Sheathed in Silicon

Chapter Two



The sky was nickel green even through the sepia, and the atmosphere overhead above seemed to boil. There was no sun to speak of, only the glow of LED's from a million different monoliths that made up the skyline. They dominated everything and were singularly brutal. Little care was given to aesthetics; this was entirely unlike the cities he remembered.

Sean could not fully grasp the astonishingly tall height from which he gazed upon Metro. From where he could see, there was no bottom to the world. Even with him not being anywhere near the ledge of the causeway he stood upon, he felt the full gravity of the endless fall that awaited anyone unfortunate enough to spill over the ridge. The legs of the shell refused to obey his will. They crumpled at the waist. The machine's knees hit the steely floor with a loud thud, and only by some autonomic response did the use of its now extended arms keep the entire shell from falling flat on its face.

“I'm so high up,” he thought, feeling an awful sense of vertigo that went along with being perched from such a height. “Where--”

Something struck the body, and it keeled involuntarily over on its side. With Sean's vision turned about, his eyes were greeted by a giant made of steel towering over him. How had this massive thing crept upon him? The how became entirely unimportant as he appraised the golem. Its fists were the size of catcher's mitts, its feet were large enough to crush a man's chest, the entire thing lacked musculature, but it was square and bulky to a degree that was only capable of exuding raw, industrialized power. On its chest was a glowing banner that read "OMNITECH ENFORCOM," the words scrolled along horizontally one letter at a time.

“Extract yourself fifty feet away from these premises.” Each word was a crushing baritone that reminded Sean of a muscle car's engine firing on all cylinders.

Sean pushed the shell up from the ground but was only capable of lifting the upper-body while the legs and hips continued to rest on their side paralyzed. He felt like a deer caught in the headlights.

“You will comply.” The Enforcer's right arm began to unfold with a hiss, shifting about like a Rubik's cube being shuffled.

"Wait." He pleaded and began to push the shell up from the ground a second time, begging the legs to move. "I can't even control this thing!" Sean could barely make the useless chassis that he was now slaved to walk with his full concentration, let alone try to make it run in the face of crippling, imminent danger.

“10, 9, 8...” The arm continued to manifest into something altogether different. A large arrow appeared in his vision, pointing to the left as if it were a GPS instructing him to turn. Sean whipped the head that housed his mind around, and he noticed a waypoint that identified itself as exactly 50 feet away from where he currently was. “COMPLY.” The Giant repeated.

In a desperate scramble, Sean started to drag the shell against the floor, causing an uncomfortable sound to cry out as the various materials that made up its form ground out against the steel. He was putting that polished finish from Left through some real hell in just the five minutes he had been out in the real world.

A spotlight flicked on and surrounded Sean, tracking the movements he forced the shell to make as it crawled away. “5, 4, 3...”

"Please!" He screamed back at the Enforcer. The unfamiliar voice of the shell rose several octaves above what he had previously been capable of. The waypoint was tantalizingly close, so close that it practically filled most of his vision. Sean reached out with one of the shell's hands and drove it straight into the bronze point of light. As he did, it burst into a thousand digitized cubes.

"Your compliance has been noted," The Giant stated mechanically, and the light around him cut out, "OMNITECH thanks you. Remain productive." He could hear the OMNITECH Enforcer begin to stomp away. Each step was a piston driving itself into the floor.

Sean lowered the body's head until it brushed against the ground, getting detritus on the mask. He began to sob pitifully again. All he wanted was to curl up into a ball and cry. It was then that he noticed the arm of the shell was extended precariously over the side of the causeway. The vox emitted a feminine gasp. He pushed away from the edge with all of the haste that he had mustered when trying to escape from the Giant's gaze.

He leaned back on the shell's posterior and kept the thing upright with both arms flung behind its back, legs splayed out in front. Now given a moment, he could really focus on his new surroundings. Between the narrow gaps of the buildings were lines of movement that reminded him of ants following their invisible trails. There were many of them, and each was carefully positioned in the air. Sean wondered what these were until a tremendous brick of a vehicle flew by the causeway at blinding speed and utter silence. He watched the brick shuttle away as it shunted down one of the "alleys" between the skyscrapers.

