When he woke the lights were back on. The engineers office that he had holed up in was brightly lit by the overhead arclights.
He sat and took inventory. He had the chocolate he had found and two bottles of water. He also had a bunch of drawings of monsters. He drank some water and ate two squares of chocolate then placed everything including the drawings into his kitbag.
Looking around his eyes fell on the terminal. He went around the desk and pulled the chair in and sat behind the terminal.
The system booted quickly. When it asked for a user name and passcode he drew his bag up onto his lap and took out a hackbox. This squat block of circuits and software had several wires that ended in clamps. He pulled the wire cabling up from beneath the terminal and located certain wires and clamped each in turn. The sharp metal teeth bite through the insulation on the wires and shortly the hackbox was connected to the system and started to work it's magic.
He got out his palmcoder and loaded up the interface for the hackbox. He entered the man's name into the hackbox and it began spitting out likely combinations of user name. Then the hackbox began testing likely usernames against every possible hexabase combination. It ran for twenty minutes before finally the prompt disappeared and the sysnet opened up before him.
The first thing he did was aquire a map of the facility. He found a floorplan and it was large and intricately complex, an organic creature more flesh and blood than steel and grease. He could not move the map to his palmcoder and so he studied the routes there on the terminal. He studied routes between here and warehouse and spindle. The elevators within the spindle went to every floor.
He sent out a query for more data. There must have been something about what this was there on the mainframe. However this time his rough intrusion had been found out. Seconds later and the terminal and identification certificates closed off. Not before he got something out. He looked at the downloaded file. It consisted of medical records for a single medical station over the last two months. He studied it. He played with the data a little but no fine tuning was necessary. It was clear and he typed the conclusion into his log.
MET 14-05 records indicate spike in non accidental injuries leading up to civil collapse. None reported in April
He retreived his hackbox and disconnected it from the cables and put it away. Then he stood and made his way to the door and he removed the deadbolt locks and then covered the sensor diode beside the door. It slid back into the wall and he slipped through into the corridor. With a glance behind him at the t-section he went the opposite direction towards storage.
Half the arclights out here had burned out during the surge. The compensater still drizzled smoke around the ceiling. The other half had not and the the corridor was wrapped in bands of dark, and light, which made the dark darker.
Then the corridor opened out into an open area. The ceiling was further than a single floor permitted and along its edges were stairwells up to landings on the next floor. The opening was circular and the sides arced left and right around this bizzare node. He continued straight through the middle.
It was a dark place. He moved carefully and without sound. There was refuse lying underfoot and cluttering tabletops and around the base of potted trees. There was packaging and foam cups and rotted food.
He met a solitary figure in that soundless dark. It looked almost like a child. It stood against the wall with its eyes closed and as Even walked past it opened its eyes which glowed like two blue stars in the dark.
It whispered something and Even stopped.
What did you say.
Master it said again. Master. Then it closed its eyes again.
He went on and shortly heard the sound of servo motors behind him. When he looked back the robot was picking up pieces of refuse and stuffing them into a cavity in its torso. It was a cleaning bot a very old model perhaps 50 years old and very primitive.
There was some tree here. Perhaps a pine. He came over to it and put out his hand. His hand passed straight through the tree. There was nothing there. Just a lie. They were holograms all of them. He looked around.
His entry here had been tentative but it must have come to the attention of the system god that ruled this garden of Eden for without warning the ceiling dissolved into an unbound night sky. Overhead were the twin spirals of the galaxy and the circle of some bright moon.
Fake leaves swayed in a fake breeze. He stopped and turned left without rising and looked into a pool of darkness up on the second floor. Nothing happened for a few minutes. Then part of the darkness detached and the shadow of the shadow grew long across the bulkhead until it merged almost seamlessly with the dark at the head of the stairs.
He stayed still for five minutes then ten. Nothing was visible or became visible. He went on and he detoured around the base of the stairs and kept the place in view as long as he could.
