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ZNN Online July 20th, 118:

Shocking Discovery at Food Processing Plant

Two days ago a pair of hackers employed by the Prosperity Group made an unforeseen breakthrough in cracking the source code of the Cornucopia Machines used to feed Zootopia's wide variety of species. As you know, these machines were discovered below the watering hole that our great city was built around over one hundred and eighteen years ago, enabling the interspecies peace that has held to this day. Excepting the Night Howler crisis two years ago of course. However, our scientists have been unable to reverse-engineer their systems and duplicate them or figure out how to make them do more than convert one food source into another, until now.

These hackers have been able to interface with a Cornucopia for the first time and discovered a wide menu of schematics stored within. It seems, not only can these ancient devices turn a pile of grain and roots into nutritious protein paste for predators, they can also be programmed to convert nearly any form of matter into another state so long as it uses the same elements. Thus far they have discovered blueprints for hundreds of different tools, pharmaceuticals, even weapons! But rest assured, Prosperity assures us at ZNN that they will refrain from releasing Cornucopia Machines to the consumer market until they find out how to lock or remove the weapons' blueprints from the devices.

Perhaps more shocking than these instruments of destruction, however, may be the discovery of blueprints for items that seem designed for insertion into mammal bodies. The Cornucopia Machines apparently have directions for grafting such things as claws, pheromone glands, prehensile tails, and even fish-like gills onto any species. And then there are the implants of purposes we can only guess. What could "Mesh Inserts," "Cortical Stacks," or "Medichines" do for mammalkind? We won't know until someone volunteers to have them implanted.

<1 They had no idea what was in store when they unlocked those things.

2> It's not like the Fall was the nanofabricators' fault or anything you know.

<1 Were they? Those schematics included the early AI seed algorithms that led to the TITANs.

2> If mammals hadn't found that technological boost our grandkids would have developed them on their own.

<1 I was thinking more about what if we'd never found them in the first place.

2> You'd rather we still ate one another? Never took you for a neo-prim.

<1 Why do I even bother with these Autonomists?

---

March 4th, 140. (Old) Zootopia, Planet Ark

As her alarm went off Judy considered that she had preferred it when the dang thing was outside her head, before the Mesh Inserts. She couldn't even get the satisfaction of slapping the snooze button and getting an extra few minutes of sleep, as the virtual voice of her muse reminded her.

[Judy, it's 5:00.] Sky, the AI agent running on her Inserts noted. [You know you should be getting ready for work now.]

"Let this old lady get her rest." The groggy bunny replied.

[You're forty-eight years old, even before Biomods and Rejuvenation were discovered that wasn't "old".]

Judy sighed in defeat and swung out of bed to prepare for the day. The smart-alecky algorithm was right, with her augmentations she was physically in no worse condition that when she was thirty, but mentally she felt old. She was twice as old now as when she had first joined the ZPD, half her life as a cop, and just less than that in a completely different world it seemed now. Many things she'd grown up taking for granted were no longer true. She thought she'd made waves when she seemingly proved that a mammal didn't need to settle for what society thought their species was best suited for, but now people could bypass their body's limitations with augmentation, or even get new ones and change species entirely, if they could afford it. Now an entire generation had grown up in this strange new world now.

Her inserts pinged with an incoming message from the precinct. She answered with annoyed voice only. "Yes, Ben?"

[Judy!] Clawhauser's mental voice was tinged with a heavy degree of desperation and fear. [We need you here ASAP!]

"What is it? More Biocon protests? Or did we find where Weaselton is getting those bootleg pods?"

[Worse, much worse. Chief wants you and Nick down her now so you can be briefed in person.]

Judy's ears shot straight up in shock. Chief Fangmeyer wasn't normally as irritable as her predecessor. What was going on to make her so concerned? "We'll be there in ten minutes!" She terminated the call and began to toss on her clothes, armor, and "Agonizer" crowd-control microwave pistol. "Sky, call Nick and make sure he got the message too!"

[His muse is screening calls.] The AI replied.

"Tell Jack it's vitally important. Use our priority code if you need to."

[Sending.] There was a moment's pause before her muse continued. [He is awake, Jack says he will inform him of the situation as soon as he gets down from the ceiling.]

"Just make sure he's ready in five." Judy remarked, barreling down the stairs to her car.