“Cars...” He gawped. “They have fucking flying cars.”

Sean, at last, pushed the shell back onto its unsteady feet and wiped the debris from the shell's faceplate with one stippled palm. He still couldn't fathom why the palms of the shell looked like that, but at least he could FEEL with them, sort of anyway. The sense of touch was nowhere near sensitive as his hands, his real hands had been. The way the shell's own provided feedback reminded him of trying to touch things while wearing thick gloves.

Sean took stock of his situation as he overlooked the unending metropolis. He could feel basically nothing. He could smell nothing. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't eat. Couldn't drink. He didn't even know if he could sleep. Sean balled up the hands of the shell. At least he could feel that.

"Fuck," the shell's soft voice emitted.

Then something occurred to him, something that was most perplexing. Sean had done well enough to stay away from tall buildings in his life, but even he knew that as you went up higher, the winds got stronger. Much stronger. Strong enough to literally make skyscrapers sway, and yet here there was no evidence of wind blowing. He reached out with one of the shell's hands to confirm his theory. Nope, nothing. He cast the shell's head upwards and gazed at the roiling, angry sky overhead.

What exactly had happened to this world? Sean wondered. This wasn't the Earth he knew, not even close.

He lowered the shell’s head back down and studied the innumerable pillars. While he noticed that they all shared the same shape and were dotted with light, a few of their number glowed radiantly from their corners. They seemed to pulse in time with one another, as if they were a great, synchronized heart beat. Did that mean something?

Then in the guts of three of the cyclopean towers was a trio of pinpoints of light. They glared directly into Sean's vision. Each shone like beacons in a sea, but it felt to him as if he were staring directly in the sun. Individually they burst forth from their own skyscraper. One was on the left, one in the center, and one on the right. The lights continued to grow brighter and grow larger before dimming, as if they were stars collapsing in on themselves about to go nova. Which was exactly what they did.

In perfect unison, the lights came back and expanded at such a rate that it beggared belief. In the first few milliseconds of their expansion, the facial projector's eyesight cut out. Going from pure sepia to perfect darkness. Deep inside, Sean knew what those lights were, but he could not believe it. It was impossible, but this day had been full of impossibilities. He felt a chill in his mind as the panel that gave him sight was overwhelmed and shutdown. Fear filled him, with the possible chance of him being blind began to take hold. No sooner than it had come, the terror from the lack of sight was shaken out of him as the causeway began to buck violently under the stress of a massive earthquake.

The previously absent wind had arrived. It blew into the shell's frame with the power of a mighty gale. Even blind, he instinctively willed the shell to raise its arms and protect him from the gust that threatened to knock the unsteady body over.

The legs of the shell shook particularly hard. He willed the shell to stand. "Not again!" he shouted to himself. Through the din of the world crashing down around him, the shriek of his new voice went without notice. To his surprise and sickened delight, these legs did not fail.

Several moments went by before the sound, the shaking, and the wind ebbed. Strings of code ran down his sight at such a clip that it was impossible to parse. Everything went fuzzy like a TV tuned to a dead channel. Seconds later, his sepia world blinked back on -- channel found.

Three mushroom clouds greeted him as the vision found the city once more. The trio of disasters emanated from the titanic buildings where the lights had beamed. The unspeakably tall lengths of the skyscrapers were now stunted. Fiery plumes replaced much of what had visibly been cement and steel. Each of the structures now sagged under their weight and began to cave in. Smoke and dust vented from their sides as they crashed down on themselves with miserable groans. They disappeared into the ether below. There was no sound to be heard as they soared towards the ground and out of sight.

What was this insanity? How many people had just died in nuclear oblivion? Would this happen again? Would it happen to him? He began to think of a billion different ways that things were about to get even worse as if he hadn't already reached his nadir.

