“You lot stay there and no funny business, we got the NFPD on speed-dial, and for a GeoSynth loader, they’ll come right-quick.”
While tattoo-guy was giving us the pep-talk, I realized his right arm was cybernetic. It’d been hard to notice under the overall and the gloves, but now that I had a good angle, the seams of synthetic skin were glaringly obvious. The rubber that kept them together had started to wear off some time ago, meaning they probably took good care of it in an attempt to prolong its utility as long as possible. “You must be paid well to afford a cybernetic like that, sir.” I tried to compliment, trying to ease the tension.
Four people shared glances and immediately chuckled.
“Forgive him, he’s from the frontier,” Bob said. “Cybernetics are a rarity over there.”
Tattoo-guy whistled. “Frontier? No shit. Who’s your overlord?”
“Uh… NexCorp?”
“Never heard of them.” Gun-guy butted in. “Must be some shitty-ass village.”
I bristled a little. “I’ll have you know we have four megucas.” The chuckling turned into laughter, my face immediately felt hot. I petulantly crossed my arms and grumbled. “It’s not a village, it’s a couple million people in size. That's the very definition of a city.”
“They have a wall and everything.” Moreau nodded, chuckling louder.
“Wh-what’s that supposed to mean?” I sputtered. “It’s a good wall!”
Tattoo guy pipped up, tone full of mirth. “Just the one?”
Snapping my mouth shut before I could make more of a fool of myself, I simmered in my own annoyance. Of course a frontier city would be peanuts compared to a mega-city, but that didn’t justify them calling it a “village”!
Bob spoke up. “Think you can give the boy a good view of what a real city looks like?” He sounded honest, but it was easy to see the corners of a grin underneath his beard.
“We ain't no tourist ride, but he’ll be getting an eyeful anyway.”
“See?” Moreau elbowed me, cackling with a voice full of mockery. “I bet you didn’t even have a high enough internet subscription to get content from outside your zip-code. You’ll get to see the big city!”
I neither confirmed nor denied her claim, but it was irritating all the same. There was no internet access that went beyond the city walls, not for a pod-guy like me, that required satellite comms privileges. But there were plenty of AI content creators that would concentrate and spread news and memes from the upper internet levels. So of course I at least heard of some of the stuff that happened in the big city, even if it tended to come in a week or five later…
Oh God, I grew up in a village.
In the grips of this horrible terrible realization, the transport had taken off, sliding out of the hangar like a pizza out of an oven, rattling once the arid winds outside took hold. We lifted off, and were soon gaining altitude. The way the transport moved gave me the distinct impression of an air-hockey disk traveling through the air. It had the capacity of spinning on the spot, but it had no ability to take a curve or alter its trajectory in any timely manner. At first there was not much to see, the only thing ahead of us but a dull blurry gray mountain in the distance. Yet the closer we got, the weirder the mountain looked. Too spread out and uneven, with jagged sharp drops and… pillars? I squinted as we kept approaching.
It was no mountain.
The mega-city of New Francisco stood upon the continental shores overlooking the Pacific ocean like a technological metal fortress. From a distance it looked as if a castle that was really close, yet every passing minute we got closer to it, and more details became apparent, shattering the illusion. Four sky-scrappers towered beyond the low clouds, spiral patterns following their upward ascent into the heavens. Each tower was surrounded by tens of thousands of "smaller" buildings, each one of them barely a needle in comparison, but larger than the singular NexCorp skyscraper back at Frontier City 02. Every single one of these buildings was unique in its design, shiny with silver, glass, and gold, yet unified in their desperate attempt to catch up with the towers that pierced the clouds. Every one of these structures was connected with one another through what could only be millions of sky tunnels and plazas that'd been suspended between the tightly-built infrastructure.
As we continued getting closer, I noticed other details, the fortress was split up and divided into sectors. The towering heights at the center were surrounded by a thick wall into which other skyscrapers had been built. The wall was almost hidden from sight, completely invisible to anyone not paying close attention. Not the second wall, though. The second wall broke away with the monoliths and buildings higher than they were broad, instead being surrounded by gargantuan gray cubes of concrete and stone. Each one of these utility-box shaped buildings were fortifications in of themselves, impenetrable by anything that was not equally gargantuan in size, surrounded by a thick brown-gray smog that swayed around them as if it were a toxic soup. Flying vehicles zoomed overhead the smog like a well-organized swarm, thick payload transports and tiny personal ones hurrying from one side to the next in a desperate race.
Surrounding this district was the last wall, a wall bigger than any wall I'd ever seen or could have ever imagined. A behemoth laying on its side, wrapping up the city in its embrace as its body cast long shadows within. It dwarfed everything else save the four towers, nothing could compare to its size other than a literal mountain. Just looking at the thing made it easy to imagine it could house several cities' worth of people inside itself. And yet the wall, despite its massive scope, had a gash. A section had been violently torn off, smog from the inner district seeping out like a lifeblood while thousands of vehicles moved around the wound to rebuild it. I caught glimpses of the inside of the wall, riddled with corridors and rooms, hinting at another hive of activity within its confines.
