The crack spread quickly but didn’t bring the ceiling down on my head. I stood there for a moment in shock holding my breath, then a thought from the back of my head pulled me back into action: You need to wake mom up.
She wouldn’t wake from an incarna dream unless she chose to exit herself from within or someone shut the player down from outside through the menu and a short waiting period. Now I was wishing we’d bought the hospital ones that woke you up when anything physical happened to you. The only emergency eject method to get mom out of the incarna was to pull the cord out, it’d be sudden for her and disorienting but we were in danger. I’d never seen fercrete actually crack. Scrape or chip but never crack.
I turned and ran out of my room and across the small living room but even with the small distance I was too slow. Just as I reached my mom’s room door and started reaching for it, even as I slid to a stop in front of it, a sound unlike what I’d heard before exploded behind me.
It sounded like a car crash that turned into rushing water or carbo-powder being poured into a bowl. But it was so loud, so much louder than I thought such a sound could be. I flinched against the door in fear before turning my head to see what had happened to see something unrealistic even as it happened in front of me. Like it shouldn’t be possible. A shivering, irregular lump of metal surrounded by swirling black smoke was resting in the doorway of my room but the more scary issue was the melted hole in my ceiling. Not even a super heated hole, just melted like a plastic tarp over an exhaust vent.
What was that smoke, was it some sort of super acid? Was that what the lump was, a shell for some acidic gas strong enough burn deep into the underground of the city?
I needed to get into mom’s room but my mind wasn’t working, I was paralyzed with fear for the first real time of my life. This was my home and it was being melted down in front of me.
Standing there like a gonk was the worst possible thing to do but I just stood there looking at the lump and the smoke and the hole above my bed. If I’d been in bed right there I’d have been crushed and melted instantly was my only thought I clung to my mother’s bedroom door uselessly. The smoke was still filling up my room from the hole even as the lump of metal sat there slowly melting itself down among the gas. I could hear screams and shouting from the hole in my ceiling, likely from where it had punched through upstairs neighbors apartments to get here.
I started to come to my senses a little and was about to open my mom’s door and try to get inside and barricade the door best I could, maybe try to form a seal, when the metal lump sprayed black smoke in jets from it around my room like a overheating boiler blowing it’s valve.
The smoke quickly shrouded my room in darkness, fast enough to seem near instant to me. The smoke didn’t stay in the little room long though as it quickly flooded the living room I was in as well. It almost seemed to fill the space with purpose to my frazzled thoughts, unnaturally spreading to cover the most space as quickly as possible rather than a simple expanding mist.
As the smoke hit me I quickly let go of my mom’s door handle and pulled the front of my vest over my nose and mouth and squinting tightly against the gas. I couldn’t open my mom’s door with the smoke right here, it’d just get use both hurt. I didn’t really know if the door would even protect her room from it but I wouldn’t be the one to open it at least.
I tried make out the lump to see if it had stopped making more smoke but I couldn’t see clearly through the dark smoke and stinging eyes. After a few moments thinking about what to do I knew I didn’t want to leave the apartment, it might get me out of the smoke but it’s leave mom behind. I also didn’t know if there wasn’t more out there anyway.
The smoke in these few seconds had spread pretty evenly around the space it could, I resolved to take a few steps forward and get sight on the lump in my room. If it was done making gas then maybe I could just bundle it up and let the gas disperse naturally.
Even those two steps were hard though, I felt my skin starting to burn. Not even itch like I thought it would, it went straight to feeling like it was being touched with little fires all over me causing little shocks of pain that seemed to be creating a sort of background pain that wasn’t going away.
I got a little closer to my room and saw a tendril like a wire or a blood vessel stretched across the floor from the lump, which was now a puddle, up over my bed which had been mostly melted unnaturally into the floor and then up onto my shelf and into the power cell I had found.
Even as I watched through streaming eyes the power cell melted away, deforming around the tendril as it spread over it. Soon it was just a pitted ugly lump of metal a fraction of the size of the actual cell.
Then the room flashed blue as an incredible amount of tiny motes of light grew bright blue and then faded into orange and faded. The light seemed to follow across the space towards the puddle but I couldn’t be sure with my eyes largely blinded by tears.
Even as I registered it happening around me I was struck by a massive jolt pain and fell on my back away from the puddle. I could smell the burnt flesh, that light had just roasted my skin in an instant. I couldn’t move, I was just slowly curling up against my will with my eyes closed and screaming. Wasn’t even holding my vest up anymore, nothing else was possible but to be in pain.
Everything else was gone.
The last thing I remember was the smoke moving wildly over me for a second, swirling like it was being blown away somehow. Then I felt a heat run from my head to my toes but heat in my head remained, growing hotter but I was already at my maximum for pain and couldn’t do anything but keep screaming.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
I saw the red hazard lights of the apartment living room, the lights that came on when there wasn’t enough other light. You were never in true darkness in the water district, this had once meant to be a shelter, and that meant there was a red hazard light built into nearly every surface so that no tiny patch of space was allowed to exist in complete darkness without a hazard light turning on nearby to light it up even if only just.
