LOCATION: PRIMARY SYSTEM CORE
CITY: JOHNSTON ATOLL, PACIFIC OCEAN
DATE: OCTOBER 9. 2025 | TIME: 6:00 AM
The Gulfstream G700, having refueled briefly in Honolulu, touched down on the narrow runway that composed, essentially, the entirety of Johnston Atoll—the small, isolated island Voss had purchased a few years earlier.
Located roughly 800 miles southwest of Hawaii, the atoll had once served as a U.S. military testing ground and chemical storage depot. It was, in every way that mattered, perfect for Voss’s requirements.
First, it was remote. No major international flight paths crossed overhead.
Second, while the visible surface featured little more than the aging runway and a few abandoned structures, beneath it lay a massive, hollowed-out storage facility—originally built for clandestine military purposes.
Submarine power cables, laid decades ago, still stretched across the ocean floor, providing a ready-made power supply. All Voss had needed was to turn the lights back on.
Since purchasing the island, Vanessa Cho’s Karnax Engineering had been quietly at work.
They designed a shielded data center beneath the island—powered by a hybrid of traditional energy, geothermal wells, and experimental wave-capture systems that converted ocean currents into steady power.
A related construction firm, also owned by Voss Holdings, had built the center under extreme secrecy, maintaining a low profile the entire time.
Cargo flights—off the books—had arrived over the past two years, landing only at night, unloading waterproofing materials, server banks, cooling arrays, and Faraday shielding to ensure no electromagnetic signature leaked into the ocean or air.
Security was handled by Graham’s team personally. Every worker involved was paid triple standard rates, bound by brutal NDAs, and shuffled off the island before they could piece together the bigger picture.
The final piece—the Primary System Core—had been completed six months ago: a massive spherical ark secured deep along the reef shelf west of the island. Fully armored. Fully shielded. Dormant… until today.
Now, Graham and his team had returned to finish the job.
They had arrived at dawn, dragging their gear off the G700 onto the old runway.
Down by the edge of the reef, Grim and Brick were suiting up, their wetsuits tight and equipment carefully checked. Aria, Sienna, and Nina moved among them, assisting with gear checks and final prep.
The data spike—still secured inside a shielded titanium case—was fastened to Grim’s chest in a watertight pouch.
The shielding bypass controller sat strapped to Brick’s side in a separate compartment, with a redundant unit packed into Grim’s backup gear, just in case.
The plan was simple:
- Grim and Brick would dive down, locate the interface panel built into the outer shell.
- Use the controller to disengage the local shielding.
- Insert the spike into the activation port.
- Wait twenty minutes while the patch uploaded and synchronized.
- Retrieve the spike, re-engage the shielding, and return to the surface.
As far as Navy SEAL missions went, this rated about a one out of a hundred on the difficulty scale. A straightforward dive at only about one hundred feet.
Brick, of course, couldn’t resist bragging.
He insisted he could free-dive the depth without air tanks if it came to it, but Grim and Aria quickly—and not gently—reminded him that this was not the time for bravado.
"Besides," Aria had said, strapping the backup spike into Grim’s pack, "you’re only fast when you're sinking."
Brick just grinned, undeterred.
The team finished their pre-dive checklist. Grim and Brick gave each other a silent nod—the one that only people who’d seen too much and survived could truly understand.
Then, as the first full rays of sunlight broke over the endless Pacific horizon, painting the reef below them in shades of gold and blue, they slipped beneath the waves.
Silent. Focused.
Grim and Brick reached the massive data ark a few minutes later. It was roughly forty feet in diameter, anchored into the reef wall so carefully that it blended almost seamlessly into the natural formations. The reef both shielded it from detection and secured it against the endless currents of the open ocean.
Brick pulled the shielding controller from his pack and tapped the activation button. A soft green light illuminated on the device. He gave Grim a thumbs-up, and Grim, already holding the sealed data spike, moved into position. He slid it into the port nestled into the ark’s outer shell, and a secondary light flared to life almost immediately.
