Beckett yawned. It had been a long day of nothing on the western entrance of the city. People came and when. Nothing particularly interesting happened today. He was told, as he clocked into this shift, that a Rail Drive activated sometime yesterday in perfect view of the kiosk. Beckett missed all the cool stuff. His job was mostly to do nothing. Most of these kinds of jobs were like that. He was the human element to a job no human needed to do. Mostly. Everything was automated, a gruff hulking man carrying an equally hulking antelope asked him where fastest way to Akasha was on this side of the city. He apparently hadn’t been around for a while, so Beckett passed a map to him and explained how to find the lift. That was going to be the most interesting thing today for sure. He was nodding off, wondering what kind of dinner was getting served down by the plaza.

*wrappatap tap*

Mmm, maybe it’ll be Szechuan food. That spice really scratched the Deepdowner in him.

“Uh, hello!” A person was tapping on the glass of his booth.

Oh, people. People?! He sputtered out of his daydream. Suddenly sitting up straight with a smile, Beckett asked, “How may I help you!”

“We’ve got an individual here for registration.”

Oh, fun! Wait… No, not so fun. Beckett hated babies. They whined almost as much as he wanted to. Beckett mused with the half-formed idea of babies knowing the boring sort of affair life was, and that being why they cried. Certainly, that is usually why he cried. He would surely have to write this down in a poem or something, see how much he could make on the market.

“Excuse me.” Beckett realized he must have still been stuck in a half daydream. “I’m sorry, sir. Where is the little scamp? So brave crossing the Suburbs.”

“Not a baby. Her.” The man in tattered black clothes pointed to a gangly, blood-stained… thing. Was that even a human? The blank copper-stained visage made his skin crawl. His heart halted in his chest and he began to sweat.

“Hello!” It gave a friendly wave. His heart began beating again.

“Hello.” He responded unsteadily. “So, you say it, I mean, she hasn’t been registered anywhere yet? Surely you must have made a mistake.”

The man leaned on the glass and brought his head close to the mic, “No mistake. She’s never stepped foot into a civilized piece of land. Not even once.”

“Wow.” This day was actually pretty intriguing.

~~~

“So there I was, being chased by invisible dogs when BAM, I trip over one of them an fall down a hill. I was like ‘noooo’ and the wolves were like, ‘awooooo’ in my head. They do that, howl in your head. So anyways, I was like ‘hiyaaa, fuck you puppo,’ and—” Bec sat on a medical table recounting a story to a doctor happily humoring the bubbly, enthusiastic girl.

When her shift started and she’d seen the bloody blank thing just sitting there in her waiting room, she’d just been dreading the day with yet another unhygienic psychopath. The shock came when the person disrobed to reveal a cute girl with a hell of a story to tell. The numbers on her medi-slate were odd, and the girl was even odder. The girl revealed herself to be just covered in scars and, while the doctor trained to recognize these injuries from textbooks, she hadn’t expected to see a mature individual with so many. Scars from lacerations, burns, and what appeared to be at least 3 different gunshot wounds. She glanced at the medi-slate over and over again puzzling over this enigma. She just had to ask, screw the medical history, she wanted to know right now.

“Do you know that you’re completely blind?”

Bec stopped midsentence. “Blind? Of course! That’d be a wild thing not to notice.”

The doctor rolled her eyes. Wild, was this girl raised by both wolves… and old fogies? Ignoring the spectacularly dated response, she continued, “Well, your eyes have taken some serious damage. I’m afraid I’m going to have to recommend you to an ophthalmologist. That’s an eye doctor.”

Bec pouted. “I know what an ophthalmologist is. I maybe unregistered but I’ve been to school!”

“Well, when you find me a school that allows unregistered students, I’ll believe you.” The doctor smiled.

The checkup was brief but enlightening. This girl was barely even on the scale when it came to healing. It’s almost like she was born a year ago. The doctor squinted at the girl kicking her legs anxiously on the table. “How old are you exactly?”

“Mmm, I think 19?”

The lady looked at the medi-slate. Yup, that checked out. She tapped the box on the slate that said Not a rapidly aged clone.

~~~

Bec was tired from all the tests done to her, so when she was relieved to find Black and Scarlet waiting for her at the entrance of the hospital. Her clothes were clean but still damaged. The whole building laid at the foot of the city as a requirement to encourage hurt people to get medical help as soon as they could get within the Semifield, the term for the area outside the city that would be within the pulsing range of the Field. Bec learned that the wave of energy pulling the Fabric from the air was called the Field and pulsed with the city being its epicenter. The Field has been expanding slowly over the years so, while the land directly around the city now constantly lies in its range, the term Semifield stuck. This was all cool lore that Bec would gladly read all about, but she’d rather learn diegetically.

“Bec, you aren’t a character in a story, you would just learn normally” Al chided her.

As they walked through the permeable kinetic shield, a whole world was revealed.

“Could have fooled me, Al!” Bec was giddy. Her eyes wandered from building to building. If these things were even buildings! In front of Bec were green spires creeping like ivy towards the sky. THE SKY. INDOORS. “It’s like a different plane of existence.”

“It basically is. We’re in a pocket dimension. Every ‘floor’ of the tower is actually just an engineered realm unto its own. There are entire floors of ecosystems with animals yet to be discovered, geography unexplored and still growing.” Black shook his head. “I don’t know how AmiGo does it, but damn is he good. Sometimes I wonder if even he knows all the secrets of the tower…”

“AmiGo is a woman, and you know it!” Scarlet punched Black in the shoulder. She gazed at the sunny city streets with a bustling crowd exploring the many stores. She took in a deep breath of fresh air.

“AmiGo?”

Black and Scarlet exchanged an inscrutable look. “We’ll let you figure that one out.”

“It’s the core central AI that runs the city. I know Al wants to merge with it.”

Scarlet gave out a short, forced laugh. “I hope you take your time with that. Al is your friend, isn’t he?”

Black shrugged. “I was hoping she’d sell ‘em off and buy us a drink.”

Scarlet winced. “Don’t be so cruel, Black. He’s Bec’s only friend even close to her age.”

“Yeah, well, let’s hope that changes. The City offers many pleasures. Real friends are one such luxury.”

They stepped onto a cable car and got whisked upwards towards a tier of city Bec only now could see from their slowly rising vantage point. It was an ecological city. That’s clearly what it was. A tree the size and shape of a skyscraper loomed over their heads. A building with a central waterfall poured down to a lake. Bec rubbed her fingers against the glass to get a clearer picture and realized the lake was spotted with boats and had beaches full of people. A set of rivers stretched their fingers through streets and neighborhoods and what looked like gondolas were dropping people off at different points across the city.

Bec couldn’t help but ask, “what is this place called? Just the city?”

Black chuckled as he lounged in the soft chairs of the cable car. “No, no, no. Each floor has its own name.”

Scarlet finished Black’s thought, “This floor is called… Avalon.”