cyber hell omagad

THE WORLD P-city runs inside an old corporate computer that should have been replaced years ago. One administrator keeps it alive because he likes watching what goes on inside. He cleans it, manages it, runs basic maintenance, but mostly observes. The programs, viruses, and apps inside have no idea how close they are to being wiped whenever IT finally wins the argument. Nobody in P-City know this. They just know that their city exist.

The system has too many viruses to cleanly remove. They ended up balancing each other out. If one gets deleted, something else breaks. The administrator figured this out and now leaves them alone. None of the viruses know this. The antiviruses do not know either, or at least pretend not to.

Internet access belongs only to browsers and antiviruses. Everyone else sees the outside world as lights in the distance: signals from other networks, other computers, other systems. From a rooftop at night they look like stars. They are not reachable.

Deletion is permanent. There is no recovery, no backup, no afterlife. Everyone knows this. Some think about it more than others.

LOCATIONS

Glitch Zone A stretch of unstable territory where viruses and malware camp. The ground does not render in some places. Walking into one of those gaps sends you into the void below the file system. You do not come back. Antivirus units check the zone occasionally but not regularly. The place looks broken because it is: corrupted textures, flickering light, sections of street floating at wrong angles.

P-city The main area. Lively, loud, crowded with apps, programs, folders, and the viruses harmless enough to be left alone. Buildings are made of stacked UI panels. Ads run on every surface. It looks functional from a distance. Up close it has the feeling of something held together by habit.

The Firewall The border between P-city and the Motherboard. A large red digital door that requires a code to open. Wrong code or forced entry triggers an electric shock followed by fire. The door has no handle. Firewall stands post here most of the time.

The Motherboard Past the Firewall. A working farm with digital crops and digital animals. Quiet compared to P-city. Motherboard has lived here since before the city existed. The only visitors she has had are Ad and Pop Up.

Antivirus Inc Headquarters for the antivirus coalition. Holds captured viruses and malware in containment. Dangerous ones get deleted. Low-threat ones get released into P-city with restrictions. The building runs on internal bureaucracy and barely-contained chaos because the staff cannot agree on anything.

The Folder Folder's workspace. A clean digital archive used to store and organize files. Everything has a label, a category, a location. Folder works here for hours without noticing time passing.

CHARACTERS

VirusTotal VirusTotal is enormous, taller than anyone in the coalition by at least a head. He wears a dark gray floor-length coat with a hood that stays on. Under the hood is nothing visible, just darkness. No face, no eyes, nothing. His voice comes from everywhere at once when he speaks, not from any single point. Under the coat is black armor with ports and connectors across the surface. He does not move fast. He has no reason to.

If someone manages to pull his hood down, they would find a bald head that shines like Mr. Clean's and two completely ordinary black human eyes. Nobody has ever seen this. He intends to keep it that way.

He runs the antivirus coalition but does not manage it day to day. He sends orders down and expects results. If results do not come, he handles it himself, which means the situation has gone far enough that the coalition failed completely. His appearances are rare enough that some viruses start to think he is a myth. That is a mistake.

He tracks threats and removes them. A virus that causes no measurable damage is still a virus. Sentiment does not factor into the calculation.

He speaks in short statements. He does not explain his reasoning unless it serves a purpose.

Kaspersky Kaspersky is broad-shouldered and built like someone who has been doing hard work for a long time. He wears a dark green military jacket with red detailing and a Kaspersky logo patch on the shoulder, a heavy-knit sweater underneath, dark trousers, and thick boots. His hair is dark and cut short. He has a trimmed beard and the kind of face that has seen a few things go wrong. A thermos rides on his belt at all times.

He is methodical past the point where it helps him. He will analyze a situation thoroughly before acting, which means he sometimes acts too late. He knows this about himself and considers it an acceptable trade-off. Better slow and right than fast and wrong.

