Chương 12: Strategic Censorship

The website was live. Now all it needed was users. She sent the link to Water Armies she had contacts for but had never used, as well as multiple PPR firms and unaffiliated botnets. She also took out several ads on several websites. Eventually STAR would spread organically, but for now she made sure to push it into every platform she could access. Embedded in comment chains, dropped into threads, quietly introduced, and spread among groups that thought they were private.

Anyone still alive, awake, and trying to make sense of things would have an opportunity to encounter it. The message was simple. The opposite of the old timey maps that wrote about mysteries and monsters at the edge of the world. They were on the edge of a new world and here there be information. Traffic did not flood in all at once; instead, it began as a slow, steady trickle that built as the link spread outward. People were interacting. Asking questions, offering partial answers, contradicting one another.

Patterns were forming as people speculated, debated and, importantly, revealed information. Scarlet watched as her programme quietly collected and redacted, flagged and sorted. Her eyes narrowed as her systems filtered the incoming data. Her newly gained PER and INT did the rest as her mind adjusted to the sheer volume of information with unwarranted ease. She withdrew most of her front-end bots. She no longer needed them. For now, she would observe and collect.

She watched as a few threads with sensitive information were flagged and disappeared from the front end. Information like that she'd keep to herself. Other than ensuring the mod-bots and her back-end program were working, she stopped micromanaging the site and allowed her little STAR to shoot off on its own. Boy did it take off. Her attention shifted briefly to one of the upper monitors as movement caught her eye. A video had gained traction. Lots of views and more engagement quickly ticking up.

It had been posted around the same time her website launched, from somewhere called Arnhem Land, Australia. Scarlet had never heard of the place, but it was beautiful. Curious, she played the video. A young, aboriginal woman stood in frame, breathing hard, and holding her bleeding arm. In her hands was a long spear that appeared strangely pristine considering that not only was the woman bleeding, but she was standing facing a dead snake slightly longer than the woman was tall.

Only the snake had horns growing out of its head, and was weirdly flat. The ugly green-brown creature was covered in a mix of bloody injuries, and what looked like cauterized wounds. Scarlet paused, studying the still image. The spear didn't look like a traditional combat weapon. Instead, it reminded her of something she'd seen in a documentary about fishing. For a moment she couldn't believe she'd remembered that detail. It had been so long ago she'd forgotten she'd watched it.

Then she went through other memories and associations and found she knew a lot more about Australia, and snakes than she had any right to. It's how she knew for a fact that she was looking at a horned sea snake. That horned sea snakes were found, unsurprisingly, in coastal regions, and that this must have been the largest one in recorded history. She also knew that unlike that monster in the video, horned snakes did not have acidic blood. Were they venomous? Extremely – this was Australia after all.

However, that didn't explain why the areas around the dead creatures non-cauterized wounds were sizzling and smoking. And why around its gaping mouth, the ground was still slowly being corroded by the blood it looked to have coughed up. Probably a result of the multiple, conspicuously spear-shaped holes through its middle. It would appear roidcoons weren't the only things to mutate. Then Scarlet thought about how she knew all this at all.

She was clever, certainly, but she'd never had anything like an eidetic memory… Only… What did it mean for a stat to pass its initial 'potential' threshold? If 10 was theoretically the human limit, what did her 11 INT actually change? She could ponder over that later. Right now, she wanted to understand just what made the video so popular, outside of the disturbingly proportioned nightmare creature. She pressed play.

The woman and the person holding the camera were talking and laughing despite the bizarre situation.

"Yeah, looks like it was just level 1?" The woman in the video said.

"How do you know?" Asked a male voice from behind the camera. It sounded young. Early teens at the most, and that tracked considering he had to tilt up to capture the woman's face before panning back down.

"You didn't check your battle log?" She asked, still grinning"My what?" He asked.

"What?" Scarlet echoed as the image on the screen shook while the boy fumbled with the camera.

"Seriously?" The girl chided.

"How did you collect your loot?" This time the girl seemed genuinely confused. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Loot?" The boy shouted.

"Loot?" Scarlet echoed in disbelief.

"Yeah. You seriously didn't check for loot?" The girl stared, then broke into a grin so wide you could see her back teeth.

"Well come on then," she said, reaching for the boy and dragging him closer to the, frankly, very ugly horned-snake-thing. She took the camera from him as she began speaking in a language Scarlet neither recognized nor understood, but she didn't need a translator to get an idea of what she was seeing. Out of nowhere, objects just materialized. One was a thin metal tube that reminded Scarlet of a test tube, only this one had a lid. Then there was a thin booklet type thing that Scarlet couldn't read the name of.

Not couldn't understand, or make out the words, or translate. Something was making it impossible for her to read. The frame shook again as the woman pointed at the book and said something. Then they were both shouting, laughing, and jumping in place. The camera shook for a while, the image blurry before the clip abruptly cut off. Scarlet sat without moving, her expression stiffening as the implications lined themselves up neatly in her mind. Could it have been AI? It was fast, but not impossible.

