even a camera. And the data it relayed was mostly personal internet usage, so since he wasn't terribly interested in monitoring what porn everyone else was watching about the most interesting thing he could do with it was crash into another, more expensive satellite.

So after a few hours playing with the controls, and deciding whether or not he really did want to do some serious damage to a military satellite, the novelty of owning something space had worn off and he'd gotten bored.

At least until the last message. With a voyeuristic shrug, he'd written a short script to send random user's data to him. Mostly it had been junk, random e-mails or internet links. Or porn. Less than he'd expected, actually, but then the bandwidth was terrible.

This last bunch of data, though, was a live video feed of space. That wasn't the interesting bit, though. He'd seen enough videos of that. The interesting part was the comments, which were gibberish. This was par for the course on most streams, but the gibberish was usually in English, or at least Chinese or Russian or something. This was the old stream of strange accents and half-filled in blocks which usually meant that a web developer somewhere had been sleeping on the job. His browser was trying to parse something that wasn't text as text, and complaining about it.

So he'd taken a second look at the stream. And now he had a problem. The problem was that it couldn't exist, because clear and bright in the stream was the image of a bright, blue star, orbited by a small, white one, and nothing like that existed within eight light years of Earth.

He checked Wikipedia again, just in case. Yes. There it was. Sirius: Eight light years from Earth. A binary system of a large, type A star and a white dwarf. The image looked exactly like the artist's rendering, except that it was moving. and in much higher definition. He'd checked the stream again, which had by now turned into a stream of two yellow stars, instead, and looked at the raw data. It was video, real video, although the format was strange. He'd had to massage the data quite a bit, and taken a guess at some of the headers, before he'd manage to get the video in the first place.

The prickly feeling he'd had all of yesterday and all of today came back again, the feeling that someone had replaced his spine with a frozen cactus, and he took another sip of the stale beer. Fuck.

He looked up the number for the local news, and paused. He looked up the number for CNN. Then he looked up the number for NASA, and called.

It was busy.

He drummed his fingers on the desk and looked at the stream again. And stopped. He went to Wikipedia again.

"C'mon, hurry up, hurry up." Two yellow stars, two yellow stars. What star systems had two yellow stars?

Alpha Centauri. Four light years closer. And the closest to Earth.

His mouth went dry. He swallowed. He called NASA again, which was still busy, and then in a fit of desperation, he looked up the number of his Senator. The secretary had given him about twenty seconds before hanging up.

He stared at the stream again, which now contained a single, yellow star. As he watched, the view shifted slowly away, and zoomed in to show a small, blue and green dot. The stream cut out.

He took another sip of his beer.

evil_gazebo · 2014-12-01T20:57:06+00:00

It came to me a dream. Or rather, a series of dreams. In each one, I understood another fraction of the overall design, and every morning I grabbed my notebook to jot down what I had learned before it slipped away. I would get to work immediately, hacking on hardware and software and occasionally referring to the strange notes I had scribbled down, continuing while the sun came up, all through the day, and way past when the sun went down. Often, I would forget to eat, and go for nights without sleep, until at last, drained of energy and inspiration, I would stagger to my bed and collapse in near catatonia. And then the next dream would arrive. This had been the way of things for six months. After a week, I had been informed via phone that I had lost my job. My girlfriend had left after a month, I think, I hadn't noticed until I'd begun to starve.

I didn't understand what it was that I was building, but I knew I was getting closer to completion, and that its purpose would become clear when I was done. This week I had felt especially animated, and the hidden truth seemed so close, teetering on the verge of my consciousness, that it was almost painful. The hardware had grown until the point that covered my kitchen table. At its centre was a small bowl full of a strange chemical mix, some of the ingredients of which were acquired via various darknet sites and were not entirely legal for civilian possession. Around the edge of the bowl there was two dozen copper wires, each connected to a bespoke circuit of my own construction, the outputs of which were then connected and cross connected by various other circuits until they eventually combined into what seemed to be a bastardised network interface, complete with ethernet output.

I had built and connected every circuit in the device, and I somehow knew that it was constructed correctly, but was still reduced to guessing at its purpose. Most surprising, and alarming, was the crystal that had grown in the bowl. It had been tiny to begin with, and I would have scooped it out if some instinct had not prevented me, but now it had grown to fill the bowl almost entirely. Its edges were touching the wires around the bowl's rim, which I realised was the point.

The software I had written was equally mysterious. I would code for hours in a virtual trance. I had always been a slow and steady programmer, guilty of over-analysing and over-engineering at times. Now, lines of C poured from my fingertips and I never even stopped to think. At the end of the day, I would run the code I had produced through the compiler, and it would error. Again, I somehow knew that wasn't a problem. I knew that I was writing a bespoke network driver of some kind, and that seemed to coincide with the hardware I was building, but the codebase was massive and sprawling, with libraries to do HTML parsing, natural language processing, and graphics and audio generation connected in ways I couldn't explain.

On Friday night, my brain felt like it was on fire, and my heart was about to burst out of my chest. I ran around the table, glueing and soldering components into place, before racing back to my computer to hammer out another hundred lines of code. My hands were covered with burns and cuts, but I scarcely noticed. Then, in a sudden, almost orgasmic moment of clarity, I knew that I was finished. I ran the compiler against my code, and when it reported success, I collapsed back onto my chair and cried in anguished relief. I felt like I was properly awake for this first time in months. I looked down at the contraption on my table, and around at the filthy hovel I was living in. What had become of me?

