Welcome to Earth-0 (Ver. 1.0)

Chapter Three: A Drone's Plight

While Tigris tries to explain how she ended up in Titans Tower, the small UAV that followed Alice through the rabbit hole realizes that it is running low on power, and that it can't seem to reach it's owner to up date him on Tigris's position. So, being that it is property of Global Privatized Security, the small drone searches the city for the closest Global-operated facility in order to recharge and send a message home.

It's quest leads it to the thirty-eighth floor of One World Trade Center Plaza; a tall building more commonly known as the Freedom Tower.

The pint-sized piece of surveillance hardware was able to discretely sneek it's way into the building via an opening in the air conditioning ducts on the third floor. After entering the Global-owned section of the building, the drone starts to look for a standard charging and access pad. But it doesn't find one. So, not being detered, the drone cruises into an unoccupied open office, and it plugs into a computer. The flow of power from the city's grid to the UAV's battery pack commences while its AI control unit interfaces with the computer through the same USB port.

As the drone searches for it's owner and a way to contact him, the absence of cameras in the room does not mean that its prescence in the super-tall office building does not go unnoticed.

Nearly three hundred miles away, in the small city of New Castle, Pennsylvania, a monitor in a small cubicle in the Troutman Building activates. This is Global's Cyber Security Division. And it has received a notification of a grave threat to the corporation's existence.

Meanwhile, a low-lying technical officer calmly walks back to his console after his break. He holds a hot cup of joe in one hand and a copy of the local paper under his other arm. He takes a sip of his hot caffeinated beverage as he takes his seat as he enters the aforementioned cubicle.

He takes one look at his screen and calmly says, "Well that's unusual."

The screen states that one of the computers in the corporation's offices in the Freedom Tower is being accessed by an unauthorized user.

Being that he has dealt with this before nearly hundreds of times--and thinking that it is a simple technical glitch or the user forgetting his or her password--he tells the system to ignore it at first and to notify him if the user tries to access anything sensitive.

It takes only twelve seconds for the drone to hack into a secure satellite uplink. Said uplink site is a cluster of five large dishes outside of a small town in Nevada. The dishes readjust their positioning rather rapidly, so that in a matter of a few minutes the large dishes are now pointing directingly at five different communications satellites that have drastically altered their orbits. Four are lined up in a circle, forming a ring. Their outbound arrays are pointed towards the fifth satellite, which located just above the small town in the Nevadan desert.

As this happens, several alarms and alerts appear on the officer's screen. He signals for his supeior to take a look at the problem as some louder alarms go off at the uplink facility and at the Space Command Center at the Bunker Alpha Facility.

"Threat level is being reset to DefCon Three," the commander shouts.

"Commander! What is going on here?" Mr. Graves shouts as he enters the room.

"We don't know, exactly," the commander replies steadfastly.

"Then tell me what you do know."

"First, our equipment detected a small Boom Tube in Manhattan. Twenty minutes later, our satellite uplink in Nevada locked us out and is pointing at five comsats in a conical formation over top of the base station."

"What is the tip of that cone pointing at?" Mr. Graves inquires as he looks at the status of the satellites on the main screen.

"It's either...," the officer references a clipboard he has just been handed. "It's either deep space...or a small town in Wisconsin."