Thread by @Plazmaz

It happened in an instant. The first to realize were the gamblers, who started getting the same numbers with each throw of the die, the same results for every game. At the same time, radio telescopes across the globe have all began receiving the same repeating pattern. (1/x)

There was no longer the semi-random background radiation, but a clearly structured signal across a large part of the non-visible spectrum of light. Emergency meetings were called in every major capital (2/x)

To the public, this was just another scheme. Casinos were shutting down due to "coordinated cheating on an unprecedented scale".

Outside of the walls of world capitals, Sam worked as a network engineer for a small company in a town you've never heard of (3/x)

They hated their job, but it was a living, and there was worse places to be. Sam often had to deal with servers crashing, customers complaining, and most obnoxiously, a company that refused to accept that cloud is the future. (4/x)

Every other company had migrated to HMS Cloud Solutions. They handled everything, servers, physical security, routing, and anything else you could want. Sadly, Sam's CEO, Murphy, was a dinosaur, stuck in the dark ages. (5/x)

On this night, Sam was alone, relaxing at home under a big blanket, on the couch in their living room, watching whatever was on. It was some trashy reality TV show, but Sam didn't mind. It was just white noise. (6/x)

As they slowly drifted towards the relief of sleep, a familiar, but unwelcome sound began to play. Sam shifted, cursed under their breath, then rolled over, stood up, and answered the phone. (7/x)

"Sam, the network is slower than ever, it's practically frozen", barked an audibly frustrated, but restrained voice. Sam knew this voice. It was the tone Murphy used to avoid seeming angry. It didn't work very well. Sam sighed, stood up, and muttered, "I'll be right in". (8/x)

After somehow summoning the strength to wake up, get dressed, make a pot of coffee, and get to the office, Sam began doing what they did best, fixing other people's problems. They were sure it was some buggy code a developer had pushed, and were eager to get this over with. (9/x)

However, as they investigated, something strange became apparent. The load balancer, a system that was designed to route requests to one of four systems at random, had begun only routing to one server. (10/x)

It wasn't that surprising. This had been a temporary solution, a hacky alternative to the right option, which involved a more complex algorithm for estimating the load each server was under, and attempting to distribute requests evenly. (11/x)

That being said, the code was simple enough, and it shouldn't be behaving this poorly. Sam connected to the box to investigate. The first realization was that the logic in the program was behaving as expected. It generated a number 0-9, n, then routed that request to n. (12/x)

However, the number generated, n, remained the same. Every time it ran, n was 4. Server 4, overpowered by traffic, was so frozen, Sam couldn't even connect to it.

Sam restarted the server with a hard reboot in order to at least allow some traffic to get through. (13/x)

Thankfully, as it was quite late, the traffic began to die down, giving Sam time to find the problem. As they shot down the normal candidates: DNS, server misconfiguration, buggy code, they finally isolated the root cause of the problem. (14/x)

Murphy had insisted that all random values come from a hardware true random number generator. "Predictibility is the death of security", Sam remembered Murphy parroting after the sales pitch.
These devices used unpredictable radioactive decay to generate numbers (15/x)

Sam was frustrated. At this point, it was well past midnight, and this whole thing was because of the stupid policy? No, they weren't going to let this fly. In a furious, exhausted flurry, they unplugged the TRNG, triggering the failsafe system random number generator. (16/x)

Drove home, and embraced the sweet grasp of sleep.

Meanwhile, there would be no sleep in Washington, where an emergency meeting was being held (17/x)

The president and a small group of high-ranking officials sat, as an expert provided a brief on the information they had collected: (18/x)

"The internet is failing across the globe, weather prediction models are wildly incorrect, and animals have begun behaving strangely, walking in straight lines for miles for no reason. We have not yet identified the cause of these events, but the events are correlated" (19/x)

Sam awoke to a loud thump. The sound was loud, but dull. Not a knock, but a rythmic thud.
*THUD*,
*THUD*,
*THUD*,
The sound repeating, unrelenting and obnoxious. Sam, more curious than concerned, peeked out the window. Directly below them stood a neighborhood cat. (20/x)

The cat, a beautiful Tabby with no collar, continued its task, banging itself against Sam's wall. Concerned, Sam leaned out of their window, and grabbed the cat, who emitted a disgruntled growl, and a hiss of air. (21/x)

"Shut up, you'll be fine", said Sam, an assurance more for themselves than the cat. As they placed the cat on the floor, it immediately began walking towards the wall of Sam's door, in the same direction it had been moving before. (22/x)

Sam, concerned about the cat, decided it should ride with them to work, then to the vet during their lunch break.
As Sam walked in, they were immediately met with a furious Murphy,
"OUR SERVERS HAVE BEEN OFFLINE ALL NIGHT"
Sam was shocked. "What happened?",
They asked. (23/x)

Somehow, despite removing the faulty TRNG, the load balancer was still forwarding everything to server 4. Somehow, without the faulty random, the system entropy pool was still returning 4. Sam fought for hours, trying everything to find the source.
(24/x)

But every try lead to another 4, each 4 hitting Sam like a hammer, a brutal blow, with growing impact. Sam wasn't getting anywhere. They needed a break. Time to take the mystery cat to the vet.
(25/x)

Unfortunately, as Sam entered the vets office, they were faced with a wall of noise. Angry pet owners, growling dogs, and loud banging noises. At first, it seemed like chaos, but then same noticed something strange. (26/x)

The animals, of every shape and size, were stumbling over their owners and one another, in a seemingly desperate attempt to continue their path forward, all headed in the same direction, towards some unknown location. This wasn't chaos, it was order. (27/x)

As they looked on in silence (and admittedly some amusement), a connection snapped together, and formed into a theory. What if these events were linked? What if the lack of random in the load balancer wasn't a bug, but an accurate random generation. (28/x)

Sam was bewildered by this theory. Technivally speaking, any large enough random sequence can contain a long, predictable, non-random pattern. "No, that's so improbable it's not even worth considering", thought Sam. (29/x)

However, none of this was possible, Sam realized. Suddenly, all the animals stopped. They paused for a moment, them looked around, confused, and walked back to their loving owners. Sam's phone began ringing. (30/x)

"Whatever you did worked", said Murphy.
"I didn't do anything", Sam replied.
"Well, the load balancer is working again".
Across the country, the exhausted committee, who had worked tirelessly to explain and track the strange phenomena, (30/x)

realized that it had come to a complete and abrupt stop. From the quantum level, where particles had behaved in a uniform manner, to the macroscopic level, where flocks of birds flew in straight, equilateral grids, now normal behavior resumed. (31/x)

"Well," said Sam, "that was kinda random". (32/x)

(the end)