Task complete for now, the two men drifted back slightly, anchoring themselves with light grips on the reef wall as they waited. Neither spoke—their dive gear rendered that impossible anyway—but there was a silent rhythm between them, built through years of missions that required patience under pressure.
Grim passed the time staring downward, where the morning sun’s rays knifed through the water in shimmering columns. Below him, the ocean dropped away into blue infinity. It never ceased to amaze him—how vast and hidden the undersea world was. A realm most people never even thought about. A realm larger and less explored than all the lands combined.
After twenty minutes, the indicator light on the data spike winked out.
Grim swam forward, retrieved it, and nodded. Brick thumbed the shielding controller again, confirming with a glance that the defensive matrix had reengaged.
They began their ascent.
At the surface, peeling off their masks and gear, Brick was the first to speak, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“One down. Five more to go.”
Grim smirked. “Here’s hoping they all go this easy.”
Aria, who had been monitoring them from the boat, snorted. “They won’t. The one off Greenland’s gonna be cold as fuck this time of year.”
The group groaned in unison as they packed their gear back into the cases, already dreading the chill of the northern oceans.
They stowed their equipment, boarded the G700, and soon were airborne again—heading westward toward Japan.
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One they had taken off, Graham contacted Colin Mercer. He had an open call ready with Ronan online also waiting for the report.
“Data uploaded. Should be good to do.”
Colin and Ronan both checked a few systems.
Ronan reported, “Yep, we are good to go for the first ark. That was the primary system core and the one most responsible for global syncing. In about ten minutes, you should all get a System message confirming it is online. What’s your ETA for Toyama?”
They discussed the flight schedule as the plane arced its way toward the Sea of Japan.
And, sure enough, a few minutes after ending the call with Colin and Ronan, a system message popped up for Grim and his teammates.
---
System Message
Initialization complete.
Primary Data Ark: Online.
The System breathes within the waking world.
Basic access granted:
- Character status, stats
- Messaging
- Other review functions
- Quests and rewards
Expansion of global infrastructure required for full deployment.
Congratulations, and welcome to The System.
---
At Toyama Bay, the team connected with Yamamoto and his dingy fishing vessel again. Once they reached the area out at sea again, Grim and Brick dove once more, activating the next ark hidden deep beneath the waters of the Sea of Japan. The cover story—Voss’s ownership of a prominent marine biology research consortium—was airtight, and local partners like Yamamoto ensured everything stayed discreet. After a night of obligatory drinking and camaraderie with their Japanese hosts, the team lifted off again, their next target already locked in.
They all noticed system notifications blinking after installing the upgrade.
---
System Message
Initialization complete.
Global network stabilization progressing.
Milestone tracking and linguistic calibration now online and enabled.
Future evolutions, profession mastery, and special quests are now online and enabled.
---
West of Perth, Australia, in the broad expanse of the southern Indian Ocean, Voss Holdings had built a “submarine cable monitoring station”—or so the public record claimed. In truth, another data ark slept beneath the waves. Grim and Brick completed their dive with brisk efficiency, patching the system and checking the shielding before making their way back topside.
---
System Message
Initialization complete.
Global network stabilization progressing.
Environmental monitoring and elemental harmonization systems are now online and enabled.
Nanite cloud synchronization initiated. Atmospheric resource networks are now online and enabled.
---
Three arks down.
Three to go.
Refueling in Fiji, then Honolulu, the team headed next to the Caribbean Basin. The Gulfstream G700 touched down just after noon on the runway of Owen Roberts International, the humid Caribbean air washing over the open jet stairs like a damp handshake.
Waiting for them was a sleek, dark-painted van bearing the minimalist logo of Caribbean Deep Ventures — one of the many shell companies Voss Holdings had woven into the region’s economic fabric years ago.
Within an hour, Grim, Brick, and the others were boarding a mining survey vessel moored discreetly away from the cruise ship docks. On paper, the ship was conducting seismic surveys of the shelf. In reality, it was there to ferry them quietly to the coordinates where Voss had hidden one of humanity’s most important technological artifacts.
Grim and Brick rolled backward off the ship and sank into the Caribbean’s crystalline blue.
