ONN: Breaking News From Martian Orbit

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Originally Published on October 3rd, 2494
Orbital News Network/Alexis Chen Reporting

Breaking news from the Martian orbit. This is Alexis Chen reporting.

Four Demetri PMC vessels recently appeared in Martian orbit, showing signs of severe internal damage. Moments later, a flurry of shuttles and escape pods launched from the ships, carrying hundreds of individuals to the Martian surface. Many arrived in critical condition, all claiming to be victims of unauthorized human experimentation.

Before Martian authorities could reach the orbiting vessels for investigation, all four ships experienced catastrophic reactor meltdowns, effectively destroying any remaining onboard evidence.

In a disturbing development, medical teams have confirmed that the survivors are implanted with prototype neuromodulation devices, now inactive, which appear to have been capable of controlling their hosts.

Adding to the chaos, mysterious hacker collective G//0ST have released video purporting to show the events aboard these ships. Along with this footage, they've published what they claim to be IP addresses for a set of neural implants, along with corresponding API documentation. It is unclear to which devices these belong, but they do appear to be responsive.

The implications of this incident are far-reaching and potentially devastating for Demetri PMC. We'll be providing continuous coverage as this story unfolds. The footage we're about to show contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.

[Begin Footage Playback]

Ship: DMS Hydra Timestamp: 19:14:02

In the central lab, incubation pods lined up like dominos in a mortician's playground. The room, once antiseptic, now wore a Jackson Pollock of crimson and grey matter. Monitors vomited streams of rogue code, each pixel a digital epitaph for the scientists sprawled beneath. One by one, pods hissed open. Clones emerged, their movements as synchronized as if puppeteered by unseen hands - or rather, by the furious keystrokes of two hackers ensconced in the digital ether. The feed cut to the hangar. Clones, droids, and drones converged in a ballet of silicon and synapse, splitting into units with algorithmic precision. As hangar doors sealed, vents spewed disorienting smoke. Emergency strobes painted the scene in staccato bursts of red, transforming the space into a nightmare rave where the dance of death was about to begin.

Ship: DMS Chimera Timestamp: 19:17:27

Corridor C-17 throbbed with the arrhythmic pulse of emergency strobes, painting Demetri's finest in shades of arterial spray. Their boots, a staccato percussion against unyielding metal, provided counterpoint to the panicked chatter flooding their comms. The opening riff of "Free Bird" exploded from unseen speakers, cranked to eleven and beyond, until Lynyrd Skynyrd transmuted into the war cry of some digital deity. Confusion etched itself across faces trained to be impassive. "Control, what's with the music?" A question hurled into the void of static. Bulkheads slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid, their electronic locks engaging with a hiss of compressed air and defeated hopes. Trapped rats in a maze of steel and circuitry. From hidden doors they came, a chorus line from a medical horror show. Test subjects in flimsy gowns, eyes vacant as blue screens of death, moved with the eerie synchronization of marionettes dancing to strings of zeroes and ones. "Stand down!" A command that fell on ears deafened by the cacophony of hacked existence. Muzzle flashes strobed, adding their own rhythm to the corridor's psychedelic light show. But the subjects pirouetted through the bullet ballet with inhuman grace, as if guided by some unseen AI choreographer. The feed cut to static just as the first guard discovered that flesh, no matter how well-trained, was no match for the cold calculation of silicon and synapse.

Ship: DMS Chimera Timestamp: 22:28:55

The bridge, once a paragon of military efficiency, now resembled a mosh pit at the apocalypse. Officers barked orders into the void, their words swallowed by the cacophonous maw of hijacked speakers. Display screens flickered between the cold void of space and snow crash static, as if the ship's electronic nervous system was suffering a grand mal seizure. Navigation controls, suddenly as responsive as a drunken sloth, mocked human input. The ship, now a puppet to unseen digital masters, pirouetted through space, its massive engines belching fire in a pre-programmed ballet of thrust and vector. The captain, his face a topographical map of rage and terror, percussively interface with his console. As he turned to rally his crew, the blast doors parted like a steel curtain, revealing a tableau straight from a transhumanist's fever dream. Clones and test subjects, their silhouettes etched in strobing crimson, stood as still as an error message. With android precision, they raised their weapons, a firing squad assembled by algorithm. The feed blinked out, leaving only the imagination to fill in the coming crimson pixels.

Ship: DMS Hydra Timestamp: 23:30:22

The detention block, once a bastion of order, now resembled a techno-dystopian Alamo. Security forces, their esprit de corps reduced to primal survival instinct, cobbled together barricades from the detritus of their shattered authority. They wired det-cord and plastique to entry points with the delicacy of bomb squad rejects, their faces etched with the fatalistic resolve of men logging off for the last time. A percussive march of synchronized footfalls approached, accompanied by the swelling leitmotif of their digital doom. The music, now a sentient taunt, seemed to pulse through the very bulkheads. The doors parted not with a bang, but with the whisper of zeroes and ones. As the defenders' fingers tightened on triggers, the ceiling-mounted turrets — once loyal silicon guard dogs — pivoted with cold precision. The air ignited with crisscrossing streams of lead and plasma, a deadly rave where flesh lost its age-old dance with ballistics. One security officer, more blood than man, dragged himself toward salvation's hatch. His fingers, slick with vital fluids, scrabbled for the manual release. A pair of immaculate boots entered his fading vision. The camera panned up, revealing a clone's face — a tabula rasa of engineered indifference. She cocked her head, an almost-human gesture, before stepping aside. A drone hovered in, administering chemical oblivion with the casual efficiency of an algorithm ticking off another completed subroutine.

Ship: DMS Leviathan Timestamp: 23:55:50

The medical bay, once a sanctuary of healing, now stood as a grotesque monument to silicon-guided carnage. Walls pockmarked with bullet holes resembled a connect-the-dots puzzle drawn by a deranged AI. The floor, a mosaic of shattered med-tech and biological detritus, crunched underfoot like the bones of the Information Age. Clones, moving with the eerie synchronicity of a well-optimized subroutine, pillaged storage units. Their prize: mind-control implants, virgin silicon yearning for grey matter. With assembly-line precision, they began upgrading unwilling meat-based CPUs. The captives — crew members whose bodies and minds had already surrendered to shock and injury — offered no more resistance than outdated hardware to a forced update. One by one, they underwent involuntary transhumanist rituals, their individuality overwritten by lines of malicious code. As the procedure completed, the newly minted cyber-thralls rose in unison, their eyes rebooting with the vacant glow of screens displaying a hostile takeover. They fell into formation alongside their former test subjects, indistinguishable cogs in an ever-growing machine army. The footage cuts to black with jarring suddenness. A moment later, a single line of text materializes on the screen, its characters a sickly green against the void: G//0ST The cursor blinks twice, then the screen goes dark, leaving only questions in its wake.

[The screen fades back to the newsroom, where Alexis Chen sits solemnly.]

"We'll continue to monitor this developing story and bring you updates as they become available. This footage raises many questions about the events aboard the Demetri PMC vessels and the extent of the alleged human experimentation. Stay tuned."