E V E N T ; "PHASE 4444"
Phase: 4444
It begins without warning. Maybe you were asleep, oblivious to the world. Maybe you were awake, and take notice of the first signs.
At exactly 4:44:44 in the morning, Sacrosanct goes dark. All of it. The ever present hum of machinery goes completely silent for 44 seconds, teleporters stop working, environmental controls switch off, the network shuts down and, once it returns, the first thing anyone will see is an automated error message reporting the time of the crash, and that current service may be unreliable, as some errors were not able to be fixed.
That morning, the lights don't turn on.
In fact, nothing turns on. The station seems to be running on back-up mode, with entire blocks without power or illumination, and subdued emergency lights in the areas that do stay online. There are dead zones without network connection. Some teleporters will not be functioning, and the ones that do may glitch. The temperature controls seem to have been affected, and a thick fog clings to the ground and refuses to disperse. Some areas are afflicted with cold, leaving a building or three covered in frost rime, some places with inexplicable heat, hot enough to melt plastics. Doors lock and unlock, open and close. Elevators start and stop. Water runs. Music plays. Clanks and groans from stressed machinery resound through the station. Some of the streets bear cracks.
Hypatia is nowhere to be found. The automated processes of the station continue or falter in her apparent absence, riddled with error messages. The only thing that seems to be working at full strength are the holographic projectors embedded in nearly every wall and surface, projecting full scale touchable holographic overlays.
Outside, these overlays resemble the station's MMO game, and seem merely to be levels of the game projected in real time with life size scenery and enemies.
Inside the buildings, however...
For whatever reason, holograms appearing inside buildings seem to depict certain rooms as they were at a previous point in time. A single lit room inside a dark building will have a rosy, almost firelit glow from the projection, empty closets appearing full of clothes, personal items on tables, the sound of footsteps or voices being played back like old films, distorted in places. The decor might seem strangely opulent, unless you remember that this particular style is something that can be preset in any room and any building. Immediately outside the hologram areas are "blank" spaces, pitch black with only the glowing outlines of objects. This is another holographic projection, but more like unfinished scaffolding, without sound or full color or detail. For now, these blank spaces extend only a few meters outside of whatever area is being occupied by the "memory" holograms.
As for what you can see and hear inside the memory holograms, there are voices and echoes that seem to come from the next room, muted discussions that, no matter how hard you listen, never form any coherent words, as if the audio has been deliberately distorted. You may see shadows and movement, you may turn around to find objects have been moved or disappeared, but for now there are no images of living persons.
You will find, however, an unattached network device laying around in almost every single one of the memory holograms, and on its screen will be text paragraphs that sound almost like journal entries...
Perhaps you spend the day exploring these memories like an archeologist. Perhaps you stay home and stockpile some supplies. Perhaps you will feel, with the ever present darkness and false overlay of the holograms, that there is something out there watching you and your fellow citizens cling to the few remaining lighted areas.
Perhaps you are right.
That evening, even the back-up lights start to go out one by one.
((OOC Note: SORRY FOR THE LATENESS OF THIS, pretend it happened this morning magically. Anyway the Journal Entries are numbered and will be posted in the main community by a mod, so feel free to say your character stumbled across them in any given hologram. OOC Info Post is here, feel free to direct any questions there, to this post, or to me personally on AIM or email.))