700 Miles South of Valley Lake, an area not yet affected by the wish
Tyler Milligan stirred and awoke at his desk, raising his head from the folded arms that had served as that nights pillow. Aching, he stretched and moved, trying to restore blood flow to his arms and movement to his joints. "I fell asleep at the computer again," he thought. He knew he shouldn't, and his aches that morning from sleeping in that pose reminded him of such, but, well, it was just convenient, and he was tired after last night's late night stint in coding. "But at least I got that project finished and pushed for testing".
Tyler rose from his chair and headed into his kitchen to grab some food. One of the perks of his job, he remembered to savor; freelance programming meant demanding workloads and required an extreme self-discipline in managing his time and workload, but it also meant he didn't often have to really leave his own home for work each day. Sometimes he did, but most of what he needed for work (mostly his computer and it's peripherals) was right here, and the rest he could often reach through the long fingers of the internet.
So Tyler returned to the computer with a light breakfast snack in hand, and took a seat. He wasn't about to dive back into work right again, not after last night, so instead he chosen to take a look at some correspondence, specifically an internet forum he'd started just shy of a week ago.
It frankly surprised him that his innocent little question forum had attracted as much attention as it had over the past week, but he wasn't complaining. All it had started with was an observation: A lot of tech that required telecommunication into and out of a region in the Northwestern United States (near Valley Lake, that is) had been throwing some really strange and occasionally highly problematic errors and bugs lately, and he had no idea why at the time. Some former employers and clients had come to him about seemingly unrelated cases in that region, more or less at the same time. It vexed him, and so he decided to create a little forum asking his programmer contacts if they had seen anything else of note in the region, had had similar bugs and fixes, and so on and so on.
What happened as a result was way more responses and chat pouring in about the issue than he would've previously imagined. File transmissions routed through the region, including emails, images, plain text and even computer code would suddenly and mysteriously change contents sometimes. Some transmissions sent into the region were simply never received or rerouted. Others would come out of the region with apparently no sender. Data stored in the region and redundantly elsewhere in the US (for backup) was suddenly contradictory to each other and badly desynced, and software attempting to determine which was correct often was causing the machines that ran it to crash or freeze. Nothing there could be stored on the cloud. Users couldn't so much as log in if they and the namespace registry happened to be on opposite sides of some invisible boundary and site management hadn't yet lent the elbow grease to fix it.
It quickly became obvious to members of the forum that something nobody could place had gone very very wrong in the area, but not a one of them could fathom exactly what it was, and any guess at what the source of the issue was eventually proven wrong or unsatisfactory. Coders were finding the forum and trickling in by the day with more and more issues, and yet all they really had were mere hunches about what the big picture really was.
Oddly, errors seemed to disappear if transmissions were circulated entirely within the region, and of course if everything was circulated entirely outside things were fine as well; hence the fixes most of the coders came up with required circumventing the region if sender and receiver were both outside, backing up data kept inside outside and vice versa, and similarly making sure data that was sent inside stayed inside. They did this by remotely logging into machines inside, occasionally hacking into their own technology if the login information had changed, and demanding lots of confirmation pings to ensure the remote signals weren't messed up when sent there and back, resending if they had been.
That was largely the solution among the coders that actually patched one through, anyway. A few decided not to bother with remote login and all the issues it posed, and would instead travel there in person to repair things on-site and do some much needed hardware inspections. Not a single one of those had logged back into the forum after said travel yet. Nobody said anything at the time, but after so many days of silence it was starting to become really suspicious. Come to think of it, employees near infected hardware acted kinda strange, too...
Another thing that was quickly realized among the forum's regulars was that the source of whatever weirdness was going on was spreading somehow. Malware was immediately suspected, but nobody could identity any specific file on any computer as malicious, and it was by and large the strangest malware any of them had ever seen if it was in fact malware. It had even earned the nickname BlackMagicVirus on the forum due to it's behavior (though nobody had any confirmation it was in fact a virus).
It was simultaneously the most elusive malware ever owing to how difficult it was to figure out, and the least elusive, owing to how obvious it's symptoms were. It didn't spread nearly as fast as any old virus, more like a slow moving cloud that a quick, elusive file, but where it did hit it seemed unstoppable, completely disregarding any antivirus or other protective ware and making changes to anything it wanted, or so it seemed. It even appeared that two computers didn't have to be in computational contact to be infected simultaneously, just near each other.
