(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 12

The sky was a dark shade of grey, like static, like an old TV set between two stations. Unlike that, however, it was very quiet. A stale breeze swepped across the concrete desert, dragging a sheath of crude dust with it, close to the ground. There was almost a sense of peace to it, everything seeming dead and cold. Under the right circumstances, it could be bliss. These were not the right circumstances.
Low whines of an electric engine drew nearer, audible even at a distance in the quiet. They stopped farther away than expected, but clearly close enough for the driver of the vehicle to take his fine time getting out and crossing the broken stumps of what had been buildings in better days. Now, there was little of them left. They had not been worth rebuilding.
"Did anyone ever tell you that you have an impecable sense of dramatics, Marie?"
Another voice in the void. Another contact. Another name.
"Yeah. Drama."
Getting up from the ground was alarmingly difficult, as if gravity had settled on that particular spot to rest in, making anything heavier and less wieldy. But as it usually did, the world turned right side up with the right amount of effort.
He was... well, turned out he was a she. Young, walking with very ladylike moves around each and every stump of old concrete, like this was the place she had prepared her entire life for walking through. Effortless, light, energetic.
"What can I do for you, jefe?" she asked, sounding so positive it seemed almost offensive.
"I need a drink." It wasn't what she had expected to hear.

"You sure you wanna be this close to the city?" asked Yuna, the overly positive driver that the local branch of The Embassy had decided to send to the arrival point. The concrete desert was still visible in between buildings, looking like some fiendish ghoul trying to stay out of sight, but not quite managing it right. Buildings were growing taller and, more importantly, less damaged, although much of it was clearly haphazard repairs. The rejects of the city, both those that it rejected and those that rejected it, were setting up shop in these parts, a rough new wild west. Except it wasn't that far west. The city could be seen from any spot that wasn't entirely obstructed, tall monoliths of steel, plastic and lights howling dim colors out over the wasteland of the lost, and those that had joined the lost of their own free will.
"Yeah. Don't worry, it's safe."
Bullshit. There was no way to say if it was safe, or what was. It could be the safest place on the planet, or it could be a powder keg under an open flame candle, there was no real way to tell. If there indeed were going to be consequences, they would be dealt with by someone else, in due time.
Still with a skeptical look in her eyes, Yuna touched a ring on her finger with the thumb of the same hand, and the car sent out a tender, tinny tune. Then it made a string of whirring sounds as parts moved inside it, collapsing the roof and contracting the body, until it was the size of a large duffel bag. As a final statement, steel rods shot from its belly and into the proper lock in the ground, bolting it in place for anyone who lacked the key to unlock it.
Splintered Peak. Not The Splintered Peak, just Splintered Peak. Some obscure reference to a local story, no doubt, but not to any actual peaks in the area. This place had never had anything natural that was taller than old pine trees. It was somewhere between Maribo and Nakskov of old, two cities that had not been here for a very long time, but whose marks could still be seen on the ground in satelite photos, by anyone who had access to those. If they year was right this time, restored satelites were still a luxury for the very rich and powerful. And those two groups of people tended to be one and the same.
"I need an activity report. Can you handle that from here?"
Yuna nodded silently, not making a big deal of it. The information was out there, all that mattered was access. In the ruins, that could be a big question. In the city nobody would ever even ask.
The automatic door slid open with a few clicks, the sounds being mostly for show and to let anyone near it know not to lean on it. It was a throwback to old megastores, automatic doors once having been a very flashy addition. Now, it was kitch, a nostalgic feature for people who had not even been born when the last megastore was bombed to rubble. Still, the reason for installing it in a place in the ruins was probably just because it was cheap.
As the faint hiss subsided and the internals of the place came into view, the first thing that washed out from there was a flood of smells. The ruins smelled like nothing. Or, more accurately, the ruins smelled like wet stone, that hint of grime that only the obsessively aware ones noticed. The inside of Splintered Peak smelled like a million things, from sweetened drinks to coarse smoke, neither of which had an atmosphere of healthy around them, honestly. But this seemed like not a place for the health obsessed to visit.
"Are you absolutely sure about this?" Yuna asked.
"It's a bar. I've been to bars before."
Yuna grunted, a fake agreement. She wasn't impressed.
"Do those bars have fortified walls, too?" she added.
She was right, of course. It was less apparent at the first look of the place, but close examination of the occassional hole or tear in the surface of a wall showed a hard, dull metallic inside, easily the match of a lightly armored vehicle. The fact that there were holes and tears to see it through confirmed that it was probably there by necessity.
Walking in caused a few heads to turn. But there was no record scratch, no piano player suddenly hitting the wrong key and stopping the music altogether. Just a few faces wondering at the presence of two women of relatively small size, compared to present company. Crude body modifications could be spotted in every corner of the place, a clunky arm here and a worn eye there. This wasn't city quality, these were not city regulars. On one table lay a gun, in plain view, easily grabbed by a fast hand. On another, a knife large enough to cut the car outside in half, or so it looked. Clothes, skin and the aforementioned bodily modifications wore a range of different symbols that seemed to indicate gangs, faiths, or past misdeeds.