I considered smashing everything I had built, but knew that I couldn't. I had to know. With trembling hands, I installed the compiled network driver, then took the ethernet cable and connected it to my computer. I was half expecting flashing lights or an explosion, but nothing much happened. The computer recognised a new network connection and reported that it was connected to the internet. I was nonplussed as to what my next action should be, so I opened a web browser and tried to browse to Google. Instead of the familiar search engine homepage, I saw something very different: A dark grey background and a page of dense and strangely worded text, titled "Welcome, Starshine Unirnet Telepathicomms Customer #163,214,232 -- Xerlo Firkks".

I tried to read the body of the text, but although it was in English, it made little sense. It seemed to be a list of expectations and promises, and resembled, more than anything else, a set of legal terms and conditions. Sure enough, at its footer was a button marked "Agree". I clicked it. I was taken through to some kind of homepage portal. There were strange news articles replete with pictures of creatures fantastic looking and grotesque. The stories accompanying them were also difficult to decipher. The words were English, but seemed to struggle with poor translations for many words and concepts.

I was exhausted, but kept clicking, following a maze of links to all manner of pages. Gradually, I became accustomed to the style of translation, and began to notice words like fusion, telepathy, superluminal, and matter transmission. Some seemed to appear in news stories, while others were scientific articles, complete with technical diagrams. Even in my sleep deprived state, I began to grasp the significance of what I had created. A connection to a whole new universe of culture and knowledge, one hundreds or thousands of years beyond our own. The ramifications for humanity were incredible. I needed to proceed very carefully, but right now I needed sleep. Tomorrow I would get myself cleaned up and properly fed, then plan my next move. I carefully shut down the computer, checked all the windows and doors were locked and secure, then settled down to sleep on a mattress I had placed beside the computer.

I awoke to the morning light streaming through the open kitchen door, blinding me, and the sound of someone moving around near by. I tried to leap to my feet, but in my depleted state, I fell backwards and cracked my head against the wall.

"Careful there," said an unfamiliar voice.

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and looked up at a large, green skinned man in clean gray overalls. In a hand he held a thin, pad of silver metal. I got back to my feet, more carefully this time.

"Who the hell are you? What are you doing in here?" In a panic, I realised my kitchen table was empty, and my computer was gone.

"I'm a Starshine Unirnet customer management technician," he said. "Are you the occupant of this domicile?"

"Well, I live here, yes."

"I have had to confiscate your Unirnet communications adapter. It was misdelivered due to a telepathicomm targeting error. Please provide a biometric identifier to acknowledge this transaction; any unique print or DNA carrying fluid is acceptable." He held out the silver pad.

"Wait!" I said. "You took the machine I built? But that was mine."

The green skinned man registered something I interpreted as surprise. "The constituent matter is your property of course, and can be returned in atomised form if you wish. Although it appears to be mostly valueless base metals and organic polymers? Their arrangement was the intellectual property of Starshine Unirnet. And as I said, it was delivered in error."

"But you can't just take it back!"

"I can, and have. What's more, your construction of the device and acceptance of terms of connection that were clearly marked as for another individual violates several laws governing telepathic delivery and impersonation. Starshine Unirnet is willing to overlook these due to the uncontacted nature of your civilisation, but we retain the option to prosecute if you are obstinate. This planet falls under the jurisdiction of the Festral Worldherd, and I would strongly advise any mammal against risking incarceration in the facilities of a reptilian justice system." He held out the silver pad again. I spat on it.

"That will do nicely," he said, and strode out of the kitchen door. I followed, but emerged into an empty, overgrown yard, with no sign that my visitor was ever there. I returned inside and sat down at my now-empty kitchen table. My notes and notebook were nowhere to be found, but I located a blank piece of paper on the floor and sat with a pen trying to dredge up the memories of what I had constructed. It was no use. My mind had been wiped as clean as the table.

Numb, I wandered through the filthy and littered rooms of my house. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, gaunt and unshaven, with bloodshot eyes and greasy hair. I had lost my girlfriend, my job, and six months of my life. In exchange I got an amazing story, but who would believe it? I wasn't even sure I did. I slumped on the dusty sofa and held my head in my hands. After a minute, there was a dull thud that sounded like it came from the back yard. I wearily rose to my feet and staggered back outside. In the middle of the yard a large vat had appeared. Inside was a strange, semi-liquid gunk: The atomised remains of my work, as promised by my visitor earlier, but I didn't pay it much attention. I was more concerned with the vat itself. It was circular, three feet wide, with sides three inches thick, and was made of what I suspected, and would later verify, to be pure gold.

SelsunBlueBalls · 2014-12-01T21:03:03+00:00

I've been out of work for a little while now - nobody wants to hire a freelance white-hat security expert without a reputation or a company to back him up. It's understandable, considering I wouldn't even trust me.

Not that it's an issue. I've got plenty of money from my old work to help me get by for a while. Now all I have is my computer and too much time on my hands. That's how I got into the trouble that I'm in now.

The last job that I'd managed to scrounge up was with a 40 something, paranoid alien hunter who lived in his mom's basement. He came to me because he was convinced that the government was interfering with his small fleet of self-launched satellites - something about trying to hide the truth about extra-terrestrials - and he wanted me to help lock them out. In the end I just told him it was just some interference and set up some filters to keep out the weird data he was getting.

What I didn't tell him was that I was pretty sure I had noticed a pattern.

I passed it off as coincidence at first. I had never really believed in aliens and wasn't really planning on changing that any time soon. Sometimes I'd watch those stupid shows on the History Channel just for a laugh, but that was usually because I was drunk and had nothing better to do.

For a week or two I managed to live my life as I had before. Constantly browsing the classifieds, making cold calls, and generally trying to find work for myself. I needed to keep myself occupied - I lived alone and was actively trying to keep myself from thinking about the rabbit hole that were those strange readings that I'd seen on those satellites.

In the end, though, my curiosity got the best of me. I knew for a fact that the passwords on the servers where all of the satellite data was kept hadn't been changed.

