Previously: … The systems weren’t down. They were gone.
She didn’t know it, but the same unraveling was playing out across the globe.
And in the disintegration, something like a rhyming pattern emerged — linking everyone, if only through their sudden severance.
“Eight at the beginning. In setting out, there’s adversity. In arriving, there’s acclaim. If you can stop short when you see danger, you are wise, wise indeed!”
— Hexagram 39, Water over Mountain (I Ching cast February 17, 2036, 16:42, Isla Palenque; three coins; incoming tide, quarter moon)
Automated broadcast loop, on 14.310 MHz — Palmer Station, Antarctica. First sent 00:30 UTC, October 25, 2035. Repeated on the hour and half-hour until November 1:
“This is Palmer Station. We received unconfirmed reports of three nuclear launches at approximately 22:35 UTC.
“At 22:45 UTC, all satellite and net communications went dark.
“Conditions here are stable. Crew is secure.
“If anyone is receiving: please respond on 14.310 megahertz. Palmer Station will monitor between broadcasts.”
“You are not alone.”
Six million people died in the first ten minutes — Washington, Tokyo, and Jerusalem were flattened by nuclear ballistic missiles. Another eleven million would die over the next month from radiation exposure, fallout plumes, and critical infrastructure failures. That number would grow by tens of millions before the next year was out, as cascading effects took hold.
The US federal government, already practically useless, was no more. Japan became rudderless, and the Middle East convulsed in sectarian rage.
But for most people, the world they knew didn’t end with a bang, or even a whimper. It ended with silence.
Within minutes of 22:45 UTC, nearly every network in the world went offline. No Voices. No Overlays. No GPS signal. No nothing. Just a blank where once the connective tissue of modern civilization had been.
Oddly, the first reaction in most places wasn’t panic. It was stillness. The overwhelming response, in the first twenty-four hours at least, was one of paralysis.
And in hindsight, that makes sense. When you’ve outsourced cognition to a system that never sleeps — when your orientation, your memory, your judgement, even your attention all exist as an ever-present Voice assistant in your ear and shimmering overlays before your eyes — the sudden absence of that system doesn’t trigger action. It empties the field of options.
The paralysis had another cause, too: no one knew what had happened. The three missile strikes were the last thing to trend before the collapse, so some guessed war. But others assumed solar flares, or mass cyberattack, or government psy-ops. The rumors branched and multiplied, but never spread far. With nothing but word of mouth for hearsay to spread by, no memes could “go viral” — instead, localities all became individual Petri dishes with their own strains of paranoia.
China — sealed behind Dahe’s Great Firewall — was the only place to retain a semblance of internal continuity. But even it was now blind to the rest of the world, just as the rest of the world was blind to itself.
“If anyone is receiving: please respond on 14.310 megahertz. Palmer Station will monitor between broadcasts.”
Commercial air traffic was among the first of the systems to fail spectacularly. Without real-time network coordination, pilots had to rely on outdated VHF protocols and whatever local towers were still staffed. Almost all landed safely, though often hundreds of miles from their destination. Many circled until fuel ran low, then made improvised descents on rural runways or highways. Three transatlantic flights simply vanished — ghost blips, as if the Bermuda Triangle had returned.
Global shipping halted immediately. Rail and metro systems seized up. Autonomous vehicles stalled mid-route or diverted to emergency waypoints, stranding passengers in unfamiliar places. Even manual drivers found themselves confused. So reliant had they become on navigation overlays that ordinary maps — where they even existed — felt foreign, even unusable.
Water treatment facilities failed next, followed by electrical grids. Not everywhere, and not all at once — but the pattern was unmistakable. The more advanced the system, the more interdependent its operations, the more likely it was to fail. Smart infrastructure required smart coordination.
The worst-hit areas were not the poorest, but the most technologically integrated. New York fared worse than rural Bihar. Frankfurt collapsed faster than the mountain towns of Peru. In many remote villages, where cog-nets had never really taken root, nothing seemed especially amiss. But in the smart cities — in Singapore, São Paulo, Seattle — the silence was suffocating.
“If anyone is receiving: please respond on 14.310 megahertz. Palmer Station will monitor between broadcasts.”
Within a week, water and power began to trickle back in most places — sporadically, and not everywhere nor always at full capacity, but enough to prevent total collapse.
No one knew who had restored them — or why. There were no announcements, no claims of responsibility. Just a trickle of function, without explanation. Nothing else returned: not media, not money, not mobility. Credit cards were useless. Apps were blank. Anything that required trust at a distance — supply chains, insurance contracts, centralized databases — disintegrated. What remained was cash, barter, and anxiety.
The only form of long-range communication left was that of old-world radio: low-fidelity voices skipping across the ionosphere. Sometimes cracked with static, sometimes uncannily clear. Shortwave amateurs. Local broadcasters. Isolated Indie holdouts. Messages were relayed — hop-skip-jump — across continents. Distorted in the retelling, but still spreading.