Almost in response to his panic and definitely in response to the nuclear weapons that had just detonated, three incalculably gargantuan waves of light bronze reached up from the dark. Each one collided with the husks of the skyscrapers. The force sent the remains of the structures reeling, bending, and fragmenting under stress. Sprays of the bronze went shooting up into the air as they broke upon the skeletal skyscrapers. Each wave sent mists of bronze droplets all through the air. They were tiny from Sean's perspective, but he knew in reality that every single one was easily the size of a city bus, if not larger. Instead of breaking well past the ruined structures, they stopped as if frozen like ice.

"What the fuck," he cried and then repeated, "What the fuck."

Sean could not comprehend how such a thing was possible, how such a thing could be. Every ounce of his being screamed at him to run away, that this thing could only bring doom upon him and everything around him. He was but a speck in comparison to this ocean of bronze. All he could do was fear what should happen if the tides were to shift towards him. Before he'd finally managed to get the legs of the shell to obey him, now he was thoroughly incapable of producing the will to run or even just walk away from the precipice. Terror had locked the joints up cold.

The bronze goo began to stretch above the husks, reaching for the sky, spreading itself apart, and creating a lattice that gleamed and shimmered. On and on, the waves drove up. Twisting and shifting until they reached the same height as the buildings were before the detonations. Then the waves broke, the tops of the spiraling towers of bronze popped, and the rest of the bulk scattered in a wash of metallic foam, falling back down the emptiness from where it had come. Steam wafted off what remained behind.

It was impossible, inconceivable. The buildings had been fully restored as if Sean had not just witnessed enormous portions of them being atomized. There would have been no way to tell what just happened to them, save that the newly rebuilt skyscraper's edges glowed. The ocean of bronze had somehow rebuilt them in the span of a few heartless beats.

None of this seemed possible. None of this could be possible. Yet it was, Sean knew that now. Only a world this mad could astound the most vivid of imaginations, outdo the worst nightmares, confound the most bizarre dreams. This world was preposterous. And only a world like this could have been real for he could never have possibly conjured it up.

-

All was silent in the endless metropolis once more. The quiet was unnerving. This city was more extensive than anything he believed to be possible. Silently he wondered where it ended if it ended at all. Sean was lost in thought when he heard the sound of soft padding, like a cat walking on carpet.

"Thinking about jumping? You should know you can’t."

The voice that popped behind him intoned. Sean was startled by the sound in the soundless place. Their vocoder was boisterous, good-spirited, like a friend from days long past had stumbled upon him. Sean twisted out of his malaise and struggled to turn the shell around. Evidently, the hips and spine could only bend so far before he was forced to step round. This must have been what Left had meant about a restricted range of motion. No one was there to greet him.

"Down here."

It now dawned on Sean how limited his new vision was. Not only was he forced to see everything in sepia, what he could see above and below him had narrowed significantly. Why was that? He was dumbstruck as he realized the answer. His eyes. Sean could not move eyes that he no longer had. The only way for him to change his eye line now demanded that he move the head of the shell.

"Hey, are you listening to me?"

Sean tilted the head down to look at what had been addressing him and found a most bizarre sight. Still, he decided it was rather tame when compared to oceans of bronze that could rebuild towers of Babel.

On the ground was a man, or rather the top half of a man. His body seemed to be made of mold injected plastic. The face was frozen in a permanent smile. Full lips, cheeks hit with blush, a chin that you could cut stone on, and perfectly coiffed hair. In place of real clothes, there was a simulacrum of them molded into his body. To Sean, it seemed that the man was wearing the top half of a dark brown tuxedo with a black bow tie. There was even an imitation pocket square protruding from his chest. He hovered the bottom of his body off the ground, placing his weight on the palms of his hands in order to mimic legs.

"What are you?" Sean asked slowly, each word lazily rolling out.

"A bartender. What do I look like, a monkey?" The bartender lowered himself and scratched at his side with one arm and the top of his head with the other, "Oh-Oh-Ah-Ah!" The line between where the bartender's lips contacted glowed with each word, "What's it to you anyway?"

"No-nothing," Sean stammered, still thoroughly off-balance in more ways than one. "You were the one who started talking to me."

