Zoe, one of Jess's best NeoFriends, was a very rich Neopian. Not powerful, but she could always work on that part later. All her four pets were painted and she lived in a fortified, sound-proofed, luxurious mansion.

So she and her pets had had no idea of the carnage until Alexa turned on their TV. Quite unlike Jess's, this TV was actually tuned into Neopian channels, and therefore worked nearly all the time.

"Mom!" Alexa exclaimed in an accent not unlike Zoe's – American. "Mom! COME HERE!"

Zoe sighed and sadly abandoned her breakfast pancake for the thirty seconds it would take to chat to Alexa. "Yes?"

"MOM!" Alexa exclaimed. "Look at the TV."

Zoe looked at the TV, and wrinkled her nose. "I'd rather not," she protested. The TV displayed shots of corpses from Terror Mountain, Tyrannia, Faerieland...

Alexa obligingly switched the machine off. "What do you think happened?"

Zoe paused in thought. "Sloth!" she decided adamantly.

"Anything else?" Alexa enquired. "Any connections?"

"Connections?" Zoe parroted blankly.

"Well," Alexa started, "remember two months ago, that article about Diana Wattle? When she had her own article in the Times that very week?"

"Ye-es..." Zoe lied. Alexa was too smart.

"Do you?" she asked.

"Not really," Zoe admitted.

Alexa sighed in frustration. "Well, do you remember the seven android impersonating Neopians that were in the Times today?"

Zoe paused. "Nooo..."

"Did you even read it?"

"No. Should I have?"

Alexa sighed in frustration again. "Do you ever read anything important?"

"Yes!" Zoe insisted. "I read my textbooks! They tell me what to do at school, and school's very..."

"MOM!"

Zoe stuck her tongue out at the Uni and stomped her way to the kitchen, where she found her pancake was missing, and that a small White Ona was sitting next to the plate and licking her lips.

"Kari!" Zoe demanded. The Ona jumped in fright. "Have you been stealing my breakfast again?"

"Breakfast," Kari the White Ona repeated.

"Yes," Zoe agreed. "Breakfast."

"Breakfast yummy," Kari summarised, then proceeding to jump off the table and scramble away. Zoe sighed in frustration, and then heard a knock on the door. Curiously, Zoe went to open it, and discovered Jess and two of her pets, Blanche and Tigger.

"What are you doing here?" Zoe asked. "It's only eight in the morning."

Jess ignored her friend and pushed her way inside, slamming the door after her Uni and her Kougra.

"You're safe," she panted, relieved.

"Of course I'm safe," was Zoe's immediate reply. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"No one else is," Jess replied. "The silence is deafening out there."

"I've always wondered how silence could possibly be deafening," Zoe replied, puzzled. "Do you mean no one outside's making a sound?"

"There's no one outside," Jess replied. "Jenny wouldn't open her door. Nor would Retti, nor Leb, nor..."

"Why?" Zoe asked. "Does it have anything to do with all those dead people in Tyrannia and Faerieland and Terror Mountain and..."

"You mean this is global?" Jess demanded. Zoe shrugged.

"I guess," she replied weakly.

"This is horrible," Jess complained. "Absolutely horrible. I expected a nice, quiet Saturday, you know. Where I could relax, drink tea, eat chocolate, watch Doctor Who at seven-thirty... instead, I have to take revenge on Doctor Sloth. This is absolutely fantastic." Her voice dripped with so much sarcasm that even Zoe realised it was sarcasm, and she was well-known for not understanding it.

"Where're Saint and aussiejewel?" Zoe queried. Jess shrugged.

"Saint," she said venomously, "is at home, being a coward. aussiejewel... I don't know where she is. In fact," she continued, "I have a suspicion that I haven't known where she was for a long time."

"Oh," Zoe replied, not really understanding. "Why?"

"Because," Jess explained, "she was an android. An android who had two programs. One was programmed to believe she was aussiejewel. She had all aussiejewel's memories and personality traits. The other was a killing machine."

"Sooo..." Zoe thought. "So someone had a really, really large satellite thing and switched aussiejewel's program with it?"

"That's my theory," Jess replied. Blanche coughed. "Well, Blanche says it's her theory. But I thought of it first, she just vocalised it before me."

Zoe laughed. "Jessie!" Then she thought of something. "So what's your plan?"

"It's brilliant," Jess announced. "We're going to go to the Space Station and take revenge on Sloth."

"That's petty, though," Zoe argued.

"ZOE! I'm not the one who has one Crusher for every citizen of the Universe. That's petty."

"Not the Universe. Just Earth," was Zoe's award-winning defence.

"That's still six billion Crushers," Jess argued. "So, what are you planning to do today, Zoe?"

Zoe thought. "I don't suppose there'll be any TV if there are no TV programmers," she sighed.

"Probably not," Jess agreed.

"Then I'll eat cake," Zoe grinned. "Cake's very healthy, you know."

Jess doubted it, but it wasn't worth arguing the point. "See you later, Zoe."

"See ya!" Zoe waved cheerfully and Jess, Blanche and Tigger left her mansion. Hopefully it was strong enough to withstand some android attacks. That was the advantage in having lots of money: you could buy awesomely powerful upgrades. Even if there was an android in there, the satellite's message telling it to be bad wouldn't have gotten through.

If Jess hadn't ruined it by opening the door.