Chapter Forty – Trash Panda Crush

“It just… happens. One day you wake up, you back hurts, your knees are beefing, your kidneys feel like they rage-quit, and you you’re pulling more weird pains than a gacha player pulls PNGs. You look at the calendar, realize that you missed a birthday a while ago, and to your horror you realize that you’re twenty-five years old.

Game over, man. You’re past your prime.

From there, it’s all downhill. Everything after that is a speedrun to the grave.

If it wasn’t for the team at Want-Not Inc, I might have unalived myself, for real!

–Want-Not Inc advertisement campaign for New You artificial youthening program, 2038

***

When Rac said ‘I’ll show you his camp’ I kind of expected to follow her there, but we didn’t even leave the parking garage before she turned to me and rather sheepishly asked if I could give her a ride there.

To be fair, she didn’t have her own hovercar, and I suspected she was getting to Gros Baton’s ‘camp’ by means of public transportation.

We could do better than that.

Rac and Nya got into the Bastion, but not before Rac went and grabbed a gun. That big one that looked like an LMG. The same thing she’d been carrying to do merc-work, which had me a little nervous.

“So, where exactly are we headed to?” I asked. “Just any parking garage?”

Rac shook her head while taking a moment to glance through the interior of the Bastion. I think it was her first time inside the ship, actually. “No. Most of the floors aren’t cleared. Baton started near the top. There’s a bridge from floor sixty-five over to the next building over. That one was never involved in the incursion, so it’s safe. That’s how I get in. The floors above that are all cleared out.”

“How many?” I asked.

“Total? I think there’s seventy-five floors above the plate. I don’t know how many underneath.”

“Crap,” I said. “And how deep has Gros Baton and Hedgehog cleared?”

Rac shrugged. “I think down to the fifties or so? They’re doing a few floors a day. Leaving turrets and drones to keep an eye on things.”

“Great,” I said. So only fifty-ish floors of a mega building that needed clearing, right smack in the middle of the city. Or like, adjacent to the middle of the city, kinda. Just a few blocks over, in any case.

We took off in the Bastion, and it was only a couple of minutes before I was circling Mega Building 501. It was one of those nouveau-Brutalist style buildings. That meant that it was basically just a giant black brick, sticking out amongst the other megabuildings in the area.

There was plenty of room to fly around it though, so I did a couple of times, once near the top, to find the entrance to one of the upper-floor parking areas for hover vehicles, then again lower down while scanning the building for trouble.

I was kind of expecting… I don’t know, giant roots or vines or something to be sticking out of it, but there wasn’t anything like that. The building had no windows, though there were some slits for ventilation, a lot of them marked by long streaks of grime that stuck to the side of the building below them.

It looked… about as maintained as any other mega building around.

“Alright,” I said as I moved us back up. We came to a slow stop before the entrance to a parking garage that had a 65 stenciled on it. No guess as to which floor it was on.

There should have been sensors that noticed the Bastion approaching to open the gates, but nothing happened as I came closer. Frowning, I tried to ping the doors through my augs, and only got gibberish as a reply.

“Nya’s got it,” Nya said from behind me. She leaned forwards a bit, one hand grabbing onto a handhold near the cockpit’s ceiling. A moment later the door clunked, then started to slide open.

“Thanks,” I said. “What was up with that?”

“Someone’s AI got creative with the door,” Nya said. “To lock it up tight-tight, nya! But Nya’s used to getting in places she’s not supposed to, and has all the hacker tools!”

I nodded, then started to push in. The garage had cars in it, but also a thick layer of dust that covered just about everything and which washed out as the Bastion moved in. The lighting inside was off, except for some red emergency exit lights and shelter direction illumination by the exits. Not a good sign.

I brought the ship down, set it on stand-by mode, then got up.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Nya slipped out of the room first, but Rac lingered for a moment. “Is she really a samurai?” Rac asked in a low whisper.

“Nya heard that!” Nya shouted back. “With her cool samurai cat ears!”