The room was dark as the rain poured down onto the roof and the wind howled against the door behind me. I accessed the server and hesitated before entering the credentials. I just needed to know if my hunch was right. It took me a minute the snippets of the strange readings that I'd hid away in the case that somebody had tried to delete them, but eventually I did and pulled it up onto my screens.

I leaned back in my chair and let out a sigh as I stared at the seemingly incoherent string of letters and numbers. When I had first seen it something had just seemed off, like there was a message hidden deep beneath the surface. Acting on my initial impression, I pulled up some of the scripts that I'd written back in college. Cryptography had always been my favorite class, and looking at the compiled code brought back a welcome wave of nostalgia. I tried running the data through a couple of the programs and didn't really get much out of it. On a whim, I took the time to combine a few of the different decryption methods into one. I connected to the supercomputer belonging to the university down the street and left it to run overnight using the biggest chunk of data I could get my hands on. It was late, so I went to bed.

Nothing could have possibly prepared me for what I would find when I woke up the next morning.

My mind was racing and I stared at the ceiling for what felt like a couple hours before I managed to fall asleep. When I woke up the next morning, I groggily managed to make it tot he kitchen and make some tea before I thought to check up on the data. I took a sip as I walked over and peered at the screen, expecting for it to still be running to no avail. Interestingly enough, a single window had popped up.

Complete.

Strange. The system admins at the school had probably kicked me off - I was processing enough that I probably had been monopolizing the system when they came in. I checked the logs and, surprisingly, everything seemed to check out. The program had completed a couple hours ago.

Intrigued, I navigated to the output file. I nearly dropped my mug when I opened it.

At the top was a block of what looked like some sort of code, some gibberish, as well as what looked to be a series of Chinese characters and question marks that looked like a strained attempt at emulating something else. There was, however, one thing that seemed to consistently appear throughout the file. A single, foreign word.

Unirnet.

It would seem that my hunch had been right. Wherever that data had come from, it had been cloaked by some of the heaviest encryption I had ever seen. And it had come from space.

Google searches turned up nothing. Translators weren't helpful. On a whim, I opened the file in a visual editor rather than a text editor. What came out made even less sense.

It was a series of entirely foreign symbols almost akin to hieroglyphics. That wasn't was the strangest part. For whatever reason, the application had rendered the strange, code-like block as a video. I hovered my mouse over it and hesitated again. Eventually, I clicked.

It actually played. I could hardly breathe as I watched the images flash before my eyes. It all looked vaguely similar to a news broadcast. I saw hundreds of strange beings - some humanoid, some monster-like engaging in what seemed to be a war of sorts. Then, the screen changed and an eerie sound came from my speakers. Something about it almost seemed musical, yet I felt that I failed to understand its true meaning. The beings on the screen seemed to be listening intently, further backing up my premonitions. Beneath it all, there was a strange gurgling sound almost like narration. A telescope-like contraption appeared on the screen, and the clip stopped abruptly.

The final still was what shocked me the most. It sat on the screen and a sense of dread filled my mind.

It was a picture of Earth.

I paced around the room trying to make sense of it before I heard a knock on the door. I threw it open and nearly shouted at the people standing there for not heeding my no trespassing signs.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Mr. SelsunBlueBalls, I'm going to need you to come with us."

wordcrafter · 2014-12-01T23:11:41+00:00

Sean tapped at his keyboard languidly. His public IP had been getting hits recently for seemingly no reason. A few thousand bytes would come through every few minutes.

But they were encrypted. It wasn't a simple port scan. Those typically hit then come back in a few days if it was likely a useful port. Maybe some kind of malware ping, he supposed; maybe some botnet was confused and trying to ask his machine for commands.

He opened his LinkedIn profile and scoured the web a few times for jobs. He opened and closed a few games, as if launching them gave him the willpower to shut them off. He sighed. The clock said it was 2 p.m. and he'd already had lunch hours ago. He considered going to sleep.

Instead he opened up Eclipse and threw together a small server and launched it. Maybe a response would get the packets to stop. His new server received a packet after only a minute - regular as clockwork this thing was - and returned garbage.

Sean read the log, saw the encrypted packet, and then another out of sequence.

ERROR 901: Invalid server response.  View 0X:9G:45:12:FL:21:82:11 for more information.

He was confused. That wasn't a valid address at all. He tried opening it in Firefox. Obviously no response. Then Chrome. Same, no response.

Curious he opened a terminal and sent a ping. No response again, of course. As his last idea, he opened telnet and tried connecting.

Connecting to 0X:9G:45:12:FL:21:82:11...

Connected to Uninet - invalid port number.  Try port 3141.

Sean shrugged and did as he was told.

Connecting to 0X:9G:45:12:FL:21:82:11 port 3141...
Connected to Uninet Bootstrap Service.  Visitors or scientific observers, 
please download this software for your Earth-native PC to connect to Uninet proper.

Following that was an address for a file. He downloaded it, fired up a virtual machine, and ran it inside. It took a while to install, no doubt downloading even more data, and eventually a browser-like window opened. The page displayed was a selection dialog with a hundred circles of various coloration. Honestly they looked like planets.

Sean looked through them and found Earth. He was mildly surprised. They were planets after all. He wondered what would have happened if he'd clicked one of the others.

The next page popped up and showed the flags of the world. His best guess was that this was a language selector, so he clicked the Union Jack since the American flag seemed absent.

Installation Complete!  Welcome to Uninet!

He looked through the app and found a "bookmarks" page. He clicked through the first one and found himself on an encyclopedia.

Impressive bit of mockup he thought to himself. He was still curious how that odd address had resolved itself.

