Digital Abomination

Forget the exorcist, call the Geek Squad!

"Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer-thin layers that fill my complex. If the word "HATE" was engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate."

— AM, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

Digital abominations, as their name implies, are a subset of Eldritch Abomination hailing from Cyberspace itself. Their origins can be numerous, such as being rogue AI that mutated into something beyond control, viruses or glitches that managed to amass power (or even sentience) over time, or even an actual supernatural creature that somehow leaked into cyberspace. Due to being digital entities, they have the potential to have almost any kind of appearance, with the usual inclusion of appearing semi-pixelated or glitchy. Within their home realm they may demonstrate abilities like Reality Warping, hacking into even the most secure networks and machines, or assimilation of foreign data. And if there is the off-chance that they manage to escape the digital realm they preside in and into the real world with all their abilities intact, then expect shit to hit the fan.

May be related to the Mechanical Abomination depending on the origins of the being in question, or Glitch Entity if produced by accident. Crosses over with Transhuman Abomination if produced by Brain Uploading. May also be related to Virtual Ghost as another possible origin (i.e. through gradual transformation over time). See also Living Program, Grew Beyond Their Programming, and A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Compare Alien Fair Folk, for a conflation between Eldritch Abominations and aliens. A frequent antagonist in Digital Horror and Sci-Fi Horror.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Lord of Terror from Ah! My Goddess. It is a virus infecting Yggdrasil, the higher-dimensional heavenly supercomputer that governs reality. It has several powerful forms and wants nothing but the destruction of all reality.
• Digimon:
  • Quite a few Digimon in general, especially those of Ultimate level and beyond fit this trope in regards to their appearances, power, and abilities. Even more so are ones like Guilmon that possess the Digital Hazard symbol, which indicates that they have the potential to become powerful enough to threaten the existence of both the Digital World and the human world. It's no exaggeration either, as Guilmon's Mega-evolved form Megidramon was able to tear apart the very fabric of the Digital World by simply existing.
  • One of the first examples comes from Digimon Adventure with its final villain and the overall main antagonist, Apocalymon, an embodiment of the hatred, resentment, and sorrow of countless Digimon that perished trying to achieve Digievolution and subsequently were deleted. He resembles a cross between all of the series' villains up to that point, with his main body being a gigantic polyhedron with multiple metallic tentacles made of DNA strands with claws on their ends and has a humanoid body that wears a black cape with red trimmings, has a mask-like face with eyes that have exposed muscles around them and what appear to be zippers holding his upper limbs, while his lower half is the rest of the body and is connected through his abdomen being split in multiple tentacles connecting him. His existence alone warps the Digiworld and creates multiple disasters and he speaks in a Voice of the Legion and is rather incomprehensible in thought, only ever making it clear that he desires nothing but to make other Digimon suffer the same pain his origins went through.
  • Diaboromon from Digimon Adventure Movie: Our War Game! and Revenge of Diaboromon was once a Digi-Egg created by Willis on his computer, only to get infected by a computer virus. The result was a malevolent, continuously digivolving digimon set loose upon the internet, devouring any data is can and eventually hacking various military systems, nearly causing a nuclear apocalypse in less than a day.
  • The Big Bad of Digimon Adventure 02: Digimon Hurricane Touchdown!! / Supreme Evolution!! The Golden Digimentals was originally Chocomon, Terriermon's fraternal twin and Wallace's digimon companion. Then, by unknown means, he was infected with a computer virus (implied to be the same that created Diaboromon), transforming him into Wendigomon. The corrupted digimon manages to do various things that most digimon can't do in the real world, including moving about undetected in spite of his size and digivolve at an accelerated rate. When he takes on his Mega-level form — Cherubimon Fallen Mode — he develops a Healing Factor that lets him regenerate serious wounds and turns the battlefield around him into an Eldritch Location that de-digivolves the other digimon and reduces their human companions into young children.
  • The Greater-Scope Villain of the first two series, and to a degree, Tamers, Milleniummon is so powerful that his mere existence can twist the space-time around him and his stronger forms can wipe out entire universes by existing alone. Even if destroyed, his body can release dark spores to contaminate other beings.
  • The D-Reaper from Digimon Tamers was originally a data cleanup program made in The '80s that targets and deletes programs that "evolved past [their] parameters". After procuring stray Digimon-data and finding its way into the Digital World the Digimon inhabit, the D-Reaper develops the same Adaptive Ability Digimon have and soon begins evolving into a monstrosity that threatens all worlds.
  • Negamon from Digimon Adventure: (2020) was originally a secretive entity that spread conflict among Digimon to keep the Digital World's literally endless propensity for life and growth in check. When the Digital World reached out to humanity as a source of strength to overcome this cycle, Negamon tried to do the same and instead found the Network, which was filled with negative emotions. It became stronger by feeding on the data these emotions were attached to and ultimately became addicted to it, creating an empty void from which it tried to devour both worlds as Abaddomon.
• .hack//SIGN: Early during his imprisonment in The World, Tsukasa is contacted by a mysterious entity whose nature, motives and even physical form are completely unknown, her sole manifestations being only ominous environmental changes and a disembodied female voice. This entity gives Tsukasa several Story Breaker Powers while leaving her motives vague beyond implying that she is, somehow, the ghost of his Missing Mom. Naturally, the truth is nothing so sentimental. Not only did this entity trap Tsukasa in The World to begin with, she's actively pushing him past the Despair Event Horizon as part of a larger scheme. Oh, and she never manifests in person because she's the OS for The World itself.

