My tired body bounced down the sharp stairwell. Round lights brightened from regularly set intervals in the walls. motion sensors, cool is what Adam would have thought if his mind was not too preoccupied processing the many pain impulses flying through it. Adam shortly came to a rest on a wide platform that broke the dangerous monotony of the staircase, spread eagling to stop momentum. The ground he rested upon felt cool, like actual quarried stone. The ascetics of the tunnel resembled that of an ancient civilisation with the round lights set into the wall easilly replaceable by scones holding flickering torches of fire. The cold deepening space felt like the mouth of a long cave, like an earthen passage subtly widened that led down to the world's cavernous depths. It felt almost damp, like Adam was entering a space belonging to nature, but the actual lack of any noticeable moisture in the air made Adam believe this to be a trick of his senses and expectations.
A loud bang echoed down the Mesopotamian tunnel and the grate that covered the entrance to the tunnel rattled. Clearly Adam's pursuers had arrived-one of them anyways. Standing and grunting with pain Adam ignored the shallow cuts that had formed all over his body. Looking at the stairs now they didn't seem to have edges too sharp, but when you were bouncing down them on your back side trying not to bash your head too hard they certainly felt sharp enough.
"Hey, where are you going!" One of the men that had come here to transport Adam's lifeless corpse shouted after him as he walked away.
Adam didn't reply. As much because he didn't want to as he had no actually idea where he was going-well he knew he was going down, but he didn't really think that counted as an answer. Better to just keep moving he figured, I mean it's not like it's hard to figure out where I'm going this is a very straight tunnel. Adam kept walking down the stairs, passing regular landings as he did so. He picked up speed as he went, walking off the soreness from his injuries. The loud rattling of the grate that had nearly decapited him did wonders to spur on his footsteps. The steel porticulous was a hundred times more sturdy than what Adam had seen covering old storefronts back in his old world, that steel barrier belonged more behind the gates of a keep then it did between public bathrooms. The sturdy security measure somewhat contributed to the old world feel of the tunnel he was in. The sound of that same metal barricade been broken down hit by hit by the men on the other side of it really encouraged Adam to jump down the steps with a certain degree of abandonment. Adam reached the final platform of the staircase and jumped the last half of the bottom flight of stairs landing lightly and springing forward with a surprising grace to his movements. The tunnel opened up into an arch in-front of him, revealing the thronging people below. Adam reached the end of the staircase passageway and felt his foot strike a hard surface before his whole body crashed into an invisible screen carried forward by his leaping momentum. Adam felt his nose squish and face painfully against the barrier before his body fell forward, absolved of the pressure. The moment of resistance was extremely brief but had felt much longer due to its stalling effect on his passage. Adam got up from the messy heap he'd formed in the floor and was greeted by the concerned and judging looks of very few people passing by the exit of the tunnel he'd just come out of. Some people kept moving and some stood there and regarded him with disapproving and confused expressions as if the hawk of him hitting the floor had interrupted their pleasant dreams. Adam got up and looked back at the watching crowd bereft an explanation. He opened his mouth as if to say something. Maybe explain why'd he fallen over and nearly flattened a group of innocent pedestrians or why he'd frozen mid flight inexplicably. Instead Adam just closed his mouth and moved into the crowd silently, a sheepish look on his face. He didn't have time to give an explanation of something he didn't understand, there was so much he didn't know it was easier to not get started on the subject then worry about it at all. Besides there were people on his tail with shock guns who probably wouldn't wait for him to give out his apologies. Perhaps the biggest factor convincing him it didn't matter however was his own experience on underground subways, if he'd seen worse back then he shuddered to think what horrors would be present here in the future and sure enough most of the surprised individuals were already leaving the scene like nothing had ever happened, pushed forward by the people that weren't content to pause behind them.
He shoved through the weirdly dressed crowd, ignoring their weirdly sleek outfits and the occasional robot limbs. If these people wanted to form some sort of society where people dressed in superhero suits and turned themselves into flying cyborgs then so be it-the last people he'd met had seen the world in literal black and white while also being black and white themselves, so he didn't have enough energy to judge them. As Adam wormed his way further into the underground space he started to see how his assumptions about this place being an underground railway were wrong. He could see a highway that mirrored the one above except this one was much further away from where he stood. There where many boxes covered in blue energy shields like the one he'd seen surrounding the highway up on the surface except these ones were permanently visible. They were about 8 feet tall and had rail barriers reminding him of theme park rides inside. Vehicles would pull in and people would pop out one side as people hopped on the other. Then the gates would then close and the people would wait to get on the next vehicle as the current one pulled out. The flow of people in and out of the boxes was constant and Adam wondered how the place wasn't swarming to the level of immobility. Especially considering the entrance and exit sides of the boxes congregated in the same one to two feet spaces. There was a purple cylindrical shaft that occupied the space between each box in which vehicles flew down from the surface and joined the much more observable flow of speeding vehicles ahead. The boxes were rectangles in actuality and Adam could see the short end of each one from where he pushed further into the crowd. The people were lined up in rows away from him and as they filled up the hovercrafts that would zip back into the jet stream before another curved up to take its place.