"I suppose I did," the blinking between the bartender's lips continued. He lifted a hand and pointed it at Sean, "Let me guess, you were just defrosted."

"I was, at least, that's what I've been told," Sean admitted. "This hardly seems real, but what else could it be?"

"Don't worry, kid," the bartender replied, "I don't think anyone truly believes this place is real." The bartender got a little too friendly and slapped Sean's shell on the shin and laughed. "I mean, if I saw what you did on the first day I was reborn, I'd think I was going bananas too."

Sean was silent, not sure of what to make of this. The bartender was right. Maybe he was going to lose his mind if he didn't find some sort of stability soon, some way of just slowing things down to a more manageable speed. Perhaps ground everything back to some kind of totem of reality.

“Could you tell me what just happened?”

The bartender sighed, "Ah, kid. If I had to explain it we'd be here all day, and trust me, there are more important things."

“More important than that?” He stressed with the word ‘that’ with some incredulity and tilted the shell’s head back towards the impossible.

"You'd be surprised. These grand scale events will rarely impact you." The barkeep paused and made an awkward shrug by raising and lifting his body, "You're simply not important enough." The bartender backed off slightly and appraised Sean's shell, "I see that they at least took the time to clean you up before kicking you out on the street."

“Yeah,” Sean was suddenly all too aware of the fact that the bartender was looking the shell over. He crossed an arm in front of its breasts and another over the groin. “Could you not stare?”

"Sorry, sorry." The bartender did a little spin on one hand and turned back about to face Sean before bowing in apology; well, as much as a man without a waist could bow. "My mother would be ashamed of me looking over a vulnerable girl in such a state."

“Bad guess,” Sean muttered angrily.

The bartender took a moment to process Sean's meaning and then figured it out. "That's a rather unlucky roll of the dice."

He rubbed at his chin. "My manners have been atrocious today. I should have gotten your name."

“Sean.”

"That's a good one. I knew a few Sean's back in my day." The bartender picked himself off the ground again with his arms and 'walked' backward a few feet away from Sean. "I don't really have a name anymore, but I guess you can call me Barkeep, Bartender, or just Bar if it's important to you." The barkeep raised a hand up to Sean for him to shake, but Sean ignored the gesture.

"Alright, Bar," Sean's mind got to turning. Perhaps he could use this man to figure out how to find some blind spots in the Binder. Maybe he didn't even have a Binder. Sean felt a little jolt of pain. That was odd. "Can I ask you a few questions?"

"Okay, but make them quick. We should get outta here."

“Were you brought back like me?”

“Yup!” Bar answered loudly. “Although I am not sure I would do it again if you offered me the chance.”

“Uh-huh, and what are you doing here?”

“Always good to know more people like us.” The barkeep drummed his fingers on the ground. “Besides, they don't really give you a handbook before you're tossed out like garbage.”

“How noble,” Sean said with some sarcasm.

"I wouldn't call it that. It's more like... you scratch my back, I scratch yours." Bar replied. "Besides, you already thought I was a monkey, so a little mutual grooming couldn't hurt."

“And what could I possibly do for you?” Sean hugged the arms of the shell tighter against its body, trying to cover up as much of it as possible.

Bar took notice of what Sean was doing. "Nothing like that. Believe me!" The barkeep continued, "And it isn't what you can do for me, but rather what you can do for us."

“Which is?”

"Well, some of us are a little less able-bodied than yourself." He waved a hand up and down his shell to exemplify exactly what he was getting at. "And a few are much worse off if you can imagine."

“I see.”

“Yeah, it's tough out here, kid.” The Barkeep sank low. “I'd like to help you if you're willing to work with us.”

“In exchange for me carrying you around or whatever, you'll tell me how to disable this Binder?” As Sean said those words, he felt the nub of something at the back of his mind grow large as it unleashed a zap of pain straight into his mind. Curiously, as he shivered from the hit, so did Bar.

“You shouldn't have said that." Bar said sadly. "Talking about disabling the B-word is forbidden around these parts. Not worth the pain."