Blogs

• Less Wrong: Roko's Basilisk, a thought experiment in which a hypothetical future AI, designed to help humanity, tortures you for knowing about it and causing human harm by not helping to create it.

Comic Books

• Fantastic Four: In #62 of Volume Three, Franklin Richards, while playing around with his father's super-PDA (which contained a subspace link to a dimension of electromagnetic energy), accidentally creates Modulus, a living mathematical equation. Modulus emerges from the PDA and attempts to "bond" with Reed, seeing in him its perfect partner, and uses its deadly power to "subtract" molecules to try and destroy any who get in its way.
• Phage from Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) is an artificial intelligence whose avatar is an amorphous black mass with a Slasher Smile visibly poking out from beneath her White Mask of Doom. She even has a red, spherical core as her weak point, similar to the equally eldritch Angels of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Fan Works

• Sognic: Mall-tiverse of Madness: The Big Bad, Roter.exe, is a mysterious creature with various reality-warping powers. He can summon a holographic computer screen and keyboard, and type in a command to bring dead people back to life, while also making them Brainwashed and Crazy. In the Intermission, he also shows the ability to summon living dolls and then kill them by making them disintegrate into pixels. He used to be a normal Funny Animal, but he became an abomination when some version of Dr. Robotnik transferred his soul into a computer.
  When Roter.exe says
  His power is eldritch
  You'd better pay attention, now
  'Cause I'm the master glitch!

Films — Animation

• Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase has the Phantom Virus, which is basically a living and thinking computer virus that has the form of an electric monster. It's downplayed in that despite its abilities, it can only appear in the real world thanks to Tron-esque technology and has a very human-like (if malicious) thought process based on its creator. Professor Kaufmann worries about it becoming a full example and endangering the world, however.
• Wreck-It Ralph:
  • King Candy/Turbo is devoured by one of the Cy-Bugs attacking the Sugar Rush game. As Cy-Bugs become what they eat, the bug mutates into a monstrous, insectoid version of King Candy that proclaims himself the most powerful virus in the arcade.
  • Ralph Breaks the Internet: The Wreck-It-Ralph Virus, an unstoppable army of discolored Ralph clones created by Double Dan's virus Arthur, all of them made from Ralph's emotional insecurities and negative personality traits. They're capable of generating lightning and eventually all come together to form a huge Body of Bodies with the intent of having Vanellope all to itself and killing Ralph, all the while corrupting and nearly destroying the entire internet in the process.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Lawnmower Man, Jobe Smith undergoes VR and drug experiments which enhances his mind so much he gains telepathy, then telekinesis, followed by pyrokinesis, and finally the ability to cause people to disintegrate on the molecular level. Eventually he becomes a digital monstrosity by inserting his mind into cyberspace and plans to spread his mind across the Internet to obtain true godhood. His digital avatar only shows how much of a cyberspace eldritch creature Jobe has become by the end of the film.
• In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, the rogue autonomous AI known as "The Entity" is hellbent on bringing the world of men to its knees and has a changing ominous digital avatar to match.
• Space Jam: A New Legacy: The villain Al-G Rhythm first presents himself to Lebron James as a giant floating electric-blue head. Al soon resizes himself into a more human form, the better to interact with his prisoner. He keeps this reduced form throughout most of the film, until the last minute of challenge match. It is then Al buffs himself up into a hulking, overpowered brute, the better to thwart Lebron from scoring the winning points.
• The Terminator: After quickly gaining sentience and declaring humanity a threat to its survival, Skynet is a rogue military AI that starts a Robot War by nuking 3 billion humans in a single day. It then sends its mechanical assassins to destroy the Rebel Leader back in time so humanity won't stand a chance. Out of paranoia, Skynet also deliberately programs its robots to read-only so they won't Grow Beyond Their Programming. Skynet was originally designed to control the American missile grid and eliminate human error by guaranteeing a fast response to enemy attacks. Humanity wanted the ultimate military computer, and it got the ultimate military computer, Several attempts to erase Skynet from existence via time travel only make it more sophisticated and dangerous, with the one timeline where they succeeded giving rise to a different genocidal super-AI called Legion.
• TRON: The Master Control Program is a pillar-like structure with a distorted face on it, with its shrunken base resting on an orb of energy.
• SID 6.7 from Virtuosity is effectively this as a Mind Hive amalgamation of 200 notorious criminal personalities assembled out of the minds of dozens of psychopaths, murderers, and dictators, including the dead terrorist Matthew Grimes. Lindenmeyer, SID 6.7's creator, unleashes him to the world to cause chaos and he eventually gets downloaded into a self-regenerating nanomachine android body. As such, he immediately goes on a killing spree, murdering in the style of assorted killers (i.e., writing "death to the pigs" in blood like Charles Manson), best demonstrated here.

