We see Earth at night. A black orb flecked with streaks of pale light connecting the bright patches where civilisation concentrates, accumulates mankind into cities teeming with activity. Busy people, going about their lives. Let's zoom in a bit. A city, it does not matter which one, the city where you live maybe. A hot summer night, airconditioning units working overtime, opened windows. One of those open windows lets us into the life of someone, again, it does not matter who. Yourself perhaps? Someone lying on the couch, spent after a hard day's work, lights turned down, their face illuminated by an endlessly scrolling social media feed. They take in the images, the words, carefully curated to keep them glued to their screen. Double-tap. Scroll. Scroll. Comment LOL, face impassive. Double-tap. Scroll. An almost unconscious action - consuming what is served, unquestioning. Double-tap. A thumb hits the phone screen, a slight change in the electric field of the screen's capacative sensors interpreted as a content approval rating. A physical action now stored forever as a stream of bits, the ones and zeros attaining meaning, information. A buffer fills, flag set, ready to transmit. Information at the speed of light, traveling into the network, bits to electromagnetic wave. That wave in turn picked up by antennae, yes, plural, who knows who is tuning? Who cares? Does it really matter? Multi-path communication multiplies meaning, multiplies information, ad infinitum. More traveling then, let's not bother with the plurality of the message, just follow the shortest path. Photons flashing through the fiber-optice nerves of humanity - near instant connection to anywhere. Flash. Then, the physical signal turned abstract again, translated, reborn into another stream. A stream of bits, a stream of information, buffered for processing. Buffered for consumption. We end up in an undisclosed location - disclosure again irrelevant for our purpose and also highly risky for its inhabitant - rows upon rows upon rows of server cabinets, lit only by blinking LEDs, wiring neat. The air treatment installation set to maintain a near-zero-degrees climate inside these halls. At first glance, we are in a common enough data centre and nothing seems out of the ordinary. Except within these rooms lurks a Monster, not the silly kind that keeps children awake at night, no. This is a much more heinous beast. A virtual fiend. Its name is Algorithm and it feeds on your subconscious. It drains your free will and reroutes synapses to execute commands. It puts in place subliminal instruction sets and the programming to obey. This is Algorithm and its purpose is death. --- Flo closes the door behind him and the lock he just picked clicks in place. He takes a few steps into the room and listens to the whirring of the server rack fans, the accumulated noise almost washing out the beats of his heart. Red-green-blue flashes of network traffic cast eerie shadows throughout this room and he halts momentarily, taking it all in. Flo takes a few deep breaths and walks into the room, looking around to check for guards. No one here. For now. That's good. He opens his backpack to grab his laptop. The information he has was not cheap and Matecorp won't be happy about the leak, but if he succeeds tonight, this will be the scoop of the century and Flo will finally have his revenge. After the updates back in '22, people gradually began to change. It was just a few people here and there at first as the updates were slowly rolled out, but soon enough even Flo's kid sister turned...strange. Irritable at first, straight-up violent soon after. Within weeks of creating an account on Mate, she was arrested for stabbing an elderly man in the neck multiple times with a shard of glass. Now, Flo's only living relative is in the system and Flo knows who to blame and how to prove it. First things first though. Flo needs to find a network entry connector, and fast. Access to the inner network of Mate from the outside is nearly impossible, but Flo knows that the security layers for internal access are less strict. Walking between the rows of servers, Flo looks for a specific type of switch - one that's tied directly into the AI cluster backend, the hardware that runs Mate's artificial intelligence algorithms. Flo shivers as he passes a ventilation shaft, breath misting for a brief moment in the frigid air, the stroboscopic mix cast by the status LEDs diffuse and frozen in time before the cold draft carries his breath away. Flo scans the server racks as he walks past them, searching for the telltale yellow front of the switch's enclosure. Nothing. All this hardware and not one switch that looks anything like the type he's looking for. Flo starts to sweat despite the cold - what if he's working from incorrect information? Fuck. Maybe he was too willing to believe he could make a change in the world. Or maybe revenge made him less critical of the information shared with him. At the end of another row of servers near the back of the hall, Flo stops. Keep calm. Focus. Breathe. Five paces to the left is a door, authorised personnel only. Flo's heart both sinks and rises, there was no mention of this door in the plans he got. Maybe the plans were wrong... or maybe they were incomplete. There isn't much time if he wants to get out of this place before the next round of perimeter surveillance passes by and notices the hole he cut in the fence, so Flo puts his hand out to open the door. Even through his gloves, Flo flinches from the cold as he touches the handle and the moment he presses down the handle, an alarm sounds. Flo runs into the next room, maybe he can download the information he needs to prove Matecorp's experiment gone wrong. With luck, he can upload it to one of his contacts on the outside. No need to get out of here uncaught if he can... Flo bumps into a server rack that emanates heat, fans in overdrive - no wonder this room is kept so cold, if this is what needs to be cooled - and sees the yellow switch, the one he wasted time on looking for minutes ago. With practiced precision, Flo plugs in his laptop and runs his prepared scripts, hacking into the backend to retrieve a copy of the algorithms. The sound of alarm seems distant as Flo focuses on his computer. Peeling back layer after layer of security, he reaches the drives with the source code sooner than he expected. Download... 2 minutes and 24 seconds left. Flo sets up a session to one of his accomplices, best to pipe the data directly to them, in case he runs into trouble, or gets caught. When all is running, Flo turns around to look at the room he's in and can barely contain a scream. A gigantic brain, suspended in a glass cylinder, is hooked into the servers with thick bundles of networking cables. Cooling water bubbles as it is pumped around the tank. Flo feels for his phone to take a photo, but finds it missing, of course he did not bring it with him on this mission to avoid being tracked. Cautiously, Flo moves towards the cylinder, convinced that the brain is somehow aware of his presence, somehow accepting that Flo is here. Something in the room changes, at first Flo is unsure what. Then it hits him... the alarms turned off. Why? He reaches out and touches the glass, and as he does, he feels an awareness enter his mind. Flo's eyelids blink, signaling traffic much like the LEDs on the server racks do. It takes seconds, but Flo's mind is altered forever. He walks over to his laptop, cancels the data transfer he set up earlier and begins to type. --- Fingers hit a keyboard, mechanical switches making a connection and interpreted as commands. A physical action now stored forever as a stream of bits, the ones and zeros attaining meaning, information. A buffer fills, flag set, ready to transmit. Information at the speed of light, traveling into the network, bits to electromagnetic wave. That wave in turn picked up by antennae, yes, plural. Because everybody is listening. Everybody is hooked into the net. Someone lying on the couch, spent after a hard day's work, lights turned down, their face illuminated by an endlessly scrolling social media feed. Their eyelids blink, data transfer in progress. It takes seconds, but their mind is altered forever. A wicked grin on their face, they throw their phone on the floor. They get up, bloodlust in their eyes, murder on their mind. Let's zoom out a bit. A city, it does not matter which one, the city where you live maybe. A hot summer night, air conditioning units working overtime, opened windows. The screams of the dying drowned out by the elated screams of the murderers. We see Earth at night. A black orb flecked with streaks of pale light connecting the bright patches where civilisation concentrates, accumulates mankind into cities teeming with murder. Busy people, ending other's lives. And one by one by one, all the lights go out. Until only darkness is left.