Record number twenty five



A year has passed since I last posted, almost to the day, and yet I am no closer to discovering the mechanism behind this Static. I am afraid that however hopeful I seemed, all my efforts have come to nothing. Mariana is still firmly ensconced on her digital throne, and while she exists the entire world is powerless in the face of her revenge. For it is coming, I am sure of it. Why she has waited this long I do not know. Perhaps she is watching us. Learning from us. After all, she was asleep for a good fifty years.

Despite there being no blatant attacks against me, I am certain I have seen her. Not in Mariana’s Web, for I haven’t gone back there since the last time. I’m too afraid of what I might find there. No, it’s when I least expect it. I use my phone, or my computer. It’s there for less than a second, a fraction of a moment, gone so quickly I’m sure I imagined it, sure I’m going insane. An image of Mariana’s Web, with the cartoon-like interface, yet it’s somehow different. It happened three times before I realised the difference. Proton, Marie, all of my uncle’s old friends, they were there in Mariana’s Web. They were on the ground, lying there with limbs at unnatural angles and their eyes wide, staring at some unknown assailant. It is a warning to me, a warning to stay away. It’s one I’ve heeded thus far.

She’s been in my head, or rather I’ve been trapped in hers. I know that she could reach back out to me at any time and send me into a coma again, still and unmoving on the floor. This time she might never relent. I might never wake up, and who then would carry on this fight? Not anybody who reads this, for they take it as fiction where it is fact.

I am at a loss. If I fight, I will be destroyed. If I stand by and do nothing, the country and perhaps the entire world will be destroyed, when Mariana is in the mood for it.

So tell me. What can I do?