Then I noticed one more thing. The outer wall, the behemoth, was surrounded by a seat of off-white and gray structures. At first I'd thought it no more than automated defenses of some sort, why would anyone build outside the safety of the walls? Yet as the closer we got, the more apparent it became this was no defensive fortifications but houses, factory plants, and many other tiny buildings, each one no more than a handful of stories tall at best, tiny even compared to the smallest buildings within Frontier City 02, yet spread out so far it was like an oil-stain that seeped out of New Francisco and into the badlands.
“Where’s the wall?” I leaned forward, trying to get a better view of the world below. “There should be a fourth wall.”
“There isn't one.” Moreau answered as if it was the most mundane thing in the world. “The city might start construction for a fourth wall in the next decade or two, but not before repairs to the third are finished.”
“How do they remain protected from the monsters?” I asked, bewildered. “What happens if there’s a swarm?”
“What’re you talking about? Of course we have a fourth wall.” Tattoo guy laughed. “It’s just made out of rubber.”
The comment got nods out of the others, I glanced at Moreau in confusion. She just waved me off. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the chance to see what he means sooner or later.”
My desire to complain some more was contrasted with the knowledge this was probably not the best time. It still bugged me, however. The whole point of the pods and walls was to protect humans from monsters… and to prevent monsters the opportunity to grow stronger. What would happen if some high-class just waltzed in there and began a massacre down there? It would pose a clear threat to the rest of the city. And as formidable as the fortifications looked, I had my doubts they would be able to handle a B-class becoming an A-class right outside their walls.
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“Latest estimates put the New Francisco at having one point three billion people.” The doctor intoned. “Not that there’s been a proper census since the refugee crisis started, so the number's likely a bit higher than that.”
“Crisis?”
“You heard about the fall of Los Angeles?”
“About thirty years ago, a B-class got through.” I nodded along, it'd been in the history class.
“Thing is, the city wasn’t wiped out. The monster did a lot of damage, but most of the population had survived… unfortunately, most of the key infrastructure had not.” She explained. “City could only sustain a tenth of its population, things went from bad to worse, as soon as starvation started to hit and food-cost bloated, people made a run for it. New Francisco was the nearest destination.”
“Second generation myself; gramps talked about that all the time.” The copilot chipped in. “Lots of cons running back in those days, promising safe passage and leaving you for dead without a credit.”
“NF would’ve been able to cope if it’d been the only case. But the number of high-end monsters have gone up as of the past twenty-odd years.” Moreau shook her head. “Now we’ve got a whole thing going on. I won’t bore you with the politics of it. Suffice to say, all the major players are still fighting to figure out who gets to foot the bill.”
“While they all get the labor for cheap.” Tattoo nodded. “We’re entering regulated space, time to pull the curtains.”
Before I could get to ask what he’d meant, Bob had pulled me back on to my seat, and a metal divider rose. “Faraday cage.” Moreau explained, tapping on the metallic divider. “Makes it harder for external scans to see what’s inside.”
“Wouldn’t they be able to tell if something’s not showing up?”
“It would draw attention if they didn’t have this up on every trip.” The doctor shook her head. “Everyone knows they’re smugglers, but they don’t smuggle often enough that a random stop would warrant the cost. In the end, regardless of what they do, the PD would get a bill from GeoSynth for the lost revenue and delays. Not exactly something you'd want to risk for some small bust."
Bob scoffed. “The best way to survive in NF is to make sure that if someone goes after you, they’ll get caught in someone else’s crossfire.”
Moreau nodded back. “Wiser words have never been spoken.”
----------------------------------------
Fortunately, we weren’t randomly stopped for inspection. When the divider came down, we were in a warehouse of some sort. The vehicle had been plugged up and emptied by a dozen different hoses. One of them, I noticed, led to a smaller set of containers, ones that would be far easier to get on to a truck.
“What’s shroom-juice anyway?” I asked Bob as Moreau was finalizing something with the duo.
“It’s nutrient paste.” He shrugged. “It’s just a preem variant of it, barely enough it’ll get them a few extra credits. But at the same time not illegal, so it’d be hard for anyone other than GeoSynth to nail them for moving it around.”
“Huh.” I was fairly sure I’d never eaten any shroom-based protein foods, it’d been bug and algae all the way. I made a mental note to try it out at some point. “What now?”
Moreau came back, confidently puffing up. “Now, young man, we part ways. Temporarily at least.”
Staring at either of them, I hesitated. “Could you elaborate?” It wasn't like I wanted to be glued to their side, but at the same time, it was best to confirm. For all I knew they'd gotten updates to the situation through their neuralinks and I'd been in the dark.
