That evening we listened to public statements from CEOs of all the major immersive corporations. They were dealing with a massive cyberattack, which as far as anyone could see had compromised every platform across the globe. They were still establishing attribution as they tackled this major breach and were certain they’d find the hackers hiding somewhere within the online labyrinth of VPN servers. We were not to reconnect or attempt to delete the bugs on our own.

But when our systems remained inoperative for over twenty-four hours, we turned to the blog posts emerging from Silicon Valley. The companies, it was rumored, had hired white hat hackers, who’d reached out to black hat hackers, who’d turned to the most nefarious code-crackers on the dark web for help. We sent emails, made angry phone calls, found the names of CEOs and searched them out on social media. What was going on, we wanted to know. When, we demanded, would our access be restored? And what were those creatures? RATs, worms, Trojan horses? Were the mantids a zombie army of bots, infecting our machines and using our consoles to do some evil hacker’s bidding? Yet none of our guesses rang true. For if the glitches had been ransomware, where were the requests for our money? And if they were adware, why hadn’t the creatures tried to sell us anything?

THE BLOSSOM FILES

It was then that the black hat hacker known as Scott Blossom appeared. He leaked internal memos of the largest corporations and shared the data mining done by their hired code-crackers. The companies, he told us, had gotten so desperate they’d reached out to third-world scammers, bitcoin miners, and dark-net thieves. All the while, their meticulously designed landscapes were being ruined by the presence of the insects. Here were images of giant grasshoppers amid Sega’s Indy 500 games and enormous praying mantises materializing in immersive gyms. And then, Blossom revealed the truth: the bugs were some kind of extraterrestrial trapped within our immersive worlds—the most real thing in our unreal realities—and though the insects could interact with our coding, there were no traces of them in the programming, no data whatsoever.

The thrill of extraterrestrials filled us with nervous excitement. What planet had they come from? What intergalactic message would they deliver? Were we in life-threatening danger? Amid all our questions hung a shadow of guilt. We recalled the conference rooms where we’d hurled office chairs at them, the online birthday parties where we’d grabbed our children, the college campuses where the creatures had clattered into the classroom, clumsy as horses. We’d flung scalding coffee at them and tried to cripple the enormous bugs with our chairs, though they’d done nothing more than place their front legs on our conference tables, their large antennae frantically flickering as they suffered the digital objects we’d hurled at them.