Chapter 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.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it’s taken without the author’s consent. Report it.

“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.