Chapter 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.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

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.