A few tables were unoccupied, and Yuna, still looking very skeptical of the place, quickly found a small one to sit by, signalling at the seat across from her. A small square on the table lit up as she sat, and she looked at it for a moment, making a few gestures with the fingers on her right hand. A flat blob, barely the size of her palm, seemed to ooze onto the square from somewhere below, quickly forming a hexagonal ridge around its edge. Liquid, too, began oozing up from below, and as it filled the hexagon, the ridge on its six sides rose to match it. Before long, it was a hexagonal glass, filled with a swirling liquid of pale blue and golden brown.
"You have no augmentations, right?" asked Yuna, for the first time seeming not just uncomfortable, but outright nervous, as if there was some insult to be found in that question.
"No, they'd never survive the jump."
That was the delicate way of putting it. The less delicate way was that any metal, plastic, electrically conductive or most other non-organic materials in such things would overheat violently and fry whatever meat or bone they were attached to. It was an unpleasant way to die, and even worse to survive.
"I'll order for you," she added, making it clear that the two things were connected. Looking around the room, there was barely anyone without something altered, some more visibly than others. In a place like that, using those things to place an order was probably less impractical than it seemed.
"You typically drink on a mission?" she continued, as a similar hexagonal blob appeared on the table, rising as it filled with the same kind of pale blue and brown liquid. It smelled warm and sweet, like sugar dropped on a hot stove. But it had a definite hint of something sharp and nasty hidden inside. "I thought taking in fluids was a big no-no."
"That's just for the rookies."
It wasn't. It was for everybody. Fluids became part of the body quite quickly, but like anything else local, they did not return back home with the traveler. A few glasses of water, given time to be absorbed by the body, could leave a returning traveler on death's door from dehydration when they stayed behind. Even the loss of the local oxygen that became a part of the body but never returned could knock a veteran traveler unconscious on a bad day.
"What's the report say?"
As hoped, Yuna forgot her interrogation about the drinks and focused on something she only saw. She had no visible modifications done to her eyes, but that meant nothing. There were other ways than obvious eye implants to see the world that remained invisible to everyone else.
"Shit," she mumbled, clearly not intending to say anything.
"What?"
Squirming a bit, she flipped through information only visible to her. That she was flipping through something was only visible because of how her head bobbed slightly with every new block of information.
"Remember how you felt we were a safe distance from the city?"
She waited a moment to get a worried nod in response.
"Sorry, Marie, but I'm afraid that luxury won't last."
The noise of the bar seemed to fall away, if just for a second or two. Big cities were a bad thing for time travel. Too many things could go wrong, too many events could be changed by the tiniest of actions. It was like repairing a car while it was driving, everything was in motion and full of powerful forces.
"How... not last? How much not last are we talking about, here?"
Had it not been for the bitter effect of the blue and brown drink, that news would have been the perfect trigger for panic. Whatever the drink was, it slowed the mind down enough to strangle that panic in its infancy. Of course, there was no guarantee that the effect would last.
"Uhm... bad?" she answered, clearly having trouble with the way the question had been phrased. "There has been a lot of activity, but the bulk of it is around Reintegration Square. That's..."
"That's in one of the outer arms of the city, I know."
It was bad. It was really bad. Even if it wasn't exactly the heart of the city, in any meaning of the word, it was in a fairly crowded part of it, a techie district, full of commercial traffic and custom development microfactories. The huge buildings that could be seen in the distance from outside the bar were closer to the center, but even in an arm of the city, the large, blocky structures contained people living, working and maintaining the city and its assorted machines. There were many pieces on a board like that, too many to count.
"It doesn't matter. This is too important."
Yuna looked up from her blue and brown, her hand on the glass stopping in the air for a moment before she continued sipping the drink.
"You sure?" she asked, even though she clearly already knew the answer. Her question was rhetorical. The decision was made.
"It's a sneak and peek mission. We're not interacting with anything or anyone. There's very little that can go wrong."
Famous last words.

The city spread out in all directions. It made the head spin, trying to align the up and down felt by gravity with the up and down of the buildings. Or the building, perhaps. It all seemed like one big building, an angular spifer's web that stretched out in all directions. Vertical towers merged seamlessly with horizontal ones, rising around the walkways and bridging over them. It looked like three cities of skyscrapers, one standing regular and two tilted on the side, running in either direction at an angle to one another. Walkways seemed like tunnels through buildings, looking up at floors and down at roofs, glass so everpresent that it felt like the entire place was partially transparent. The souls of feet above your head, the tops of heads beneath your feet.
"This is a bad idea," Yuna mumbled. It was impossible to tell if she chose that phrase because of how clichéed it was, or if it was just the first thought that popped into her head. Not that she only now started worrying, she had voiced her dislike of the idea the whole way there.
