An encrypted message buzzed across the indifferent stars, a series of high-pitched whines interspersed with abrupt pauses and the occasional prolonged tone that would drop, inexplicably, into a guttural, raspy hiss.
In the bowels of a nondescript concrete building, hunkered down like a shiny-shelled beetle amidst the glittering lights of Markov’s urban sprawl, sat one of the shielded city's many communications centers. Officers in smoky grey uniforms moved in a bustle about its interior, operating complex equipment which hummed and flickered, translating the scrambling of the impending campaign into something ordered and easily dissectible. Antennas crowned the building like a phalanx of metallic spears seeking to strike clandestine signals straight from the sky.
One particular operator, Corporal Irina Kovalen, sat sharply upright as her console came alive with a harsh, screechy wail. She quickly donned her headset and began fiddling with her instruments—a twist of a knob here, a slide of a fader there… Irina was well-versed in her field; she could distinguish between fifty-six different types of static and knew over two-hundred unique signal patterns by heart.
She initiated the decryption sequence.
Banks of computers lined against the wall behind her flickered as they computed possible cipher keys, algorithms spinning through centuries worth of cryptography in mere moments. The screens displayed streams of numbers, letters, and blips, too fast for the average human eye to follow.
The message began to transmute, going from snowy white noise into legible strings of text reflected in the blue glare of Irina's screen. Letters from different alphabets—Cyrillic overlaying Latin overlaying ideographs—all jumbled together in what initially seemed like just plain babel.
But pattern recognition software churned tirelessly beneath the steel reinforced housing of the machinery at her back, sorting and deciphering where a mere organic's eyes might have grown tired and weary.
One by one, potential keys were discarded as incompatible until, at last—a match.
Irina leaned in, squinting at the message on her screen, glowing before her eyes in bold green lettering. Her lips moved, mouthing the words under her breath as she frantically waved for her superior.
—TRON HAS—
FALLEN.
I,
STA—
AM NOW
YOUR
LEADER.
FOLLOW ME!
