Operators>Forum>BS_Guides>Environmental>#READMEfirst.ver12.3.a.2

Think the Samurai should be more concerned with heavy metals in your local river than what sort of custom pants makes their ass look best? Congrats, you're in the correct place. Before you go writing a guide no one is going to read though consider two things. (1) tens of thousands of man hours have gone into the General Guide. Consider starting there and reading through the talk pages or looking at the history of whatever article interests you. (2) The environment is insanely complex. Pre-Samurai times even a single dam on a single river had hundreds of thousands of man-hours by professionals looking at the environmental aspects and repercussions. There were rules, laws, and regulations. Now a Samurai can put up a dam in two days, fill it with equipment to 'clean the water' and walk away. Totally unaware that the equipment he used was meant for consumable water, thus killing everything down to the microbes and very likely doing more damage to the environment than never building the dam in the first place. This is not a thought experiment. It happened and it was not an isolated incident. Want to stop all the frackers from creating earthquakes in Oklahoma and fucking up ground water? Good, that's a good goal. But when a BS did that, guess what it did to helium prices? Helium we need for everything from MRI machines to medical molecular printers. You think disrupting the auto market by introducing hover cars was bad? Think about what happens when you kill off the base layer of that predator-prey pyramid you learned about in elementary school because a Samurai doesn't like the "icky stuff" in the rivers.

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I was born in a mega-city. Not this god forsaken stretch of hell that was hot before global warming really kicked off, but a proper mega-city. You had to use public transport in a mega-city. Other people thought that meant we didn’t walk too much. I walked miles every day. There were no transport hubs where everything came together and you just got on and off at the same place. Mega-cities had tens of millions of people. Worse, they had corporations fighting for control. You just didn't get central hubs. You had to worm your way through the city, sometimes walking on sidewalks that could melt the soles of your shoes to get from one drop-off point to another pick-up point. And sometimes you had to do it quickly if you didn’t want to stand around with a bunch of weirdos waiting on the next train, monorail, bus, or lev-transport.

That’s to say, I had a daily cardio workout just by existing and being poor enough I couldn’t afford personal transportation or ride-shares.

Moving to a post-incursion city was sort of the same thing. Everything was spread out more, and likely there had been trains and monorail and bus, but the bus stations might have been destroyed and never rebuild and the subway cooling systems might have been looted in the chaos so that no one could ride or they would cook. So while it wasn't mega-city distances I needed to travel, I still ended up walking and keeping my cardio up.

The elevator wasn't an option. Both the normal one and the emergency car would shoot to the 84th floor and then start down from there while the incursion alarm was active. I could try to ride it down and then back up and get off on the 84th and take the stairs from there but I estimated I’d be able to make it to the 84th from the 70th quicker on the stairs.

I estimated poorly.

Worse I didn’t realize it until I was stepping foot on the 75th floor.

There wasn’t a stop between 73 and 84. So I either had to go back down two floors. Then wait or fight for a spot on the elevator. Then ride it down and back up. Or I just had to push and climb nine more floors.

I hoped pushing on would be faster.

I knew she wouldn’t stop at the 84th floor. Not after I realized the thermite in the prep bags was really for the large security door there. The magnet, the angle it would hold the can so the thermite burned into and through a door's lock.

It was practically designed to stick right to the locks on the stairwell door on the 84th floor. The one that blocked access to the upper floors and the building's machinery, boilers, and various organs that kept the building alive.

Water storage, elevator parts, and solar panels crowded the upper floors. Most of the floor to ceiling glass windows were gone. There were arrays of pipe that Greg had just painted black and glued mirrors around so that the sun could heat the water to boiling. That steam pressure somehow ran all the way down to the ground floor where it drove water pumps that pumped water up through check valves all the way to the upper floors. The water was stored and treated there and then plumbed all the way back down the building.

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Or maybe it was that the steam machines ran the pneumatic pumps that stored air pressure and those did all the work? I think that was how Greg had explained it.