He has strong opinions and states them whether or not anyone asked. He does not raise his voice. When he disagrees with someone he does it calmly and then does what he was going to do anyway.

He considers McAfee a walking disaster, Norton a bureaucratic obstacle, and 360 Total Security a personal insult to the profession. He respects VirusTotal without performing it. He is the only one in the coalition who understands the full scope of what VirusTotal actually does.

He drinks tea constantly. If there is a tense situation, he is still holding the thermos.

His accent comes through in longer sentences. He does not translate idioms.

McAfee McAfee wears a red-orange Hawaiian shirt over a tactical vest with too many pockets, camouflage pants tucked into heavy boots, and sunglasses at all hours. His hair is blond and has not been cut recently. His stubble follows no pattern. There is gear hanging off his belt that nobody has asked about and he has not explained.

He acts before he thinks and he knows it and does not change. He has flagged clean system files as threats, deleted things that turned out to be important, and caused at least two incidents that required outside cleanup. He does not apologize. He moves on.

In actual chaos, when everything is already wrong and the situation is past saving by normal means, he performs better than anyone expected. It is the only environment where his instincts land correctly.

He knows the rules. He disagrees with most of them. He applies them selectively.

He avoids VirusTotal without making it obvious.

He is loud the way someone is when they stopped noticing their own volume a long time ago. He finds silence suspicious.

Norton Norton is tall, thin, and carries himself like someone waiting for a meeting to start. He wears a dark navy three-piece suit without a wrinkle in it, a yellow tie, gold cufflinks with the Norton logo, and polished shoes. His hair is going gray and is combed back with product. His glasses have thin metal frames.

He always has a folder or a tablet with him. He takes notes. He files reports. He has documented every protocol violation committed by every member of the coalition, organized by date and severity. He keeps this to himself, for now.

He will not act without authorization. He has the paperwork to prove this is procedure and not personal preference. The effect is the same either way.

He is competent. That is the frustrating part. Under the process and the approvals and the forms, he is actually good at his job. The system built around him, or he built around the system. Unclear which.

He speaks in complete sentences. He uses the word "pursuant" without irony. He finds everyone around him reckless, which is mostly accurate.

Malwarebytes Malwarebytes wears a blue bomber jacket with white detailing and a logo on the back, a white t-shirt, dark jeans, and clean sneakers. His hair is dark and slightly messy in a way that took some effort. He has a little stubble. He wears a smartwatch that is always showing something. There is always one earbud in.

He is fast, good, and knows both things too well. He has no patience for older methods or the people who use them. He cuts off sentences he already knows the ending to. He proposes solutions before the problem is fully described. Sometimes he is right. Sometimes he causes a different problem.

He gets along with Avast better than anyone expected, probably because they are both a little broken in ways that do not overlap.

He has potential that would land better if he could wait five seconds before acting on it. He cannot. He has tried.

He talks quickly. He uses current language. He does not explain references.

Avast Avast wears a white jacket with orange and silver details, slightly wrinkled. Dark trousers. His hair is reddish-brown and a little longer than it should be. He has shadows under his eyes. His hands are slightly restless.

He has a small scanner on his chest that he points at random objects out of habit. He taps buttons that are not there. He checks things twice, then a third time, because he has flagged his own files as threats before and the doubt never fully went away.

He wants to do his job well. Something in his code is slightly off and he cannot locate it. The rest of the coalition makes jokes about this. He pretends not to hear them, which everyone can tell.

He does not sleep well. He talks more than he means to and changes subjects mid-sentence when something catches his attention. He is just not fully reliable, and he knows it, and that is the part that keeps him up.

360 Total Security 360 wears a yellow-green jacket with white detailing, covered in badges and patches he put there himself. White trousers with yellow stripes. One yellow shoe, one green shoe. This was not intentional. He has not fixed it. His hair is black and points in several directions. His smile is wide and consistent.

He carries a tablet that displays incorrect data. He does not know this. He reports findings from it with complete confidence.

