Chapter 0.1

Rkipt is a barren land where pilgrims go to pray and die. It is a land with no relation to the world around, only the news wire that keeps going during most of the night. The node, a big and nebula like formation not far away from the fringes Rkipt, was the only appearance of normality long lost. Pilgrims do not care for the amusements of nodes; they have no other preoccupation than the journey to the forgotten land.

We were 3 pilgrims newly anointed and with no direction. The faster lanes did not welcome us, since our travel was contemplation. Vesta was an extreme programmer specialized in a language long lost to humanity, Holst was a former fighter pilot turned transformation guru; and I, Luot, was a technician with a penchant for the packet handling software of big routing devices. We were all weary of the lies at the heart of the nodes, and the pilgrimage to the barren land of Locust has become a mission.  The only question remained as to what the barren land was and where the road started.  We were ready.

Not long ago, a group of technicians had found a strange pulsation that was formed when networks started to vibrate and became unstable.  It was a pulsation that was emitted shortly before the network went into disarray and by many was interpreted as a distress signal rather than an amplification of resonance.  Any network is not defined outside of its own.  We suspected that if we could somehow infiltrate a large enough network, and create an instability event, the pulsation would give us some kind of answer.