Maniac's Mayhem

Chapter Nineteen: From High To Low

I ascend the rickety scaffolding.“You know what? I might be afraid of heights after this.”

Sure, it’s protector tech, so it is probably safe, but that doesn’t stop my stomach from almost jumping out of my body every time it shakes. The worst part is that I know for a fact that with the help of my mask, I would even survive the fall with ease.

“Knowing that does not get rid of the creaking noise, you know that right.”

I try desperately to calm my legs, that are still shaking like crazy.

“I beg to differ. What are you going to do if something attacks me and I fall off,” I am not impressed by Lyssa’s attempts to reassure me.

“You have a response for everything, don’t you?” I ask sarcastically.

“I see. In that case, I have a question.”

“Why does that sound like an insult? You know what, never mind that. How fucked do you think this place is?”

“Like all the support pillars are gone right, and seeing as how this place is not buried in rubble, that means that this forcefield is keeping up the city plate, right?”

I am not that good at physics, but I feel that is somewhat correct.

“Okay, so if the shield gets disabled, the entire undercity will get squished.” I sigh. Well, this is going to be a bit more complicated.

“That is really not helpful,” I say with a bit of a smile; I guess Lyssa at least picked up some graveyard humour at some point.

I nod. “Yeah, we gain nothing by being passive. I'd rather have the solution and then figure out a way to mitigate the damage than wait around for someone else to come up with a solution,” I say as I come up to the last platform.

The ceiling is low here, forcing me to crouch. I put my hand on the roof or, I guess, the shield. The feeling surprises me. The barrier feels like nothing, neither hot nor cold, just this piece of smooth glass or whatever it is made of. I flick my finger at it, being surprised when no noise comes from it either.

“What is this thing?” I ask in complete wonder.

“No way! Really, I could not have guessed that,” I say with exasperation. “I meant, what kind of barrier? Why does it not hold any heat or make any sound?”

“Like a hologram?”

“How expensive would that be?”

Well, that is a disconcerting statement. “How much less?”

I scoff “3 thousand, so what you are telling me is that this barrier is worth almost a million points."

“Anyway, putting all those crazy ideas of spending millions of points aside, this thing is basically built out of pure light?”

I try to study the barrier even more.

“Lyssa, glass fibre also works with light, right?” I am starting to have some rather basic ideas.

“So, can I send a signal through the light barrier? Like how data gets transferred through a cable.”

It stays silent for a while, until Lyssa makes a noise that can only be described as a deep sigh.

“Right, it was just an idea, so there is no way to get through this shield, then?” I knocked on the shield a few more times, noticing that it still did not react to anything.

“Well, fuck!” I sit down on the platform, looking out over the undercity, or what is left of it. The near-constant stream of gunfire lights up the hordes of antithesis outside. “How long can we even keep defending this place?”

“So we either get rid of the shield, dropping the entire upper city on top of the undercity, or we are overrun in the next month; those are some great options.” I don’t think I have ever wanted to run away from a situation more than right now.

“With what resources? Even if we could, I don’t think the antithesis are just going to let us build them in peace. We would be under constant attack.”

“That sounds more doable, but what about the undercity?”

“Okay, so we got that sorted, but that still leaves the main problem: how do we break the shield?”

“Le, what now?” I always thought of myself as decently bright, but this is all going a bit over my head.

“How would we even know where to aim?

”

“Wait, is that easy to find?”

“I see, but if we could make a hole, why not send a message through instead of breaking the shield? Then they can secure or even evacuate the city, leaving us with less to worry about.”

“And we can’t be sure how long it would take for help to arrive when we send the message.” I finish the rest of the explanation, before I fall into a contemplative silence.

“Can’t we set up more generators, capacitors, and other infrastructure first, before we send the messages?” I ask.

“And we don’t have much time, and even though we can get as many points as we want, they are better spent elsewhere.” I sigh. “Fuck!”

Whatever we do, people are guaranteed to die, be that from unexpected cave-ins or the plants crawling out of the undercity and into the upper city. Worst of all, it was my choice. I could wait, making sure it was as safe as possible before pulling the trigger, but that would risk the lives of the underworlders. The other option was to get them out as quickly as possible, risking the lives of the people living above ground.

