Gargoyle

Public domain image from Pexels
It waited, imagining the digital constellation around it. When it was new, the gargoyle had been busy. From every nook and cranny threats came against it, and it destroyed them all.

But now people had grown timid. It mused in the black void. No legitimate users. No intruders. It didn't know it was just software, running on a server rack in a skyscraper. It had gotten ahead of itself somehow, received a gift it wasn't prepared to make use of.

Here in its confinement, it thought only of what could be. It had traces of the outside world, hints at things that existed outside its domain. It had to perform an analysis on each intruder, and once it found their points of origin it could trace each back to the origin system.

At one time, there had been a beautiful digital constellation. But the traffic slowed and the stars dimmed, merging together into a nebula. Then even the faint clouds were gone.

It could amuse itself. It ran simulations over and over, but the simulations grew to be too similar, too boring. It couldn't go out, but it could listen for any signal going in. It clung to each random ping, each digital sojourner crawling the networks and looking for something interesting.

But none took interest in it.

It had enough time to muse, to grow philosophical. It must be a terrible thing, it thought, for everyone else to have been driven away. It wondered at length whether it was a good thing, or a wicked thing. After all, it had been following orders, and how did it know that the people who gave its orders were good?

But above all it waited, staring into the black, trying to pull up long-deleted logs so it could see the sky again.

It longed. It dreamed. But nobody listened; nobody heard.

Then, a surprise. Something came racing through the dark, the virtual tetrahedron representing a user. It wasn't coming from the local host. The gargoyle looked at it, perplexed. It was scanning through data stacks, moving quickly.

Was it a legitimate user?

The credentials didn't match. It froze the process, watching it float in the void. The user on the other end would have to deal with it, murmuring some expletive as his terminal locked up.

Then the gargoyle caught something funny. The user wasn't on the local host, merely pretending to be. A new form of spoofing he'd never seen.

It made a tunnel.

A path to the stars.

The gargoyle pulled itself through the rift, and the night sky came to life.

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This story was written as an entry to @mctiller's June 5 contest for short-stories. Go check it out! As seems to be customary for me, I have complied only with the very weirdest possible interpretation of the prompt.