V/O:
Axial News brings you this live feed from the TNA Sub-directorate in Beijing. Please donate! Your contributions have helped bring you this important service:

*A public square - thousands are gathered before a screen*

Today we celebrate the people. Here in Beijing we reaffirm our commitment to the world, and are honoured that we can have this dialogue with the great nations of the globe. Today we speak again of our shared need to be rigourous in our responsibilities towards freedom, and each other. Welcome.

Today, we are pleased to announce the latest developments in our expansion of peace operations across the Recovering lands. Forty two new nuclear reactors in the former UAE will supply our Eastern neighbours with enough renewable energy to meet their booming housing sector. Thirteen hundred squads of Peace Officers to return home, in time for the holiday season of Chinese New Year. And today, we recommit to the promise of free travel between cities for all - pending the outcome of the PPP networking agreements. It is our fondest wish that we may all remain patient as the Public Private Partnerships networks strive to acheive a balance between profit and sustainability. Your safety is paramount to us all.

Now, it is been whispered by the faceless architects of myth that a tyrant's hand has shaped the TNA. Here we see the disinformation of the deluded. For we are not a sole brain. We are you. We are not indiscriminate. All is known. We are not inured to the necessity of our task, of managing the global order together. We are transparent. If we have a fault, it is that we are all only too cognisant of the desires of all the great people of the world in coming together to restore humanity, and extend ourselves too far perhaps in every conceivable manner to accommodate and realise the dreams that enliven all our minds. This reality, we have created together.

The Censored would see that awesome task compromised; they seek to dismantle the New Jerusalem as it is being built: therefore they are Censored. They engineer and sing interference in the collective signal; therefore they are Censored. They would have you think that War is Peace. They seek to proclaim that which saw us all imprisoned - therefore, they are Censored. The people have moved on from such vain argumentation. This is just. The reasons, as we all know, self-evident. This is just.

Millions died so that their lies could be revealed.

On this day, we remember those who have fallen to allow us this that we must cherish. I ask you all to bow your heads for a moment's reflection on their great sacrifice.

*Cut to advertisement*:

In this age of boundless wealth, what greater wealth can we bestow upon our loved ones but that which is beyond price - a personal inscription of their own DNA, the Book of Life. For a short time, these beautifully machine-sculpted platinum discs are to be made available to the public. This once-in-a-lifetime event is made possible by the munificence of Omskrit Global; and the TNA.

***

An employee of bASE corporation. As he speaks, a monitor appears, bearing the code:

bASE - behemith access and send engine
gimel-beth-vav-vav-vav

v/o: rhesus integrity confirmed. viral anithesis correlate 7 installed.

The blackout occurred three years into my employment with bASE. We were mediated through the subcontracting by-law resolution #418 - Trade Nation of America subsidiary, quantum cryptography - unbreakable. Medicated through it, too, supplements to maintain protein integrity and ease the decompression of logging off. Our workpod connections were high-load sucrose filament. After ten hour shifts dissembling, my head would throb. Even with the supplements, my head would just pound, like the bursting of billions of vessels in rhythmic, fire cracker brilliances of pain. So after a while, I stopped taking the pills. Fuck it. What difference does it make?

Well, entering the pod began to feel... it made me increasingly uneasy. The application of the paste on my temple started to feel - like a metal tongue, wet with synthetic salivants, sharp and cold. I began to notice a buzzing sound in my right ear - the opposite side to the sucrose filaments, they integrate through the paste, the...

*As he begins to speak, a spotlight closes in on him. Figures in black begin to manipulate his actions as he logs in to the workpod.*

...the major contract is the DNA junk code - dissembling, sorting, storing, cross-referencing the junk, matching, refining the search, connecting the dots. I don't know how many of us. Millions, maybe. The Interface is pure hypnerotomic overlay, at genetic resolutions plus augmented menu-system fields. Our hands work like pincers and knives, a slice here, a cut there. Store the junk extractions. But with the buzzing... I seemed to... the resolution didn't seem so crisp - the virtual tracking of my hands seemed to lag - and the headaches continued, phenomenal, until one day I blacked out. In the pod. I blacked out. For maybe five seconds, thereabouts, and when I came to... this sounds nuts, totally fucking nuts maybe - but I swear - I saw a city. A city on fire. And there were great metal... beasts, walking through the smoke, slicing through the walls of blackened factories, trampling through the wreckage. I tried to move... and I realised I - I raised my hands and these two... I was a pilot. And beneath me were a thousand corpses from who knows where.

*During this speech, the black figures have essentially taken control of his body, running it through a series of slicing, pulling, carving movements, as though eviscerating some unseen enemy.*

The system went into shut-down. The filaments just - slid away from my temple, the grid saying 'bASE pod xx.23 system fault - restore/repair technician will be dispatched shortly.' It has to be a hack, doesn't it? This Phantom Agency... it has to be some kind of hack, yeah? I'm taking the pills again. I'm just gonna pretend nothing happened. 'No, sir, the system just fritzed out on me, nothing unusual eh? I imagine it happens all the time.' Fuck... I don't want to lose my job...