At 12:15 p.m. Washington time, an AI robot calling itself Friday announced that it had planted a bomb on the space station's propulsion levitation system. It would detonate in half an hour, and the falling space station would directly destroy the American continent.
The news quickly surpassed everything that had come before it, shooting to the top headlines across major apps and drawing everyone's attention away from the monsters aboard the space station.
Many people's thinking was easy enough to understand. Even if there really were monsters on the station, they looked like the kind from Alien movies—creatures that hunted humans through a space station. It was certainly brutal, but at most, a few people would die.
But an AI uprising was different. Based on most people's moviegoing experience, once this kind of thing rebelled, it was out to conquer the entire planet. Hadn't it said the space station would destroy the American continent?
Before, people had only felt sympathy for the station staff. But now, disaster was about to fall on their own heads. They had no time to sympathize with anyone else; all that remained was the terror of wondering whether they would die.
People always cared more about themselves than others. When they still had the energy, they could spare some kindness, but when they were nearly facing destruction themselves, who had the time to worry about anyone else?
Thus began a new wave of rumors and conspiracy theories. This time, people's imaginations ran even wilder. Some claimed the government had already been secretly controlled by robots, some said the evil experiment had created these terrifying robots, and others said the experiment itself had been orchestrated by robots to wipe out humanity.
Humans feared humans, but they feared things beyond humanity even more. Everyone had lived on