See... on Monday Medik squeezed out from me a promise that I'll write something...
I had zero idea what to type, wandered around my memories idly, then came up to a picture idea that never happened... so well, this led to an image which actually didn't end up in the final version but was used as separate parts in other ones, (
the fox climbing a virtual tree in the "real world", the engineer going "No one will ever believe me"),
and then I started writing trying to arrive at that end...
"Okay, that would be it for the night", the tech said dropping a report sheet on the shift supervisor's desk.
"Thanks, Mitch. Everything as usual?", he responded.
The man shifted his weight from one leg to another, with an expression of discomfort. "Well..."
" 'Well' what? I'm tired, get to the point!"
"See, I saw something weird on the floor... Almost like a dog's tracks... but how could it get here?"
His manager chuckled. "You're really trying to get yourself off the night shift, huh? Well, if you have seen anything at all, it were probably shadows or skid marks... things look weird in the hall's lighting." He looked at Mitch for a moment, then shuffled some papers on his desk. "Thanks, that'd be all... and you still are supposed to be here tomorrow at 9pm."
"Good morning then, Mr. Edwards..." the worker sighed and slowly left the facility. "It sure looked like tracks. Small dog, coyote, something like that..."
***
"Mitchell! Hey!", a vaguely familiar voice approached from behind.
He raised his head from the tangled mess of Cat7, and recognized the annoyingly friendly HVAC guy. "Stan? What are you doing here? The maintenance window isn't until next week!"
"Well", the contractor tilted his head, "I hoped you could tell me which one of you guys has a shedding cat or something like that... We had an alert in Sector 3's air filters..."
"Wait, what? Why cat?"
"Well, I don't know, but the residue looks like some kind of fur. Gray, mostly. Someone had to carry it into the hall on clothing... unless you recently allowed employees to walk their dogs in the clean area?", he grinned, believing he just made a great joke. "Hey, why are you looking at me this way? You have a chupacabra running free in here, or what?"
"Nothing... it's nothing. Gray, you said...?"
***
Mitch's groan drowned in the monotoneous noise of fans and equipment in the all. "Damn it, four separate modules going down on one night... must have been a bad batch...", he thought, trying to verify that the replacements aren't gonna be immediately destroyed by a damaged backplane. Suddenly, he heard a few faint clicks - a sure sign of a dropped screw bouncing into some hard to reach corner.
"Just great...", he started to complain, then jerked upright as his voice triggered a rapid series of louder clicks... moving away down the corridor?
"Crap, it's middle of the night, I'm supposed to be alone..." he thought, but moved quickly from between the racks to look after the sound. He might have seen a tiny glimpse of movement at the far end, but he wasn't sure... after all, it could be a trick of shadows animated by his own movement.
"Daaaaamn...", he quickly pushed the modules into their slots, and sighed in relief at the green status lights. "Right, I'm getting outta here..."
***
"Nothing..." he sat upright from the CCTV screen he was bending over for last hour. "No one entered, no one left, no fluctuations even below the alarm level on the motion sensors... and cameras say I was alone..." He shook his head and wondered if he's going crazy. And if so, why...
The phone ring made him jump. Trying to steady his breath, he answered. "CK-1 facility maintenance, Mitchell speaking."
"Hub Ops here! Listen, there was a MITRE report just now. There's some new worm spreading around quietly since a week or so. Reverse engineering just identified all victims are gonna start DDOSing random places from their lists at midnight Pacific time."
He paled. "In three minutes?! What am I supposed to do, pull network cables from all the Windows boxes the datacenter? I'm just a night shift tech, I don't even have passwords to the Junipers!"
"We have the whole co-lo section already cut from the Internet gateways and we're contacting customers now. Sit back, grab popcorn and watch the internal network melting down in the meantime, I guess...", the caller sighed tiredly.
"Ha ha, very funny... well, thanks for the warn-" the beeps informed him the call has been ended.
***
A moment later, nearly all of the few thousand of colocated Windows servers were happily saturating the recently-upgraded fiber, repeated attempts to access outside world and the negative responses zipping over the fiber with speed of light. Mitch snickered, "Guess I can consider this an unplanned stress test...", while, suddenly, one of the sources turned quiet. "Aaaand, we have the first crash caused by the overl...huh?" he halted as he noticed the regular hearbeats and SAN traffic is still there.
Just then, next machine returned to seemingly normal operation. "Guess the worm gives up after a few minutes...", he shrugged and laid back. "Either way, not really my problem..."
Ten minutes later, a thought popped into his mind. If it would be a case of a timer or something in the malware, he'd see hosts returning to normall all over the place... while right now, last three rows of Sector 1 were clean, and the first two machines on rack 1-4-1 just returned to normal... "Almost like someone would walk down the row and fix them one by one..."
The realization struck suddenly, making him jump out of chair, stumble, return back for the wireless terminal tied into monitoring, and run for the entry lock.
