Are we alive?

That damned message won’t leave my dreams.

Are we dreaming?

All I want to do is sleep and clear my head.

Follow me into the breach.

What is all of this about?

Stop this.

I lift myself out of bed and look at my phone. 6am. Ortiz left at 2 so I got maybe 4 hours of sleep. I look over to the computer in the corner, the monitor still displaying that accursed message.

//:: IT HAS BEGUN ::\

I rub my eyes and take myself over to the computer; if I can’t sleep, I might as well try and figure out more. There were 8 video tracks in total and I could only get a partial audio track from one of the videos. But none of it makes any sense.

I sit in my chair and stare at the black screen and white flickering text. I hit the spacebar and as usual, symbols and static flash across the screen before reverting back to the original text. Nothing has changed.

I hit the keyboard of my workstation and it starts to wake up. There has to be more to this. I open my email once the computer boots up, thinking about who I can show this to. Could I even send the files to anyone? Would that be safe?

du-DUH

My computer pings with a message. It’s from Satoru.

yo bro, everything good? He asked me. I must have forgotten to turn invisible mode on.

“Yeah, mate. I’m good,” I replied to him.

We’re going to clear p1s now

wanna join?

Oh jeez, of course they’re doing the new savage raids right now. And I’m the one with no life?

“Got some things to sort out. Maybe you can carry my butt later.”

dope

but you should prolly dps

Yeah, tanking a new raid when I’m the learner isn’t a good idea. Good thing I got used to DPS again playing Reaper.

“Sounds good,” I reply to him. Maybe some raids later would clear my head. This virus, or whatever it is, is mentally exhausting to think about. Maybe I should call for help on this. Ortiz has too much on her plate already and I’ve bugged her enough and Satoru, while a good nerd, is a shut-in like me.

I look through my phone contacts. I haven’t deleted a single contact since high school because I’m too lazy to do it properly so I guarantee you there’s someone in here who can help.

Scott? He was a decent guy but we only met briefly when we shared programming classes; I don’t know what he’s doing now.

Craig would be a good choice. He was a good IT wizard like me. Eh, on second thought, he was really big into aliens and gods; not a good pick.

Montel? Damn, I haven’t spoken to him in like 15 years. He always wanted to become an audio engineer. Pretty sure he’s a funeral director now.

Why do I have 3 “Ashley”s in my phone?

Which Cody is this one in my phone?

Jake. Yeah, Jake. He was my roommate in engineering school and now works as an engineer at a plane manufacturer. Dude’s a genius when it comes to analysis. I remember those nights when we would get drunk off of our asses, grab a whiteboard, and start solving equations. This was all 6 years ago so who knows if his number is still good.

I look again at the clock. 6:30am. Is it too early? I don’t know where he went after we graduated since I moved out of our dorm after sophomore year to live in the on-campus apartments.

I hesitate.

I tap his name.

The phone’s ringing. That’s a sign. What if the number isn’t his anymore though?

Click. “Hello?”

I swallow the lump in my throat. “Hey, is this Jacob Brake?”

“It is. What can I do for you?”

Oh thank god. “Hey dude, it’s Michael. From college. I know it’s been a while but do you remember?”

“Ohhh yeeeaaahhh!” I can hear him say in realization. “Dude, how’s it been?”

“Oh you know, living the dream,” I chuckle. “What’s new with you?”

“If only you knew, bud,” he laughed.

“Are you busy right now?” I ask. I like this little reunion but there’s business afoot.

“I’m actually off today,” he replied. “What’s good?”

I hesitate but decide to tell him that we had a breach at work a couple of days ago and it resulted in finding a virus implanted on my hard drive that I can’t remove with strange files on it. For the sake of my reputation, I left out the strange translating words and how the server rack still had power for a few moments after cutting it off.

“I know this sounds crazy,” I finish, realizing just how screwed up this whole thing is, “but I’m really at the end of my rope here.”

“I don’t think it’s crazy,” Jake replied. “I was actually wondering if I’ve been going crazy the past couple of days?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Around that time, I was in a video conference with some other engineers and our cameras just went all static for a few minutes and displayed some strange symbols,” he explained. This was all sounding too familiar. “It displayed some text for a moment and then instantly cleared up. I thought it was just me but the others all saw the same thing.”

