HiranyaShesha
Ten Dragons, One Hundred Clowns, One Thousand Weirdos... and everyone else
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Gaura is a cybersecurity student who notices things other people miss-QR codes baked into band logos, binary scratched into toilet stalls, empty friend requests that vanish the moment he taps them. His ADHD brain is wired for pattern recognition, and the patterns he's finding around Melbourne are getting harder to dismiss as coincidence.
Dragging his friends Shanti and John along for the ride, Gaura follows a trail of cryptic codes through city streets, networking events, and alleyway smoke spots. The clues lead him to a shadow network that moves through the city like a second operating system, its members disguised in adversarial makeup and 3D-printed accessories, communicating through Markov-chain gibberish and rickrolls, calling what they do "the game."
As the boundary between cryptographic puzzle and psychotic break starts to blur, Gaura is left holding one question that won't let him go - What isn't a computer?
And if he keeps pulling at the thread, will he like what he finds on the other side?
The Mirror of Shards is an ontological cyberpunk mystery about hidden grammars, the compulsion to find a pattern, and what happens when the pattern starts looking back.
*Disclaimer* This is a work in progress, I have almost not edited it at all.
Also, I have a little bit of brain damage that affects my memory, so if this hasn't been updated in a while I have probably forgotten that I wrote it. If you want more, you can email me at griffyn@sandhi.com.au to remind me it exists, or you can just wait, I rediscover it every 6 months or so.