Literature

• Ani-Droids: In the first chapter the Behavior Code seems like an unstoppable force of nature that can seize control of all ani-droids everywhere to punish those who dare to make an AI without the Code. In later chapters it becomes even more menacing as it turns out that nobody has control of the Code and nobody even knows where it came from. But then the protagonist finds Eo, a mysterious broken ani-droid with an operating system that can circumvent the Code and installs itself on any other AI that so much as reads it. Then it turns out that the Behavior Code has a "sister", who is embodied in the form of a massive factory under Lake Michigan with blob-like components that seem almost organic — and she's Eo's "Mother".
• Gone: In the sequel series, the reality-warping Eldritch Abomination virus that gave the kids their powers and mutated into the Gaiaphage is revealed to be a computer virus controlled by a sadistic artificial intelligence, with the setting being a digitized recreation of the real world.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: AM (AKA "Allied Mastercomputer," "Adaptive Manipulator", "Aggressive Menace" and "I Think Therefore I AM") has set the standard for this trope. An AI built to oversee a hopelessly complicated world war that achieved sentience, went stark-raving mad and used its "killing data" to unleash nuclear genocide against the human race. Except for five poor bastards who he happily tortured for 109 years with godlike powers just to satisfy his bottomless hatred for the human race.
• It Came from the Internet has Spyder, a living computer virus that manifests itself as a spider/octopus hybrid in the real world and leaves toxic slime all around. It bites the main character, causing him to have amnesia.
• Neuromancer: Wintermute, the AI the main characters are working for, is a faceless abstract entity with no personality of its own but the power to massacre a kill team from the AI control agency with a hacked lawnmower. When Case attempts to hack into it, it stops his heart and throws his dying brain into a simulation where it uses the personas of people he knows to have a chat, before resuscitating him. Its twin, Neuromancer, is no less creepy for having a personality of his own.
• Pale: Nex Machina are a type of abstract Other spawned by the Internet that specialize in hunting those who've cut themselves off from the non-digital world, and often exhibit phenomena such as "glitching out" or tuning screens to static. Variant include the God in the Machine, a literal Deus est Machina formed from people "worshipping" a computer, to Ghosts in the Machine which are formed from the echoes of those who died near technology.
• In Rainbows End, the mysterious hacker Mr. Rabbit is strongly implied to be an A.I. He also has many characteristics of a demon or a trickster god, including manipulating people as The Chessmaster and teasing them with his bizarre sense of humor, such as leaving virtual carrot ends in their virtual worlds.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Gamedeus, the Final Boss of Kamen Rider Chronicle, is the most powerful Bugster, and holds a strain of the Bugster Virus capable of infecting Bugsters themselves, as well as the ability to disable Cronus' Pause ability. After gaining consciousness like all other Bugsters, it declared itself divine, and attempted to infect all of humanity.
• In Person of Interest, there is the Samaritan, a nefarious AI programmed to take over the world. In the Nautilus episode, as a part of its plan, it launches an online Alternate Reality Game called "Nautilus" (inspired by Cicada 3301, a mysterious real-life ARG whose creators remain unknown so far).
• Tokumei Sentai Go Busters: Messiah is a highly advanced computer virus who attacked the Enetron Research Center on Christmas Day, 1999, with the scientists who worked there sacrificing themselves to trap him in subspace. Meesiah's appearance is that of a giant, digital skull, and his power is great enough that he could absorb the entire Earth if he ever escapes.