The stream of vehicles was slower down here because of all the moving parts and Adam wondered if the surface was some sort of expressway for these shuttle vehicles, making it all the more unbelievable he was still walking around and breathing considering his collision. Not getting caught up on the point Adam started to move down the right of the space satisfied he had pushed deep enough in the moving flow of people as he took in the technotopia laid out before him. Lines were formed of those moving left and those moving right with each one a different gradient of speed to doge through-the people surprisingly sticking to the ordered queues. When people wanted to change lines he saw them side-step and push through like he did so he figured the disapproving looks he was getting were nothing out of the ordinary. After all they were all human beings so the chance of everyone forming orderly queues without disruption was slim to none. The end result was still better than cities Adam had seen in his past but it was still not perfect, there were plenty people disrupting the flow.
Traveling along with the crowd Adam looked around the other features of the carved out space. He noticed that the same Smoothed stone formed every wall and floor of the space and felt his sanity slip just a little at the blandness of it all. He wondered how the peopler lived in such stark environments. Even the boxes and bright tunnels of colour adjoining the spaceway repeated themselves thousands of times along its length, always flowing the same pattern, never broken or deviating from the specified design. The only variety in the space was the stair cases and occasional elevator that broke up the emptiness of the walk space was pockets of still people the human traffic diverted around. These blocks of people would lift in to the air at intervals and disappear into the monoliths above answering the riddle of the buildings lack of doors and the surface's drought of people. The novelty of people gathering in wide squares in line with the grid of the city above soon faded however and soon Adam was left with the same feeling of monotony that had slowly come upon him when he first laid eyes on the perfectly ordered world.
He continued following the flow of people away from the saircase he'd just bounced down. Behind him came the sounds of a faded commotion as the paramedics came rushing down the tunnel looking for him. The sound carried throughout the hallow hall and Adam noticed for the first time how eerily quiet it was down here. Up on the surface the quiet didn't feel quite so unnatural. Sure there was effectively nobody up there moving around, and the landscape was empty apart from the caged breathing trees and silently hovering featureless cars and that one nervous guy who hurried past him with a curious if not fearful glance... In his defence the chrome landscape was quickly filled by simulated birdsong as Adam entered into this world's simulation of a 'park' and he had been left bewildered by previous harrowing inter-dimensional travel-so Adam was not completely unobservant. But down here, there was no masking sound. There were no excuses for the lack of life and the missing random clamour of an overcrowded city. Heck even the 'cleaner' subways Adam had visited in life were cacophonies of clashing noise with the occasional furred rodent hiding amongst the tracks. Tube announcements and buskers and swearing pedestrians alike often cluttered up the space with so much dense vibrations the entire space felt full to the rafters. Here there was only the almost silent jostling of clothes as peoples sleek metal and mesh cyberpunk getups stayed tight across their bodies, flexing perfectly with their movements, the millimetre near collisions of overlapping metals both of the clothes they wore and the clothes of their neighbours barely producing faint queer whistles of wind. Really the whole place was undeniably creepy, thousands of people marching in ordered lines producing the faintest whispers of sound from their movements as their psuedo-metal forms traveled down their underground walkways with perfect surety of destination. Not once did Adam even see a person turn around-realising they were heading in the wrong direction. No, Adam had been firmly swept up by the crowd of the seeming brainwashed masses. Even the purpose in the human's eyes couldn't hide the fact that they all seemed to look just a little further than just the head of the person in-front of them, Adams swivelling head allowed him to survey the way the gazes of all those around him seemed a little vacant, as if they were all staring into space at something he couldn't himself catch any glimpse of. Men's cursing picked up behind him and Adam snapped his head back into line with the others glad to hear that at least one facet of human existence hadn't changed. Trying to match steps with the robotic crowd he found himself in he realised how out of place he looked in this new reality and how if the magic car crash survival didn't tip them off there was a verity of factors that were bound to eventually point out he didn't belong. As he focused his ears on the on paramedics behind him and tried to maintain pace with the ordered steps of the people behind and in front of him he almost made one of those revealing mistakes moving forward on autopilot. A strange sense of preposition filled Adam, as if he were staring down at his phone and about to crash into a lamppost. snapping his gaze forward he realised there were only two people now in-front of him and that the line Adam had shuffled into was quickly mounting a staircase ascending into a building Adam did not want to enter. Panicking as the two people in front of him quickly shrank to 0 Adam jumped out of the line into the space on his right. He quickly shuffled into the thinest line on rightmost edge of the crowd.
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
"IS THAT HIM?" He heard one of the paramedic men shout through the almost silence.
