The trip across the rest of the city was uneventful in comparison to the mugger. Just some sales people trying to swarm me in the shopping areas I passed through and a small incident with a tiny toddler kid wondering why I had a big scar. I just told him I got hit in the head with a machete and that was enough to blow his little middle class suburban mind. His corpo mother gave me a glare that did more harm to me than the mugger.
I got on the city bus and sat at the back trying to stay out of the sunshine. Not because I live underground though, just because it was damned bright. Unfortunately the bus seemed to be driving in such a way to bring the sun around to my window so it could laser me in the face. I even moved over to the other side of the bus and then the bus turned a corner and the sun was right there hitting me on the other side.
The surface sucked. The sun couldn’t be escaped. It was either too hot and the sun was blinding you or it was a full on storm and the rain was so heavy you’d get washed away. Underground life was the best, the same temperature all the time and the weather was just on the vid screen.
Getting off the bus was wild because it was near an orbital terminal so there were crowds of rich folk and police everywhere with any of them clocking eyes on my little scarred face giving me a look like I was literately a zombie who had got into their rich people compound. Even though it was just a nicer street near the spaceport.
I ignored the rich folk and made my way through the area until I got away from the transport hub and out into the pedestrian streets that led to the first wall, the flood wall. From there it wasn’t far until I reached the militarized defensive wall. Here I had to actually go through a security checkpoint and get me guns, ammo and knives out to pass them through a scanner. Then they were given back to me and I was let through the wall into the industrial zone.
They weren’t there to stop people from bringing weapons here, they were there to know what weapons were going in and out along with who was going in and out. I could have found a maintenance tunnel or some other way through or under the wall to avoid being tracked but I didn’t need to be stealthy here. I was just making a delivery, not running major criminal operation.
It felt a bit weird walking out of the security checkpoint and suddenly the hundreds of various turrets with different calibers and types of ammo loaded locking onto my movement for a few seconds before they failed to receive a fire order and went back to static mode.
I knew they wouldn’t just shoot me but that was a lot of turrets aimed at me for a few moments.
Being the lone figure walking through the super scale yards was a little surreal, the only path I had to walk along was a strip of fercrete edged with white marking with little side paths leading off into the distance to large warehouses and hangars. All the ground not taking up by the paths was just sterile brown dusty soil that didn’t move in the baking sunshine.
I couldn’t see any workers or drones around apart from some distant air traffic and a few specks of things that might be flying drones on the horizon. Otherwise it was just me, the blinding sun overhead and the path with the wall behind me.
It took another thirty minutes of walking in a straight line before I found little pit stop place for workers to take a breather. There was a single industrial looking vending machine and a pair of long benches in a little fercrete square among a crossroad of paths. I quickly bought a water and sat down to drink it, using a little of it to clean some of the left over stickiness from my hand.
Holding my hand to my forehead I looked into the distance to the east and spotted the bunker ruins I was looking for out past the last of the path across the brown soil landscape. Even further beyond that was a steadily growing density of craters as it passed into the firing range of the city artillery.
I wondered what had happened to lift a bomb proof farm bunker up enough to have it break itself through the surface and shatter, exposing it’s internals to the world. Then again it was likely from before the Nuclear war and there were a whole lot of nukes and kinetic bombardments. It wouldn't be too weird to imagine a couple of close blasts stretching and crushing the ground enough to lift something they couldn’t quite break up out of the ground.
Must have been crazy to see though, the raw destructive forces involved must have been huge. I didn’t know a lot of history outside of names of events and some rough geography. Maybe this whole area was still green before the Lunar war like in the movies?
Most of the cities on Earth got all sorts of virus bombed back then, especially the megacities. A lot of the soil near the cities wouldn’t grow anything even now all this time later unless a corp took the time and effort to carve away the soil down to the bedrock and rebuild and reculture the soil, bacteria and fungi back to the surface. I wasn’t sure of the details.
I finished my drink and grabbed another, this sun was killing me. The UV lights underground and vitamin additives in everything kept me from becoming a total cave dweller but I still found bright sunlight just… too much. Too warm and too blinding. Give me my air conditioning back.
As I was sitting there looking over the wide, flattened expanse of the industrial sector I spotted a big moving drone pushing something out of a warehouse in the distance. A big covered shape on wheels. At least there was something out here other than me, even if it was a drone.
I looked up at the blue sky but there weren’t any birds like in the movies, not near the city anyway. The megacities worked very hard to completely destroy all animal life from insect and up. Even most mites were too much to allow. You didn’t see rats or stray pets, there just weren’t any around. Some rich people would have some animals around but they would be vat grown and sterile, trapped in their penthouses, mansions or private zoos.
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One of the creatures from the movies I actually liked were whales. They still existed apparently even after all the trouble and ecological problems. There were a couple of different types for different environments around Earth and even some living in zoos on Luna and Mars. There was even a famous whale clone line that lived on a Jovian zoo station called “The Adrastean Menagerie” in a gigantic spherical tank that I’d seen pictures of.