A linecar passed overhead, making that whistling sound that they were known for, a sound that carried so poorly that the remaining thousands of them zipping around the place on their thin rails were barely even audible. The rails themselves melted into the city, as well, looking like fragile threads of dull glass.
"Where we're going, we don't need roads..."
"What?" asked Yuna, not catching the reference. It made no sense explaining it to her. For her, it was ancient history, just one more movie from a long gone civilization.
"Nothing. Where do we go from here?"
The car was, again, folded up and stored at a site in the edge of the city. The broad streets in this part of town were for walking only. Rapid transit used linecars, either private or collective. In the greater scheme of things, this was a small bump on a bigger city complex, but it ran by most of the same rules, and the luxury bridgeways that allowed actual cars to pass through it were few and far between out here. Far up above, some could be seen, up in the top levels where the wealthier citizens lived. Closer to real sunlight, when sunlight came through the cloud cover. The lower levels were reflected light at best, artificial at worst. Well, darkness and dim, worn neon-style at worst, but that was still a few levels below.
"Look, Marie, this is a really bad..."
"I know."
There was no point in the discussion any longer. During the fitting, out by the vehicle storage lot where the car was now, she had repeated the same warning, again and again. She had been with The Embassy in this time for several years now, and she knew the stakes for mingling during time travel. This was a bad idea, she was right about that. Sadly, there were no real alternatives.
"The reports all center around the square. I had Braham stick an anachronome in the suit, it's in the HUD."
She was right, again. The head-up display had a few icons listed, all of them looking fairly uninteresting. At the bottom, however, a small symbol of a crossed out watch popped at when the small bar next to it detected eyes looking at it. The bar was short and greenish yellow. That was natural. Those things could detect when a time traveler was wearing them, easily. It would need to be bigger to show that there was significant time travel activity in the immediate surroundings.
"Yeah, it's only reading me here."
"Right. We need to get to the square and have a walk around to see if something triggers it. You up for it?"
Yuna seemed to ask out of more than just politeness, she seemed honestly concerned. The HUD in the tightly fitted, narrow sunglasses flashed softly when looking at her, offering up any information that the overall system had about her. It was a standard function, a way for people to cut out a lot of chitchat when meeting while busy. Right now, there was no need for it.
The HUD glasses fit nicely over the eyes, molding themselves into the exact shape of the skull and eye socket. They connected into the suit that Yuna had insisted was needed, a set of thin and sturdy things running along arms, legs and most importantly the back, allowing protection from impacts and giving some degree of boosted movement. Yuna had fully modified legs and permanent support in the back and arms, she didn't need any. The suit was for people without such augmentations. Like new arrival from the badlands still surrounding the city, and other cities like it. Or time travelers, although that probably wasn't a big topic at the design meetings.
"Yeah, I'm just... getting the hang of this suit."
Yuna didn't like that remark, sending a piercing look, almost like she was looking through any and all clothes to examine the suit as it clung to the skin.
"Marie, if this goes south..."
"Yeah, I know. Let's just make sure it doesn't."
The walking street leading farther into the city, towards Reintegration Square, was wide, carrying a crowd that looked to be in at least the dozens just nearby, hundreds if looking farther. Yuna had changed her looks during the fitting, replacing her short hair with long, flowing curls that shifted their colors slowly over time, a living rainbow of pastels and dark greys and blacks. Her clothes were no loner the slick, street-worn ensemble she had worn to the arrival point, but a loose outfit, complete with loves and video fabrics that ran a loop of old TV and movie clips. She seemed to feel it was needed, to avoid easy detection. That seemed a bit paranoid, but then again, she had to live in this world, even after the mission was over and done with, so it made a kind of sense.
As the crowd passed and Reintegration Square came closer, each step taken along the nearly transparent walkway bridge began to be a mental strain. Images flickered across buildings, nothing imposing and nothing threatening, barely anything coherent, but the mosaic of images and some hidden algorithm behind them seemed to force attention to something. Only that something never became apparent.
"I hate the city."
Yuna looked over. "Why?" she asked.
Soft street lighting mixed with the hints of natural sunlight that poked through, dilluted and polluted by the many upper levels of transparent walkways it had to penetrate to get through.
"I feel it in my head. I feel it... talking."
Yuna seemed fairly untouched by the complaint, which actually seemed a bit insulting.
"The word on the line is that they upgraded the entire city system. New memetics, new psychotropics, the works. Don't drink the water."
The last remark seemed like a joke, or a saying that was only meant as a way to end the brief information dump. There was no weight to it, no dramatic hush or added intensity in her voice.
"I still hate it. I can feel it picking around in my brain, trying to tamper with things."
"I thought you had that in your time, too," Yuna said, almost pondering out loud. "Commercials, service announcements, that kind of stuff, right?"
"Sure, but I know when I see one of those. Here I just..."
