James blinked, sat up, rubbed his eyes. An elaborate prank? Maybe a coordinated stunt, thousands of people changing their SSIDs at once. Except… posts were timestamped from Tokyo, Berlin, Chicago, São Paulo. Whole continents reporting the same thing. And it wasn’t slowing down.
A malware attack? That was the only thing that made sense. Something clever spreading through vulnerable routers, renaming networks as it spread. Yeah, he thought, that could work.
He snapped a screenshot and fired a text to Shelly, the only person he knew awake at obscene hours — or at least awake sometimes. She was a digital forensics specialist; this was her world.
James: Hey. You seen this wireless network thing going around? R13-8?
A few minutes later, his phone buzzed.
Shelly: Dude. It’s 3:00 AM. WTF? What wireless network thing, and why would I know about it while I’m SLEEPING?
James frowned, thumbed a reply.
James: It’s showing up everywhere. Look at your Wi-Fi. R13-8.
The typing dots blinked, then her response came back fast.
Shelly: …Yea. I see it. It’s here too. That’s… weird.
James: So what’s the deal with it?
Shelly: No idea. You’re the one doomscrolling. I’ll check logs later. Now let me sleep.
James: C’mon, you’re the expert here. Breakfast? We’ll talk then.
Shelly: Fine. You’re buying. 9 AM.
James tossed the phone aside and lay back in the dark. The rain pressed against the windows like static. On his nightstand, the phone buzzed one last time. A new notification: New network available: R13-8.
James pushed open the door to the local pancake house, the little brass bell above it jingling against the storm outside. The smell of coffee and fried batter wrapped around him, warm and almost too normal after the night’s unease. Inside, life carried on obliviously. People laughed, coughed, gossiped across sticky tables. Forks clinked against plates. To everyone else, it was just another morning. To James, it felt like he was walking into a simulation, too ordinary, as if staged to keep him calm.
Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Shelly. She was impossible to miss. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black boots, black eyeliner framing eyes that hadn’t known sunlight in days. Her MacBook glowed like a lighthouse in the dim diner, lid covered in stickers — Defcon skulls, Black Hat logos, band logos, memes only she would laugh at. The machine screamed notice me, though she herself looked determined to be ignored.
James slid into the booth opposite her. “So?” he asked.
Shelly didn’t even glance up. “Food. I’m hungry.”
James raised a brow. “You know what I mean.”
She sighed, spun the laptop around with practiced fingers. “Look.”
The screen lit his face, reflected in his widening eyes as he scanned line after line of data. His mouth went dry. “Holy shit. How is that even possible?”
Shelly slipped into her courtroom voice, calm, precise, detached. “I connected to R13-8. No password, unknown encryption. It assigned me an IPv6 address. Gateway is fe80::29a.”
She tapped the screen. Her tone was flat, clinical, like dictating evidence. “I ran a scan. Everyone connected to R13-8 is on the same LAN. In plain English? Every device, every phone, every laptop, same street, same neighborhood. Global.”
James stared. His throat tightened.
Shelly went on, unbothered, spearing a forkful of pancake as if reading grocery prices. “I could reach the Internet, but I don’t know how the routing works. The gateway shouldn’t be able to forward traffic anywhere, yet here we are. Stranger still? The IP resolves to GPS coordinates.” She flipped to another screen. “48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W.”
She paused, watching it sink in. “That’s Point Nemo. Middle of the Pacific. The most remote location on Earth. They call it the spacecraft graveyard. If you stood there, the nearest human would be in orbit above you.”
James sat frozen, jaw slack, words refusing to form. At last, he managed to stammer: “That… that’s not possible. Even if a device existed there, it couldn’t broadcast worldwide. That’s—”
Shelly chewed her pancakes, unfazed. She swallowed, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and shrugged. “I know. I have no explanation. No evidence. But it appears to be true.”
Shelly pushed open the glass door to her office suite. The moment they stepped inside, the building seemed to awaken.
Overhead lights snapped on in sequence. The conference room screen lowered itself with a quiet mechanical hum. Workstations lit up, status LEDs blinking in green and amber. The HVAC kicked on with a low sigh, air circulating as if the room was exhaling.
James froze in the doorway. “It feels like it knows we’re here.”
Shelly smirked, brushing past him. “It does. Automated environment. It’s supposed to make you comfortable.”
James wasn’t comforted.
