Chapter Fifteen (1/2)

It had started slow.

A research station here. A science outpost there. A new or struggling colony over in that place. Ships vanishing now and then. A few GalNet posts had to be censored for disturbing content. A few Universal Social Media posters had to be banned for violation of the Anti-Violence Statutes. Then gaps in GalNet started blossoming out on the Unified Outer Territories but nobody was that worried, half of those worlds were the UnUnified Races or the Uncivilized Races, some of whom had barely had star drive for a century.

But whispers started.

Something was out there. Something was wiping whole worlds away.

Those who whispered first found their posts wiped away with no explanation. Then they found their accounts more than banned, they were purged.

Then those who whispered started vanishing.

A Vuknaraa with 1.2 billion followers mentioned that her cousin out at a research station hadn't GalNetted her in over a year.

Less than an hour later she was gone. Not just from GalNet.

Her luxury apartment, with eight private rooms, was empty and for purchase.

A Tnvaru shipping magnate mentioned to some friends at dinner that his second cousin, who had established a colony three years ago, had missed her last six shipping deadlines.

He vanished without a tuft of fur.

The dull gray vehicles of the Executors were seen. Those who recorded them vanished.

Then it happened. A capital world started screaming. Video, audio, text, pictures, flooded GalNet with the governor's code attached so that it couldn't be supressed without wiping out whole nodes of GalNet, which the Unified Science Council would never allow.

Beings watched in horror as ships fired from orbit, boiling away oceans, turning the very atmosphere to plasma fire, turning the exposed bedrock of the planets to glass. Massive war machines landed on planets, disgorging smaller ones, that began swarming cities and killing all who inhabited it.

They didn't just kill.

Killing was clean. Killing was quick.

Most machines, by accident or design, just killed.

These machines murdered.

The video of a sobbing Inhamahn brood mother, an EVR rig sloppily put onto her, the skullcap held in place by jagged shards of metal, being held in cold steel claws and being watched as each egg was smashed, the insides smeared across her feathers and beak, before her head was twisted off from the body, had over 1.2 trillion views on GalNet before the EVR video was wiped away.

It wasn't recorded by a bystander.

The machines themselves had recorded it.

Recorded her despair on EVR.

Had preserved every egg being broken, every unborn chick being crushed, every iota of her pain.

And posted in GalNet.

Every post, every video, ever picture, every audio file, all had the same header.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

Audio of an entire city of 1.2 billion Savashan screaming in pain and agony was overlaid across the Unified Executor Council's broadcast for calm, over their claim that rogue hackers were simply trying to alarm people.

Before 12.5 trillion viewers the twelve council speakers were each overlaid with smaller videos of a member of their race not only being killed.

But being murdered.

The code that overrode the broadcast turned out to be a high level intelligence agencies disaster code from a world that had gone silent months before.

Random pictures and videos started having horror attached. A random advertisement for an air vehicle would have the vehicle suddenly massacre the happy family, with complete EVR of how it felt to be part of them. A simple picture of a sunset suddenly warped and showed a metal claw crushing a screaming Elmetankii.

The Chief Executor's, a Savashan with glossy scales and a thick tail, made an announcement watched by trillions that everything was under control. His image was suddenly replaced by a tiny unborn Savashan being pulled from its egg by a barbed needle, the tiny saurian squirming before plasma roasted it alive even as the Chief Executor's voice droned on and anyone with EVR felt the infant's confusion and agony replace the Chief Executor's calm and confidence.

The victim had the colors of the Chief Executor's brood.

Planetary governments began screaming for protection, demanding that the Unified Military Fleet protect their worlds, no matter how far from the encroaching blackness they were.

The fact that there wasn't enough ships in all of the Fleet to post a single ship at even a 10th of the worlds was leaked onto GalNet public information boards before the Unified Military Fleet could even make a decision.

The Unified Military Fleet was ordered to protect the Core Worlds, the oldest worlds, of the most powerful and wealthy of the Unified Civilized Races. Some ships mutinied, heading for the home worlds of the majority of the crew.

Others vanished into jumpspace and were never seen again.

Riots started, sweeping over major cities. Government officials and peacekeepers were killed where the mobs found them. GalNet was awash with video of the riots, taken from the omnipresent cameras. Those hunted by the rioters found their locations being reported on GalNet.

And the location of their families.

Their killings were broadcasted live.

GalNet became a horror show.

Then the virii attacked. Slashing into databases, from lowly cooking recipes to high end corporate research R&D databases. They were everywhere.

And they knew how to kill any who wore EVR.

Horribly.

GalNet became a war-zone where the virii, self-replicating and evolving, attacking everything from public transport to person to person calls.

One place fought back.

They erected barricades of neon and chrome, raised up firewalls of streaming green code, and attacked back.

Code that worked within a simple game worked outside, on GalNet itself, but it had to be guided, had to be used to be effective. It required will.

From out of a simple game poured tens of millions to fight.

Battlefields were strewn with the gasping avatars of dying players and the scattered prisms of defeated virii. Foxholes were dug into shattered infostores, berms erected inside Social Media chat rooms littered with the dead, aid stations built in the wreckage of traffic control systems.

They were defeated, no matter how valiant they were, more often then they won.

They still fought on. Climbing over their dead and wounded, taking the fight to the virii.

But the message had gone out.

Then, one day, for no particular reason at all, a diplomat was shot in the head.

In GalNet, in bunkers of chrome and neon, in fortifications of streaming green code, in foxholes dug into shattered databases, the word went out.

HOLD THE LINE, CHUMMERS!

WE'RE COMING!

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