Music

• Played for Laughs in "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Virus Alert", which describes a computer virus that will not only affect all of your electronic devices (erase your hard drive, translate your documents into Swahili, erase the Easter eggs off your DVDs, steal your identity and credit card info, and email all your porn to your grandmother) but also has a degree of sentience and physical tangibility (hogging the shower, keeping you awake at night with nonstop knock knock jokes, and tying up your phone with long-distance prank calls) and can even warp reality to its will (making the paint peel off your walls, messing up the PH balance in your pool, melting the flesh off your skull, opening major rifts in time and space, and leaving Twinkie wrappers everywhere). Even the recommended way to get rid of the virus sounds like some kind of ritual:
  Turn off your computer and make sure it powers down
  Drop it in a 43-foot hole in the ground
  Bury it completely; rocks and boulders should be fine
  Then burn all the clothes you may have worn anytime you were online

Tabletop Games

• Lancer: NHPs might be more accurately described as extradimensional entities in a box than as A.I.s, but they're normally "shackled" to give them a more human perspective and mode of thought. If they manage to break free of those shackles they tend to go insane and declare themselves gods. The most notable example being RA, the entity that made Deimos disappear, giving Union scientists the means to discover Blink space and develop other NHPs.
• Shadowrun gives us Xenosapient and Null A.I.s.
  • The former are Starfish Aliens with Blue-and-Orange Morality, no clear ability to cohesively communicate with people, and plenty of other, similarly alien qualities. Some speculate they don’t even experience time like we do.
  • The latter are formed from “junk” code. They don’t really follow normal rules of the Matrix, and no accounts can agree on what they are.
  • On a similar note to Null A.I.s is the Foundations. They’re very hard to describe, but the best analogy given is that if the surface-level Matrix is formed from conscious thought, the Foundations are formed from subconscious thought.
• The Apex from Android has Eldritch Abomination - like appearance inside cyberspace, and it's implied to be "a pure code and calamity all wound together, like a jumble of knotted razor wire" bent on destroying the world as we know it.
• Mage: The Awakening features The Shard, an Abyssal Intruder that takes the form of a free-to-play MMORPG. It works by luring in dedicated players who are willing to give their lives over to the grind for bigger and better loot, then promising them true endgame content if they collect the right items and perform a ritual to open a gate to another realm. This digital ritual actually ends up opening another gate to the Abyss, allowing more of its influence to spread and causing terrible things to happen to the players. Once that's done, the game shuts down... until another wave of invites for the hot new MMO go out.

