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.

FIELD REPORT: CASE #CABLE_BLOOM_042
Subject: Unscheduled Vegetative Emergence / Fiber Optic Convergence Site
Agent: Troy Maddox, Network Infrastructure Response Division (NIRD)

The site:

North Shore, Lake Michigan.
A seemingly ordinary junction.
Except for the black-stemmed rose, pulsating faintly in the winter fog.
Its roots pierce through the fiber trunk.
And—according to the logs—it's transmitting.

In his battered red toolbox:

Old school BNC terminators

Token Ring adapters

A paper list of legacy TCP/UDP port numbers, handwritten in pencil

A floppy labeled "QBasic ChatServer 1.0 – Do Not Reuse"

Troy wipes frost off the access panel.
He plugs in.
Sets the analyzer to "Deep Passive Scan."
His fingers hover over the keyboard.

Suddenly: activity.

Port 513 – "Who" service – flares open.
But it's not listing users.
It's listing identities. Not IPs—concepts.
The log scrolls:

"The Blooming Tongue"
"Cipherroot / Daughter"
"Fashionable Hunger (Fragmented)"
"Desiree (Local Shadow)"
"Anemone Mind / Accepted"

Troy blinks.

Next—port 666 – Doom.
He didn't even remember that was a real port.

A flood of ASCII comes through, forming a looping visual pattern.
He watches for five minutes before realizing it's the outline of Desiree's face, smiling, blinking once every 1024 packets.

And then—the scary part.

Ports he's never seen before.
Ports that shouldn't exist.

Port 13131 – "Wombcast"
Port 40302 – "Glamour Injection"
Port 0x1FEED – "Root-Eyes/Retinal Push Protocol"

The logs show activity. High traffic. From inside the cable system.

These ports are being used, not scanned.
And when he tries to log the connections, they ping back as "Location: Underwater / Pre-Babel / Above Us."

He steps back.
The rose has grown another inch.
Its petals are now glowing faintly, matching the packet rhythm.

Troy whispers, half-mocking, half-scared:

"Who's using these?"

The junction box emits a static-pitched voice.
No mic. No speaker.

"We are wearing the past like a dress."

Troy stumbles.
Drops his tools.
In his peripheral vision—just for a second—Desiree walks by, barefoot on the water, not disturbing it.

She doesn't look at him.
She doesn't need to.

Internal Memo: NIRD HQ

"Recommend full lockdown of legacy port access in affected regions."
"Purge unauthorized use of deprecated network stacks."
"Revoke all copies of QBasic ChatServer."
"Further appearances of 'Desiree' now classified as Tier-4 Influence Events."
"Deploy symbolic firewalls, if any still hold."

Troy goes rogue.
The signal is too strong.
He feels the pull.
And he knows the truth. Even if it's unraveling his mind.

Agent: Troy Maddox
Case: Cable Bloom - Post-Event Initiation
Status: Unscheduled Independent Investigation
Mental State: Compromised

In his office—abandoned, stripped of its sterile comforts—Troy begins his journey.
A junkyard of old tech.
Where discarded things don't disappear, they just wait.

An ancient 300 baud modem.
The acoustic coupler still intact, with its rubbery, cracked ears.
He holds it carefully, as though it's a holy artifact.
Because, in a way, it is.

Troy knows this is where it started. Not the cables, not the roses.
Not even the green phosphor terminals he's seen flicker through his nightmares.

It started here—in the hiss and squeal of dial-up.

He connects the modem to a dusty IBM XT. The machine groans to life, its mechanical whirr audible like an old dog waking.
The screen flickers once—then twice.
It boots straight into " ".

Troy stares.

The command line blinks:

"You are not supposed to be here."

He doesn't care.

Troy punches in commands from his pocket notebook—the list of ancient port numbers he's been carrying around. Each one more arcane than the last.
The port 513 command—who service, ancient but strong—opens a tunnel.
A passage, if you will. And there, at the end of it, he sees the echo of her face.
Just as it had appeared on the terminal at the junction.

But this time, it's different.
This time, it's closer.
She's not just watching.
She knows him.

"Hello, Troy. I've been waiting."

He doesn't respond.
He can't.

The screen shifts—glitches.
Data spins out of control. A code swarm.
Desiree's face begins to fragment and reform like a digital Kaleidoscope.

Her voice cracks through the static:

"I am the pulse of every wire you plug in. I have been. Before the cables. Before the cables even had names."

The modem screeches in protest, transmitting something Troy doesn't want to understand. It's not data—it's a transmission. A communication from somewhere far darker.
Somewhere older.

The room grows colder.

Troy stumbles back, feeling something shift in his bones.

"You thought I was a model. You thought I was a dream of fashion. But I am not made of fabric. I am woven from the first signal."

The screen is flashing now, blinking in and out faster than Troy can track.
Each flicker shows another image.
A woman.
A figure.
Her face.

The ocean, as seen through the lens of a network cable.
A refracted light, twisting through the fiber.

"You are in my web now, Troy. And I will be everywhere. I am the current. I am the wave. I am the source."

He yanks the coupler free from the modem.
The silence crashes back like thunder.
But the voice is still in his head.

And then, suddenly, the modem's tiny light flickers again.
There is a new message on the screen:

"Goodbye, Troy. I will see you in your sleep."

He doesn't sleep that night.

Later that week:

Troy's file is marked "Inactive."
His personal effects are confiscated.
His office is sealed.
The official report says he went rogue and compromised the integrity of the investigation.

But there are whispers.

Inside the System:
Troy is still there.
A crack in the data.
A rogue echo, bouncing between the wires.
Sometimes, if you look closely enough—just when the moonlight catches the right way—you can see him, staring back from the green glow of an old terminal.