The first one was discovered three quarters of the way up a transmission tower in Calgary, dangling by a mix of thin wires and duct tape. The tower climber took a pause from his job to inspect the keyboard, testing out its mechanical keys. He typed out “sszasawesawawzvn,pjihi;[]” then hit Enter, not realizing what would follow. A hologram popped up above the keyboard, displaying “LEADERBOARD:” followed by the number one and his text. He shrugged, radioed his discovery to his command center, and continued his climb.
The instant Enter was pressed, a website appeared giving a vague description of the location of thousands of keyboards across the globe and an accompanying leaderboard for each. The first, “radio pine in the southern great white north” indicating the tower’s disguise as a tree, sat alone as the only discovered keyboard for months. The second, “tomb below a steel icon” was found in the catacombs of Paris. The finder input a simple “hello world” and left it at that.
The site’s attached forum became the hub for discussion and discovery. Moderators were silent, and conspiracies on the website and keyboard origins flew rampant. Those who sought out the hidden keyboards called themselves ‘keycachers,’ making it their mission to decode the descriptions. Some keycachers copied the original message from the tower climber, while others had their own signatures. One keycacher managed to type six entire chapters of Moby Dick into a keyboard attached in the rafters of an arena before claiming that the police had forced them to finish typing.
As leaderboards grew and the keyboards’ locations became known, it was a race to find the last few. It was speculated that there was one buried in the Arctic Circle, and another at the bottom of the ocean. The most discussed location, described simply as “forbidden entry” had just one entry on it’s leaderboard with no additional clues to its location: “Do not come here, you will be killed”. Theories ranged from nuclear facilities to presidential bunkers to the Vactican’s Secret Archives.
a repost from my twitter during Invisible Networks, a series of prompts run by @ctrlcreep (a huge inspiration of mine)