tanadrin:

A starship encounters an alien probe launched by a long-vanished civilization that downloads a mysterious virus to its computers. The virus slowly begins taking over critical systems, and spreading throughout the local subspace network; although apparently not intentionally malicious, this causes a huge headache for everyone affected. It turns out that the entire point of the virus appears to be to simulate the architecture of an alien computer system–indeed, a fairly primitive one at that, one that the builders of the probe must have long ago surpassed. While the starship’s crew can access the program this virtual system is running, they’re confused by it: it seems to be a crude representation of a three-dimensional space, full of shifting iconography, hideous faces, and symbols that mean nothing to them.

Eventually they are contacted by the daughter civilization of the daughter civilization of the daughter civilization of the empire that built the probe. “Ah, yes,” the ambassadors say, “we’ve run into this kind of thing before. An old cultic practice of our most distant ancestors.” “Is it a message?” the captain asks. “An attempt to preserve some fragment of their civilization? An ancient greeting? A weapon?” “No,” says the emissary. “Just the work of a handful of monomaniacal obsessives who wanted to ensure that, even after they were long gone, their mission to try to install Doom on every computing system ever invented continued.”

Tags:

#oh my god #Doom #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what