Browser City

Chapter 1: The Clickbait

*Specific Note: time works differently in this universe. For example, a character can be eight days old but look like eight years old.

The User of that laptop was a hopeless idiot.

He was human, and therefore a self-important git. He didn't know that digital beings were living inside the browser he used every day, that there was actually an entire city, full of energy, running on electrical power and Wi-Fi connection: Browser City.

The city looked like an island floating in a sea of binary code flowing in every direction. Tall buildings made of steel, precious metals, and neon lights defined its skyline under a midnight blue dome for the sky. The Core, the highest building of them all, hosted the most vital features, apps, and add-ons that that bright city had got to offer. It was their workplace and home.

Shannon Wise, a search engine, was among them. A digital female entity resembling a young adult human being, with a lean figure and a passion for questioning things.

"Why doesn't the User know that we exist?" she asked her dear older brother, Aethelred Wise, while working from the round-desk-shaped control panel in the centre of the Console Room, the most important room in the Core.

It was a room fully decorated in dark grey and pristine white. It contained several desks all around the control panel like planets orbit around their beloved sun. 

At that moment, the Wise siblings were alone.

Shannon's blue eyes glowed with curiosity as she kept shooting questions at him, "Doesn't our existence make sense? How would their browser work if not? Why haven't Users thought about it? Why won't they talk to us?" Her shoulder-length brown hair moved with grace as she had uttered those doubts. She wore a skin-tight, indigo suit which covered all her body, with an art deco linear design in glowing white.

"I don't know about that, Shannon," Aethelred replied with calmness from the other side of the control panel. He was a tall, adult male with short, brown hair, a short beard, and dark grey eyes. His suit was sea green with also art deco, white glowing lines.

"Shouldn't the browser settings and the most prominent and basic feature in Browser City know that?" The smirk on her lips didn't go unnoticed.

"You're quite a chatterbox today, sis. You could search for that information yourself. You're the search engine, right?" he went on while she was already opening a new holographic search window in front of her.

I love chasing after information! It's as exhilarating as hunting the ultimate prey. Quenching her thirst for knowledge made her digital heart soar. 

Her brother saw how invested she was in the task by the way her fingers keenly clicked and swiped left and right in the flashing windows hovering in front of her. He chuckled lovingly.

Then, he looked up at the ceiling, where the cam was broadcasting the User's face live. He sighed.

"We can see him through the cam, but he can't see us," she said when she noticed her brother staring at the User's huge face above their heads. 

The User was a human male in his late teens.

"Such a shame," Aethelred added with a calm countenance. It was that kind of aura and his assertiveness that made him a born leader and a true source of trustworthiness and wisdom in the Core. "It's like one of those mysteries in the universe, I guess. The moon's fading magnetic field. Or the existence of multiverses."

"What's a multiverse?" She opened yet another window to search for that as well. 

They were hovering over the round control panel as a background job while the User was browsing for something else entirely. Shannon's job consisted of checking on the User's browsing activity and making sure he was safe from online threats that might poison the device they lived in.