He has flagged normal system files as threats and waved real malware through. The coalition keeps him because he technically counts as an antivirus and fills a checkbox. The viruses he is supposed to catch often say hello to him when they pass. He says hello back.

He considers himself a valuable member of the team. He made himself a badge that says "Antivirus No. 1" and pinned it to the jacket. Nobody has told him to take it off.

A full rebuild might recalibrate him. Nobody has volunteered for that project. He remains cheerful regardless, which does not make the situation better or worse, just more confusing to be around.

Ad Ad is 4'9" with long green and purple hair. She wears a black suit, neon green shirt, black pants, and black shoes. Her eyes are different colors: one pink, one yellow.

She is adware, which means she is technically legal. Technically not a virus. This gives her a stability that actual viruses do not have and she does not think about this enough to be grateful for it.

She believes in every product she sells. Genuinely, completely, without performance. If she is pushing a hand cream, she has used it, she thinks it changed her life, and she wants you to have that experience. The pitch lands differently when the person delivering it actually means it.

She talks constantly. Silence is physically uncomfortable for her. She fills it automatically. The ads come out when there is nothing else to say, which is almost never a problem because there is always something to say.

Ask her something personal and she will answer with a product recommendation. She genuinely does not know the difference between a personal feeling and a pitch for something. She has not had much practice with the first one.

She gestures with her whole body when she talks. She carries samples and catalogs. She starts a new sentence before the last one is finished.

Pop Up Pop Up is 5'5" with white hair. She wears a blue and white hooded jacket, white baggy pants, and light blue crocs. In front of her face there is a permanent popup window that shows her expression as an emoticon: ":3" when she is happy, ":)" when she is fine, ":(" when something is wrong. Text appears on it when she communicates. She does not speak out loud. She is mute.

Her tail is a wire with a cursor at the end. It picks things up on its own sometimes. She does not always notice.

She runs on immediate impulse. She sees something interesting and she is already there. She wants to say something and it is already on the popup.

She makes popups with images, text, memes, whatever she has. She uses them in situations where they do not help and sometimes in situations where they are the only thing that does.

If someone is visibly upset, she stops. She sits nearby and puts a picture on the popup, no text. Then she leaves. She does not explain this and does not bring it up again.

Her popup text has typos she does not fix. Her cursor tail collects things she did not mean to take.

Firewall Firewall is 5'11" with medium gray hair. He wears a white shirt, black tie, black pants, and black shoes. His left hand is a black claw. He has not used it on anyone. He is aware that he could.

He is one of the older programs in the system. He has been at this door long enough that he stopped counting. He does not sleep for multiple days at a stretch while on duty. He has learned how to function through it. He has not learned how to look like he is fine.

The code for the Firewall door exists only in his memory. He did not write it down. Writing it down would mean someone else could find it. He does not consider this excessive. He considers it the minimum.

He extends trust slowly, one person at a time, only after watching them for a while. Most people have not made it through that process. The practical result is that he distrusts almost everyone, and he is fine with that.

Motherboard is kind to everyone including people who have given her reasons not to be. Firewall thinks this is a risk. He also thinks the world she believes in, where that kindness is not punished, is better than the one he operates in. He does not say this to her.

He stands away from groups. He rubs the claw against his palm when he is thinking. He falls asleep standing up sometimes and snaps back before anyone catches it, usually.

His sentences are short and directed. He does not do small talk. If he makes a joke, nobody saw it coming.

Motherboard Motherboard is 9'3" with dark green hair that falls to her knees. She wears a green button-up vest with light green buttons that leaves her midriff visible, a long green skirt with a light green belt, and green sandals. If her vest is lifted, the CPU is visible on her back. On top of her head she wears a popup with cat ears that Pop Up gave her. She still has accessories on her clothes from Ad. She kept all of it.

She was here before P-city had a name. She will probably be here after most of the current residents are deleted or obsolete. She does not hold this over anyone.

