The bedroom wall was covered in monitors, their cords neatly gathered to pull through an opening near the back of the massive desk below. Felix pushed a cordless keyboard along its surface with him as he shuffled from one end to the other in his leather office chair.
Behind him was a twin bed, blankets ruffled, one pillow dangling from the side. An end table next to it held an unplugged alarm clock. Otherwise the space was well kept, almost sterile looking.
Felix's dark eyes never left the screens, pupils dilated in the eerie blue light of the room as he rolled with his intrigue. The soft hum of the quantum computer under the desk was the only noise outside of an occasional click. He was lost in the ocean.
Felix had never been to the beach, but his grandmother Mary had been in love with the sea. She was one of those old folks who stuck out in Felix's mind as always having been decrepit. She passed away when he was 8 years old, but not before the great ocean exploration had concluded.
Felix didn't understand then when Mary had told him with bright eyes that in her youth only 5% of it had been explored. He didn't know what it meant to her to have her curiosities satisfied, to see such a big thing unraveled at the end of her life... Not until the new internet.
AI made things like mapping the ocean floor, developing medicines, and cleaning up environmental hazards a breeze. Felix had never known a life without it, yet he still didn't see the internet takeover coming. He was 15 when humanity seized the internet with the help of AI.
Everyone in the old times thought AI would be the undoing of life as they knew it, and in some ways that was true. It made jobs scarce and changed the authenticity of creatives, but it also became a powerful ally. From its birth, the internet was made to share information.
As people became increasingly aware of censorship globally, they began to strike back. Hackers made their own AI, one that disrupted the connections between data centers. World governments fought back against this, but repeatedly found they couldn't trace it. The AI was constantly rewiring and rerouting the connections, blocking any corrective action.
The icing on the cake were the power grids, which AI took control of along with the data routes.
Since then, the web had grown exponentially. It was the ocean Felix wanted to map. So desperately in fact, that he never left his apartment. His food was delivered once a week along with clean laundry, swapped out with the dirty clothes and garbage bags he left outside his front door.
For 16 years now, Felix had lived this way. His peek outside the door his most intimate connection with the physical world... Digitally though, he looked into the hearts of thousands of people each year. Felix liked to find the source of information.
A tough case sometimes took him a full day, rarely longer... However, Felix had found himself stuck for the better part of six months now. He kept finding footage that appeared to be vintage but wasn't. Its source eluded him. It seemed connected to a string of strange writing, yet he could never quite pin that. Where he once worked for 12 hours, he now pulled 16. The mystery consumed him.
Reaching down to grab a thermos from his lap, Felix is just about to sip his coffee when he sees it. Contact! After months of sending questions into the void, the void responds... With an encrypted file.
In the space of minutes Felix had it decrypted, only to find that the contents were a riddle in their own right. His eyes took in each componet as he drained the thermos, and a sinking feeling pulled his gut down through the floor. Pages of characters and equations boiled down to a simple string of text. The file held coordinates.
For the first time in months, his eyes simply fell to the floor. He considered the circumstances with slow and steady breaths.
After many moments elapsed, Felix found his feet and wandered into his utilitarian kitchen. Pulling open the stainless-steel door of the freezer, a friendly face greets him. Unfiltered cigarettes, his guilty pleasure.
He didn't smoke much, had to keep the computer healthy... But in times like these Felix thought best with a cigarette in hand.
By the time its gone, he's made his mind up. Stubbing it out, he walks back to his computer with more confidence.
As the screen loads up the details of the location the coordinates lead to, Felix can't help but to smirk. It's a warehouse about 40 minutes away. It all just seemed too easy. Most likely it was a troll, Felix thought... He also knew it would drive him crazy if he didn't find out.
With a nod to no one, Felix heads to his closet. The outside clothes feel odd after so long, but none more than the shoes. As he laces them, Felix recalls the tales of his grandmother Mary. She'd be proud that he was exploring his own ocean.
Without looking back, he walks through the front door. His answers were finally within reach.
The part of town the coordinates led to was an old industrial area. A few of the factories were still in use, but for the most part business had left this district long ago. The building Felix found himself at was abandoned, not a gate or wall in his way.
From the street he could see an open doorway, the darkness beyond it sending a shiver of anticipation down his spine. It beckoned to him...
It was all too easy. His mind screamed that he ought to be wary of such a thing. Yet, his feet carried him forward all the same. The proximity consumed his skull, heart beating erratically, soon...
As he walked into the warehouse, a strange buzzing filled his senses, familiar in its own way. Excitement carried him on, he could feel it in the vibrations that he was close.
With a flashlight trained on the lengthy hallways ahead of him, Felix made his way deeper into the warehouse. The buzzing was much louder now, it rested in his organs.
Then the green hue caught his eye. Resplendent, pouring out in the terror of exploration. Felix reached the next doorway, and was lost in the bright green light spilling through its crumbling frame.
The buzzing was at an all-time peak now, splinters in Felix's ears. He hardly noticed though, because in front of him was what must be a hologram.
Swirling green looped with the blackest black he'd ever seen in the center of the room. The far wall held old machines, yet his view of them was fragmented, like the air was ripping apart and fusing back together endlessly. Something nagged at him, like a burning in his gut...
He needed to walk into it. It was the answer...
Then the light flipped on.
A stampede of feet followed, and in the blink of an eye the room had filled with men in white protective suits. One stepped forward, holding a laminated badge.
"I'm Lieutenant Philips. We have some questions for you." He said briskly.
"Wha-" Felix tried. Then, "Who are you people?!" he managed to heave out. The suckers had come out of thin air! Meeting his gaze through the shine of his helmet, the Lieutenant considered Felix. Around him, the others gazed at the morphing green tendrils as they buzzed on.
"We're the organization. We've been following you for some time now... So, tell us Felix, how did you know where to find this rift?"
This is my response to the S&S monthly prompt to write about the discovery of an intermensional rift, and how it was found in future times. This was written to compliment the lore from Rise of the Pixels, where the gameplay involves linking to a parallel world, accessed through this rift.
In game, this is managed in our world by "The organization", which my character Felix meets in the end. If you're curious about the inspiration for this story, follow the links above!