“I fucking hate this.”

I am now lying down on the platform, completely out of options.

“Well, that sounds like you did not make any progress.” Katelyn says, her voice coming from below me.

I almost jump out of my skin. I have a few thousand points in protector upgrades. Scanners are useless if you don’t pay any fucking attention. Once my heart finally calms down, I answer her. “That kind of depends on how you define progress.”

“Uhm, a way out of here.” She sounds a bit unsure as she sits down beside me on the top of the scaffolding.

“I have those, but all of them involve a lot of people dying, so…” The rest of the sentence goes unsaid.

She visibly winces. “Yeah, I see that isn't great. Can you walk me through some of it? I am not as techie as you, but maybe I can help?”

“So you probably have already guessed this, but if the forcefield is turned off, the entire city will drop, turning the undercity into a pancake.”

“You don’t like to mince words, do you?” She is smiling, but I do see the concern in her eyes.

“The only thing that will be minced is us if we don’t find a solution.”

“You say that like you expect it to turn off any second.”

I sigh, feeling slightly defeated. “It's just that I don’t know why it is on, in the first place.”

“Did you not come from a facility where they were testing on the antithesis? This seems like an easy dumping spot.”

“Easy in theory, yeah. In practice? I don’t know anything about shield generation, but I can’t imagine the energy bill being anything cheap, and it leaves a massive footprint. Why not just burn them all?” I argue.

“I guess with gas and oil shortages, the amount of fuel you need to burn them would not go unnoticed.” Katelyn does not sound all that convinced about her own statement either, but at least it is a possibility.

“I mean, sure, but that still leaves the second problem of escalation.”

“Escalation?”

“Yeah, when you leave hives alone, they don’t just sit there and do nothing. They keep producing bigger and meaner modules until one breaks through the shield.”

Katelyn nods. “That is true, but what does that mean?”

“That this could not have been a permanent solution; I know most corporate management is dysfunctional to the point of incompetence, but still, even they would know that this kind of thing doesn’t end well.”

“What if it was not a corpo?” Katlyn ponders, darkly.

“Well, I don’t think the plants did it…”

“What about another samurai? I know there was an incursion quite recently. Still, before that, there hadn't been one in more than a year, so the only other place to hunt antithesis would be the German death zone,.But you are lucky if you find any modles in the double-digits there, with how often samurai go in there to hunt nowadays.”

I nodded in agreement. I had gone hunting in the dead zone myself and had gotten lucky with the amount of points I walked away with, only to later learn from Magenta that The Thing, one of Mother's daughters, had purposefully led most of them into us to help us get more points. If she had not done that, we would have gotten way fewer points, and I still managed to spend most of them on what I considered to be essential upgrades.

“Would that even be allowed? Wouldn't the protectors step in?” I finally ask.

I scoff loudly. “So what? I can kill some people just because it helps fight the aliens?”

“But that was to protect people,” I defend myself. “This is not the same.”

I turn white, feeling somewhat sick at the thought. “How could someone do that?”

It is at this moment that Katelyn leans over and grabs my hand, rubbing it softly. “Humans have for a long time sacrificed each other to get on top, it's in our nature.”

Well, that is a happy thought and something I want to reject outright, but I can’t. I have seen how the Corpos live and have been in the machine. I have seen people push each other down just to raise themself up.

I just thought, or hoped, that Samurai would be different, but I guess that does not necessarily have to be true. I still remember reading the news of a little girl clawing at people and aliens, terrorising England with an army of raccoons, so I guess it is not that unthinkable, just disappointing.

I let out a deep sigh. “If it is a samurai, that means we should probably prepare some gear to fight one, just in case.”

For some reason, Katelyn smiles brightly at me. “Melody is going to love that.”

It is a faint feeling, but it is almost as if I feel the girl in question laughing deep inside our mind space, while lying on our big leather couch, already getting excited. “I think so, too.”

I finally stand up and look at Katelyn. “I should go. I need to cool my head a bit.”

She just nods with an understanding smile. “I see. How do you plan to get down?”

“Like this,” I say with a smile before teleporting back to the ground; I am already in love with this ability.