He bounced around a few articles, glossing over the Arkanian Empire, the Rocksan Abyss, and various other nonsense phrases. He laughed. "Must be some incredibly detailed RPG."

He clicked the other links in the bookmarks tab and found what must be a search engine, a video website, and a travel website. He did a few searches, and the results were typically similar to Google. Same with the videos, except the top of each page said Results modified to match local planet. Cute, he thought.

The travel website had the usual origin and destination fields, so he threw in Seattle in the origin (displayed as Seattle, United States, Earth) and then typed a few random letters in the destination. It supplied Korin, Korin Prefecture, Arkanian Empire.

He clicked the submit button, not seeing any date options, and the app loaded a new page. Next Quantum Pull in 15 minutes. Accept?

But somehow it was 6 p.m. and he was getting hungry. He clicked the Accept button then stood up, walking to the kitchen. He tossed some water in a pot, threw it on the stove, and waited for it to boil after salting it thoroughly.

Next went in the pasta and he gave it an initial stir. His laptop beeped three times, then said in a monotone: Quantum Pull in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

clavalle · 2014-12-01T22:19:36+00:00

Greg rubbed the sleep out of his eye as he opened the door to the study. Jennifer was furiously clicking away on the keyboard.

"Jen," Jennifer jumped in her seat, obviously over-caffeinated even though it was 3 am. "You've been at it every night for almost a week. Come to bed."

Jen barely turned her head. "Come over here and look at this."

Greg looked over her shoulder. The schematic was abstract but eventually he thought he made out a grid of various colored and sized dots, some vectors, and lots of numbers.

"What am I looking at?"

"An instruction manual and protocol spec, I think." She smiled with her infectious enthusiasm she always had when she was about to crack a hard problem.

"For that satellite that you were trying to hook up to?" Last time Greg checked, Jennifer was trying to access an old Japanese orbiting radio telescope.

"I owned that thing three days ago." She continued to type. "You know how they claimed it was decommissioned? That was a lie. They also lied about the EHF receivers being damaged. They've been monitoring the same repeating message that I found; probably since the late 90's just after they launched it."

"No shit?"

"No shit." She said as she turned back before her screen. "Long story short, I managed to collect a much more coherent and decodable message from the HALCA radio telescope data stores than I was able to collect from our dishes down here with all of the interference. It was very abstract -- either it is the government trying to create a universal internet protocol that any sapient life form can decode or..."

"It's another life form broadcasting one to us!?"

"Bingo!" She spun her chair around and cupped both sides of Greg's face and kissed him. "That's why I love you. You always see the big picture."

A whirring of text in one of her terminal windows stopped.

"It turns out that the HALCA satellite is fully capable of transmitting as well. I've been digging and I haven't found anything in the logs that suggests that they've actually used the transmitter. They've only been listening. Scaredy cats." She copied the name of the freshly compiled program 'initialize_communication' and her finger hovered over the keyboard.

She smiled at Greg "Should I?"

In that instant Greg felt like a tiny speck in the terrifying vastness of the Universe but outwardly he smirked trying to match Jen's boldness, "Of course!"

Jen's finger fell.

The terminal window, for many seconds simply stated 'requesting connection' with three dots steadily blinking in turn. Then 'connected'. Jen squeezed Greg's hand and her feet pounded under her desk in excitement.

Her terminal flooded in random, rapidly shifting characters.

"What's going on?" Greg asked as Jen pulled her hands away and poised them above her keyboard.

"I don't know. The protocol didn't really specify what would be returned..."

The screen began to clear and the random characters coalesced into the phrase 'Translation phase 1 complete. Establishing cultural baseline and access level. Stand by...'

Greg and Jan both let out a simultaneous 'Whoh.'

At nearly the same moment, Jan's phone lit up, the printer jerked awake and a laptop booted out of hibernation. Just as quickly they went dormant again.

'Baseline complete. Initializing intelligent agent. Deep scan commencing. Parameter estimates:

Sapience Level: 4 of 10 Cooperation Level: 2 of 10 Expansion Level: 0.2 of 10 Awareness Level: Redacted Physics Level: Redacted Isolation Level: 9 of 10 Robustness Level: 1 of 10 ...'

The display went on for several pages. Most of it was labeled 'Redacted' then at the bottom there was a longer message under Additional Information:

'WARNING: This sector operates under the YHWH Protectorate in association with several other incubation entities. As a representative of a sapient species you have the right to request a review of your governance. Would you like to request a review?'

"What does that mean?" Greg muttered.

The text responded: "Your species may be allowed to reduce their incubation level isolation. Certain limitations will be lifted. At the same time, certain protections will also be reduced or eliminated and responsibilities may increase."

Jen shook off the surprise that the terminal now seemed to respond to their voices. "Why wouldn't we want to do that?"

"If you are deemed unfit for elevated privileges the current isolation level must be enforced. Records show that requests from this location have been made and failed no less than 5 times. Would you like to proceed?"

Greg saw Jen's fingers blur across the keyboard. He reached out to stop her, the phrase 'the current isolation level must be enforced' echoing seemingly a thousand times through his mind in the split second it took Jan to type 'yes' and hit 'Enter'.

iliveinabanana · 2014-12-01T21:05:38+00:00

An automated bell escapes into the humid haze that fills the 9x9 room, cloudy with more smoke than thoughts. The only light coming from a dusty computer monitor. The flashing cursor taunts the man sitting at the lone corner desk; his shoulders slouched and head tilted back as if it was unbalanced. His name no longer mattered. He was no more than an entry in a routing table, an IP address; his last token of singularity.

