The number of people in VR had continued swelling over the two-week period of martial law and strict curfews. While not everything had translated to VR yet, which meant people still had to leave their houses for things like critical jobs, most people had still taken advantage of the time dilation in the public simulation and spent practically an entire “month” getting accustomed to the new world. That time had been enough for even the hottest of heads to cool down and wonder why they’d ever been angry in the first place. After all, nothing truly bad had happened since the empire officially came into existence; on the contrary, a lot of good things had come their way.But while the hotheads had mostly calmed down, conspiracy theorists came to the fore. While extra time to think about things was a positive thing when dealing with angry people, conspiracy theorists were the exact opposite. The more time they had on their hands, the deeper, more complex, and more weirdly believable their

Inside a former Russian military warehouse.“Is the inventory complete, comrade?” an old Russian colonel asked. He was once a commisar during the Cold War, and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he had transitioned to the regular army and made it up the chain of command until he offended a general and was posted out of the way in a desolate ammunition storage warehouse in Siberia.“Yes, sir!” The former soldier snapped to attention and saluted the old colonel, handing him a folder containing the detailed inventory listing. “The stores have been tallied and logged.”The colonel took the folder and opened it to the last page. He glanced at the total number and signed his name at the bottom, approving the final tally of ammunition in the warehouse. “Prepare for the handover process,” he ordered with a complex expression on his face. Despite how it ended, his career had been glorious, once, but what began with a roar was destined to end with a whimper. He sighed, then turned his attenti

*A Marmaray metro train derailment has been discovered as a result of detonation from in it [Damage: medium] [Situation: yellow]*(Ed note: Damage refers to the amount of damage caused by the attack, and situation is a scale (white-green-yellow-orange-red-black) on an ascending level of catastrophe, where white is basically harmless to the empire at large and black is an extinction-level event. It takes into account every other factor than the immediate damage dealt by the attack in question.)*An explosion has been detected in a weapons warehouse in Russian alps [Damage: minor] [Situation: green]**Explosion detected in a Saudi Aramco oil rig [Damage: large] [Situation: orange]**A plane has exploded in former US airspace [Damage: small] [Situation: white]**A police station exploded… [Damage: medium] [Situation: green]**An explosion has been detected in the Suez Canal, [Damage: large] [Situation: yellow]**A....**An….**Explosion….**Burj Khalifa has fallen [Damage: extra-large] [

In the air over what used to be known as Haiti.Four fighter jets whooshed over Port-au-Prince at Mach 7 on a patrol route that provided full scanning coverage of the paralyzed city. Though they were flying fast and low, the sonic boom following them wasn’t any noisier than a regular pre-empire passenger jet, if not even quieter.{Scanning complete. Proceed to the next destination.}The pilots of the jets acknowledged their orders and increased their speed to Mach 8.4 as they headed southwest toward Carrefour, surrounded by an invisible bubble stretching fifteen kilometers in every direction. Their mission was simple, though emotionally and physically draining; they were performing deep scans on each city they passed over in an attempt to pinpoint possible survivors of the wave of terrorist attacks carried out only minutes before.Similar operations were being carried out all over the world as the Aeolus Air Force sent out squadron after squadron of Aeolus ES-75 Catseye reconnaissance

While the terrorist attacks continued, it was at a much slower rate. Reports began dwindling and reduced in frequency from seconds, to minutes, and finally, tens of minutes. And with an average response time of twenty minutes, it seemed that the AIs had caught up to the trend and the worst was over.All of the scenes around the world had been cordoned off. Imperial police and LEAs were maintaining the cordon as RES-QRs dragged out survivors and placed markers on the dead for later retrieval; at that moment, survivors mattered more. Some of the smaller attack sites, like the wave of suicide bombings at UNESCO Heritage Sites, had even been cleared of all casualties and GEMbots dispatched to repair the damage. Soon, most of the attack sites progressed to the cleanup phase. Active rescue was only ongoing at the worst of the sites, like in Dubai, where the Burj Khalifa had been dropped on the Dubai Mall and a few other skyscrapers fell due to the blast; or in Paris, where the Louvre had i