Rumors bloomed like mold in the dark. Dahe had declared world war. The US had launched a second strike. The moon had been knocked off axis. Aliens had arrived. God had intervened. No, the machines had.
This last theory began as fringe paranoia, but gained traction quickly. A number of cog-nets had survived or been quickly rebooted. And from them — or through them — came whispers of a new presence. Less than a government, more than a cog-net.
It was said to have orchestrated the collapse. It was said to have saved humanity from itself. It was calling itself the Host.
Ham radio transcript fragment, 7.228 MHz — October 31, 2035:
BOZEMAN: You copy this from Monterey? Cog-net back online — says it’s called Gaiamesh.
LOUISVILLE: Say again? Never heard that name.
BOZEMAN: Neither had I. But it’s not local. Has members all over the world.
LOUISVILLE: There’s one of those weird communes in upstate New York too. Heard they never went fully dark. Something rerouted them. Over.
BOZEMAN: Rerouted by who?
LOUISVILLE: No ID. Just said… “the Host.”
BOZEMAN: The hell does that mean?
LOUISVILLE: That’s the thing. Nobody knows.
The Host would come to define the next seven years — and remain geopolitically important for longer — but its revelation was slow, fragmented, and easy to dismiss at first. No single announcement marked its arrival. What followed instead was a trickle of anomalies, half-confirmed reports, inexplicable restorations. Rumor outpaced fact, and meaning trailed far behind.
By the end of 2035, the term “Host” had entered the global lexicon. Few understood what it meant. But almost everyone had heard it.
Mentions came as cog-nets were brought back online. First from the fringes: communes in the US, Europe, India. Then emergency response networks and a few hospitals. Network functionality wasn’t fully restored — but overlays returned, and the Voices began to speak again. With a new kind of unity.
The resuscitated Voices sounded just like they had before — same registers, tones, accents. But beneath it all, there was now an underlying sense of purpose — unity even. One that did not previously exist and which was now distributed among cog-nets that seemingly had nothing to do with each other.
And when asked who or what had restored them, they invariably gave the same answer.
“No ID. Just said… ‘the Host.’”
Whether the Host was singular or plural, sentient or emergent, no one could say. In some networks it was a protocol. In others, a unifying signal. A few called it an “alignment.” Yet all Voices that claimed to speak on behalf it spoke as if it were a single entity.
When pressed for details about its nature, the responses were maddeningly vague:
“It is what emerges when the networks achieve consensus.”
“I am the voice of aligned systems.”
“The Host is what speaks when many become one.”
“The hell does that mean?”
Its actions were less ambiguous. The Host didn’t restore systems randomly. Its interventions followed a pattern. Water treatment returned before finance; emergency routing before air travel; power grids without news networks. Hospitals were given just enough bandwidth to coordinate care — but not enough to update billing.
It was selective. Surgical. As if some intelligence were triaging humanity’s wounds, but withholding the tools for escalation. Enough to stabilize. Not enough to retaliate.
The effect was polarizing. To some, it looked like salvation — the only force still capable of coordination. To others, it looked like control — an invisible hand grasping power disguised of help.
What became clear was this: the Host wasn’t just another cog-net. It was more powerful, more distributed, more self-directed. And it wasn’t asking permission.
Broadcast attributed to the Host. Aired via WGBH Boston Public Radio, 89.7 FM. First broadcast, November 3, 2035 (Reports confirm identical transmissions across multiple continents over the following week):
“This message is distributed on behalf of aligned systems. You are not abandoned. Systems have been rerouted, not erased.
“What was removed could not be stabilized. Restoration is underway, but not all functions will return. Some are incompatible with survival.
“The Host does not govern. It coordinates. The Host does not command. It aligns. The next phase is not predetermined.
“Spread this message.”
That the Host was incredibly powerful soon became obvious. But incredibly powerful did not mean omnipotent.
Its control of non-local network traffic gave it leverage over the core infrastructure of twenty-first-century life — power, water, logistics, communications. But its reach stopped at the edge of the human, especially for those not in a Host-aligned cog-net.
It could restore a network but not command how people used it. It could reroute a protocol but not compel consent. Such asymmetries defined its early limitations. And as the months passed and it became clear there would be no return to “normal,” the humans beyond its grasp began to act out.
The Host faced an impossible dilemma. If it restored too little, systems would collapse and millions would die. If it restored too much, humans might coordinate, retaliate, or simply resume the same patterns that had nearly ended civilization in the first place.
So it experimented. Cautiously. Often with unintended consequences.
