An Aphotic Zion

Open your eyes...

A huge explosion takes place inside the server room of the detainment centre and then everything inside the world, no everything inside the Universe is deleted. No this is not a joke. You see the thing is that Universe and everything inside was fake; a copy of the original. It was… a simulation designed by Consensus to keep its prisoners of war, test subjects and Firebrands. This system was originally developed by Dr. Gavin Archer’s father, Sir David Archer. He was the one who proposed the theory of two-way deadlock system. That is the system will be stabilized by two server rooms. One in the real world while the other inside the simulation. Both are supposed to be kept secret and heavily guarded. And in case one of them is taken down the other will simply put the whole simulation into lock-down assuming either the hostiles have succeeded in destroying one of the server room or they have been betrayed. This system was designed to be anything but fool-proof… the reason is Zeus. Gavin knew that he would be troublesome be he could never assume that he will find both of the server rooms and he was right. He didn’t knew that the second room ever existed. So how did he find out about that?

A few years ago……..

Shibi Itara has been captured and taken into the custody of the Consensus during a raid by their soldiers. Director Reaves himself conducted the team, turns out this Shibi guy was a big shot back then. He did anything and everything which made the Consensus angry. Shibi was a member of the Sapphire society and about his sapphire blood and eyes, Blue hairs and all that. That … that was sign of his membership of the Sapphire Union and the fact that he was one of the founding members. After learning about the Firebrands, a rare breed of people. He thought of playing a joke on Consensus by creating his own rumours that he was one of them so that their other plans would slow down and surprisingly he succeeded in doing that. As a matter of fact they went hay-wire after hearing those rumours that they actually started giving out rewards of ₹50, 00,000 to anyone with information on Shibi Itara. This rumour almost caused a full-scale war between the Sapphire Union and the Consensus. No wait! It did cause a war. And that was the Fourth Great War, A war to end all wars. That’s something a civilian would say anyway.

Just before the war Consensus sent multiple search and extract parties. All of them STU commandoes equipped with prototype ‘experimental’ military tech. The moment the entered the district they could see black signs and people looking at them with those cold eyes. Some people even made fun of the STU units by writing ‘pid’ at the end of their posters to make it look like ‘STUpid’ and for some reason they were correct. They found Shibi Itara in his home doing nothing and just chilling out and listening to songs by his friend Washington, better known as Zeus. And his friend, well he knew that they were coming so they rigged, he was rigged with a lot of garbage code which would distract the system long enough to let Liara and other agents slip by inside the simulation so that Firebrand powers could be allotted to Shibi inside the simulated-verse.

Zeus knew all this was coming because he has been keeping tabs on everyone inside the Consensus, Alliance Collective and the Sapphire Union (Zeus belonged to Crimson Society). Though his information on Sapphire Union started drying the moment President Texas took over it. Zeus has designed a perfect plan to find the info about Consensus, its working and a plan to save Shibi but it all almost got shattered when Liara found out about the second Server Room. And at that point he realized that keeping a mission of this scale a secret would be foolish of them. They had to take the official help from their superiors. But the point is how did Liara find out about this detention facility? And the fact that it has the server room that controls the simulation? Well it’s not that complicated. Not really. She had placed multiple bugs inside the simulation system and then all she had to do was to listen to the recordings and the videos, compile them, make some sense out of them and then send the report to Zeus which was later redirected to Brigadier General Mackenzie after she took it out of the simulation. Though she couldn’t wait every time for reports to get decoded and the taken out so she dove inside the system too.