Chapter 336
My time out at the overlook hadn’t fixed anything. In hindsight, it never really did. Standing out and looking at the city only made things quieter. With some music and calmed emotions, it let me think things through. Irritated and aggravated as I was, it just gave my thoughts room to stack and overlap until I couldn’t tell which ones were worth listening to anymore.
I did what I always did when my head got too loud. I buried the problem and went to work on something I understood. I got back on my bike and headed for the speakeasy where I could work on something that actually mattered.
The apartment building seemed to creak judgementally in the cold on my way toward the hidden away bar. I slipped past the concealed doors and layered locks, retreating to somewhere much more familiar and cozy.
I gathered up a box of supplies and then slipped down the shaft near the back. About a quarter of the way to the Underground, far below the speakeasy, I stopped at a small room I’d excavated in my free time while testing my autominers.
I set down the box and let one of the bug-like devices free. The autominer clanked across bare rock, and its six, segmented legs gripped the cave wall like an insect. Its mandibles spilt open, and a beam of condensed plasma lanced out. It sunk into the stone and turned it molten in seconds.
The liquid rock flowed cleanly into a siphon line and vanished into a reinforced tank beneath the chassis. I had to add the tank after the Mk. I’s kept burying themself in stone. It helped, and the intense heat from the tank let me build a small thermoelectric generator that helped the little guy’s batteries alive.
The bot was one of twelve that chewed methodically through the rock beneath the speakeasy. Each one was no larger than my head, though they ended up being much larger and heavier than I initially planned for. That was fine though. They got what I wanted done efficiently outside of their several stops to go automatically recharge and dump their tanks when at capacity.
I’d already checked the streets on the building above, mapped fault lines, and adjusted the schematic dozens of times down to the smallest variable. If something collapsed, it’d be a stroke of misfortune and not because I messed something up.
My plan would expand the small cave out into a warehouse-sized cavern eventually. Already, they mined around support pillars that took the weight of the roof. I’d have to reinforce them later by hand, but for now I liked the raw look of it.
Hmm… or maybe I could build some kind of auto constructor too? That’d be… It wouldn’t be impossible. If I added supply points, and then built in micro foundries into each of them—no, no, that’d be way too complicated for now. I should just focus on getting this place up and ready first. Once I got my own Industrial Foundry, I could look at crazy stuff like that.
So far they only cleared out a space the size of a shipping container. It was just enough for the charging ports siphoning from the city’s electrical grid and slag dumps. Everything was set up so they could automate the process without needing me to constantly hover.
Or, that had been the plan. Instead, I leaned against the wall for way too long watching them work. My mind drifted and time seemed to disappear. There was a comfort in watching my bots work. They didn’t ask questions I didn't have answers for, and would only fail if I messed something up first.
The autominer’s artificial intelligence sat comfortably below the legal thresholds. They had no true autonomy and followed my schematics with pinpoint precision. That simplicity made it so I still had to monitor them for unexpected events, though. Responsibility never truly went away.
I tossed out a Dragonfly to patrol the space, and then forced myself to leave. The cavern would soon dwarf the back rooms I’d been crammed into for months. Soon I’d have the space to work on some larger, grander projects that’d been stuck in my head for months.
The micro nuclear reactor would have to go down first. I could only leach electricity from the city so much before someone noticed. The reactor would be more than enough to power all my machines
I headed back up to Neal’s Foundry and finished some last minute modifications. I slipped a drive into my deck and extracted the dozens of chrome templates that the thing would need to operate. Then I shoved everything I’d need into a portal and left the speakeasy behind.
Cold punched through my poncho as I stepped out onto the city streets. The climate control struggled to keep up with the freezing temperatures of the city. I finally started to fully warm up once I got onto my hoverbike and its heater kicked on.
I paused for a moment while I waited for the bike to warm up. Two connections beat inside my chest warm and close. They were at Neal’s. One was definitely Luna, and the other was most likely Saint. The third pulsed faintly on the other side of Aythryn City in Oldtown, near Blitz base. Mira, probably.
I didn’t probe the connection any deeper. We still hadn’t talked, and pretending that gap was intentional felt a lot safer than admitting I just didn’t know what to say. I’d have a chance soon, though. She was still living with me, so it was only a matter of time. That made it a later problem, which was Future Shiro’s specialty.
I tore out of the garage and dropped into traffic. Snow drifted down in lazy spirals, sticking to neon-lit asphalt and the roofs of passing cars. The city felt muted in the midst of winter, like someone had suddenly turned the saturation down.
I parked on the roof of the apartment complex that swallowed Absolom Clinic and rode the elevator down. The tree into the middle of the courtyard stood leafless and abandoned, with snow dusting its branches. The air felt so much colder than it had the last time, though that might’ve just been me projecting.
The bell above the door chimed softly as I stepped into the clinic. Nael and Saint spoke in low voices near the back of the place. They both looked up at my entrance and their conversation rapidly died.
”Shiro! I was wondering which of you it was.” Saint lifted a hand in greeting and smiled cheerfully.
”Mira’s probably at a gun range.” The words came out sharper than I wanted them to. Even just thinking about her still scraped raw nerves.
