The cloud diffused sun shone on the barren strip of beach below. The waves were low, and the tide was lowering, slowly and quietly receding, to return the sandy land back to the shore. The woods grown behind the beach were close to the water, leaving only a good 50 meters of true shore that stretched on for miles. Other than the sound of the few Seagulls that gilded and squawked far down the beach, the atmosphere was simply peaceful.
Resting somewhere down the shore, right between the woods and the water, were two beach chairs, two towels, and two bags, freshly set to stay the next couple hours. Fittingly, two brothers could be seen swimming 30 meters out in the water, splashing around and throwing a beach ball to each other, without a care in the world.
After some time, the two decided to race each other to the shore, only to tie and walk back together.
One of the brothers was a semi heavy adult, with a goatee, well kept hair and a few tattoos running up the right side of torso.
The other brother was semi skinny, with no beard but more of a full haircut, and semi muscular arms that had been earned long ago but not improved upon for quite a while.
The bigger brother strided out of the ocean and onto the shore, instinctually grabbing his towel and reaching in his bag for his phone. He turned it on and checked for any new messages, only to stare at the screen for another second and realize there were none. Swiftly unlocking it and opening up his browser, he searched up the guy his brother told him about in the water to see what he was like. The page buffered, and to his surprise, kept buffering. After 5 or so seconds, he checked that his unlimited mobile data was turned on and in range, and sure enough, it was.
“Why won’t this damn page load?” He said to himself, and not a second later, the screen read “Connection timed out”. He slept his phone, and put it back in his bag.
He turned around to where he expected his brother to be, only to stare at the miles of empty beach next to him. He whipped around to look back at the shore, and to his shock, his brother hadn’t walked out the water with him.
His brother stood dead still with the water to his waist, with a look of almost horror on his face, staring into space at the woods in front of him.
Terrified, the bigger brother sharply turned around to see what was in the woods he was staring at.
But there was nothing in the woods.
Looking around, he saw nothing around them was out of place, other than his frozen brother.
“Christiano?” He called out, “...Are you ok?”
But his brother didn’t answer.
Dropping his towel, he jogged into the water.
*I wonder what I should get for dinner tonight*, Ian thought to himself.
It was still 1 in the afternoon, and Ian still had 4 or so hours of work to do. But he was fresh out of talking points to talk with his neighbor Seishou about, so he put his mind back to work programming the company’s new software.
After some time, He found himself scratching his head while scrolling up and down his code, unable to find what exactly the problem was. He opened up a new tab and typed in the error message, which he had gotten in the past, but forgotten what the solution was. While the page loaded, he checked over his code one last time, just to make sure he didn’t skip over anything, but it all checked out.
He tabbed back to the loading search page and waited for it to load.
And kept waiting.
After another twenty seconds, he moved his mouse to the wi-fi option to see if he was still connected to the group’s ethernet router, and sure enough, the ethernet connection symbol was still there.
The page continued to load.
Ian stood up from his chair and craned his neck around the back of the computer to see if the ethernet cable was plugged into the computer, and once again, it was.
“Hey Seishou, are you getting internet?” Ian turned his head back to ask.
“Internet? Yeah, I should be,” Seishou answered.
He opened up his browser to show the documentation he was referencing.
“See? I just loaded this like a minute ago,” Seishou explained.
He refreshed the page to prove his point, but after another ten seconds, it became stuck loading just like Ian’s page.
“Wait - no - I was still using that, crap,” Seishou panicked.
Confused, yet determined, Ian marched out of his desk and down the main router their section had. From a distance, he could see two other people looking around it too to see if something was wrong.
*Oh, ok, looks like someone must have pulled a plug*, Ian realized.
But while he kept walking, doubts ran through his head. *If it’s a simple plug pull, why haven’t they plugged it back in yet? And wouldn’t my computer say it was disconnected from the ethernet if it was unplugged?*
Ian walked past the wall of dividers and glanced to see the long hallway between all the sections, only to notice that employees in different sections were walking to their routers with confused faces too.
*Oh no,* Ian quickly comprehended.
It was only enough time until the speaker system made the chime that an announcement was going to be played, and everyone looked up to listen to it, intently.
Uzal looked over the spreadsheet her secretary emailed her with a look of annoyance.
*I don’t wanna do this,* She said to herself, *hmmm…*
She speedily pulled out a wireboard from behind the monitor and dramatically set it next to the keyboard on her desk. Pulling out a hanging wire from the shelf above her desk, she pulled it down and carefully plugged it into the wireboard contraption.
Quickly, she went to open the IDE, but she hesitated.
*Maybe I shouldn’t,* Her conscious came to , *Who knows, there might be some interesting entries in there.*
Uzal slowly pushed the wireboard aside and put her mind on the financial spreadsheet, checking over the data.