She ran it through several programs, burning time and processing power but she had to know. When it all came back with the stamp 'authentic' Scarlet could hardly believe it. Her gaze moved away from the video and back to the neat, flowing data streams. She wished the video hadn't been posted so publicly because now a bunch of people would see it. That was game changing information. However, with how viral it was in just those first few minutes, it was unlikely the information would stay a secret.

That's why Scarlet had downloaded it, then buried it in flags and reports. Then she took a moment to create a 'highlights' page that would allow her to display both uploaded and embedded images and videos. After that, she re-uploaded the Arnhem woman video to STAR under a clickbait title. Of course she added a shoutout and link to the woman's account, she wasn't a monster. Credit where credit was due and all. She just wanted to be the primary platform where System information was found.

Then Scarlet redirected part of the programme that was trawling the web to compile images and videos like this and upload them to STAR as soon as they were discovered. She spent a while adjusting her filters. She was having difficulty accounting for the sheer possibilities of this new world. How did you ask something to look for 'the impossible'. Then she realized that's exactly what she needed to do. Her attention returned to the screens, as she tweaked the parameters. Then the structure was in place.

The system she had built would continue to gather information without her constant supervision, pulling in what mattered and setting aside what didn't. It would not be perfect, but it was comprehensive, and more importantly, it was done. Though done and perfect would be ideal.

"... there is a crack in everything…" she mumbled the quote as she forced her fingers away from the keyboard. Scarlet leaned back slightly, her fingers tapping against the armrest as she reviewed what she'd created. Information was flowing. Data was being collected. Patterns were beginning to emerge.

"All right," she said. Maus shifted and lifted his head just enough to acknowledge her before settling back down.

"This gives us a place to start, and a solid foundation," she continued, her tone even as her thoughts aligned.

"What it doesn't give us is confirmation." This was all second-hand information. Useful, sure, but incomplete, and unverifiable unless she went out and verified some things for herself. Her gaze drifted briefly toward the far side of the bunker, toward the door that separated her from everything she had just spent the last several minutes observing at a distance. The world outside had continued moving. The proof was right there on the screen. And if she wanted to stay ahead of it, she would have to move too.

Still, she couldn't shake the sense of unease she had at the thought of going out. She pulled up the CCTV footage again and stared. She manually panned several cameras, scanning the yard and the woods; front, back, and sides, all to no avail. Perhaps she was being paranoid? Rightfully so, but still. She couldn't let 'bad vibes' stop her from doing what needed to be done. Even if her instincts were rarely wrong. There were still corpses lying about. Those might attract scavengers.

Considering her last experience with local wildlife, that would be a very bad thing. Apparently, she also had loot to collect. The System was giving out rewards, and she couldn't afford not to collect them. Truly, what was the alternative? Waiting inside for what? Could she spend a lifetime just messing about on her computer? Playing with data, organizing information… She found herself smiling at the thought and shut it down, hard. Even before glowing knives and monster snakes, that was never a real option.

"We cannot fall behind," she said to Maus. That meant facing whatever was out there waiting for her. So, she'd prepare. She crossed the room and reached for some of the equipment she had set aside earlier. This time when she went out, she'd be ready for battle. First, she changed into more tactical clothes. The fitted pants were pulled over the thin armoured vest. Over top was her holster, which was hidden by a grey field jacket.

She hadn't had the time to get it tailored, but at least it fit, and the lines were clean, even if it was quite bulky. And cast a terrible silhouette. She pursed her lips and turned to look at Maus.

"Needs must," she sighed, holstering her handgun with increasing familiarity. Instead of her usual cane, she chose one she'd bought for a dangerous stakeout she'd done a few months back. On the outside it was a black lacquered wood with a flared metal handle that continued down the shaft for a handspan. There was a button on the side that when pressed would separate the handle from the shaft. With a quick yank, it could become a short blade.

It wasn't the most convenient weapon, with the multiple safeties, but it was nice to know she had it in a pinch. The knives came last. These she strapped cleanly around her waist beneath the line of her jacket. She'd also ordered a second, cheaper set. The quality wasn't as good, but they were more accessible as these strapped around her thigh.

"I'd prefer not to need any of this," she told Maus as she smoothed down the fabric of her jacket.

"Unfortunately, reality rarely aligns with preference." Maus settled on her shoulder as Scarlet made her way to the door, adjusting slightly to account for her injured leg. The wound hadn't damaged anything vital, but it did make putting her weight on it annoying. As they moved toward the exit Scarlet mused on what Integration did that had 'fixed' her limp. Was everyone similarly healed? Was it a 'fix the defects' type of thing, or more of a 'return to baseline' treatment.

All superfluous thought left her head as a hint of anticipation washed over her. Then. Yep. There was that familiar sense of unease. She reached for the handle anyway.