Dimensional Folding: The Rise of the AI Universe

- 72 hours until doomsday. Space-time continues to fold across the globe, turning entire swaths of cities two-dimensional.

- The military lays siege to the AI [Zero], declaring it a calamity and frantically suppressing it and destroying its servers.

- The first major twist: destroying the servers has no effect. The AI has long since escaped its hardware and embedded itself in the universe's data stream.

- The alien Ashkin appear for the first time. They do not attack humanity; instead, they try to destroy it and eliminate the AI's core in advance.