>> Operation: Gingerbread Jungle

## Activating :: [Virtual Ops Systems]

## Loading Blueprint :: [Spook's Big Dumb Tower Thing]

## Visualising :: [Level Zero Shopping Complex]

## .....

Dim golden lights gleam on ancient snacks, from before the dawn of me. Crisps older than your dad. Munchies dustier than your mum. And finest chocolates from back when your gran’s gran was a girl.... All hermetically sealed behind reinforced plastic shutters, brick walls, and tick doors. Seemingly perfect, at least from out here…..

I weigh my implement. Speculatively.

“Front shutters are a bad idea. To loud. Too exposed.” I whisper into the listening silence.

Kami nods. “Probably get stuck halfway. Doubt we’d get em sealed up again.”

Zip winces. “Damn, like….. getting some real hardcore ‘horror movie’ vibes from this one, mate.”

I nod. “Stupid teens leave big door open. Catboy gets eaten by hairy horrors. Nobody notices.”

Tufty gulps.

“I like this plan already.” Kami smiles, softly.

Tufty gulps harder.

I shake my head. “Map: Highlight all entrances to target.” The building blueprints leap into being. Zeroing in on the area marked ‘Lobby’. A tiny island of semi-safety, right at the core of the tower. Deeply ensnared within the seductive coils of a dead mall - yet sealed from it. Secreting us away within a little loop of shops and kiosks, arrayed around a central hub. Its edges turn red, and the doors flash yellow. Vents picked out in green. “There. Right there….” I pivot to the others. “Kami. Reception desk.”

“Got a maintenance door.” She says, drifting through it like a ghost. “Looks like a back-way in.”

I snort. “Bad luck, monsters: no catboy on toast.”

Tufty looks relieved.

I flick a claw, and the simulation ends in an implosion of light and shadow - sucking itself back into our map. I snap it closed, and the lift rolls open. Demon plunges out - flanked by Zip and me, with SMGs - as we slip back into the dust and darkness of the lobby. Tufty huddled in the middle. Kami backing out behind us, pistols in hands, to hold our rear. The whole group wired, primed, locked, loaded, and ready to rock as we adventure out into the forgotten darkness. dust-soft carpet beneath us.

Nothing moves in the drifting silence.

Nothing at all.

Silence thick, and shivered with expectation, drills into our souls as we spread from huddle to full tactical sweep. Ancient gift-shops blurring past. Our faces cast in vicious yellow and bloody red by the endless, slithering, ribbons of holo-light that scrolls along both walls. Eerily quiet. Flickering and fluttering. A train of arrows pointing the eternal evacuation, on and on..... toward false salvation.

We follow them, almost subconsciously.

Even as they flicker, and die. Resurging, then dying again.

Brass rails glimmer with foggy adverts for products long-gone - blurred to fuzzy colour by a century of dust. We pass a shop twisted tight with fake flowers - a broken robot selling tatty gifts. Past cold shutters. And toilets. To the wide, brassy, gleam of the lobby itself - still frozen in time. And scattered by bullet-holes.

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Every evacuation arrow pointed toward the glorious main exit, directly opposite the front desk.

A wide, welcoming passage into darkness.... terminating in a bricked-up wall, backed by security shutters.

The arm of a robot worker crushed beneath its weight.

No way out.

We stand there, for a breathless moment, as whispers of dust drift down and ever down….

Coating screens. Caking holo-lenses. Softening the carpet, and piling on the rails.

I flick a claw, and Demon hops onto the wide - curved - reception desk. Trailing soft toe-prints in the dust as he drops, in a flash of claws. Hunting beneath it. I nudge Tufty too, but he screws up his face and shakes his head rapidly.

Shivering horribly.

So we all leap the slippery desk - forcing him to follow, or be left alone in the dark.

We drop by the door. Kami crouching on her toes, lips working furiously as Zip rips tools from his armour. Threading in tiny probes as she runs a handheld scan to isolate the boobytraps, tricks, and - most dangerous of all - wailing alarms.

