WebWorks

The cult called “WebWorks” is not much like anyone’s idea of a cult. For starters, it is entirely digital. It is the brainchild of a computer developer named Marcus Howell, who rose to prominence in the early ‘80s with several programs, like Dark Horizons, an early attempt at a space simulator.

Overview

The game proved popular, as did some of Howell’s other educational programs, though unfortunately their educational subject matter was quickly outdated. Still, the success of those and further developments put Howell in the spotlight in the early days of widespread Internet usage. A skilled hacker and technician, Howell was a wizard of the dawning information age. He also grew increasingly unhinged, as the diet of energy drinks and O'Tolley's fast food he ate voraciously contained incredible levels of Wyrm taint.

Howell’s dreams became troubled as he began to see what he felt was the true reality beneath the surface, interpreted through the Internet as a medium — a great web spreading over the planet, slowly entangling the human world, interconnections through conduits of glass, steel, and fiber optics. As the Wyrm’s taint seeped into his dreaming mind, Howell saw the opportunity to do what no one had done before him. Awakened to the truth of the world, he realized that the great web spinner whose works bound the human world from without also held captive the force of change and destruction. That great force, the Wyrm, was a prisoner, but Howell was determined to help free it and put the world back on the right course.

The taint engineered into Howell’s next batch of programs drew the attention of Wyrm spirits, which aided him in what ways they could. As the turn of the twenty-first century approached, Howell began to seek out others like himself online: arrogant gamers and computer gurus who enjoyed their superiority in the burgeoning digital world. His words, carefully crafted and thoughtfully written, struck a chord in others them as he wrote of the blindness of the masses, The “cult,” unofficially named after Howell’s company, WebWorks, has members who are ostensibly consultants and contractors. Howell himself recruits dozens every year.

What the cult does, and so very well, is fight on a battlefield under-appreciated by both forces of the Wyrm and those of Gaia. Until his group began to grow, the Internet and global network formed by cell phones, easy international travel, and communication telecommunications networks was largely the domain of the Weaver. Howell realized that he could use this global connection to reach further than any purely physical cult ever could, and help loosen the Weaver’s grip on the human world. In turn, the Wyrm’s position strengthens and Gaia weakens further. The Garou never cared about the Internet and now find themselves reacting too slowly to a widespread problem.

Members thus use their skills and anonymity to spread both chaos and their message. They feel that the human world grows ever more static and calcified; it slowly stagnates, while the force of change for the future suffocates. They advocate using the very weapons of stagnating society to tear down the walls and fray the threads of the great web. On the surface, WebWorks’ activities resemble those of Incognito, but far more focused. Incognito is a chaotic force, seeking to troll the entire digital world. WebWorks has a very deliberate purpose and always works toward that goal. Every virus engineered and released by the cult, which numbers in the thousands, holds a small amount of taint. Every screensaver, every application and game, all of them are tainted, and they spread like wildfire throughout the Internet.

The effect any one tainted code program has is small, but in aggregate, the effect is quite significant. People are frustrated and infuriated by their computer technical issues, whether caused by viruses or programs that harm the computer. Sometimes, jobs are lost or families wrecked — a man who works hard his whole life to raise a family might find himself forever ruined by inappropriate pictures of children or other women — even though he’s never so much as looked at anyone like that. He’ll never know that the WebWorks’ Encyclopedia of the Mind program he bought for his very own children put those pictures there. Arcane formulae hidden within the code ensures that human authorities never have a direct link back to any WebWorks product. The result is the spreading distribution of small amounts of taint, weakening people the world over to render them more vulnerable to spiritual possession and despair. The chaos caused in the lives of those burned by WebWorks products furthers the effect, and allows a programmer in Mexico to grievously harm thousands of users in China, without ever having to leave her room.

The other profound effect of Web-Works is the weakening of the Weaver’s stranglehold over the information superhighways. It slows the great spinner’s rise that much more every day, and every strand broken by WebWorks is a strand no longer binding the Wyrm. Garou can hardly fight an enemy like this, even were all the Garou Nation comprised of tech-savvy Glass Walkers. The numbers are too great and the threat is too widespread; even though packs sometimes locate and destroy a cultist, his victim is often half a world away. Most WebWorks cultists work alone once inducted into the cult, and even those who work in groups are just a scale on the hide of the dragon. Removing one leaves tens of thousands more, all lords of a realm the Garou don’t fully understand and cannot simply smash. Worse still, the cult grows every day, and its members are active day and night. The only effective way to deal with it is to strike it at the source, and for all its power, even the Garou Nation cannot simply destroy the Wyrm. Beset by enemies on all sides, this rising cyber cult strikes from a realm largely untouched by werewolves, much as the Garou utilize the Umbra.

References

• WTA. W20 Book of the Wyrm, p. 84-85.