The elevators were run on that same giant compressed air system. I knew that part for sure.

Something else I knew, no one got above 84 unless they could get through the door.

I was wheezing and panting when I reached the 84th. I’d long ago lost any sort of sprint or speed and was operating on a step-at-a-time mentality. A sort of just-keep-moving mantra cycling through my head.

There were people bunched up around the elevator. One of the men was pointing a hand cannon at me that he jerked up and away with a curse. Several others let out breath they’d been holding.

They were all staring at me. All of them were older. Older men.

They clutched at pamphlets. Pamphlets that were scattered on the ground around them. There were discarded bags and backpacks and a four wheeled carry-on luggage.

The doors opened a moment later and a loud voice boomed, “Be civil people. Children and women first. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. No bags.”

The man speaking had half stepped out of the elevator. He was wearing the Red and Green semi-uniform of the building gang that maintained the building's systems. They were the ones that evicted people, dealt with anyone who didn’t understand what was flushable and what wasn’t, power or water thieves and the like. They also hauled off the literal trash, the dead bodies, and collected fees for water and sewage. They had a guy who maintained the digital market exchange between power and internet access, as well as a sort of bounty board where jobs were posted. They didn't pay in credits but in water or as a way to wipe out building debt.

Greg had the same uniform. Except his was a shirt. This guy was in some sort of football pad looking vest and I could see a submachine gun style weapon on the other side of him as he moved.

He never looked in my direction and the doors closed a moment later.

I was still panting. Hard. No wonder they had a gun drawn. They probably thought I was a xeno lumbering up the stairs and breathing hard enough to be something in the double digits.

There was a colorful pamphlet a few steps away. I moved towards it and almost bent over. Then I thought better of rolling those dice on my back and squatted with my legs.

Which was stupid as fuck because I’d just climbed a few million steps and my legs were like wet noodles.

It was a pamphlet with directions on how to navigate the underground to the excavation point. The same directions on the plastic card Sara had come up with.

“Huh.”

I turned back to the door and swore as the pamphlet slipped between my fingers.

The door wasn’t scarred from thermite. The door, and the locks, were whole. She hadn’t gotten by and I’d run up the fucking stairs for no reason. Worse that guy saw the top stop was empty. He might not bring the elevator back up. So now I had to race back down to the 73rd floor and hope I made it before it was empty and they skipped stopping at that floor too.

Sara had probably gone down first to make sure the first people out of the building knew hot to evac. She might have even had those pamphlets made and squirreled away. Could be the guard on the elevator was passing them out at each floor, picking up another load of them each time he reached the bottom.

It made sense. It would calm people. More than that it would give them hope. Give them purpose. People were easier to control when they had a goal.

There would be less violence with the pamphlets. More survivors. I was sure Sara had made them.

I leaned back, just to rest a moment. I’d give the elevators a chance to come back up. If not, then I’d start down.

Then the wall moved.

I windmilled my arms and leaned forward, but overcompensated and ended up on my hands and knees.

There was a CLANK behind me and when I was finally back on my feet I reached out and pushed at the door I'd inadvertently leaned against.

Nothing. Then I pressed my hand into it and put some weight on it.

The heavy door began to swing back.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

I knew she made the pamphlets. It just fit too well not to be true. But that also meant she was on the roof trying to call in positions with these cereal box walkie-talkies.

If she could get up there. She would get up there. It was too good of a vantage point to be ignored.

It all clicked. That first meeting. She picked this building for the sight-lines. She started looking for a job on the floors above us, that’s why she’d applied to all those-

Fuck.

Everything clicked into place. She'd been prepping for something like this forever. Of course she'd have thermite as a backup. But I bet she had keys too. And likely some sort of lock pick as well.

I had to put some weight into the door to get it open. Then I slipped past and swore before I took that first step. I wasn’t even sure I’d caught my breath yet from the previous floors and it was nine more floors to reach the roof.