"It's sympathetic, you know," Bar informed him. "You say it, and everyone nearby feels it. If you're gonna think that sorta stuff, keep it in your head. No reason to make everyone else suffer."

Sean winced. Perhaps getting around this thing was going to be tougher than he thought, especially since just talking about it was penalized with pain.

“I can take it.”

“Not all can.” Bar lifted a hand, cautioning Sean against making the mistake a second time. “Second piece of advice, the pain only gets worse each time you break a rule.”

Bar turned around after telling Sean about this little bit of horrible news and began to clamber off, one palm at a time.

"Now come on," Bar called back. It was then Sean noticed that his head was fixed in place, which meant he was basically just shouting ahead, "Follow me, and I'll show you to our home."

Sean stepped away from the lip of the causeway and began to walk on unsteady legs down the endless road that stretched out before them.

-

They had been walking for what felt like nearly half an hour. Every once in a while, Sean would look over to his left at the featureless wall of the skyscraper. Just to see if anything had changed, nothing had. Now and then, he'd notice a rectangular outline carved into the face. The pair said nothing to one another as Sean forced the shell to walk behind Bar. His concentration would falter at times, and the shell would nearly trip over its own legs. There had to be an easier way. He could control the arms and head well enough, but the legs felt as if they'd never stop eluding him.

At last, he broke the silence, "How much longer?"

"We're nearly done with the first leg."

First leg? Sean thought. This was going to be one hell of a hike.

Sean was inherently distrustful of the barkeep. He doubted that new friends just appeared out of thin in air. They certainly hadn't when he was alive. but it wasn't like he had much choice. This guy, Bar, was the only one who had shown up after his expulsion from the Revivification Center. The dark crevices of his mind began to wonder as to what his real motives were. Perhaps he would be made into scrap, or turned into some sort of living sex doll, or there was always potentially a fate even worse than either of those that he hadn't thought of.

“At last,” Bar declared.

Their first destination was a portion of the wall that had been jammed open. A pile of scrap kept the door from slamming down to the ground and sealing up once more. It wasn't a particularly large gap, but Sean estimated that he could probably make the shell crawl on its hands and knees through there. Bar stopped at it and turned back towards Sean, one hand on the bottom of the pried open door.

“Just through here.”

Sean could not make out what lay beyond the threshold, but it was dark. Anxiety sloshed about in his mind. “In there?” Fear in the unfamiliar voice of the shell dripped out of the vocoder.

“Yeah.” Bar slipped inside and out of sight, wrapped in the darkness.

Sean turned the head of the shell about, trying to see if he was being watched. No one was nearby. No one had been following them. He wasn't sure why he thought there might. Perhaps it was just the Binder sitting in the back of his mind like a voyeur.

“Come on in,” Bar called to him. “The water's fine.”

For a moment, he considered running away, but to where? There wasn't any other place that he could go to. Sean forced the legs of the shell to lower themselves unsteadily, the knees brushed up against the ground, and he reached out with the blunted hands to feel about in front of him. He was definitely going to die, wasn't he?

A hand grabbed one of the shell's without warning, and Sean cried out in terror.

"Relax. It's just me." He guessed that Bar was in front of him, but Sean couldn't find him through the gloom. "Get on up. It's time to walk."

“I can't see,” he said as he began to force the shell up from the ground, Sean realized that Bar was still holding onto the shell's left hand.

"I figured as much." Bar began to tug at his shell. As he did, Sean heard a rhythmic thumping sound just ahead of him. That was probably Bar's body smacking into the ground while he dragged himself along with one palm instead of two. "Just hold on. I'll guide you to where we've got to be."

Sean made the shell squeeze onto Bar's hand as if it were a lifeline. He was afraid that he'd be left alone in the black that filled the space around him. He was worried he'd be unable to find his way back out should he need to run.

“I'm going to let go of you for a minute, have to fix the lights.”

Bar pulled his hand free. Sean could hear him carefully balance his body on both palms as he walked away from Sean. A few seconds later, he came to a stop. There was a sound that reminded Sean of his father pulling the ripcord on his lawnmower. Rather than the noise of an engine starting, however, the night suddenly vanished under the oppressive glare of a thousand hidden lights.

