It's the Googleplex, and Tim Richards is pulling a late shift, just about everyone except janitorial have headed home. He's got two hours of paid creative time to burn so he's idly fiddling around with the unfathomable ocean of data stored in the acreage of servers deep under his feet.

Tapping in queries and algorithms, snippets of scripts sent whirling into the technoaether to dance for a while before dissipating, he randomly tries something he hadn't thought of before.

Why not, he thought, why not try cross referencing the names of places mentioned in the endless catalogue of digitised books, magazines, and other written material, even the ones the company isn't allowed to publish, the intra-copyright archives, with the maps?

Heck, he thought, tapping his pen against the half cup of cold coffee embossed with the biohazard symbol on the desk beside him, why not open it up to general search? Let's check every mention of every place on every website as well! Let's see whose city is most popular, and then join the dots by date, that should be worth a blog post. Might even get a mention on slashdot.

Writing this one was going to take a little time; he was already half an hour over his allotment but who cares. Finishing, he pressed 'commit' with a flourish, and took a swig before spitting it back out. May as well get a fresh cup while the program was working.

As he slouched back into his chair, the results started to appear on the expansive four monitor setup he talked about to make his flatmate green with envy. Slowly, a picture began to emerge, lines and webs of data connecting nodes and nexuses. The half smile slowly slipped off Tim's face, to be replaced by an open mouthed look of increasing surprise.

Reflected from his glasses, the light of spiralling data wrapped itself tightly around empty spaces, areas speckled across the globe as clearly marked as the entrances to a funnel spider's welcome mat. Clusters of references increased all around them, but inside these zones... nothing...

sounds like the start to a Clive Barker novel.

There are several ways this could be played.

1. A matrix type game where the blank spots are alien encryption stations to keep our reality toodling along. Tracking down these spots lead to the protagonist's reality slowly unraveling. Will they take the blue pill or the red one?

2. The blank spots are warehouses that house arcane objects too dangerous to be at large. They give off a field that interferes with computer analysis and wireless signals. Yeah, it's Warehouse 13, but that's ripe for a game.

3. Portals from other worlds. A Rifts type of deal.

4. An x-files type game. Government facilities protected from cyber-eyes. What are they protecting/covering up?

My mind drifts immediately into the sort of thing that Gibson has been doing a lot of in his later stuff; also the sort of thing that Doctorow has come up with; an adventure based around investigating those "Dark Places".  

What are they?  Deep holes of the internet, where noone mentions them in any publications or blogs.  Nothing showing on satellite that seems specifically interesting in some cases, but in others there might be a building, a complex, or even dark blocks of tenements; occupied, by the cars and foot traffic, but for some reason never mentioned; no mailing addresses, no businesses listed.

They slip between the cracks, in the urban environment, because people have other things to do than wonder who lives in the buildings.  They certainly don't know anyone who does.  And who would want to?  The locations seem to share being just slightly too old to be fashionable and get shitty cell reception.

And if one of the players is the programmer in question, he might try to explore the nearest one (probably in the forests near Seattle) only to discover that while there's nothing specifically driving him away, all the roads seem to stop short, and camera-monitored fences citing 'Private Property' block the way to those who try to use foot traffic.

It's when he heads east, to Boise, and the nearest urban location that he finds a breakthrough; while wardriving through one of the areas he picks up a single network ping.  A bit of kitbashing later, he's ready, and in his car, late one night, he connects to the Network.


That's what comes to my mind, I suppose the rest would be dependent on the game.

I assumed the check reviewed all the news stories out there and correlated them so these were dark spaces with no news or information, so not so much internet blackspots more non places.

The sort of place that is deliberately average. Town like this usually exist in Indianna or Maine don't they ?

game wise for me it calls out for a horror/weird game

Quote from: The Traveller;690029Clusters of references increased all around them, but inside these zones... nothing...

The event horizon of black data holes ...

What kind of data "thing" was there before it collapsed under its own mass?
(Google's servers? NSA servers collecting data from around the globe, swallowing more than they could handle?)

What does a data supernova look like? What's a data quasar or pulsar?

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;690044The event horizon of black data holes ...

What kind of data "thing" was there before it collapsed under its own mass?
(Google's servers? NSA servers collecting data from around the globe, swallowing more than they could handle?)

What does a data supernova look like? What's a data quasar or pulsar?

Very cool. The whole thread, actually.

My first assumption would be that it was my blog, and the Flying Mice web site.

I would undoubtedly be correct.

-clash

Turned 90 degrees, the image displayed forms the Yellow Sign, or the face of Cthulhu, or some such ...

And the programmer gets up from his console, his eyes empty, a thin line of drool coming from his mouth, and marches forth: to feed ...

...and since he's cross-referencing by date, historical analysis shows that the DeadZones are slowly, inexorably, increasing in size and number, starting with a single DeadZone, a single location.  Cross-referencing with other locations reveals a web of companies and agencies owning properties that then "go dark".

...or analysis of the pattern reveals that the DeadZones, of their own accord, are slowly forming a Dho-Nha Curve - the beginning of Case Nightmare Green.

Lots of good stuff here, and some directions I hadn't considered at all. The Google archives include books many centuries old, so for the sake of the thread we can assume they have the majority of printed material published since about the tenth century in digital form, and automatic translation into modern English. This does include newspapers and pamphlets. I'm thinking maybe digging deeper into the data might bring up some revelations about the type and nature of the references clustered around these places which have never entered the sphere of human awareness.

Wew, coincidentally I just found out that Google has a thing that lets you search all of their books for the frequency of words over time.

Guess we know what Tim was working on before he joined the dots.

There's some kind of potential for modern-occultism stuff right there, if you follow the notion that the Internet is the material expression of what we used to call the "Astral plane".

Quote from: One Horse Town;690034There are several ways this could be played.

5. Sections One through Eight.

Good suggestions all around, and it does make you think that it depends what sort of genre you want to run:

If we're gonna play CoC, I'd probably go with Ravenswing/Kruger suggestions. If Cyberpunk's - Dirk's or OHT's.

If Shadowrun's or modern military gaming:

I'd probably go with Secret Government and/or Corporations installations angle - 5 minutes later, a group of man in black (and I don't mean suits) burst down his door, and he's arrested under a charge of planning to commit an act of terror, Koran, 5 kilos of Semtex and plans of nearby school found in his apartment's room.

Then, the next day, the man's wife/girlfriend contacts her friend, who in turns contacts her friend blah blah blah, until the news finally reach a certain shadowy group of former crack commando unit who in 2003 who were sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit, and who later promptly escaped to survive as soldiers of fortune.