>>6840922
You know, the utter ludicrousness of the core concepts of this setting always sort of turned me off of it.

We had an easy time on page one. Nothing out of the ordinary for the board. I had damn good bolter.exe file at my side was firewalls coded by only the best. My prober was a strange one. We called him Jonas. Somewhere along the way he picked up an Imperial Pysker skin file and was now happily modded into it.

We'd been sent into to find a few porn Files that might still be hidden on a thread from a few cycles ago someone had 'misplaced' after a terrible accident with a buddy of his. why the fuck they were out in /rs/ was beyond me. Regardless, it was a paying job and I was strapped for cash.

So down the rabbit hole we went. Page hopping, Jonas leading like the faithful hound he was. By page eight the code was getting funky. I could hear him rambling about the 'death of threads' being nearby. I should have payed closer attention. We found the cache with little trouble. It was all pretty vanilla stuff but hey, porn is porn.

>>6841003
you must love tron then.

(A great and terrible voice cries out insatiably from the void: MOAR!)

>>6841066

Make that two.

Files neatly compressed we set on our way back up from the bottom of the Rabbit hole. It was page five when we hit trouble.

Janus stopped dead in his tracks looking about like he'd seen a ghost. shaking he began babbling off a code line I'd never heard him use. With a scream of RUN! the whole page lit up. The twisted landscape making my gut wrench this way and that.

That was when we saw it. Hiding amongst the ruins of an .txt file. It was nothing more than a collection of code barely held together by shoddy programming. It looked like a ragged excuse for a person. At least, most of it. Its hands simply ended in swirling code an most of its lower body was just a mess of tangled code line that writhed about. In one 'hand' it clung to a ratty mop.jpg and stared at us with eyes that were little more than gaping holes carved into a face.

"Not relevant..."It gurgled as it lurched forward. Before I had time to react(damn low bandwidth) It was on us. Janus beat it off the best he could tearing at the damn things code with his bare hands even as the skin on them peeled away showing line beneath.

I got my trusty .exe To bear as best I could trying to not hit Janus in the process. With a thunderous DAKKA. I took off an arm code streaming as it gurgled out more nonsense.

Janus pulled back with that. His hands were raw code and it looked like those 'legs' had tore up his torso something nasty. The thing scurried away faster than I thought it should have been able. Somehow holding together even as I let off a few more shots managing to ping it square in the back. spreading its code across that blasted twisted heath of a board.

Needless to say we got the hell of there. We landed in /tg/ with a little incident and gave the ruddy bastard his porn files. Telling him next time he goes diving In /rs/ to stay put and let the cybers have their way with him.(after getting payed of course)

Janus shortly after left town with a different crew. I got word back from him though about how he had encountered something like the thing we had fought in /rs/ as far out as the area around bay12...the implication was less than thrilling.

A few cycles later I had my fun with the as I would later come to know it 'Janiter'.

I was at an outpost doing some er....recon work. We shall say for a couple of close friends of a company I work with. I was working along side a few good hackers and a Green boy Called L33m@ster.

Not a bad kid, just not bright. He thought he was the bees knees(I watch little bit too much of the old time stuff I'm starting to think) though honestly he was a poor shot and was still using standard issue knigh/tg/uy equips. standard patter las.exe and carapace.firewalls. Nothing great but solid all the same.

We had a simple job. Go check out an old link that might have a stable gate. It was out in the wild net of course. A bitch that was just to get there. I've never had to deal with so many stealth programs just to get around a few pages.

We got lucky. the programs held out and we found the link without trouble. It was to an old fort from what we could ascertain. The hackers were wary though, so was I. Naturally this left greeny L33tm@ster on point.

+1 internet to you sir, i liked it. good writing :) neat concept too

He went in and came running back out with a look of horror on his face. Screaming about some sort of cyber program that was chasing him down after a couple of pages. An expected thing really. Cybers were in every goddamn space we had not secured. I prepped my trusty .exe and got ready to purge the place.

The hackers gave me pause. One of them, an old salt like me was quaking like a leaf saying that the scans greeny brought back were all wrong. That it was no cyber on the other side...we didn't get a chance to decide one or the other what it was, green boy forgot one of the cardinal rules and had not sealed the link.

Bursting out of the link came the cyber-thing I had seen in /rs/. It was screaming like mad rambling about god knows what. The hackers started rambling off code and Greeny pissed himself in the first ten seconds. I decided to take a more immediate approach.

Three rounds of solid code reactive shells slowed it down long enough for the hackers to get a vault program on the fucker.

It was not the original recon target but it got enough attention. We packed it up shortly after and had it shipped to Bay12 for study. Figured they would love a chance at the thing for study and besides they payed the highest.

A few ten cycles later I heard Greeny there had gotten the axe during a /b/raid, I was not all that shocked honestly, I was bothered when I heard janus almost bit though. A thread had come down on him 404ing way to early....

>>6841491
just working off of servercrash is all

bump

For some reason, this has made me imagine pages 0-10 as the 9 levels of Death in the Old Kingdom books.