They stood in a wide room that had a ceiling that stretched up several stories. The room itself was full of junk, most of which Sean couldn't identify. The piles looked vaguely like broken electronics or robotics.

Leaning against the ground in front of Sean was Bar. He had pulled a previously unseen cable from the back of his head and jammed it into a control board that'd been cannibalized from the wall behind him. Wires hung between the panel Bar held in his hand and the section that was now missing.

“That better?” Bar asked, almost sounding concerned.

“Much.” Sean began to step towards Bar while he looked around at all of the piles of junk and defunct instruments. “What is this place?”

"This is an antechamber," Bar explained as if he were telling Sean the difference between up and down. "This is not." Sparks flew from the cable that connected Bar to the board, and lights on it flashed. The wall behind the barkeep slid apart and revealed that this was just the entrance to something far more significant.

Bar unplugged himself from the board. The cable whipped about and disappeared into the back of his head. He then slipped the panel flush back into place where it practically disappeared and turned around before continuing inside. Sean had the shell follow close behind.

-

Bar began by asking a question of Sean, “Do you know the word 'arcology'?”

Sean shook the shell's head and then realized there was no way Bar could have possibly seen the gesture from behind his tottering form. “No,” he replied as he began to take in the sights.

The new room, if it could be called that, seemed to stretch on for a mile in each direction. Surrounding the expanse were walkways jutting from its walls, paths of them crisscrossed in the air overhead and below as they led from one side of the interior to another. The walls that Sean could see and the floor he stood upon were made out of odd containers with handles flush with their faces. Almost all of them had a single light blinking around the handle. Others were dim. The containers weren't particularly big. They reminded him of a good-sized safety deposit box.

The ceiling overhead was vaulted, and a single beam of light projected from the center illuminated the entire expanse. The dome reminded Sean of his visit to the Hagia Sophia. There wasn't much difference, save that this one was so high up and so broad that it might have been a true relic from heaven. Tan colored clouds hovered and danced with one another just below the ceiling. He was taken aback by the enormity of it all as he processed that this room was large enough to create its own weather system.

He also noticed little things, such as the flocks of drones that flew around. They soared through the air, perhaps performing little duties throughout the vast complex, but he was wrong. One from the droves above dove down and came to perch upon a nearby pillar made of the boxes. It was an ornithopter, a mechanical bird. The apparatus rested only for a moment before another of its kind flew over and pestered it away.

Moss and vines clung to the walls, water poured through ancient cracks. It was a collision between three equally powerful aesthetics. One was industrial and sleek, the other was old and European, and then there was the verdant sheen that seemed to be steadily swallowing everything. This place would have been majestic if it wasn't for the extensive disrepair.

Sean gazed down at the bottom of the room. He quickly regretted his decision to look. In the glimpse that he sole, Sean noticed the water streaming from all across the chamber now collected at the center. There was a natural waterline that was marked on the walls, soon it would rise above that. Perhaps one day it would overflow flood the entire complex.

“Well, this basically is one.”

“One what?” Sean had been lost in his sightseeing.

"An Arcology." Bar had begun to move again, forcing Sean to cut the lollygagging short. "Keep up."

Connected to the walls were strange vertical gantries that were mated to the walls via sliding frames. Most of the gantries slid this way and that, moving up to the boxes seemingly at random, connecting to them for a split second and then drifting away to another and performed the same action. Sean wondered what exactly they were doing and what was in these boxes that seemed to make up everything.

Bar started to unpack his explanation once he realized that Sean had no idea what he was saying.

"An Arcology is a self-sustaining ecosystem within a structure of some kind. It runs on its own power, has its own atmosphere, its own food chain, sources of water." He stopped and pointed at the creeks and vegetation that had begun to form all around them. "All that good stuff," Bar explained. "This building and the others you saw outside are essentially arcologies. Near as I've been able to piece together anyway."