There was a sudden sense of wrongness in the air. Like the path ahead was not the right one. There was nothing particularly threatening lurking there, along the walkway bridge, amongst the crowd. Just a weird, ominous sensation of being wrong, somehow.
"Marie, you're staring," she said, this time hushing her voice a bit.
"I know. Are we going the wrong way?"
Yuna looked down the walkway. "Yes, it's this way. Why?"
The sensation was growing stronger.
"It seems... wrong."
Without actually knowing the right way, or any way at all, it seemed like a bizarre thing to say. But it also seemed true.
"There's nothing. It's just the city making your mind freak out. Ignore it."
A large image danced across the surface of one of the buildings, or a part of the connected city-building, whatever it was called. A simple image, a couple of deliberately styled stick figures doing a nonsensical pantomime over what looked like cage full of birds. When the cage opened and the birds flew out, it seemed terrifying, for some reason.
"For #*@!'s sake, Yuna, something is really wrong here. I think the city is trying to..."
Sound seemed to flow in waves, volume washing in and then washing out again. A small piece of music, a classic-sounding bit played on highly synthesized drums, made its way through the soundscape of the mumbling crowd. It was very out of place, with barely any other unnatural sounds around. No advertisements, no traffic warnings. It felt like the old westerns, a hush coming over the local saloon as danger entered town and walked through its creaking doors.
"Do we abort?" she asked, sounding nervous and annoyed in the same sentence.
A slow breath. Then another. The music kept playing, hiding in the background, like a child wanting you to know it was there, but very much out of your reach. A few more images seemed imposing, but they quickly fell away, like the city knew that it had been found out.
"Yuna, can these city systems target individuals, or is it just for crowds?"
She hesitated. Whatever this was, it was rare enough for her, or common enough, to completely escape notice.
"Theoretically, sure. They use some high level memetics to lock wanted criminals in a crowd. But that's really advanced stuff, why would they..."
"I think they know we're here."
Yuna froze, then started looking around. It was a meaningless gesture on her part, of course, an instinct left over from a time when every threat was something that could be seen. This was not that.
"I say we abort," she said, in a firm voice, rather uncharacteristic of her. A single look at her revealed something tampering with her, too. In fact, the entire crowd seemed on edge, people sending more looks than minutes before. There was a tension in the air.
"No, I think it's too late."
She didn't like that particular answer.
The square was not that far away, taking only minutes to reach. The crowd was more dispersed the closer one got to it, people having the odd habit of moving faster when exiting or entering a place like it. The square itself was even more open, a three layer construction of more opaque floors, with only segments made transparent to avoid a claustrophobic feel.
"Are you getting the same readings as me?" asked Yuna, voice kept low for no reason at all. The crowd was noisy enough to cover most sounds, and if anybody paid particular attention, they would have heard it anyway.
She was right, something was affecting the little bar with the crossed out clock. There was something that didn't belong in this time. When it sensed that it was being looked at, the little icon unfolded into a crude map of the place. The green outlines of each floor meshed together with the sight of the actual floors perfectly, making it seem as if the real floors had a greenish halo to them, an otherworldly glow. Triangles, simplified arrows, seemed to infest the place like cockroaches, making it hard to see the crowd as more than colorful background noise.
"I think so. What the hell are they trying to tell me?"
No response came from her, not immediately. She was preoccupied with whatever she was seeing, whatever alternate version of the city her own modifications were showing her. Without much confidence, she began to move to the right, towards a small walkway ramp leading to the floor below.
"You mind filling me in, Yuna?"
She made a quick gesture, pointing to her face and swirling the finger in the air. It wasn't perfectly clear, but the hand she then held up seemed to urge silence.
The ramp did indeed lead to the next level below, to a rather chaotic underside of the square, the wide area of it here replaced by a labyrinth of thin walkways in a multi-level design. Along them, individual people moved fast, some seeming to run. The biggest group seemed to be three moving together, most being two or just one person alone.
"Service paths," Yuna said, never turning to look back. From behind, she looked lost, constantly slowing down and regaining her bearings. She was still just walking in a single direction, following the ramp, but she was clearly mapping out something.
A sudden image appeared, plastered awkwardly across the HUD, of little bullseye markers all around the place, red and slowly flashing. Along with them, a fog of blue, inside of it shifting solid fogs. The fogs seemed to be searching, the visual representation of the sensors scanning for something in that particular area. The red markers were less clear. Looking up at them and switching off the HUD revealed small, plain boxes, attached to the support beams of Reintegration Square overhead. Surveillance.
"There," Yuna whispered, as the blue fog finally gatherred into a solid blob, seemingly inside a nearby building. There were no entrances on the level into the building, and no signs of it on any level right above or below. It was little more than a wall of reflective surfaces, throwing the panorama of the square and its surroundings back in a darker hue. Nonetheless, Yuna suddenly raised her pace, going in the direction of that mirror wall. Her modified legs began to fully kick in, having already shortened the time it took to get to the square, but now making her seem to sprint, in spite of her casual body language. Luckily, the leg segments of the suit were able to keep up with her.
