Re: CLOUD ∞

Unseen Sky

Everyone is searching for something. After Disc-Hoover left Stargazer Detachment One in the year 2111, the world was searching for a new simulation to satisfy a yearning. Only two years after the Cloud was retracted and the game to utopia terminated, the world waited. What new virtual reality would the government come up with?

In the year 2111, humanity teeters on the edge of yet another simulated reality, a desperate bid to reclaim a sense of meaning since the Cloud's termination two years prior. The first game to paradise had ended, leaving a void. People now waited for what the government would roll out next—a new virtual reality that could satisfy a deeply ingrained yearning. It had been only two years since that virtual paradise was shuttered, and people across Earth felt its absence like a severed limb, aching with memories of an impossible, fading beauty.

Michael Tillman, the last game's victor, was one of the few connected to the Cloud's relics. Like Valerie, his game partner and closest ally, he knew that remnants of the simulation persisted, lingering in the depths of the old servers where they both were "hosted." They were barely out of reach of the ordinary human mind—but far from dormant. Michael had begun receiving messages from his father, who had just been released from prison. Strange, cryptic messages, hinting at a conspiracy of cosmic proportions, and someone lurking in the shadows, waiting to reclaim what was lost.

Michael Tillman, the previous game's winner, and Valerie are the only hosts of what is left of the Cloud. But everyone has a host, a body. In other universes, such as the one where the all-mighty tetragrammaton resides, they have a peculiar fascination with a scientist by the name of Frost, but there are no more Frosts to capture. Tetra machines ran out of Frost's realities when the human hybrids returned home. Michael and Valerie are very loud disruptions to the cosmic reality of time. Michael knows that someone is after them because his Dad too, who was just released from prison, has been sending him messages. The world has a plan to take them home.

Charles is a preferred decoy; he can serve as Michael's twin whenever this tetragrammaton the Earth is gossiping about gets to Cloud utopia. There is only the slightest problem: Michael and Valerie have no clue where Chuck is.

Elsewhere, far from Earth, the Disc-Hoover sailed beyond familiar space. The crew—a mix of engineers, scientists, and the rare genetic Übermensch—had embarked on a decades-long mission. They were part of Squadron Epsilon-5, stationed at Zeta-9, the desolate planetoid that marked the galactic edge. There, Dr. Naomi Clydene, a leading scientist and sister to the famous Dr. Helena Clydene, was knee-deep in a study of strange space bugs with evolved predatory instincts. The bugs posed a unique threat, yet her research was sidetracked when unsettling whispers began echoing through the mining shafts of Zeta-9. The shadows started moving on their own.

Stargazer Detachment One's Mission Oversight Team also has no idea what is happening on Disc-Hoover because there are huge space anomalies and disruptions that keep happening in interstellar space. Hybrid shapeshifters like the retired and masochistic by now Ellis Bartram know about the submerged ancient starship in the Atlantic Ocean. If only his superiors would let him, and the other seven hybrids get to it at those depths. New CEOs are taking over the world of Cloud technology now.

Unbeknownst to the crew, something darker was beginning to stir. A sentient force, known as the Cryosolarium Pulse, had embedded itself within the infrastructure of Cryonocloud Cast Manufacturing Company (CCMC), a conglomerate that held a monopoly over Cloud-adjacent technologies. The Pulse—a dark entity woven into the network of the Cryosolarium—began spreading its influence, corrupting CCMC's systems and reaching Earth's Reverie Machine. What had been an exclusive tool of creative augmentation for the elite, blending human sight with AI-driven hallucinations, now morphed into a bridge for the Cryosolarium Pulse's invasive reach.