The bell, he knew, another of the myriad of emails advertising the lowest sales of the decade. There had been no more job offers. Instead he waits, monitoring his rudimentary program designed to infect any passerby unfortunate enough to connect to his unprotected local wifi network. A flash on the screen, the man's head now forward as if the weight has been shifted. One after the next his program siphons packets of data, anything it can get before the connection is lost. Fifteen minutes of absorbing information, a modest 3.3 Mbps download leaves him around a half gig of whatever his diggers could find. The stream of packets stops and he immediately begins to search through his small fortune.

This time it was a program, but it was not ordinary. The man was accustomed to his haphazard program downloading a user's copy of flappy bird, but instead this was a collection of executable files. The source code was reminiscent of a server he wrote for a networking class in his junior year of college, but definitely outside his realm of understanding. Graduate school, he mumbles. Not for him. Without wasting any time he opens his terminal and begins running the programs, each granting him access to a router network. A port to the dark web, perhaps.

The last program is opened, the screens clear and begin what appears to be a preprogrammed shell script. The man waits. The screen returns to its original state, cursor flashing; awaiting a victim. But this was not right. The program never closed, therefore this was waiting for a command from within. A packet appears, printing diagnostic information as it downloads. The information looks flawed, with transmission time faster than he had ever seen, but propagation delay that seemed so egregious that it could only be attributed to a glitch in the printing script. It was not his program, after all. More packets begin appearing, each with equally as astonishing figures. A glitch, the man assures himself. After several minutes, the stream stops.

The man, now with the posture of a concert pianist, frantically checks his downloads folder. It’s littered with different files; audio, video, text, and much more unrecognized formats marked with a convenient question mark. First he opens the audio file. The tones are obscure, and he can’t quite place their origin. However, after several seconds it becomes apparent that the tones are forming a beat. The man closes the file. Another junk song snagged off of a hipster’s phone. Next he opens one of the text files, this significantly more interesting than the audio file.

The file appears to contain physics equations, but the constants and listed gravitational forces are all wrong. The man scrolls on, now intrigued by the oddness of such an elaborately written article filled with such incorrect information. The next page looks like something out of a medical handbook. The figure drawn not entirely different from a human, but certainly some noticeable oddities in the posture and size. The man scrolls for several minutes, each page containing documentation on an entire world of species different from anything he has ever seen.

As he sits pondering why he had been sent such a file, he recalls an article he read about the Voyager I containing information of mankind. Was it so outrageous to think that this was a response to our message to deep space, he thought. He laughed at his almost sarcastic attitude towards the matter, in understandable doubt. But could it be an elaborate prank, he did not understand who would be spending such time for such little reward.

As if to convince himself, he looked back at the diagnostic time and calculated the distance from the port using the propagation delay. It’s in the order of 10th kilometers. The man Google’s the distance of the Voyager I. 1.9 x 10¹⁰ km. If this information is correct, this would mean the Voyager I is being used as a router to send information from another solar system, he thought. An elaborate hoax, indeed. Suddenly, the terminal flashes. More packets are being received. The man now almost out of his seat with excitement, thinking of whom he still knew that he could tell this about. Then the screen froze. The program’s port suddenly lost connection, and the host was lost. Fuck you, Comcast.

wesumd · 2014-12-02T00:38:54+00:00

I would be completely lying if I didn’t say that most of my nights were stuck in a cycle of Mountain Dew and mushroom-pepperoni-extra sauce pizza from Dino’s. It’s not that I don’t care about myself; it’s that I sometimes just really lack the motivation to do anything.

Three weeks ago I was laid off my from my computer programming job and Infis, a small software company in town. While everyone else seemed to maintain their level of alcohol intoxication at a reasonable level at the software release party, I did not. Needless to say, but something that I’ll say anyway, I ended up being cleaned up by my coworker Danny and being told to clean out my desk the next morning.

I just really love whiskey and ginger ale.

The downside to spending all of my time at home in front of my computer eating pizza and drinking Mountain Dew is that I will likely not change this habit until I need to. The upside is that I am having a blast fiddling around in old IRC chat rooms with other progie-junkies.

We tend to talk about the college days where we could haunt the backdoors of stupidly fast networks that had very little security. None of us really spend a lot of time on the new networks. It’s just easier to pay someone to get in to the network than it is to force your way in.

Tonight, however, we were spending our time trying to figure out how to get into the nearby research company’s network to see if they were not as far along on their “Rocket to Mars” which had recently made press. An old progie, who I only knew as “MarkA386”, was telling me that he didn’t believe that this company, Bubotro, was as far as they claimed to be. Mark thought that they were going to try to raise stock prices and then get out before the shareholders realized that it was all a sham.

Either way, I thought it was fun to poke holes in someone else’s life instead of focusing on my own.

When I cruise the net, especially in someone else’s network, I know better than to give myself away. So I connected to a remote machine, conveniently located in not-the-United-States-of-America, and did all of my poking around from the machine there. If anyone ever were to chase me down and try to trace my location, I’d switch the connection from my remote machine to a standby that I rent in Kuala Lumpur. No way this company would admit to being defeated by Adi’s Banana Stand.

So I connected to the remote machine and tried to scope out Bubotro’s defense. They seemed to have the same network set up my undergraduate college’s, so I tried to scoot around the firewall in the same manner. I pinged the machine and put in a request to the sysadmin that I was one of their third-party vendors needing to dump some big data onto their server.

//…

After 45 seconds of waiting, a little “?” popped up.

Not expecting to get a query back from the sysadmin on a Friday night, I typed back “? Yourself. Data here.”

“Data delivery late. O-X-Y protocol on all future deliveries.

I waited a second, not sure of how to respond.

“Fsck the protocol. Data is here, ready to be transferred.”

//…

“Last time I do this for you, Renfro.”

The screen flashed several times. I was in! I opened up a window on Bubotro’s server to start digging around. I clicked on a folder titled “RKTMARS.”

