Knights of the Viral Moon. Chapter 1. The Upload System. Boot. The screen surged and I was already moving. Boot slammed against the deck. A chair clipped my leg and skidded away. Someone shouted, maybe my name. Maybe a warning. But it drowned under alarms in the low grinding hum crawling out of the speakers. I grabbed the rail, vaulted it. Palm’s burning as I hit the metal in front of the screen. The console erupted in a spray of sparks. A junior officer to my left hit the deck. Hands over their head as the main alarm tone shifted from a rhythmic pulse to a high pitched jagged screen. I lost the room for a heartbeat, just a blur of smoke and red light before I forced my eyes back to the glass. Dad, the image wavered, too bright, too close. Pixels crawled across his face like frost on glass. Static snapped and hissed, cutting the feet into jagged strips. Then it fractured. My father was there. Red emergency light strobed across him, breaking him into moments. Shoulder, hands, eyes. He was bent over a control panel. Breath fogging in the air. Fingers stiff and shaking as he worked the manual overrides. The cold had settled into everything. Turning the room hard and sharp. I slammed my hand against the screen. Dad, look at me. The picture lurched. The camera swung for a heartbeat. His head lifted. His eyes came up straight to the lens. Straight to me. My chest seized. I’m here. I said the words tripping over each other. I’m here. I love you. I’m going to my HUD ghosted two dads one glitch. My own voice came back in my ears a half beat late like someone else was wearing it. I reached for the tuning knob, but the audio desynced. My father’s mouth moving while the sound lag behind. Trapped in the delay. His mouth moved. The speaker’s spat static. Ecocides faced tore across the feed. Huge laughing, distorted. And the image buckled under it. The signal screamed, folded in on itself and vanished. Dad, snow flooded the wall. I stood there with my hands still pressed to the screen. Breath tearing in and out of me. Pulse hammering so hard my fingers shook. The taste of metal coated my tongue. Override. Now. I roared. Behind me three crew members lunge for the manual lever. The heavy door at the end of the bridge groaned. Opening just a sliver. Long enough to see the vacuum frost on the other side. Before the emergency bulkhead slammed shut with the force of a falling moon. The lever snapped. One technician fell back clutching a broken wrist. The door was dead. Permanent. Behind me the bridge systems reset. Core or snap back into place. The simulation resumed perfectly. The light in different waiting. My father was there. That was enough. Open it. I shouted spinning back toward the consoles. Open the door. Now. The word now came out wrong. Too loud. Too sharp. My fists slammed into the rail before I realized I’d moved. Pain flared and vanished under the heat flooding my chest. Hot and reckless. The part of me that wanted to break anything that refused to move. I was trying to snap toward it. I’ll kill you, I said. Then. No. Son. Don’t. The sound was thin. Drag through static. Barely holding together. But it landed. The anger stalled mid-strike. Collapsing inward. My raised hand froze. Trimbling now. Not from rage, but from stopping. The feed stayed dead. The wall stayed blank. It’ll kill us. The voice came again. Fate and tearing apart. Don’t. No. I whisper. The word meant only for him. I won’t. Silence followed. Heavy, unforgiving. Behind me systems finished rebooting. The simulation waited. The echo of his voice stayed with me. Fractured, undeniable. Long enough to breathe. It all started just like before. A flick. And ping, ping, ping ricochet between the morning sun and the one that sets. And for a fraction of a femto second. Static once tuned to doubts and anxiety. These FOMO moments made into mine gave way. Seizing back gains, PsyOps infiltrated whispers. Forget about them. Look over there. Stay preoccupied. I’ve got your best interests aligned with mine. Quick, apply more aggression drops. Divide and conquer. PsyOps whispered manipulatively. A stray feed flickered onto my secondary HUD. A parent faced line with terror was shoving two children into a reinforced floor shelter. They looked toward the camera for a split second. Hope or plea I couldn’t tell before the feed cut to black. I hesitated for a single breath. The weight of a thousand families settling into my lungs. But something strange happened in that fraction of a femtose. I stood at the helm of the Papatuanuku where the reality grid began to fray and likes, pings and emojis faded away. Weary, my size exhaled. Gasp sharp. I inhaled again and again. Could it be? Yes. Momentum moved. Gradual. Certain. For their yonder, I witnessed the gathering of the knights. A constellation of resolve. Though my sensors whispered of calculated failure. The helm resisted my touch. The navigation will felt like it was encased in lead. Dragging as the ship drifted several degrees off course. I fought the weight, my muscles burning as momentum bled off into the void. Baldr dash we said. For vibe and rebound we do. Tis right, stumble, face flat, embarrassed ego be. But nay, PsyOps would not prevail. Rise we must, and as the sun did rise once again, so did we. Hashtagger-1 didn’t wait for my command. She slammed her palm down on the deep sink pad. Diving sideways as a burst of counterfire turned her monitors into a spider web of glass. She ripped three feeds out of the suppression net and