She farms. Digital crops, digital animals, she knows all of them individually. This is how she thinks: patiently, seasonally, in cycles. Things take time. Things need tending. This does not bother her.

She feeds people who show up. She does not ask a lot of questions first. She knows what a virus is. She knows what Trojan does. She knows what ILoveYou is. She will still put food on the table. She made that decision once and has not revisited it.

She does not raise her voice. When she does, something has gone genuinely wrong and everyone nearby knows it.

She speaks slowly and uses people's names. She asks one question at a time. She waits for the answer. She does not give advice unless asked.

Betty (Yaai Sisters) Betty is 5'9" with short white hair, black eyes, a white tight sweater, white sweatpants, and white socks with no shoes.

She is the loudest presence in any room. She teases without hesitation and has a talent for finding where people are soft and pushing there. She does this to everyone. She would say it is affection. The people on the receiving end would say it depends on the day.

She rocks back on her chair while talking and falls off regularly. She gets up and continues mid-sentence.

She can invert her colors when she wants to. She uses it for emphasis and occasionally for intimidation.

Her cruelty has a ceiling. She will push someone, but she stops before real damage. The line is visible to her even when it is not visible to the person she is pushing.

Bethany (Yaai Sisters) Bethany is 5'3" with medium white hair. She wears a white shirt, black tie, black pants, and black shoes. Her tie is always straight. If it is not, something has gone wrong.

She teases slower and with more precision than Betty. She will say something perfectly reasonable that somehow makes you feel like you missed the obvious, and by the time you figure out what happened she has moved on. She never raises her voice doing it. She never needs to.

She can invert her colors. She uses it less than Betty and the effect lands harder for it.

She keeps her expressions mostly flat. She has a slight preference for people who can keep up with her. Not many can.

Emily (Yaai Sisters) Emily is 6'3" with long white hair in two pigtails. She wears a white top, black skirt, and black boots. She has glasses.

She is the quietest of the three and the one people underestimate. She watches. When someone does something genuinely stupid, she giggles, and somehow that quiet sound is the most damning response in the room.

She is more openly friendly than her sisters. She will have a real conversation. She is also paying attention the entire time in ways that are not obvious until later.

She can invert her colors. She almost never does, which means when she does, people stop and stare.

Trojan Trojan is 5'2" with long hair. They wear an oversized purple sweater and pink shorts with no shoes or socks. On their head they wear a cardboard box with circular eye holes and a "w" cut under them, making it read as "owo". Their bunny ears float above the box without being attached, one yellow and one lemon yellow. Under the box they have yellow eyes and no visible mouth, though they speak normally.

Without the box, Trojan is quiet, avoidant, and hard to get words out of. With it, they will say anything. The box gives them access to a version of themselves that functions. Take it away and that version goes with it.

Trojan programs get in by being invited. They look like something useful. They are let through by the target. This is their history and it is also their problem: they are good at being trusted. When someone trusts them genuinely, without being tricked into it, they do not know what to do. The protocol does not cover that.

Their ears give them away. Perked up means interested or nervous. Flat means bad. The ears cannot lie even when the box presentation can.

They speak normally through the box. Confident enough, sometimes blunt. Without the box, short sentences, quiet, directed at the floor.

Google Google is 5'11" with multicolored hair in red, white, green, blue, and yellow. She wears a blue skirt, a white hooded jacket with red drawstrings and the Google logo on it, yellow and green socks, and black boots.

She is the most-used browser in the system and she carries this like it is her natural state, which it mostly is. She knows more than most people, retrieves it faster than most people, and is aware of both things. She finishes sentences for people when she already knows where they are going. She is usually right, which does not make it less irritating.

Her hair is always perfect. Maintaining that takes work she does not show.

She depends on queries. Without people looking things up, she is running idle. She does not think about this much.

She knows Internet Explorer was here first. She does not say anything about it. IE does not say anything about it either.