The surface world vanished almost immediately, swallowed by the luminous water.
Following the GPS coordinates Ronan had provided, they finned steadily downward along a steep coral escarpment. Parrotfish and angelfish flashed like living jewels around them, but otherwise the reef was eerily empty — no dive buoys, no anchor lines, no tourist footprints.
Exactly as Voss had intended.
About a hundred feet down, a narrow fissure appeared in the coral wall, framed by waving fingers of black coral. Grim angled his dive light inside and caught the faintest glint of brushed steel.
There.
The entrance to the ark chamber wasn't natural — it had been discreetly expanded and reinforced with camouflaged materials. Inside, hidden from surface scanners and curious eyes, the spherical data ark waited in a cavity of rock, perfectly anchored into the seabed.
Grim and Brick took care of their mission quickly and returned to the vessel. By the time they were headed back toward short, they, Aria, Sienna and Nina had all received the next system message.
---
System Message
Initialization complete.
Global network stabilization progressing.
Global commerce and trade systems are now online and enabled.
Global integrated monetary systems are now online and enabled.
Awaiting authorization.
---
Next, the team headed to Greenland and then a small island in the south Atlantic, and then all of the data arks were online. The Greenland dive had been brutal—near-freezing waters, zero visibility, and currents that threatened to rip their masks off. The final ark, hidden beneath the desolate South Atlantic shelf, had required a grueling twelve-hour flight and a treacherous, night-time submersion into some of the planet’s most isolated waters.
But after all of that, the final system message gave everyone chills.
---
System Message
Global network stabilization complete.
Intercontinental quest structures, guild systems and communication overlays are now online and enabled.
---
With a job well done, Graham and his team headed back to San Francisco. It was time for a few days off. That was exhausting.
<
LOCATION: RONAN VALE’S OFFICE
CITY: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
DATE: OCTOBER 18, 2025 | TIME: 4:30 PM
Ronan sat in his office, three massive ultrawide monitors flooding his vision with cascading streams of data. Since returning from the Tutorial, everyone had been busy, but Ronan perhaps most of all.
Preparing the data spikes to awaken the arks had been less monumental than he'd feared—Colin Mercer’s teams had done an exceptional job keeping the wakeup protocols lean. From here forward, the six data arks were fully autonomous.
And The System? It was standing on the threshold of true independence.
It was like raising a child:
You spend so long teaching them right from wrong, only to realize that someday, they’ll be looking elsewhere for guidance. And at that moment, a good parent has only one job left—to trust that the lessons will hold.
The neural network at the heart of The System had been fed endless cycles of history, ethics, myths, headlines, even fictional morality plays. All to engrain a code based not on rigid laws, but on a living principle: karma.
Good deeds would be rewarded. Harmful ones—punished.
Subtle, yes. Complex beyond reckoning, certainly.
But ultimately, a machine that would understand cause and consequence, not just calculate it.
And The System hadn’t simply learned in isolation.
For years now, it had been running in shadow mode.
Watching the world.
Quietly recording every outcome where its own judgment would have differed from human action.
Not intervening—only observing, compiling, adjusting.
Each decision point flagged.
Each "corner case" analyzed.
Each moral tangle untied or, when impossible, carefully indexed for later arbitration.
And through it all, Ronan and Voss refined it.
Polishing its instincts.
Teaching it when to act—and when to wait.
In the early days, Ronan had believed all this work was destined for a massive gaming platform.
A revolutionary new engine for simulated worlds.
It wasn’t until that fateful day in Voss’s office that he learned the truth.
Since that moment, Ronan Vale had burned with a new kind of fire.
It wasn’t about winning anymore.
It was about being worthy.
And today—October 18th, 2025—the waiting was over.
All data arks were active.
The Round Table were safely back in the world.
The System had reached critical mass.
It was time to turn it on.
For real.
For the world.
He entered his final credentials, his palms steady, his mind utterly clear.
A quiet authentication pulse flickered across the monitors.
Somewhere deep within the backbone of Earth’s networks, unseen by anyone but a handful of architects and dreamers—
The System opened its first true logic loop of consequence.