Hundreds of people had gathered on the city's outskirts. They were outside a large factory building and were there to protest the destruction of Cabot Park. The crowd chanted their message.

“Save Cabot Park! Save Cabot Park!”

Teenagers Kae Bartosz and his friend Juniper Kurisawa had read the online chatter spread by the Liberty Vanguard, an online movement that fought greed and corporate oppression. They hadn’t even been to Cabot Park before. The corporations abandoned Cabot years ago. Instead, it was now home to thousands of homeless squatters. But the corpos wanted them gone, to demolish the old buildings and construct new ones.

Standing in the abandoned parking lot, some people joined in and chanted anti-corporate slogans, and some talked amongst themselves. They picked up snippets of conversations. "Did you see the vid? That psycho gunned down an entire village!" A woman standing next to them said to her friend: "These NyxCorp bastards gonna pay!"

At the front of the crowd, someone started chanting, "Nyx crap, Nyx crap!" The rest of the crowd joined in, "Nyx crap! Nyx crap!"

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The charged atmosphere energized Kae and Juniper. They considered themselves 21st-century net warriors, digital resistance fighters that always took the chance to battle against the corpos and for the truth. This was their third flash mob protest. They carried weapons: Kae packed a couple of homemade incendiary devices in a sling bag, while Juniper collected rocks for her slingshot.

Someone had set off fireworks, filling the air with a strong sulfur smell. A graffiti drone had spray-painted the side of the factory building with the age-old anarchist slogan: No gods, no masters. A slogan adopted by various anarchists and revolutionaries over the years, and now adopted by the Liberty Vanguard movement.

Juniper climbed up on a rain-slick concrete parking barrier to better view the crowd. Through the lingering smoke of the fireworks, she could see a large black truck approaching. The vehicle screeched to a halt, the side part of the truck slid open and four mechas stepped out. Tall exoskeleton combat mechas the size of a car, all painted in urban camouflage. Like the mechanized infantry of her favourite show.

There was a commotion at the front. The mechas raised their weapons and opened fire into the crowd, high-explosive ammunition tearing into flesh and bone.

Juniper screamed, “Take cover!” But it was too late. The rain poured down, a mix of blood and polluted rainwater seeping into the thirsty, crumbling concrete ground.