[004] The Givings of Fire
He was walking around the cluster of sparse bushes, growing in what seemed utterly random order.
A distant sound of the cascading waterfall was somewhat soothing. He liked coming down here and wandering around for hours, lost in the maze of his thoughts. He was thirstily breathing in all that air, even if now it was stale. Supporting infrastructure was already shut down; it was just a matter of time when everything else collapses on itself. “It is just a matter of time,” - he muttered to himself, almost inaudibly.
Mentally he was already preparing for the journey back on the ground. It took a bit of time to pass all of the gates and checkpoints, crossing these vast and enormous spaces and complicated muddle of corridors, and then spending what seemed like an eternity in the high-speed elevator. The lock of the first sluice doors clicked down, the doors shutting down behind his back tightly. Gate just read his access profile, and the grey conduit lit in the pale green light. “Here we go” - he caught himself thinking. He already started to crave that experience walking on the soft carpet of moss, covering most of the surface of Zone N. Marching in a reverberating tunnel made of concrete was a bizarre experience, almost surreal.
These hexagonal pipes stretched for miles, deep in the ground, surrounding this enormous buried structure like a twisted maze. To reach the elevator, one needed to walk at least a few kilometers in these grimly lit grey tubes. Every so often, the continuous reverb of your steps would be interrupted by the occasional security checkpoint or another gate - operated autonomously by the machines. Once you pass the checkpoint and the last door closes, it’s a grey, seemingly neverending journey again. And that weird hum, which accompanies you throughout your whole trip underground.
Finally, one more gate, and then you walk onto the brightly lit platform, carved in the big, open space. XY enters one of the capsules, unzips his costume a bit, and then relaxes into the chair. “17 minutes and 32 seconds to reach the overground station” - metallic elevator voice announces, and then the door closes. He closes the eyes. The hum was slowly fading away, and he didn’t notice how his thoughts started to wander. It was an engineering marvel indeed - a vast underground complex - happened as an attempt to create the library and the storage for everything worth preserving. That is how the Longevity project was born. The new Tribe was established, responsible for finding ways to protect all that’s valuable, even after thousands of years. It seems like the impossible thing to do at the time, having in mind all the previous experience of archiving knowledge and preserving artifacts. As a result, these massive structures were created. While being vast engineering artifacts, they were kept secret, hidden from the prying eye, and heavily secured. Over time, priorities changed, and the focus shifted elsewhere, leaving the project underfunded and being robbed of some of their engineering artifacts. Like the hypnagogia devices, used in every ‘amusement bar’ you can find on every block in the city nowadays. They were created to capture the people’s dreams and store them until it would be possible to do something useful. Later, the market found its way to monetize this invention and use it to make even more profits for the backing corporations. It was also becoming more and more dangerous to operate these. While Invisibles were unseen in the city, they were a bleak reality here, in the plains. Knowledge gardens were very well kept secret, but rarely obfuscation was a great practice to secure something. And most of the Invisibles weren’t just some blunt barbarians. Most of them were very well equipped and able to manage sophisticated machinery. There were rumors that there were some ex-Tribe members among them. XY heard about the previous drone hack jobs, and he was pretty sure that was the job of the Invisibles, not some ‘control plane issues’ bullshit. Everyone knew that debugging these complex systems was almost impossible, so you couldn’t blame the operators either. However, the situation became somewhat tense after a few of those container ship hijacks, where they were driven into the shore and left there, damaging the precious goods. Knowledge gardens usually had very few trained people to defend it, often depending on the automated defense systems and few engineers around.
The situation in the megacities wasn’t that glamorous, as it was displayed in the grid. More and more people were being pushed to the outskirts from the ‘good’ districts by the System, allowing wealthy people above the threshold to cluster nearby, slowly expanding their ‘territory.’ The support of the System was unbeknownst, but it was there. Vast information about the people living and traveling through and their habits was collected every day, and then it was selectively fed to the urban planning tribes, informing their decisions about what and where to build. People started to notice that it’s getting harder to keep above the threshold in some instances.
It wasn’t evident when the tactics of the Invisibles changed. For a very long time, Invisibles were attacking the System itself, for being excluded from it. People living in the megacities and around weren’t part of their agenda. Until recently, at least.
XY remembered those dark months. People in megacities called them drone wars. Previously it was unheard of the military drones operating in the open and targeting individual objects in the city districts. As a response to the threats, drones now were everywhere, and there were lots of them—the same for extensive sensor networks deployed everywhere. The problem was that while the System looked like an impenetrable living organism, defending itself quite successfully, it wasn’t the truth. The disease was already inside, doing its job. It was the slow and painful death from the thousands of cuts inside. They were inside the cities, tracing and snooping the signals, mapping the networks, and scouting the territories. The blessing and the curse of the megacity were that everything was interconnected and managed. And that meant that someone could access it without proper authorization.
The first attack of the hijacked drones was abrupt, like a swarm of black crows, covering the distant sky. All the military drones operated by the System were equipped with the warheads to defend against the enemy. Those who survived the first hits in the municipal smart house districts heard high-pitched ringing in their ears for a week. The false sense of security collapsed on itself at that moment. After a few days, another one followed. And then another. Swarms of drones were visible as a threat, but virtually everything was at that point. It wasn’t safe in the smart houses, as your air filtering system could suddenly fail.
The concrete of the city started to burn. The rich people began to consolidate their efforts to defend themselves. They lived in the districts, where they could withstand even biological attacks. You could live for weeks in these hermetical domes, looking into the burning city down there, waiting for the inevitable to come.
Eventually, the wealthiest people went to the bunkers—the ones who could afford that. Most of the population couldn’t. There was a large amount of “luxury” bunkers under the megacities, allowing to wait out pretty much anything in these shelters. Everything ensued into the bloody chaos across the cities. Decades of the carefully cloaked and ignored systemic oppression resulted in the bloodbath. And it wasn’t clear anymore which side was fighting for what.
And then the Octoset incident happened …
When XY got the L0 type message, he immediately knew what to do. Not only because his PA immediately started following emergency protocol and all required steps were seen in his field of vision, but it was ingrained, like muscle memory. They practiced it a lot back in the day, like a doomsday scenario, which should never come. And it was like a fun exercise to accomplish, running through it like a fun game, knowing that there are no real consequences.
He started an emergency lockdown procedure for the knowledge garden he was responsible for. While most of them were already shut off or being shut down, there were 3 of them which should remain fully operational, tightly sealed, keeping the seeds bank and artifacts library safely underground.
He sat in the chair of the capsule, bringing him down to the complex again, and wondered whether he would stand on the ground ever again.
Link to the recording: https://soundcloud.com/palanga_street_radio/decaying-foundations-004-the