#mooks

They towered like a firewall walking, with steely eyes and lead souls, not acting, but always about to act at your wrong move. She remembered she had had heard rumors about how they were made. She started walking faster.

There was a sound. a shout as she walked. She saw another program, being held by an Electroshock, their stun-grapple-cannon wrapped around them like a noose. There was a small decal in slight protest of the regime like graffitti, hovering in the air, only half compiled. 

The program beat their fists against the thing's hide, but to no avail. The noose choked tighter. The pieces of the program began to crack, pixels bleeding as polygons cracked. Still he fought. Still he bit.

It did not save him. The Electroshock took the entangled program, and raised them to its head. With one flash of their bright light, they were gone. No shattered polygons, no bitmap piles of glistening digital visceral. Just pixels floating in the air, a clean form of gore.

On seeing this, she did the only thing she could do. She ran.

She ran down the streets, shadowed by the cold lights. She ran from the crowds, heads to the ground like her. She ran to her work. She knew the path, even though she felt lost. So very lost, doing the one thing she could do. The one thing she'd always done. Run away.

And then, all at once, she was there. 

As she re-rezzed, strain moving from static fuzz to sharpness as if breathing, she looked up to the sky. And she remembered yet again why she didn't want to look up. The nodes once hung like stars in the sky, links to other places in the digital world, the twinkling lights in its black skies.

But now, the stars were winking out one by one. They had been for a long time, but by the time she'd realized it, it was too late. Too late for her, at any rate.

Because, what could just one program do?

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SO, I'm bringing back my old CQ-verse setting, sorta. Which, if you don't remember it, it was basically my take on "Digital World" settings, ala Tron, Mega Man Battle Network, Reboot, Digimon, ect. 

It was well liked, probably had the most potential, but it's lain fallow over these years due to... well, all the stuff putting the net under constant threat, like KOSA, the suite of age verification laws, the threats to Section 230, ectcetera, meaning the net these characters would live on... might not exist anymore. 

But, I've decided to work that very fear into this new iteration. As to how it ties into the old one? Well, you'll see. Because, as the story implicitly tells, with great villains we need great heroes to fight then, now don't we?

The name, as befitting the musical theme naming of the whole CQ-Verse stuff, is based on the working title for the song Shock Treatment from the musical of the same name! You know, that Rocky Horror semi-sequel nobody liked! And yes, I did that partially because they look like a giant taser.

I'm also doing an attempt at drawing attention to the activism meant to save the net in each entry, because god knows we need more eyes on that, so boost it wherever you can. 

My org of the day is the Free Speech Coalition, a newer one but one which has been doing fucking vital work resisting the age verification laws infesting states and threatening to infest this nation. Join up with 'em, and maybe we can not only stop these laws from being passed, but maybe even fight back to burn away those that infest our states now...