With the advent of the Internet and its rapid technical progress, virtual graveyards have started popping up in the 'Net

I know, right? I've toyed with the idea of a Reboot or Tron rpg - but this injects a whole level of horror and creep and mystery.

Haunted internets?
A 'Dark Web' underneath the 'Deep Web'?
Roving rogue programs in the cracks between the systems?

Yes please.

But there is hope in there too. Light amidst the darkness.

You just have to dig deep enough.

Not all that is lost is dark, it seems. Goodness also has been forgotten, unfinished, amiss. Drifting amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the lost links...

A place of want, of yearning, of fractured dreams and lost hopes. Things that could have been, but never will.

Not all of these places are harmful, mind you.

Heard a story out of Veeky Forums's /scvng/ board. Some user said he was drifting through gravesites and found an old chatroom. Funny thing? It was an RP chat. Users talking like they were from Victorian England. So this user says he bookmarked the location, still goes back every now and then to have a chat.

Now it's not all sunshine and flowers, buddy. Remember that popular scam, the Nigerian prince one? He's still out there somewhere, heard he's gotten a bit more violent as he's got on. And that Heartbleed exploit all those years ago? Got a serious upgrade. Now it really makes your heart bleed...

Stay woke scavver

And what about all those chain emails? Some have grown to almost unfathomable proportions, filling darker corners of the net with their iterating coils, grasping at stray scraps of passing code.

What, you wanted more? Damn, you guys never give up.

Lemme see... Ah, I got it. Alright, remember the USA's anti-underweb initiative? No? That's because they're very good at hiding their mistakes.

Huge undertaking it was, said that the Undead Net was becoming too much of a problem. Place for terrorists and criminals to hide while the heat died down.

So they trained a special division of Netrunners, gave 'em the very best in equipment and defenses. I'm talking decks that would make your head spin. The cost was enormous, but the Government convinced the people it was necessary. To protect their security, they said.

Now, lemme ask you a question: you know why scavvers are so god damned superstitious? It's because the paranoia is what keeps you alive.

So this special unit, called it the "Paladin Forces" on account of the undead, see? Yeah they had a few good runs. Took down a couple of blacksites being used to traffic all kinds of crap.

But they didn't listen to folk like us.

Kept goin too foolhardy and ran headfirst into a...What do the krauts call it? A Datakraken. Good thing for the US, that fucking thing swallowed the whole unit, identity and all.

That's why you've never heard of them

The email graves are the worst.

Sure, you'll find the useful nugget every once and a while but...

Well I got a buddy who been down into those things one too many times. Says he... says he sees 'em, y'know?

No, no. I mean like he can see the emails in his head when he closes his eyes. Used to be once in a while in his sleep. Next thing you know he's been talking about forwarding his grand kids some cartoon or something.

Says he's gotta be with 'em.

His emails, not the kids.

Haven't heard from him in while, actually.

This is cool shit, user - it combines imagination, gaming, and computrons, with a heaping helping of storytelling.
The creative wheels are spinning, user...

This stuff is reminding me of that old Server Crash fluff I read about...I like it.

It's what happens when I'm stuck at work, user. It helps me pass the time. I'm really digging the whole urban myth vibe the stories set up

>This has created a new commerical boom.
>For all the death inside of it, the internet had become its own living place, a veritable Terra incognita for VR explorers
>companies hired thousands to carve out whole sites and severs so that they could settle parts of the internet as tourist spots, eager to view the living deadta
>thousands of employees still regularly risk their lives charting the virtual continent.

Catfishing?

Fucking hell, scavver. You ask about the weirdest shit.

Yeah, I got a few stories about it.

Well, it was a pretty popular thing to do back in the day. Go online and pretend to be some cute girl, flirt with a lonely guy on the web. Some of the albums of what happened are actually kinda funny. In a sad way.

But what happens when you abandon the profile. Joke's over! Time to take a few screencaps and have a quick laugh with your friends, right? Well for you, maybe. But that's a person you just made! A person with only one fuckin' purpose: be cute and flirt. Sometimes they get self-aware, fuck off to wherever those kinds of programs go.

Most of the time they just keep on. There's a general thread somewhere on /scvng/ dedicated to finding them. Call it "Dogfishing" I think. Find the profiles, and delete 'em. Or enlighten 'em.

Funny thing is, you gotta pretend to be a lonely guy on the internet to do it. Flipped tables and all.

