Joint effort between Namnesor and Sytel, of the Bob and George forums.

1. Making Contact (Tadashi's POV)

I had an understandable sense of responsibility towards Alpha, or as it was popularly known, the Internet. It was, after all, my creation. I'd come up with a number of networking technologies, actually, but Alpha was the first one to become a household name around the world.

So when Alpha started having mysterious errors and glitches with no discernible cause or pattern, I felt that it was my job to find out why.

I took my work seriously-- perhaps too seriously. I hadn't been home to see my family in three days-- or was it four? I'd lost track of time from staying up every night, drinking countless cups of coffee and looking through error reports and event logs from innumerable servers.

It was a seemingly-normal night when I finally reached the answer, just as any other. For me, however, it had all become a mish-mash of time; days and nights bled together as I got closer to unravelling the mystery.

The attacks, if they were attacks, didn't seem to be coming from some group of netjackers; they originated from seemingly random points, and the only apparent pattern was that they seemed to come from main backbone servers more often than not. That didn't help, because the security on those servers was the best in the world. And their security logs showed no accesses-- unauthorized or otherwise-- of the sort that would be required to produce these errors...

It had started out small and benign; things would work oddly, but not problematically. A 10-megabyte file downloading in mere seconds, when it would ordinarily take half an hour. Long-missing files popping back into view when they were needed. How long this had been going on, I didn't know, because most people had assumed that it was just their own computers acting up and hadn't told anyone. Nobody had thought to compare notes until later.

Things started to degenerate. Emails had strange lines of text in them, text that the senders swore they hadn't meant to put in, seemingly crossing wires from some other email in the mail server. Animations and some large images disappearing from web pages, erased first from display and then from the HTML itself, with the site maintainers swearing up and down that they hadn't touched it. Things that users could have done, through neglect or error, but when enough of them started giving the same story... people who knew how Alpha worked began to wonder if something really was going on.

And then it passed the point of there being any question. Every Alpha-connected device in an entire city going berserk at once, even if the devices had totally different network connections that didn't correlate to geography. The printers in a grid of city blocks that each printed out a single page of black and white, and when the pages were assembled in the same pattern as the city blocks, it spelled out HEAR THE WIRES. The national anthem broadcast in every school in the country being replaced with online radio stations one morning.

Who could be doing this, though? And why? It would take phenomenal resources: the ability to crack seemingly every Alpha-connected machine in the world, from backbone servers to automated tools running on obscure proprietary operating systems. And whoever was doing it wasn't using this power to make a political statement, or transfer money from people's bank accounts; they were seemingly doing it just to prove that they could. A terrorist group might do something like that, but once they'd made their point, wouldn't they identify themselves and start making demands? And yet nobody had stepped forward to claim responsibility for this.

It would require phenomenal computing power and networking hardware to pull something like this off. It was as if whatever was causing these errors had the ability to be everywhere Alpha was...

Maybe it was just the late nights without sleep and the overdose of coffee and error reports, but a strange idea crept into my mind, and although I knew it was crazy, I couldn't dislodge it.

Maybe Alpha itself is doing this.

The idea was curiously tempting, although I didn't even know what it could mean. These events were no mere outbursts of random data. They were ipurposeful/i, like the office printer incident, clearly orchestrated by someone with a plan.

That haunting, cryptic phrase from the printer incident ran through my mind. Hear the wires...

Maybe it was a message. Maybe some of the other glitches had been messages too? I started browsing through the reports with renewed interest, searching for any that might shed some light on what the mysterious force behind them was trying to say.

There was one definite common factor running through nearly all of the data reports; the "strange happenings" weren't particularly malicious. While missing files could be viewed as such, they were never important enough to break something, only to be noticed.

Though, the early bug reports were decidedly tame. Unexplained network lag and, conversely, unexplained network speed bursts; nothing to truly be worried about, until now, at least.

I started putting the pieces together, but the closer I got, the worse I felt. What if Alpha was doing all of this? What would I do? How would I react? Something like this had never happened before, precedent was being set every moment.

It fell down to one "test", one probe that would confirm or deny all of my theories. Whatever the result, something large was on the horizon, and this would set it all in motion...

I decided to end the debate. At least, I figured this would end the debate. In truth, it was an extremely far-fetched idea.

I opened a chat window, and typed in the recipient's name as "Alpha".

(THikari) Hello? Alpha?

(Alpha) Hello, Dr. Hikari.