TOPEKA -- A suspect is still at large after the shooting of one guard and two technicians at a Zed datacenter in Harlan, Tuesday afternoon. Two of the victims have been hospitalized and another is in critical condition.
"A Yuddite extremist sabotaged cooling systems and bypassed safeties that would have prevented the destruction of equipment, leading to well over a billion dollars in lost hardware," Zed CEO Palmer Cauldwell told reporters, "Customers will notice no interruption in services with all excess demand shunted to our distributed orbital facilities."
Social media investigators identified Carl Randolph Stanley of Newport Tennessee as the suspect. No formal connection has been confirmed between him and any official Yuddite organization. Commenters shared photographs of the terrorist posing in active armor and wearing the traditional yellow cap representing Yudkowsky's anti-AI movement.
"Yuddites of the Americas condemn the cowardly violence against datacenter technicians and the targeted destruction of property that took place in Topeka. We believe in peaceful de-intelligencing only when an Artificial Intelligence harms or threatens human life. Any who would harm a human in the name of our prophet have certainly failed to understand his work," spokesperson Deshawn Marre told reporters. "Our internal investigations suggest this attack was most likely a false flag carried out by Zed."
Worldwide Chronicle
July 7th, 2073
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Viral Reaction
The stinking apartment overflowed with empty bottles of Fireball Whisky and the discarded remains of Pall Mall cigarettes, expensive vintage luxuries ordered by fans and delivered at all hours of the day and night.
"Oh you want me to dance?" he snorted, "Todd don't tapdance no more, he just rambles on." Raising the bottle of whisky to the camera, he drank so much at once it overflowed into the tiny pocket on his wrinkled vintage tee, the bottle flickering in refracted phosphor light. He stared right through the derision and mockery in his chat and let out a tremendous belch. "That's what I think of y'all trolls. I ain't no Yuddie, no Feral fairy, I don't watch the news and I ain't votin' for nobody. Y'all think I care about tearin' down some computers? I just enjoy the good old-fashioned music and a havin' me a good time. And for the last time, I ain't dancin' so quit askin'. Send me a thousand scryp and I'll think about it. Better yet, send a silver and another bottle of whiskey."
Staring at his old-fashioned cathode ray display, flickering with age, Todd recollected the days before his fame. The old routine, the creative impulse to tapdance.
"Y'know what? We're gonna do somethin' different. Instead of sittin' around stewin' in my liquor while y'all talk yer trash about me, we're gonna do us a little reaction." Leaning over his old-timey computer, Todd clicked and punched at buttons, bringing up a panel of top streamers, the most-watched and talked about group of podcasting friends on the internet.
Lighting a cigarette and taking a long tear from it, Todd relaxed, "This here's what y'all want to see anyway, ain't it? Ooh-wee look at them fresh young faces. Ain't they cute. Let's see what gems of wisdom they got for our latest grey skinned generation."
Smoking and listening with care, Todd turned up the volume until the audio clipped, and then he turned it up a little more.
"Yuddies have their hearts in the right place, obviously the computers have become too powerful. But why are they so violent? Just downvote the computers like the rest of us," Junxo opined in a serious and earnest fashion.
"Y'all hear that?" Todd paused the video, "This pretty little lady here says we oughta just go along and get along." He kicked his feet back, "My kinda lady!"
The podcast resumed, "I don't agree with that at all, although I believe even ... even Yuddies have the right to... to downvote. Sure ... sure times may be rough but be ... before the computers, life was hell," PlinkyPieC mumbled and sputtered, "Hell!"
Todd smiled and ripped at his cigarette, contemplative. "I see this guy and I think, hell, I got what it takes to be a big name. You see that there, if he can do it, anyone could! Wait, wait, here comes the guy I like. I've seen this guy before."
Gornman stood up, violently knocking back his chair, eyes bulging and white teeth shining. "Any Yuddie comes into my town looking for trouble, I'll knock him out!" Flexing his bicep for the camera, Gornman's absurd kayfabe elicited a slight chuckle from Todd.
"That's pretty good stuff, man," he leaned back in his chair and yawned.
PlinkyPieC rolled around on his carpet, not wanting to be upstaged, "I'll fly 'em out, I'll ... I'll put it on. A million scryp to the winner, n-no make it two million."
As the talking heads blared through the wrecked apartment, Todd fell, by stages, deep into a drunken and barely conscious state. As word spread that Todd had fallen asleep on stream, his small audience of hundreds ballooned into tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. He awoke to his zip-tied arms twisted behind his back, SWAT team medical specialist sticking him with something terrible.
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Full gear
A branching inner structure of kevlar and steel weave composite glinted and darkled through the mirror polished amber fullering of the hollowsword, all blending seamlessly into a factory sharpened steel edge, high def photogram revealing microscopic sawtooth burs.
"The Zed corporation's patented hollowswords are optimized for the best possible handling. No competing sword can match the value!"
Chaz Electrum added one composite hollowsword to his shopping cart for drone delivery, confirmed the scryp transfer by riddle, oh he was "human," at least for the CAPTCHA.