”Hey, kid.” Nael smiled warmly. “Here to check up on Iris?”
”And drop something off.” I brushed snow off my poncho and moved deeper into the clinic. “How is she?”
”Not good. I gave Doctor Cumen a call just in case, but comas are…” He sighed and ran a hand through his short-cut hair. “The best we can do is keep her stable and hope for the best.”
”How’s Luna?”
”She looks like you did when Mira went missing. I don’t think she’s slept.” Saint shifted in his seat. “I asked around. Still nothing on Kaynis… you should talk to her. A familiar face might help.”
”Chek.” I didn’t even know what to say. I was bad at this part. Comforting other people… I’d just never gotten the finer grasp of it even with my Perks helping.
Still—Luna had lost almost everything. And, technically, she was my employee now. It wouldn’t be good to watch her self-destruct. I’d try, at least.
I slipped down the clinic’s back hall until I found her hunched beside a bed. She looked smaller than I remembered her curled up beside Iris’s bed. Her eyes were dull, reflecting the light of a deck she furiously worked on.
Iris lay beside her under a pale sheet. Her injuries were all taken care of by Nael, and now she just slept, breathing slow and even under the careful watch of dozens of monitors.
Neither one of them looked up when I entered, though that wasn’t much of a surprise. I took a deep breath and leaned against the doorframe, searching for the right words to say.
“She’s stable.” I said quietly. It didn’t come out quite right, almost like it was something a system would report instead of one person trying to comfort another.
Luna’s head flicked in my direction, sending dull white hair flicking around messily in every direction. Her eyes were bloodshot, and ringed with an exhaustion I recognized all too well. Even as she looked away, her deck whirled in the background. “I-I know…”
“Right.” Of course she did. That was stupid—why did I say that? “Medtech still what you want? When she’s strong enough to be moved, that is.”
“S-strong enough...” Luna echoed hollowly and reached forward. She ran a careful hand down Iris’s arm. It was cut off just below the shoulder. Nael had long removed the mangled chrome. “S-she was always the strongest of all of us.”
I pushed off the doorframe and approached the bed. I tried to keep from looking too closely at Iris’s face. It felt wrong, almost, seeing her comatose like this. Especially considering how she’d always acted and treated me in the past. Seeing her so weak… it made me deeply uncomfortable.
”You should sleep.” I nearly bit my tongue while saying those words. Two strikes for Shiro’s stupid statements.
Luna laughed sharply. “I tried. E-every time I close my eyes, I-I’m dream of her w-waking up and asking me where everyone went.”
“I… sorry, I’m bad at this.”
She looked up at me, eyes meeting my own. Every single Cue of hers radiated worry and exhaustion. “I-I noticed.”
”I can fix a lot of things. I just—I don’t know what to do when I can’t.” Everything was so much easier when I had a plan. Maybe I could try the eidolons? There wasn’t one for healing, but one of them may have an idea for waking her up.
Or maybe even for tracking Kaynis. They weren’t omniscient and hadn’t been much help while I hunted for Mira, but there was still a chance we could find the wolf man with a bit of luck. Or—
”You can’t fix this.” Luna’s shoulders sank. “I-I don’t think anyone can.”
”I…” Ugh—I felt so powerless. First the fight with Mira, and now this? When was the last time I felt this weak? I hated this feeling.
Silence filled the room only broken by the soft beeps of the monitor. It pulsed constantly with the indifference of a machine. Luna went back to clacking away on her deck after a few moments. I got it—that drive to keep working and hoping to turn something up, I mean. That was the exact same mindset I had when diving into Scav dens.
”I-I keep thinking.” Luna’s hands paused on her deck. “I-If only I’d been smarter, stronger, faster—j-just better, things might’ve been…”
“It wasn’t you.” I ran a hand roughly through my hair and backed away. “If I moved quicker—didn’t try to plan for everything—we could’ve gotten there sooner. M-maybe not River, but Kaynis and Iris—“
”T-that’s not fair either.” She sighed and closed her deck. Conflict broke out on her face. Half of her looked like she wanted to blame me, and the other half could recognize that it was just a bad situation all the way around. “Y-you’re kind of exhausting.”
”Sorry.” I didn’t know how I felt about that. I thought I’d been doing good, but recent events were making me rethink that sentiment. “Should I go get Saint? He’s better—“
“So much better.” She chuckled and shook her head. “Y-you have an honest and genuine vibe, though.”
Honest Face struck again. It was one of my oldest and most useful Perks even to this day. I fell silent. I wasn’t sure what I should say, or even what I wanted to say. My head was still a mess.
The monitor beeped between us and we both dropped into our own thoughts “I-I haven’t found Kaynis yet.”
“Neither has Saint… If you find even a hint, though, let me know. Even if I have to break into Raijin, I’ll help you find him.” As long as it wasn’t BosSpace. My chance against the corporate overlord weren’t high.
“Thank you.” Luna curled up in the chair beside Iris’s bed and set her deck down. “Will you—w-will you stay with us? J-just in case she wakes up while I sleep.”
“Of course.” I tossed her my poncho to act like a blanket and took a seat. By the time I made myself comfortable, Luna had already fallen asleep.