Chapter Four - Below the City

“Hex-platforming is a technique that became popular in the late 20s. It involves creating a set of six large pillars to hold up the corners of a hex. The hex’s size varies, but it’s usually between 100 and 200 metres from point to point. Buildings are built above these, and the gap between the hex platforms and the ground allow for plenty of space where infrastructure can be laid out. Sewers, electrical grids, any kind of interconnecting system.

Now new cities are built to sprawl out more, and have extensive above-ground piping and networking. It’s not much better. At least in a hex city, the superpoor are entirely out of sight.”

--The Hex, by Professor of Engineering Duskland, 2041

***

The taxi dove down, and down, and then even lower down, slowing all the while as the driver went from just a little nervous to an outright wreck, hunched over the wheel and with his eyes roving all over to look for danger.

I didn’t blame him.

The orphanage where I’d done a lot of my growing up had been on the ground level, near the outskirts of the city. Ground level was, generally, bad news. It’s where all the people who fell from above ended up. A lot of the chemicals in the air were heavy, and they tended to seep down too.

No one wanted to live so low, so those that did have to live there weren’t often there by choice. They were the slums, built in and around the pillars holding up the massive towers that hid the sun from view.

Right now, we were below that.

The city had been an island, once, but that was decades ago. Someone had terraformed it, built a new ‘ground’ onto which to build the rest of the city. Everything under that wasn’t fit for living in; it was all pipes and earthquake absorption shocks and pillars dug deep into the earth to hold the weight of everything above.

When we started to dive, we’d been in a nicer area. Gomorrah didn’t seem like a slum-raised kind of girl. Now, about thirty floors below that, we were in hell.

Horizontal smokestacks were spewing some vapours onto the road, the clouds of smoke being torn apart as cars which didn’t look street legal raced past. Bigger trucks were moving by, some taking the ramps leading up to the ground level. Most of those were being escorted by little drones.

“It’s a bit above this,” the driver said. He gestured up to a hole in the ceiling above that cut through the ground level, but never reached the sky. The interior of a hollow skyscraper?

By the looks of it, it was one of those industrial ones. The sort that was a windowless box from the outside. I guess it made sense that they’d move things in and out where no one could see it happening.

The cab rose up and we started to navigate through a maze of catwalks and suspended roads, the path marked out by rings of green light, at least where the lights hadn’t been torn off and stolen.

“There it is,” the driver said. I don’t know if that was relief in his voice or not. He pulled us up and around to a hole in the wall, the faded words ‘employee parking’ next to it.

A bazaar had been tacked on to the sides of the hollow interior, catwalks leading to little booths and shops suspended over the void.

We came to a stop, not quite parking alongside the other cars. I guessed the driver wanted an easy path to rush out of if things went south.

“Alright,” I said as I pushed the door open. Judging by the way my helmet’s augs flashed and switched to tanked air and the way the driver’s nose wrinkled up, the place didn’t smell rosy. “I’ll give you a call if I need to get out,” I said.

“My shift ends now,” he said. “Not working tomorrow.”

“Uh, alright?” I stepped out, boots squelching into some muck as I shifted my weight to move. “Myalis, can you give him a good tip?”

Certainly.

“See you around!” I said as the taxi driver put pedal to metal and rushed out of the parking area with a squeal of his car’s engine..

“Bye,” I said to the taxi’s retreating back. I shifted my shoulders, resettling my coat on properly, then tapped my thighs where my guns were tucked away. Everything looked like it was in place. I moved out of the parking garage, then to the edge of one of the walkways.

I held onto one of the struts coming up from below, a big chunky thing that was supporting some structural stuff above, then I leaned forwards to look down. The ground, the actual ground, with dirt and mud and trash, was only some hundred or so metres below.

It had probably been a forest or something once, and there were some lots where plain old-school homes still stood in the shadow of the city, trash heaped up against their walls. Some little buildings rose up around the pillars, with windows that had lights on within casting some light across the dark.

I couldn’t imagine it being much brighter in full daylight.

“Right, Myalis, where’s Gomorrah?”

Tracking her now... she’s three floors above, in an abandoned factory floor. To your right, then up. Follow the signs leading to Irregular Welding Co..

I nodded, then did as the AI said. The steps I climbed, all rust-covered corrugated steel, creaked as I moved up. There wasn’t too much traffic. In fact, as I entered the bazaar one floor above and started to make my way to another staircase, I noticed that half the stalls were empty, and maybe a third had shitty AI behind them.

“Hey, hey! Do you need anything?! Best shit you’ve ever seen, fresh from the trashcans of the rich fucks above!”

I paused at the voice; not at the pitch—it wasn’t the best I’d heard—but at the age of it.

Turning a little at the next intersection, I found a little girl on a plastic crate, with what looked like a video game console over her head. “Look! A console, Playstation Nine! Still functioning, three generations old! We can even hook you up with some DRM-cracked games!”

She had... trash behind her. That was the word for it. Knick-knacks and broken toys and some exercise equipment. All of it a bit grimy, all of it obviously broken.

A dumpster diver then.

I’d seen their sort before. Hell, I’d jumped into a few myself when I saw someone tossing something good away. They had their own little territories and rules. Where to dive, what to pick up, which places to avoid.

I moved on. Felt bad for the kid, but there was only so much I could do. It didn’t look like she was hawking to the greatest customers either. It struck me just how few people there were around.

“Is there anything about why this place is so empty?” I asked Myalis.

Nothing on any news site. Homeless migration trackers show a three-hundred percent increase in mortality rates over the last week.

“Holy crap, what... oh, the incursion?”

That’s likely. The Antithesis would travel further underground, though they usually prefer more access to sunlight. Most paramilitaries wouldn’t stop them.

“Damn,” I said. “Are there any left?”

It’s likely. The Antithesis are difficult to root out. Though any large break-outs within the city would be noticed and purged. There are some Vanguard whose entire duty is to sit above a recent incursion site and wait for more Antithesis to appear.

Made sense to me. I continued along, up another staircase that I didn’t trust, then past a large set of double doors with the words ‘Irregular Welding Co.’ next to them. The interior was a poorly lit mess of girders and catwalks. There were supposed to be huge machines here, at least I assumed as much from the markings on the ground, but they were all long gone.

The hum from the neon lights above fought with a clunking air vent to be the more annoying sound filling the room.

It didn’t take much to find Gomorrah. She was walking away from a group that was huddled next to a tarp lean-to, her steps conveying just how frustrated she was.

“Oh great, she looks like she’s in a good mood,” I muttered as I started after her.

Time to see what was up with my closest samurai friend.

***