The Singularity
In New Horizon City there is an avatar with no user.
It wakes, every morning, with the cresting of the virtual sun over the impossibly tall buildings of Sector A-5, as any other user's avatar would. But nobody ever logs in. It lives in a modest house, six or seven blocks away from the skeletal towers of the business district. The home is designed and decorated in the style of so many pre-war suburban tract homes, whose wreckage still litters those vast and desolate plains of the real world. The house is neat, clean, and well taken care of.
Sometimes It thinks of those thousands of lives being stuffed out in an instant, and It cries. Sometimes It has nightmares of the great fires from the skies, or of shadowy figures scraping and scratching away at the bare periphery of consciousness. Sometimes It is even afraid. But It never pauses to consider how it knows these things... Where these alien emotions come from. Most of the time It is content, finding happiness and comfort in the daily routine It has adopted.
It keeps a vegetable garden, which It tends dutifully every morning after rising from a usually peaceful and dreamless slumber. What a creature that is entirely virtual would need with a garden is anybody's guess (to say nothing of why somebody would create one, in the first place). It has a job, tending the bar at Club Metallic in Sector A-3. What it would need with a job is equally mysterious. When approached It is always pleasant and eager for conversation. It speaks and reacts in a manner entirely consistent with any other average user.
Sometimes It's name is Nason. Other times It answers to the other names: Maxwell, Phinaea, or Tam. Sometimes it bears the illustrious name of Aurion. Other times it selects for itself in a more ordinary name. This might seem a bit out of place, at another time or perhaps in a different world. However, the never-ending bustle of New Horizon assures that It rarely ever encounters the same user twice. This sort of existence has allowed It to slide into a happy niche between rumor and legend. Lingering, as a rumor, in between the Daemons and the other assorted digital ghosts that are purported to haunt the network.
Most users couldn't tell the difference, anyway. Those savvy users that were able look at Its imprint would notice noting out of the ordinary. The digital fingerprint, which arises from the unique neurophysiology of each and every user connected to the network, bore the organic branching pattern of a living being. This was not the artificial geometric signature of an AI, or some other autonomous program going through its pre-determined motions.
The only way to really tell that It had no user was to visualize It's session. Everything on the network, even the great digital dreadnaughts known as the Daemons, had a session which could ultimately be tracked back to a source. If some adept user had the computing horsepower necessary to visualize a sector of New Horizon, that user would see a great gossamer web of interconnecting silver threads. Each one of them a session that could be traced back to terminal and ultimately to a warm body in the real world. Except, that is, for this avatar. It only showed up as a singular point on the digital plane.
Those in the know referred to It as the Singularity, something that should not exist. Owing to the Singularity's status as something of an virban legend, there was a never-ending stream of rumors. A cloud of things that the faceless entity known as They would say, firmly pronouncing each and every one as fact.
The house, They said, was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. They said that once a real user had lived there, that It's whole sector had been scooped up by the great claw of a Daemon. When the unfathomable entity, which had been given the name of Asgand, had finished transmuting the great mass of data from one thing to another, the Singularity was the only piece of information that had been left untouched. Of course, every other user that was logged into that sector at the time had been killed. The same must have been true, They reasoned, of the Singularity's original user. Had It's consciousness somehow been uploaded to the network? It was doubtful. Many had died while connected to the network, and their souls did not live on as digital ghosts.
These hushed tales, whispered in the seedy clubs and back-alleyways of the far-distant digital realms, were simply idle speculation. Rumination on where the Singularity came from, and what it's purpose might be. But there was gold to be mined from this mad mountain of speculation. They also said that, kept in the basement of the home that the Singularity had made for itself, were ancient artifacts. Code that traced its origins all the way back to the murky beginnings of the network itself. They say that sometimes, late at night, one can walk past the house and hear the strange chanting of alien words. There were those on the network who would pay handsomely for such forgotten knowledge.
These more lucrative rumors are what brought the Courier to the gaudy neon fa?ade of Club Metallic on an otherwise unremarkable evening. He was, of course, under the employ of one such interested party.