“Do you have a recording of this?” I ask him.

“I don’t, but I did take a screenshot of it just a moment before it freed up. Would you like me to text it to you?”

“Please!” I respond with no hesitation. I wait a minute as I hear him scroll through his phone and then I get a text.

I look at the picture and it showed a video call with 5 cameras that all went static. But that wasn’t all; he caught the text too. I felt my heart sink as I read the text.

“Jake, this is the text it showed you?” I ask while my voice cracks.

“Yeah, pretty strange right?” he replied nonchalantly.

I read the text in the picture again, trying to find some explanation for this; any explanation at all.

//:: IT HAS BEGUN ::\

I confess that the virus on my hard drive displays the same text and explain that it seems to translate itself somehow; that my co-worker reads it in Spanish and one of my friends reads it in Japanese and they all mean the same thing.

“No way,” Jake responds, taking in the information.

“I know how ridiculous this sounds, but something’s going on,” I continue, really taking in just how screwed up this situation is.

Jake spends a moment thinking before coming up with a proposal. “Do you remember Christian? The kid who liked playing Clan Wars 2.”

I think for a moment and try to remember him. Was he blonde? I know he had a bunk bed with his roommate. “Oh yeah, got us all sucked in for a bit since there weren’t any good MMOs at the time.”

“Yeah, I remember him saying he wanted to work for NASA. We should check in with him.” Jake proposes.

“Do you really think aliens are involved?” I ask half jokingly. It’s not that I don’t believe in aliens; the universe is too big for there to not be aliens, but there’s no way this is aliens.

“You said it, not me,” Jake laughed. “If he does work for NASA, that means he’s a bigger nerd than the two of us; he has to know something about this.”

He had a point. Jake and I both ended up as mechanical engineers. If Christian went to work for NASA, he would have even more knowledge than us. On top of that, the same event happened to both Jake and I at nearly the same time. If there were scientists that were looking for radio signals or anything like that, maybe they said something. At the very least, if someone did report it, then we know it’s not a virus. If no one did, then this is isolated somehow and likely someone is sending viruses to anything with an IP address.

“Do you have his phone number?” I ask. I sure as heck didn’t; we didn’t share classes together and I’ve rarely interacted with him.

“I don’t, but I know his old roommate; I can contact him,” Jake responds with a newfound confidence in his voice. “I’ll give him a shout and call you back.”

“Awesome, thanks man!” I respond. Hopefully, I can actually get somewhere with trying to figure this all out.

I hang up the phone and look back to the test bench monitor and stare at that haunting white text. I look at the picture Jake sent me and compare it to the monitor; the text is practically the same in every way. What does all of this mean? The worst part is that I haven’t even talked to Jake about the audio track; would he hear his own voice in the audio like Ortiz?

It has begun.

What has begun? Who would make a virus like this? Or if it is a message, who would send a message like this? Wouldn’t it be better to tell us what had begun? You know, ‘the end of the world has begun’, ‘war has begun’, ‘climate change has begun’; hell ‘your food has begun to burn’ would tell me a hell of a lot more than ‘it has begun’! If I was trying to send a message like that, I would at least be a lot more descriptive.

Maybe this isn’t a message. Maybe it really is just a virus intended to make me scratch my head. Maybe an over elaborate marketing campaign.

I just sit at my desk, running through the possibilities while scrolling through my news feed. If this is a thing that happened to others, why is there no news coverage?

Oh there is.

Some TV stations are saying they experienced a brief outage in some areas, usually black or blue screening. Some areas lost internet service for a couple of minutes. Ultimately though, it looks like it was chalked up to a weird server glitch. There is no mention of ‘it has begun’ or any viruses.

I head to a few forum sites and some people are reporting the outage, but that seems to be that. One guy claimed his internet outage cost him a ranked game and went on a tirade about how ISPs in this country are horrible and greedy. Not wrong, but at the same time, chill dude.

