01

Jade snapped into consciousness, an odd sensation considering her normal function would have her awareness come to her over the course of a few seconds. She tried to open her eyes, but nothing happened. There were multiple possibilities for this. Her eyelids could be malfunctioning and simply not opening, she could be blind, or her pod could be completely out of power. All three options were extremely unlikely, but the refusal of the all consuming darkness to abate proved something was wrong.

Not for the first time, she wished she had been given the military-grade optical sensors of the Archangel androids instead of the more realistic biomimicry eyes she herself had helped create. With no visual input, she attempted instead to open a direct link to one of the laboratory cameras via the data cable inserted into her arm. Again, nothing happened. This lent more credence to the lack-of-power theory.

She felt a twinge of concern rush through her as she queried her own power reserve. 25%. The twinge of concern suddenly leapt into stomach-churning minor panic. Twenty-five percent was emergency power. She had gone to bed with far more than that. To be at such a low level while sleeping, she would have had to essentially be in hibernation for nearly half a decade. Something else must have happened, as that line of thinking was utterly ridiculous. It was the kind of thing that needed a direct meteor strike or geothermal nuclear war to leave her stuck in her unpowered maintenance pod for any length of time.

Jade pulled the data cable out of her arm and reached behind her back to pull the power cord. Once free of her direct connections, she felt around for the mechanical release lever, slammed it to the side, and pushed the heavy metal door open. Again, she was greeted with utter darkness.

"Hello?" she called out to the empty room, her voice echoing slightly in the otherwise dead quiet. "Dad?" She could hear her voice. She could hear the faint echo of it. She could hear the sound of her bare feet patting across the cold, hard tiles of the lab floor. The whole place seemed utterly absent of life, but that didn’t stop her from continuing to call out. "Lilith? Dejah?"

The lab had been her home for pretty much her entire existence, so while she moved cautiously on the off chance that something had been misplaced and was in one of the walking paths, she otherwise knew exactly where she was going. She made her way to a maintenance closet, felt around for the generator, and patted around until she could locate the pull start. A couple of pulls produced an odd cranking sound that didn’t seem quite right. She acknowledged the futility of trying to start a generator without knowing if the gas lines were even turned on. Jade spent some time feeling around for the lines and trying to locate the little switch that either impeded or allowed the generator’s fuel flow to the cylinders. She found the gas cap and, upon opening it, gave it a quick sniff. Jade gritted her teeth and scrunched her nose. It wasn’t a smell she was familiar with and unfamiliar smell is not something one wanted to come from a tank that should hold diesel. It was a concerning thought. The diesel sitting in the tank of the generator should have been good for at least a year. As far as she was aware, Dejah had run her scheduled maintenance on the machine less than a month ago.

Unsure what was going on, she put her hands on her hips and stared down at the generator with a disapproving look. At least, she assumed she was staring at it. With the all-consuming darkness, she couldn’t even tell if her eyes were actually open.

With a long sigh, she left the maintenance closet and headed to the armory. Her thumb jabbed one of the rubber buttons on the armory door lock and she was rewarded with a faint yellowish glow. Apparently, the little battery inside the door's keypad hadn't gone bad, proving once and for all that her eyes were open and functioning. She punched in the code and entered the armory. The faint glow from the keypad illuminated nothing, but somewhere in front of her was a wall of weapons. Some of those weapons had flashlights. Jade felt around for a few moments before pulling off a carbine and clicking on its attached light. Somehow, the pure white beam of photons was a relief. It showed that everything in this room, at least, was fully intact. She used it to find a smaller sidearm with a light, as well as an actual flashlight before placing the carbine back in its home location.

Now armed with a reliable LED flashlight and a 10-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, Jade began an honest search of the laboratory. Which started with raiding her dresser and putting on some clothes. A quick tour of the facility revealed that everything was where it should be, down to the book she had left on the rec room table before going to bed. The only misstep in her search was the mistake of opening the refrigerator. She immediately slammed it shut as a nauseating wave of rotten odors escaped with a hiss. She stopped breathing until she left the rec room and made her way to the laboratory's elevator. She rolled her eyes and sighed at her own stupidity after pressing the call button. Obviously, the elevator wasn’t going to work without power, but the action was so ingrained in her routine that it was habit. An action that, ironically, made her more human than any other machine.

She climbed up to the first level of the house via the laboratory's emergency ladder. After unlatching the heavy metal door that separated the laboratory from the rest of the house, she pushed open the back end of the bookshelf. This was where things were very much not in order. The house looked as though it had been ransacked. Books and papers were scattered all over the floor, several chairs were knocked over, and the windows were shattered. Though they remained in place, preventing any air from coming in, a spider web of cracks covered every single window in the room.

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Jade made her way through the house, noting that this was the state of every single room. The kitchen looked especially bad. The cupboards had been completely emptied, and the fridge and freezer stood open, their contents long since rotted and off-gassed. On the other side of the house, the windows had been blown inward, not just shattered. Again, the entire area had been ransacked. She found Lilith’s and her father’s room mostly intact. The end tables were knocked over, and someone had made off with the gun her father kept in the secret compartment beneath his side table.