They sometimes communicate with the 'meat' world; but in unexpected ways. Power surges and brownouts are the most common manifestation of their 'voice'; but ghostly echoes of dead conversations can be heard beneath the static of empty channels. And insistent after-images as screens power down; hypnagogic transfigurations of script and pictures that haunt the mind for hours.

Ah, you heard the voices too?

Yeah, lotta people think that what happens in the net stays in the net.

Idiots, I'll say.

Any fuckin' scavver worth his salt knows that ghosts are real.

No, jackass, I don't mean that Ghosthunters is right.

Go ahead, turn off your lights. Turn off your phone. Turn off you fan, your lights, everything connected to the grid.

And listen.

You'll hear them. Lost code, abandoned lives, dropped calls. They'll speak to you. You might even see 'em, images on the screen. Saw part of a cam show on my gram's TV once.

Next time you do it, ask a question. I hear tell you can get an answer if you ask politely, heh.

>dropped calls
fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, this shit is bigger than i realized...

>part of a cam show on my gram's TV
Are you me?

He is - from 2003!!!!!

Bigger than we could know. Everything's connected to the Net nowadays. And everything has an impact.

I think the brainy folks call it Source, some kinda whatchacallit generated from every call, every search, every click.

It never goes away

Maybe?

Got a buddy tells me, "I've got all kindsa social media accounts!" Well y'know what I was just saying about that Source shit? Yeah.

See, from what we found there's at least 3 Tom Smith's out there, fully aware and each convinced that they're the real one. One even had a wife in VR.

Thing is, how am I supposed to know that my pal is the real one?

I might be you, and you might be me.

>2003 called, they want their families back

>Every meat person has mutliple online accounts and personas.
>They all think they are real. They all think they are YOU.
>They think YOU have stolen their lives and imprisoned them.

>They want out.

The lost spam bots...
They always got to me,

working their way through thousands of forgotten ICQ accounts. Just trying to find love, or sex or something, I dunno companionship I guess.

Buddy of mine said he had a friend once.

Great guy they used to go digging the deadweb together all the time.
This guy always took point, always bought snacks. The perfect friend to have in a place like that.

Then one day My buddy hears about a vulnerability that opened up in some Lost Hotmail accounts. small window of opportunity, easy money.

He heads in there, it's a total milk run, when he gets back his friend is waiting for him.
The guy starts freaking out about him going off on his own.

Like totally losing it....

Then he starts repeating himself...

Then he starts asking my buddy if he'd like to see horny girls in his area...

Now my buddy works alone.

What about the search engines? What happened to them?

I'd writefag but I'm no good off the cuff

You ever tap into a search engine?

I mean one of the dead ones, like Ask Jeeves.

Put your mouth under a faucet and run the water. Fills up pretty quick right? These 'faucets' just sit there and run all day all fucking night spitting out information.

Now put your mouth under a faucet and pretend that the faucet won't let go. Information just streaming out of it, trying to find somewhere to go. Human mind can only handle so much input.

Those things catch you unaware and it's gonna be a long time before someone can pull you out.

always bring a proxy with you when you're fucking around with those things.

Glad to see some other writefagging going on

Feel like adding something in

Actually, sometimes they're pretty useful.

You got a sieve program? Set down a safe ways away from them and run that baby, and you might fine something neat.

See, the Sieve'll load a buffer of searches and you can pick through them at you leisure. I know a guy who once found a link to a Gravesite that people thought never existed; made all kinds of money.

I like to think that not everything will drive you crazy or kill you outright

Roight, you drifters know about the usual Gravesite searches go, but at the mention of old Search Engines, it caught my interest.

You guys know about Creds right?

That shits still digital, like most everything now.

Well there's quite a bit of precursor eh... Forms of Credits though.

Digital forms of dollars and what not.

But more than just that, old bank accounts, giftcards, ehh... A Paypal is a good place to look for despite them still doing their same thing, it's just they're old stores of money lying around in the nooks and crannies of Sites waiting to be transferred, and oh god, I'm lucky as hell if I ever manage to dig up Bitcoins.

The money doesn't just disappear, it can't.

It's got a trail.

But gods it's damn terrifying finding something you sometimes feel like is too good to be true.

