Everything

The most fearsome sectors feature literal ghosts in the machine. In places that have been corrupted by Whiteouts or malicious programs, that overlap with the Low Umbra, or that mark the site of a particularly nasty digital death, you might find such ghosts… or worse, become one yourself! Haunts are obvious; like Meatspace haunted houses, they feature ghostly phenomena, often acted out against a misty, ruined backdrop. Such places play ugly games with your mind… and because consciousness is everything in the Digital Web, those games can have nasty consequences.

More frightening still are the Hung Sectors, where metaphysical data stutters can trap unwary travelers and get them stuck, frozen or flickering, in potentially endless loops. And then there’s the Rip: fractal storm-tides that are said to draw netizens into the Trash Sector, a legendary virtual hell of lost data and broken-code chaos. Some folks think that the Rip and the Trash Sector reflect the damnation of Alan Turing – making that Sector a virtual rock where the Prometheus of net-space gets eternally devoured for the hubris of opening it up to us. Others speculate that it’s where data goes to die… and because everything is information, it’s the ultimate fate of all things. An even cheerier theory posits that the Trash Sector is the demented side of virtual reality, the broken shell of its divine consciousness.

Oh, yeah – didn’t I tell you? According to some theories, the Digital Web is alive… and it feeds on our life energies when we spend time in it – which, when you think about it, would explain a lot of things about the Internet age.