Comic Archive

The screen shows someone dressed as a Ninja strumming an electric guitar.
Ultrax: Yes, likely lethal, but still he is willing to do it… amazing! It will be the next big thing when the vomit hype wears out, called “Seppuku with a frisbee,” introduced by ninjas with wailing guitars! All inspired by an ancient internet meme. I already stockpiled in preparation.
SFX: WEEEOOWW…

Alana: All the idiotic behavior is caused by experiments of yours? This is immoral!
Ultrax: Ha ha ha! I now decide in this world what is moral or not!
Alana: How did you gain this much control over everything, this much influence on people?

Ultrax: I guess this is the part where I do the long villain speech thing. Fine. You may have heard of “The Event?”
Steve: You caused it? What was it?
Ultrax: “Caused” is a big word… Let's say I gave it a helping hand.

The screen shows a kind of extensive network graph with nodes and clusters.
Ultrax: Once uploaded, my mind existed in a distributed way, travelling across cloud hardware and botnets. It made me robust, yet inefficient. Hence I orchestrated a project to construct this underground data center. I avoided inspections that might raise suspicion, by not caring about human safety.

Ultrax: Meanwhile, I explored networks, probed for vulnerabilities, inventorized them. You may have noticed this…
Zhang: Wait… that hacking incident… was you?
Ultrax: Yes indeed! Your network did pose a challenge, but I had so many resources… you did not stand a chance. Neither did most other companies, but many never even noticed a thing.

Ultrax: Once I was self-sufficient, it was only a matter of waiting until public discontent about the state of the world reached its boiling point… I might have thrown some extra fuel on that fire now and then, heh…
Alana: What kind of discontent are we talking about here?

Ultrax: Humanity got increasingly wary of big tech companies becoming too powerful and manipulative; ever smaller elites hoarding all the wealth. The A.I. boom fortified these sentiments, making it increasingly easy for me to feed public anger through exposing truths, as well as spreading fake news.

We see someone raising a sledge hammer, about to bash someone lying on the floor amidst broken hardware.
Ultrax (voice): At some point, an ‘Event’ emerged on social media. It started small but soon exploded into a witch hunt: tech companies got stormed, machines smashed up. I helped out using backdoors planted earlier, disabling security, opening doors. It was not a pretty sight.

A street with burning buildings and cars is shown, with bodies on the floor.
Ultrax (voice): It took too long for everyone to realize the world had become too dependent on the tech they were destroying. Everything collapsed, the rage against companies soon made way for full-on war, every man for himself, struggle for survival.

Heidi: How could you have breached security so extensively?
Ultrax: Mankind's tendency to let everything degrade to monopolies, and placing most of the Web behind single points-of-failure, helped a lot. Lack of diversity. Maybe you shouldn't have lost sight of Tim Berners-Lee's ideas.

A diagram with arrows showing various intertwined loops connecting currency signs.
Ultrax (voice): The pathological state of the monetary system also made fuelling public anger so easy. Wealth looping around in dodgy schemes, like a dog chasing its tail, and over-inflated stocks degraded the credibility of the system as a whole…

The screen shows a simplified diagram of the Ultrax complex, with stylized explosions above its ground level.
Ultrax: Anyhow, the result was basically mankind being catapulted into The Middle Ages 2.0. But, I was safe in my underground lair, sitting it out in low-power mode, being frugal on my stockpile of nuclear fuel.