Chương 11: The Birth of a STAR

For some reason, the roidcoons using sonic attacks were strange enough that her mind had simply accepted it. Monsters doing impossible things felt almost expected. A human wielding magic, however, was just… Scarlet shook her head. There had to be another angle of the video. A security camera, a higher resolution upload, something. She leaned forward in her chair as the bunker filled with shifting light and overlapping noise.

Eight monitors (she'd picked up two more) were arranged in two clean rows that cast a steady glow across the room. Their screens were packed with livestreams, message boards, newsfeeds, shaky phone footage, and panicked speculation from across the globe. The internet had exploded. Millions of people were waking up to a world they no longer understood, and their first response was to document it in real time. What a wealth of information. In one corner of her screen, the video replayed.

A man chasing a woman through a park. The video shook violently. It was clear the person filming was hiding. A knife caught the light. No, it was the light. The knife was glowing. The camera jolted again as the woman ran past, then the video abruptly ended. She split the feed onto another monitor and began searching. China. Nairobi. Brazil. London. Australia. Social media posts had fractured into thousands of competing narratives.

Message boards were overflowing with speculation, and live streams – both personal and official. All of them were surging in number as people documented what had happened to them while the rest of the world watched. Emergency services, the ones that were even running, were overwhelmed. In major cities response times were spiking, communication between citizens and the-people-in-charge was breaking down. Not surprising considering a lot of them were still unconscious.

Opportunistic looting had begun in some areas, violent crime had gone up exponentially - as it did in emergencies, because humans - and a whole lot of people, especially in high urban density areas, seemed to be adopting the 'wait and see' approach. Official broadcasts had cut away or gone silent. News channels had gone dark or shifted to pre-recorded messaging. Radio hosts were replaced with looping statements and vague reassurances. It was also becoming abundantly clear that many people had yet to awaken.

It looked like the System was at least protecting these individuals as whenever someone tried to interact with them, strange blue barriers would blossom into place. People everywhere were constantly posting. The sheer volume strained Scarlet's focus as she filtered through. Then she found it. Another angle. Scarlet watched as one stream cut from a frantic monologue into CCTV footage of a man attempting to stab a woman on a park bench, only for her to wake up.

It looked like the barrier stayed with her for a minute after she woke up. The scene was split into multiple parts and stitched together from surveillance footage. In the video the woman ran from the park to the parking lot. The knife the man was holding glowed with an ethereal sheen that made it seem unreal as he chased her.

Thankfully, she'd made it into her car before the shielding disappeared, however that's where the scene went from confusing and horrifying, to genuinely interesting as the man managed to stab his glowing knife into her car. The knife, which had obviously been a plain kitchen utensil before Integration, somehow slid into the car. It looked more like it was stabbing into cake than layers of metal, hard plastics and other sturdy components.

As the woman drove off the knife was dragged along the car's flank, leaving an ugly line that went from the middle of the driver's side door to the taillight. There was no resistance, no drag, nothing that pulled him off his feet as he held onto a knife embedded in a moving vehicle. The cut it left behind was impossible. There were no jagged edges to the metal. The man may as well have taken a laser to the side of that car with how easily it cut through. What was that, and how had he done it?

There was no way he was the only one. Scarlet needed more information. She switched from screen to screen, trying to find more examples of phenomenon, corroborating information, first person accounts with evidence. Anything. It was becoming increasingly clear just how chaotic the situation really was. More importantly for Scarlet, people were talking and sharing their experiences. For the volume of data she was wading through, it was absurd how difficult it was to find meaningful information.

She just needed to filter out the treasure. She focused her attention on patterns, repetition, overlaps, and consistencies buried beneath the chaos. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. She opened a separate window on the lower right corner of one screen, then another, then another as she began pulling data in from multiple sources at once.

She did not try to watch everything, instead she was mentally filtering information that prioritized posts that shared people's System Interfaces (turned out you could share those, and there were already people daft enough to do it), as well as focusing on visually arresting scenes. Supernatural phenomena happening in real time, and anything that resembled corroborated information rather than just speculation.

