Chapter 000 - A text message?

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[Irregular peek of Energy Detected – Initializing Deep Scan…]

[Monster Activity Detected – Initializing [Midas]… Loading… Please wait… Loading Completed]

[Monster Invasion Defense and Assistance System is Online [Midas]...]

[Initializing Sub-Systems… Loading… Please wait… Loading Completed…]

[Creating [Training Tower]… Please wait… Completed…]

[Selecting Players candidates… Please wait… Completed]

[Sending Invitations to all Players candidates to participate…]

[Waiting for reply… reply received 1/????????]

[Initiating Player teleportation in 3…2…1…]

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[Message]: “You have been invited to the [Training Tower] as part of a defense program which purpose is the creation, training, and support of Players, do you wish to [accept] or [refuse], please reply this message before the training period ends”.

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This text message in all languages of the world was sent to millions of people all around the globe throughout their phones, most people thought it was some kind of internet joke or a game, one they can start playing by replying [accept], however, people that didn’t have the time ignored it or just [refuse] it, deleting it would not make the text message go away.

Some of those that had [refuse] thought that the person on the other line would force them to continue or maybe encourage them to [accept] and play a fun game, but nothing else happened for those that had [refuse] as their first reply, and even if they sent [accept] later on no new messages would came back, this was because they already had sent their replied, their only option was to move on with their lives and forget about it.

However in some cases people that had [refuse] it and saw that nothing happened, started to grow curious as they moved to ask their friends or family if they got the same text message that they did and what were their replies, if they didn’t find anyone with the message they would instead search around the internet while asking other people in forums what happens when you [accept] the message and for them to publish the results.

People started to notice something was off with this text message as none of the people that said they would [accept] it didn’t send more messages after that, they all went offline from their chat rooms if they were using their phones or stopped replying to their post, on the other hand, people that did write back were just trying to troll the internet by saying they have won the lottery or that something magical happens like a person disappearing from the spot, of course, no one believed that and as they weren’t consistent with their histories people started to suspect they were either lying or you really will get something amazing, making more people to try for themselves.

It wasn’t long until someone noticed that those that sent their replies as [accept] were consistently disappearing from the world in reality, like shadows hit by a flashlight, they were gone as soon as they pressed send, and no matter the place or what they were wearing they would be no more the next moment, nor they will leave behind even the shadow of their figure, this all became an internet sensation in an instant after a streamer with millions of subscribers replied [accept] to the text message during a live stream and made him disappeared from the spot.

Many were labeling this as a magic trick or a prank as it was already known for some people like the text message prank that was causing people to go missing after they had replied to a text message, however this news soon reached all T.V channels as the video of people vanishing one after the other like part of a magic show in front of a crowd of incredulous people, this was broadcasted on national television, meanwhile this video and many more were quickly being circulating around the globe thanks to the internet lightning fast speed, and soon were overflowing the news feeds on people’s personal smart device or PPSD’s most commonly known as phones.

The news spread like wildfire as something that you can do yourself at home with your PPSD, you only need reply a text message, and like a dam that broke, videos of people doing it as part of a massive challenge started to overflow the internet and circulated around for the whole world to see. People of the world wake up next day to news headline of the viral challenge that will make you disappear, without realizing that the people that tried it was actually going missing as soon they did it, of course not everyone in the world got the text message even when they have a PPSD with then, as for who was the sender of the text message nobody knew.

People dismissed this news as a new CGI gimmicky trick videos while others thought the headline was some kind of marketing ploy to gain more views for a new phone game and to increase the hype around it, but whatever it was it still caught people attention.

At the same time this news was making the world spin, news of a massive increase in cases of reported missing people were starting pile out until it reached the mainstream media, until it blow up in the people faces with a hundred thousand if not a million of people going missing in the last 48 hours, the unprecedented increased was soon revealed as this wasn’t just happening in one country but all of the countries all around the world have been piling out cases of people going missing in the last 48 hours.

The greater the number of people with a PPSD’s in a country, the greater the number of people going missing in that country, this was to be shown that there was a direct correlation as people started to pinpoint to the cause.

