Every virtual game had been banned. The sweeping ban left all players without any virtual games to play, forcing them to log out amid a chorus of curses.
Some hotheads went straight to the research institutes to hurl abuse, but the Robot Police soon detained them for two weeks for causing disturbances.
According to incomplete statistics, more than a billion players were active in virtual games every day.
Orange Star's total population was only around four billion. Some lived in off-world colonies, but most lived on their home planet.
In theory, nightmare disease had had a chance to infect hundreds of millions of people back then.
But there was a problem: spreading it over the internet took time.
Moreover, the authorities had discovered the problem quickly and swiftly suppressed it.
Most people were also busy playing games, spending more than ten hours at a stretch in them, sometimes even an entire day.
Even after logging out, they would not pay attention to the science and technology section. After all, understanding those research reports required a certain amount of knowledge, and recreational players had no interest.
There were far too many news articles with sensational headlines, too. Many people only glanced at the headline, or clicked through and gave the article a quick skim.
The most intense spread had occurred through chats on social apps, within research institutes, and through circles of online friends.
When the Scientific Research General Institute warned everyone not to sleep, its announcement had not revealed the full contents of the nightmare. Otherwise, the impact would have been on an entirely different scale.
Previously, the authorities had registered more than forty million nightmare disease patients. All of them had been relocated, and large numbers of surveillance cameras kept watch over them in the real world.
Spreading the