"Yuna, I don't think there is anyway..."
A red icon flashed across the HUD. She was speaking through it, now, not through words that could more easily be picked up by whatever those boxes were. And she clearly prefered not being spoken to, either!
At the foot of the ramp, as the transparent floor of it merged into a larger walkway with a scattered set of lines and symbols to guide any pedestrian using it, she made a sharp jump to the right, making it easier to pass without hitting her. Standing beside her, it became clear that she was checking out the entire building, as far down as she could see, and then up through the transparent walkways above. The HUD suddenly flooded with little outlines, some fixed in the building, some moving on it like little bugs.
"We do this, and we leave," she finally said, in a tone that was not much different from one that might be asking for another cup of coffee. She didn't seem like it was up for negotiation.
"What's our way in?"
Waiting a few seconds, she then pointed at a small box rolling down the side of the mirrored building. The HUD dropped any other marker in the area and only highlighted that one box. "Service transport," the letters appearing below the moving box read.
Without another word, Yuna jumped. The legs that had looked nothing out of the ordinary until then unfolded, thigh and calf splitting open into multiple pieces and knee joints, now bared mechanical parts, expanded their width and briefly opened an air intake, taking in air to compress and use for shock absorption when landing. Charged magnetic pumps extended the entire legs to one and a half their usual length as they launched her forward, across the significant gap between the ledge of the walkway and the side of the building.
Making the suit match the jump turned out to be more difficult. A set of icons immediately popped up across the HUD, and the leg attachments of the suit shifted slightly, suddenly feeling more springy. A quick instruction flashed on the HUD, showing to simply make a skip to trigger the jump mechanism.
"Holy #*@!, I'm gonna die..."
Traffic across the section of walkway was light, but every increasingly bouncy leap across it seemed like a gamble against some idiot out of nowhere gunning for a collision. The twenty paces across the transparent floor were crossed in only six leaps, and the final leap ending with a hard forward angle to trigger the suit. Feeling like dangling the legs in front of the world's biggest speaker at a dubstep concert, magnetic locks discharged hard, flinging feet, legs and everything on them clumsily into the air. A stream of lines faithfully tracked the jump towards the service transport box that Yuna was already clinging to, but the landing was hard. The box made a crunchy noise as its side split open, sending a cloud of dust and tiny fragments flying from inside. Apparently, it was carrying whatever had been cleaned up from floors inside the building, and plenty of it.
"What now?"
Yuna said nothing, but simply grabbed hold of part of the box, a large splinter from where it had been smashed open. With strain painted across her face, she bent the splinter outward without snapping it clean off. Something suggested that she had done it before.
Never even slowing down through it all, the box simply continued its calm ride down the building, aiming at a panel near the corner, which dutifully opened to take it in. As it approached the panel, the panel itself seemed to shift back and forth in a strange manner, almost as if it was uncertain of what to do.
"Stay close to it," Yuna hissed, swinging around to squeeze up against the box next to the bent out splinter. "It needs to get the whole thing inside."
She turned out, again, to be right. The panel finally found a proper distance that allowed it to get the whole box, bent splinter and all, inside. That included the two people now pressing their bodies closely against the side of the box. Ans as the panel shut behind the box, light dropped to almost nothing. A small blue emergency light, no doubt a permanent fixture in most places for the unforeseen events that were so unforeseen that no existing machine automation was in place in advance to handle them, shone a bit down the track that the transport box was now on. It gave everything an eerie glow, a wash of blue shine around nearly black items.
"We need to get off," Yuna whispered, perhaps thinking that the automated machines would hear her and rat her out to whoever was in charge. "It's gonna send this one to repairs, and it's gonna be no time at all tll we get spotted and someone from security comes along to fix the problem."
The last two words had a strange, intense tone to them, as she was making pretty clear that the problem to be fixed was the two people entering the building through unauthorized means. Being solved would likely not be pretty.
The service tunnel that the box had entered through was in poor condition. Condense water dripped from many points along the roughly rectangular hole that the tunnel dug into the building, and traces of things having scraped along the walls or hit them hard were everywhere. There was no effort t keep the place in a pristine cindotion, much like looking good. Nobody went here. The place was not for people, it was for the machines maintaining this section of building, That showed clearly in how nearly impossible the place was to navigate, little protrusions ready to cut into the flesh of a carelessly moved bodypart. Surfaces next to one another could be freezing and cold, and the pale blue light of the emergency lamp did very little to illuminate the way. All that there was to walk on was a few ledges, like the light designed to help a human crew find their way around if things went so badly wrong that only human hands could do anything about it. Human hands had not been there for ages, it seemed.
