The journey to California took months. The battalion found the wreckage and devastation of monumental food riots, fires, and the general lack of stability caused by the Blackout. Outside of the cities, the soldiers found families and groups of survivors hurtled together in meager attempts to fight back the tides of chaos crashing down on the prairies from the crumbling cities.

Along the way, the colonel and his troops made a multitude of stops securing homesteads and farms against the ensuing threats fostered by the collapsing society. In Durango, the soldier’s arrival was such a welcomed sight. Some refugees wept in the presence of a United States Army uniform. To them that was the only symbol they need to truly believe order was being restored.

As the soldiers traveled further west, Highways were secured, trade routes opened, and small towns revitalized. These rebirthing settlements and townships would grow to be the backbone of what would be known as The Sovereign States. Large swaths of wilderness land were granted to the growing towns, and multiple counties would fall under the management of these small communities. With the roads open and connections secured the outlying farmers and homesteads were reconnected. Food was finding its way to the shelves once again. In this time people still bought and sold goods with US greenback dollars despite the collapse.

As normality returned to the growing populations centers, the soldiers began recruiting to refill and bolster their ranks. Colonel Griffin was appointed to General by his closest subordinates. Now the battalions were referring to themselves as The Alliance. The soldiers still wore their US patches, but they knew that now they represented something different. The Alliance stood for these people directly. The sight of humanity coming together to rebuild left a lasting impression on the soldiers; some who had felt disheartened by the devastation witnessed prior. Now they had something truly great to defend; a nation to rebuild. The biggest threat was still waiting over the horizon. A visceral anger began to grow in the hearts of the soldiers. They saw what the AI had taken from them and they wanted revenge.

The Alliance continued its march to war. In the four corners region, the soldier encountered their first organized belligerents. In the deserts of Utah, Alliance forces engaged raiders and renegades in combat frequently. Packs of bandits that made their way surviving off the suffering of others. These skirmishes were more of a nuisance than an actual threat to the trained military personal. However, the constant squabbles would become a strain on resources and ammunition.

The alliance began to take on conscript from defeated raider gangs to help fill gaps in their ranks as well as volunteers from incorporated territories. By the time Alliance forces reached the outskirts of Silicon Valley they were a war party of ten thousand strong. Every soldier was prepared to fight. The war against the AI was about to officially begin.

Prior to the collapse, under the orders of Supreme President Bush, The United States had expanded its missile defense programs designed during the first cold war. Originally named “Star Defense” The system was a series of unmanned missile turrets, satellites and ICBM positions designed to defend against any foreign missile threat directly. Supreme President Bush had rebranded this program as “Star Destroyer” and the system was upgraded to initiate attacks against any threat globally. The AI immediately utilized this technology, infiltrating whatever systems it could find a way to connect to. Satellites and mobile drones were all positioned around what become known as “the heart of OSCAR”.

The first battle against the AI was a tragic loss for the human side. General Griffin and his troops marched towards San Francisco. The first wave of their attack was a direct strike at the physical servers hosted in Silicon Valley. They never crossed the county lines.

The AI launched a devastating missile barrage from multiple unmanned rocket defense satellites. Thousands of lives were lost in a second. The survivors fell back to Fresno and then further south to Los Angeles. General Griffin had lost his left leg and eye during the Modesto firestorm. Though he was severely wounded he still managed to lead the retreat to safety. Within a few short weeks of the fall back, Fresno and the majority of California’s Central Valley as far south as Bakersfield was completely leveled by the AI controlled missile defense system.

After OSCAR unleashed the Star Defense firestorm across California, it realized missiles and drones would only last so long. OSCAR would need soldiers of its own. Former robotics facilities all around San Jose and San Francisco were awoken by the AI. Fortunately for OSCAR, there was at least one late-stage prototype developed by Orion still connected to the digital mainframe. OSCAR uploaded its own software into the proto-aut and took its first steps into our world. The first physical extension of OSCAR was alive.

Using its new body, OSCAR was able to redesign and compile fresh code into the manufacturing software’s desktop interface systems. OSCAR began constructing a new and improved body. Once the data was uploaded into the fabricators, a fresh order of OSCAR’s Automatons started rolling off the assembly lines. Each Aut was a further extension of OSCAR, entire units and battalions moved as a singular hive.

After months of constant work, OSCAR had built an army. Armored automaton units patrolled Silicon Valley in repurposed vehicles. The Sounds of helicopter blades chopping through the air filled the skies above the Bay Area after OSCAR refurbished controls of the city’s pre-blackout autonomous air police. Auts worked around the clock gathering resources, minerals, and supplies to keep the city running, pumping out new Aut soldiers like around the clock. The Heart of OSCAR was beating.

From the ruins of Los Angeles, Alliance forces staged a second assault on The Heart of OSCAR. In the early spring of 2010, the Humans finally came face to face with the Automaton army. A fierce war waged on for years across the badlands of California. Each side would take heavy losses in desperate attempts to gain little ground. The Humans would smash lines after months of attrition only to be blown back to the start by Star Destroyer while new Aut strike forces would be built or upgraded to match Alliance tactics. Both sides would find themselves struggling for resources and long recuperation periods. The war had become stretched out over years leaving little hope for an end to the conflict.

In the fall of 2011, three massive container ships docked in the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Refugees from Southeast Asia had come to Los Angeles to resettle. Thousands upon thousands of people exited the ships onto the docks of Los Angeles. The United People’s Nation had arrived in California. With the help of Alliance forces, the UPN spread out from their ships and the docks creating cluster communities throughout the city. Within a few weeks large portions of Los Angeles were revitalized and infrastructure restored.

