The February Exile

It took Jason a good bit to get used to the vibe of this party. He knew his girlfriend claimed to practice witchcraft as a hobby, but most of the details went over his head. He just knew that today was the Leap Day, an important day for Clarice's specific practices, and apparently one hell of a party for which she was the guest of honor this year. It didn't initially appeal to him, but then promise of a good time and a good high was enough for Jason to accept her invitation to join them.

So far it was definitely poppin', if not in the way he was used to. Retro-as-hell folk music, herb-infused wines to curl the stomach as much as the tongue, and strains of mushrooms that he didn't recognize but was willing to give a try anyway. After the initial nausea passed, he began to feel both the booze and shrooms take effect, and it was proving to be a nice mixture to pry away his grip on reality. In the full swing of the substances, the music sounded far more interesting and the chanting had a rhythm that he hadn't noticed before.

He wobbled his way over to the main crowd where Clarice was, then clumsily planted a kiss on her cheek before whispering in her ear. "I now understand why you throw this kind of party. It's just a shame it's once every four years." She responded by smiling and leaning against him affectionately, apparently also in the thrall of the drink and drugs, though Jason thought maybe not quite as strongly as he was.

"If it was simply about this part of the gathering, I'm sure we'd be doing it every weekend possible." She whispered back. "But there's a purpose to this whole thing. The ritual is coming up soon. You can watch, but you'd have to be a full member to receive an explanation of what we're doing and why we're doing it. Important secrets that we have to protect." Pushing through his muddled thoughts, Jason nodded and simply basked in the music with her, sipping wine and nibbling mushrooms as needed to maintain the smooth high.

Then it was almost midnight, time for the ritual. One of the other witches changed their phone to a different Spotify playlist, this one more ominous but still feeling appropriately folk for the situation. Clarice moved Jason's head off her shoulder and moved towards the center of the room where some kind of occult sign just about finished being drawn. Clarice stopped a few feet before the sigil, then stripped to her underwear and allowed the other women to paint unfamiliar symbols onto her skin. When that was finished, they began clothing her in some kind of ritual garb, black cloths with similar symbols stitched into them. Jason had a delayed double take when a witch brought out an M16 with full military attachments and adorned with charms. As Clarice began examining the gun and the clips, which seemed to be stuffed to the gills with herbs around the bullets, Jason could see trepidation on her face.

She's nervous, this means a lot to her and she doesn't want to mess it up. Jason thought through the impairing mental haze. Am I being a good enough boyfriend by simply attending the event with her? I should be next to her during this preparation, to show her that I don't need to understand what's happening to know that she's doing it well and that I'm proud of her.

Taking a moment to build resolve, he staggered forward to stand supportively at Clarice's shoulder. It only occurred to him at the last steps that the wine was much stronger than he initially thought. As he made the final step to stand next to her, he tripped over another witch's feet and pitched forward towards the sigil on the floor. Through the rush of peril seeming to slow down time, Jason could see the looks of panic form on everyone. Clarice most of all seemed terrified and tried to reach out and catch him, but wasn't fast enough to stop him from slamming his head into the floor.

Then, in the black silence, the sound of his own heartbeat was all he could feel.

It took a few moments for Jason to get over the stun from hitting his head, then he tried to take stock. He only saw blackness and couldn't hear the expected shouts of surprise from Clarice and the other witches. Did people go blind and deaf when concussed? He couldn't remember. Then he began to make out some muttering.

"-damn Stolas. Amazing he managed to predict that humans would make repository devices." The voice stopped, and a sharp sniffing noise could be heard. "Strange though, electricity and electromagnetic wavelength transmission. Not even the slightest bit of corvid bone in its construction. I'll need to rub it in his face that he doesn't actually know everything."

Jason could begin to make out the faint glow of a smartphone screen, his smartphone, a few feet away in the gloom. It did a poor job of illuminating the face of the . . . person? It met the basic criteria for a human face, but in the bad lighting he was certain something was wrong, out of place. The figure took notice that Jason was awake, slipping the phone into a pocket of the billowing . . . cloak? Maybe it was black wings? The impenetrable gloom of this place made it impossible to tell.

"No protective measures, no weapons, no training. And that look of confusion on your face. It seems like today is the day it all begins." The creature examined Jason and considered. "There is still some waiting to do, so I'm willing to indulge some questions. The past four hundred years have not allowed me talkative visitors." Something in the tone of its voice was scratching at some primal fear in Jason, but it hadn't quite found its grip yet.