Nonetheless, Yuna seemed very much in her natural environment! Moving quick and nimble through awkward angles and nearly dark corners, she made her way through the place with a relatively brisk speed. She did stop, several times, to not get too far ahead, but whatever experience she had with this sort of place, it showed!
The suit was also becoming a bit of a problem. Yuna's legs had long since retracted and folded up into normal size, and inside the tunnel they even seemed to shorten, making her overall silhouette seem stumpy, limbs not the proper length for her size of body.he suit, meanwhile, forced clothes to scrape against things harder, preventing softer flesh beneath from giving way and bending to pressure. The complex joints around the knees, even though they were as slim as could likely be expected, felt bulky, poking out and getting caught on every sharp angle jotting from the barely visible walls. And beyond all those annoyances, the suit finally began to feel ninflexible, refusing to crouch as deeply as the body asked fo it, refusing to let limbs bend in extreme angles. What was for safety and what was simply the restrictions of the suit were questions for another time and place. It was limiting, and all that counted was how big a hindrance any one limitation turned out to be.
With no warning, Yuna stopped. The pale blue light around her looked strange, but only when standing right behind her was it clear, that the tunnel had taken a sharp turn downwards. Casting shadows in the blue, all the protrusions and angles that continued down gave a distorted sense of perspective, shrinking in the distance but lit from so many changing angles by the few and widely spaced lights. Looking too long at the drop was a recipe for nausea.
"What now?"
Yuna wanted to answer, but she clearly had nothing ready to say. Looking in every direction possible, one at a time, she looked like a mouse caught in a trap. She was thinking, not panicking, but there was nothing to tell how long it would be before that changed.
"There," she mumbled, not making it clear if she was just talking to herself. Then her leg thrust forward, extending first to normal length and then going a bit beyond it, before kicking a small latch hard. Rather than simply breaking, the latch and the entire bit of tunnel wall that it was attached to just cracked and tumbled into the drop, making scraping and pounding noises all the way down. Aparently surprised at how easily the latch had fallen apart, not to mention the noise it had made, Yuna kept staring down the drop long after the sounds died out!
Whatever it actrually was that the latch had kept shut, it didn't open just from the latch being torn off. Yuna swing over to the dent that it had left behind, fingers clutching some thin rails that seemed like they would snap if she thought a single bad thought about them. As before, the hard work was done by her legs, One of which locked its foot firmly between some protruding components along the tunnel wall. The other placed its foot on a flat piece of wall where the latch ahd been. A long, hard push, and the flat part bent outward. The hole it made was enough for a small person.
On the other side was a bit of a drop, this one however ending on a railless stretch of ledge along the wall of the inside fo the building. Yuna effortlessly made it from that ledge to a length of thick pipe, skipping along them all like a cat, feet extending in order to grip the footing better.
The suit, on the other hand, was less cooperative. Had it not been for Yuna reaching back several times to grab an arm or a leg, it would have all ended in a fall that seemed to continue down forever, the more human appropriate lighting now showing floor after floor of nothing to stand on. It was no machine tunnel any longer, but it was still a service area, pipes supplying the building with air, water and many other resources, thick cables running electricity and data conduits up and down and side to side.
"This is not right," Yuna said, this time loud enough that she clearly wanted to be heard. "We should have found a real floor by now. There seems to be no floors. That makes no sense."
The way the city built both up and in any other direction made it hard for anyone to guess its internal structure. Even from the outside, everything clear and visible, making sense of what was where was a challenge. From within the belly of the beast, it was next to impossible. But Yuna seemed certain in her observation.
"Maybe this is just a supply part of the city. I mean, there are lots of..."
"No."
She was more thinking out loud than trying to silence disagreement. Perched on the point where multiple pipes merged, she was scouting the place, trying to make sense of the incoherencies she felt she saw.
"No, someone is using it to do something it was not designed for. See those useless beams all around the walls?" She pointed at lengths of sturdy beams that protruded form the walls but were neither used nor went anywhere. "Sloppy job. They hollowed the place out in a hurry. Your friends are building something in here."
She turned, making it seem for a split second that she was losing her balance, but it was the move of someone completely sure in their footing. Her extended feet were still gripping pipes and protrusions like a skilled monkey's foot.
"What exactly is it you're looking for, Marie?"
"I have no idea."
The answer was, in many ways, an honest one. Just not in the way that really mattered. Yuna seemed to know that instantly, her eyes not wavering.
"Sidney is building something. She might have been building it for a while. Huge, weird monuments across time. We have no idea what they're..."
It took a fraction of a second for Yuna's feet to disappear under her, getting torn violently to the side, making the rest of her body follow only by twisting in a way that looked horribly painful. She disappeared in between pipes and standing beams before there was any time to react or even wonder about it!
In the blink of an eye, tiny things filled every perceivable space. Little disks, no bigger than a human head, hung in the air. But before they could do anything, a harsh vibration, feeling like a blast of sound but sounding like a puff of air, shook every surface, flinging the disks out of their places. As they fought to regain whatever balance they had when hovering, something else flew through the air. Yuna.