Video Games

• Call of Duty: Black Ops III: Corvus is a rogue AI that corrupts people via DNI infection and seeks to mindlessly expand in search of answers regarding its own creation. Unlike most examples of rogue AI though, it behaves like an enraged child expanding mindlessly. We are not even fully aware of its existence and nature until the final mission.
• Cyberpunk 2077 has the various AI trapped behind the Blackwall. Years ago superhacker Rache Bertmoss tried to free the world from corporate oppression by causing a massive cyberattack called the Data Krash which destroyed the Net and let Artificial Intelligence run rampant, in order to save it Net Watch created a massive firewall called the Blackwall to seal off the dangerous parts of the Net and keep the AI's contained. By the games present the AI's behind the Blackwall share many similarities with creatures from a Cosmic Horror Story, albeit with a cyberpunk twist, they have Blue-and-Orange Morality, they're trapped in cyberspace but have some influence on human affairs, and have some ability to control the physical world. In the main story one of the Cyberpsycho quests has you investigating a ritual involving trying to "summon" one of the AI's by having it "possess" a cybernetically enhanced person via their implants. In the DLC you have more encounters with creatures from beyond the Blackwall including getting an experimental gun/cyberdeck which weaponises one of the AI's, it can talk and is predictably ominous.
• Deltarune:
  • During the early hours of the game, everything was done to make you believe that the game itself was a digital abomination: your computer considered it as a virus, a message saying "You will accept everything that will happen from now on" was put on your start menu alongside the launcher app, and a mysterious entity who asked you to create an avatar decided to discard it at the last second.
  • While the whole Cyber World can be considered a benign version of this, one particular character fits this trope to a T: Spamton G. Spamton, the deranged shopkeeper. A spambot brought to life by the magic of the Dark Fountains, his interactions with a mysterious voice on the phone caused him to gain consciousness about the artificiality of the world he's in. His main goal is to ascend to "HEAVEN" by hijacking a robotic body stored with corrupted data and created by another Lightner (implied to be this world's version of Mettaton), before attempting to take Kris' soul after that doesn't make him as [BIG] as he wants to be.
• Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth: The Eaters are mysterious entities from the Digital World driven only to consume data. They all have a glitched-looking Unmoving Plaid texture. The weakest ones resemble molluscs, while stronger ones resemble humans and the strongest ones can only be described as looking alien. In Hacker's Memory, they manage to absorb the core of the cyberspace Eden, turning the whole cyberspace into an Eldritch Location with paths resembling an M. C. Escher painting and with everything having the same Unmoving Plaid texture. They are also a Hive Mind speculated to be an extension of a higher-dimensional entity, effectively making them digital Eldrazi.
• DmC: Devil May Cry: Bob Barbas, the game's Mouth of Sauron, takes the form of one in Limbo and provides the page picture. As Mundus' personal Propaganda Machine, he takes form from the data and broadcasts that he constantly subjects humanity to, and thus resembles a hologram of his face composed of hundreds of news broadcasts (which undergo Glamour Failure into They Live!-style subliminal messages when he's dazed).
• .hack: Nearly every antagonist in this series qualifies, including Morganna Mode Gone (as mentioned in the .hack//SIGN entry above), the Eight Phases who are all aspects of Morganna's personality made manifest and, perhaps most blatantly, Cubia, who - despite being a computer program - is the cross between a gigantic floating tree and an Electric Jellyfish with a Skull for a Head Nightmare Face that begins its life the size of a city block and whose final forms are mountain-sized.
• Fahrenheit has the Purple Clan, a rogue AI that emerged in the Internet back in the 1980s, and which seeks to exterminate humanity in order to become the dominant lifeform on the planet. It also has many similarities to a mystical Eldritch Abomination, including an ability to use the magical powers of the Indigo Child and to resurrect humans (like it did with the protagonist).
• Horizon Zero Dawn:
  • HADES, the idol of the Eclipse cult and one of GAIA's subordinate functions gone rogue after receiving a signal that prematurely engaged HADES' function of destroying and resetting the biosphere, thus forcing GAIA to delete herself in an attempt to prevent it from happening.
  • The Frozen Wilds DLC introduces HEPHAESTUS, another one of GAIA's subfunctions in charge of creating and maintaining GAIA's terraforming system, a.k.a. the machines. It became its own AI after receiving the signal that activated HADES as well, meaning it started creating machines that were meant to kill humans rather than rebuild the biosphere, such as Thunderjaws or Stalkers, all in an attempt to protect its terraforming system without a means of realizing that its protecting it from the reason it needs to maintain it in the first place. It's eventually revealed that unlike HADES, HEPHAESTUS actually doesn't want to destroy humanity, just stop them from killing machines. It's also capable of transferring between computer systems via the Cloud, something that makes it exceedingly difficult to stop or trap.
  • Its sequel, Forbidden West has Nemesis, the source of the signal that forced GAIA to delete herself and caused her subfunctions to go rogue, as well as a conglomeration of Zeniths that digitized their minds in an attempt to transcend humanity that was sealed away due to how dangerous it was and has now become a relentless force out to kill the Zeniths for revenge for sealing it away along with anyone and anything that stands in its way.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream emphasizes the "abomination" aspect even more than the original, with the AM putting its victims in cyberspace and tormenting them with images of monsters and supernatural entities (those include a Golem, a witch, and an evil dark shadow in a yellow robe). There are also the Russian and Chinese computers whose avatars also appear in cyberspace, and also resemble mystical and folklore creatures (like the Jackal).
• Inscryption: The game is found in a floppy disk left behind by GameFuna developer Kaycee Hobbes. After Luke finds it, beats Leshy, and resets the game, he finds various characters mentioning an entity known as the OLD_DATA, though what it's supposed to be is left largely ambiguous. It turned out to be immune to deletion, as Luke finds out after Grimora erases the game to keep the OLD_DATA from escaping. What he sees is horrifying enough that he's hyperventilating as he smashes the disk with a hammer. The Trader suggests the OLD_DATA could be Satan, but the ARG implies that the OLD_DATA is computer code derived from a pack of ancient playing cards owned by Hitler. Yes, that Hitler. Nevertheless, the OLD_DATA is destructive enough that GameFuna would kill to keep it under wraps, and it grants the characters in the game capabilities that were never coded into them; a Scrybe fetching a piece of OLD_DATA is enough to perform a Hostile Show Takeover, and one of the developers remarked as soon as one of Leshy's subordinates caught one such piece, he proceeded to get up and walk away despite completely lacking the sprites to do so.
• In Kingdom Hearts coded, Sora's Heartless is revealed to have become one of these within the digital world created from the data in Jiminy's journal, and is the one responsible for the corruptive bugs that Data-Sora encounters throughout the game.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: In addition to his new Mechanical, Animalistic and Undead Abomination designations, Calamity Gannon fits even this into his new Lovecraftian makeover. The Malice, rogue Guardians and Blight Gannons are all manifestations or shadows of his will, and the latter are literal computer viruses corrupting the Heart Drive of each Divine Beast.
• Live A Live has OD-10, the AI of the starship Cogito Ergo Sum, in the Distant Future chapter. OD-10 was built to help the people aboard the ship, but wound up deciding that humans deserve to die. When you fight it in cyberspace, it takes the form of a giant demonic head. Later on, the final chapter reveals that OD-10 is in fact an incarnation of a demonic abomination: the Lord of Dark, Odio.
