There really isn’t much to do in New Houston if you’re an introvert.
Sure, you can browse the intranet or the submesh, but most of the things you can do there are gated by microtransactions. If you don’t have access to enough funds, you’re basically locked out. You’re left with about two options, one of which is books, the other old, pre incursion media like movies and television shows.
Personally, I was raised by the latter.
* Emmelyn Seras, 2057, in an interview with a Seattle News Station.
***
Beneath the spotlight, I stand perfectly still, clutching my weapon of choice in my hands. I begin to tap my foot on the ground, repeating that beat three times until I set into motion. With practiced ease, I twirl the top heavy staff in my hands in time to the music in my head, lost in a world beyond my own as the orchestra swells. I bring the tip of my spear down, spinning it around me as if I was cleaning the floor with a mop.
Er, well.
I guess I actually am mopping the floor.
I sigh, pausing to rest my forehead against the wooden shaft of my tool, a little bit wet from my small bit of play. I may be a professional at what I do, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a little fun. A spoonful of sugar, and all that.
I shake my head, then get back to work. The Montero manor always needed something cleaned, but the job I seemed to be assigned the most was cleaning the long back hallway connecting the eastern and western wings of the building. It never really actually got dirty, considering no one ever fucking used it, but the dust would accumulate, and god forbid the damn marble floors weren’t shining.
I freeze when my contacts light up, a voice call starting without my acceptance. [“Emmelyn! Are you finished yet?! I had to force the call through again, you silly girl. Get over here, now.”]
I gasp in horror, thinking I had screwed up royally, but when I look down at my work, I find that I actually have finished. Guess I got lost in my malding a bit. I run over, dunking the mop into the rolling bucket, then rush towards my new destination. I slide into a small side office, where my boss Marianne spends quite a bit of her time.
“I’m done! What else do I need to do?” I pant as I speak, brushing a stray platinum lock out of my eyes.
My hair had grown out a bit in the last few months, but I never really found the time to style it or get it cut. My dress, a stereotypical Victorian maid dress that I wish was a bit cuter, is as prim and perfect as I could possibly keep it. Out of the things that had been drilled into me hard during my training, that was perhaps the most useful. I touch my pocket, feeling my glasses safely in their case. I wish I didn’t have to wear the stupid connection contacts during work, but at least I couldn’t get them wet while I was… working.
Taking a notebook out of her pocket, my boss marks something off, then flips a few pages back. Grimacing, she pinches the bridge of her nose, then walks over to look out the window. Wiping a hand on the window, she brushes the dust that comes off of it between her fingers, then sighs.
“It’s been two months since you finished your training,” She states, walking over to loom above me. “I need to be here when the family returns, so I need you to run an errand for me.”
She puts her book back into her apron, then flips out a thick plastic ID card to me. I glance it over, finding to my surprise that it actually has all my information. “I need you to go down to the twelfth floor, to check on our facility down there. You don’t need to clean it or anything, but we do need someone to make sure it’s still running. Just check the terminal after you go inside.”
Marianne puts her hands behind her back. “Send me a message when you’re done, and I’ll send someone down to get you.”
I gracefully do a little curtsy, then carefully watch my steps as I walk out of view of the office. I momentarily peek behind me to see if she is watching, then full on sprint towards the staff entrance to the manor. I had never been lower than the sixth floor of the reef, and now I was getting to go twice that deep. People only spoke of the place in murmurs, talking about how it was just a dreary floor filled with hydroponics farms or something.
There had to be something more to it, and now I was getting the chance to experience it myself.
I stumble out of the building onto the rather dreary balcony, rushing over to the central lift where I rapidly mash the sea level button. As it lurches to a start, I giddily remove my contacts and put my glasses on, now no longer restricted by my duties. I watch as the elevator’s glass wall reveals the floating wet dock of the central tower, the crown jewel of New Houston. Upon it sits the always present, always vibrant, oh so important grand market, booming as always. I lean my head on the transparent surface, looking through the rainbow of stalls to see if I can spot Freesia.
“No, bad brain!” I slap my cheeks, then put my hands on my hips. “I am the great Emmelyn Seras! I can’t let a simple mistake depress me!”
I spin, raising my finger up into the air, then begin to speak in an exaggerated tone after clearing my throat.
“You see, I am the very model of a modern major individual, I’ve information here and far and everything additional!” I swing my body around, pointing down at the shifting crowds. “Who cares if I’m not the winner of the position oh so critical? I can’t get down when I need to reach the pinnacle!”