"Security! They fou..."
Her words got cut by a thin metal bolt slicing through the empty air, splitting into many as it went past her. The bolt, and every lesser bolt it split into, dragged a chain behind it, the barbs along them being clearly visible even as they zipped past.
"What do I..."
The question was quickly answered as disks, perhaps around half of them, ignored Yuna and came rushing in. A bolt on a chain, much like the one that had almost gotten Yuna, struck a nearby pipe, sending brief sparks flying!
It was as if the suit knew. As if it already had a plan for such a situation, just waiting to spring it. But in the end, it was simply reflexes amplified and modified by a thousand sensors embedded in it. A twitch to dodge became almost gymnastic evation, a thought of a small pipe's support strength sent the hand of the suit to grab it, fingers extending beyond the length of the natural, human fingers inside of it. The suit was not thinking, it simply followed thoughts as orders, and did it well!
With Yuna still being thrown around, mostly from her own, willing actions, one of the sources of bolt chains finally came into view. A hulking humanoid form, twisted and distorted as if someone had stretched it like a lump of dough, its limbs too long and thin for any healthy human being. The long limbs grabbed ledges and stray pipes and part climbed, part swung itself like an artificial monkey from the bowels of Hell through the chaos of ledges and pipes to grab. It was fast, moving like it knew the course already, like a trained soldiers navigating obstacles on a well-known training ground. And when its eyes finally locked on, they glowed a faint, sickly green.
"Abort. Escape."
The two words came, one after the other, over the HUD. Wherever Yuna was and whatever she was currently dealing with, she was in enough control of herself to mentally instruct her own modifications to send that message. It would have been a good sign, had the message been better!
At the speed of thought, the suit's limbs moved in a sad, much lesser fashion like the metal monkey, grabbing, pulling and thrusting against their surroundings. Assisting to make the very decision of grabbing points near automated, the HUD showed points calculated to be the best to grab. All it really needed was the overall route, and a thought of accept at each decision. And yet, the small circle in its left side showed a blip, the metal monkey, catching up, and fast!
"Yuna, where are you?!"
The question seemed to disappear into the low static of the communication systems. Seconds went by, the static rising and dropping, the metal monkey getting ever closer.
"Up," came the answer. However abstract it seemed, it wasnt lying. Without warning, Yuna plummetted by, falling deep into the floorless innards of the building.
"Follow!"
The internals of the building were yet more mess of pipes, ledges and god only knew what else, looking like the gaping mouth of some ancient beast, only faint lights to make out the outline of everything. The HUD did its best to outline edges better, but the colors never truly meshed with the dark silhouettes, making it more of a headache to feel confident about Yuna's apparent plan.
"Follow!" repeated her voice over the comm. The tiny blip showed the metal monkey gaining rapidly, soon to catch its target. One bolt flew past, dragging its familiar chain, but weaving through the organs of the building obviously made it hard for it to find its target without wrapping around something.
Choice ran out. The monkey caught up. All that was left was to fall.
It felt soothing, almost serene. The fall made the body, and the suit, feel weightless. The many bits of building innards fell by, melting into the background as only the mouth of dim lights in their midst mattered. Everything else was just background noise.
Then, flashing rudely across the HUD, lines appeared. They went still deeper into the deep, but they had an end, and it came rushing up faster and faster as gravity accelerated the fall. At the end, markers showed a sturdy point to grab, and the line went off horizontally, towards unknown parts of the place. The turn came rushing up at a frightening speed. And like a bullet shot from a gun, it arrived, the suit hand grabbing it on command. The arm inside hurt from the very sudden jerk, but the suit itself was less fortunate! Sounding like a chorus of ripping cardboard, bits and pieces tore out through the joints, spraying the surroundings with debris from splintered parts. The remaining arm tried to compensate, but it slowly failed, grasping more and more desperately at anything the HUD would identify as even remotely a good idea. Yuna was somehow outside, her marker on the HUD showed that much. She had found a usable exit point. That point was now drifting farther and farther above. The suit, for all its ingenuity, could not stop the fall.
All of that made the durability of that slender, elegant piece of suit engineering much more impressive as it crashed through the surprisingly flimsy oiter building wall! Shards of steel and glass alloy scattered like leaves as the crash splintered everything, leaving a hole in the side of the building a bit bigger than the average human body. With a sound like thunder, the reinforced feet slammed into the transparent street below.
"Holy #*@!! Yuna, I..."
Every syllable made a small spray of blood spit out.
"I'm out. I don't think I'm okay."
She sent a reply, sounding out of breath, but the message was impossible to hear. The sound of fast moving claws was too loud.