In just two days a million people have gone missing while leaving not a single trace behind to follow, but it is not true that they were going missing without a clue as it was a known fact that the missing have been taking part in a wide scale internet challenges that make them disappear so there wasn’t a case here.

“They must be hiding in someone else house while doing the challenge” a world government official declared, and this is what most people thought at the time as he wasn't fired on the spot, however the world government was still forced to act throughout the whole world and they did this by sending the Global Police to investigate as this challenge already had gone out of control, with serious crimes being committed around the world.

The Global Police or World Global Defense Police, GP for short acted fast, two days after the incident had started they put together an investigation team with their top agents and in just one day they had to recollect all the evidence from all the cases they could muster to handle and put together a global case like never seen before, their conclusions as shocking as the case itself.

Out all of the cases they could handle, most if not all of them have a few things in common, first of all, all of the missing people have a smart device with then that was connected to a network and was capable of sending and receiving a text message from any or all cellphone networks, this was proven to be true by using the computers logs that showed the people location that was monitored by the network and the time then matching it with the report.

The logs also showed another clue, the last communication coming out from their phones was that they had sent a text message before their phone signal has disappeared from the network grid, they didn’t just move away to another location the signal from their phones just stopped coming altogether.

Even if GP broke the privacy laws that prohibited the contents of a text message to be read by anyone else other than the sender and receiver of that message, that message still could not be read as the connection and all the messages were all fully encrypted with an unprecedented level of security that the GP computers could not crack.

But it wasn’t like they need to decrypt the last message they had to send to know its contents, because, they all already knew what the message was as it had been recorded and streamed by the own missing people at the time of their disappearance, they knew even to the point that in some cases the video showed the time in their cellphone screen as they recorded the video, this time perfectly matched with time registered in the computer logs.

It was not that the GP didn’t have any clue to work on what so ever, it was, in fact, the opposite, they may have too many clues but the conclusions they could draw out from them made no sense, no one with a healthy mind could reasonably accept a cellphone was kidnaping people away and that nor brand or model matters as long they got the right message, even when their own agents did the challenge in front of the GP director, they hesitated to report it.

In the end, they still delivered their preliminary report together with their recommendation to the world government for all the networks to block this message from being sent or to block all cellphone networks altogether, even if no one would believe them and their reputation would crumble into tiny specks of dust the GP director still hoped that some people at the world government would listen.

However the world government acted as predicted and called the GP director a loony for sending such report and recommendation, the GP just ignore it and moved onto their next point in the list, finding the missing people and rescuing them as they started to deploy their field agents that got the text message.

The GP did this without asking for the world government permission as this was their case and they already had been assigned to this mission giving them complete control over it, after all why ask for permission when world government all thought that the GP director was a loony and that it has failed this mission already away. Now they were calling him into question and asking for him to be removed out of his position, the GP as a whole just straight out ignore the world government calls as they rebelled while they still keep doing their job.

The fallout between the GP director and the World Government didn’t reach to the mass media.

The case of the missing, a world phenomenon, they all have replied to the text message with an [accept] as their answer and now they all have vanished from the world, location unknown, situation unknown, reason unknown, alive or death unknown, and this phenomenon where people are going missing still is going on.

It didn’t take too long for other people to connect the dots into a line and then formed a square as the evidence presented itself as a box-shaped mystery with all the missing people inside, but whom could have believed it until you tried yourself, those that knew the cause tried to prevent the world but they were mocked and looked down upon like the GP, but even if they weren’t, it was already too late to do anything as the text message keep arriving at people phones, in the waiting for them to send their reply.

Deleted it and it will come back again, ignore and it will weight down your mind, [refuse] it and you will regret it, [accept] it and you will disappear, things like this could be read almost everywhere as the world started to descend into a spiral of chaos and madness because as of now the rails from where the world runs started to disappear and the crash was imminent.

In this new era of world chaos, people took the chance to go missing using their own method instead of replying to the message they just ran away from their crappy lives, with so many people going missing all the time and all around no one would come looking for them anyway, free of their debt and mental pain they celebrated.

