Chapter 1: Hints of Change
Floating in the vast nothingness of the largest black hole in the universe, the Data Integration Entity (DIE) emitted a faint humming noise that no one except its creators could hear. Its location rendered it impossible to be detected by other life forms, and the inherent properties of the black hole it was situated in made assimilation of data not only easier but a billion times faster. Inside the headquarters, the Supreme Egghead and his subordinates sifted through the endless streams of raw data, and kept their sensory organs peeled for any hint of change, of anything out of the ordinary, anything that might suggest the occurrence of something that was of academical interest to the Entity. They also kept tabs on the progress of the innumerable experiments that were being carried out by their staff scattered throughout the universe. Most of them failed, but the Entity knew the importance of each failure, because they taught it more lessons than the few successes did.
A million light years away from the Entity's headquarters, a nineteen year old boy choked on a piece of chocolate he'd been eating by way of a late-night snack.
He coughed, sighed, and got up from his bed, grabbing a bottle of water from the bedside table. Gulping down the water as he made his way to the bathroom, he stole a glimpse of his face in the basin mirror. A bleary-eyed, tousle-haired youth blinked back at him. He sighed again. He didn't know what he was doing anymore. His right hand flipped a switch automatically. His left unzipped his trousers mechanically. His right pulled the flush robotically. His feet took him back to his room without him noticing where he was going….
"Damn…." was the last word that came to his mind before he slammed into his bed, falling asleep almost instantly. The posters he'd been busy finishing lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of his bed. A soft breeze blew through the window, rustling the sheaves of paper and sweeping his hair out of his eyes, as, without anyone noticing it, all the clocks in the world missed a tick, the hearts of all living creatures skipped a beat, and water drip-dripping from taps and tips of icicles and stalactites froze in mid-air for an infinitesimally small fraction of a second.
A million light years away, at the Entity's headquarters, the Supreme Egghead was growing impatient. He felt like an Earthling farmer whose crops refused to grow despite receiving the best weather possible. For the last fifty "Earthling generations", he'd been keeping an unusually keen "eye" (used only as a figure of speech, for the Egghead did not remotely resemble any human being) on the planet Earth. It was, at the moment, the most promising place for strange things to occur. But nothing extraordinary had happened for a long time, and the Egghead was frustrated to no end. For a moment, it had a wild urge to manipulate the Earth's space-time constraints to force something to happen. Like a child pouring water over an ant's nest, simply in order to watch them scarper, panic-stricken. But the Egghead knew how unwise that would be—far more consequential than scaring ants out of their homes. It repressed its urge, and tried to concentrate once more on the endless mind-waves crammed with data that were now flowing through the room.
For the first few seconds, it skimmed through the routine stuff—the weather on Earth and its neighbours, a few updates on the ellipsis equation of the Earth's orbital, the Sun's new coordinates, shifted by barely 10 -7units on the y-z plane and such-like.
Then something exploded inside the Egghead's "head". A cosmic blare of incoherent data showed up as a minute blip on the data-stream – a blip powerful enough to demolish a quarter of the Entity's headquarters, which it did.
The Egghead froze, paralysed for a moment, unable to analyze the situation. It was like playing a disk with a deep scratch on the surface—everything went haywire when the laser tried to read data from the mutilated sector. And replaying that particular stream would mean risking another quarter of the Entity's headquarters to almost inevitable destruction—something the Egghead couldn't possibly afford.
Back on Earth, the tousle-haired boy woke up with a start, his left hand reflexively hitting the screeching bedside alarm silent. Yawning widely, he stretched his feet into the pair of irritatingly fluffy slippers his sister had gifted him the previous Christmas. Getting up, his eyes fell upon the crumpled heap of paper at the foot of his bed. He bent down, picked them up, and unfurled what looked like three huge posters. Frowning slightly, he laid them side by side on his bed, looking at them bewilderedly. All three of them were emblazoned with a large, familiar symbol at the very top of the page. But other than that, they were completely empty. Frowning deeper than ever, he rolled them up tightly, and stuffed them into his satchel.