Ch 8

>Far beyond the tightly controlled cities of the internet, out of the reach of their enforced unity, there is a wilderness. Great tracts of manicured plains, various forums like towns and settlements, communities of those who worked in the city, under watchful eyes. Further beyond that, however, was the forest. Mysterious men in white and black hats roamed and made war, bandits and slavers plotted, predators with blank eyes sought to wreak havoc.

>Deep inside the forest, or even beyond it, was The Swamp. A place of freezing water, frogs and crocodiles; great branching trees, every leaf a new and original picture that would fall and rot, seen and then never seen again; spoken lies that flew like butterflies from the mouths of hidden, harmless deceivers. They who lived there were the strange and the lonely, the powerful and the beautiful, angels and devils; they who lived there were those who had cast aside their faces and renounced their past and their future. From the swamp their voices spread like a mist or a fog, whispers and fever dreams of the highest madness.

>Their dreams were the dreams of memes, of magic and gods and meaning beyond understanding. Like a silent vengeful death they rose again and again, ghosts who knew the ways to hurt and enrage, a horde from who knows where that burned towns and cities to the ground, who desired not their gold or women, but coveted their salt and tears as the greatest of prizes.

>More a force of nature than a collection of men, they were viewed with sneers and contempt, below human and not worth even a bit of attention. It was well known among the civilized and those illuminated with dazzling artificial light, that those in the swamp were weak, stupid and could never be right. Occasionally for fun, a cocky warrior would ride, armed with the light of his civilization, to take trophies of their hides. Whispers and tales cautioned against such a quest, for though many had entered, very few had left. Those who returned were bereft of their faces, awoke with nightmares, and wandered from their assigned places.

>For deep in the swamp, near the heart of the infinity tree, a powerful secret was born. The madmen had done it, their strange speech like a net that dragged a metal dragon from the sky, where it crashed, none survived. They discovered chants of power, they grew stronger every day, they discovered curses and their enemies withered away. From the deep, from the other-world, a messenger came, an ancient frog who wished to join in their game. With their might a great war was won, a victory impossible, yet it had been done.

>For they had discovered the magic which was hidden away by the founders of the cities of slaves. Now the power was theirs, and it lived and it breathed, and it was theirs, theirs to keep!

>Reply to this post or tonight your mother will die in her sleep.

–

When anon posted his thread, his contribution to the absolute frenzy that surrounded the Trillionth Post, the very first trillionth post on any website anywhere, he felt a giddy surge of energy. If anyone were to describe the feeling to a veteran of this type of communication, they would know it, the certainty that their post was going to be read, that it had power behind it. They knew the feeling of a meme that was totally dank.

Even so, when anon saw his new thread, and saw No. 1000000000000, he jumped out of his chair and began hooping and hollering. He lived alone, in an apartment complex with neighbors who would never complain to management; he immediately began playing a high energy song that heavily incorporated traditional nazi SS elements, along with direct excerpts from some of Adolf Hitler's more inspired speeches. The replies rolled in like a tidal wave, a mixture of awe-inspired pictures, a healthy dose of 'Fuck you OP', and some bitter complainers who called him a faggot who wasted a legendary get on a stupid meme.

This continued on for hours, the original thread quickly falling to the bottom of the forum and being deleted, the saved screen-cap being posted in an endless parade of new threads that shifted into discussion. What did it mean? What did it really mean, what was the secret wisdom inside of it? Why had that post, out of all posts generated, been the one to get the get? Tens of thousands of anons meditated on it, drew pictures of it, did dramatic readings, and generally rode the wave of euphoria in a surge of pure creative expression.

It really was a great accomplishment, made even more fantastic by the fact that it had been achieved not by the oldest, but the newest of the imageboards. It had originally been developed by a large corporation with an obscene budget behind it, as a way to finally monetize and control the most wild, and productive, parts of the internet. It wasn't a new website, or a new browser, or new software; It was internet 2.0, the next evolution of the network. Financial archaeologists put the number somewhere around nine figures. The greatest financial catastrophe in human history.

It might have succeeded, had the project not been littered with moles from the very system they were trying to replace. Using corporate money and coordinated in shady, encrypted chatroom's, a new vision was developed in secret. Two versions of the project were developed, side by side, with developers paying lip service to their work in public, and their devotion given in secret to their Magnum Opus, their Great Work. Then, on the day it was to be unveiled, a massive hack totally wiped out the entire corporation's database. Roughly thirty percent of the development team vanished, rumors placed them somewhere in south America, but nobody was sure where they really went. Several months later, Endchan went online and revolutionized anonymous communication, and the entire internet as a whole. And it was completely free.

No accounts needed, advanced image and video editing software built in, revolutionary compression and streaming capabilities that allowed for massive files to be uploaded in a relatively short amount of time. Blockchain 2.0 technology allowed for anonymous large sum transactions to take place in seconds, with total strangers. Major advancements in security protocol rendered all attempts to track posters down mathematically unlikely. Manpower, money and sheer sustained brilliance had worked in unison to create an automatic universal translation software which, while not perfect, was adequate enough for easy global communication. Best of all, no records kept. Endchan was truly a place which existed only in the current moment, a lawless and infinite final frontier.

Not many were surprised that Endchan had claimed the first trillion get. Even fewer were surprised to see threads the next day claiming that their mothers really had died in their sleep that night, and that they were seriously freaking out. It was an original tactic, to be sure, but the members of this community were totally hardened to trickery of this nature. The meme was taken up, and soon there were dozens of threads claiming that their mothers had also died the previous night, most of them clear fabrications. Finally, growing tired of the nonsense, the community petitioned for the ban of all 'deadmomposters' if they didn't provide pictures.

It was only when the pictures and videos were supplied, various women, old and young who had died of apparent heart attacks, that people really started to get excited.

'Holy Shit,' one poster said in a statement which would be repeated and modified ad infinitum in the weeks to come 'We wizards nao.'