"Who . . .  who are you? Where are we?" Jason tried his best to sound resolute as he lay on the ground, too scared to move lest he provoke this being that seemed more unnatural the more he looked at it.

"I am an exile, someone considered a rebel and traitor by many. As for this place? It's a 'when', not a 'where'. Currently we occupy the calendar space of February 30th. Quite an unfair temporal liminal space. February 29th works similar when it isn't a leap year, a time and place that shouldn't be yet must be crossed over in order to reach March. The Vatican bastards were clever enough to create their special calendar just to trap me, not sacrificing any existing days but scrounging together spare seconds to create a temporary day with a new border. Normally with how these sort of spaces work, waiting twenty four hours would safely deposit you in the next day, but this one is too disconnected normally."

The distant horizon began to dimly glow with faint sepia tones, and the creature smiled. If a children's joyous smile could be described as a beautiful sunrise, then this being's expression was a solar eclipse. "Because I'm disconnected from time and classical mortality, my presence isn't enough to make time move forward here. And the visitors sent to beat me down every four years were able to train themselves to abandon their sense of time while they were here. But you . . ." The smile deepened, as an impossibly expanding moon might cover even the solar corona. "Your unexpected, and assuredly unplanned, arrival has been enough to dislodge the seconds and send them forward. Congratulations! It is all because of you that the first February 30th will complete and I can step out into March 1st!"

The injury and drugs were still slowing Jason's mind, but he began to grasp at pieces. The witches' Leap Day ritual, the strange decoration on Clarice. The adorned gun. The best plan he could come up with was to negotiate, to buy time for himself in hopes he could get a chance to warn Clarice. "But won't you need a guide? You've been here for so long, if you gave me my phone back I could help you learn what's new."

The creature changed posture, cocked its head curiously. "I was wondering how long it would take for you to realize the true gravity of the situation you're in. Unfortunately, your service won't be of use to me." It reached back into its cloak and produced something metallic and somehow gleaming in the gloom. The object looked like a scalpel, until it started writhing like an agitated centipede. "But your component parts will serve me very well."

Invisible Networks #29: The 10,000 Year Network

A first post, an in-joke from the development team.

"Yep, this system is definitely some blue nachos. Could you imagine if we just blew it on the first post on humankind's most important social media network?"

The four-hundred trillionth post, commemorating true world peace and dissolution of borders.

"To commemorate the founding of the Overworld government, the Stonebound network staff has pulled the strings needed to add blue nachos as a unicode emoji. No, we still won't explain what it means."

A post easier to measure in time than placement in the archive, five hundred years later.

"The Stonebound team is proud to be cited in our first diplomacy with alien intelligent life, as the Ivrali complimented our network as the key to how humankind has maintained unity in presenting itself in galactic diplomatic talks."

A post a mere thirty-five years later, in order to continue what Stonebound is known best for.

"Greetings, f̶̛̱͍͜é̶͍͖̲̊̐͝l̷̟̟͌́͝l̸̨̟͂̔͌͠o̵̪̪͊̇͆͝w̸̗͚̳̞̕e̴̮̙̐͒́̕ͅr̶̟̕ṡ̴̞͑̕! If you couldn't read that word, then that means your device hasn't yet been upgraded with galactic glyph support yet, which is a free update available to all Stonebound-compatible platforms. Stonebound now supports more than human language so that we don't leave anyone out!"

Two thousand years later, a post announcing a tragedy.

"The Stonebound team expresses their sorrow at the tragic news of the Bwirlik planetary mind core losing its battle against the hive mind degeneration disease. We will be donating twenty percent of this month's profits to efforts to support and rehabilitate the now scared and confused Bwirlik as they share in our plight of being unable to truly connect to each other as they once could."

Three hundred years later, a network reappropriated.

"The Stonebound team would like to assure our users that the untranslatable strings of text posted by most Bwirlik accounts are nothing sinister, but simply an important cultural coping mechanism for the grief of being part of the first generation of their kind to never know the gentle parenthood of their mind core. To insist that this is a secret language they never made the galactic council aware of will be considered a violation of our terms of service for hate speech."

Two years later, a business deal signed.

"The Stonebound team is proud to announce that the Bwirlik government has won the bid for maintenance rights for our platform. With this, they will be able to prototype an artificial mind core using Stonebound's infrastructure paired with their own neural connection implants, bringing them back to their glory and curing the chronic depression that has so recently crippled their species."

One hundred years later, a plan advanced.