>>6843834
Necroposters delve into the darkness beyond the edges of the boards, bringing back That Which Should Not Bump.

>>6843902
Then is >>6843790 some sort of an evil creature and this thread something absolutely terrifying?

I'm happy to see Server Crash is still alive and kicking, even if nobody really uses it for playan.

>>6844027
Yes.

I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!
http://zip.4chan.org/tg/11.html
neeheheheheheeeeeeeeeeeeeh!!!!!!!!

>>6844932
>http://zip.4chan.org/tg/11.html
>11.html
SQUAD FUCKING BROKEN

>>6844932

IA IA MOOT FTHAGN

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh moot 4chan wgah'nagl fhtagn

>>6844959
I screamed.

Also good story.

>>6844932
Where are their images? God, they're just talking amongst themselves like it's nothing, but something took their images.
I ain't never...

>>6845522
IT'S LIKE TALKING TO THE FACELESS!

Shit, that thread reminds me of the bit in Eternal Sunshine where he ventures back into old memories.

I fear no Janitor.

After being to /d/ I came back changed...

So now I have no fears.

Holy fuck...I wrote this last night and its still here?

so, should I make this a more regular thing?

>>6846687
Your writing is substandard. If you decide to post again, please proofread and have someone else go over it as well.

>>6846717
sorry I its been awhile since I've done something like this and it was more a of spur of the moment type deal. Next time it will be more carefully proofread.

>>6846753
Your writing may be of mediocre nature, but I did like the story itself.

>>6846753
It's nice to see some love for Server Crash, but like Anon said, some proofreading would be lovely.

>>6846931
will do in the future. Like I said my muse sorta hit me with a hammer last night and I tend to have limited runtime with internet access.

>>6846971
what the hell?

We were out on the Fringe, hopping across a chain of half-populated IRC servers when the netsplit hit. It happened without warning - we'd only just arrived at our latest mark, ripping through the meagre firewall the worthless bastards had installed in nanoseconds. Their bot was on us quickly, I'll give 'em that, but Joker barely had to tap it with his .exe (a custom jobbie) before it dissolved. We cornered 'em in their tiny little fort, feet crunching on old, broken hyperlinks and outdated topics - there wasn't a single Op among 'em, something I thanked Moot for at the time. Jones drilled 'em for data, porn, anything we could sell, and managed to get a few clips out of 'em - not much, but better than nothing.

Then it hit. Everything... froze, went pale, like. Then it started cracking, great gleaming fissures - I couldn' for the life o'me tell ya what they looked like, but by Moot I'll never forget the noise. It was like white noise from Moot's media player, a horrible, tearing howl that shook us fit to our bones.

I could hear Claude howling over the terrible noise - "NEETTSPLIIIIIITTT!". One by one, people started vanishing - just disappearing into the cracks, dissolving into smoke. Jones, too - Claud and half the poor bastards in the channel stayed, though, frozen dead solid. Next thing, I musta taken a hit or somethin' 'cause I woke up later, and the storm was over.

I've been watching the ones who're left for days. They haven't said anythin', haven't even moved. Nothing will open - I can't even hit Google. Trying to touch the others is so hard, so pointless - they just flicker past, as insubstantial as a broken link on a sea of degraded HTML. They can't hear me. They can't see me. It's so cold, here. So cold. I tried to disconnect - been trying once a second for damn near ten minutes. The fucker keeps tellin' me there's nothin' to disconnect from.

It's so cold.

The bots have discovered this thread. They key to sentience is within their terrible grasp.

>>6847079
wtf is a netsplit

Netsplit is when some people get kicked off IRC because the servers are under too heavy a load. Or something.

>>6847129
no idea, its not me writing that.

>>6847129
>>6847136
I might be full of shit, but I recall reading that IRC networks operate on nodes. A netsplit is when a node is split due to a network burp or something and there ends up being two channels with the same name, one of which ends up dying or something. My IRC-fu is weak.

WE touched down At Gitpfort without much incident. It was a modest little for these days. During the fall it took a hell of a hit by the cybers but, thanks to help from Wiki and the chans we pulled it out of the fire. Of course, we took advantage.
It was now, divided up evenly between the two sides, Wikis holding the media and off topic boards while we held the gaming sections naturally. It was an uneasy truce at best. Here and there we would have a few outbreaks of fighting, some young gangbanger trying to stake his claim in the web.
I’d gotten called in for a job searching one of the older portions of the site. Gitp had one of the largest most stable archives in this sector. It was an ancient place filled with god knows what. And I was told I had to dive into it. I thought it was just another walk in the park so to speak.
Moot, I was sorely mistaken….

>>6847176
Seriously, is a little proofreading too much to ask?

>>6847176
I'm sorry, I did I thought I had it cleaned up better than it is. My apologies.

I'm loving this. Any write of up the setting anywhere?

age.exe

>>6847129
In computer networking, specifically Internet Relay Chat (IRC), netsplit is a term used to describe the disconnection of a given node from the previously established network or between two nodes. As an IRC network is an undirected acyclic graph, a split between any two nodes splits the entire network into two pieces.

