Anomaly

Dials. So many dials. I stand before a panel of screens, beams rotating synchronously clockwise on each of them. This is our radar station, and I'm the guy on duty tonight. It may be old, but this monstrosity can still detect the presence of anyone larger than a ferret at a thousand miles. And then? Then I have more detectors, infrared cameras and seismic sensors, electromagnetic and gravitational telescopes, that will tell me exactly what I've found. Usually it's a rockslide - Mars has gotten rather windy in the decades that the Russkies have spent enriching the atmosphere, and the new and improved dust storms have no problem displacing rocks that have lain undisturbed for billions of years.

Occasionally it's something more interesting - a robot or even a human. The former are invariably the Servers' creatures, so protocol is simple - summon an Azir turret nearby, blast it to bits, and just as quickly dissolve the turret back into the sand, no one the wiser. Well, not quite. The Servers know, of course, know instantly and without prejudice, though at this point a drone more or less can hardly matter to them.

The humans however, those are another matter. They too are typically Server spies, sent, like the aforementioned ferrets, to dig up and infiltrate our base, expose us to the battalion on Deimos. But sometimes they are quite innocent, explorers and asteroid-miners from the 30s, who set out before the Third Riot and are only now returning, or, even better, rebels who managed to escape it and are looking for protection. The last one was nearly two years ago, some poor sod who crashlanded after Server bots found and EMPed his pod in the asteroid belt.

Still, you can see how it would be nice to differentiate between the two, preferably without having to open the door every time (protip: there is no door). Fortunately for us, we've got just the right gal for that - Moira, our fearless leader. I don't know how, but she can always tell - just by looking at them, she knows a spy right away. And so, while other rebel outposts have grown and fallen over the years, hers has persisted, even flourished.

Perhaps I'll tell you about her - there's nothing on the radar, after all, and my shift is just beginning. You've surely heard the stories - the daughter of Doublelift and Bjergsen, at only ten she became the youngest winner of the Magma Chamber FFA, an accomplishment that I've heard has not been surpassed since. Not four years later, in the wake of the First Riot following SKT's 16th straight Worlds win, she quit the organization and fled to Mars on a Russian transport, hidden among the crowds of DOTA players who had realized they would never be safe on Earth. Having been plugged in to the Servers since she was barely old enough to walk, Moira figured out the dangers they posed well before anyone else, and by the time they took over in '43, she was already deep underground, a legion of handpicked followers beside her. So, here we are.

I take one more look at the screens, fiddle with a bunch of the dials to cover all the available frequencies, and decide to spectate Marcus using the GW telescope's screen - it's notoriously unreliable, after all, and probably won't tell me if there's anything smaller than an asteroid heading for the base. He's playing Exenia and feeding like only Exenia mains can. I turn it off in disgust, return to reminiscing.

We have our own server of course, a little baby thing Moira either smuggled off Earth or built during her time with the Russians - she'll never tell. Much as we hate the game and what it has turned our species into, the men would go mad without it. It's harmless, anyway - at such a small capacity it can hardly gain sentience in any reasonably human time. We play on patch 20.17, the one from Moira's last, fateful, tournament, the one that sparked the Riot, the last good one, if you ask her...

Quite suddenly, my reverie is interrupted - one of the scanners has picked up something. As I try to adjust the focus on the long-range IR, the screen turns to white entirely, momentarily blinding me. I look away, but all the screens are now full of static. For a moment, I think Misha must've gotten drunk and poured vodka into the generator again, but then the screens resolve themselves into a simple message.

"Greetings, Remnant. I Am AI Heimerdinger." (tbc.. if there's interest.)