*Errrrr Beep Beep Beep Beep!*
Uzal stopped in her thought, confused and concerned. Usually, that beeping would come from her phone desk to her right, but this beeping was coming from the machine on the wall to her far left.
The Emergency Integrity Notification Machine.
This machine monitored all the power and communication coming into the Septance Building, and would notify the CEO, Uzal Delilah, if anything was compromised.
She steadily rose from her chair and creeped over to it to see which notification was going off.
Next to the red flashing light read “Last Ping Not Received (>2000ms)”
Uzal stayed standing with a wrinkle in her brow, waiting to see if any of the other dots would flash up, but none did.
Usually, the dot “Internet Connection Severed” would flash with it, which would mean a powerline was cut, or the internet was somehow turned off in the city’s grid. But that wasn’t the case. The internet to the building wasn’t cut, it was just, slow.
*That doesn’t make the situation any better though,* Uzal thought.
*Beep Beep Beep Beep!*, the company phone on her desk rang.
Uzal faced the phone, snapping out of her trance, and paced over to it to answer the call, which she saw, was from the assistant CEO.
*Beeeep!* “Uzal, the building’s internet’s been compromised,” He alerted her.
“Not quite, someone’s just using a lag switch on the whole building,” She casually informed him.
“Wait, really?”
“Yep, the EIN says we’re still holding a connection. Alert Security so we can get to the bottom of this.”
“On it,” He confirmed.
Uzal pondered, thinking what else she could do about this odd scenario, except to notify the outside world.
She grabbed for her phone to text Korobase about Septance’s problem, but just as she flipped it over, a text notification popped up, from Takumi Korobase.
“From, Takumi: HELP OUR INTERNET’S DOWN.”
*Oh no*
Uzal immediately set down her phone and paged Clarion on the company phone.
“Clarion, Clarion!!” She called.
In the far back of the room, the elevator door chimed as it opened, and quick pacing could be heard.
Uzal turned around and expectantly saw Clarion walking toward her.
“Uza-,” Clarion started.
“-Clarion, what do the stats and cameras show for ours and Korobase’s electrical grids?” Uzal interrupted.
“Uzal, my connection timed out too,” Clarion finished.
“What? But you have satellite connecti-”
The two took a tense moment of silence, registering the gravity of the situation.
Uzal then jumped to the company phone and paged the security head.
“Put the building on lockdown immediately, I’m going to make an announcement to everyone in the next couple seconds.”
*Dingg dinggggg*
Out of the corner of his eye, Ian spotted a security guard enter the room through one main staircases.
“Attention Septance Building,” Uzal Delilah, the CEO, announced over the loudspeaker, “We are going to hold a lockdown. As far as we know, internet connection for at least all of Japan has slowed down to the point of unusability. No one is allowed to enter or leave the building until we have a better understanding of this threat, thank you.”
*Dingg dinggggg*
A moment of silence after the announcement ended, followed a rise in the volume of murmur and worry amongst everyone.
“AND STAY CALM!” One of the security guards near the center of the room shouted, which plateaued the noise to an acceptable level.
Ian took a steady first step, and then accelerated into a speed-walk back to his desk.
Seishou was also standing up, looking around at the room and at the phone in his off hand.
“Holy crap,” Ian muttered as he reached his desk, pulling his chair out and dropping down into it.
“Do you really think it’s a threat?” Seishou asked.
“I don’t know, I can’t imagine something like that on a nice May day like today.”
“Best case scenario, someone pulled a rather important plug somewhere. Worst case scenario, someone destroyed a lot of web servers all at once or…”
“Well, they couldn’t have destroyed ALL the web servers in the world, that would include ours, and Septance is known for having very good security.”
“Well the other possibility is just as unlikely.”
“What would that be?”
“Someone’s using up the entire bandwidth of the internet.”
“Christiano!” He called out to his brother, splashing around by fastly wading into the water.
Christiano turned his head only a few degrees as his brother came up to him and put his hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eyes.
“Christiano, what’s wrong?” He asked.
“It’s down,” Christiano softly stated.
“What? What’s down?”
“The entire internet.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“My hearing implant. I changed it to be able to listen to my web servers internet frequencies and translate them to tones so I can hear my company's web traffic. But it all just flatlined. I thought it was going to just be for a second, but there’s been barely any sound for around a minute now. I heard you say your page didn’t load, and you use a different service provider than I do, which all but confirmed my suspicion.”
“The whole internet is down??”
“Indefinitely, yes.”
“Well, how?”
“I…don’t know. But if I were to guess, someone’s probably spamming requests to millions of sites all at once, but…”
“Millions?? Holy crap, man.”
“...But, no. It doesn’t make sense why someone would do this, unless this is an accident caused by something else…”
Christiano suddenly started walking toward the shore, almost dragging his brother along with him.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting to the bottom of this.”