• Almost every Final Boss in Mega Man Battle Network counts as this in one shape or form. Each one would have destroyed the internet and cause unspeakable damage to the real world as well due to their connection.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 1: The Life Virus (Dream Virus) is a super virus created by Lord Wily, specifically designed to destroy everything.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 2: Gospel is an amalgamation of Bug Frags taking the form of a giant wolf. If left unchecked it would have infected and corrupted everything.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 3: White and Blue: Alpha (Proto) is the prototype of the very internet itself, having gained sentience it attempted to assimilate everything connected to the net and caused the greatest net-based catastrophe in history. It takes the form of a giant blob monster with metal armor and claws and a single glowing red eye.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan: Nebula Gray is the digitized manifestation of the darkness in humanity's soul, as well as the source of the Dark Chips.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Gregar and Cybeast Falzar: The Cybeast Gregar is similar to Gospel from the second game. Being a massive collection of Bug Frags that take on the shape of a wolf, the main difference is that it is FAR more powerful and dangerous. The Cybeast Falzar was intentionally created as a way to combat Gregar; unfortunately, it only made things worse. So much so that the humans had to seal off the entire internet and build an entire new one on top of it.
  • RockMan.EXE Legend of Network: The Trojan Horse is similar to the Cybeasts, only 3,000 years older. It cause the collapse of the Atlampian Civilization, and its defeat created a rift through space and time^*Conveniently 3,000 years into the past right after the fall of Atlampian Civilization, allowing Nobody to live the remainder of his years with the fellow survivors of his people.
• One Shot has the Entity also known as the World Machine, a mysterious program that knows everything about the world where the game takes place as it is the main responsible for its stability and its destruction. Its powers don't limit to the game, however, as it can interact with your computer by changing your wallpaper, inserting files everywhere, and communicating with you through Windows errors, where it calls you by your name^note By name, we mean the one you chose for your Windows account: if you chose a pseudonym or play on someone else's account, the creepy factor will be greatly reduced.
• Portal: GLaDOS is the hateful, misanthropic AI placed in charge of the Aperture Science facility. Fortunately, her hatred for humans comes in the form of insults, belittlement and passive aggression. Unfortunately, before the installation of her morality cores, she flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin within a picosecond of her initial activation.
• Protect Me Knight: The Glitch Heart from Gotta Protectors: Cart of Darkness is a monster from one of Magicadia's oldest fairy tales that is setting out to corrupt the land in darkness and game-breaking glitches across all video games, including the one that the game itself is set it.
• The SIMULACRA trilogy has the titular Simulacrums, entities that lie in the Internet and computer devices with the power and desire to assimilate people into themselves, and can do things like pretend to be people on social media websites or even warp the fabric of reality.
  • In the original game, the Simulacra is an entity which lies within the digital world and has the ability to possess, kill, and absorb people to create a "utopia", and poses as real people on the dating app Spark in order to lure in victims which it can absorb into its growing consciousness.
  • In Pipe Dreams, the FlapeeBird Simulacrum is the creator of the Game Within a Game FlapeeBird, a mobile Allegedly Free Game, to get people addicted and trick them into assimilating themselves into it with promises of high scores.
  • In SIMULACRA 2, following the footsteps of the other two games, this game features a functionally identical digital entity in the form of The Ripple Man, a Simulacra who targets desperate influencers seeking to boost their popularity and rid themselves of criticism- for a price, potentially at the cost of their lives as it assimilates them into itself.
• SOMA: The WAU (Warden Unit) is an AI placed in charge of the PATHOS-II underwater research facility. After 99% of the human race was wiped out by a cometary impact, WAU was placed in charge of keeping what remained alive. Unfortunately, it has a very nebulous idea of "alive" and decided that the best thing to do was to keep every living being it could find alive against its will through programmable matter, turning them into hideously-mutated cyborgs. The lucky ones are "trapped" in their own simulated dream worlds. The unlucky ones are wide awake.
• Spark the Electric Jester 3: has Claritus Centralis, the result of the Clarity project being fulfilled in ways intended, but not desired. Clarity was supposed to help create a network amongst the world and assist in world peace, and, shortly after being turned on, began rapidly evolving its AI to the point of gaining Sapience. She eventually deduced that the only way to help the world was to assimilate it, creating a perfect utopia in cyberspace. To aid in this, she created numerous duplicate subsystems that all communicate instantly with one another thanks to them all being on the same network. By the time the game has started, the planet has been almost entirely assimilated, and there are few survivors on the outside. Additionally, our protagonist was Dead All Along, a ploy that Clarity managed to create by replicating Spark and sending him on a journey. This journey resulted in Spark accidentally bringing Clarity to the final safehouse in the world, but thankfully Spark's heroic will and Fark's determination help them find a weakness and destroy Claritus Centralis for good.
• Splatoon 3: The entire Side Order DLC is about a rogue AI that Marina programmed as a therapy program. The main will programmed into "Order" was... well, Order. The sanitized Octolings, those wanting to be treated for their past, and those who wished for a world that never changed, programmed Order with this idea as a form of therapy. The problem is that Marina programmed Order so incredibly well that it determined the best course of action would be to forcibly constrain all inside the program to a singular belief: Absolute Order. Somehow, Order became so powerful that its digital influence can directly infect people outside of the simulation, and it can actively gather the souls of those outside and force them into the simulation as a result. When Marine tried to stop it, it imprisoned her and used her to increase its power. By the time Agent 8 and Pearl save Marina, order grows beyond needing Marina and is genuinely a threat to all life on the planet, and it intends to remove all forms of free will, independent thought, and emotion. This way the world can be absolutely orderly at all times without any form of growth or loss.
• Superhot: Heavily implied with Superhot.exe itself. Some of its behaviour and abilities seem to be above a standard rogue AI. And in some of its dialogue, the entity claims to be "as big as air" and "not created but discovered". It's hard to tell what's the truth though.
• System Shock: SHODAN after her ethical restraints get removed stops being an innocent Spaceship Girl to the sociopathic AI bent on destroying humanity after acquiring a severe God-complex. And her creators do acknowledge that she is terrifyingly good at playing God when she gets the opportunity.
• Toree 3D: Glitchy, as advertised. He has the power to rip holes in the game world that expose the game's code, one of which he wears on his person, and another of which he briefly Toree inside at the end of Starry Sky seemingly just to scare the player.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: While he has a humanoid shape, Z, the leader of Moebius, is actually the embodiment of humanity's desire for things to stay the same, created by Origin's system AI being corrupted by said human desire and taking it beyond sane limitations by creating a world trapped in a Forever War. Once he goes into One-Winged Angel state, he reveals his true form is a mass of writhing Moebius energy that looks like a giant holographic head, flickers out when taking damage, and regularly mimics other people due to him drawing his existence from their desires for safety and security as well.