While other people weren’t as lucky as a never before seen crime wave hit them and robbed of their lives or freedom making them a different kind of missing that most people weren’t aware, people that live into the light could not see the darkness hidden under their feet and even if it was in plain sight and even if they knew it they still choose to ignore it, they have no say nor power to stop it anyway.

As the world keeps spiraling away into a time of chaos, crime and panic, more news keep hitting the world making the turns go faster, as the attacks of wild and domestics animals that killed or injured a person were also starting to skyrocket, dogs that tried bite off their owners necks and some that successfully tried, cats that went crazy aggressive as they used they shard claws to injure people, birds that attacked people in flocks all around as a new kind of virus that affected only the animals started to spread making them 1000% more aggressive against humans, maybe a new kind of rabies perhaps, those animals had to be put down immediately and then burned into ashes as kids cried the loss of their pets and their parents covert their wounds.

However this news was overshadowed in the mass media as there were far more important things going out all around the world at the moment, that were far more important for the modern people of the world, the news T.V channels explode once again.

“All the Internet and cellphones networks have being hijacked by some unknown group of hackers, their demands are still unknown and until now no damage has been reported”

This was released to the press and printed into every paper or website but the real news was far worse than that by a long shot, project code [Midas] revealed itself to the world government and an unknown group of hackers was what made it into the press.

This unknown group of hackers has asked not for a money bounty for giving the control back, but instead they had asked to let people decided on their own if they want to become Players or not, since then they haven’t sent another message to the world government via text message from the same place that the cursed text message came from.

When world government finally discovered that the text message they initially thought it was a joke was actually the real the cause of the missing people case by their own private investigations after the president daughter disappeared in front of his father eyes, this made them wanting to jump from the rooftop of a high building for not listening when the GP had already told them the cause days ago, only now they could start believing it, should they had maybe it could have prevented a lot of people going missing.

They immediately followed the GP recommendation and sent the order to shut down all networks that were affected by text message, in other words, almost all networks if not all of them, communications would be restricted in the short term as they try to figure out what to do next but this was better than losing even more people, however this is also when they got the text message from [Midas], the world government ignore it and proceed with the order.

Soon after they realized that they, the ones in control, weren’t the ones in control anymore, not just have they loss the control of all networks including T.V, but of everything that was plugged into a socket wall, however, they release a less shocking information to the press trying to cover up the sun with their thumps and hide this huge problem under the carpet or passing it as something minor.

For solutions they have none, with the GP gone silent they had tried to come out with a solution on their own but found none, cutting the power off was not viable option unless they wanted to throw all of humanity back to dark ages, not to mention they only way they found to shut it all down was by stopping the machines from mechanically working, in other words, it was by destroying the machines, and with it they meant destroying almost all of the technology infrastructure of the world, this was no difference than throwing a nuclear bomb over all of their cities, and like a world government official expressed it in a private reunion, “the machines have rebelled against their master”.

Destroying the machines that gave them light, water, food, and fresh air was like putting the horse before the cart and then shutting down the horse with an assault rifle and then burning down the cart to ashes with a flamethrower, only for the wind to blow at the end, and spread the ashes all around the world, in short, a very bad choice, however this was not the only plan they had, because doing nothing was also an option, a bad one but at least not a very bad one, it was the only option they thought it will bring fewer repercussions for the world and to their careers as no one in the government wanted to be remembered as the government that destroyed the world after all.

This was because even though the world has suffered a massive hack of unprecedented level which the likes of the world has never seen before, still no damage has been felt, well, that’s only if can you ignore the increasing number of people going missing and the crime wave spring, but those were just products of people own doing and could be controlled by using the police and the military unlike the hack that it nor couldn’t be controlled or stopped it.

And as the people of the world keep disappearing, all systems and sub-system that keep the world spinning out of control keep working in perfect order without their human operators, and as the world government keep pretending it was working on the solution all the while actually doing nothing, an even bigger problem that was not an issue right now grew on the shadows.