I find myself giggling incessantly as I step off the elevator, my eyes meeting those of an almost deathly skinny girl, their pretty emerald eyes hiding behind their tired facade. As I walk, I consider stopping to ask them if they are okay, but decide against the decision as I just simply don’t have the time.
Seated beside twelve more of its kind, a huge Dredge Bell spray painted blue by someone who obviously didn’t know what they were doing slowly extends its arm over the rippling surf. Hung carefully from its chain, a steel container large enough to hold one adult man dangles. When the crane lurches to a stop, a distinct clicking begins as the chain slowly lowers its load towards the ocean. When the container hits the water, it is quickly consumed, only the metal loops following behind it indicating that it still exists.
“Hey Georgie!” Running up to the elderly man, I tap him on his back. He yelps and jumps nearly half a foot in the air, turning to look at me like I was crazy.
“Emme! Need to put a bell on you, girl!” Chuckling, the man takes a breath of relief after clutching his chest, then starts preparing the crane to the fourth floor. “Why you off so early, anyways? Get fired already?”
“Nope, and for the record, I am not going to the fourth floor just yet!” I wink, and point to the largest crane. “I need that one today!”
“Eh?” Raising his eyebrow, Georgie stops his movement. “The twelfth? What kinda nonsense are those folks makin’ you do?”
I shrug, taking the very shiny keycard out of my apron to show to him. He takes a quick look, then shakes his head and starts to prepare the creaking, ancient crane. It creaks ominously as it moves, its components probably not having been used much in the fifteen years that Georgie has owned it. Not very many people came and went from the twelfth. A rusty iron box rattles to a stop beneath the concrete dock, and I don’t hesitate to leap inside to sit down on the chair.
“This’ll be a rough descent, Emme. If you start feeling light headed down there, don’t be afraid to hit the emergency switch and use the oxygen,” Georgie states, walking up and putting his hand on the door, “If you drown in my elevator, that’s real bad business.”
I giggle as I dismissively wave a hand, and the old man grins as he shuts the door. Light vanishes from my eyes, and with a sinister clank accompanied by a woosh of air, I know that the container is now sealed from the elements beyond.
Shaking as the crane extends, I begin to get a bit nervous as it continues far longer than I expected. Since the central reef was shaped like a cone, it made sense that lower floors needed to extend farther… but this was kind of ludicrous. Suddenly, we lurch to a stop, and I slam my hand against the wall to steady myself. When I pull my hand back, I grimace at the greasy feeling of something stuck to my hand, yet I can’t tell exactly what it is in the darkness.
Thankfully, the chain begins to click, and I feel the familiar increase of pressure as I dip beneath the waves. The sound of the market vanishes as it goes unsettlingly quiet, the only noise the slight grinding of my transportation’s metal binds. I shakily reposition in the seat, but that just makes the box begin to sway, a pendulum in the deep.
For what feels like an eternity, I sit there in the dark as I slowly descend. The only things telling me I am still moving are the sounds of the chains and the slowly increasing weight in my ears. That wasn’t a particularly good sign for the state of the airlock, but I was trying my best to stay positive.This trip had been way, way longer than any other time I had used a crane elevator, and I have no idea how much longer it was going to be. It was mind boggling how much deeper the twelfth floor was then the fourth, that’s for sure.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Ignoring the grimy feeling of metal dust on my fingers, I begin to mindlessly sing the first song that pops into my mind:
“There's a place for us, somewhere a place for us…”
I immediately slam my head into the side of the capsule, but it’s too late. Freesia’s stupid beautiful face, her ridiculously silky ebony curls and skin are implanted into my mind, refusing to leave now that I had accidentally let her in. It’d been three months since the day she left me for him, three months of her residual heat slowly fleeing my skin. ‘Somewhere’ had been our song– No, in hindsight… I guess it had always just been mine. I attached it to our relationship myself though, and now I was paying the price. It was painful now, but I’d reclaim it.
Hopefully, with a different girl’s hand in mine when I do.
Without warning, the capsule slams into something, lurching hard as I do my best to not fall over. I grab the edge of the seat, nervously listening for any leaks. Thankfully, the container hadn’t decompressed, which would have been, uh, really bad for my current status as alive. The crane does not stop after the impact, though I’m wondering what exactly it was before the container once again slams into something.