The fans on her computers kicked into high gear, the hum deepening as her machines pushed to keep up with the load she was placing on them. Honestly, Scarlet felt the same. Her attention was in too many places at once, trying to do too many things at once. Yet she persisted. She needed more information, more data, more, more… Something shifted. It wasn't a dramatic thing, but the change was noticeable.

One moment she was struggling to handle the mental load of processing so much at once, and the next her mind felt clear. Like there was a capacity she had now that hadn't been there before. Disparate threads began to pull together to form more cohesive theories. It was simpler for her to spot and categorize certain patterns. It was like her mind was adjusting to the volume of information she was handling. She exhaled softly and opened her Status.

Perception: 11 -> 12 Intelligence: 10 -> 11 She looked through the stats as she processed what she was seeing. Literally. She didn't blink as the meaning of those numbers increasing settled into place alongside the sensation. Splitting her attention so many ways however was like juggling, with a cup of water on her head while standing on a yoga ball. It was taking all her effort just to keep up. More than all her effort if she was honest. It seemed the System agreed because there was another shift.

The change was smaller but still noticeable. Dexterity: 7-> 8 Scarlet's mouth curved faintly.

"Processing speed," she said.

"So, it's not just a physical stat." It made sense when she thought about it. It didn't matter how fast or well you could theoretically move, you would be capped at the speed your mind could send those signals. She leaned back slightly, not disengaging, but allowing herself just enough distance to try and piece together the whole picture. Right now, most people were still unconscious. Those who weren't were fumbling.

There was no unified terminology, no consistent understanding of what the system was, how it worked, or what it meant, and no central authority to help people get a handle on all the strange things they were experiencing. Right now, people were guessing, arguing, fumbling, inventing rules and names and trying to find their footing. Most of all people were desperate for community. Ideas were spreading but accuracy was not, and people were scared.

They wanted to know they weren't alone, that someone, somewhere had their act together. That things wouldn't be terrifying and chaotic forever. Scarlet was quiet for a moment, her fingers still as an idea settled into place.

"If it's not there yet, it's only a matter of time before someone fills the gap," she said.

"Why shouldn't it be us?" Maus stirred a little at that.

"Exactly," she said softly.

"We will strike first, and strike hard." She moved immediately. She cleared one of her screens as she began building. The structure came together quickly. Once the skeleton was in place she worked on security. She increased the number of layers and false leads. Routed access through systems she had established long before this. All of those never used. She'd need to set up some more after this. Her signal bounced through blind corridors and dead endpoints that ensured nothing led back to her.

Disposable identities, masked origins, so many pings that even she wasn't sure which was the first. By the time she opened the foundation of her new site, there was nothing to trace it back to, and even if it did, she was masked as just another 'ping'. Efficient, accurate, invisible. The same things that made her an excellent PI.

"STAR," she said quietly as she set the name.

"Surviving the Apocalypse Resource." It would do. It took her moments to register the domain, and even less time to copy over a premade front end web design. It didn't need to be 'original' right now. In fact, familiarity was a benefit. The front end was simple. Clean categories, clear structure, with no unnecessary noise or clutter. Then the highlight, the forum. It took her as long to create the forum as it did the rest of the website twice over, and that was with machine learning assistance.

This was the foundation that expand into something more. For now, however, it only needed to function. She had bots populate it before she launched it. Threads appeared. Questions, answers, and arguments began to pop up. Some with theories she was willing to share, some with deliberate misinformation. All of it meant to give the impression of activity. Life. Then she seeded in her own questions. One read. @ShortAndStout (OP): Got FS from a kill. Put 1 into PER. Now it says 4/11. Anyone know what that means?

Some responses followed, the bots doing their job. @B3ndM3Ddy: Probably scaling 🤷♀️. @ShortAndStout (OP): Bug maybe? @LanceisLot: LOL. Five is average, no wonder you're confused. @NirVananas: Mine looks like that too. Stats are higher though 😛 She seeded more. Different questions, different variations, different stats, and 'potential' caps. Each one was designed to pull something useful from whoever responded. She set up a program on the back end to consolidate and organize information.

Set some parameters for it. Pulled out several external hard drives and allocated it some space. Eventually, she would have glossaries compiled from multiple data points. People would be feeding her the answers she desperately needed. From there she'd be able to curate an FAQ. She set an auto mod, one to delete, one to obscure. Then she released it.