The Remote Incursion

[Shelby]

It was hard to point to a single instigating event for the phenomenon known as the Remote Incursion. Reports ranged from the benign, such as delivery drones going missing and strange sounds on the radio deep in the desert, to the more extreme cases of freighter crashes, communications satellites vanishing from their orbits, and one unconfirmed story of ancient robots on a cargo plane powering themselves on mid-flight.

One incident that called attention to all the others, and the looming threat building on the frontier, occurred on New Year’s Eve, 2020, when the test flight of a remote weapons platform named Southern Star ended in tragedy, with the complete destruction of a local air defense squadron.

While reports were initially scattered, ever more incidents of drones, AIs, and other automated systems going rogue cropped up after the New Year’s Eve incident. The largest number occurred south of Cadentia, but the incidents seemed to spread, as rogue systems reached out to one another, drawing vehicles and robots and machines away to remote locations. Two patterns quickly emerged:

They seemed to be drawn to powerful communications equipment as well as high places, and they were not afraid to resort to violence, especially when it came to guarding the isolated locations where they had decided to gather.

Not all systems seemed to be vulnerable, while others resisted, through careful preparation, autonomous intelligence resisting the will of the strange virus, or pure luck. Systems that successfully fended off attempts at takeover, or were recovered, had some of the greatest clues to the nature of the phenomenon: relics of code that suggested an intelligent and rapidly adapting computer virus.

As the mysterious virus began to spread, mostly far to the south but making inroads in and around RhyDin, efforts to stop the Remote Incursion were already underway. Many rogue units would be recovered or destroyed, and some of the outposts would be eliminated before they could make much progress--

--but it was not yet clear what these rogue machines were attempting to do, seizing equipment and gathering together in remote peaks and towers on the frontier.

(( This is an open SL! People are free to say that any susceptible vehicles, droids, computers, or other systems are effected by this virus. Maybe you have a tower, a mountain home, or a tall building where infected machines decide to set up shop! You are also free to encounter, restore, or destroy infected machines -- or take out a location where they are gathering together with stolen communications equipment! I will update this thread in the coming weeks with further story developments, but feel free to use it to link to or directly post related stories! Please DM me on Discord, Miskatonic09#8031, if you have any questions. ))

[Shelby]

Tower of the Southern Star

[Coydog]

This Is How Eye Roll (Ongoing!)

[Akarui Sora]

A Southern Star and Calamity.

[Pharlen]

The electronics are getting weird... Dancing Queen