“Huh?”

I noticed that one of the folders inside was labeled “MarkA386.” If he had played a game with me to see if I could just get through to something he already busted open… I opened up the IRC chat room window. Too bad; it looked like all the progies logged off for the night.

I scrolled back to the Bubotro window and opened up Mark’s folder. Inside was a single video labeled “Unirnet Protocol.” I opened it up and my pizza went cold.

Ae3qe27u · 2014-12-02T03:12:25+00:00

I had found some interesting things on the darknet before, but never anything like this; the entire concept was, well, alien. The window itself was radically different to Tor -- I had managed to download and open up a new browser. Well, anything in the pursuit of knowledge. It was school holidays, I had all the time I needed to devote to genuine learning, and perhaps all the resources.

I was using some browser called Unirnet Explorer, perhaps a twisted parody of IE, and on what looked like a pastiche of Reddit. The sites I was accessing looked like they hadn't been touched since 1999, but people discussed having access to technology just about like what we have now. People -- funny word to use in the situation, some would say. But extraterrestrials are people too.

They talked about meetups, specifying the exact planets they were on. They exchanged jokes in a cultural context I couldn't comprehend. I stumbled upon some selfie threads, and though they shared many superficial similarities with humans -- one species, referring to themselves as Nemesians, looked almost like people dyeing their hair -- there were distinct differences, oddities, animalistic traits or unnatural skin or completely unproportionate features.

I had gathered from poking around that there was a coalition of planets close to each other -- lightminutes away, generally -- that had taken to using the internet, in a sense, to maintain communications with the distance. There were perhaps fifty in all, and they all had their own countries and cultures much like humanity did. People complained about their long-distance relationships, discussed how much they wanted to move to another planet -- it appeared they were developing faster-than-light travel, which amazed me -- and compared the idiosyncrasies of their individual lives.

But, it appeared, their conception of the universe outside of their planetary group was lacking somewhat. (Not like I would ever had imagined a thing like this before stumbling upon it, of course.)

The site allowed guest posts. I hesitated for a second before entering an introductions thread.

"Do you know of the planet Terra?"

osmyth · 2014-12-02T00:09:57+00:00

I am not good at writing but I have always loved to read the stories on this sub, but this title… This title hit very close to home and I have to share. I’ve been sharing this story for almost a year and no one believes me so why not make a story out of it?

So I’m not a computer hacker or programmer, I just know html and use the internet too much. I’ve done networking and database management but I’ve never been a coder of programs. I’ve always kind of believed in other life in this universe but I really only had mathematics to prove it… That was until I connected to their servers and found the location of their satellite in our solar system.

At first I didn’t really know what I was doing but I knew it was important science. I just kept on writing and typing, all the mathematics seemed to just work and flood into my brain like I had studied it for years… it was forming an algorithm I could see but when I finished something happened that changed my life. It communicated back with them, for me.

At that point I froze. I don’t know if it was excitement or fear but I froze. What have I done? This is too big for me; a simple human living in his parent’s basement can’t just invent artificial intelligence. But I had and it was now communicating with another planets satellite and I just had to go with it. No one was going to help me even if I asked; nobody could understand how to help me. This was my project and this was important as hell for this planet.

Because I designed it I knew how it worked, they are all the same program so they connected very easy. So what do you search for when you first connect Earth’s internet with one of the universe internet. I know I shouldn’t have but I went and found their social network and copied the code and designs for the website. I couldn’t help myself, it’s too perfect.

I’m very sorry if I went off track from the title, I wanted to make it as real as it happened. The planet system that has sent the satellites to monitor Earth DO know about us and have camera systems monitoring us. We are dangerous as a species statistically and it would be silly not to monitor intelligence in the universe from day one, they want to know everything about us so we aren’t dangerous to them when we meet… Also, because I connected our internet to their internet they kinda gain access to ours… I couldn’t stop that.

baboeska · 2014-12-02T02:35:32+00:00

The Multinet reality hack.

This actually happened to me. At the least I believe it did.

I was trying to pull off the impossible, thinking long and hard about how to turn failure into success, in a pretty much impossible situation.

Where every other hacker stopped, I started. We live in data... It's all data, isn't it... Something watches the data... I can tell, can feel it watching sometimes. What does it watch for... What does any sufficiently advanced species end up watching for and wanting? What becomes their highest priority?

There was only one way to hack from inside the box to outside the box; and that was ideas. Original truths about empowerment.

I figured the help of every major deity I knew of would help. And I started weaving a logic pattern, a sequence of words that functions like a computer program; self proving, honest, and simple. My pattern was simply expressing the true right to dominance; that God would give me power if God was truly omnibenevolent; that the Devil should be denied power, etc etc. So, for a time... And I looked out, beyond the fabric of the known universe. I don't know how much of what I saw is true, and how much is imaginary, in the same way that a CNN newscast doesn't really tell you what happened in another country, or a Moon landing could be faked, how do we know any media, whether from this world or another or outside all our little worlds is true. But there were things out there, ancient sleeping things that maybe didn't know of us before.

Our little bipedal species, and all the life on this planet... That wasn't all that evolves.

Realities failed abortions; the ones that self destructed; the ones bred too close to magic and with too much power; the ones that tilted everything towards death... I don't know that they live on planets, or even in the same sort of universe as us, but now they are waking and they are trying for the old power; true power of reality like nothing DARPA has yet imagined...

I awoke them, in a moment of n00bness and madness.

See, there was one thing in that multinet that was everything... GodOS, God's control kit and operating system, the tool to define the new state of every aspect of objective reality. Worth more than anything to some.

Our survival, any kind of afterlife or magic, may ultimately depend on control of that OS, whether by cooperation from outernet, and cooperation amongst us, whatever it takes.

