《Splintered Worlds》Chapter 14: Ripples II

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The retina scan shot a wave of green light into Lucas's left eye.

He flinched, as he always did, but pressed the nail of his index finger deep into his thumb. The slight pain that swelled usually helped relax him through mild distraction.

And he needed to relax. The scanner wasn't just identifying him. It was measuring his pupil dilation. Looking for signs of excitement or anxiety.

But Lucas was nothing if not professional. The light faded and the doors hissed open.

Storage unit 2359 was unremarkable. Just like any of the other of the vast mega-structures in the city.

City. Lucas thought that was too kind of a word for what this place had become. City spoke of people and vehicles and noise. Of life.

Here, everyone might as well have been dead.

Like all the storage units, it was run automatically. By droids, mainly. Robots built for specific purposes: cleaning, transportation, maintenance, repairs. Most droids were small and unobtrusive, but some were eerie facsimiles of humans, just without the skin. As if it had been peeled back to reveal that humanity was just a metal creation all along.

There were still repairs beyond droids though, thankfully. And that had given Lucas his way in.

He stepped in the lift and pressed for the 24th floor. It lurched up violently and, a second later, stopped at least as jarringly. These lifts weren't meant for humans and they always caused Lucas a few moments of mild nausea after usage.

The light was soft purple in the corridor. Helped the droids' visual sensors operate at maximum capacity, so he'd been told. The corridor itself was metal. Cold chrome. No need for pretty wallpaper or cheerful paint here.

Lucas had needed to disconnect his boss before he'd entered the building. Any illegal communication in or out if the storage unit would be pounced upon. No way to send signals to his target undetected, from outside of it.

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Inside though, that was a little easier.

He turned into a second corridor and counted the rooms until he found it.

A second retina scan. He dug his nail deeper into his thumb until a splash of blood dropped onto the chrome floor. The door opened and he walked in.

Lucas called them coffins. The hundreds of glass tubes that stood in eight long rows across the huge room. Each tube contained a naked body floating upright in gel, dozens of tiny wires running from their heads and spines into the frosted top of their unit.

Two of the coffins that he passed were empty. He guessed the virus was doing its job. Not that killing was its primary purpose.

Finally, he found her.

The repairs he was meant to make -- a connection to a neighboring coffin that he'd rigged to break, on his previous visit -- should only take a few minutes for him to carry out. And his time would be monitored closely. He would have to fix the problem and speak to her within the time.

Lucas needed to jog her memory or he wasn't going to get paid. More than that, his boss wouldn't be happy with him. And that meant trouble. As it was, Lucas was already shouldering the blame for her memory loss. His boss saw it firmly as his responsibility to get sorted.

Lucas slid the bag off his back and set to work.

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