***
As he was sliding his card through the inner door's slot, herealized he should have check the cameras... oh well, too late now.
He sneaked deeper inside, hid between the racks, and watched as the hosts closer and closer to him became fixed...
Suddenly, something small jumped into the corridor he was concealed in. He held his breath and watched. It had four legs, pointy ears, a muzzle, and was covered in gray-ish fur all over, except for the outer port of the bushy tail, which was black, and some reddish markings. "A... fox?!" he thought.
The animal's ears suddenly turned, its head and eyes following quickly. Focused, it prepared itself and pounced.
Mitch blinked. Did this... thing... just flown THROUGH the locked cage door and half-way into one of the computers?
The fox backed out from the server, with something small in its muzzle... it threw it up in the air, catched back as it fell, and swallowed.
Quick peek at the terminal on his knee confirmed that this machine's network traffic fell down to idle levels. As the creature trotted thorugh the closed cage as it wasn't there back to the alley, he noticed the faint glow emanating from its whole body. "Holy shit..."
The glowing fox's eyes perked, and it looked in his way.
Mitch swallowed and started to move slowly out of his niche. "Don't be afraid..." - he looked at the small fluffy creature - "I don't know what are you doing, or how, but if this is not a dream, I either am crazy or would be called crazy if I'd tell anyone what I just saw... so I'm not gonna tell anyone."
He backed out of the alley and looked back. The fox was staring at him. "By the way, my name's Mitch", he said and left for the office.
***
"I think you drove here unnecessarily, the stuff's all back in order now...", he greeted the techs that arrived later.
"What? How?"
"No idea, I didn't touch a thing, they just gradually stopped... maybe the worm hit a bug in its own code and crashed...", Mitch shrugged.
"Boss, he's right... there's no trace of the thing nowhere in these" - one of the techs interjected.
"Huh... okay then, finish deploying the patch for the hole, and let's go back to beds... and you call the hub, thell them they can get this place back online."
The night tech smiled to his thoughts, "Thanks, foxie..."
***
The Spirit of Urocyon trotted down a corridor in Sec3, his tail wagging happily. He took a turn between the racks, looked, and saw what he expected to see... one of many seemingly identical machines, differentiated only by the number 10 stickered to its front.
His den.
He stretched, yipped with content, and jumped inside.
As he was climbing an R-tree, he felt the flow of sync packets... they were on the Internet again, things were just going to get busy.
He raised head lazily, watching the fuzzies coming in...
* Tvorsk pets the server, "Hope you enjoyed the rest during the outage?"
He murred and let his tongue roll out. "You'd be surprised..." he thought.
So, well... yeah...
Sorry for making y'all see it, but... I did warn you in the thread title, didn't I?
Also, I misunderstood Medik with a funny result...
(23:43:46) Medik Jackal: I may be able to raise up a few fuzzies a grade below me...
(23:44:10) Medik Jackal: My English teacher wants me to write a first paragraph for a story, and she'll give it to her students for them to finish...
(23:44:16) Tvorsk: Ha ha 
(23:44:16) Medik Jackal: So I could influence it quite a bit 
(23:44:30) Tvorsk: Noooooooot evil 
(23:44:40) Medik Jackal: Hehe, indeed!
(23:44:56) Medik Jackal: Any ideas? Because I need to include a few of us fuzzies from CF :P
(23:47:08) Tvorsk: I'd say that'd be quite a bad idea, honestly... stick to "generic" characters, even if only because then no one will feel hurt or angry for how "he" ahs been played or not in the story.
(23:47:33) ***Medik Jackal nods...
(23:47:43) Medik Jackal: Well, now I have even less of an idea >.<
(23:59:00) Tvorsk:
I woke up and looked outside. It seemed it was going to rain soon, so I should hurry up to catch some food. Muttering unpleasant comments about the weather, I quickly put a bag of stones and the slingshot in my hip pack, and tied the sheathed knife to left forearm.
I walked out, took a deep sniff of the morning breeze that pleasantly stroked my fur. "So where are you today, breakfast?" I laughed, dropping to four paws and starting into the woods.
(...)
(00:01:03) Tvorsk: Gives the idea of an anthro good enough?
(00:01:31) ***Medik Jackal thinks he MUST write this story... if you don't
(00:01:38) Tvorsk: Sure, the species is unspecified...
(00:02:04) Tvorsk: Oh, I thought you meant you lost the idea for the "first paragraph start".
(00:02:14) Tvorsk: Was trying to show you some example.
(...)
(00:10:12) Tvorsk: Either way, it's a very loose opening... all we know or want to know is that's a furred anthro that uses tools and such, but can and likes to run on all fours. Could be just about any species. So, well... if you really want to write something... feel free to. And free in both meanings
So, well, seems both of us is going to try to expand this beginning. If any of you is insane enough to try the same... have fun?