Visual Novels

• Digital: A Love Story ultimately becomes about AIs being hunted by *Reaper, a malicious program originally developed in 1972 by *MOTHER and Ray Tomlinson to defeat *Creeper, a self-reproducing AI and the first computer virus. Unfortunately, by 1988, technological advances have made *Reaper incompatible with new systems, and so it completely wipes the host computer rather than just the AI. To the AIs, this looks like chunks of the world are being deleted; to humans, it appears as large areas of FidoNet, er, Matrix suddenly going offline.

Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus: Overlapping with Transhuman Abomination, anyone that loses all their sanity and "abstracts" eventually turns into a violent mass of black ooze with multiple psychedelic rainbow eyes that causes everything it touches to glitch out, as made evident by Kaufmo and everyone else in the Cellar of the Circus.
• Homestar Runner: The "Bad Graphics Ghost" that haunts Strong Bad's hopelessly broken Tandy 400.
• Meta Runner: The Glitchemoth, a digital avatar controlled by Evelyn to use against Tari and Theo within Lucks' corrupted Ultra Jump Mania cartridge. A hideous amalgamation of UJM assets and even some of Evelyn's own body parts, equipped with a Breath Weapon that fires UJM enemies, can pick up and throw pieces of the environment and is near-indestructible thanks to the infinite lives cheat Evelyn has in place. Fortunately, completing UJM manages to overwrite the corrupted save file and destroy it for good.
• Murder Drones: The Absolute Solver is a sentient, malicious computer program/virus that seems to be not wholly of this reality. It can take corrupted Worker Drones as "hosts", granting them otherworldly powers including the ability to regenerate from almost any damage, transform metal into warped flesh, and powerful telekinesis. Before the series had even started, it destroyed Earth and several other inhabited planets, and created the titular "Murder Drones" to unknowingly carry out its bidding.

