A/N: this is a one shot, but I can continue it if you like, this is mostly just an idea I had to write down half asleep, before I forgot, but I thought it was good enough to submit so, enjoy.
Disclaimer: I do not own Serial Experiments Lain, or any of the characters related to that work, Tenma however is my own character creation, albeit just a passing thought for a name, if continued character can be developed later.
Tenma was like any teenager of the 2030's, he breathed technology, had grown up during the 2020's and the VR tech boom, mostly because of his uncle who had been around since the early ages of cyberspace, what used to be nicknamed the wired before the advent and then universal use of wireless and mobile technology, something nobody could think of living without anymore.
Technology and Cyberspace were everywhere, and Virtual Reality was the preferred method of accessing it, though the older ways were still possible, corporations mostly controlled the access however if you knew the right people or had the right skill sets you could gain access anyway, and nobody really fought this, not like they used to, information was free and people liked it that way.
Cyberspace was everywhere, people walked in the streets hooked into it through augmented reality, people wore glasses not to correct their vision but many just for the access that mobiles once were used for, now everyone used their glasses to make communications links, and a tablet was just a physical extension to use with it.
But as all pervasive as it was, it wasn't without it's dangers, during the millennium there was a lot of hype, people were filled with hysteria because of a series of strange occurrences that happened in and around the introduction of IPv7, which was dropped due to supposed dangers around it in favor of a much stronger and safer net protocol now known as the Virtual Reality Interface Protocol, which became the backbone of what was now known as cyberspace.
Cyberspace in and of it's self was a fairly new layer upon an already multilayer world, it created a realm of new possibility which was quickly exploited by the people who control the world, but they weren't the only ones to see it's potential, fairly early on closed hacker communities took advantage of VRIP and built worlds that were both connected and isolated to the rest of the virtual space around them.
Tenma was now around sixteen, and most of what he knew about this he learned form his uncle who belonged to one of the hacker enclaves, an older one which seemed to exist and was mostly made up of old men from the early years of the net, in many ways it was guarded and defended in the way usenet or certain IRC chatrooms had been decades before.
His uncle had gotten him a VR headset for his tenth birthday and some physical books which while a bit outdated showed him things that allowed him to grasp cyberspace in the guise of a wizard, as time went on he isolated from his friends, his thoughts mostly to the online communities he frequented.
This however didn't stop him, he was looking for something, hunting for a myth told of in the darker corners of the net, of a goddess of cyberspace who cared about humans, an artificial intelligence given rise as the net grew bigger and more complex, awoken by a global consciousness while IPv7 was being tested.
of course he didn't believe most of this, but the story still fascinated him, he wanted to find some kind of evidence or proof of her existence, some sign that he hadn't been looking for a non existent needle in a haystack.
It was during one of his explorations through the more isolated parts of Ikebukuro that he encountered a strange man, he had a scruffy look about him, looked to be in his late fifties, he had a bunch of pre-millenium systems, for sale, one of which was a server which had a lot of weight to it.
The server had a tachibana labs logo on it, Tenma knowing it's value since tachibana had gone defunct nearly a decade before offered the guy a fair price for it, the guy clearly didn't know what he had because he didn't even try to haggle it higher and just accepted the money, he seemed almost in a daze.
Just as soon as Tenma had left the alleyway the guy seemed to have disappeared, having fulfilled some unknown desire or need, it wasn't until he got home and hooked it up to the nearly dozens of old systems in his apartment that Tenma would come to realize just what he had bought, and it was a lot more than he had bargained for.
Once he powered on the system it seemed to run for a few minutes, loading something then there was a screen glitch and it shut off, he wondered if it was simply incompatible with modern hardware, but then he saw the screens on his other systems begin to malfunction as well, something wasn't right and he knew it but this was unlike anything he had read or heard about, if it was a virus it was clearly advanced even by current standards.
He looked at the glitching screens when a face almost began to take shape, it was that of a small girl, she looked scared, then vanished again, he wasn't sure what was going on but something was running around in his systems, and he wasn't sure if they could handle it.
he quickly cut off his internet access, he couldn't chance whatever this was escaping from him, he wanted to capture it, see how it worked, a trait he inherited from his uncle who seemed still capable of building systems on par with what a lot of people thought were cutting edge these days, but Tenma knew better.
It seemed to stop whatever it was and the server's monitor powered on again text began running down the screen, he hadn't heard of such an old system being able to be remotely triggered like that but he guessed whoever had owned it previously had made upgrades to it, or that it had been an early prototype for the technology.
The text began to form clear words, it kept repeating a message over and over again, after filling the screen it stopped, his systems almost seemed possessed, he wanted to see just what he was dealing with but his screens were old, and weren't providing him with enough information so he went into his virtual reality access system and logged into the network materializing his avatar in the older system represented as a simple grid.
there was a light that seemed to be sitting at the center of an outdated sector, probably within the server he had just bought and setup, as he got closer it began to take shape, it seemed to stand out from the rest of the systems as it was represented in graphics on par with the latest vidgames but seemed almost real.
as he got closer he realized it was the girl that had appeared on his screens briefly before, he reached out with his hand but she seemed frightened of him, whoever or whatever she was, she was unfamiliar with current technology.
He stopped moving towards her and spoke, his voice was run through a speech recognition engine and the text transmitted into the program that was running on the screen before, he said hoping to calm her/it, whatever she was, she looked at him with a puzzled expression, he was speaking but she could only feel the text responding to her, it felt isolated, but she wasn't sure how to respond to him.
Within moments she told him her name and was asking how long she had been there, he was unsure but given the systems age at least two decades, she told him about how she had ended up in the system, about how she had done so to save her friends from a maniac with a god complex who was trying to control the world through IPv7.
in return he told her about what had happened since the IPv7 effort was dropped in favor of VRIP which was focused on a man/machine interface instead of forgoing the machines entirely, finally he asked if she knew anything about this goddess of the wired, she seemed confused at the term stating she heard of a god of the wired, referring to the maniac, but that it seemed to transition genders, he didn't realize he was talking to what he had been looking for this whole time.
Finally he opened up his virtual reality machine's security to the tachibana server allowing her to leave the confines of the outdated system in hopes of having a better way of communicating with this artificial construct which seemed, at least at one point, to be a living person, or perhaps was once capable of leaving the confines of the virtual and interacting with the real, he wasn't quite sure which, but one thing he was sure of, he was determined to find out.
A/N: hope you enjoyed, if you want me to continue this one let me know, I love hearing feedback, but I can leave it here too as a oneshot, either or, anyway Like, Fave, reply, ect..., SpookyZ, Signing off.