The smoke was gone. The dim red light showing me my living room ceiling. I was losing consciousness and all I could think of was how I could see the ceiling now. The heat in my head was fading but so was I. I wondered if I even had skin left, was I just going to bleed out here on the floor? I couldn’t get any strength under my limbs, they just stayed curled into a little painful ball.
My sight flickered and darkened. I tried to turn my head to mom’s door but I just couldn’t. I hoped mom was safe in her room. I hoped she’d be okay.
The adrenaline leaving me at least, I passed out.
-
Muffled voices were the first thing I heard when I woke up, though I was more worried to find myself mostly paralyzed and laid out in an unfamiliar space. With effort I turned my head to the side and brought an unknown man talking to an unknown woman into my slightly blurred view.
“-orget to take record of all recovered individuals before they go missing, I don’t want anyone who’s brought into recovery leaving without us knowing who they are and their address.” said the man wearing some sort of hazard gear with a medical equipment rig over his torso. The tools were mostly benign scanner looking things and wires but a pistol under his arm gave me pause.
“We have the data for the local residents and our teams have collected all the injured civilians we can find; though there are more than a few dead ends where the structure was pierced into and caused a collapse into the subsections.” The woman wearing an odd pair of glasses with one normal lens and the other was tinted black with flickering lights within that I couldn’t make out said. She was carrying a pad that was flickering with near constant new lines of text and pictures I couldn’t make out.
“Those are likely dead anyway, make sure all the injured are screened, cleared and charged. I don’t want any of the product traces being found, follow the emergency response procedure for now but if you find anything else like evidence nine somewhere we haven’t cleared make sure you lock down the… Oh hello there.” The doctor continued talking for a while before noticing my alertness.
“He… What Hap… Urgh…” I tried to talk but I couldn’t get the words out through my throat, every time my mouth moved my head throbbed painfully as well.
The doctor leaned forward and pulled a small palm sized tool out and checked it and then looking at something on his optical display as his eyes flickered with blue lights for a moment he responded with a slightly different manner of speech than he had used for the woman.
“It’s alright young man, you’ll be fine after some recovery time. Your skin has been exposed to a class two corrosive asphyxiant and you’ve got some further damage to your throat. You’ve avoided major damage to your eyes and your lungs seem fine. There shouldn’t be any disabling effects but you’ll have some scarring, though you’re listed here as ten years old so any scars might fade as you grow older.” The doctor rattled off, I was likely not the first he’d told something similar to today.
“My… Mom.. Is sh…” I managed to get the noises out.
“Your mother isn’t listed among the injured or the deceased so she must be fine, she’ll be among the resident temporary shelters with the other displaced residents. You and your home were damaged by an industrial incident caused by our competitor Nelson Technologies when they detonated an explosive in the underground highway above your home. We at Kitsuban corporation are volunteering our help to those affected by this incident but assume no responsibility for any damages, harm or loss of life caused by Nelson Technologies actions.” The doctor said, the second part of his response settling into a prescribed mode of speech.
“Thank…” I said though I wasn’t really sure what had been done to me medical wise outside of some cheap looking bandage spray.
“No problem, young man. I am first and foremost a doctor after all. You’ll find your bill has already been applied to your personal city account or the account of your guardian should you not have one yet for your convenience.” The doctor said before losing focus with me and reading something on his optical interface. “Now I need to attend to the other residents, please make your way to the displacement shelters when you feel able.” He finished with and left to do whatever.
The lady he’d been talking to had left at some point though with my poor vision and lack of focus I’d missed her leaving entirely. There was another small medical bed nearby but it was empty leaving me alone in this prefab tent structure. I tried to raise myself up to sit but I couldn’t move my body well yet, clearly still dosed with something numbing.
I tried to pull up my optical interface but all it caused was a mix of static to wash over my view for a moment each time I thought to bring it up, the mental prompt failing to show my expected biomonitor application to check my vital signs or my message application in case I was left with anything from the corp doctor about my debt or whatever.
After a few attempts causing nothing but static I touched the cerebral implant at my left temple, the smooth chrome warm to the touch.
I’d seen toddlers wandering around in my neighborhood with slightly nicer models these days so they must have updated the city government subsidized model in the years since I got mine but it had never given me any issue before now.
When I tapped at it I felt a tingle but that was about it, my vision wasn’t filled with my interface. I wondered if I’d have to get it replaced or not.
Suddenly I felt a shock run from head to toe and had the sensation of putting a battery on my tongue. I felt tears run from my eyes but I wasn’t in pain. Then my interface started to flicker into my view.
But it wasn’t my interface, it was a boot screen for a different style of interface. Kind of weird looking with a light gray aesthetic instead of my normal blue and it didn’t have any corp logos or idents.
The gray box filled the bottom left of my vision and filled with debug text of some sort. I recognized words like “Connecting” and “Valid” and other terms when it suddenly switched over to more biological words likely to do with my implants.
It then opened another gray box in the middle of my vision that quickly populated itself with more debug text that then disappeared and instead a hazy mass of colors faded into sight in the middle of it, reminding me of the effect when I pressed on my eyelids, which then resolved into a white triangle and then another inverted below it kind of like an hourglass.
This symbol was then underlined with a line of text that flickered a little before appearing more solid.
[Sanctum v1.2.1a]