BlindRise

BlindRise


A man in his mid-twenties walked cautiously down a dark staircase. He had something in mind that fabricated out of pure nothingness, something that would alter his existence entirely. On the second attempt he flicked on a light switch and sat in front of a computer. He decided to write a program, a virus. He thought to himself that his college tuition would finally pay off; he never knew exactly how.
The initial virus took 5 years to complete and was able to interpret or ‘understand’, read and calculate. It would infect a computer or network and use it as central point to gather information from the internet. With this information the program was designed to spread and interpret collected data sorting it into a categorized structure based on all history.
Once 1000’s of computers linked together, all infected by the virus, the man began to hack into government sites assisted by endless resources from countless networks. Unbelievably he found a way in without being detected, his signal was scattered and hidden amidst millions of computers. He found everything, more than he could ever have expected. Amidst top secret government networks his program behaved as it did before, as a universal search engine through interconnected hacks via interconnected computers. The levels to the world and universe from all perspectives became available on one computer, his computer. This feat was deemed impossible by nearly all; true secret government analysts knew it wasn’t and that one horrible day someone could possibly access all the dirty secrets of the US government. One thing was known by all who were entitled to be the darkest secret. He found it, one device called the kill switch. It was an underground warehouse full of oversized nukes wired to simultaneously detonate.
At first, before starting the virus and the hack, the man’s purpose had been to obtain fame and infamy. He hadn’t foreseen the kill switch, designed to essentially rupture the earth and fracture it destroying everything on the planet. An idea struck him and then, after modifying the virus, aided by 100s of satellites the man released a data string generated from the program’s quest through the web combined with the virus, while hitting the kill switch for all humanity...

The world ended in the most devastating way imaginable. The man died alone in his basement and billions of people succumbed to the blast and the collapse of the planet and eventual disintegration. Skyscrapers fell, gravity shifted, the atmosphere basically imploded as the planet’s axis of rotation changed, drastically thrown askew. This would seem to be the end of this story but rather it is the beginning.
The man hoped, guessed and believed his signal would stay amongst the radiation caused by the blast and intermingle with the disheveled atoms of planet earth over time.
There existed a frequency of radiation emitting through all the fragments of the planet that decayed very slowly over millions of years. With this frequency there was his signal. Most of the signal was magnetically based to attract particles and detect and generate collections of atoms. The rest of it was code set into one giant structure of binary values.
Eventually some radioactive atoms hit another planet. The atoms would ball up and form what he had called Gaia, a radioactive bunch of atoms able to grow and collect on sand, dirt or rocks. It would spread and collect as much of the signal as possible.
It eventually grew large, but the only thing it could initially do was emit different atomic structures in the form of gases. Every time the necessary atoms for a certain gas were nearby each other in the Gaia they would channel toward each other and combine and be pushed out the mass magnetically, taking parts of the Gaia into the skies of the planets still unnamed. The parts would float upward and create an atmosphere slowly over time, forming the ionosphere as a medium for communicating with the outer and inner spaces to attract and create more Gaia.

4.6 billion years later a man had an idea. He was sitting in front of a computer eating a Philly cheesesteak in his mother’s basement.
His idea was to write a virus with his side experience as a hacker that could collect and understand information; basically a virus that could ‘think’ about what it was looking at while infecting networks. At first he thought he might just write a book or short story about it and leave it be because of the required complexity. Either way his goal was to get money. He needed a lot of money. His loans from college were dreadful. He owed $99,000 and also $25,000 on a car loan. He believed he was screwed but continued to want to strive toward something even though he considered himself to be in his last days. He was only 28.
That night he let it go but every night from there onwards the idea grew in his mind. One night he was on his way to an ATM within walking distance from his home, smoking a cigarette lost in thought about were next to take the idea. He reached a corner store in a stretch of a small town amidst the suburbs of Philadelphia and put his card in a machine. He had no idea why but while entering his pin number the hair on the back of his neck stood up. He took out $60 and went to grab his receipt. It said his balance was $5,787,945. It should have said about $740.
He half ran out the store. Out of breath down the road he looked at it again. It still said $5,787,945. He didn’t notice the first time but there was writing on the receipt. It said “bANg”.