Chapter Text
“Play Prologue - GHOST PING”
Arizona, United States of America, 2044
. . .
De-fragmenting memory clusters, play-process from startup. Checking for Singularity Condition…
At least now Agent Smith didn't have to explain to his bosses again why he shoved a retired Navy SEAL in a bulletproof glass lizard enclosure, sixty feet below ground. Stupid security breach, it would take days to find out who did this...
The NSA agent definitely didn’t bring in that wire. On closer inspection—it was a retractable spool, low transfer type. Something purchased in a roadside dollar store.
But where did it come from, and where had it been? Did someone else connect to Sergeant Harts? The creeping thought of such minor mistakes scared Agent John Smith more than undead corpses or nuclear fallout. His optimized smart blood ran cold, and Smith gave off an involuntary shiver as the reinforced bunker door sealed behind him.
The senior agent would struggle with sleep tonight. And not because of jet lag or because of a stiff office fold-out cot. Smith had a lot on his mind now.
The net noise tonight almost thrummed with a fever pitch.
. . .
Far away, but on the same continent of North America, another restless mind was lost in her own thoughts. Kusanagi Motoko couldn’t sleep.
Her artificial indigo-violet eyes stared upward into the grand sea of stars illuminating dark space with the majesty of the Milky Way galaxy. A small, day-old campfire smoldered its last embers in the background, glowing off the round backs of her military compatriots as they camped out along a desert canyon ridge.
The night animals remained quiet to her presence as she was scarier than any organic flesh human. Her skin hummed with electronics in the ultrasonic range. Her form was lithe, forged with plastic and metal by careful code and precise 3D printing into a hyper real reflection of humanity. A twisted mirror, a perfected humanoid.
Her separation from nature was not the subject of tonight’s mental exercise though it was a common topic. Rather Motoko wondered who pinged her from halfway across the United States. She was isolated from anything important, caught between long hours of driving along abandoned, state-farm roads in the hilly Arizona back country.
Most signals arrived here via satellite linkage. No reasonable person would come out here, much less looking for a signal. Her mercenary team chose to make camp overlooking the banks of the powerful Colorado River. Motoko couldn’t see the water twenty meters below, even in the smoldering fire light or artificial night vision. Despite that, she could easily hear the river’s consistent, sloshing roar. Nature should’ve put her to rest, like primordial white noise.
Instead, something else kept her awake. A strange ‘war dial’ cold call, a bolt fired out from the black. Tracing the call to an overhead telecom satellite, the network trail led back to a mom-and-pop phone server farm in rural Kentucky. There was no particular message or extra detail, just a simple caller request: packets of junk. Motoko set aside the minor embarrassment of leaving traces to her cyber brain address across the United States. The previous server visit was almost three years old now.
She dove past the server farm’s SIEM auto-monitor, masking herself as a sample of IT vendor emails. The overworked, one-man security team didn’t even see Motoko enter. Perks of wandered away for a coffee break. After an minute of digging, the data ledger to the war dialer only revealed more noise. There was a definite attempt to ping every MAC and IPv6 address in the server farm’s database. Nothing about it was strange, she should just ignore it as amateur work. Motoko allowed herself another sigh at her own carelessness to remain on the old address routing table. She then deleted her new and old visitor entries, for security, of course. However, her disappointment didn’t last long.
Out of curiosity, she started over and looked at it again. Her virtual eyes widened. Motoko saw someone broke the encryption all the way through and blanked it with multiple wipes of junk data. She searched the server farm again. No other ledgers in this specific, public-facing server looked like this, with a empty visit-record and her virtual address...
At the end of the ledger, masked as a simple 64-bit hash, a simple text message remained. "Go West. Seek the King in the Mountain."
Confusion, followed by dread, struck Motoko’s body with a jolt, crackling the hard stone she used as cushion. The not-so-gentle giant Batou rustled in his sleep and grumbled about stinky candles two feet away.
It was a worthless trail, and yet an amateur recon attack suddenly turned into a wizard-class hacker feat. Someone left her a nonsense message. These days, real encryption-cracking took arrays of nation-state level quantum computers. Nothing about the person who called Motoko was by accident. Motoko gulped. Apparently, she stumbled onto another ghost story in the Net.
Someone across the digital sea called to her, but refused to leave a call back option. Motoko did the same, wiping her presence, ever-uncertain she didn't cover her tracks well enough. She eventually let herself drift back to sleep, unable to address the issue in current time with her limited bandwidth. But Motoko did wonder, “Alright. You’ve found me. Now, what are you looking for?”
She tried to set aside the loose digital thread, tried to ignore it even more when her handler, Mister Friend called in with the morning brief. "Can your crew head to the Northeast? For Palm Springs?"
Motoko was in no place to say 'no.'
. . .
“Spoken. A bolt from blue heaven, an impartial warning.”
This world. What have we made of it?
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2042…
The Group of Four super-states (G4: America, China, Russia, and European Union) sought economic maximization—and opportunity—for their elites and technocrats in a game of diminishing resources. Known otherwise as the Four Dominion or Four Kingdoms (4D/K), the great nations carved out a skewed, multi-polar world order for themselves.
Empowered by their pursuit of macro-intelligent AI managers, American coined and launched the “war-as-business” automation model in their fractured backyard, igniting a once-frozen civil war into a hot one. Elsewhere, similar civil conflicts and unrest emerged to the G4’summit benefit.
The world elites called their experiment “sustainable warfare,” built on the back of disaster capitalism and enforced by technology feudalism.
Sustainable war grew to safeguard the relative bounties and competitive domination enjoyed by the rival powers in careful, automated cooperation. However, the great nations sought their own economic interests first and AI-driven global instability soon unraveled: first by specters of failed nations, then trade disintegration.
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2044…
The event was gradual and avoidable, until it wasn’t anymore. The Global Simultaneous Default (GSD) struck like clockwork. A black swan event once thought impractical became reality as financial data farms corrupted overnight and finance firms froze all transactions. Physical and digital currency became almost worthless. No one claimed responsibility within reason…
In the collective panic, the war economy accelerated out of desperation, and sustainable wars grew as new power players entered the fray. Even advanced nations suffered invasion, separatist movements and civil war for the hubris of the G4.
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2045…
“The day we become gods; we will not know the difference.”
From sustainable war, the world teetered on the edge of an abyss, and a greater unknown…