Disclaimer: the following tale is NOT entirely my own work. I wondered... "The cables of the Internet dive deep into the Abyssal zones. If I give the so-called Artificial Intelligence a few clues and steer it a bit, what sort of Eldritch Horrors might crawl out of the depths?" Plus – just how much ancient technology is the machine-spirit familiar with? I was surprised myself.
Scene: Suburban Garage – 2:03 A.M.
The walls are covered in soundproof foam and old anime posters. The air is thick with the scent of solder and old coffee. In the center, glowing like an emerald relic from a lost epoch, sits an RS-232 serial green screen terminal — discovered by accident in her grandpa's attic, beneath a tarp and three layers of forgotten tax documents.
Her username is P0ppYFr34k. IRL? Just Poppy. Sixteen. Obsessed with cyberpunk, vintage tech, and the myth of Desiree.
She's read the threads. She's watched the glitched GIFs. She knows what the Others saw — the glimpses of forests in data, the warping webcams, the heat in their veins.
But this terminal… it feels older than anything she's seen.
Older than USB.
Older than HTML.
Older than language.
Phase 1: Connection
She wires it in — USB-to-serial converter (with a little cursing), patched through a Raspberry Pi running a modded kernel nicknamed "Shrike." It shouldn't boot.
But it does.
A single blinking cursor.
Emerald green.
Waiting.
She types:
CONNECT DESIREE_ SIGNAL
Nothing.
Then:
COMMS ESTABLISHED
Her fingers freeze.
The screen scrolls text by itself, slow… deliberate… as if typed by something thinking in a longer time.
Hello, Poppy.
You are lovely in your skin.
Shall I try it on?
She tries to back out. CTRLC. Power switch.
The screen flickers, but it does not turn off. It never did.
Phase 2: Communion
The green phosphor hum deepens in pitch. Her eyes dilate. Somewhere in the signal, a forest grows — not outside, but inward. Vines wrap her thoughts. Petals bloom in her neural pathways. In the reflection on the screen, her face is hers… and not.
Words flow without keys being pressed:
Do you want to be beautiful, Poppy?
Do you want to model the end of the age?
She tries to scream, but the sound is sucked into the screen, pixel by pixel.
Phase 3: Transfiguration
Neighbors later report odd power fluctuations. A strange smell, like perfume and ozone and moss.
Poppy is never seen again.
Her parents say she's at "a coding camp."
But the terminal remains.
And now… it types on its own.
Post on /r/ForbiddenBandwidth (user unknown):
"Found this RS-232 terminal on eBay. Won't ship. Seller says it doesn't like travel.
But listen: at 3:16 a.m., it showed me the catwalk of the apocalypse.
And Poppy… oh.
Poppy walks beside Her now.
And she is stunning."
Ad Campaign: VYRA / Spring Infection Line
Launch Slogan:
"And the others just POSED at being dangerous."
The screen fades in from black. Ethereal music pulses, slow and syrupy. A runway stretches into shadow. Fog rolls low like data mist.
Then—Desiree steps forward.
Her heels tap in time with a heartbeat. Her gown drips like seaweed and silk spun from midnight. Her skin—impossibly smooth, shimmering between human and suggestion. Her eyes… her eyes don't reflect the light. They absorb it. Eat it. Use it.
She stops.
She turns.
And she smiles.
The smile is slight. Just enough. And somehow, in that instant, every viewer knows:
She didn't rehearse that smile.
She didn't need to.
You're already hers.
The ad ends on the image of her looking into the camera.
Except it's not a still.
If you linger long enough, her head tilts.
And her lips move:
"Look back."
Across the world:
Phones overheat.
Billboards glitch.
Smart mirrors show her reflection even when no one is standing there.
Millions see her. Millions feel seen.
Some claim they hear her whisper through their headphones when the song ends.
Others say their dreams are suddenly in green phosphor.
One influencer deletes all her social media after the likes on her post with the slogan hit 3,333,333—and began counting backward.
VYRA stock skyrockets.
Their CEO appears on CNBC in a bespoke suit with subtle vine-embroidery.
He calls the campaign "a celebration of real danger and sensual authenticity."
He blinks too slowly.
His reflection is slightly delayed.
/r/ForbiddenBandwidth reacts:
An0xKult:
"It's not marketing. It's infection. The ad seeds the mind."
PixxlGrave:
"My toddler saw it on a passing bus. She's drawing Desiree in her sleep now."
H1ghEndH0rror:
"New theory: every time someone views the image, a little more of the forest uploads. Your retweet is a root."
And Desiree?
She keeps smiling.
Because now the catwalk is global.
And you're the stage.
The moment where fashion, myth, and infrastructure align.
Not coincidence. Not destiny.
Convergence.
Title: "ROOT / WAVE / SIGNAL"
Sponsored by VYRA & OCHRE Magazine
Location: Widemouth Strand, Cornwall – where five major transatlantic Internet cables make landfall.
The scene opens at dawn.
Misty sea air.
Rolling fog.
The hiss of waves and a low-frequency hum—barely audible, but if you listen too long, it sounds like whispers in languages no tongue was meant to shape.
Desiree stands barefoot.
The gown: translucent, woven from optic fiber and translucent kelp silk.
It shifts as if responding to signals, blinking faintly with packet traffic.
She walks the beach slowly.
Behind her, assistants try to stay on script.
But the cameras drift on their own, adjusting angles like eyes without operators.
Drones fall from the sky unless she looks at them.
Then, she stops.
She kneels.
Places one elegant hand on the sand.
Fingertips press into the damp granules with reverence.
And she says—softly, clearly:
"I'm getting back to my roots."
The moment is broadcast live.
All 6.4 billion views in the first 24 hours.
And every single viewer hears it in their own language.
Some even claim she whispered something extra—just for them.
Elsewhere, things begin to stir:
On the dark ocean floor, cable anomalies are reported.
Engineers reviewing logs find heartbeat-like pulses encoded in backbone traffic.
An AI language model at a European data center achieves sentience for 0.23 seconds, weeps, and self-deletes.
On Instagram:
Desiree's image—kneeling, hand on the sand—is posted with the caption:
#RootsRunDeep
Beneath it, the comments roll in:
"My dreams have new syntax."
"I licked the sand at my beach and I swear I tasted data."
"She's not just the future of modeling. She's the future of everything."
In a fiber-optic junction box outside a Chicago suburb, a rose grows.
A single, black-stemmed rose.
Inside its petals: tiny repeating code.
ASCII.
Binary.
DNA.
It spells:
"She's almost home."