I wanted to see one in real life, maybe one day I’d take a boat out to the ocean. Go on a nautical adventure and look for a whale to swim with. That’d be fun. Swimming alongside a real behemoth creature. Seeing one at a zoo was alright but I wanted to see one in the wild with it’s family or clan or whatever they were called with the whole ocean around me.
Hopefully I didn’t have seasickness, that was a thing that happened to people in the movies. They’d be all excited about the ocean and then they’d just get sick on boats. That would be annoying, maybe Sanctum could fix it? Whatever.
Throwing the second bottle into the trash can attached to the side of the big steel vending machine I turned to the bunker in the distance. Time to finish this little task.
I walked off the path into the soft, dry soil that seemed to want to eat my boots as I took step after step into it but at the same time just crumbled away as soon as I lifted my feet. Very odd.
The distance to cover was quite a way, taking about fifteen minutes to make it across the flattened land to a the ruin. The actual broken structure was exposed to the surface but also flattened with the rest of the land so it didn’t poke out of the ground apart from a few blocks that had shifted with rainfall to give away the location of the bunker.
Looking down into the broken open room I saw it was quite large down there, about the size of a small hangar or a large office space. The flattening of the land around it caused a lot of structural damage to the bunker though and left me more than enough broken blocks and exposed rebar to climb down without issue. I got to it, switching my eyes over to night vision once I got about half way down and the light from the cracked hole in the roof gave up.
Setting foot onto the broken flooring I noticed it wasn’t fercrete but old concrete but strengthened with what I think were called dodecahedron lattice of steel. Whatever the three dimensional version of a hexagon is.
A bit wild for a farm bunker, I wondered what this was meant to be back in the day? Didn’t mean anything now though. It was just a long since looted clean, broken and flattened ruin half buried in the dead soil. It was just a dead drop spot for me at least.
I couldn’t look around the big open space easily because of all the rubble and soil so I had to walk around between the piles until I found a load of rusted iron trash from an office space. What looked like a stack of iron filing cabinets that had been stored together, stacked up in a corner but had since rusted and fallen into a pile with only a few of the ones on the edge retaining their boxy shape.
Walking over to one of the closer ones I looked at the drawers closely until I found a green cross drawn on the side of the filing cabinet in line with the second to bottom drawer. I pulled the drawer open, which it seemed to fight against opening and made a terrible squeal and grind as I pulled on it. Once the drawer was open though I saw someone had placed a simple clear plastic tub into it. My dead drop target.
I placed Allie’s memory shard into the clear tub and pushed the rusty drawer closed carefully so I didn’t break the whole thing as it was barely held together.
Looking around in the dark for signs of recording equipment found nothing, it was common for third parties to discover dead drop sites and leave recording equipment to watch it for months or years until they caught someone at which point they could sell this information to brokers, even if they didn’t know the context or purpose it was still a movement of information or an object that someone might need and know more of.
Climbing out of the dark back into the light and up to the flat landscape above felt oddly wrong, maybe I was turning into a cave dweller. I switched my eyes over to normal light and then checked the setting and found some simple polarization options that I flicked through until the light wasn’t quite so blinding.
Time to head home. Back to the welcoming gloom.
As I was heading back to the wall I saw a small team of workers walk out of the security checkpoint all wearing overalls and joking with each other as their overseer who was wearing cleaner overalls and a white helmet with a chin guard tried to get them to hurry up along the path.
They mostly ignored me as I walked along with my hands in my pockets but then the overseer took issue with me being here and put a hand up in my path.
“Hey kid. What are you doing out here? This is Walden-Sutton Heavy Industries land your wandering around on. Do you even have a visitor pass?” The overseer asked angrily as the workers slowed behind him, some of them rolling their eyes.
“You don’t need a pass to be out here, these are city industrial yards. Public land. The paths are at least, even if the area around are currently rented. I can wander around all I like.” I said.
The overseer didn’t like me knowing the laws, that tended to annoy people who liked laws. I found it very weird how that worked.
“Loitering around corporate properties is grounds for arrest, corporate espionage is a capital offense even for snot nosed kids like you.” He said as his face grew redder as he got angry. Angrier. Some of the workers seemed to be enjoying the show while others had gotten bored.
“Chief, we need to be moving along you know. Have to get those parts into position before sunset and all. So the techs can fit them tonight?” A blonde muscled worker said. He seemed either bored this is not wanting to see a kid arrested for walking.
“I’m sorry for walking here, I didn’t know, but if I don’t hurry along won’t I be loitering? You say that was an espionage charge? That’d make you complicit as a corporate insider right? You’d be why I was loitering, holding me up here and all. I’d be sure to mention so to the investigators at least.” I said, trying to be a little intimidating but mostly failing. Adults didn’t find kids scary, generally.
The overseer scoffed at my threat but then his gears turned and he remembered just how easy it was for corporate espionage problems to run wild and take out everyone involved and turned quiet.
“Get out of here kid. I see you again here and I’m calling the patrol. Come on you lot, I’m counting this as you’re first smoke break.” He said before turning on his heel and walking away, the workers groaning and following with one of them giving me a scowl as they left.
I just thought they were all gonks. I kept on towards the security checkpoint as I put them out of my mind.