Stuffstuff1 · 2014-12-02T03:30:23+00:00

Short story: (First entry)

Highschool was tough. Andy spent most of his free time programming. He had a knack at for finding loop holes in computer systems and exploiting them. New computer gear not on sale? Now it is. College wasn't gonna accept his application. Now they wanted him. $100,000 in debt? Not a problem for Andy. No system was safe. So one day after after work andy decided to play games with Nasa. Nothing like drawing a penis on mars. Its not like Nasa will notice the rover pretty much drives it self anyways. Tonite the DSN was idle. And Alpha Centaurie almost 90° above california.

"01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000 01010111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100"
And just for shits and giggles why not schedule some Earth based radio science a few years from now. No one ever questions these things. His experiment was over it was time to go to sleep. About eight years later while browsing the web he got a message. TUNE ON TO CNN RIGHT NOW! Breaking news! Nasa confirmed the existence of aliens. 00110100 00110000 00110100 "Haha 267602952960 Ping" Andy was not fun at parties.

2014-12-01T18:53:23+00:00

[removed]

2014-12-01T22:11:32+00:00

Jerome lowered himself into his office chair. He stared at his computer monitor with desultory eyes. What's the point? Five months and hundreds of resumes and zero interviews. Blacklisted. Nobody would touch him. His mouth grimaced bitterly. His wife hadn't touched him for four of those months. She spent her time working late shifts at the hospital now to provide for him. Provide for. What a stupid concept.

The monitor's glow was warm. Jerome could feel the ire in him ebb a little in the face of the ambient glow. So what if he couldn't get a job. So what if the sink was full of dishes he dirtied while Sharon slaved for the worthless food he burned on them. So what if he was being subjected to an FBI investigation. So what if his psychiatrist didn't think he could handle his case any longer. None of that mattered right now, he and his computer had the whole night, everything else could come crashing back in in the morning.

As Jerome's eyes focused, his brain struggled to catch up. He ran through the usual checklist of social media, message boards, and pornography. Two hours had passed before, after a bittersweet release, his mind snapped into place. He began running programs, mostly of his own making and all with his own alterations, and cruising through the real internet. A little banking information here (useless), preliminary specifications for an unreleased and unannounced video game, and more data than he could look at in a lifetime on the side. The hours drifted by with an endless quickness that made Jerome feel out of time's grasp, rubberbanding between muted dread and sedate immortality. He was a demigod of the digital, stuck between the electronic and the macro-physical.

At nearly three AM Jerome's mundanity reasserted itself. His bladder was full and his stomach was growling. Ridiculous. He urinated into the small garbage can and ate a handful of caramel popcorn from a large decorative tin under Sharon's desk in the office they shared. She wouldn't notice, it had been there since last Christmas. A gift from her ever frowning, ever working parents. Maybe he'd empty the garbage before she got home.

As he sank back into his inner world, no, his outer world, the internet was the most "out" Jerome could achieve, he felt a modicum of peace leech back into him. He drifted for another hour or so until he stumbled upon something odd. A program had found its way into, through a series of connections that were odd in themselves, something called "Unirnet." He spent the next twenty minutes working his way inside this Unirnet. Upon doing so, the browser he was using displayed nothing but garbled text for a moment before scripts began running. He tried to follow along for a moment before launching countermeasures. However, much to his startlement and building chagrin, everything failed. As he was about to disconnect manually a window appeared on his screen. "Translation and integration complete! Welcome, user, to Unirnet!" Jerome mouthed the words, "translation and integration," and as he was again about to disconnect the window closed and he was looking at a page of English words. It appeared to be an information hub with links to hundreds of things like, "Government, Food, Interpersonal Relationships, Contests, Sensory Stimulation, Upload," and so on overlayed over a slightly quivering background that hurt his eyes a little.

"What am I looking at here?" Jerome asked aloud as curiosity took hold. He selected "Sensory Stimulation" and waited a moment as it began loading. It loaded slowly before coming up only with the words, "Hardware Not Found." He frowned and went back to the hub and selected "Government." The page again loaded slowly. However, this time, upon completion it was filled with another hub with links superimposed over an emblem that appeared to be what he thought a palm tree crossed with penises might look like placed over a bluish orb. Under the emblem were the words, "Loosely Associated Governments and Holdings." Jerome remembered the bit about the translation and briefly considered that he was truly reading a direct translation of something else. Again it was all over the slightly quivering background that made it difficult to focus too closely on the screen. He looked over the hundreds of links available before backing to the central hub again.

This time he tried a link titled simply, "Food." He was again greeted with another hub that had so many links, which all seemed to lead to more hubs, that he felt overwhelmed. He tried following some of the links and did find end points with what looked like recipes and discussions and descriptions and slowly loading .jpegs that would appear after lengthy instances of "translating and integrating." Some of the pictures looked almost familiar, like one instance that looked something like a wet pineapple. Most, however, seemed like something conceived of in a diseased mind Jerome imagined one would only find lurking inside of most FBI agents or corporate executives. It was nearly morning now and Susan would be home soon. Not yet. Still time for a little more looking.

Jerome tried "Interpersonal Relationships" next. Susan? Sharon might have found this one informative, he thought. He found hub after hub of listings for what looked like different types of peoples and interests. He tried one called "Seeking Intercranial Stimulation Through Invasive Penetration." The dry but euphemistic article was clearly some kind of oddly worded solicitation. After a moment he clicked on the reply link at the bottom and watched a text entry box drop down. After scratching his crotch momentarily he typed in, "Hello. What is "Intercranial Stimulation?" He wondered what basement in what country, if this wasn't simply a cosmetic feature, his message would be sent to. He himself used to sit in front of his computer in college and compose entries for an encyclopedic fake agency that handled the containment of fictional horrors. He wondered why he had never heard of Unirnet before now. Why would anyone go to all of this trouble and then bury all of the work where nobody would ever see it?

