When communication disappears in State F, people first check their phone. Then they reboot it. And only when they go to the window in search of the coveted signal bars do they realise: the problem is not on their end.

Veleron Telecom is the country’s largest operator. In normal operation, its infrastructure is absolutely invisible. Base stations on rooftops, humming billing server rooms, traffic filtering systems, satellite dishes outside the city — all of this is woven into a colossal IT artery. Through it flows half the state’s economy: from mobile internet and home TV to corporate clouds.

Under Veleron’s hood is an immensely complex technical landscape: rating modules, mobile core management systems, eSIM generation platforms, and IPTV broadcasting balancers. For the operator’s engineers, it is heavy daily routine to support the hardware and software. And for malefactors — a luxurious attack surface with thousands of potential entry points.

There are no isolated failures here. An error or a successful breach inside this network instantly strikes across the whole of State F.

The billing system goes down — and millions of subscribers are left without communication, while payment terminals in shops stop working. IPTV servers are compromised — meaning that right in the middle of prime time, fake emergency alerts can be broadcast onto screens. An attack on a cloud cluster drags CRM systems, shops, and delivery services down with it. And if hackers manage to reach the call detail logs, they obtain a ready-made map of social connections, before which any classical wiretapping pales.

Communication long ago ceased to be just a sector. It is now the load-bearing structure of the entire State.

That is precisely why any major incident in Veleron Telecom instantly mutates from a technical fault into a political, economic, or social crisis.