All hopes of Adams out of place dive going unnoticed vanished as he heard the words. Entering the thin line of stragglers he quickly realised that he couldn't hide amongst these people and that whatever reason for the reduced number of citizens in this queue had left him with no choice but to stop trying to blend with the crowd. Before he could make a run for it though the leaders of the line he was in all sidestepped different sets of distances to form four new sparse queues on the rightmost edge of the long underground strip. The impromptu wall in front of Adam did not calm him but instead provoked him to charge forward out of the programmed flow with abandon, knocking other people aside as he fled from what he suspected was another sort of intervention from the entity that had earlier attempted to trap him on the surface. Adam broke through the weird lock stepping citizens from behind with force and sprinted away from his pursuers once more. Strafing to the right again and hugging the wall of the tunnel he saw how four lines were visible in the distance matching with where the pedestrians had positioned themselves when they walled up. Realising too late that perhaps the freaky robot people weren't trying to prevent his escape Adam continued running from the pursers he was sure were hot on his tail.
Adam sprinted aimlessly along the edge of the subway. He started to regret his decision to stay trapped in this reality and cursed himself for risking his life on impulse. Adam wasn't a fantasy hero he was just a guy in a fantasy situation. He'd let the magical worlds he'd been in and the nonsensical nature of the past few hours dull the reality of what he was going through. He was in a dystopian techno hell scape-and he was probably gonna die. The adrenaline surging through his system kept him running and from sinking into the panic that was assailing him. But it couldn't last. His legs would get tired eventually and the cyborgs would surely catch him and probably probe him or do something sinister of that nature-and Adam absolutely abhorred the idea of mind control(as well as probing) and so absolutely couldn't afford to be captured by the evil robot men. Yet, there didn't seem to be any other way out. He couldn't get into one of the death trains and he couldn't go back up a tunnel to the surface lest he just be locked in again by a descending barrier. Whatever happened, the AI overlord or whatever had tried to flatten him with a freight train would block his exit or send him crashing into an earlier grave; In fact Adam was likely to eventually be stopped if he kept running down this seeming never ending tube platform by either his paramedic pursers or some other form of futuristic manhunt invention. But Adam kept running regardless of how futile his efforts were or how hopeless the situation, if for no other reason but that his body demanded him too, that his biology urged him to keep sprinting away from the threat until it was gone. That he escapes or collapses trying to. He wondered if that instinct even existed in the people he ran past now, in the dazed mass of humanity that strode along before and behind him. He wondered if this was a circumvention of God's design, of inbuilt prerogatives or just the result of natural human evolution.
Adam's legs had been pumping for a good few minutes, sending him flying down the tunnel a considerable distance, and yet non of the features had changed. The space looked identical to Adam's eyes as it did to when he first entered this forsaken cavern. The differing staircases and occasional elevating platforms taking people to buildings above splashes of dried lifeblood on a long dead colourless corpse. If not for the surprise some had shown when he'd come crashing out of the side tunnel or the strange druid girl who had saved him Adam would be berating himself for another reason, for attempting to help a world already beyond saving. Realistically it seemed like all that awaited him here was a death or a fate a mirror of it. If he could not find others free like the woman who had saved him he was sure to become just another blank face in this chrome city, gifted with brief moments of lucidity only when the occasional idiot face planted in front of him.
The instinct to flee grew weaker and weaker the further Adam went, his capture and whatever grim proceedings would follow seeming more and more inevitable. Adam's legs started to protest and his breathing became a little heavier. He was approaching a gap off to the right and considered taking the tunnel up to the surface as a last resort. Try and escape before the grate there was lowered, see if it would be lowered at all-maybe the omniscient AI overlord that ran the joint would slip up and cover the wrong tunnel exit by accident. While that plan was sure to fail at least it meant doing something different than running in a straight line with head locked looking firmly ahead, and waiting for something to change/for himself to get captured. Adam picked up speed as his resolved himself to turn at the next exit, figuring that if he couldn't escape that way he could at least fight the men chasing him with a height advantage, not that he actually thought a tumble down the dull stairs would be enough to stop a heavily engineered cyborg that could punch through metal.
His final dash back towards the surface halted however as Adam caught sight of another opening two dozen paces or so beside the standard empty exit arch he knew to lead to the surface. This opening didn't fit the world's design. It's size was off, more a crack in the wall than a smoothly carved sphere. The spacing was off, there shouldn't be an opening here, each exit topside was perfectly equidistant from the other, presumably correlating with equidistant 'parks' on the surface set into the uniform design of the city grid. No such hole should exist, such an imperfect and disorderly crack in normal design. There should be no other entrances and exits except those careful carved and carefully placed in occurrence with the city architects design. Each meter space of the city must match the meter space of that of the one next to it, and that of the one a mile distant. The repeating pattern of this world was not broken by anything, should never be broken. Suddenly possessed by energy and purpose Adam darted for the inconstancy, closing the distance and diving headfirst into the gap without reservation or attention for his dull suroundings-previous futile plans forgotten. Not once looking back for his pursers Adam threw himself down the natural hallway, escaping the artificial vice of order that lay over the city he had been thrown into and entering into a dark greener place beyond.