After what Alice can only interpret as another lost match, Cass puts down his controller and leans forward. "You're certain the source is here?" He tries to keep his voice low and projected away from the others. "This was one of the last Zones to appear during that time."
Alice sighs, but with nothing better to do than drive she needs something to keep away the boredom. "You ever heard of Dark Avenger?"
"The superhero movie?" Cass asks, puzzled.
"No! They were a computer virus author from the early nineties, made a bit of a splash in the international scene with their work. Signed their early work as being written in the city of Sofia." Alice explains. "One of the earlier pioneers of virus writing. Their identity was never discovered though and and there's only some theories from the virus' injected text strings and an email chain they had with a computer security researcher."
Cass looks surprised. "Shit, that was over fifty years ago. If you think they're connected to the Corruptor Zones then why are we driving into one? Surely someone in their seventies or older would be dead by now if they ignored the evacuation order."
Alice reaches onto the dashboard and pulls a manila folder from the disorganized pile, handing it over. "Because I think this is who the Dark Avenger is."
Looking skeptical, Cass takes the folder and begins flipping through it. Alice watches his expressions from her periphery, as he becomes surprised, thoughtful, then confused. "You think the Dark Avenger is a fairy?"
"A vila, specifically. One of the theorized leyline maps has an intersection point in Sofia. I think a vila took interest in the advent of computers in Bulgaria. They have affinities with hunting, dancing and battle, which may explain some behaviors. A good hunter doesn't deplete their ecosystem, and Dark Avenger never truly threatened the collective integrity of the digital infrastructure. As for the dancing and battle, their alias and references hidden in their viruses all but confirms them to be a metalhead. It conflicts against the soft and sanitized modern views of faeries in folklore but I don't find it impossible for them to find liking in developing music genres."
Cass thinks on it for a moment then seems to accept the theory. "Ok, so if a slavic fairy became a metalhead and code junkie half a century ago, why do you think that's connected to the rise of the zones over thirty years later?"
"I think Dark Avenger became bored with computers, or at least how we made use of them." Alice takes a sip from her thermos before continuing. "If you see virus coding as a sort of puzzle, then how do you escalate from that once you become bored? I think this vila took their coding skills and tried to apply them to other mediums, working on their own project out of view."
Now seeming to follow along a little bit better, Cass speaks up. "So this vila is the inventor of the PostWilds? I can start to understand why that network could be the cause of these supernatural disaster areas. How do you think they did it?"
Alice mulls the question over for a moment, then responds. "I don't think the Corruptor Zones were intentional. The data centers for PostWilds were never found, even though the theory of them being at the center of each Zone is valid. I think something else, possibly leylines or some other facet of old magic that we don't know enough about, was being used to hold the processing load of PostWilds. There were reports of the algorithm being strange and helpful, and the platform had no discernible business model to speak of. It doesn't seem like something a human would come up with nowadays."
"Ok, then what do we do if we find Dark Avenger? Some of these files on vila paint a picture of something that's dangerous to mess with. Do you think killing them will end the Corruptor Zones?" Cass asks, expectant but worried.
"No, I intend to hire them to fix it."
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