Pluto's Kiss and ALTIMIT OS

On December 24th, 2005 a virus created by a 10 year old hacker from Los Angeles shut down the entire internet for 77 minutes. The catastrophic event was named Pluto's Kiss. (冥王の口づけ)

On that day, all computers connected to the Internet crashed simultaneously around the globe. Additionally, all networked computer and communication network control systems were shut down.

The results were catastrophic; traffic lights shut down and planes collided in midair. In the United States, the automatic retaliatory systems malfunctioned, in a short time reaching a point of crisis. 77 minutes later, the global network was able to recover itself from the incident but the resulting chaos caused the United States' nuclear defense and automated counter-strike systems to be armed.

The incident was so damaging that United States President, Jim Stonecold, later resigned from office in January 2006 after taking full responsibility for the incident.

ALTIMIT was the only OS that had not been affected by the disaster. Later studies showed that the OS was constructed in such a way as to make it nearly immune to all known computer viruses.

These two factors convinced most of the world that ALTIMIT was a perfect OS, and it became the most widely sold operating system worldwide. With profits soaring, ALTIMIT went global, opening offices across the planet.

In 2007, the World Network Commission (WNC) passed a law stating that ALTIMIT was a required software for all computers, making its saturation of the worldwide market almost at 100%. Ever since then, ALTIMIT OS has been the only major operating system in the world. Few people could imagine a computer that didn't run off of ALTIMIT-based software. Coupled with the release of The World, the first online game released since Pluto's Kiss, support for the system was unrivaled.

dot Hack

The plot of .hack is set in the early part of the 21st century. In this world, the Internet has spread across the planet, creating a unified global network which controls everything from the stock market to vending machines.

At the center of this network is a popular virtual-reality massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) called The World. Players from all around the world play this game. However, problems begin to arise when players begin mysteriously falling into comas while playing the game.

Project .hack consists of several series of manga, anime, novels and PS2 games that gives the
viewer a different piece of the mystery of The World. When put together explains what is actually occurring within and outside of the game.

.hack starts in a fictional 2005.

At the beginning of the 21st Century there were multiple computer operating systems in use worldwide. One of these was ALTIMIT OS. A small American company based in San Francisco, it seemed that ALTIMIT would never reach the popularity of the larger operating systems. However, a single event would completely change the destiny of the company.

That event was Pluto's Kiss

Death of Anakin Skywalker

Vader turned and made for the hatch.

But this is not walking, he thought.

Long accustomed to building and rebuilding droids, supercharging the engines of landspeeders and starfighters, upgrading the mechanisms that controlled the first of his artificial limbs, he was dismayed by the incompetence of the medical droids responsible for his resurrection in Sidious’s lofty laboratory in Coruscant.

His alloy lower legs were bulked by strips of armor similar to those that filled and gave form to the long glove Anakin had worn over his right-arm prosthesis. What remained of his real limbs ended in bulbs of grafted flesh, inserted into machines that triggered movement through the use of modules that interfaced with his damaged nerve endings. But instead of going durasteel, the medical droids had substituted an inferior alloy, and had failed to inspect the strips that protected the electromotive lines. As a result, the inner lining of the pressurized bodysuit was continually snagging on places where the strips were anchored to knee and ankle joints.

The tall boots were a poor fit for his artificial feet, whose claw-like toes lacked the electrostatic sensitivity of his equally false fingertips. Raised in the heel, the cumbersome footgear canted him slightly forward, forcing him to move with exaggerated caution lest he stumble or topple over. Worse, they were so heavy that he often felt rooted to the ground, or as if he were moving in high gravity.

What good were motion of this sort, if he was going to have to call on the Force even to walk from place to place!

The defects in his prosthetic arms mirrored those of his legs.

Only the right one felt natural to him – though it, too, was artificial – and the pneumatic mechanisms that supplied articulation and support were sometimes slow to respond. The weighty cloak and pectoral plating so restricted his movement that he could scarcely lift his arms over his head, and he had already been forced to adapt his lightsaber technique to compensate.

Gazing at his gloves now, he thought: this is not seeing.

The pressurized mask was goggled-eyed, fish-mouthed, short-snouted, and needlessly angular over the cheekbones. Coupled with a flaring dome of helmet, the mask gave him the forbidding appearance of an ancient Sith war droid. The dark hemispheres that covered his eyes filtered out light that might have caused further injury to his damaged corneas and retinas, but in enhanced mode the half globes reddened the light and prevented him from being able to see the toes of his boots without inclining his head almost ninety-degrees.

Listening to the servomotors that drove his limbs, he thought: this is not hearing.