Like I'm walking into the mouth of an Angler fish and I'm just waiting to be swallowed whole. Yeah it's just creds, like any other cred I have on my Bank Account, but it's odd. I mentioned Angler Fish but at times, when I find some old form of currency like Bitcoin and convert it, I don't know, but it's like it's happy. These creds came form somewhere, from someone, to someone FOR something. They're just lines of code but time just, I just feel like it does shit to it, despite it converting like any other credit out there.

I don't know, I am just a dirty Scavenger but fuck me if every part of my body isn't screaming at me to unplug seconds before I'm about to transfer, which is completely at odds at that feeling of warmth I get when I finally pull that wallet from the sidebar and clean it out at home.

What would the character classes be in this setting?

No such thing as a milk run, chummer.

Maybe different types of hacking and VR related internet interactions?

>Brute Forcers? (name sucks shit, but is more based on the concept of brute forcing something password protected)
>Mostly use shittons of processing power pin pointed at the heart of a Gravesite's weakest points and the weaknesses of it's denizens. This also lets it handle any errors before a complete stack overflow (Death)
>Your basic tank/fighter. In "Combat" if there's that, they're the dps and tank rolled into one, but in the tactical aspect of combat, because hacking isn't all about trying the same thing over and again, they expose weaknesses and openings for their allies to exploid

>Lurkers
>The unseen, unheard and anonymous users of Proxies and redirects. A good Lurker goes unnoticed. The Best weren't even there. Instead of going through a wall, a Lurker will keep walking until there is no wall left
>Definitely more of a stealth/heals class. They are the Trojan worms of classes. They will run rings around a firewall until it's stretched so far out that it breaks, they will then phase through the broken code, rebuild things as they like and when everything is cycling back up, hey presto, welcome Admin

>The cmd's
>Hacking made art. Their methods are more Rube Goldberg machines than the fine, dexterous manipulation of code, each triggering the pop of a lock which in sequence, ultimately opens the door
>Hardcore control, definitely magic/debuff. The thousand little cuts class. They will stack debuff upon debuff upon debuff, controlling the situation to their absolute advantage, exploiting a line in the RAM to access code stored from the DRM, so they can figure out how to... Basically, if A=B and B=C and C=D, and D=E, then when you go down the line from A to E, You can use A as you would E because all the debuffs you applied and use this to finish encounters

just throwing shit out there

Listen, all I'm saying is you gotta stay away from the older boards.

The big ones lasted a lot longer, so they developed a bit more... Maturity? They've got culture of a sort you see.

The small ones never got that far, so they latch onto the most intricate data and form a pattern with it. Kinda like a maze. Serious pay-data in those things, you're not digging up old, but something new: Never been seen before.

But shit goes spy games fast. Some old avatar'll spout some popular snippet from thirty years ago and wait for you to laugh.

You'll find a circle of handles worshiping some old corrupt video or picture, and you don't know what the by-phrase was.

Sooner or later, you've got a short trail of em stalking you. They seem curious, but they're not. They're testing you.

On the larger boards, you can get by with some general memes, but these guys developed in a smaller, incestuous culture.

When they start following, it's time to scrub and toon, because eventually one of them is going to confront you. They're going to say something and you won't know the response.

What? Yea.. Like the grenade servers; Something about stairs? But you don't know this one.

Like the flip of a switch, you're an outsider, and if you were trying to get to the jackpot, you're also surrounded.

I got lucky on the final dive I did; It was an old Usenet domain. The Avatars all started chanting "September" and closed ranks between me and the data. Something in the loop flipped my sleep cycle for a few weeks, but there was no permanent damage. Scared the shit out of me.

Then I heard about LJ; Was diving some old guild forum when he triggered them. Fucked up something and locked him in his head. He spent the next week following his daily routine until the food ran out, he'd pour no cereal into a bowl of no milk..

You gotta be careful about large groups of avatars; they can really easily enforce a mental pattern, and then it just gets stronger and stronger.

Yeah, the dead search engines are dangerous shit. Think "garden left to its own devices for ten years", only this garden didn't just have pansies and daffodils.

Hell, even the live engines are risky. You never know whether that link that wasn't there yesterday is something new, or something really old. If it's the latter, just clicking it could turn your meatbrain into so much pink sludge in your head.

Of course people are still putting new stuff up. You don't seriously think that the realspace governmental mandates on uploads actually hold any water, do you? The way I heard it, those mandates are routinely ignored by the governments that put them in place, because that's the best way they have of controlling their populations: use "certified safe and compliant" sites, and ensure that nothing you don't want the proles seeing gets on there.

Meh.

Noice.