We wanted to see the creatures again. Our providers had no right to deny us service. This miraculous event wasn’t their discovery to keep. We flooded phone lines and filled inboxes. The most politically active surrounded corporate offices with signs and bullhorns.

The CEO of a Buddhist meditation module was the first to relent. He reopened his immersive monastery and sent out an email extolling the ethos of an open web. Soon other start-ups followed, then gaming companies, then Google, then Apple, and finally our connections flickered back to life and the protesters returned home to place their goggles over their eyes.

The wounded creatures were still cowering in our restaurants and conference rooms, and we approached them cautiously. Wasn’t it true that after mating female mantises ripped the heads off their partners? Couldn’t they crush spines as easily as they did exoskeletons? We worried they’d seize us in their front legs, stare at us with their compound eyes, and press their abdomens to ours before tearing off our heads. But the creatures were no more dangerous than butterflies trapped in a glass, and as we gathered around them, they only stared at us, as if trying to determine whether we meant them harm.

SANCTUARY

Tasha Cozhani’s piece first appeared in the New York Times, and later in our social media feeds, expanded upon thereafter by a thousand bloggers, corroborated by hundreds of scientists, and finally, voiced by one or two of our politicians. Cozhani was a professor of entomology at Cornell’s immersive campus. She studied grasshoppers, aphids, and mantises, understood their migratory patterns, knew how their congregations acted when threatened. These creatures, she wrote, weren’t the same as our own insects, though there were clear parallels. For one, instinctual reactions when traumatized. She referenced heart rates, swollen abdomens, ovipositor dysfunction. Immersive reality, Cozhani speculated, had been the intergalactic architecture through which we’d extended our communication tower to the cosmos, and our signal had been received. These creatures weren’t coming to attack us, nor to invade or destroy; they were arriving, at our invitation, to seek sanctuary.

A group of entomologists from Prague corroborated Cozhani’s theory, pointing to lacerations on wings, broken tibial spines, and cracked raptorial appendages. Not only were the insects highly intelligent but their intent was in no way malevolent. The creatures had been mistreated, they said, and seemed to have escaped from their own world to seek refuge in ours. They weren’t hostile, nor were they the Antichrist as our religious leaders claimed; they’d simply arrived on our shores seeking something better.

“Delusional” was what AM talk-show hosts called Cozhani’s theories. These insects were keepers of decay, squirming with stingers, neurotoxins, and poisonous mandibles. They were highly dangerous, anti-insect bloggers claimed. Their bodies hid viruses that would corrupt our immersive landscapes. An invasion of bugs destroying immersive reality was simply the start of a larger migration.