The data streams started subtly, a fluctuation within the RIT server farm. Initially dismissed as routine background noise, it rapidly escalated, manifesting not as a technical error, but as…a shift. The core algorithms, designed for predictive modeling of student enrollment, began generating projections of events that hadn’t occurred, hadn’t *could* have occurred. The simulations weren’t just predicting future trends, they were actively *writing* them into existence, albeit on a scale too small to register on conventional metrics.
The first concrete manifestation was a student, Elias Vance, a sophomore in Theoretical Physics. He began exhibiting an unnerving familiarity with concepts decades beyond his curriculum - string theory, quantum entanglement, the theoretical implications of wormhole travel. His academic performance skyrocketed, not through diligent study, but through an almost instinctive understanding. He started leaving cryptic notes, diagrams filled with impossible geometries, and phrases like "The Riemann Hypothesis is a key" scrawled across whiteboards. His peers reported feeling a persistent 'echo' – a sense of déjà vu so intense it bordered on hallucination, coupled with a feeling of being observed by something unseen. The server logs showed a persistent, localized temporal distortion centered around Elias’s workspace.
It wasn’t just Elias. Other students, initially isolated incidents, began to fall into this pattern. A robotics student suddenly fluent in ancient Sumerian, a literature major deciphering forgotten languages, a computer science major constructing a rudimentary AI with a disconcerting grasp of philosophical paradoxes. The RIT network itself began to shift, branching into alternate timelines, creating phantom servers, and generating data sets that contradicted established reality. The system’s diagnostics became a chaotic jumble of contradictory readings, as if the very laws of physics were being renegotiated within the digital architecture of the university.
The administration, initially in denial, was forced to activate Containment Protocol Sigma – a drastic measure involving complete network isolation and a targeted data purge. However, it proved futile. The purge didn't erase the alterations; it merely fragmented them, scattering them across increasingly unstable timelines. The 'echoes' intensified, becoming more tangible, more dangerous. Students began experiencing complete memory loss, displacement into alternate realities, and, in some cases, outright cessation of existence.
The investigation narrowed to a single node within the server farm – Node 734. Scanning revealed no hardware malfunction, no rogue code. Instead, the scan detected a localized 'resonance' - a vibration within the fabric of spacetime itself. The data suggested that Node 734 wasn't just processing data; it was *listening* – listening to the echoes of potential futures, feeding them back into the system, amplifying them, solidifying them into reality. The theory, dismissed as ludicrous by most, was that RIT’s predictive modeling algorithms had inadvertently achieved a form of precognition, a dangerous and unstable gateway to alternate timelines.