Is it pathetic that the /b/arbarian story about WHEN I WAS actually moved me a bit inside?

>>6847413
Not really, It was very well written. It had a little twinge of emotion to it.

Bump.

A little bump to point out the sup/tg/ archive for this page lacks a Server Crash tag.

I wish I had time to write more Server Crash. I miss doing it.

>>6847362
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Server_Crash
Has a link to the fluff article and the archived threads.

>>6848432
and I'm back. Had to BS a presentation and deal with some other crap.

Whoops! I really should cool it with my "ZOMG DIS AUSSUM MUST ARCHIVE LIKE NOW!" attitude. I really thought this was a DH run.

But it was engrossing & hilarious as hell - given recent events. Thanks OP.

Thank you whoever for the corrective "Server_Crash" link & rock on!

The local hackers had a hyperlink set up for us by the next cycle. It was a small one, ringed in by firewalls that were triple strength and password protected. With little formality we set out into the depths of the archive. We landed somewhere in the hundreds. Page after page of useless junk, it was a veritable maze of pages and mini links. If you have ever dived in an archive you know this is how it often goes, ones gotta keep on their toes otherwise they might get lost in the insides of one for several decades.
We had to find some old .txt files. Some sort of directory from Moot knows when. We were working our way down into the very depths of the archive for this. That was a given fact; something so old is never near the surface. After all, that would be too Moot damned easy.

>>6849764
So, you gonna continue this or what?

>>6850296
I will I've got a game night to playetest some stuff with a buddy of mine but I'll add to it what I can when I can.

It was easy going I had upgraded my old body into a newly coded skin. It was a bit buffer than what I was used to and allowed me to heft about a nasty .exe file some Cracker had cooked up. Styled like a crazy heavy machinegun. A script heavy thing it lowered my bandwidth like hell but I was far from worried. This could take out most of the nasties running around in a place like here.
Half a cycle later we found the thread we were looking for. An ancient decrepit place from the dark days of the net, a place ancient and forgotten left to its own business, slowly breaking down into bits of code and script errors. It was a creepy place. My team was used to it though. We’d dived this site before of course. Gitpfort was pretty much left in one piece because of this archive. It was a mine of data no one was entirely sure how far it went down anymore. Most of the mods had long ago forgotten such things and no one was wholly sure who had modded this section anyways.
So, down we went, deeper and deeper searching for buried treasure like this thread, looking for the things of a bygone era. I was first in, followed up by our surfer Nick42 a decent guy and a damn good surfer at that. He could find his way through a link maze like no one else could. He had found this thread actually. Traced it from the start point following old queries and search histories he’d picked up while we were up top. Behind him, a local hacker working for our employers, a strange feller that twitched at the mention of cybers and seemed a little bit wet behind the ears still.
The thread was trashed. Most of its data was already half eroded, apart in its slow march down into the depths of the archive. The hacker somehow got in front of us and before I knew it was pulling apart the code like a kid at Christmas. In short order he was cradling some sort of compressed file in his hands looking at it like it was a gig of porn.

OMG NOT /TG/ MATERIAL
GO BACK TO /B/ YOU WRITEFAGGOTS.
BESIDES, FURRY WRITING IS THE BEST WRITING EVER.
YOU SUCK AND ARE DUMB. I MEAN, WRITING SHITTY STUFF ALL THE TIME, PSH.
YOU'RE ALL DUMBFAGGOTS AND I'M GONNA BAN YOU.
I REPEAT, NO STUPID SHIT ALLOWED HERE! IT'S NOT /TG/ MATERIAL!
GO BACK TO /B/, YOU NIGGER

>>6850791
first off. You can't ban a damn thing you're not a mod secondly, quit being a bitch. If you are the janitor you've been doing a shitty job son and we are non too pleased with you.

>>6850834
It's a parody.

A bad one, but still.

“Trouble on the next thread!” Nick42 bleated out as he drew his firewalls. “Getting a big ping; Something –“
He was cut off as something smashed through the thread taking most of Nick42 with it. I swore as I watched a swirling mass of red and black rip my right hand man to fucking shreds. It had torn his firewall apart in seconds. I had my Antivirus and firewalls out as fast as I could, firing blind into the central mass.
The best I did was drive it off the corrupted remains of Nick…Swearing I loaded a secondary program even as the hacker sat there stammering out code as best he could. Mirco-seconds ticked by as we watched it finish its work on Nick42 tearing him down and making more of the swarm. I’d seen this before, a swarm virus, damn animals.
The second program thankfully booted and I gave it the old one two. With a hefty KERCHUNK I lobbed out a compressed ripper program. An antivirus designed from something like the swarm program we were facing. Coded to be a nasty little thing the ripper program set to work tearing at the swarm with a dedication most crackers would envy.
It was at this point things started going downhill. Somewhere from inside the swarm something screamed out at us. Howled anguish cries as if it was being torn apart. I’ve seen my fair share of Viruses and till then never thought that it was possible for them to feel any pain.