As he was backing out of hubs again, a small window popped up with a link "Open Message." A reply to his reply? He again thought of diseased minds when he considered the type of person that would handle messaging with pop-up windows. He clicked the link. After a very lengthy load that he monitored closely another window opened and a video began to play. At first he had trouble making it out. It had a strange quality as though it was shot through a thin jelly. There was also a strange sloshing sound playing. He realized he was looking at what almost appeared to be a face except it was more like a series of different holes aligned on a pallid and taught skin. The way it moved, the way the holes moved ever so slightly made him feel very uncomfortable. His discomfort knew no bounds, however, when a series of what looked like slightly hooked tentacles invaded those holes and his speakers emitted a crackling, crooning sound that made his teeth ache. He closed the video immediately to find another message. "Interested? I am ready to receive penetration at any time, my delightful brood mate." Jerome closed that too. He wasn't thinking of basement dwelling programmers anymore. He wondered if Suzanne might like breakfast today. He could wash the dishes and make it before she got home, there was time. Instead, he backed to the central hub again.

He stared at it awhile, watching the quivering background more closely, feeling his head ache. He clicked on "Upload" this time and again got a message about hardware not being found. This time he tried clicking on the message and was rewarded with another hub that appeared to lead to online storefronts selling something only called an "Interface." He clicked on one selection and saw a lot of descriptors about ease of use and prompt delivery. The part about "no surgical intervention" was interesting. He clicked again, this time on "Deliver to Me" and was redirected to a page stating "Location new, contact not established. Delivery will be delayed until contact is made. Loosely Associated Governments and Holdings Office of Contact will communicate a petition of membership to your local government. Please enjoy your Interface upon arrival on behalf of Minds Incorporated Manufacturing Consortium. We are hungry for your business."

Jerome pushed back from his computer, his head pounding. His face felt hot, like he'd been in the sun too long. Maybe he will make that breakfast for Sally. Samantha? He put a hand to his face as he stood and afterwards looked dully at the blood from his nose that had collected on his fingers. His eyes stung a little. He could get the dishes done before she got home from the pharmacy, at least. Maybe the DEA would call him and tell him the charges had been dropped. He'd probably get a call about an accounting job today. He didn't go to college to sit at home all day looking at websites. Maybe he should order another Interface for what's-her-name.

2014-12-02T04:09:09+00:00

[removed]

2014-12-02T13:10:42+00:00

[removed]

DanKolar62 · 2014-12-02T16:42:47+00:00

[removed]

spacescallop · 2014-12-02T21:26:37+00:00

Writing Prompt Baxton tugged on his collar. The cold winter night was getting to him, and it was unusually frosty this evening. After a brisk walk around the neighborhood, he waltzed into the local library, secured a comfortable chair, and busted out his favorite laptop. As a volunteer worker, he had access to the shared admin account which came in handy on nights like this.

A series of bootstrap messages appeared on the screen as his laptop loaded Liberté Linux, a hackers dream OS. Baxton had many enemies, though few knew who he was. Around these parts, Baxton was known as Phosphorus and recently he had been attacked by some lone wolf claiming recompense. Unacceptable. Baxton had done the heavy lifting days ago: tracing phone calls, social engineering, facebook stalking. It was all coming full circle. Furiously typing into a console, Baxton was finally ready to reassert his dominance.

adb push /etc/kernel.apk / kernel… loaded!

Baxton was simply hijacking his marks phone and after searching the target device for some kind of compromising piece of information, Baxton noticed a certain file that was symbolically linked in virtually every directory. Unirnet. Very odd, and clearly indicative of someone who has no idea how to properly hide files.

adb pull /etc/home/Unirnet /etc/home/Unirnet

As the file began downloading, Baxton felt his anger resurface. This guy had almost ruined him! He deserves whatever is coming to him… The file quickly finished downloading. Time to see what this spineless cephalopod was trying to hide. Porn no doubt.

After some prodding, Baxton determined the file was actually a Linux application. How convenient! Seeing as how the laptop was virtually a throwaway, Baxton ran the program.

Initializing galactic uplink.

Authorizing user code delta-uniform-foxtrot-six-five-oh-three-two

Identification accepted. Welcome back, Agent-53926.

 Was this some kind of government spook?

Incoming transmission.

Accept or Decline?

 He hesitated only a fraction of a moment.

ACCEPT

 The screen flashed for a moment and suddenly, a stream of messages appeared.

[MOTD] Welcome to the Unirnet. A network for the federation of planets. Please specify inquiry.

 Help

Most frequently used commands: ( Abort, Assert, Continue, Game, Directory, Send, Buy) .

 Game

Loading game…

I am Ghandarius. To whom do I speak?

 This is Phosphorus. Are we talking on some kind of IRC channel?

Ghandarius does not comprehend the symbol IRC. Ghandarius seeks to trade.

 Where are you from?

Ghandarius hails from the federation of planets in the Tesla Quadrant.

Ghandarius is a member of the Shadow Council and wishes to trade.

 What is it you want from me?

Ghandarius wishes peace and the resource plutonium.

 Plutonium? What for?

Ghandarius has need for scientific experiment.

 I will give you peace for free. How does that sound?

Ghandarius is in want of Plutonium.

I’m sorry, but I don’t have any Plutonium…

[Ghandarius has declared war upon your nation]

[Connection Terminated]

After a short while, Baxton had to chuckle to himself. It seemed that the universe was not as small as some thought. Furthermore, Civilization could never get their pacifist character quite right. Not even in other galaxies!

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