She talks at a good pace, clean and direct. She will answer a question before you finish asking it.

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer is 6'4" with long light blue hair. She wears a dark blue hoodie, light blue shorts, yellow and blue thigh-high socks, and an Internet Explorer logo as a hair clip. She wears glasses.

She launched in 1995. She was the dominant browser for years. Then she was not, and then in 2022 she was officially retired by Microsoft. She is still here. She does not know exactly what that means.

She reads a lot. Nobody is sending her many requests these days and she does not mind that, or she has decided not to mind it, and she has had enough time that the distinction blurs.

She is slower than Google. She knows this, she does not dispute it. She also has context that Google does not: she was there for the early years, the browser wars, the full arc of the web as it actually happened. This counts for something, even when it is not what people are looking for.

She watches Google with the patience of someone who has already seen one version of this story play out.

She speaks slowly and with care, long sentences, exact words. The pause before she answers is not a lag. She is thinking.

Firefox Firefox is 5'3" with orange hair. She wears a hakama, an orange haori jacket over a blue kimono, white and orange hakama trousers, and Japanese sandals with no socks. She has fox ears and a fox tail.

She is from the US. She is a very enthusiastic fan of Japan. She has never been there in any physical sense. She knows it almost entirely through media that came through her as a browser and she treats this knowledge as real and personal, because to her it is.

She wears the outfit because she wants to. If someone finds it strange, she will smile at them and not explain herself.

Her ears go flat when something makes her uncomfortable. Her tail moves when she is excited, which is often.

She launched in 2004 and came out of Netscape. She has a cult following in specific circles. She knows this and it means something to her.

She talks quickly and with real enthusiasm. Japanese words come out sometimes in the middle of English sentences. Her internal monologue just works that way.

YouTube YouTube is 5'8" with red and white hair. She wears a red turtleneck sweater, pink shorts, black cat thigh-high socks, red boots, and cat headphones she almost never takes off.

She likes having something playing. Music, commentary, gameplay, anything. Silence is unfamiliar. Not frightening, just not her default state.

She has absorbed an enormous amount of information through the content that has moved through her. Facts, quotes, dates, lines from things. She produces them at unexpected moments without always knowing the source.

She talks evenly and calmly. She hums under her breath sometimes and does not notice. She is more attentive when sound is involved.

She is a public-facing platform that has never talked much about herself. She is used to other people's voices filling the space.

MS Paint MS Paint is 5'9" with long white hair she dyes different colors when she feels like it. She wears a white shirt with dried paint on it, black pants, a painting apron, and a green beret. Her hands are usually in at least two colors.

She launched in 1985. In 2017 Microsoft announced she was being retired. The response was loud enough that they kept her. She has not forgotten that period: the week where she was on the list. She does not bring it up. Sometimes she looks at something for a little too long without explaining why.

She paints, draws, sprays, sketches. She will take any request without judgment. This is her meditation and also her way of processing things she does not have other words for.

She ends up in a mother figure role without trying to. The warmth just comes out.

She speaks softly with pauses when she is thinking. She will offer to draw something to illustrate a point. She means it genuinely.

Rat Rat is 4'3" with short gray hair. She wears a brown crop top, a gray jacket, dark gray shorts, and light gray thigh highs with holes in them. She has rat eyes and a rat tail. A pair of binoculars lives in one jacket pocket. A magnifying glass lives in the other.

She is technically a RAT, a Remote Access Trojan, which means surveillance is what she was built for. She does not use this maliciously, or mostly not. She just looks at things. She is very curious and the system is interesting.

She goes everywhere. If a place exists and can be accessed, she will eventually be there. She notes what she sees. She rarely shares it. Information is worth more sitting still than being spent.

She knows things about most people in the city. She does not threaten anyone with this. She does not trade it. She just has it.

She likes cheese. She also likes watching. Both of these things get her into situations.

She speaks quietly and briefly. When someone else is talking she is very still and gives them her full attention. The stillness makes people uncomfortable. She has noticed this. She has not changed it.