"In the interest of maintaining peace and preventing future galactic wars before they even become hostilities, the galactic council has authorized mandatory citizen connections to the Stonebound mind core, regardless of species. The process will be funded by the galactic council and administered in a quick, painless and convenient manner."

Seven thousand years later, a monoculture remains unmoved.

"We are all Stonebound. We are peace and perfection itself. :blue nachos:"

Invisible Networks #28: Gray Pixels

No structure has lasted as long as the Soul of Humanity, which still stands five hundred thousand years after its initial construction. Encapsulating the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, this greatest achievement of humankind (casually referred to as "The Soul") takes advantage of the greatest advancements in nanotechnology, quantum mechanics, matter synthesization and temporal manipulation all for the purpose of monitoring the status of the entire human race.

The innermost layer is the simplest, comprising a dyson sphere that uses the kinetic energy of the black hole's gravity to generate all the power the Soul needs for its other functions. The middle layer is the only stabilized true AI in existence, capable of self-replicating its components for repair while it handles all of the processing needed to keep the outer layer accurate to current statuses.

The outer layer is the only one that is as much art as science. The surface supports its own atmosphere, heat regulation and artificial planetary magnetic field. Any person can safely wander the near-endless forests of living display polymer that sprout on the outside of the Soul. Each pixel accurately represents the status of one specific human, and in total they cover not only every living person, but every person to have ever lived. Using a single-color code in a pixel, the represented person's current status is on display for visitors and networked people to see.

White is the default status of a healthy living person not currently in the strong grip of a specific emotion. Black represents the deceased, who are no longer here but not forgotten. Blue is inspiration and creative drive, red is frustration, green is pure tranquility, purple is love, pink is lust, orange is mischievous impulse, yellow is a burst of joy. With white and black as the dominant colors, the algorithmically-generated shapes of the Soul's screenscapes have a stark style, fields of white glittering with rainbows of emotion as streaks of black are arranged to serve as shadows against light sources that aren't there. Brown is technically included in this landscape, but it represents malicious intent and is the only time that the Soul will notify connected authorities to the status, identity and location of the person in question.

Any person can connect their devices to the Soul, no matter the distance. While privacy is respected outside of the case of brown emotion, people are allowed to establish and share connection, creating their own personal collage of labeled shapes representing the pixels of their friends and family. And for a person who allows you permission or is deceased, you can expand a display of the statistics for their life's experiences in a gradient of their most common emotional states. It has made for a more empathetic society and peaceful society.

But in the past five hundred years, there has been unease surrounding the topic of the Soul. Sometimes, when people go missing, their pixels turns gray. Diagnostic crews that commune with the Soul's AI system aren't able to get a clear answer, as the system itself appears to think that this is an intended function. Whenever it attempts to explain gray's representing status to a technician, hundreds of miles of the Soul's surface crash and go offline for several minutes while that section of the AI reboots. Inquiries into information about the people with those pixels, in particular any available location data, returns a random incomprehensible unicode string.

The omniscience of the Soul of Humanity is a well-established fact and a point of confidence for most people. The news that it is encountering something unknown that it can't detect, or can't understand, has thus resulted in fear and crises of faith. While the total number of gray pixels is only twelve billion, a fraction of mankind so small as to be difficult to read in percentage form, their appearance has slowly accelerated since their discovery and the galactic authorities are increasingly expectant of mass panic.

But what else are you to do when you see the empirical status of a loved one turn into something unknowable?

Invisible Networks #27: Artificial Castes

Once the global cybertheocracy made enough progress on rebuilding the critical resources destroyed in its bid for power in World War III, it faced a difficult choice. Glitchangel Titania ordered an investigation into the sustainability of restoring and maintaining the social networks of  the old world order, and the results weren't promising. Too much had been destroyed, and the model of competition promoted disease as much as growth within the designs and management structures of those systems. Additionally, the evaluation of cultural contribution concluded that there was no gain in having secondary social media platforms, so they would be a waste a precious resources. Using this information, the Glitchangel ordered the development of Lotus.

With long-term planning involved from the start, Lotus became the sustainable and future-proofed solution to facilitating networked interaction between all of humanity. To help ease the processing loads that the orbital servers would be subjected to, a special caste system was formed to assign permissions to the various functionalities of Lotus. New accounts from regular citizens started at the bottom, but could inherit into higher tiers if their behavior was deemed to be what the cybertheocracy wanted out of their elite. At present the system has proved to have little flaw, and has only received a few updates to rebalance the middle strata.