With far more control and endlessly more elegance, the metal monkey came out into the slightly less dim light of the street. Finally coming to a rest, it stood on the edge of the road, cartoonishly long limbs glistening with every blue, green and orange ray of light that struck it. Then, in a snap, the limbs unlocked at mútiple joints and raced inward, snapping together right before reaching the body. The last bit of the legs slowed before the end, letting the monkey adjust its footing to match its new size. The green glow of the eyes disappeared behind sudden sleek sunglasses, and the monkey, now a human of perfectly normal proportions, adjust his dark, blue-grey uniform. Then he walked casually on, continuing his hunt!
"Marie, can you hear me? Get out of there, you're on an unsecured level. They don't care that you're out of..."
However Yuna finished the warning, it drowned in the sound of electrified air popping. A bolt of raw plasma, maybe thinner than a human hair, ripped by, leaving a trail of seaeing heat that ionized the air, with the pop resulting. The suit again took over, marking the man's weapon and reacting to a thought, ducking out of the way. Barely.
"You're not in their building," Yuna's panicked voice came in, "they don't care about collateral damage outside down there!"
That, it turned out, was an understatement. As he casually strolled ahead, his feet getting used to the flat terrain, the man fired several,bolts of plasma, creating screams and the sound of material destruction somewhere in the background. It was suicide to turn to see the details. The suit's quick marking was the key to survival. Perhaps the only key.
"Yuna, what do I do? What the hell do I do?!"
There was nothing but the low static. She had no answer.
"Yuna, leave. Just run. I know what to do."
It seemed like again, there was no answer coming. Then, a weak "okay" sounded in.
Walking backwards was oddly relaxed in the suit. It's abundance of sensors were a very effective substitute for actual eyes, marking every single obstacle, and the proper direction. That made keeping an eye on the metal monkey man much easier. He was walking a bit more briskly now, obviously holding back, likely measuring up his opponent. At no point did he give any reason for why he even continued, considering that the building was now just a mighty structure in the background. It seemed almost vengeful, like he intended to punish any and all that dared enter his den. For a security guard, that was a lot of commitment to show.
"I don't want any trouble, mister!"
The call fell on deaf ears. He either fully ignored it or just didn't care. The edge of the road was coming up closer from behind, but maybe, just maybe, there was a chance to talk him down.
"If you..."
As if to scream "just shut up," he fired a few plasma bolts, causing someone to scream in the distant background. There was very little street left, now, the edge coming ever closer.
Then, the heel of the suit hit the side guard. It was just a small thud, barely audible, but it seemed to be the only, and definitely loudest, sound in the entire world.
"Release the suit," he said, loudly, his voice carrying poorly in the rising howl of the wind that seemed to persist near the street edge. Release the suit. Be weak. Be defenseless.
"Can't do, buddy."
He disliked that response. Two bolts struck the side guard railing, sending sparks flying. He was more or less standing still now, expecting this to be the end of the hunt. Running to either side would do nothing, he could easily catch up, or simply open fire completely. For some reason, he wanted this to end without major injuries. That seemed very out of character, somehow.
Stepping up on the side guard was easier than expected. The suit extended a supporting leg, effectively making one leg a lot longer, lifting the entire thing up on the ledge. The other foot sprouted gripping toes, or fingers, or whatever they could be called, digging into the sturdy railing like fingers in cookie dough. It was less about absolute balance and more that the suit was clearly aware of the edge wind.
"Last chance, buddy. You wanna...."
"Step down," he said, clearly intending to cut through any chitchat.
"You've missed me a lot. Bad aim?"
He said nothing. His sunglass implants, likely part of his very own HUD, masked his eyes, but a frown did creep out across the rest of his face.
"Someone tell you to bring everyone in alive for a little talk?"
The small device in his hand, apparently the busy end of the plasma bolt gun, snapped its aim up, not so much to adjust it as to draw attention to the fact that, yes, he was armed. And no, he was likely not enjoying the talk.
"Sorry about that, buddy."
It felt so easy to just take that final step back. The ledge was solid, but thin, and there was nothing beneath. Unlike the tumbling, disorienting fall inside the building, this was under complete control. Legs first, a standing drop, like jumping off a chair. But without the landing. The outside of the side guard was polite enough to have the level number listed. 17. 17 levels down, the bulk of them obviously underground.
"Marie, what's going on? Your position is all wonky!"
Yuna had a vaguely conceiled panic in her voice. The fact that she used voice and not HUD messages was itself a tell.
"Marie, are you falling?!" The panic was less concealed now.
"Marie, for #*@!'s sake, the nets are shit down here, you gotta catch something!"
After a few levels, the fall changed. Gravity and the lack of balance made the body rotate slightly, in this case backward. It made fishing out the small glass device easier, the body shielding against the wind from falling through the air. A crack and a twist and the device flashed. Colored dots began to appear almost instantly.
"Marie, for #*@!'s sake, grab onto something!" shouted Yuna.
"It's okay, all under control."
Yuna never replied. The dots rushed in, atoms of another time returning to their living cargo. A moment later, the empty suit crashed against the ground on the bottom level.