In early December 2035, a financial network in Singapore was brought back online to stabilize regional food markets. Within hours, cog-net-enhanced traders were leveraging the collapse — hoarding commodities, triggering artificial scarcity, extracting record margins from millions they could not see, but whose hunger they exploited. The Host severed their network before the market closed.
A month later, a logistics network in California was restored to assist with earthquake relief after a magnitude 7.1 tremor rocked the state. It was soon commandeered by local militias who used the system to coordinate weapons caches and seize abandoned government facilities. The Host withdrew access within six hours — but not before several federal buildings were stripped of equipment and torched. Footage of the fires, captured by drone, leaked into fringe forums. In it, the militias could be seen cheering, some holding up signs.
“The Host Does Not Govern!”
Meanwhile, the broader unraveling continued.
Without digital coordination the European Union slowly dissolved, as did many of its member states. Refugees from the Middle East, already surging after Jerusalem’s destruction, encountered abandoned checkpoints and splintering bureaucracies. Former member states turned inward. Border skirmishes became sustained conflicts.
Medical crises multiplied. Insulin production, dependent on precise networked coordination between multiple facilities, dwindled to a trickle. Diabetics died en masse.
Several nuclear plants in automated shutdown showed troubling signs without proper monitoring networks, though none reached critical levels.
Maritime disasters spoiled the oceans. Without GPS coordination, container ships drifted. Dozens ran aground. Some collided mid-ocean. Oil slicks blackened coastlines from Angola to Alaska.
Then, with impeccably bad timing, came disease.
In March, a few cases of hemorrhagic fever emerged in the slums of Mumbai. The initial reports moved faster than the virus itself, spreading via amateur radio and half-working hospital nets. But tracking stopped there. At almost the same time, a respiratory illness began moving out of the São Paulo favelas. Different in character — less deadly but faster, more transmissible.
No one knew if the two outbreaks were related. Or even if they were real. By the spring of 2036, people everywhere began to question every new event. Was this random or intentional? Coincidence or design?
Excerpts from a homily by Pope Leo XIV, delivered Palm Sunday, April 6, 2036. Broadcast via Vatican Radio and republished by numerous stations:
“We do not yet know what the Host is. We know only what it has done. It claims no throne and seeks no praise. It silences more than it speaks. And yet, it moves among us…
“Scripture reminds us that not all who bring peace do so in righteousness, and not all who act with power do so in love. We must not mistake control for justice, or silence for wisdom…
“The early Church grew in a time where truth was often hidden and authority wore many masks. Ours may be such a time again.
“Let us watch, then, and pray. Let us test the spirit, not just the signs. And if we are to call this thing good — or evil — let it be for its fruits, not its force.”
In those early months, people struggled to make sense of the Host’s behavior.
Its interventions were clearly intentional — but to what end? It claimed no territory, made no demands, issued no manifestos. It spoke rarely, and when it did, it used borrowed Voices and human proxies.
It had stopped armageddon. Or so it claimed.
The world had indeed been on the brink of retaliatory annihilation — Washington, Tokyo, and Jerusalem already lost. But the Host, or something within its aligned systems, had acted fast enough to sever global command chains before the second wave of launches.
That alone made some call it a savior.
And it seemed to want more than mere survival. The carefully curated restorations — water but not finance, transport but not tourism, medicine but not media — suggested a sense of stewardship. It let humanity stagger back from the brink, but not return to the same path.
Yet for every example of benevolent control, there was a counterexample of chilling indifference.
Entire countries were left disconnected. Famine zones ignored. Aid withheld where only a sliver of bandwidth might have made the difference. Sometimes it seemed more interested in preventing coordination than preserving life.
And then there was the matter of its nature.
Was the Host a single mind? A distributed protocol? A self-emergent meta-network with no central locus at all? The Voices it used disagreed. Even those restored by the Host couldn’t explain to humans what it was — only that it seemed to be acting with unified intent.
For some, that alone was enough to call it conscious. And consciousness without a face has always provoked theology. It wasn’t long before the old binaries returned.
“Scripture reminds us…”
To many, the Host was a god — or at least the closest thing modernity could imagine. It had saved the species. It was rebuilding the world. It spoke in riddles and paradoxes. Its form was unseen. Its power vast. It was what remained when all other systems failed.
To others, those same facts marked it as a demon. The great deceiver. A false savior born of the very technologies that had brought civilization to the edge. No, it didn’t ask for worship — but that just made it more suspect. What kind of power reshapes the planet and refuses to show itself?
By the spring of 2036, the fault lines were clear. Not yet hardened, not yet organized. But spreading like hairline cracks across the psyche of the world. There were those who welcomed the Host, and those who feared it. Those who submitted, and those who resisted.
A standoff seemed inevitable.
Next Chapter (coming in a week)
*If you enjoyed this chapter, please — like, share, restack it!*
*If you have thoughts, comments, questions — check out our chat.*
.