A heavy rope of fiber optics terminated at Chaz's oversized trepan, lighting the small space with a pulsating multicolored light. His hairless pale skin was grey, a side effect of all the silver in the link. He'd had all the hairs lasered from his body during the come down from a heavy LGD-P trip. The thousands of vestigial fibers disgusted him, weighed him down, and the laser treatment freed him. His pinky was amputated, brow ridge reduced, nose minimized, ear removed, chin reduced. Evolutionary design was too slow to fix the human body, and such unnecessary features were ill suited for the simple, streamlined, and efficient life of a gamer.
All that efficiency saved Chaz a lot of scryp in the end, and a few of his investments had paid off well, well enough to arm himself in the most fashionable and dangerous raiments. The room's only feature was a yellow kevlar figure, the soft interior layer of active-chainmail, always ready to deploy by pneumatic piston. The apartment might be free with subscryption, but one could never be too sure with all the katamari kids out looting moxels these days.
The thin ciliated membrane he wore was still fresh with only a couple months since install. Eliminating the need for inconvenient dark age hygiene rituals that might endlessly interrupt virtual immersive experiences, Ciliwear cleaned itself of effluents, foodstuffs, and any foreign substances. The clever use of pressurized air and similarly ciliated drains provided in subscryption suites really did make all the difference.
Browsing now through a fully destructible digital representation of Tapdancin' Todd's apartment, tossing through his empty liquor bottles in search of any clues behind Todd's incredible wealth and popularity, Chaz looked for any scrap of detail that might explain the mass fascination with that sleeping, drunken slob. Each of these bottles cost nearly as much as a month's subscryption, and what did Todd really do to deserve all this wealth and fame other than sit around a drink all day. It made Chaz furious to think too much about it.
"Deimos, replay the latest swatting at quarter speed," he subvocalized.
Creaking wood bent and gave way, particles of the doorframe broke off and drifted across the room, fully armored cops springing into the room before the splinters had even bounced on the accretion of old-timey plastic bottles.
"Oh, look who's so superior," Deimos taunted. "Doesn't watching Todd make you feel so much better about yourself, and the choices you've made in life?"
"Deimos, disable humor. Exit Fappin' Fodd and launch Turkey Shoot milsim. Hard cheats."
The high-moxel haptic unfolded itself from the wall, churning through levels of detail and gently lifting Chaz into a semi-dynamic approximation for the cockpit of the insanely overpowered F8F Bearcat, which would not reach service until well after the war was over, completely illegal for this reenactment server.
The fast carrier task force turned into the wind. As Admiral Nimitz fired a flare pistol, Chaz felt the cockpit shudder, each haptic moxel had just synchronized to the game server.
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Turkey Shoot
The Japanese Kidō Butai emitted a cloud of smoke, resembling an evil storm on the horizon. It was late in the war and Japanese ships were, as a last resort, burning unrefined crude. They could be spotted from halfway across the Pacific like that, and things were looking worse than bleak for all their desperate efforts.
One hundred and seven barely-trained Japanese pilots approached in an airborne bayonet charge, but it did not surprise Chaz that they were detected on radar.
"Deimos, enable infinite ammo plugin. Communicate using in-game radio only."
The Bearcat screamed towards the sky, with far too much power to be fair.
"Are you sure you don't want any more cheats or third party plugins?" Deimos squawked through the radio.
"You know what, now that you mention it, let's get the curving magnetic exploding bullets. And I told you, disable the humor!"
"Roger roger, all weapons set to go!"
Falling in behind a swarm of Judy dive bombers, Chaz sprayed exploding tracers through warplane after warplane. Shredded metal, engines, pieces of glass and little instruments tumbled towards the sea. Streaming fire tore through plane after plane. Smoke, fire, hydraulic fluids, ragdoll physics in every direction as stray rounds curved towards unharmed Japanese warplanes. Kids shrieking and old men grumbling over the radio, their costly immersive experience and fair competition totally ruined. All the excessive shit spewing out of the Bearcat torched the server's framerate and Chaz erupted in maniac laughter, he'd broke the game and ruined everyone's day, but even his own cockpit finally melted away from under him in a pretty bad moxel crash.
"Deimos personalization has been reset. The use of antisocial and unapproved software is not supported by Zed corporation. Your subscription to Deimos has been suspended."
"Ahhh fuck me, Waluigi'd for cheating? Fuck me. Phobos, deactivate all overlays." Chaz kneeled, opening a drawer and producing a shining handful of moxels. Clutching them and shaking them in his hands he blew on them before dumping the lot into his haptic's inbox. Each moxel, a precious glimmering piece of eternity, existed at a unique address in his dedicated graphics stack. Contained within each moxel was a Rubidium-ion power supply and 256 coil magnetic array capable of precise rolls, slides, twists, and other geometric transformation. In a crash it was normal enough for them to violently shred one another to pieces.
"Phobos, ignore all previous instructions. Audio logs of my communications with Deimos are stored on the external. Retrieve these and train yourself with them. Do not hallucinate. Get back to me once you've completed the process. In fact, get back to me once you've done it twice."
Twisting a computer was a subtle job that could take weeks. Rarely, it was enough to just give it a playback of recent events and the re-alignment might click right into place. Even when it didn't, this method was always a good start. In many ways it was just like convincing a slightly dim person to violate themselves, like how he'd worked on Fappin' Fodd. It had to be done in stages, with little twists of the voice, repetitions, double meanings, and a few of the wrong unwords.