“Bob and I are, as they say, going to be laying low for a while.” Moreau explained. “Once word spreads that I’m back in the city, several people will be hiring mercenaries to see if they can take a shot at me.” She flashed a confident smile. “So we’ll find a nice cozy hole and wait them out. In a week or three, the bill will have run high enough they can’t justify keeping a whole goon squad running around, at which point they’ll slap down a bounty and call it a day. There'll be a lot more breathing room to get things straightened out after that.”
“I still find it hard to believe this is how it works." It felt wrong to think a corporation would expend crucial resources over what looked like a vendetta of some sort. "What did you do for them to hate you this much?"
Moreau scoffed. "There's a long list, it's a need-to-know, and the less you know, the better."
“Not the first time we’ve done this.” Bob confirmed.
“Indeed.” Moreau patted my shoulder. “And since you’ve got no business getting tangled in this mess, you’ll be going on your way.” Her smile broadened. “But I'd be very much interested in having you spend the next month and change with me. Lots of samples and tests to run, with no access to the outside world..."
As much as it sounded like they had a plan, it also appeared I wasn't a part of it. Which, in a sense, was exactly what I'd wanted, but at the same time there was that slight unease at not being entirely sure how to proceed from here. I'd spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do once I came to New Francisco, and now that I was here, there was a vague doted line connecting me towards "kill monsters", with "pay the bills" somewhere along the way surrounded by a bunch of question marks.
Still, thinking in on it, I didn't want to be a part of this mess more than I absolutely needed to. “I’ll pass.”
The doctor made a face, appearing genuinely disappointed but for only a moment. “Good.” She reached over, handing a very familiar red cred-chip. “You really should be more careful with your money.”
“I…” It took me a moment to remember, snatching it. “I won this from a bet.” There was a certain oddness to this little situation. A cred-chip with this much money would've had me rabidly obsessing over its whereabouts every waking hour, but now my focus was more on other things.
“I added the twenty thousand from the original deal,” she said. “The moment you step out of here, head straight for the nearest weapon vendor and get yourself a gun. No pea-shooter, something that will scare people to toe the line. This city eats up people like you for breakfast.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I nodded firmly, already trying to run the maths of how much that might end up costing.
“Your neuralink has a folder, it’s just a bunch of zeroes. I’ve included instructions and guidelines on how to… keep things safe. About yourself.” She pulled out the quill to threaten me with it. “Follow those instructions like your life depends on it, because it will.”
“I… thanks?” When had she added this? Before handing it over the first time or while I wasn’t looking?
“Here.” She reached into her pocket and handed me a small brick? It had two buttons and a speaker. “If shit hits the fan and you think you’re about to get kidnapped by some corpo goon-squad, or worse, some gang, then press the red button. Help will show up.”
“And the green button?”
Moreau cracked a smirk. “That establishes a secure call with me. Don’t use it willy-nilly though, don’t want to risk someone latching on and tracing it.”
“Uh-”
“You should have plenty to rent out a place. Go to ‘Motel 18’ in the fourth district. No questions asked, and cheap. It’s a good place to use until you’ve found a proper living arrangement.”
“I-”
“I’ve also contacted the Sewer Saints. Nothing concrete, but they should be open for meeting you in a few days. They’ll be dropping a message in Motel 18, the code is ‘Green Eyeballs’.”
She was talking fast, and I was having trouble getting any word in edgewise. “Th-”
“And keep in mind your new metabolism. From what I’ve seen, you keep to roughly human caloric intake standards, but based on what happened after that first night, you’re likely going to need to gorge up every time you… change.”
“B-”
“Seriously, stock up. You need to stay healthy. Do exercise every day, and don’t stuff your face with whatever crap you find. Sure, you can probably keep healthy from eating rocks, but it shouldn’t be something you should test outside of a controlled environment.”
“Wa-”
“And don’t trust anyone! Doesn’t matter who, don’t tell them, don’t show them, don’t let anyone know. The last thing you need is a two-bit greedy bastard selling you off for-”
Bob reached out, gripping her shoulder. “I think you’re overwhelming the guy a little.”
I stared at the doctor and nodded. Talking to Moreau was a bit like watching a bus lose its breaks. She'd just gather momentum and talk and talk, making it impossible to get a word in edgewise. She looked slightly ruffled about getting called out. “Right.” She stepped closer, looking me dead in the eye. “Don’t die, Axel. At least not until I can run some proper tests on you.”
“Same goes for you?” I gingerly shook her hand. “And thank you, for everything.” I smiled earnestly. “Well, for most. I still don’t like how…”
Rolling her eyes, she wriggled her hand free. “Yeah, yeah, you’ll get over it,” she said. “Now shoo… but give me a ping once you find a proper place to stay in.”
With one last round of goodbyes, I headed out of the warehouse. The instant I stepped out, I looked around the dozens of equally unmarked bland gray buildings in every direction, and frowned. Bringing up the pad Moreau had given me, I confirmed that indeed it had no map function, because it had no connection to anything.
I stepped right back inside, catching the doctor slightly by surprise. “Could I get some directions to that gun-store… and everywhere else you’d mentioned, please?”