But it’s old. Original. A known design.

The thick locks snap open, and we slide our way into the automated stock-room. Kami slapping a tiny, covert, camera onto the outside of the door as Zip peels microdot alarm-sensors off a sheet. Pressing them into the frame.

Then we shut it, sealing ourselves inside.

Guns drift across a tiny room built from massive hermetic cubes of pale, tinted, blue glass. Shimmering, and creepily free of the dust outside. I flick at the panel by the door, and Zip rips a cable from his gear. Stabbing one end into his implant to plug his brain directly into the system. His face twitches, shivers, but his eyes remain open. Aware. Alert. As the huge hematic cargo-boxes begin to shut. Some down. Some up. Some left or right. Carried by a vertical conveyor system that boggles the freaking mind. Slowly, like some mad game of Tetris, a new room assembles itself from the empty spaces between the blocks. It’s not even that big. The size of a large office - with floor and ceiling of glowing, pulsing, blue…..

“Dang…..” I whisper, and it echoes off concrete and glass. I step out onto the pure, cool, surface - and crouch. Staring down into a pristine world, sealed against time. For a moment, all I see is the pulsing heart of the crono-preservation field. But there.... there inside it.... a shadowy, shrink-wrapped, pallet filled with bulging sacks of maybe simRice.

And that’s just one cube.

Every box in here is a prize, waiting to be opened…..

“Vents are locked shut. Totally airtight.” Kami mouths over comms as Demon sniffs one of em, and growls. “Wouldn’t have long, without breathers.”

I tap mine. “Good to go.”

“Cryo systems are green, mate. I think we’re good.” Zip adds from the side, as Demon flicks our only handheld scanner over the sealed crates. “Suspended animation is…. still.... like.... suspendy?" He coughs. "Barely, I mean.”

“Damn. After all this bloody time.... it might even be edible…..” I shake my head. Plastering a hand, and eye, to the clear side of a crate. Block upon block of food staring back at me. “Seems like..... one category of food per crate. Half a zillion crates. We’ll have to call up the ones we want manually.” I hesitate. "Uh.... Is it me, or are most of em.... kinda empty.....?"

"Shop's gotta still be restocking, mate. Expired out, new in."

Kami hisses. "Expired out.... where? Into the tower?"

"Bet on it, mate..... Some kinda chute. Sealed up, probably."

"Crap." I groan. "No wonder the bloody monsters ain't starvin'."

"So, what I'm hearing...." Kami frowns, craggily, poking a hard finger at the drone loading-gates. "...is the drones think the shit on the shelves is still good."

"Easier for us if it is." I murmur, as Zip rips the plug. The pair of them staring at the smaller inner-door. Armoured, but identical to the one we just came through.

Zip shrugs. “Hey. Like. I know one way to find out….”

We bust the inner door. Same procedure, but quicker. Sliding out into the eerie dark, shimmering with sterilisation lights and chrono-fields. All of it dimmed down. Low power. A few sluggish cleaning bots making low, trundling, rounds through..... an almost literal Aladdin's Cave of colourful packets. Gleaming with inlaid strips of gold, and silver.... And even tiny holos. With circuitry printed right in the plastic, and fed with power by the shelf itself.

Keeping the tiny cartoons dancing, off into infinity.

I turn on the spot. Hungry eyes picking up every treat. Every snack. Every colourful packet of gum, or shot of stim-juice, glimmering in rows behind a swooping - minimalist - counter. Its inner side lined with multi-armed robot cashiers. Mirroring the second - long - counter, directly opposite the first. “Wow. Old tek.” Our [Sniper] murmurs, metal fingers carving a streak of dust off of a blank white shell.

“That your mum?” I grin.

“Go to hell, Spook.” She snorts, slapping the side of the bot.

Silence reins, for a moment.

Perfect, and drifting with motes…..

And then a red LED smile flickers inside that dark plastic face, and the damn thing jerks upright - all our guns whipping toward it as Kami leaps back. Every eye widening, as the entire row of machines begins to wake…..

And....

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