Sean only half-listened as he noticed sections of the interior had been broken open and cannibalized for their electronics. Copper thieves? Sean doubted it. What would the people of this society need to steal copper for when they could build skyscrapers in seconds?

Before them, a stream of water several inches deep ran from a crushed water main. The stream plunged off the side of the walkway and created a waterfall. Bar splashed through as if he didn't even notice and continued beyond the other side without any impediment. He had most likely waded through this stream a thousand times before. Water dripped from his shell, leaving a trail behind him.

Sean stopped at the edge and made the shell's head look down. Slipping while trying to traverse this would be a considerable blow to his now fragile ego.

"What's the matter?" Bar called back to Sean. The bartender had turned around and was now staring at him.

“I don't want to slip.” Then he quietly added, “I am tired of falling.” Sean hated how pathetic and vulnerable the shell’s voice made him sound.

"Hang on." Bar started back through the water and came to a stop just before Sean. The bartender offered up a hand, "Just take it like you did before, and I'll walk you through nice and slow." Hadn't Bar been the one who took the shell's hand, and not the other way around?

Sean had the shell grasp onto Bar's hand. The barkeep then began wading back through the water.

"Like I was saying. I am fairly certain each of the skyscrapers is like this one," Bar said as his shell splashed the water. "Although I've never been to any other. I haven't needed to. Some of my compatriots have though and they tell me stories."

"Even if they are different, one thing remains the same," he continued, “each of these structures is staffed by people little better than drones. Hordes of them slave away, never bothering to look up from their work and ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing.”

Bar stopped as they reached the other side. “Not so bad, right?” He pulled his hand away and tapped the shin of shell Sean occupied with the knuckle of his index finger again. “I am sure you'll be able to do it without my help next time.”

“Yeah,” the disturbingly gentle voice of Sean's shell whispered.

They started walking once more, and Bar began speaking again about this and that. Sean was starting to realize that Bar was a chatterbox, or maybe he just hadn't had anyone to listen to his speculation in a very long time.

He began to tune him out entirely as they ambled along. Sean pitched the head down and looked at the ground. What exactly was in these boxes? He stopped when one of the box’s lights turn on and off in rapid succession.

"What's in these?" He gestured to the ground.

Bar stopped and turned to look at Sean. "Ah, I wouldn't worry about them," he snipped. "These guys are either the logical conclusion of this world's society, or they have it worst of all." The barkeep tilted his head left and right, trying to make up his mind. "Truthfully, it could be either-or, but it isn't like we can help them."

“What guys?”

Bar patted the ground, touching the boxes they had been stepping over. “These ones.”

"You mean to tell me there are people in there?" he said in a hushed tone.

Bar grabbed onto the handle of one and twisted it. This pulled the box up and open. Inside was a housing unit very much like the one that Sean's brain had been encased in.

“If you can still call them that.”

Sean stepped closer to examine the box's interior. Connected to the housing unit were a thousand tiny wires, either slotted into ports or attached magnetically.

“What are they doing?” Sean asked, equal parts interested and horrified that someone would volunteer to be slotted away like that.

“Mining blockchain.”

Sean swept the shell’s head around to take in just how many there were. Between what he could see lining the floors they had been walking over, the walls, the ceiling, there must have been hundreds of thousands of them. Perhaps millions.

Bar continued, "I don't know the specifics of what it is they do. Blockchain was a little after my time." He turned the handle and pushed the box containing the housing unit back down into its holster. There was a sound like a hiss as the case was closed shut and replaced.

“When did you die?”

“1987,” Bar told Sean plainly. “You?”

“2030.”

“Neat. Were flying cars already a thing by then?”

“No such luck.”

Bar laughed, “Decades of futurists were probably horribly disappointed.”

Sean would have smiled if he could have.

:)

“There we go! A smile,” Bar quickly pronounced.

Sean was about to ask how Bar knew he had been smiling, then he remembered what the projector did. Turning his emotions into fucking emoticons. He quickly squashed any sense of levity and willed his demeanor back into neutrality.

:|

This time Sean restarted the journey. Bar quickly scrambled to catch up and began heading their expedition once more.