Getting into the wackier rumors, some on the site had started to think that all that was needed for BlackMagicVirus to infect was to download enough of any sufficiently large and detailed amount of data from the region, not just data which happened to contain the infected ware. A handful of programmers took it even farther than that: they suspected that BlackMagicVirus could alter electrical signals even if they were completely analogue, and thus not subject to any computing at all. Most rightfully found this idea to be absurd, but the sector that believed in it was gaining traction and for good reason: nothing shy of something so powerful seemed to be enough to explain the things happening. There was an idea to open an analogue radio channel near the infected region, get an antenna and an analogue repeater inside, and an analogue receiver on the other side, and see whether this idea held any water. Many supported the idea of at least testing it, and supposedly a man with username Jordanoraptor had already made plans to try it soon.
Programmers from the infected regions themselves were rather scarce. A hacker with Username NotZelda did show up, said she was from Valley Lake, and proved to be a good source of intel, for a while, but a debacle shortly arose when it was discovered that, whether NotZelda knew it or not, her machine was infected with BlackMagicVirus, and members of the forum saw the signs fast enough to get her account banned before any damage was done from the spread. She was allowed to come back as an anonymous user with a masked IP and route through protective ware, but the stigma of that incident stayed, and was she was obviously less talkative and logged on less frequently after that.
These were the people and the issues Tyler had come to know over the last week, and he reflected on them a little as he took his seat at the desk. Who would've thought such an obscure error source would become so large and unite so many programmers? He'd see the forum grow from 1 to sprawling in no time at all; it honestly felt a little weird to him. But that in no way prepared Tyler for what he was about to see next.
A thread with literally thousands of messages had been opened overnight. The number of users had more than tripled in that time, and arguments were raging as he found them. Shocked to say the least, Tyler had immediately to scroll up and see what it was the had started the fire. It was a new user calling himself Quafflepuff that had made the post; apparently he had found this place as after looking up things related to the incident he posted, read up on what they had found so far, and joined just to post his issue. It read:
O my effing God, do I have an error report for you guys! I work for Twitch, right? Well, while I'm sleeping, some guy from Valley Lake, calls himself CRPGboi, he decides he's gonna Livestream from there using Twitch. Logs in, gets the stream started, so far so good. He gets 2000 or so viewers and a good fraction of that in subscribers in about two hours or so he's playing. No problem, we're Twitch, we're big and built to handle anything, right?
This Boi, though, it turns out he might have the BlackMagicVirus you guys are on about, because it somehow got into the namespace registry through the logins of the folks watching his stream. Somehow. And then it decides while it's in there to completely and utterly destroy the database. Almost EVERY SINGLE USERNAME AND PASSWORD IN OUR PETABYTES OF STORAGE SUDDENLY CHANGES TO SOMETHING ELSE AND ALTERS A LOT OF THE DATA STORED UNDER THAT NAME. It didn't even take long; it was just in, and then suddenly all was different. That was one of only a handful of namespace registries in the world for Twitch, so basically it just deleted the accounts of almost all our users in this part of the world and may as well have replaced them with random new ones. Like, "LilyFlowerChild" would become "LukeTigress" or some random shit like that.
But you know, there were a few users who still actually could get into their accounts and use them right. Guess who? Only the users that had already been infected with BlackMagicVirus.
And as if that's not enough, that one really central server the girl was streaming from? That's infected too, and it's screwing with a lot of other streams and probably infecting them as well, and probably some of our other servers because why not. All the behavior and errors while it was still running match what you guys describe here, but I don't think anyone recognized it at the time. We had to completely pull the plug on that server to keep things from getting worse, and we're cutting our teeth wondering if the other servers have been infected as well.
We're playing Damage Control right now; we've deleted that CRPGboi's account, for one, and are sending what we know of him to other sites and stuff so they know to protect themselves.
So yeah. BlackMagicVirus has probably just singlehandedly killed Twitch in one swoop, with a little help from some idiot in Valley Lake. We're not fully dead yet, but I've started looking for a new job now, cuz I don't think we've got long.
P.S. One more thing: When we tried contacting the guys near the actual hardware to see if they knew anything, none of them were anywhere to be found in our employment anymore. All we found was a single girl nobody remembers hiring, saying our boys had never worked there in the first place. Some way to quit en masse, huh?
