Fire - Ruin

Fire is all I know. Fire and ruin and futile struggle. No matter how hard I try, it all falls apart. Bit by booming bit. Booming and booming. Mocking and knocking. Knock, knock, knocking…

Wait, I think someone is really knocking. Gah! I'm in a sleep pod!

I pop open the pod to Volt's happy metallic curves. "Hey sleepyhead. What’s up?"

"Dreaming of fire and ruin."

"Cool. What now?"

I look around the trash filled alley we spent the night in. Bright City has nice parts and disgusting parts, and I’m sliding to the bottom. What now indeed.

"I'm broke, homeless, out of ammo, and my murder list grows ever longer. What a mess of immediate needs. Hard to tell where to start."

"Perhaps breakfast? I could order a pizza."

"To where? This slimy alley? No… just no. Scamming pizza was bad enough when I was broke. Homelessness takes it from roguish to pathetic."

Volt shrugs. "If you say so. Pizza Girl seems like she'd deliver to a homeless dude in an alley, but you'd know best. Shall we steal a cheezy coffee instead?"

“Yes. Thank you. Much more dignified.”

We regroup in a cozy street cafe, with our ill-gotten quasi-beverages, and attempt to untie the gordian knot of my psycho-social situation.

“I think we have to do the murders first. Getting a new apartment will just give Champion our address. May as well go shopping for death beds.”

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” Volt frowns. “But we kinda lost our house because we kept trying to kill people. Makes you think.”

“Not really. We need armaments and the locations of Harkon and Champion.” I frown into my havarti-decaf. “Same as always…”

“Oi!” Volt claps excitedly. “I know some of this! Champion’s defending his title a week from now. There’s a huge tournament. He’ll be there. Him being there is the whole point of the tournament. Also, Harkon shows up everytime we get crypto. Bit of a fanatic.”

I keep frowning. “Yeah, that shit sounds suspiciously like a fair fight.”

“We’re not gonna fight in the tournament. But Champion will have a dressing room or something. We can poison the toilet seat.”

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“That’s a drone. The real Champion’s in a floating death satellite or some shit. We need to find it.”

“Damn. Okay. How do we do that?”

I sigh heavily. “By abandoning all dignity.”

We travel to the Cheddardrome where I shuffle into a drone store. “One high quality eye drone please.”

The clerk-bot eyes me grimly. “Your debt to Big Cheddar is overlimit. You should report to a dream machine to pay it down as soon as possible.”

I nod glumly. “I was in one all last night. I’ve lost my home and will be sleeping in them from now on.”

The clerk-bot stares at me silently. Eventually it hands over a box containing a generic eyedrone.

I leave.

Down in the bowels of the Cheddardrome we find ourselves a shitty bar masquerading as a different kind of shitty bar. Volt modifies the eye drone under my instruction. Wipes all the software. Installs her own. Moves the camera to point up, instead of down. I brood and drink as she works.

Without Big Cheddar’s proprietary software, this drone can now fly in the high airspace he considers his. Not that it matters, it’d be blown up in seconds. Instead we rig it to fly low, but look up. Let’s see what’s going on up there.

It feels like we should be on a roof or something as we scan the skies, but there’s no real reason to leave the bar. The drone can get itself outside, and we’d just be farther from drinks. So, we launch it from Booth 4. Huzzah.

Volt flies it in search pattern and predictably sees nothing of interest. Anything up there is using active camouflage, and Volt is kinda shit at looking anyway. I have her take snapshots of anything that isn’t clear blue sky. Start flipping through them on my phone. It’s a lot of explosions. Which, right, I knew that was going on. Someone’s taking a run at Big Cheddar for air superiority. Is it Champion? He’s ostensibly Cheddar’s number one enforcer - his champion if you will. But I sense he’s not exactly loyal. Also, he pretty much told me so.

I have Volt send any uninteresting snapshots that happen around or at similar times to the explosions. It’s a lot of blue skies pics. Many many. A human’s work is never done. But there’s got to be a faster way than this. Perhaps I could hire some children to look at them?

Having no readily available pool of child labor, I speed up the slideshow. Really get it humming. Humans can perceive visual patterns in a tenth of a second. It’s one of the few areas where we crush d-bots. I set my brain scanning sticker to flag the photos that cause a spike in concentration, then zone out to a hundred thousand pics of explosions and blue sky.

Three hours later, I call it. Burned out. I chug a couple beer to give my eyes a break. Stomp around the bar. Tell a few jokes. Get some fries and flip through the flagged photos. Hmm. There are patterns. Random ones. Look at enough explosions and you’ll see the odd face in the flames. Sometimes a duck. Frustrating. There’s even a few clear blue slides. I flip past them in disgust. They keep coming back. I left my sticker on and it keeps flagging them. Weird. What do I see that I don’t see?

The flagged blue slides always come before an explosion. That’s context. Knowing that, a picture forms like a magic eye poster. Two drones. One huge, the other tiny. Both are almost exactly the blue of the sky. But one is slightly lighter, the other slightly darker. I’d never have noticed either, without the contrast of both in the same shot.

A narrative appears as I flick through the blue pics. Tiny grenade drones pounding into the side of huge gunships. Oof. This sky battle is costing one side a lot more than the other. Also, I recognize the wee drones. Had one thrown at me.

“Well, we didn’t find Champion, but we did learn something.” I give Volt a nod. “Send a message to Willard. Tell him I know who took his brother.”