The med droids rebuilt the cartilage of his outer ears, but his eardrums, having melted in Mustafar’s heat, had been beyond repair. Sounds waves now had to be transmitted directly to implants in his inner ear, and sounds registered as if issuing form underwater. Worse, the implanted sensors lacked sufficient discrimination, so that too many ambient sounds were picked up, and their distance and direction were difficult to determine, sometimes the sensors needled him with feedback, or attacked echo or vibrato effects to even the faintest noise.

Allowing his lungs to fill with air, he thought: this is not breathing.

Here the med droids had truly failed him.

From a control box we wore strapped to his chest, a thick cable entered his torso, linked to a breathing apparatus and heartbeat regulator. The ventilator was implanted in his hideously scarred chest, along with tubes that ran directly into his damaged lungs, and others that entered his throat, so that should the chest plate or belt control panels develop a glitch, he could breathe unassisted for a limited time.

But the monitoring panel beeped frequently and for no reason, and the constellation of lights served only as steady reminders of his vulnerability.

The incessant rasp of his breathing interfered with his ability to rest, let alone sleep. And sleep, in the rare moments it came to him, was a nightmarish jumble of twisted, recurrent memories that unfolded to excruciating sounds.

The med droids had at least inserted the redundant breathing tubes low enough so that, with the aid of an enunciator, his scorched vocal cords could still form sounds and words. But absent the enunciator, which imparted a synthetic bass tone, his own voice was little more that a whisper.

All these devices made it even more difficult for him to move with ease, much less with any grace. The pectoral armor that protected the artificial lung weighed him down, as did the electrode-studded collar that supported the outsize helmet, necessary to safeguard the cybernetic devices that replaced the uppermost of his vertebrae, the delicate systems of the mask, and the ragged scars in his hairless head, which owed as much to what he had endured on Mustafar as to attempts at emergency trephination during the trip back to Coruscant aboard Sidious’s shuttle.

The synthskin that substituted for what was seared form his bones itched incessantly, and his body needed to be periodically cleansed and scrubbed of necrotic flesh.

Already he had experienced moments of claustrophobia – moments of desperation to be rid of the suit, to emerge from the shell. He needed to build, or have build, a chamber in which he could feel human again…

If possible.

All in all, he thought: this is not living.

"Your father ... was betrayed and killed by Darth Vader."

- Obi-wan, to Luke Skywalker

A New Hope

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.

Love is more than a candle.

Love can ignite the stars.

Darth Vader

In the newly renamed Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Center on Coruscant, a hyper-sophisticated prototype Ubrikkian DD-13 surgical droid moved away from the project that it and an enhanced FX-6 medical droid had spent many days rebuilding.

It beckoned to a dark-robed shadow that stood at the edge of the pool of high intensity light. “My lord, the construction is finished. He lives.”

“Good. Good.”

The shadow flowed into the pool of light as though the overhead illuminators had malfunctioned.

Droids stepped back as it came to the rim of the surgical table.

On the table was strapped the very first patient of the EmPal SuRecon Center.

To some eyes, it might have been a pieced-together hybrid of droid and human, encased in a life-support shell of gleaming black, managed by a thoracic processor that winked pale color against the shadow’s cloak. To some eyes, its jointed limbs might have looked ungainly, clumsy, even monstrous;

The featureless curves of black that served it for eyes might have appeared inhuman, and the under thrust grillwork of its vocabulator might have suggested the jaws of a saurian predator built of blast armor, but to the shadow –

It was glorious.

A magnificent jewel box, created both to protect and to exhibit the greatest treasure of the Sith.

Terrifying.

Mesmerizing.

Perfect.

The table slowly rotated to vertical, and the shadow leaned close.

“Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?”

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:

The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.

The light burns you. It will always burn you, part of you will always lie upon the black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.

You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.

You don’t even have lungs anymore.

Mechanisms hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.

Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?

And you can’t, not in the way you once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your brain.

You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you.

Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous.

Padme? Are you here? Are you all right? You try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for burned away lips and tongue and throat.

“Padme? Are you here? Are you all right?”

“I’m very sorry, Lord Vader. I’m afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her.”

This burned hotter than the lava had.

“No … no, it is not possible!”

You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death.

Never.

But you remember …

You remember all of it.

You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom in Vader’s blood. You remember the furnace of Vader’s fury, and the black hatred of seizing her throat to silence her lying mouth –

And there is one blazing moment in which you finally understand there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker.

That it was all you. It you.

Only you.

You did it.

You killed her.

You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were thinking about yourself.

It is this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith –

Because now your self is all you will ever have.

And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now that what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and the equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.

In the end, you do not even want to.

In the end, the shadow is all you have left.

Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself –

And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker.