Then he was back into the light. He had come out the other side into the ring. He picked out the blue navigational stripe on the bulkhead and resumed following it immediately leaving the ring behind into a series of short corridors.
He came to one stretch of corridor where the walls were pitted from needlegun fire and two white ammo blocks were dumped in a pool of fresh blood.
There were no corpses of either side but there were multiple trails of blood leading away then left and right. His way was right ahead. He paused here in the junctiok and studied the trails by the fear conquering arclights.
To the right the trail of blood was a slide. Someone dragged away. To the left the blood came in spouts regular as a man's heartbeat. The blood was fresh and not dried and he hesitated only a moment before setting out to the left.
He did not need skill to read the tracks. There was too much blood to lose the trail. And every now and then there would be some bootprints in the blood. The prints were partials as if the person had been walking on the tops of their toes or more likely walking hunched forward to carry something.
Then he found her lying slumped against the wall beneath the bright whiteness of an overhead arclight. She sat in blood that soaked her black pants and described a circle about her. He crouched low over her and tilted her chin to check for pulse with two fingers questing but there was none. When he let go of her chin it fell against the chest of her blue button-up shirt beside her numbered badge. She sat 1
He eased her hands apart and then her arms and then swore and rocked back onto his heels as her intestines and other organs bubbled forward from a vertical slit of her abdomen to fall into her lap. Her intestines glistened there in their membranous casings like fat sausages. It stunk like death and iron and bowels.
He looked away and when he looked back he was studying the holster she wore on her belt. It was a fat bellied thing for the holding of a needler but there was no needler. It was just the holster. He looked around first one way then the other. The needler was somewhere else.
There was one other thing sticking out from the top pocket of her shirt. Her palmcoder. He slipped it out and held it in his hands. It was a recent model. General Systems. He thumbed the contact diode but it did not respond. When he studied it he saw it had been modded with a biometric lockout. He gathered up her hands, they were still warm, and put the coder in one hand and held her hand inside his so that she held the coder firmly. Then he gripped the index finger of her other hand and pressed it against the contact diode. It didn't work. She had been too long dead. He got a sample tube from his kit and opened it and took a rigid strip from the tube and dipped it into her blood and then placed the strip into the tube and sealed it. He got a marker from his kit and marked the sample S001.
He stood and looked about but there were no more tracks. He looked again at the wound that had defenstrated her. No emotion passed his face.
He documented the corpse with a scan and log file.
MET 14-55 dead fem mid30s see scan 003; single vertical slash wound to abdomen; cause unknown; genetic sample taken from victims blood samp001; datacoder taken SN09472743002
There was something else. An anomaly he had not noticed but he saw it now when he went to stand. He reached out and gently gripped her jaw between his gloved fingers and tilted her head to one side. It moved easily as she had not yet started to stiffen. Her hair was tied into a ponytail. Underneath her tightly wound hair was some kind of lump. He used his other hand to remove the band she used to tie her hair. Then her parted her hair to see what there was to see.
There was something beneath her skin. It bulged out at the base of her skull. Perhaps it was a tumour or deformity. He touched the skin and the scalp and it was firm like something was pressed forcefully outwards from inside. He took a scalpel and made a slice down her scalp and another and removed that section of her scalp and hair. Beneath the scalp where the should have been fat or muscle and then bone was some other kind of tissue. He cut it lightly with the scalpel and a red drizzle of blood came from the wound. He cut it again deeper and then this layer of flesh seemed to shiver and then it slid. There was no way he could explain what happened next. It just seemed to flow beneath her flesh and then dived down deeper into her, perhaps into her skull. It left no trace behind save the cavity of her scalp. He captured a portion of its blood that was on the scalpel and put it into a sample container and labled and appended this new information to his log.
There was one more thing he found. As he was backtracking by his palmcoder he saw some shadowed alcove and a high vent shafts that had some kind of cocoon shaped growth about as big as his fist growing down from it. It was high up and beyond his reach. He had seen something like this before. In the security station. He made a personal note then regarding the strange growth but had no theories to offer about what it was or what it meant. He needed more data.