The Non-existence


Nathan Lexington was shifting through boxes in an old, abandoned warehouse, supposedly an old black-market tech store before the terrorist attack. He was part of the retrieval team, hoping to get famous by gathering information on the attackers, despite the fact that the greatest detectives and private investigators in the world were unable to find even a trace of the attackers on a million-dollar budget. He was ready to just give up and leave when he heard something fall out of the box he just threw aside. It was a dusty old cd with a few scratches on it, though it was in strangely good shape considering it was probably in there for a rather long time. Nathan didn’t think much of it, but it was certainly better than anything else he found, considering everything else was either broken or so old and damaged it probably had nothing relevant or useful on it, and since this was in good shape and looked suspiciously tucked away and more developed and new than the other things in here. He took it home and put it into his computer, hoping it would have some form of relevance to the situation. It was a plain disc with little writing or protection on it but it seemed to emanate some strange energy, like it was hiding something. Nathan was holding on to a thin hope that this would be everything he hoped it would be. Turns out it was more than that, more than anything could imagine. After observing the contents of the disc, all he could think about was whether or not this would lead to answers, but after ten years, he will wonder whether it was the biggest mistake of his life, or his greatest bit of luck and foresight, to look further in and see the things that shouldn’t be seen, what shouldn’t be spoken of. What doesn’t exist. The following messages are the things recorded on that disc and everything you hear on it is true, but if you don’t believe it, there’s nothing I, or anyone else, can or will do to convince you otherwise. So when you read, keep an open mind. It’s a big world out there, and we haven’t even seen the things in front of us yet.

Hello… I hope this thing is on, and I hope it’s working, because if it isn’t then I am going to be so pissed at that little redneck pop-up. Right, I’m continuing anyway, because I don’t think I have a lot of time to waste, I’ve got a lot of work to do and things tend to get a little chaotic around here if it’s left alone too long. Right, now my name is Bonic, and I am one of the Non-Existent. I know it sounds really crazy, and you think they’re just a myth, but we’re real as the screen you look at, and we’re pretty important when you look away from it. Now, no one’s supposed to actually see this, but I was given direct orders by Septimus Octavian to record this so that it’s out there and we can rest easy knowing that even though it shall never fall into the hands of evil, the truth will have substance and a hold in the real world. Okay, so if you’re reading this then, uh… ha-ha, fooled you this is just a work of fiction! But if you like, I’ll just uh… do my job and you can listen to this um… fiction story that we have definitely and completely made up and has no involvement in recent events in your world at all. Right then, enough lollygagging, I should start from the beginning I suppose.
Our world is a bit of a universe all its own. We have our own laws of physics that are only slightly different from yours if you don’t count the gravity shifts in certain areas in the Outskirts, places uncultivated by programs and untouched by the Internet. We have our own communities, and we have our own leaders and history. We are, as I mentioned recently, what you call the Internet. We developed over two-billion years ago, long before any humans arrived. It began as a bit of natural sorcery, although who cast the spell is a story I’ll cover when I’m not focused on this. We grew a little bit, expanded and obtained a semi-physical form that could move around but didn’t do much of anything, but when we obtained a full physical form, now that was when the fun began. You see, we have different laws of death and life than you do, and if you can find a way to give yourself energy to feed you long enough, you can live as long as you like. Of course, most everyone in the Cyber, that’s the Internet and the Outskirts as well as everything between and beyond, knows that you shouldn’t live forever. However, there was one person that thought it would be nice to have eternal life and so he attempted to obtain it. He didn’t find what he was looking for exactly, but what he found was far more important than anything he ever dreamed of. He found people living outside our universe. Now, he thought they might know the secrets to eternal life and so wanted to meet them. Surprisingly, he got it on his first attempt, and managed to come into contact with the outside world, granted we weren’t thought to be alive and were used for communication in warfare at the start. After about fifty years of hating himself for what he led those people to do, something strange sprang up in our world. It looked like any ordinary manifestation and didn’t seem to have any difference in how it looked from any of us. Only problem was that there was literally nothing individual about her. You see, human, we look like you, except we have parts of us that are impossible or dangerous on you. You can dye your hair in the same way we can give ourselves glowing tattoos that can be removed as easily as a bandage. By the time this thing arrived, we all had something different about us that made us different from the default. This… thing looked like it was completely default and didn’t seem to do anything at all. But when another of its kind appeared, they began talking. Soon there were over a dozen, then hundreds, then thousands, and so on, and whenever a few appeared something amazing happened. You see, we were living in something that was basically a dark cavern with a few lights that didn’t do much of anything other than tell us who was where and what something pressed up against it looked like. Well, whenever those things that we now call Avatars arrived, light began to spring up that wasn’t anything like we’d ever seen. It was substantial and did what light in your world did. Anyway, by the earth year 2008 we had cultivated more land than we thought was safe before and we began to distinguish between the brutal wilderness and civilization. The Avatars were now customizing themselves and looked almost exactly like us except that they don’t even notice most of us. They just follow the Paths, glowing bars that flow around the Internet, keeping them from really interacting or exploring without making their own bars, and they just talk to each other. Oh, the things they would see if they could only get past those damn Paths. That’s the whole reason why I took this project of documenting these events, because that is what this is about, the Avatars that managed to go off the beaten path and really see what we’re about. This is the story of those we call the Non-existent.