braided them into a single blinding signal. Too slow she muttered. Hicking the console to force the spike home. Her feed turned bright red, traceable marked for death. But the signal was out. And by fortuitous serendipity, scroll on by or rise. The realm of inevitability your paragative be. And as the static broke, I heard. Here ye, here ye hashtaggers of the digital deep. Harket gamma ray fenders of the sonic blasts and ladies of the titanium blade, diamond sabers and swords. Far below us, cities primary shield flickered and died. An evacuation timer on my screen froze at 0 0 42. A transport ship, mid launch, stalled in the air and drifted back down. No explosion. Just the quiet failure of a thousand lives while we fought for the grid. Is it me? Optimism yelled from inside an open conduit. Sparks crawling up his arms. Or does everything sound wrong lately? Like the signals all static. See a star. See errors everywhere. mg-toa #qi @earth 🌍. Hope didn’t answer. I watched her fight the wheel. Jaw locked eyes. Hard as the inertial dampeners. Stuttered between plus 3G and undefined. It’s what happens. She snapped. When laws made start pretending their physics. When power drops rhythm and switches to tricks. Unfair rules. Loud lies. Pressure dressed up as truth. She flicked the feed. Look. An equity baked into the telemetry. Subjugation loops. Pretenses flagged as protocol. ya-kaha @tech #cosmos 🌌. I saw a collapsing nebula compact ahead of us. Ideology crystallizing into debris. The threat map auto labeled it. Pretense mass solid. Far beyond the grid. I tracked ecocide as he watched the label appear. Lock it. He murmured. I saw a minion relays flare. The pretence mass hardened. The intensity doubled. Edges sharpened. Escape vectors quietly erased. So what? Optimism braced as the deck tilted 90 degrees. We parse it. Read the pattern. Let the predictor converge. No. Hope hauled the ship into a violent role. That’s how you die. Standing still. Waiting for something that thinks it’s omnipotent to explain itself before it crushes you. A psychic shock wave slammed the hull. Hesitation weaponized. I felt the reality grid buckle. Space time packets dropped like bad frames. The Papatuanuku Yawd. Alarm stacking like bad headlines. Who cut the feed? Ecocides voice roared through the comms. Hashtagger one grinned. Blood on her lip as she looked at her ruin station. Everyone she whispered. I saw ecocides smile. Flood them he ordered. Make waiting feel reasonable. Static thickened. Fear latency spiked. Then new vectors. Copy that helm injecting counter noise. Gamma Ray sonic fender took a suppression hit full chest. Hurling him across the deck. He skidded slammed into a bulkhead and hauled himself up fist pounding the deck. The low frequency thrums slipped under the enemy shields. Making the drones jitter. He was coughing hiding the internal strain. But the beat didn’t stop. I watched a pulse ripple through the grid as. Hashtagger one slammed a deep sink spike into the comms band. Streams live. Clips mirrored signals stitched together faster than censorship could collapse them. The false telemetry flickered. Truth meters redlining as the spoofed feeds peeled away. Pretense is losing authority. Hashtagger one shouted. Algorithm of despair just lost admin rights. Ecocides console flashed red. Mute them he snapped. Shadow band the courage. Don’t do it. A yelled as a jouster dude launched too early. Rocket strapping himself. Straight toward a suppression wall. He slammed into the barrier. His board shattering. But he let out a wild laugh just before his signal cut to black. The team wavered his status flashing unknown. A base heavy. Whom rolled across the home. Sound shield up. Boom gamma ray sonic fender. Dictator static muted. In equity can’t keep a beat recalibrating resonance. Keep your spin inside the groove. I watched sonic waves collide with suppression fields. The static shattered into harmless noise. The psychic pressure thinned. Gravity stopped arguing and started listening. Optimism slammed a fist into the panel. You can’t just brute force reality. You miss the signal. You miss the lesson. The Bayesian model is poisoned hope shouted. Subjugation teaches waiting. Siaops teaches listening. I saw it. Ecocide lean forward. Then punish movement. He hissed. Example time. Portside flared white. Blade sink confirmed. The ladies of the titanium blade stepped forward. Three synchronized sabers measured the void. They cut not the mass, but the space around it. The pretence mass folded into its own lie. Edited out of reality. I watched three arcs of light cut across the tactical overlay as the ladies of the titanium blade dropped in formation. Diamond sabers slicing through the solidified pretenses. The debris split, not shattered, but rendered off. Obsolete recompile. Ecocide barked. The fragments tried to reassert themselves and failed. We forged miracles. Their leaders said calmly. When false laws act divine, we cut them back to size. Keep moving. Collision timer reset. Zero zero colon zero two point one to infinity. Ecocide slammed his palm down. Collapse the lane. The collision timer vanished. Not zero. Not safe. Gone. For half a second nothing moved. No alarms, no music, no heroic line. Just the ship hanging inside a space that had been edited out of the universe. I felt it then. Not fear, not victory, cost. The kind that doesn’t announce itself. The kind that waits. Somewhere in the grid, something adjusted its aim. And ecocide smiled.