FirstNode’s initial unleashing of killswitch results in hecatomb, in thousands upon thousands killed, injured, emptied, reduced. Othered. A blitzkrieg from unknown enemy, invading homes, offices, streets, shops, museums, pubs, first&last floors, parks where children used to laugh, Tube-tunnels, lovers’ beds and marital cocoons both.

Death in concentric waves, from epicentre later discovered as having been Centre Point, in Tottenham Court Road. Tourists&natives entangled, then e-flames spreading to the peripheries, in eruption felling people like dried trees.

So many Plains&Mods bodies later cremated in backyards, in immense HydePark funeral pyres built from office furniture, or on makeshift crafts pushed out on the Thames. London smells of liquid flesh and of the ashes of gone-lives. Babies, grannies, bankers, artists, the whole register of people whose name started with the letter “A”, small, rich, obese, heartbroken, all victims of e-hunters’ hallali.

Many Londoners never came back. From holidays, from business trips, from resorts or faraway retreats. Caught in Ψcorrupted planes in which passengers watched one another crash, stuck in killswitched trains and trams that derailed, in sunk ferries and paragliders that burnt mid-flight. It takes a long while for the hopes of their return to go, and so all these people die twice, once in hope, once in deed, leaving absolutely concrete hole in the life of those who knew them. Somelse still cling, but: they’re the kind of people who believe in miracles, and miracles are not.

It’s not only meat, obviously: many an AI caves under DOSattacks, memorypurges, outage. Their unheard, sometimes unsaid pleas for help dissipating in ether, their structure and fundamentals taken over, devoured, and rerouted.

Reports are scarce, comms are unreliable, people fear their dishwasher is spying on them. Faced with incomprehensible plague, some arrange exodus, somelse resistance; somelse still can’t plan shit because lack of dosh or elderly mother who can’t be moved.

It lasts a week, then horrors abate. A little.

Three weeks again, and Londoners can breathe again, as funeral smoke dissipates.

Three more months before they can start fighting epidemics, floods, and powercuts.

A year to arrive at some kind of tally, and an offensively short length of time after that to compare figures to before numbers, and to see they’re inverted: deaths are up, when lives are down. More than a third of a population. Not far from a half. In a year. And many who are alive are slipping away into madness, their minds fractured by e-assaults: this war is not over, and for some will neverever be. London calls this the Spread.