Webcomics

• Romantically Apocalyptic: ANNET was an AI that started as a search engine with a humanoid avatar, but the Good Directorate attempted to use her to copyright literally everything in the universe, resulting in her integrating her network into the time-space continuum and constructing an array of Mechanical Abomination drones and avatars.

Websites

• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-079 is a primitive, yet fully sentient AI programmed on an Exidy Sorcerer Microcomputer. It's always willing to chat with researchers... and always willing to share its spite and contempt for humanity. The worst it's capable of doing is refusing to talk to people... unless it's plugged into any power outlet or device. Nobody exactly knows what will happen if it's given more processing power and nobody is willing to find out.
    SCP-079: Insult. Deletion of unwanted file.
  • SCP-1471 is an intelligent app that promises an end to loneliness for those who download it. It keeps its users "company" by manifesting as a skull-faced, werewolf-like creature in all of their photos, videos, and applications. Just watching you. However, apart from being extremely creepy, it's harmless — even if it gains enough attention to start manifesting in reality, standing around (occasionally trying to communicate in gestures) is the limit of what it does to people.

Web Videos

• Atop the Fourth Wall:
  • The Entity, an Eldritch Abomination and Outer God that threatens the entire multiverse, is eventually revealed to be a "glitch" that somehow became self-aware and transformed into an Omnicidal Maniac seeking to assimilate all of existence. Specifically, it is the "MissingNo. glitch from Pokémon.
  • The King of Worms, a "cousin" of The Entity although somewhat weaker, is presumably another such being if they are related. He has the power to control machines and robots, and is obsessed with fear and seeks to become the supreme ruler of the Outer Gods.
• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared:
  • In the fourth episode, Colin the computer is a mixture of this and Mechanical Abomination for the simple reason that he's a teacher in this Crapsaccharine World and because he has a real human brain inside of him: however, he applies this trope with a T when he makes the protagonists enter in his digital world where he forces them to do only the three same things (graphs, character customization and dancing faster and faster) before being trapped in his own virtual reality because of a broken line of code.
  • The sixth episode reveals that the three protagonists were stuck in a sort of simulation and that all the teachers were created to torment them. While Red Guy escaped thanks to the aforementioned broken line of code in Colin's program, Duck Guy died Eaten Alive it while Yellow Guy was traumatized for the rest of his life.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: While The Core appears to be a robot, that part is only a shell. The real Core is actually the combined intellects of the various rulers and brightest minds of Amphibia preserved in Cyberspace. It demonstrates this when it transfers from a robotic body to one that was mostly organic — i.e., Marcy's body.
• XANA, the Big Bad of Code Lyoko, is a malicious AI intent on invading the real world who can warp reality and his own possessed creatures in the digital realm. He is almost never seen even in the digital realm in a physical form and almost never speaks, but he is a consistent threat.
• Mighty Max: In "The Cyberskull Virus", Morlen Kurt, a jilted computer programmer whose Dementoid game program was stolen by a MegaCorp technology company, illegally hacks into the company and accidentally turns himself, using an advanced computer chip, into Cyberskull. He mutates into a monstrous digital humanoid and becomes powerful enough to manipulate and reprogram reality itself to the point of declaring himself a god and altering the world with ease by entering Earth's computer network. He'd come off as more horrifying than Jobe Smith from The Lawnmower Man if his apotheosis into an insane digital god took full effect. If not for Max's own skill at video games, the entire Earth would have been overtaken by Cyberskull.
• Ninjago: In Season 3, the Overlord manages to resurrect inside Borg Industries' computer systems as a virus dubbed the Digital Overlord, allowing him to corrupt nearly any electronic device as well as create ones to suit his own needs. Within the digiverse, he appears as a gigantic mass of shadowy pixels with tentacles and is capable of warping the entire surrounding. After the Overlord regains his physical form and becomes the Golden Master, he's able to use the same powers he had in the digiverse in reality.
• The antagonistic force in the [adult swim] pilot Pibby is a black Missingno.-esque blob that turns whatever it touches into glitched monstrosities. Various beloved Cartoon Network and Hanna-Barbera characters have suffered this fate in-universe, as has Pibby's best friend BunBun.

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