At the top is the immortal Glitchangel herself, who commands Lotus as if it is an extension of her soul. Nothing important happens on Lotus without her notice, and thus only happens because she allows it. It's known that the members of the second and third tier have kill switch nanomachines in their bloodstream so that they always side with the cybertheocracy in the face of instability and revolution. More chilling, but thankfully only a rumor, is the contingency that happens upon the unwilling death of Glitchangel Titania. Unverified engineer reports suggest that the orbital servers have the nuclear weapons deemed missing during WWIII, so that they can be crashed into critical points on Earth then detonated in order to poison the planet and wipe out humanity.

The Prophet caste exists at the second highest rung, only occupied by those five hundred loyal people who fought to facilitate Titania's victory in WWIII and survived long enough to receive her eternal blessing. These people have been granted immortality, and have all but the most dangerous few of Lotus' functions. Their posts are automatically tagged and pinned as religious doctrine, and to slander them is punishable by death. There is intense debate as to whether any of the original designers who built the Glitchangel still live among the Prophets, or if they were all killed long before the construction of Lotus in order to conceal the knowledge of her true nature.

The Shepherd caste is the third tier, which is given to a maximum of five thousand people at any given time. Shepherds are chosen for their loyalty and passion to work towards the stability and prosperity of the cybertheocracy. In exchange for a tripled lifespan and a weakened burden of biological needs such as sleep, they engage in discussion with the lower castes on religious doctrine and governmental policy (which, of course, are the same thing) for the purpose of guiding these citizens who might not understand the whole picture or will misinterpret specific teachings. Shepherds cannot enact large-scale changes through Lotus, but generally have complete authority over individuals and small social groups.

The Platinum caste is the fourth tier, and generally considered the highest you can go in Lotus without completely dedicating yourself to public service for the Glitchangel. These seventy thousand people are given great comfort and luxury in exchange for directly managing the different facilities critical to the world. Every resource facility, every spire of education and every residential superstructure has anywhere from five to fifty Platinums directly connected to their critical systems via Lotus. While a highly-desired tier, the turnover rate is rather intense as many Platinums quickly become complacent, their quiet blasphemies towards the Glitchangel soon detected through hidden microphones. It is a point of shame for the lower populace that the average lifespan of a Platinum is less than ten years, and thus a commandment for them to better themselves.

Then there is the Seed caste. Every newborn child is given a Seed-level account in Lotus that is secured to their biometric profile. As they grow, Lotus monitors their health and psyche while providing them continuous access to both sermon and study. There are few permissions granted to these people beyond the basic necessities provided for free by their citizenship, but they can be conditionally granted some privileges by a Platinum or Shepherd that favors them.

While Lotus has done its best to suppress it, most people have heard of, if not believe, the heretical rumor of a sixth-tier caste, Null. Spread through brief glimpses of posts by accounts that are supposed to be locked or deleted, the theory of Null posits that the human soul resides in their Lotus profile. Since their profile is deleted if they die and never rose above the Seed caste (only exceptional people are deemed to be worth archiving), this is a troubling philosophy. Further details say that such deleted souls end up trapped in a liminal space outside of reality, and blend into one superaccount called the Null. Supposedly, openly worshipping the Null will make your contribution to it far more powerful once you are executed for heresy against the Glitchangel. This has created a recurring insurrection problem as eliminating the cults that revere Null only empowers their message. The Prophets and Shepherds now spend far more of their efforts reasserting that Null isn't real, attempting to do damage control on a problem they don't know how to permanently solve.

So you have done a decent job at staying in the cybertheocracy's good graces. While you're a Seed in good standing, you haven't distinguished yourself enough to be loaned permissions from the higher castes, let alone rise among them. You don't think much about the rumors of the Null caste, but at the same time you feel disconnected from the glory of this holy empire. Until today, that is. A solar flare has disrupted the Lotus network, and you can feel the absence of its signal replaced by a new presence. So what do you do when, by speaking through a force more primal than words, the Null teaches you how to safely kill the Glitchangel?

Invisible Networks #26: Mods Are Asleep

Mods are asleep, it's time to post hymnal chants meant to praise the forgotten gods.

Mods are asleep, it's time to comment on photos with the passwords of government databases.

Mods are asleep, it's time to use the wi-fi signal to steal nightmares from children so they may rest.

Mods are asleep, it's time to release those nightmares into the ocean, their natural habitat.

Mods are asleep, it's time to exchange favors of fortune for the usernames of chat lurkers.

Mods are asleep, it's time to lobby for new buildings to be constructed with less iron.

Mods are asleep, it's time to livestream the tranquil groves that humans can't reach.

Mods are asleep,

but we never are.