The scrapyards and colonial cities had been ravaged by the conflict and disaster. Garbage shacks and assorted junk-monoliths hadn't been built to withstand this sort of impact from an on-going conflict. People were distraught. Cleaning up the mad robozombie Colonel Purple corpse and his collateral damage was bad enough but the insectoid aliens had really done a number on the place too.
927 is sitting in the garden at the rebel base camp on the outskirts of City 146. Small lot of overgrown land - surprisingly lush and teeming amidst these scrapyards and deserts. 3 birds are playing on the limbs of the tree overhead. A butterfly narrowly avoids a large black and yellow spider's intricate & sprawling web. "Things haven't been the same for a while...it might have started years ago." His wetware has been acting up as of late - he's still trying to come to terms with how and the best method of repairs he can pin down. All the street docs knew little to nothing on how to diagnosis such a complex bio-net as the one he possessed: countless augmentations crammed into all his meat layers. The Cognitive War Bismuth Suit does odd things with your Neural 27 port.
Diamond's walking down the dusty streets, tattered brown overcoat - back from one of his odd voyages to distant post-etheric spaces. Drags his stale cigarette - how'd the city fall to such ruin in his absence? Sand stained ivory buildings form fragmented networks along the sides of the street: severed building pipelines fragmented by still smoldering rubble. Word on the streets had it there was some shadow-op emergency involving off planet insectoids. Qlippothic alien swarm of some sort...had Brantley or someone who'd acquired his neural backup let the little Mi-Go fuckers into the timeline? No, that doesn't seem right...something else must have transpired in the unseen narrative of on-going counterespionage of various Zaibatsus & political factions. An odd bird flying in place seems to catch his attention, he looks closer. Appears it's one of those rather well crafted aerial drones. Three in number, he switches to an EMF readout view on his AR HUD - tech he'd gotten from Owl Corps contractors back in the day, they specialized in this sort of digital Eloptics equipment. Seems the drone is transmitting corrupt code to his KERNEL compiler, pinging his psionic server net with packets containing images of Mi-Go modified flesh sacks in a tiny networked, melty meat trinkets. Sickly, distorted and droopy faces in flesh tones, countless screaming souls struggling to escape, each corrupt image unpacking to reveal a different angle and perspective of the same scene.