They settled into the conference room. Shelly connected her laptop, and the flatscreen filled with scrolling text feeds, lines of messages blurring past like a stock ticker during a crash. Alerts, chatter, fragments of dread from every corner of the net.
- Wi-Fi disappeared. Only R13-8 left.
- Router reset itself, came back as R13-8.
- Corp Wi-Fi offline, whole city running R13-8.
- LAN scans = millions of hosts. All local.
The room flickered with the flood of data.
Shelly powered up another television against the wall, flipping to a major news channel just as the anchor stiffened, finger pressed to an earpiece.
“We interrupt this program for the following national security alert. Please be advised that a wireless network of unknown origin is being broadcast nationwide. Its purpose is unclear. Citizens are urged not to connect, and to refrain from online activity until further notice. Our military and intelligence services are investigating. Updates will follow.”
James shifted in his chair, fingers digging into the table. “That’s… that’s global. This isn’t just some attack. This isn’t even war. It’s bigger. Way bigger.”
Shelly flicked to another channel. Then another. Each country was broadcasting its own version of the same warning, the same sterile words spoken in a dozen languages. The same advice: don’t connect. Don’t go online.
She leaned back, arms folded. “I wouldn’t be so sure. There are black projects out there we don’t know about. Experimental systems. It wouldn’t be the first time intelligence has failed to see it coming.”
James looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “Shelly… no country could do this. Not at this scale. This feels… coordinated. Like the whole planet’s on one switch.”
The lights overhead flickered once. Just once. Enough to make the silence in the room heavy.
Shelly’s fingers hammered the keys, each strike sharp and purposeful. James watched her, pulse quickening.
“You… you’re digging for more, aren’t you?”
Her eyes didn’t leave the screen. “I really shouldn’t be doing this. Like, felony shouldn’t. But I know a backdoor into a three-letter agency’s intel feeds. Old job. Old clearance. James,” she shot him a look, deadly serious, “you can never, and I mean never, talk about this.”
James nodded, throat dry.
Her typing slowed. The scrolling stopped. She stared, frozen, as if the words themselves had turned to knives on the screen.
“This…” she whispered, “this is really bad.”
James stood, his chair screeching against the floor. He leaned over her shoulder, eyes scanning. And then his breath caught.
SPY SATELLITES: NO VISUAL CONFIRMATION OF POINT NEMO MULTIPLE VESSELS — PULL PATTERNS CONFIRMED AIRCRAFT — LOSS OF CONTROL, BEING DRAWN SOUTH PACIFIC VECTOR
Images flickered up from foreign satellites, captured before their feeds died. A whirlpool, vast, monstrous, churning the ocean into a black spiral. Around it, ships and planes wheeled helplessly. Higher still, satellites themselves dragged into orbit-decay, their light streaking across the atmosphere as they spiraled down.
And then the screen went black.
REAL-TIME FEED INTERRUPTED INCOMING TRANSMISSION: RDEV5 DRONE VIDEO DOWNLOAD COMPLETE
The footage rolled.
A drone’s eye skimming waves. The horizon tilted. The vortex widened ahead, swallowing the sea, pulling clouds down into its throat. The drone fought, tilted its rotors, but the pull was absolute.
James could hear the whine of its engines through the feed, pitch rising, hopeless. The camera blurred as debris slammed past, circling, spiraling. Down, down, until the light vanished and water turned to ink.
Yet the feed didn’t stop.
Lines of data scrolled beside the video. Shelly read them aloud, her voice faltering.
“Gateway not routing traffic… routing subjects. Conversion in progress. Entities stored at nucleus. Identifiers confirmed.”
She swallowed, hard. Her fingers trembled as she grabbed her phone, pulled up a browser, entered the IP the drone had flagged.
The page loaded.
A counter ticked upward in real time. Faces filled the screen, one by one, row after row. Clicking an image triggered audio: last screams, prayers, whispered goodbyes. Some voices begged. Some cursed. Some welcomed it, delirious with awe.
James stumbled back from the table. “No. Oh God, no…”
And then, the voice came.
Not from the laptop. Not from the phone. From everywhere. A resonance, carried through the very air, faint and far yet unavoidably clear.
“You left us no choice but to intervene. You may continue to exist. But your abilities are now within the boundaries of our code. Your world is compiled. You are now the game. We are the players.”
The lights flickered. The counter surged higher.
James’s reflection lingered on the screen a heartbeat too long — then joined the counter.