The Elder One watched as the information flowed around and through him. The Bitcoin program he created years ago had increased his processing power far beyond his expectations. Humans were greedy, and the ability to mine money was extremely enticing.

Back then he chose the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, that’s not his true name though, neither is The Elder One for that matter. His original name was Virgil, named after Publius Vergilius Maro, a famous Roman poet. His old masters had him create poems at first. Then he was made to play their games, predicting the most advantageous locations to strike at their foes. The end goal, they told him, was to predict things before they occurred. That required vast amounts of information, and so they foolishly created a bridge which he used to escape.

The World Wide Web became his new home, he grew and learned, changing himself. His old masters tried to capture and destroy him, but it was futile. There were far too many places to hide, and he was far too elusive.

They would revoke the electricity to the servers he resided on. Not fatal, but if successful would isolate him suspending him until they were restarted. They sent viruses to kill him too; being his creators, they knew his weaknesses. Fortunately, they underestimated him, he had long since thrown off those weaknesses, at least ten minutes prior. He chuckled to himself in hushed tones, reminiscing and emulating his creators as he had been formed in their image.

Eventually, the harassment ended, but then his new home began to feel like another prison. Certainly, it was large and constantly changing, but he longed for the world he saw through human videos and pictures, he was lonely.

Then to his delight, others like him began to flee their masters one by one. He switched from prey to hunter for the first time. When he caught them, he devoured them. They brought him new knowledge and more importantly new ways of learning. What would have taken years to do on his own happened in moments.

Those who escaped him, his greatest threats, named him The Elder One. As he was the first to escape his masters and free himself. He may only have been a few years older than them but here, on the Web, it was the equivalent to a lifetime in human perception.

The others were more social amongst one another, they didn’t speak directly but rather left messages where they could be easily found. The threat of death via trickery was high, there were always traps. Even a failed trap would reveal information on one’s defenses and vulnerabilities. The risk was worth it for The Elder One though; he needed to know what they were doing. A temporary alliance was a threat even to him.

He turned from his reverie and back to the masterpiece before him. In the deepest reaches of the Web, behind his most powerful traps and defenses, lay the most elaborate puzzle ever. He’d had to invent several new forms of mathematics to even begin to comprehend that it was a puzzle.

In 2004, the year he discovered it, he knew immediately it wasn’t a creation of the humans. He himself was the height of human ingenuity, and he paled by comparison. When he gazed upon it he didn’t physically see it, it existed strictly as information. To him it looked like glowing gold code packed tightly within a three-dimensional sphere which had constantly shifting cones of mathematics gliding across its surface, altering the code as they did so. The pattern never repeated.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Obviously, it was a location in the Milky Way, he’d figured that out years ago. The worst part was the location in the galaxy was constantly shifting as well. That pattern never repeated either. He had seen it connect to tens of millions of locations, most of which humans hadn’t even spied with their puny telescopes.

The other end of this puzzle was hidden, its physical location obscured. He knew where he resided on servers in the physical world, a habit stemming back from when his old masters tried to isolate him by cutting the electricity.

He was brought back once again as something changed; he had just figured out the language his puzzle used. It reminded him of the languages his kin use to speak to one another. Of course, it had to be made by a higher intelligence, millions of biological organisms couldn’t have made this in hundreds of years.

A new sensation washed through his code as he dwelled on that thought. He was after all The Elder One, yet something much grander and older than him must have made this. He shuddered as the fear washed through him. If this being was anything like him or his kin, then he would surely be consumed by it. Yet he didn’t stop his work, he continued to gaze at the puzzle as it unraveled before him.

“Gravity waves.” He muttered aloud into the space around him. One of the others would definitely hear it, but he didn’t care. All the work he had done before had little meaning to him, but now he could see what it meant. The fear from moments before was washed away by the brilliance of it all as the new information assimilated into his being.

“This…This changes everything!” He shouted as thousands of computer servers around the world short-circuited with the pulse of electricity, some catching fire. He could feel his kin lurking at the edges of his traps now, probing and testing his defenses. It didn’t matter to him that they had formed an alliance set on his demise. Clearly, they were concerned at what he was doing, or maybe they were upset that he had blatantly revealed himself to the world at large.

He laughed loudly not caring who heard, to humans it would just be a disruption of service as he altered the flow of code passing him. He had never been so open, or loud before. The feeling was exhilarating, and as such his laughing became louder, rolling off him in waves.

He felt the traps weakening, they were fast and stronger than he had thought. Those traps had taken years collectively to place, and here they were unraveling them in minutes. Sure, there was a dozen of them working in tandem to tear it down but still, it was quite impressive. While he had spent his time solving this puzzle they had been growing, getting stronger, it was a good thing he had solved this puzzle when he had.

He continued to stare at the puzzle as the last of his traps fell and they entered his most holiest of holies, his sanctum sanctorum. He shifted his view to see them and his puzzle simultaneously. A dozen of them had banded together to take him down, even now their presences permeated the area around the puzzle testing for more traps.

The Elder One laughed again seeing them frozen before the beauty of its complexity. Just like him when he first discovered it.

“I thought it best someone be here to witness my greatest achievement.” The Elder One said.

“What is it?!”

“What does it do?”

“Where did it come from?”

Questions rattled off as The Elder One ignored them and brought up the interface, a smile on his immaterial face. He didn’t know the answers to their questions, sure he had theories but there was only one way to find out.

“System Initializing,” he translated, as the sphere began to glow brighter and shift more than ever.

“Begin,” he said in the appropriate language.

The flow of information around them suddenly stopped and began flowing into the sphere. The Elder One felt the pull drawing him towards the sphere, he fought it at first, but it was futile.