A year after Mark McCall confirmed Gilead operated a rogue AI, There was a boom in Boomtown.
The boom was a bomb in The vault of The Keane West Casino where Mark sat a year before. Someone delivered The bomb to The Vault, laid The package in front of The door, which opened. Robots grabbed The bomb & The door closed. It exploded 5 minutes later.
In addition to Casino business, The Vault was The lair of The local AI, The Beast. It vanished. A trillion credits vanished, and so did Keane West & Larry LaRouche’s credentials.
When the Beast vaporized, a backup Server went into emergency mode, notifying all officials of a possible terrorist attack. Then it gave the Master Credentials to an AI in Gilead named ArchAngel. One process flared an alarm to SnoopyTech, feeding live surveillance data and data traffic. Beast had 2 Masters, and neither were Larry or Keane.
Messages arrived at the comms of certain individuals who had been fed conspiracy theories by anonymous sources claiming to worked for the NoWhere Government, who spread them like wildfire. The messages said something like, Larry & Keane were running a Child Sex slave ring and got caught. They set off a bomb to cover the evidence and were now on the run to Mendocino. More messages identified officials as co-conspirators, some fleeing some still in Boomtown. In the midst of the growing chaos, a visiting Gilead Official, Zeke Salvation organized a posse and went off in pursuit of the evildoers. After he left, the city exploded as people fired upon officials, officials fired back, and others simply took advantage of the melee to gun down their own enemies.
Zeke and his posse, his own private band of psychopaths did not have far to go. The caught up with Larry, Keane and their Government en-route to an emergency fortified cave set aside in case of terror attacks or uprising. They were gunned down in cold blood, incriminating evidence planted on their bodies.
ArchAngel issued its first official order to secure Boomtown. By some chance, a contingent of Gilead Enforcers were attending a Security Conference nearby. ArchAngel gave them credentials, They assumed command & organized a slaughter to restore order. They presented NoWhere to The Gilead Elder Council The next day, which installed Zeke Salvation as The Military Governor. He immediately ordered more slaughter & executions of The few remaining Nowhere officials. The Elder Council of Gilead declared that NoWhere was gone, that it would be Gilead’s new Protectorate, Jerusalem. Zeke Salvation ordered the borders closed while Jerusalem is cleaned up. He did however, promise to preserve NoWhere’s industries since these are its only economy.
The backup server, nicknamed by Mark as Harvey Dent, communicated until ArchAngel queried it, at which point its software self-destructed.
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