"There have been studies though that-"
"You liberals and your studies! Look it's simple. You know why no Samurai has pulled a Hitler? It's not this semi-mystical evaluation process the techo-gods claim to do. You can't know how people will react to trauma or power or whatever until they've been through it no matter how powerful they say their technology is. The real reason-"
"They are significantly advanced to the point-"
"THE REAL REASON no Samurai has just taken over is because they die when the little chip gets implanted in their brain. They pick the weirdos and the young because who is really gonna notice if the meat puppet controlled by the chip is really acting that different right? Everyone will just say, 'oh they are acting a bit off cause they can teleport in a big-ass guns now or hack banks to make themselves rich or whatever.'"
"Huh?"
"Just huh? Eighty-four percent of followers are listeners man. No dead air. Fill it. Speak. Or get off the program. This is supposed to be a back and forth here."
"I think I've been on this show too long if I even consider considering any of the fringe ideas you put forth. But then the question is why? Why bother? Why, what I assume you are going to claim is staged, do Samurai make mistakes? Why do they lose their tempers? Why do they get obsessed with mundane things like looks or how many followers are buying their merch? What's the point of faking human if the Protectors have all the control anyway?"
"Okay. Stay with me here-"
"Nope. No-fucking-way."
"Just let me-"
"I swear to god if you say-"
"They want our women!"
Frick and Frack morning DJs.
----------------------------------------
Floor ninety was quiet. Well, not quiet, quieter. Much. There was some rhythmic clinking and whirling, and a breeze, but the noise I had to cover my ears for as I climbed up the stairs was gone.
Greg, like an insane person, didn’t continue forward down the stairs, but instead turned and walked through the elevator banks. If you wanted access to the rest of the floor you had to go that way, but why?
He stayed in the middle so that gapping maws of the open elevator shafts opened four to a side some ten or so feet from him. He acted like the open shafts weren’t even there.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
“Have to check the elevator machinery is pressured up, or it’s a long walk down," Greg whispered.
The other guy kept his gun up against his shoulder and pointed down the stairs.
Sara had her submachine gun up to her shoulder as well. I fumbled at the holster and managed to get the pistol out without shooting myself.
I was still panting. Or maybe panting again? I couldn't keep track.
I’m sure I would have been breathing hard just from the fear, but it was still the fucking stairs fault.
“Shit,” Greg said, once he was past the elevator banks and sort of looking left into the next area.
He lowered his smaller gun and shifting the big rifle on his back before walking forward.
Sara began to follow, and when the other guy backed away from the stairs I realized if anything was coming up all I had was the tiny pistol I’d never practiced with.
When it came down to the choice of hanging out by the stairs or following the others, I followed, doing my level best to avoid looking at the elevator shafts.
The building was huge. The floor I effectively owned was mostly empty. The office space we actually used took up about a fortieth of the total space. Mostly we let Greg and his minions do things like make rainwater catchment trays or run ventilation shafts, or route power and water where ever things fit best. Sometimes they stored scrap metal studs there so they wouldn't get stolen as they worked on other floors in the building.
Our office space looked like slightly dated corpo offices instead of someplace squatters lived. But outside our carefully cultivated office space the rest of the floor looked like some sort of dystopia.
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Exploring the rest of the floor was like being in a building that had barely survived an incursion, was ‘cleansed’ by Samurai in the most disgusting way ever, stripped by looters, exposed to the elements, and then reoccupied when the cost of land and livable space went up again.
This floor looked worse. The floor wasn’t even whole. There were sections with holes or pipes that rose up, or wires that dipped down.
There was a huge open space that looked out on an open sky that knotted my insides up.
It was clear that something the size of four hover cars used to be connected to a lot of stuff. Pipes and wires and tubes were pulled free. In a few cases it looked like metals was pulled apart like taffy.
Greg kept walking forward.
I’d stopped well clear of the first hole in the floor.
“Greg. I don’t know about this,” I said softly, but he held a hand up.
There was a thin strip of metal, three or four inches at the most. Something that would have sat between two floor to ceiling windows.
He walked right up to it, put his hand on it, and then LEANED OUT trusting to the metal to keep him from plunging to his death.
I took a step back. I couldn’t breathe!
Then he was walking back and shaking his head.
The more than slight breeze ruffled his hair. I bent over.
I think the intention was to put my hands on my knees and catch my breath. Instead I fumbled my gun on my right knee and it fell.
