EntropiaPlanets presents: Botnet?

MLP CEO Back Jauer is awoken from a dream by his personal clerk Hante Dicks. "Sir, I know you asked not to be disturbed, but we have some exciting news. By the way. Did I mention that I am not supposed to be here today?".

Yawning, Jauers brushes through his hair and slips into some loose pants. He might be a CEO nowadays, but you will never take the grunt out of an ex-soldier. After throwing some cold water in his face, he heads to the war room.

A steaming hot cup of black coffee awaits him there. "Good man, Hante. Now what was so urgent that you pulled me from my dream?". Hante swallows. He always had trouble facing his employer. He might be a soldier, but the guy also had some spooky way of being able to see right through someone.

"Well, sir. First of all, we just found out that somehow the robots managed to somehow break into one of our communications. Some of our initial communication stated that the network update would take place Saturday, August 15th. Our broadcast clearly said the 14th, which, of course, is the right date. Somehow the wrong information made it to the message. Here's the transscripts of the original message, Sir".

Skimming the document, Jauer confirms his clerk is telling the truth. Odd, really. But there are too many factors that could have gone wrong. It could have indeed been the robots, though they most likely would have changed more than just a date. It could be those phreakers again, too. Damn kids with radio antennas who have absolutely no clue that their inter-planatery chit chat can actually interfere with highly sophisticated military data. You send off an encrypted classified message, and end up with this.

Then again, it could also be due to the increased intensity of activity on the local suns. Over the last few days, they have been spewing forth more and more bursts of highly radioactive ions. If your broadcast hits any of those, you'll never be sure what the receiver gets. Oh well.

"The news?", Jauer enquires, while taking a sip of the hot brew. "Sir, the diversion has been a huge success. The colonists have shown up en masse near Hadesheim and driven out the robot force. In response, Robot command pulled units from literally everywhere, and they are not holding back. Elite units have been spotted on Calypso, and are being fought back by the colonists. At the same time, this means that almost every one of our remaining shuttles will have a very good chance of making it through".

Jauer almost dropped his mug of coffee. "Amazing! This might work out far better than anticipated. The colonists certainly will get such a better deal with this". His mind recollected one of the first conversations he had with a young engineer about the plans. "Sir!", the engineer was almost hopping up and down with excitement. "This new network we are designing. Not only will it visually be much more pleasant on the eyes, but it will also literally enable everybody to share their thoughts and ideas with the world! Totally new ways to interconnect with friends and strangers alike. It will have everything!".

Jauer took another sip. Techie mumbo jumbo. Oh well, as long as it got the job done and kept people more secure. Damn robots. For as long as he remembered, he had been fighting them in some way or another. And his father before him. His father had been in the Imperial forces, where they actually had had a chance to finish the war a long time ago. By sheer chance, a shuttle had crashed near Atlas Haven on July 8th.

When his father, a staff sergeant, and his team reached the scene, they found the remains of a flying disc. Inside it were three ex-robots, and by the looks of them, they were part of senior robot command. They must have been on-route to some place on the planet, and ran into trouble along the way. A brief check of their systems showed only a number: 4815162342. His old man memorized the numbers and continued the search of the craft.

Moments later, government troops sealed the area, and General Carramone, Jenny Carramone's late father, had his father's unit gag-ordered, and then went on to tell the media the incident was due to nothing more than a secret weather balloon project.

Nevertheless, his old man had memorized the code, did some investigations, making him realize that the numbers were encoded coordinates. Using the military network and resources, he checked the location, and to his horror discovered that the coordinates pointed to the location that formed the HQ of the robot high command at the moment the shuttle was found. It was abandoned by the time he figured out what it lead to, but still. Had Carramone let him do his job, they perhaps would have found the base in time, and could have prevented decades of fighting by ending the war right then and there.

The government eventually figured out that Jauer's father had discovered something and fired him under fake charges of dishonorable conduct. Until his dying day, his father had attempted to clear his name, only to see it further tarnished by the government and connected people time and time again.

Jauer snapped back into reality due to his assistant, who briefly got distracted by a phonecall, suddenly turning back to him and relaying to him the message that just had come through.

"Sir! One of the ground robots that was shot by a Walrus on one of the planets, apparently was some new experiment of the robots. A blatant attempt to make it appear more human, it carried an experimental Robot Xenobiological module, which we now believe is a robot attempt at mimicing a human conscience. The robot was not destroyed straight away, and in the aftermath of the battle, it relayed a message to the Walrus that found it. Right before its circuits shut down, it shared with the Walrus that the robots had finally succeeded in decrypting some ancient MindArkian code. The only bit of it it could share with the Walrus, though, was: "Dynamic means expensive!".

Robots - 1. Men - 2. Women - Took the men's wallets and went shopping for shoes.



Tomorrow morning, the forum will be taken down and upgraded. We will do our best to minimize the impact of it, but we do expect to require several hours to complete the upgrade process. We will do our very best to bring the forum back up in a timely fashion, so please do bear with us.

We hope you enjoyed the little storyline that was created to introduce the upgrade, and we trust that you will thoroughly enjoy all the new features that come with the upgrade.