POV Seth

Hope took up position in the rear seat. She surveilled the yawning darkness beyond through the small scope of her gun. “All clear!” She confirmed.

Seth was first through. He crouched in the darkness and moved to the rear of the vehicle. Seth did a quick sweep of the area with his energy rifle, shining his light into the darkness, catching nothing but wide-open space and support pillars in his sights. The absence of additional lights was a good sign that the enemy wasn’t nearby. Darkness would work to their advantage.

He returned his light to his starting position, and this time moved with cautious, intentional movements as he took in the details, searching for a way to the main floor. He and Hope had trained all year on syncing their movements in anticipation of the last game, when darkness was most likely to play a strategic role in the scenario. Light and scope moved in unison.

To his left was a cement wall with a large, yellow, stenciled B1 indicating their floor. At least the main floor wasn’t too much of a climb once they found some stairs. He ran the light along to the length of the wall until both light and wall disappeared into the darkness.

Ahead were the fractured remains of a barrier and a short, automated booth. A spike barrier had bits of metal and rubber caught in its teeth, suggesting that the car had punctured its tires and smashed into the small machine when it lost control of its desperate escape.

“All clear!” Hope confirmed a second time. His team filed out behind him.

He moved along the wall, passed the ruined machine, his line of sight slipping into the void beyond his light. There was nothing to see. Just vast emptiness.

He swept his light back to the wall he and his squad followed. Nothing but the dizzying eternity of rows of cement blocks. No doors. No signage.

He swept the light back to the garage, catching sight of a sprinkling of vehicles. He hadn’t seen them in his previous sweep. But here they were, clear as day, the same model on repeat in a few different spots. Must have been a popular model back in the day.

He kept his squad moving along the wall. Eventually, they’d find the stairs, a door, something...

When his light swept back to the garage, the car nearest him was no longer grey, but a light powder blue. A trick of the light, Seth told himself. He couldn’t explain how he had missed the other vehicles. The formerly near empty garage had grown crowded with a multitude of makes and models. Despite Seth’s skull pounding with warning, he justified that people of the age preferred to park in clusters deeper in the parking garage, closer to the building’s entrance. It was a good sign, wasn’t it?

He said nothing to his team. They felt Seth was crumbling under the weight of his responsibilities. He didn’t want to worry them. He didn’t want to prove them right.

The cement wall that had gone on for an eternity a moment prior had turned to join the security booth, blocking his progress forward.

No one remarked on the oddness. Seth buried the anomaly as yet another detail he had failed to observe.

A series of bright yellow, four-foot-tall pillars blocked a small single vehicle access route, leading deeper into the parking area. They reminded Seth of soldiers standing guard, only these were seized in a permanent up-right position, never to be relieved of duty.

Seth pushed past the yellow soldiers and opened the door to the booth. Thinking back on it, he had no reason to check it. The stairwell leading to the main floor was likely just beyond the security station.

All twelve squad members cramped into the small space; ducking below the window panes to avoid being seen despite the pitch black of the area. There was little room to move.

Seth checked the perimeter readout, noting that the yellow marker had followed them into the garage. There was no going back.

The room breathed, like a sleeper taking in a deep breath as they rolled over. No one else noticed that the security booth was a little bigger, offering just a little more room to move around fellow squad mates. Seth was grateful that the room hadn’t gotten smaller.

“Permission to look around,” Hope asked. She was already looking over the station’s elaborate control panels, at least the parts of it she could see through Seth’s light. Across from him was a partially opened vibrant blue metal door. To the back of the booth was another set of control panels and a series of inactive security screens.

‘We should leave,’ Seth’s instincts shouted. There was no other exit. They were in a kill-box, but eyes on the enemy would be useful. “See if you can trigger the power from here,” he told his techier squad members, buying time to rationalize his gut feeling. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt, would it?

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A second later, Erick cooed when he peered into the room beyond the blue door. “I found me a weapon’s cache.” If Seth gave his subconscious a personality, it would have thrown its hands up in the air. It would have pointed toward the door, whose red paint had faded and peeled. Wasn’t it blue a second ago?

“Leave it,” Seth said before he had the chance to think about it. The certainty of his own words caught him by surprise. They had emerged from that knowing place. A place so deep inside that most people can’t hear it.

Erick kicked the door when it wouldn’t budge, then signaled for help. Wallace and Gemma maneuvered their way through the squad, trying to move the door each and failing. Seth’s breath caught in his throat, desperately hoping that the door wouldn’t give so much as an inch. “I said leave it, Bradford,” Seth said, his tone carrying the same firmness and authority he wasn’t quite accustomed to.