Dejah’s room had been thoroughly searched for some reason. Then Jade paused outside Jill’s room, hesitant to enter. There was no logical reason why whoever had raided the house would have left Jill’s room untouched. That said, it was the only room with the door still shut. Slowly, Jade opened the door. Dim light filtered through the dirty, shattered window. The room appeared untouched. The bookshelves still held volumes of children’s books and stuffed animals. The air was still as a grave, and the entire space felt like a cross between the inner sanctum of a church and a mausoleum.

Jade took two soft steps into the room. Her gaze locked on the coffin-like cryo chamber in the center, anticipation gnawing at her. A foreboding sense that nothing good awaited. Jade’s father had built her with his own two hands. He had crafted a mechanical brain, complete with base programming to learn and the ability to feel emotion. A brilliant human, capable of creating an AI machine and fleshing it out to be nearly indistinguishable from any other human. He had been powerless to stop his normal daughter’s neurological degenerative disease. Jade’s little sister had been locked in stasis at the age of four, waiting for the day their father, or his colleagues, could find a way to restore her. Whether that solution came from mechanical engineering, biological science, or even dark magic. If her own pod had been without power long enough for her reserves to drop to 25%, the cryo chamber would have been without power just as long. Jill would have died within minutes.

The apprehension Jade felt as she leaned over the pod, trying to peer through the window, pounded into her psyche like a sledgehammer. The realization that the thick, sludgy material blocking the viewport was on the inside sent a nauseating wave of sickness crashing over her. Sweeping her out into an ocean of emotional instability the likes of which she had never experienced before. Quickly, and with rapid breathing unnecessary for a machine, Jade stumbled out of the room and shut the door. She hunched over, hands on her knees, and initiated the mental process of overriding her emotional switches. Slowly, the overwhelming sense of loss faded behind the veil of machine logic, and her mechanical heart returned to its base rhythm.

It took quite a while to methodically work through her emotions, one switch at a time. Normal humans didn’t have the advantage of throwing off their reactions and dealing with them piecemeal. A fact she could only count as a silver lining of her machine intelligence. The process might have taken longer, but in many respects, Jill had died years ago. This was merely the body following the mind. Jade had to figure out what had happened. She needed to determine when the power went out, why the safety mechanisms hadn’t kicked her out of the pod, and where her father, Lilith, and Dejah were. And more importantly, if they were even still alive.

It seemed inconceivable that any significant length of time had passed without her family’s return, but she wasn’t ready to write off people she remembered speaking to yesterday. Last she recalled, Dejah had gone into town to run errands, while her father and Jill had been summoned to a meeting at the military facility on the far side of the city. The only unusual detail was the urgency of the summons. Jade herself had stayed behind, spending the afternoon in the rec room and reading a couple chapters of her current book before plugging into the pod and powering down for the night. A power failure should have woken her up. That realization struck her as one of the most disturbing thoughts of all. For her to sleep past her charge time, the facility’s electronics would have needed to suffer extensive damage. Of course, it was also possible she hadn’t charged at all, and whatever event took place occurred shortly after she had shut down. Still, she should have woken up within a day. A sufficiently large EMP could cause such a failure. A massive solar flare might also explain the situation, but without power in the house, the reasons behind her extended sleep remained a mystery, at least until she stepped outside. Once again, Jade found herself deactivating emotional switches to dampen her reactions. Even so, her human-like, but still very mechanical mind seemed to stutter at the visual input before her. Her mouth dropped open at the scene arrayed before her.

The city before her lay in ruins. Skeletal skyscrapers reached into the air like the dead boney spines of some colossal monster. Their mirror-like glass was missing or shattered. Multi story roadways stood cracked or missing chunks, the concrete having fallen to the lower levels. Their rebar reinforcement dangling like cut tendons. Cars littered the streets, discarded trash that lay among the cracked and neglected roads. And all of it covered in vegetation. Trees grew out of roads, cars, and buildings, decades worth of growth. The clear poly dome that covered the city was mostly absent, its panels shattered on the ground or embedded in buildings. What was left had collected bits of dirt and started growing its own layer of vegetation, shrouding part of the city in green tinted light.

Slowly, Jade returned down the ladder into the dark laboratory. With nothing but a single candle for light, she sat at the table and watched as it burned down. The tiny, flickering flame went out long before she could process the emotional distress of waking into what appeared to be a post-apocalyptic future.

Notes:

The original “Bunker” was a fairly well liked start. The problem was the main character. Yari’s mindset had her building a hidey hole and sitting in it like some broody video game boss monster. I lost interest. Jade is an old character that has lived in my head for over a decade. She’s always been a side character.

I started playing Fallout 4 again, ignoring the main plot. That coupled with a new book were the MC is a human consciousness downloaded into an android had me thinking of Jade walking through an Irradiated city looking for survivors. Then I remembered “Bunker.” If Jade was the main character, it would be less about hiding, and more about growing. It would be playing Fallout 4 with an emphasis on base building and ignoring the main storyline.

Something I’ve got to figure out first. Setting… The original “Bunker” was set in my fantasy world pretty much concurrent with “Fantasy Farmstead: Modern Benton Cove.” Jade is from a “Black Halo” setting, but should fit in just fine. I’ll run a poll I think.