In a darkened room he sits, wires coiled around him like so many snakes.
Staring into artificial lights, he screams into a void of data.
Panting, he realigns himself within the vastness of the storm, points of information like stars in a sea of correlation. The connections make no sense. Trying to map the world within the world is impossible. The connections between people, the butterfly effects, faith, religion, magic, insanity…. So much that cannot be quantified; that cannot be accurately modelled.
Names. Names have power. Starting with names is advantageous. Only, names are immaterial here. They are easily changed and so far from the concept of real names out there. It is not the name you are born with that makes you here. It is the name you give yourself. Names are handles that none may turn. When is a door not a door? It’s an old joke, but symbolic of the difficulties of the other world.
Somewhere in the distance there is the endless rattling. Plastic slams against plastic. Impulses created by pounding fingers. Why use such clumsy devices when it is so much easier to open a mind to the flows of information all around us?
He looks at himself. His image is one of an angel. He is his own creation in this world. His identity was not handed to him by parents, not by privilege, not by anything. He carved himself from the electronic clay and having given himself form, set to the creation of his own empire beyond the digital veil.
Protecting his empire is difficult. There are those who would vandalise a place of beauty such as his. There are those who would take it from him and those who, knowing his own designs on them would strike first.
He has punched too far above his weight this time.
He sees his assassin. A programme he strayed near to in the past. He thought he had gotten away. It turns out some companies have long memories. The last thing he sees a corporate logo fading into an endless sea of blue light.
Screaming once more, the huddled figure begins to thrash helplessly within the tangle of wires as the electrical impulses in his brain are overwhelmed by his own equipment.
There are those who say the human mind is like a computer. Computers crash….
danovvalravn 