Wallace let go of the door without a second thought, but Gemma glanced from Erick to Seth. “I can get this open,” Gemma offered. Wasted energy wasn’t Seth’s concern.

“Leave it,” Seth repeated, “I need you on high alert defense.”

Gemma glanced into the weapons cache, then nodded. “Yeah, makes sense,” he intoned. Gemma was Seth’s trump card. He was the real reason they had survived the Championship games, and this one was shaping to be no different.

“Don’t be a pussy, Gemma, you’re better than that,” Erick kicked at the door. When Gemma ignored him to help the techs at the panels, Erick pushed him into the panels. “Fucking pansey!”

Gemma didn’t bother reacting. He was clearing his mind of all conscious thought and stripping his soul of all emotion. He had one job, and he was going to do it well. “I need a light in there to see what we’re up against. Rogers, give me details about the damage.”

“Keep it on a private channel,” Seth added, not wanting to stress his team.

Erick jutted his chin toward Seth in a silent threat. Erick removed his helmet to wipe beads of sweat from his face. Seth acknowledged the sweat dripping from his own brow. It was stifling. “You’re a moron if you think the enemy won’t use whatever they get their hands on,” Erick said.

“You’re right,” Seth acknowledged. Gemma signaled a thumbs up to Seth. He was ready to do what he needed to do. “From now on, we’re on high alert. Just in case I haven’t made myself clear, anyone caught using live rounds will be kicked from the team. Victory or not.”

The verdict shocked his squad. The stress of the last game always made Seth’s no kill rule feel unreasonable. He couldn’t blame them. They were facing a brutal death if they got caught in a fight with the opposition. The problem was that he didn’t see his opposition as his enemy. The bulk of the players weren’t war bound; they had a different motive behind their vindictive victories.

Thinking about it now, he didn’t want to associate doctor Yan’s perspective with all other elites, they couldn’t all be looking for the thrill of taking a life.

He couldn’t deny the psychological need to dehumanize the opposition. She had murdered several dozen people by the time she graduated. If she didn’t frame her murders as a necessity, if she didn’t frame her fellow man as sub-human, her conscience would have eaten her alive. Instead, it had eroded her values and corrupted her intent into the few worthy and the millions of the unworthy.

“Time’s up,” Seth announced.

“No luck,” Gerald reported. “There’s a power relay through this station, but it looks like they cut it off at the source.”

Smith continued, “Can’t tell for sure, but I think the power through security was just for this floor, but it’s not the main site from what I can tell. If there was a backup generator, that’s probably been spent ages ago. How are we going to get the data-pack with no power?”

“I’d guess that the server had its own backup power supply,” Hope chimed in. “No guarantee. Depends on leadership’s value of the digital assets. You know, short-term goals vs long term. But given what we’ve been asked to get…” Hope shrugged. “We could always drag out the servers and hand that off.”

“You’re suggesting direct server access,” Regina nodded in approval.

“Well… maybe. I’m assuming it’s on an isolated system with a closed off network. I mean, we might be looking at some old school tech. Maybe even some pre-server tech,” Hope replied.

“But then our tech wouldn’t be able to connect to the old stuff,” Smith countered.

Hope nodded. “It’s all ones and zeros in the end.”

Seth smiled to himself. ‘Clever.’

“We’re overthinking this,” he told his team. “We’re confusing ourselves by muddling what we know and our expectations. Our understanding of the building blocks of our society is pretty good. We know we need power to keep our servers running. We know we have multiple power sources to our data-archives as part of our fail-safe plan. Like Hope said, it depends on leadership and what they deem worth protecting.”

“Get to the point!” Erick spat.

“My point is, we’re judging our forefathers based on our systems and processes today. We expect the past to operate based on the way we expect of them today. We have systems and laws that govern data access and storage. Those rules probably didn’t exist at this age.”

“POINT!” Erick groaned.

“My point is we’re expecting to tackle a problem that doesn’t exist yet.”

Hope snapped her fingers. “We have the tech to power a system, if we need to. Even if it’s for a few minutes to look through logs, if they exist. Might be still going too high-tech and we may need to look through paper logs. I’ve never seen paper logs before,” Hope giggled with anticipation. “Anyway! SETH’s POINT IS ERICK, that our goal is to find and grab the right piece of hardware. We don’t do a direct download. We just grab the piece we need. Let the G.C. figure out the rest.”

It was a clever little puzzle that answered all the original quirks. If it was hardware they were looking for, they’d have to carry it. It can only be stolen, not copied. One person can carry it, suggesting that the thing they were looking for was small.

Short of running into the enemy, fully armed with live weapons, they had this victory in the bag. Now to get to the main floor.