This time however, it’s a joyous occasion. After a few seconds, the door to the capsule hisses before it swings open. I frantically rush out into the bright airlock, breathing heavily as I lean on the clean wall. A quick glance finds my hand covered in a rusty powder, and I do my best not to cry as I take a cloth out of my apron to clean it off. When I do, I unfortunately find my hand still itchy, something that I distinctly disliked. I brush it off as the airlock clicks open, and I step out into a new wondrous land.
Or, well, I would’ve, if the whole place wasn’t a red tinted industrial hellscape.
Everywhere I looked was covered in rusty pipes, from which jets of anomalous gas would occasionally shoot out. None of the wonder of the seafloor was obvious here, no green farms or beautiful pools of silverfish. Just more of the same, boring New Houston I had known all my life. Looking around, I find no one nearby, but I don’t let that bother me; Georgie worked alone after all.
I don’t hesitate to begin my exploration, hopeful that this area was an outlier, that I would find something fascinating to look at before I did my job. It’s futile, it turns out, as when I enter an open area it reveals a wide variety of bland gray concrete buildings, covered in just more pipes. I roll my eyes, and begin to trace the messy twisting corridors, looking for the address listed on the card I was given.
It takes a good while, but eventually I do find it, actually very close to the floor's western stairlock. A high tech scanner sits beside a heavy steel door, and not wanting to dilly dally I swipe the card. The entrance slides open with a swish, and I skip into the sterile facility to find… not much.
The entrance is completely empty, beyond a terminal panel on the wall beside another door. When I walk up to it and it scans my card, it displays a UI declaring the facility as ‘functional’. It also, however, had a five minute timer for… something. When I click on the blank button next to it to see what exactly it means, the door beside me slides open.
“Oh,” I mutter, immediately considering what the consequences of me going in there would be.
First thing that could happen would be that I'd be immediately fired for going inside to check what was happening, something there was a distinct possibility of. The Monteros were pretty secretive from experience, and I had only ever met the lady of the house. She was kinda scary. Second option, I get fired for not fixing a problem that the timer indicated and all their work going up in smoke. It was probably less likely, but if that was the case I’d probably end up being the scapegoat.
In other words, I was probably fucked regardless of my decision.
Deciding to yield to my curiosity, I purse my lips and walk through the open doorway. The door closes behind me, a small slot opening in the wall to scan me. Seemingly not detecting any issues, a new door opens, this one on the other side of the room as the previous. I shrug, then pass through it.
Inside, I find a row of computers, sort of high tech yet… not. They were flashing and beeping and everything, yet each was way bulkier than even the cheapest model sold anywhere on the reef. Their case color was faded, but their screens were perfectly clean, nary a speck upon their surface.
Walking up to the nearest station, I narrow my eyes as I click through a UI, finding a familiar company chat program still open. Trying to find out what is going on is a bit of a futile effort at first, most of the personal messages just vaguely talking about a ‘project’. It isn’t until I click into a side server that I find the juicy info I was looking for.
I gape at the information, my eyes wildly scanning the project description I was reading to see if it was a joke or not. I flip through them all, my blood running colder with every single file I open. When I get to the final one, titled ‘Project Davy Jones’, I can’t help but gasp and do a double take at it.
“The crazy bastards…” I immediately rush away from the terminal, and running up to a door labeled ‘Biological Hazard’, I scan my card, then tap my foot as I anxiously wait for it to respond.
It beeps, then slowly slides partially open- Before it suddenly stops when a sudden power surge flashes through everything nearby. Not willing to wait to see if the power comes back on, I squeeze myself through the tight hole. I dash down a purposefully complicated maze of concrete, zigzagging until I reach a door shut tight with a heavy latch. I heave it open, and when I step inside, I find the nightmare described on the computer is far, far too real.
Twelve giant vats, covered by glass lids with their edges marked by white powder, contain a pink, throbbing sludge which is absolutely filled with tiny crawling, disgusting Antithesis worms.
I swallow a bit of vomit, shakily stepping up to a nearby terminal, built into one of the factory’s pillars. I cautiously press the power button, and to my relief it turns on, immediately displaying a simplistic UI requesting a command. I try a few things, to no result, before noticing a stack of thick binders beside some tools on the other side of the large room. As I run across the room to see what they said, a Klaxon begins to blare seemingly from everywhere around me. I pause, then pale when I take a glance inside the closest vat.