---

"Seriously Carrots?" Her vulpine partner asked as he got into the passenger's seat next to her. "You wake me up, in that particular way, for reasons that you can't even specify?"

Judy rolled her eyes as she pulled away. "Nick, you know perfectly well that Fangmeyer wouldn't call us in for no reason. She probably didn't want to discuss it over comms that could be tapped or something."

The fox sighed and leaned back in the chair. "Look, if something big is happening there's no way it's still a secret. Somebody will have seen it and posted it to a dozen different social networks by now." Nick's eyes rolled back as he retreated into the wireless Mesh in search of an answer. And then he shot forward in his seat with an undisguised expression of horror. "We need to get to the armory, now!"

"Why? What's going on?" Judy asked, surprised at his sudden turn of phrase.

"No time," he replied. "Tell me you have weapons with you." He yanked open the lockbox in the back seat and drew Judy's Agonizer just as a strange drone came over the horizon. It looked mostly like a standard cargo quadrotor, but it had what seemed like a jet engine bolted onto the rear end and two of its graspers ended in spinning disks. Nick rolled down the window and aimed at the drone, microwaves causing the air to shimmer. The drone didn't show any response to the Agonizer shots and began to swoop in on the car. "Damnit!" Nick swore at the device in his hand, "Judy, I need you to give me permission for "roast" mode."

[Sky, unlock my Agonizer's safeties for Nick now.] Judy mentally directed at her muse.

[I'm sorry,] the Muse seemed genuinely apologetic. [It's hardwired, you'll need to touch the biometric sensor and input your passcode for Nick to use potentially lethal power levels.]

"Nick, I need you to hand that back to me quick." Judy said, holding out her hand.

"It's right on top of us you dumb bunny!" The fox shouted as he held the beam on the attacking drone. "We don't have time!"

"I need to unlock it so you can fry..." she trailed off as the drone slammed into the side of the car and wrenched her lithe partner out through the window. Its' prize snagged, the machine flew straight up, dripping blood as it went. There was the sickening sound of metal grinding on bone followed by a loud thump on the car's roof. Judy was frozen in place, unsure what to do, until a red-furred arm still holding her blunt-nosed pistol flopped over her window. Cautiously, she opened the door, pausing to take her Agonizer back and fully unlock it before stepping out and taking a look. The optimistic glimmer she'd allowed herself fled at the sight of the headless carcass oozing its' last vital fluids onto the paintwork.

---

Later, Judy couldn't say why she'd dragged Nick's headless body into the passenger seat and belted it in. Without a brain he couldn't be revived, and the saws had cut low enough to take the cortical stack implanted at the base of his skull. He might still be resleeved from his external backup, but ZPD policy prioritized witnesses and officers who could report on who or what killed them for resleeving first. And without his stack he wouldn't remember a thing that had happened since his last backup, whenever that might have been.

Regardless, she found herself driving at a breakneck pace through the streets of Zootopia with a corpse sitting next to her. As Judy rounded the last corner she spotted the mob. The streets were packed with shouting mammals, and not in anger like a normal protest, this was screams of sheer animal terror.

Judy switched on her comm to Clawhauser. "Officer Hopps here. I'm outside, but it looks a little like the way in is blocked."

[Oh,] the cheetah sounded strained as he answered. [Just, stay where you are. A couple of the riot cops will come to pick you and Nick's, Nick's...] He couldn't bring himself to say the last word.

The crowd shuffled as an elephant and a rhino decked in heavy plate armor shoved their way over towards her, unfortunately directing the mob's attention in her direction. The panicked mammals reached the rabbit first and began pounding on the sides of the car. Judy kept her hand on her Agonizer as she listened to their terrified shouts.

"Help us!"

"The end is nigh!"

"Oh God is that a dead body?"

"Terrors from beyond the stars have arrived!"

"Please, help."

Finally, the rhino, McHorn she thought, threw aside two of the rioters and reached the driver's door. With some hesitation Judy carefully began to open the door. She'd barely opened it a crack before a pink-skinned arm ending in a split hoof wedged its way in and grabbed her. "The Great Old Ones have arrived!" There was an electric tingle on her wrist where she'd been grabbed and then the world around her disappeared.