The world government way of doing things was always the same, putting off the problems that were not an issue right now and deal with the ones that were, as there will be always a tomorrow and new problem to solve, better to rest now and wait for the sun to rise again tomorrow than hurry up for solution that could make the current problem far worse, after all, the world was already full of problems anyway, and maybe now they could put their focus in other problems and move the agenda forward to something like the new type of rabies that was affecting pets aggressiveness levels around the world, even though it wasn’t an issue right now.

By the fifth day because they could not trace the hack back to its origin nor they were able to stop it, regaining control of the systems has become impossible after five days, the only thing they could realistically hope to do was trying to prevent more people from going missing which numbers are in the 90 million now, this is what was put as top priority in the agenda while all other items in the list were dismissed.

The plan put in motion was to take away the people's phones voluntary or involuntary and send [refuse] using their phones as the security systems that are being taken over prevented doing it in any another way.

In their press released there was not a single mention for a plan to rescued the already missing people as their locations and status remained unknown, and so the world keeps spinning around while the world government did what it could as it waited for a new day to come and for a solution to present itself.

After six days the government had to face facts, they could not hide it anymore, too many people were missing and too many system were compromised as the rumor “The world government has lost control” together with “I had to put my pet down today and it is all the world government fault” started to be spread all around the internet and the T.V, they had to come out clean for all of this mess and hope to find a real solution this time.

They released a new statement, explaining in detail the extent of the hack and how it was related to the cause of why people were going missing citing a text message as the cause and leaving out any mention of [Midas] or the hacker group name nor their demands as the government straight out told people to [refuse] the message immediately, and they even installed a cellphone ban around the world and passed a new law, the [refuse] law and tried to enforce all around the world.

Even when the world government went against [Midas] request for letting people make their own decision if they choose to [accept] or [refuse], either way, no response or attack came back from [Midas] at all because of this.

Even though this press statement didn’t stop people from going missing at least earned them a little bit of more time as people hesitated, however, the underlying message was that they have lost control of the situation making people forget about other matters.

But it was far too little far too late, in the next day from when the day the message was released to the world, two million of reported cases of missing people around the world had been filled and submitted, by the fifth day when the government started their mass broadcasts in the same hijacked networks telling the people of the world to outright [refuse], the number of reported cases was already reaching the one hundred million, in a planet with 7 billion people one hundred million missing in five days was devastating.

The missing Players as people started to call them, they tested onto themselves and between friends as they ignored warnings, being more thrilled than ever before of being part the chosen Players as not everybody got selected and those that had initially [refuse] were starting to appear in talk shows, with faces filled with regret for not being part of the missing during their interview on national television.

After a week of the start of chaos has gone by in the blink of an eye, there was still no trace of the missing people and with the count capped at one hundred million missing people before they stopped counting altogether a new day has arrived.

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“… I had to put my dog down yesterday I feel like crying…”

“… you too? My mom says our cat got away but I saw a receipt saying it was put down but I hated that cat anyway it always scratched my favorite dress…”

“…you are so mean…you should get a dog next they are the best… sniff sniff…”

“…hey did you received that text?...”

“…sniff yes I did, just yesterday… why do want to give it a try?”

“…No way! People really are going missing when they [accept] you know…”

“…But aren’t you curious? After my dog died I feel like wanting to disappear too...”

“… I am curious but my dad stole my phone so I couldn’t send the reply…”

“…what! Didn’t you complain to him? A cellphone is something too precious for our daily lives you know?...”

“…Of course, I complained all day, but no matter how much I beg my dad still wouldn’t give back…”

“…your dad is so evil…”

“… yeah...”

“…then how about we send a reply together using my phone and see what happens? If we both are holding the phone at the same time would we disappear together?...”

“…Ehh? Does that even works?...”

“…I don’t know but it is something we can try out you know…”

The two student girls giggle away.

As two schoolgirls were discussing their afternoon plans an unfocused teen boy was in dazed not far away while listening to their private conversation, most of the things they talked usually were girly stuff that he didn’t care much, but today’s topic has drawn his attention as he keeps looking at the screen of this phone in a daze as if trying to come out with a decision.

[Message]: “You have been invited to the [Training Tower] as part of a defense program which purpose is the creation, training, and support of Players, do you wish to [accept] or [refuse], please reply this message before the training period ends”.

“…”