March 2012
The gates swung open and a black limousine, flying the flag of AKhenaten Corporation swept into the road. The sidewalks were lined with people, weary, bent, hungry people waiting for work, any work, they'd happily clean the washrooms at AK Corp. if that was the only job available – anything to get their foot on the ladder of Corporation employment. Everyone knew, if you don't work for AK Corp. you counted for nothing….less than nothing.
The car drove slowly along the road, then stopped – the heavily tinted window opened and a man's arm appeared, the watchers waited, would he have some Ankh for them? Just a single coin could be the difference between eating and going hungry. From a well-manicured hand a sudden shower of coins was arcing through the air, men and women fell to their knees, pushing others out of their way, kicking, punching, anything to get their hands on a precious coin. Another coin was flicked out of the window and was grabbed before it fell by a tall, dishevelled man standing, watching, slightly detached from the rest of the crowd. He glared at the figure in the car, sitting in comfort, decked out in AK Corp. uniform, and bellowed at the top of his lungs as the limo and its occupant moved on.
"You think I want your charity? Screw you McGee!"
October 2009
Tony was early for a change, so he decided to have some cereal and coffee at home, rather than grabbing a breakfast burrito from the drive–through. He switched on the TV in the kitchen and watched for a moment as a well-groomed, softly-spoken man of about 45 was leaning against an antique desk talked about some new company….then he started to talk about computers and Tony reached for the remote to switch channels. He had to listen to enough of this at work, no way he wanted to hear geek-speak over breakfast, he hit the remote and did a double-take, same picture on this channel, had McGee been screwing with his TV? He scrolled through several more channels and it suddenly hit him, that wasn't any old antique desk…it was the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office! But where were the flags? All he could see was a logo of the sun surrounded by rays superimposed with the words AKhenaten Corporation.
He grabbed his phone and tried to call Gibbs – No Service – he went to his home phone, no dial tone, just a disembodied female voice 'This service is temporarily unavailable, please try again later.' Time to get to NCIS; he needed to find out what was going on.
March 2012
Tony put his hands in his pockets and with head bowed he trudged down the Mall. Suddenly weary, he sat down on one of the benches, he looked back where he'd come from – The Capitol…but the seat of United States government no longer, Lady Liberty was gone, and in her place a huge golden sun.
How had we let this happen? How did the heart of Washington become the headquarters of AKhenaten Corporation? We'd been going about our everyday business without even realising what they were doing. How, day by day, kilobyte by kilobyte, IP address by IP address, they were taking over every major computer system in the world. Then that terrible day dawned when they all realised that their lives would never be the same again.
October 2009
He'd left his apartment that morning to try and drive to NCIS headquarters, but the roads were in a state of chaos, none of the traffic signals were working, and it was a free for all as the DC rush-hour traffic did its worst. By the time he got to the Navy Yard it was obvious that something very big was happening, there were no guards on the gate, and cars were parked wherever there was a space – and some of them where there wasn't really a space. He ran into the building, there were people everywhere! He spotted Gibbs who was frantically trying to bring some order out of the chaos…McGee handed him a loud-hailer.
"Pipe down! Listen – we currently have no guards so the first thing we need to do is secure the perimeter, we have no electronic communications so you'll need to keep in touch with your team members in person. Agnew, your team take the main gate, ahh, at last DiNozzo – get the other gates manned. McGee, get together with Abby and anyone you have from cyber-crimes, see if you can get us some kind of com-link somewhere, Ziva, work with Tony – I'm going to see Vance. Listen people, this could be a terrorist attack, so be alert, trust no one…"
March 2012
Gibbs was right about that...it became a time of suspicion and mistrust, a time when men and women who you would have trusted with your life became tools of the AKenaten Corporation. Tony pulled his coat around him. We'd thought the chaos and confusion of those first days was as bad as things could get, but that was only the start. The people behind AKCorp had been planning their take over for years, maybe decades. They had attempted financial coups before, but all they had succeeded in doing was causing panic in the world stock markets. But this time they'd got it right. They had taken note of the chaos in the World's financial markets in 2008, they'd gleefully taken advantage of the recession to feed on people's mistrust of the existing financial and banking systems, and they offered themselves up as the perfect solution to the world's problems. One bank, no stock market required because one corporation effectively 'owned' everything, they tapped into law enforcement agencies and got the people they wanted in the places they wanted them to be. Their computer networks had infiltrated armed forces the world over – without AK orders nothing could move – the logistics of getting military equipment and manpower moving had come under the control of the Corporation. It was easy to find sympathetic commanders in any country you could name – and it only took a few to lead the many...