Shekinah

>>>Jackpoint :RunnerBoard:Stories

[Subject - guest-user:Glitch, uploaded 7.28.2068]

“This is all during and after the Crash, right? Just before it all lit up so, like that fall, there's this game going around, complicated as hell, but addictive, real addictive, popular among the kids and... ah... maybe some of the less mature deckers on the MSPlex 'trix, "Polybius", right? Hard to find a copy, which just made it more alluring. Published under a handle 'Shekinah', nobody anybody had heard of before. For some of the kids, the real hardcore fans, looking for info about, and then theorizing about, this figure became almost as much of a game as Polybius itself, ya know...

So, anyway, Polybius had this big event on Halloween of that year. New puzzles, patches, the whole nine. And there was this big rush of new players, too. N00bs mostly, but a with drek-hot connections. I was afraid that rich corp kids had discovered the game, which would pretty much have ruined it for me. Was supposed to kick off this whole weekend of release stuff (Halloween was a Friday that year) with a big surprise planned for Sunday at the climax.

Of course you know where THIS is goin', right? November 2, 2064? None of us knew it at the time. I had to work that day, it was also the Novatech IPO and I was supposed to try and snatch some of the new stock, but I'd been so distracted thinking about the Polybius midnight release I'd stumbled into some Novatech Black Ice while doing scout work the night before and was sleeping it off at a street doc's, so this next bit is what I heard from the survivors later…

Anyway, the Crash goes down but, and this just what I heard later, mind you, but Polybius stayed up. Those who were in the game at the time say they didn't even NOTICE the Crash until afterwards. Which means that while every server in the world swallowed its own shit and died, whatever was running this game, didn't. And those who played to the end? Who found the 'final prize', well word is, and I can confirm this was the case with the couple I was later able to look up, weren't quite, the same. And they started talking about the mystery publisher, this Shekinah, like someone they knew...

After the Crash, natch, things were pretty bleak and we were all just trying to survive. [pause] Those of us who survived. Me? I was back to going at ATM's with a ghostdamned screwdriver to try and save up for the new cyber that we were going to need. The matrix was down in the 'Plex for probably two months. And that's a cold fuckin' winter, let me tell you. So, if you needed any kind of networked communication done, only people to turn to were the Polybius kids. You remember them, right? The N00bs who'd come online for the Halloween release? Well, somehow they managed to stay online with NO GHOSTDAMNED INFRASTRUCTURE. Nobody talked about it, but everybody used them, 'cause there was no other choice. The old-timers that survived grumbled darkly about 'otaku', and looking back I think its pretty obvious that they were probably what we now call 'technomancers'. Although remember, those types were just a scary urban legend back then..."

Nobody met the kids themselves, and I don't think anybody ever met this Shekinah, although her followers wouldn't shut the frag up about her. To do business with these kids you went through the non-N00b players who'd hung on 'till the end. They had the connection to the kids and they were different... empty eyed, forgetful, talked about 'Shekinah' and the 'Great Singularity' alot, evangelizing about some kinda techno-rapture or something. Which sounds silly as hell now, twelve years later, but when everything's gone dark, people will believe anything that offers them a spark of light…

You had to pay, of course, they had a momentary monopoly and even crazy cult kids aren't gonna let that pass. At first it was normal stuff, nuyen (if you could find hard scrip or uncorrupted certs), electronics, food, water, batteries, the sort of drek that becomes currency when the world turns off. But then, as they got richer and became a supplier, it started being work, tasks, spying, stealing, courier work. Work could get you matrix-access, sure. But by January, it could also get you access to some of those stockpiles of supplies they'd built up. Not a lot, mind you, but more than nothing. There's rumors that some people even did wetwork, kidnappings and killings, although I never was there for any of those. Rumor started getting dark. There was a serial killer down in Frogtown that winter, some people connected to Polybius, but it was a weird time and people wanted to make sense of the chaos, so I don't know if I can credit that…

Then, the lights came back on. Groundhog's Day 2075, the Corps finally reestablish matrix connection in the upper Midwest. But not for everyone. New Wireless Matrix meant totally new hardware and like me, a lot of people couldn't afford it yet. And Polybius was well-established now, with followers and resources. They started to get militant. Started to sabotage the new Matrix to maintain their monopoly. A hit on the NovaTech building downtown brought a corp sweep of underworld decker-types and I was lucky not to do time.

And from those who were able to afford to go online, I heard about some of the stuff they found when they got on the matrix. Like the Polybius had gotten there first. These scary big agents, nicknamed ‘em ‘Operators’, looked like the old ‘Slenderman’ memes, and they were armed with these heavy-duty attack programs, illustrated like stone wasps or marble hornets or something. And some of the old brainburned guys who survived the Crash, they claimed that there were these coded number strings that would interrupt and infect their code, claimed it got worse the more they dealt with the Polybius crowd. ‘Course guys in that condition claim a lot of things, so consider the source, right?

Also, deckers started, well, disappearing. Big names too, guys like Pig's Eye and Great White. Just drop off the map, or be found dead, blood coming from every hole in their head. Local street docs spread the buzz about 'non-standard ICE' or 'feedback buffer failures'. When one of the disappeared, this is Great White, come back one day, this is March I think, and he's talking all Polybius-culty, naming names of the dead as 'saints' and 'ascended', it kind of focused everyone's attention. And when he just falls down in the middle of the street two days later, bleeding like he'd hit Black ICE even though he wasn't even jacked-in? That brought it all into sharp resolution.

Everybody of any skill left in the 'Plex came together for a council of war. D-Icer, CloudBurst, Rhinestone, all the biggies. Did what they had to, dug deep and rooted this 'Shekinah' out of where they were hiding in the deep 'trix. Back in those days AI's were few and far between, so if it was an AI, nobody knew what they were looking at. Only a few months after the Crash, of course, everybody had Deus on the mind, but you gotta remember nobody knew any other damn AI's at the time. I even played my part right at the end, although I was nowhere near the center of the action. I'm a lover, not a... OK, I'm not really a lover, either, but I'm definitely not a fighter. Some say that they wiped this slitch out, others that they just buried her so deep she would never be found. Whatever the truth, Polybius came to a halt there, and all of its members either were found burned-out after or just disappeared. And all the spooky stuff that went with them? It just... ya know... stopped.

Never did find out where the node or server for Polybius was. Like I said, I was always out on the edges of this situation. Maybe somebody found it, but I never heard about it if they did, and they ain't saying. There's all kinds of crazy stories out there, but none of them have a lick of evidence, and they're the kinds of things folks make up when they're looking for answers, ya know?

Twelve years now, dead and gone. And twelve years gone is just gone, right?

Right?”