Forever…

Light and Dark

In the senate arena, lightning forked from the hands of a Sith, and bent away from the gesture of a Jedi to shock Redrobes into unconsciousness.

Then there were only the two of them.

Their clash transcended the personal; when new lightning blazed, it was not Palpatine burning Yoda with his hate, it was the Lord of all Sith scorching the master of all Jedi into a smoldering huddle of clothing and green flesh.

A thousand years of hidden Sith exulted in their victory.

“Your time is over! The Sith rules the galaxy! Now and forever!”

And it was the whole of the Jedi Order than rocketed from its huddle, making of its own body a weapon to blast the Sith to the ground.

“At an end your rule is, and not short enough it was, I must say.”

There appeared a blade the color of life.

From the shadow of a black wing, a small weapon – a hold-out, an easily concealed backup, a tiny bit of treachery expressing the core of Sith mastery – slid into a withered hand and spat a flame colored blade of its own.

When those blades met, it was more Yoda against Palpatine; more the millennia of Sith against the legions of Jedi; this was the expression of the fundamental conflict of the universe itself.

Light against dark.

Winner take all.

There came a turning point in the clash of the light against the dark.

It did not come from a flash of lightning or slash of energy blade, though there were these in plenty; it did not come from a flying kick or a surgically precise punch, though those were traded, too.

It came as the battle shifted from the holding office to the great chancellor’s podium; it came as the hydraulic lift beneath the podium raised it on its tower of durasteel a hundred meters and more, so that it became a laser-point of battle flaring at the focus of the vast emptiness of the senate arena; it came as the force and the podium’s controls ripped delegation pods free of the curving walls and made of them hammers, battering rams, catapult stones crashing and crushing against each other in a rolling thunder-roar that echoed that senate’s cheers for the galaxy’s new emperor.

It came when the avatar of light resolved into the lineage of the Jedi; when the lineage of the Jedi refined into one single Jedi.

It came when Yoda found himself alone against the dark.

In that lightning-speared tornado of feet and fists and blades and bashing machines, his vision finally pierced the darkness that had clouded the force.

Finally, he saw the truth.

This truth: that he, the avatar of light, supreme master of the Jedi order, the fiercest, most implacable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known …

Just –

Didn’t –

Have it.

He’d never had it. He had lost before he started.

He had lost before he was born.

The Sith had changed. The Sith had grown, had adapted, had invested a thousand years’ intensive study into every aspect of not only the Force but Jedi lore itself, in preparation for exactly this day. The Sith had remade themselves.

They had become new.

While the Jedi –

The Jedi had spent the millennium training to fight the last war.

The new Sith could not be destroyed with a lightsaber; they could not be burned away by any torch of the force. The brighter his light, the darker their shadow. How could one win a war against the dark, when war itself had become the Dark’s own weapon?

He knew, at that instant, that this insight held the hope of the galaxy. But if he fell here, that hope would die with him.

Hmmm, Yoda thought. A problem this is …

====================================================================

He spoke softly, but not to himself.

He spoke to the Force.

And the Force answered him. Do not blame yourself, my old friend.

As it sometimes had these past thirteen years, when the Force spoke to him, it spoke in the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn.

“Too oldi was,” Yoda said, “Too rigid. Too arrogant to see that the old way is not the only way. These Jedi, I trained to become the Jedi who had trained me, long centuries ago – but those ancient Jedi, of a different time they were. Changed, has the galaxy. Changed, the Order did not – because let it change, I did not.”

More easily said than done, my friend.

“An infinite mystery is the Force.” Yoda lifted his head and turned his gaze out into the wheel of stars. “Much to learn, there still is.”

And you will have time to learn it.

“Infinite knowledge …” Yoda shook his head. “Infinite time, does that require.”

With my help, you can learn to join with the Force, yet retain consciousness. You can join your Light to it forever. Perhaps, in time, even your physical self.

Yoda did not move. “Eternal life…”

The ultimate goal of the Sith, yet they can never achieve it; It comes only by the release of the self, not the exaltion of the self. It comes through compassion, not greed. Love is the answer to the Darkness.

“Become one with the Force, yet influence still to have …” Yoda mused, “A great power than all, it is.”

It cannot be granted; it can only be taught. It is yours to learn, if you wish it.

Slowly, Yoda nodded. “A very great Jedi Master you have become, Gui-Gon Jinn. A very great Jedi master you always were, but too blind I was to see it.”

He rose, and folded his hands before him, and inclined his head in the Jedi bow of respect.

The bow of the student, in the presence of the Master.

“Your apprentice, I gratefully become.”

The Dark Always Wins

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.

It always wins because it is everywhere.

It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the mid-day dun and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.