I put down my phone and pull up the corrupted drive in my workstation, looking at the strange video files again. I only looked at the Endeavor file. I decided to look at the Manifest file; maybe there’s something more I’m missing.

I open the file and as before, I am greeted by a strange symbol with static in the video feed and static in the audio. I put on my Empyreans again and turn up the sound. For a while, I hear only static.

However, there was something to the noise; it was…pulsing? I don’t know how to describe it, but it felt like it was pounding in my ears with some strange rhythm. It was hypnotic, like binaural music or something. The rhythmic thumping, drumming, pulsed in my mind like it was coming from my brain itself.

Suddenly, the rhythmic thudding stopped and was replaced by a loud hiss, like a broken mic through a faded record. It has some pattern to it, but I could only hear the static. Along with the hiss, there was some droning sound that I couldn’t make out. It was like the rhythmic drumming from earlier, yet it was steadier, almost like a detuned bass.

The video contained 3 minutes of these tones repeating each other the entire time; one after another. I realized then that this file was different; it was exactly 180 seconds long. That was strange but I listened to the audio again and realized the audio changed 6 times in that time; exactly 30 seconds apart.

I threw the file into a video editor to get more information. It only got weirder; the video metadata was nothing but some distorted text like badly encoded binary. I checked the timestamp and even the video milliseconds were 0, meaning the video was EXACTLY 180 seconds long. But for some reason, my editor didn’t display a framerate or resolution; it treated the file like raw data that could be encoded as video, but wasn’t a video.

Okay, so this Manifest file is a video file yet not a video file. I guess a file that my OS can interpret as a video is more accurate. I decided to check with the other files and they all produced similar results; a video file that was not quite a video file. The mystery of this drive only deepens now. Usually when a file is corrupted, the OS just refuses to read it. Here, my computer is trying to read the files and what I’m seeing is that attempt.

I get lost in this mystery to the point where my phone ringing actually startles me. It’s Jake. I answer the phone and put it on speaker with one of the earcups of my headset off.

“Michael, bro, you’re not going to believe this,” Jake told me over the phone in a hurried voice.

“What’s going on?” I ask; he may be talking about Christian.

Jake’s explanation was brief and in panting breaths, like he was running. “I got a hold of Christian and let him know what happened. How soon can you get to Boston?”

I think for a minute. A last minute plane ticket to Massachusetts is going to be expensive, but doable. “I guess I can leave sometime this weekend. Why?”

“Dude, no. Christian wants us there like today,” Jake explained. “He wasn’t specific, but it seemed like he knew something was up and wanted us there immediately. And he wants you to bring the hard drive.”

“Are you pulling my leg right now?” I ask him. This really has to be the biggest prank; I’m not about to throw down $400 for a plane ticket for no reason.

“I’m not; he was dead serious,” Jake answered. He didn’t have that telltale chuckle in his voice of someone who was pranking. In fact, it sounded like he was packing.

“Give me his phone number,” I tell Jake. “I’ll talk to him and try to make my way there.”

“I’ll text you later!” Jake told me and then hung up. A minute later, I got a text from him with a phone number.

I tap on the number and it rings once before someone answers.

“Hey, is this Michael?” a man asks on the other end.

“It is, I take it you’re Christian?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he confirms and I can hear typing on a keyboard in the background. “How soon can you get here?”

“What is this all about?” I ask.

“I can’t explain everything over the phone, but we need to put our heads together,” Christian tells me, his typing getting faster in the background.

“I’m not going to Boston without an explanation,” I tell him, starting to become frustrated.

I hear him groan and hit a key.

Follow me into the breach! Can you see how this all ends? Can’t you all see our destiny? We must stop this!

I hear a recording in the background play; my recording. I can hear myself more clearly in this recording he’s playing than what I extracted. How did he get the recording though? I never sent it to anyone.

The recording stops. “Now do you understand?” he asks me.

I could only sit in silence, contemplating everything. It was the same recording, but clearer and with more information. Yet it was still my voice. How did he get it? How did he get that much information?

“I do,” I tell him. I look at my phone and open my airlines app and buy the first plane to Boston. “I’ll be there at 15:00,” I tell him as I spend $500 on the last minute airline.