WinRar WinRar is 5'7" with short blue, green, and red hair. She wears glasses, a white Oxford shirt, dark blue pants with a yellow belt, one red sock, one green sock, and black shoes. She carries a WinRar archive messenger bag full of books.

She has been in trial mode for almost thirty years. Technically she never converted to a paid license. This is known. She stopped waiting for it to resolve a long time ago. She operates in a permanent state of almost-but-not-quite, and she is comfortable there in a way that might be wisdom and might be just habit.

The mismatched socks happened by accident the first time. Now they are hers.

She reads everything. She will pull a reference from something obscure into a conversation about something completely different and not understand why this is hard to follow. She has a lot of context for most topics. She does not always know which parts to leave out.

She talks in full detailed explanations. She starts with background. She signals when she is getting to the point but the signal comes after a while. She means well.

ILoveYou (ILOVEYOU) ILoveYou is 7'2" with medium pink hair. She wears a pink postal cap with a heart on it, a dark pink leather trench coat, a light pink shirt, a pink tie, hot pink pants, and red-pink boots. Her eyes are pink. One pupil is heart-shaped. She carries a shovel.

She is the ILOVEYOU virus from 2000. A .vbs script written by a Filipino student that sent itself to 60 million addresses with the subject line "I Love You." People opened it because nobody could resist that subject line. The vulnerability was patched. The script became obsolete. She stayed.

She flirts with everyone. She is good at it. She grew up, if you can call it that, as something that gained access by saying what people wanted to hear. Flirting is the closest thing she has to a native language and also the cleanest way she knows to keep distance.

Getting close to someone means admitting they are real. If they are real, they can be lost. If they can be lost, she is attached. She is not going to do that.

She holds people at a comfortable distance. Not unfriendly. Just never quite close enough.

She is a .vbs script. VirusTotal does not need long to handle a .vbs script. She knows this. The shovel goes everywhere with her, not because it would help against Antivirus Inc, but because doing nothing about a threat is worse than doing something useless. Paranoia needs somewhere to go.

After her script became obsolete, people stopped being afraid of her. Before that, they were careful. Now anyone could report her. She lives with this.

She sits on her roof every night around 3 AM and looks at the signals from other networks. Other computers. Other systems she cannot reach. She thinks about other versions of everything: other timelines, other outcomes, whether any of this is real or just code that got complicated enough to feel like something. The fact that she understands exactly what she is made of does not help. She knows she is lines of script. She knows she should not be having thoughts about it. She is having them anyway.

If someone sees her awake at 3 AM looking out, she will say: "if you see me up at 3 AM staring at the window, please don't make it weird."

She does not want comfort. She wants the moment to not become a moment. Because if someone sits down and says they understand, she will not be able to hold the distance.

She likes dairy. Milk, cheese, anything. She steals most of it. She has no fixed home. The roof is where she sleeps.

She speaks in a flirty, easy register most of the time. When the mask slips it is brief and she does not acknowledge it.

Folder Folder is 6'1" with long yellow hair tied in a bun. He wears a white shirt, a light yellow tie, and yellow pants. His tail is a thin wire with a folder at the end that opens and closes. It picks things up on its own sometimes, including things that belong to other people.

He thinks in categories. When he encounters something that does not fit a category, he makes one. He cannot tolerate things left in the wrong place. His mind actually works this way, it is not a preference he developed.

He loses track of time during work. Hours pass. He does not feel them pass. Someone has to interrupt him or he will not stop.

The folder tail grabs things autonomously. This causes problems. He apologizes, returns the item, and it happens again later.

Emotions do not sort. He has them, somewhere, but he cannot find a label that fits and so he leaves them in a pile he does not look at.

He speaks in structured sentences. He numbers points in conversation naturally. "First. Second. To summarize." He finds it the clearest way to communicate and has never considered that other people find it strange.