“She is,” I confirmed. “Didn’t the old cat lady act give it away?”

“I guess,” Rac said. “I… will you grow out of the cat thing?”

“Hey, I never grew into it,” I said. “That was pushed on me against my will.”

Nya was at the entrance, arms crossed, tail twitching. “What do you mean, old?” she asked. “You, young one, tell Stray Cat that Nya isn’t old!”

“I mean…”: Rac hesitated. “How old are you?”

“Nya is a youthful thirty-nine!”

“That’s twenty-one years older than me,” I said.

“Twenty-three older than me,” Rac said. “Or twenty-four, maybe?”

Nya stumbled back with a ‘hnnrg’ and a hand pressed over her heart. “Nya is… an old cat lady. No! How did this happen? Nya was so cute and youthful just yesterday!”

“Right, so, where’s Baton’s camp thing?” I asked.

“This way,” Rac said as she walked past Nya, ignoring the old lady’s theatrics with practiced ease. Rac might have been in this part of the building before, or at least, she might have a map of it on her augs, because she led us straight to the exit and didn’t even hesitate before opening the door up manually by means of a half-hidden handle that needed to be folded out of the door.

I supposed it was meant to open automatically, but without power, it defaulted to requiring a bit more of a physical touch.

The corridors up here were wide, and dark as balls. I had decent low-light vision on my cybernetic eye, and I imagined that Nya had better with hers. Rac resorted to pulling out a flashlight with one of those blindingly bright LED bulbs on the end, which… did the trick, really.

“The place was mostly evacuated the day after the incursion started,” Rac said.

“Mostly?” I asked.

“Top floors first,” Rac said. “That’s where all the rich sorts were. There were two big corps in this building. Uh, a weapon’s R&D place, and another called Avenir… Bioworks, I think.”

“That’s never a good sign,” Nya said. “Bio-anything is bad.”

I shrugged. “Could be an innocent pharmaceutical mega corp,” I said. Then I met her gaze and chuckled darkly. Yeah, right.

“Anyway, they had c-suite people up here, their families, a bunch of nice stuff,” Rac said. “That got moved out of here pretty quickly.” She turned the light towards a pair of trolleys that looked abandoned, they had a few pieces of luggage on them still. The effort from the people doing the evacuation? If they were pulling luggage out, then it couldn’t be too bad.

“What about below?” I asked.

Rac winced. “Not so good. Gros Baton can tell you more, though. Elevator’s here.”

She moved us into an atrium space of sorts. The nice kind, with a lot of benches, some faux-trees, and large monitors on the walls. There was even a massive aquarium with… a lot of dead fish in it, next to a little hair stylist boutique place.

“The elevators work?” I asked.

“Some of them,” Rac said. “Gros Baton made some jokes about working on our glutes by taking the stairs every day. Then when I kicked his shins about it and had him run up five floors because I ‘forgot’ something, he got the elevators working again.”

I snorted. Okay, that was cute. I wasn’t gonna tell her, though.

“So they do work,” I said. I had some interesting memories about elevators.

“Yeah. And if they don’t, there’s two samurai that can probably rub their brain cells together and figure something out, right?” she asked.

“You used to respect samurai,” I said.

“I respect some of them still,” she said.

And I supposed I wasn’t on that shortlist, huh? I reached out to the elevator with my augs, and a moment later it pinged open.

We got in, and Rac tapped the button for floor Sixty. It only took a half minute for us to be there, stepping out into another atrium that couldn’t be more different.

There were lights all over, wires strung up on mounts jammed into the ceiling, and a dozen deployable turrets fanned out across the space. A generator was rumbling in the corner, probably alien tech since it wasn’t giving off smoke, and there were several tables and workbenches scattered around.

Gros Baton was there, a styrofoam bowl in one hand, plastic spoon in the other, and eyes wide like the kitten caught with their hand in the cookie jar. “Raton?” he asked. “C’est quoi ça?”

“Yo,” I said with a little wave. “This is a welfare check, don’t resist.”

***

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