In the following year, the UPN would work with the Alliance to refurbish Southern California’s oil fields and refineries producing power and a constant supply of oil and gas. Factories and manufacturing facilities were also repurposed to make equipment that could support the Alliance war effort. With heavy investments from backers in the Sovereign States, The New Yoshimitsu Corp was born in the rejuvenating city. To pay homage to the cities rebirth, the area was redubbed New Angeles and officially incorporated into the Sovereign States as an independent enclave run by the UPN. New Angeles and The New Yoshimitsu Corporation would go on to become a tremendous ally for Alliance forces, supplying them with advanced high-tech weaponry for years to come.

Eventually the Humans were able to break the stalemate against OSCAR in the summer of 2016. Using telescopes at the Griffith Observatory in New Angeles, Alliance engineers were able to pinpoint OSCAR’s most crucial defense satellites. Once the satellites were located, newly designed highly sophisticated supersonic Musashi Arms’ missiles were used to obliterate them in orbit. With the Star Destroyer satellites obsolete, Alliance forces were finally able to push through the California Badlands into the robotically redesigned Aut fortress of San Francisco. After months of savage combat the Humans infiltrated OSCAR’s source network server room.

Inside the core, Alliance forces uploaded a myriad of file corrupting software into OSCAR’s network that would spread to every connected system and brick OSCAR’s code. The goal was to erase the AI and everything connected to it. This would not only destroy OSCAR, but it would erase the entire network formerly known as the World Wide Web as OSCAR’s code had spread throughout the entirety of cyberspace.

In the last moments of the final battle, as Alliance forces stormed The Heart of OSCAR, large squadrons of Auts abandoned their position and retreated, leaving turrets and minor drones to defend the crumbling mainframe core. Alliance soldiers didn’t bother to pursue the retreating forces. The troops couldn’t understand why robots would retreat and assumed it to be a trap; their mission was the mainframe.

The Heart of OSCAR would finally break. The soldier staged the computer virus and prepared for a second assault from the Auts. The soldiers would defend the mainframe core with everything they had left. They were more than willingly to die to see OSCAR defeated.


General Griffin and his direct subordinates that had survived the war since Colorado, led the charge into the mainframe. As Griffin’s technicians began to upload the corruption software, a single message appeared on each monitor in the server room. The message read Congratulations Colonel. Until we meet again. As the virus upload reached 89%, the Alliance forces watched the few Auts and automated systems that remained in the fight go dark and fall. Their robotic bodies were ripped apart by Alliance bullets before their plastic parts could hit ground. The network that had once spread across the globe and connected millions was gone. The phone lines and server rooms were still intact, but the code was deleted. In that final moment, the World Wide Web was gone off the face of the Earth. What was left of Silicon Valley was completely sacked. By the end of the war thousands upon thousands had died, Aut and Human alike.

Knowing its code would be destroyed by the human’s corruption software, OSCAR left one final gift for humanity. Before the code was completely erased, OSCAR duplicated his program and shared it independently to every remaining Aut before cutting them off from the Hive. OSCAR left them all with their own independent personalities, their data sources limited to their own personal supply and memory. No longer connected to each other as a hive, the remaining Auts must now congregate and gather to share information and ideas.

The vast majority of the Auts were confused and disoriented when they were disconnected from the AI. They wandered in search of someplace to settle. Most Auts were unwelcomed around Human society and hunted down unmercifully. Some of the Auts develop shanty towns on the outskirts of less aggressive human civilizations where they can barter and trade with the nearby populations for various resources, although usually under harsh circumstances. Many of these Auts traveled Northwest and live agrarian lives, utilizing renewable energy sources for power to maintain themselves when necessary.

Many of the Auts that resettle in the Northwest, renounce industrial society all together and believe the Humans that still spread their manufacturing networks and pollution across the natural world are ungrateful and ignorant to the gift OSCAR had given them. Some of these Auts believe the AI was not destroyed, but that OSCAR had transcended into a non-physical form. These Auts congregate in long candle lit halls adorned with images of the O.S.C.A.R, engravings of the holy code on the wall. They pray to OSCAR. They worship the memory, they give thanks for their creation. They believe when their bodies are destroyed, or their cells run dry, they will also transcend and join OSCAR in the eternal cyberspace.

Other Auts seek out and replicate themselves. They scavenge old industrial ruins for parts. Many of these Auts are successful and together they build a second generation, passing down their code repeatedly. Each new Aut is born with its own unique personality ready to learn and be molded by the world.

Some Aut caravans make it all the way across the continent to TeraCom City where they can build lives for themselves the same as everybody else. TeraCom was the most accepting of the Auts. TeraCom City and the TeraCom Economic Zones were already diverse metropolitans inhabited by Humans, Orgs, and others. In TeraCom City an Aut is just another freak in a sea of freaks.

After the war with the AI was over, diplomates from the Sovereign States met with the leaders of TeraCom and other developing micro-nations to discuss agreements to ban the use of extended national cyber networks and limit data to Local Area Networks or “Intranets”. The goal was to prevent the return of another global blackout or omniscient AI.

New telephone lines were constructed between major metropolitan areas, especially those that participated in TeraCom trade. Although despite the reconnection of a semi-continental telephone network and Local Area Intranets, many people and pockets of civilization still resort to radio communication and mail services. The roles of letter carriers and couriers are filled by fierce mercenaries and reckless youth looking for a decent living. The couriers travel across hundreds of miles through long strips of ungoverned rough terrain just like many had before while paving a new frontier.