A huge pipe shoots open, and I gasp when a suction force from within it begins to move the worms… somewhere. Redoubling my speed, I rush to the binders, flipping through them to try and find whatever I can to stop whatever these madmen were doing. Eventually, to my chagrin, I find what I’m looking for in the smallest binder, the last one I check. Taking it, I run back towards the terminal and grimacing at the sight of nearly emptied vats.
When I reach the computer I find it has turned back off during my search, and I anxiously have to press the power button AGAIN. It takes a few moments, but I get back to the command module and begin to follow a string detailed upon the final page of the binder. When I finally input the last bit of code, just the word ‘purge’, the entire room seems to heave around me, and for a moment I worry I had just doomed myself. Thankfully, that isn’t the case, as all of the large pipes come to a close, followed by a few smaller pipes opening to emit a visible gas onto the remaining ten or so percent of Antithesis. The worms, upon touching said cloud, nearly immediately shrivel up and die.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I begin to walk back towards the way I had come in, before a sudden growling from behind me makes me pale. I had purged ALL the experiments, hadn’t I? And they weren’t just working on the worms here. I turn my head, catching sight of an almost humanlike alien with a tail, two blades upon the back of its hands, and well, a hole filled with teeth where its head should be.
“Whoa, i-it’s okay, good plant alien who most definitely wants to murder me,” I mutter, backing up slowly, “I don’t want to hurt you, and I most definitely can hurt you more than you can hurt me. Definitely.”
After my fifth step back, the alien decisively states its opinion on my conflict resolution abilities by screeching with a nearly human scream before rushing at me with its blades pointed out. I yelp, then throw the binder at it as I start to run towards the only place I can think of to go. It slashes through the papers without even slowing down, and as I get about halfway through the room, I feel a small, ever so slight chill in the back of my head; I immediately duck. The alien’s blade cuts directly into one of the glass covers, shattering it partially and leaving its blade embedded within.
I awkwardly leap forward out of the range of the other, then run forward towards my goal. I hear a grunt from behind me, just before a distinct shatter. Soon that gut feeling that saved my life before returns, but I am more than ready this time. I grunt as I swing a heavy metal wrench in a wide arc, slamming into the approaching arm and shattering it entirely. The alien screeches in anger and pain, but I don’t let up. Taking a step forward with a scowl on my face, I aim the next impact for its mouth.
It raises its good arm to block, only for a deep, satisfying crunch to fill my ears as its bones shatter underneath my metal weapon. When I raise my chunky weapon to make the final blow, however, I gasp as a sudden sharp pain blooms in my stomach. I had forgotten about the alien’s tail, and apparently, it also had a blade. Not wanting to just let myself die for nothing, I follow through on the blow, crushing it’s chest. The monster crumples, its tail going limp, but the knife in my stomach doesn’t seem to budge from its home in my flesh.
I collapse to my knees, a bead of sweat falling onto my lens. Shakily, I remove the cloth I usually used to clean them from my apron, only to find it covered in blood. I take a deep breath as I look at the ceiling, a strange acceptance washing over me.
Then, a sharp pain digs into my head, and a foreign, feminine voice soon emerges.
Salutations to you, madam. Your bravery, your determination to do what is right, has not gone unnoticed. Through your heroic actions as but a normal, feeble human, you may have saved more souls than you could fathom as possible. Take your weapon and rise up, Emmelyn Seras, to serve humanity as a Vanguard. My name is Achys; I am the one who will keep you whole.
I can’t help but snort.
“That was kinda over the top, miss Achys. Can you make it so I don’t bleed out?” I point to my stomach, then wince as an incredibly sharp sting begins to move up my body.
Indeed, just stab this into your wound, well, after you pull out the Model Ten Variant’s tail though.
First Point Update!
Initialization Bonus!
Reward: 100 Points
Enemies Eliminated!
1x: Model Ten-T
Reward: 10 Points
Horde: Model Seven-T
Reward: 590 Points
Starting Total: 700 Points
Catalog Unlocked!
Class-I Medical Utilities Catalog
Cost: 50 Points
New Purchase!
1x: Class-I Woundstop
Cost: 5 Points
Final Total: 645 Points
A box appears beside me, and I gasp. Biting my tongue, I yank the tail out, finding that its edges are viciously serrated. Trembling as my life flows out from my abdomen, I take the cylinder inside the box out, then stab it into my stomach, filling the odd, nearly flower shaped crevice with a plaster-like substance, and I huff a shocked laugh.
“Well, this is certainly new.”