It clattered once on the floor and slid right over the edge into a foot wide hole.
I heard it drop, then clink, then clatter. Each sound much farther than the last.
I puked.
It wasn’t much of anything. I hadn’t eaten today. Not that I couldn’t afford to, though there had been days like that. I’d just been so busy.
It was strongly acidic watery goop, and I ended up sneezing and trying to wipe it out of my nose more than get it out of my mouth.
Greg looked down the hole, the glanced around the area. Then he looked up.
“Fuck!” I said stepping back. Not that he could fit down that hole, but still.
He glanced at me and then at the hole.
“You ain’t getting that back. That used to be a vent shaft from floor fifty-four if I remember correctly. I think someone on sixty-two cut it and put something in the way.”
“Water storage tank,” the other guy said. Greg nodded at him.
Did they not realize something had pulled a huge piece of mechanical equipment from the floor out of the building and dropped it? How were they not in full-blown panic mode?
“Don’t lose this one,” Sara said handing me her pistol, “I don’t have another spare.”
I nodded and made sure to put it into the holster.
“I figure in the time it took for us to walk down here one of the big fliers took an interest in the big noisy machine, you know how they can get.”
“Umm,” I said looking between the three of them, “I don’t know how they can get.”
“Pretty much ignore anything that isn’t in their way if it isn’t bio-matter,” the other guy said, “sometimes though they go nuts and tear up big noisy things. Maybe so they can hear better, maybe cause the stuff is hot and noisy, who knows.”
“So the elevators?” I asked, more than ready to get moving.
“Tanks are there,” he said pointing, "and the gauges show the check valves held."
They looked like tall scuba tanks. There appeared to be hundreds of them. They stood tall, and there were little cages around them, possibly to keep them in place or upright. There was metal tubing running from the top of each tank down a long line until the tubing bent up and all joined into a three or four inch pipe that ran along the ceiling.
“Tanks feed the header,” Greg said, “and header feeds the machine. Looks like there is still about two-thousand psi in the system. Should be enough for an hour or two of continuous usage.”
I didn’t have the math or physics to work it out, and I’m sure if I had the skills I didn’t have all the relevant data, but it seemed like the system was able to do a lot more work than I had expected.
“That seems like- a lot.” I paused and finished the sentence feeling foolish.
“Started with sixty-three three-thousand psi canisters. Picked up every old can anyone got a hold of though. Got over three hundred of them now. Been branching off into power generation and-”
“Time to go,” Sara interrupted.
I still couldn’t figure out how she was the de facto leader. She was the youngest, and though I felt bad for thinking it, pretty. Not that pretty women were stupid, but in my personal experience they tended to move through life easier, and hardship forced people to pay attention more. I knew it was a bias, I could acknowledge it, but it was there. Not that I, with my old, plain-looking, college educated, maleness was qualified to displace her.
By the time we reached the stairs I realized she likely was the most informed and prepared for an incursion. Her cult and likely her upbringing, not to mention all her charity work gave her thousands of hours of real world experience with this stuff.
Greg did in fact have to call an elevator back up to the 84th floor when we reached it.
“Once they call a floor as clear they don’t go back, makes it faster to clear the lower floors if no one has to wait for the elevators to stop at empty floors.”
“Lowers the chance a xeno gets in as well,” other guy said.
I was just about to ask him his name when Greg said, “Got it.”
He’d pried the button panel off and had to twist some wires together back there or something.
It wasn’t his words that stopped me from asking, but the fact that everyone else took a step back and somewhat lifted their weapons.
I did the same, first having to get my gun free of the holster again. Well, Sara’s gun.
“Never made it to the range?” Sara asked.
She was smiling. I’d never lied to her, not like Paula had, but there was never enough time for it. Besides, carrying a weapon, when I was regularly mugged on public transport, would just mean I had to give the weapon up or get into a gun fight I wouldn't survive.
Mugging on public transport was more, present your cash and we take a cut, than it was armed robbery. It was almost civil. Don’t give the muggers anything, and you were going to have a bad time of it.
Some people would rather take a beating, or worse, didn’t have anything at all to spare.
“What?” Greg asked.
I glanced at him and found him looking at me. He'd taken a step so that he was standing beside me.
I was about to say something about not having said something when I realized I had.
I repeated what I said, seeming to hear it for the first time.
“It’s all triage,” I said slowly. Before I could finish the elevator dinged and I got my first look at a xeno up close.