Judy found herself in a dark expanse of distant stars in infinite blackness. She was reaching for a strange device hanging in open space, almost as black as the endless night around it. As she approached it the artifact suddenly shifted, impaling her arm on a spike that had seemingly just grown out of it. The black then began to flow around her arm like water going downhill or a time-lapse of mold growing. She felt like it was not only violating her body but her mind as well, disconnecting and reconnecting neural pathways according to its own indecipherable will...

Judy snapped back to reality with a start. Crying in anguish she swung her Agonizer into the pig that grabbed her and let loose with a microwave burst strong enough to cauterize pain receptors. His grip slackened just enough for McHorn to pull him off of her. "Come on," he commanded, picking her up one-handed.

[Sky, what just happened?] The bunny cop asked silently as she hung limply over the big officer's shoulder, unable to do more than wave her weapon menacingly at rioters and look back at the elephant.

[A raving madmammal grabbed you and you shot him with a microwave pistol on full power.] Sky answered. [Was that a reflex?]

The elephant clumsily shoved the headless fox into a black body bag and Judy just looked on in confusion. [Just that? What about between the grab and the shooting?]

[Judy, just over three seconds passed between him taking hold and you zapping him. If it felt longer it was probably just adrenaline.]

[But...] the bunny left off as she wondered. Was she going insane from the strain? Or could that vision or hallucination or whatever possibly mean something? Her attention was drawn away by a pair of missiles launching from one of the trucks forming an improvised barricade around the police station, bringing down two drones similar to the one that had carried off Nick's head. A third drone managed to release a stream of silvery liquid onto the crowd before being shot down by a second volley.

The screams of terror turned to pain as the silver fluid climbed up the mammals' bodies, dissolving their flesh as it went. "Nanoswarm!" Judy shouted, finally snapping out of her fugue and scrambling out of the rhino's grasp. "EMP! We need EMPs!"

Grunting, McHorn pulled a spherical grenade from his belt, popped the cap, and threw it at the nearest concentration of grey goo. The grenade exploded in a burst of light and the nanoswarm collapsed into an inert puddle in a 50-foot radius around the blast, only to come creeping back to life from the edges in seconds later. The bunny pulled a second EMP from the rhino's belt and prepared to throw, but he yelled "not now, too close!" He pointed towards the barrier, Guardian anti-nanotech swarms buzzing around like dust motes, occasionally darting towards a stray silver tendril.

Judy looked towards the center of the swarm, as she watched a middle-aged tiger was stripped to the bones and toppled over. She would back and chucked the grenade straight for the epicenter, hoping to neutralize the worst of the disaster. But to her fascinated horror, a tentacle of grey goo shot up and grabbed it before it could detonate, dissolving it harmlessly.

The officers passed through the clouds of benign nanotech and into the door held open by an irate chief Fangmeyer. "Hopps, report!" She demanded.

Gasping for breath, Judy babbled something about "drones, Nick, his head..." all while keeping her hands on her holstered Agonizer and the last of McHorn's EMPs.

Frustrated, the tiger yelled at a medtech coming to check the bunny's vitals. "Get her into an Ego Bridge and backed up. If I know her she'll be running back out with a plasma rifle as soon as she catches her breath. She's the only one of us who's seen a Headhunter up close and we can't lose that information."

"Got it, Chief." The medic brought Judy over to a set of chairs with bulbous apparati above the headrests. As soon as she was sat down the device unfolded like a giant plastic flower and grasped her cranium, producing a tingling feeling as it scanned her brain. The medtech injected Judy with a light tranquilizer and she began to calm down as it kicked in. After several minutes of staring into space she suddenly remembered what was going on and tried to straighten up.

"Wait," she shouted to anyone who could hear. "We've got to help those people outside!"

"Scan 87% complete." The Ego Bridge's interface said. "Please remain still until backup is finished."

"There's no time for that!" She shouted back, grabbing at the Bridge's head. "Those people are getting eaten alive, we have to..."

Suddenly, the view of the ZPD backup clinic vanished, replaced by a featureless white landscape. Judy had no time to wonder what was going on before the logo of a red-and-blue solar system and the words "Species Consortium Indenture Services" faded into view.

"Please remain calm." A disembodied voice stated flatly. "We are sorry to inform you that your last sleeve has died since your most recent backup and your cortical stack could not be recovered. As your backup service has been unable to provide you with a replacement sleeve we will begin your free evaluation for our indentured servitude programs."

If Judy had been capable of doing so in that basic simulspace she would have broken down in anguished tears at the dawning reality of her situation.