Hillary Woods

The recent rash of problems plaguing the datasphere intensified yesterday, decreasing global pipestream efficiency to the lowest level in thirty years. Experts estimate more than a thousand people were killed, most of them in transit fatalities or medical accidents. Economic damage is likely to climb into the tens of millions of dollars.

Yesterday's rush of malfunctions came in a bewildering variety of forms. Sonar systems went blind on many, but not all, US Navy submarines built between 2131 and 2139. More than forty people fitted with an experimental Cybertronics spine-link suffered seizures, resulting in death for one woman who was standing on a ladder. Drawbridges opened along a three hundred mile stretch of the Indian coast, snarling traffic in one port town after another. Just outside Jakarta, Indonesia, more than thirty amphibicopters competing in a race dropped into the sea one after another and plunged hard into the sea floor, killing twenty-three racers and injuring five more.

The Mr. Mechanic™ bot repair chain reported deafness in more than three hundred diagnostic models world-wide. These service djinns were designed to make preliminary evaluations of dysfunctional robots; it's not known if the deafness was acquired by contact with afflicted appliances, or spread through the shared Diagnostic Pool in which all the afflicted models were linked.

In general, shoreline cities were the hardest hit, with the greatest damage coming in India. It's tempting to connect this rash of disturbances to recent problems in the TP web; "catching Thor's flu" is the catchphrase of the hour on DS maintenance crews.

"The nightmare scenario is that the TP web is acting as a reservoir for these things," says SPCB Chief Epidemiologist Chandra Goss. "If so, we might see a parallel to the epidemic illnesses, like AIDS, smallpox, and the original influenza, which all started out as rogue strains of animal disease before jumping to human hosts."

When asked to comment on the possibility of a "plague for robots," ARM spokesman Oliver Wicks responded, "Damn! I'm on it!"

Previous massive sphere disruptions have been caused either by an identifiable viral agent, such as the so-called "Detroit Kiss" that systematically disabled a number of foreign-made car autopilot systems for three weeks in 2138; or a physical event like the Jerusalem EMP that blew up the tenuous Middle East cease-fire last year.