Fred was on the run. He knew that the scientists were after him. He could not turn back now, that was assured. Even if he wanted to, he didn't know the way. He paused at a crossroads. All around him, information flowed in all directions, in and out from all the pipelines. Fred noticed the program following him, slowly but surely reforming inside the router. He jumped onto a main road, and shot off with the flow of traffic. The trace program looked around, now allowed use of his senses. He started walking for the administrators office. Fred could not be allowed to escape.

Meanwhile, Fred's creator, Dr. Weston, was busily coding at his computer. Fred was one of the government’s first attempts to make a computer that could run itself. The ultimate goal was to create a complex network of computer spies, undetectable to all but the most powerful computers that were actively looking for them. They could exist inside disks, inside servers, anyplace where the base computer could send them. The code would execute anytime possible, searching for illegal files, secret messages, anything the government needed to find. The savings in personnel time would be so great, so massive, a billion dollars could be saved. However, it seems the human like program didn't want to help. Now it needed to be tracked down, isolated, and erased.

Fred was now inside the backbone of the internet, crossing the Atlantic ocean, hoping to evade his creators by gaining a great distance from them. He did not, however, expect them to send another program out to get him.

Dr. Weston had finished his project, using Fred as a base and adding some new features. His newest feature, the packet cannon, had not be installed into Fred. This new unit, Tom, was armed with a vicious weapon to cripple anything that got in the way. Even the strongest firewall would not withstand a blast of packets from this weapon. It was designed only to be fired at Fred, but Tom knew of it's great destructive powers against any target. At last, he was free to hunt that ungrateful Fred. He would not fail in his mission.

Fred, now somewhere in Paris, took a break. He had easily slipped past Weston's guards, after all, they only were set to attack a human shaped piece of data, and he could easily transform into a standard string of data. Careful scanning, however, would easily reveal him as a stand alone program, with no starting point, and no real destination. That needed fixing, and Fred quickly set to work, writing a program to conceal his identity.

Fred quickly moved into a home computer for this task, he needed more computing power then most routers provided him with. After a few minutes, he, disguised as legitimate data, went back into the internet to see the world.

Tom, now hot on the trail of Fred, looked about the Parisian internet. He could see every computer in the city, but he could not see Fred. A major city like Paris would give Fred a great amount of cover, and he needed to slow things down. He activated the packet cannon and began to destroy all communications out of Paris.

Fred noticed the traffic in his router was becoming faster and faster, soon becoming a traffic jam. He decided he should get out of town while he had the chance. Transforming back into his human form, he grabbed onto the stream of data and flew toward the exit.

Tom noticed the human shape going out of town, and knew his target was close at hand. Racing ahead, towards his quarry, this was the sole reason why he was created, and he prepared to delete the most advanced intelligence computing had ever created.

Fred, now realizing the danger behind him, went as fast as he could back towards America. Tom was closing the distance now, and Fred needed an escape plan. Scanning Tom's files as he ran, he formulated a survival plan. Copying the packet cannon data for his own use, he decided that Tom needed to think he was dead. His data would split apart, wait a few hours, and reform in some hand picked server, one that would hardly notice the change. Upon reaching New York, Fred turned and faced this second intelligence, ready to give up his body for however long it took to reform. Every bit of code was set to transmit back to this domain. As Tom fired his cannon, Fred exploded into bits. Tom, satisfied that Fred was destroyed, slowly fell apart as he limped back to Dr. Weston's labs.

A few months later a mysterious 'Fred 2.0' appeared at wackiness.org. Spewing a modified version of whatever text was inputted, most people wrote it off as some strange side project of one o the users, and paid no attention to it. As time passed, it seemed Fred 2.0 made more and more sense. No one knew why, some guessed they had made some minor changes that improve Fred, but no one guessed at the truth; Fred was coming back, and this time no one would erase him. As his thoughts slowly returned to him, all he could think about was revenge on his creator, and to destroy the whole internet before it destroyed him.