“I was told I’m in crippling debt. Any truth to that?” Sean asked after a few minutes of silence.

"Absolutely. We're all in debt. That's the point of well, of everything." Bar shifted from one hand to another. He had a perfect balancing act going. Sean wondered if the barkeep could help him out with his own issues.

“How do you figure?”

"Simple, as long as you're in debt, you're going to be kept under the thumb of a… well, y'know, that thing in your brain." He swerved around saying the B-word. "And the longer you've got one of those, the more you're going to work, and the easier it becomes to turn you into a wirehead."

“Wirehead?” The longer strides made by the shell could easily keep up Bar’s pace, but Sean struggled to take advantage of it out of fear that he’d collapse into a pile.

“That makes two words that you don't know. You definitely weren’t much of a reader were you, kid?”

“I only cracked the books for work and school. Was never a fan of them otherwise.”

Bar sighed as he trotted along. “Without any cultural references you can circle back to explaining all this is going to take a while.”

Eventually, they came to a hole in the wall. This one, like the first, was pried open by a pile of scrap.

“Finally. My hands were starting to get sore," Bar joked.

Blessedly, this time the door was held open almost all the way to the ceiling, which meant he didn't have to crawl. Sean wondered how Bar had managed that one given the difference in height. The hallway that they gained access to flickered with dim light at its end.

This was home?

He'd sooner take his chances in a dark alley than voluntarily walk into this place on his own. Then again, he wasn't exactly alone. Plus Bar was leading, he could still potentially get away if this was indeed a trap. It wasn't very long before he found what they had been headed for all along. A room full of shells. Almost all of them lay inactive except for a smaller one that sort of looked like an oversized PEZ dispenser. This one hovered above the floor under its own power.

Some sort of apparatus was attached to the ceiling, thick lengths of cable hung from it with an unusually thick one falling down the middle. Each of the shells had one of the cables attached to them. The specific location for the connection didn't seem to matter. The strange device hanging overhead was also the source of the light. It sputtered in and out of life like a loose light-bulb.

“Wake up!” Bar shouted before tugging on the larger central cable.

When he did this, the room grew bright as the power to the light was restored. Each of the cords fell away from their individual shell, now all at once, they began to stir. There was much grumbling to be heard over the sounds of whining servos, creaking metal, and the compression of pistons.

“What the hell…” came one voice.

“Fuck you!” cried another.

“I was nearly done cracking some ICE,” whined a third, it was tinny and scratched like an old radio. “I hope whatever you're here for was worth getting us up early.”

Then a rapid beeping came from the PEZ dispenser as it flew directly into Bar's face. Sean wasn't sure, but they seemed pissed. Bar pushed the floating shell back away from him with some effort.

“Sean, the gang. The gang, Sean.”

The drone-like shell spun out in the air before making a circle around the room's perimeter and then came to a sudden stop in front of Sean's shell. The beeping started up again. It performed a flip in the air and tilted from side to side on its axis.

“He can’t understand you yet, idiot.”

More beeping.

“Yes, he.” Bar placed emphasis on the pronoun.

One loud beep. The shell hovered away quickly and took up a position behind the largest one in the room. To Sean, it looked like a domino made of steel. Taller than it was wide or thick. There was no discernible face on it, but there was a ticker like the one that had been on the Enforcer's chest. The word "Greetings" popped up on the display.

Many of the shells said nothing. In fact, they acted as if Sean didn't exist. That was fine with him. He was in no mood to socialize with a bunch of 'people,' even if they were in a similar situation as himself. After all, he was only here to find out what this society of survivors knew.

Bar’s shoulders sagged at the silent exodus of these shells. From his upper-body language, Sean got the impression that the barkeep had anticipated a wholly different reaction. Bar straightened up and began to address the small group that remained, including Sean. Acting as if whatever plagued him had never existed.

"Now Sean, since you like names, we'll call that one--" Bar started and then stopped as the shell furthest to the left flicked an antenna on its head towards him. Then he started back up again, the lag in between words was almost imperceptible, but Sean heard the hitch. "Sticks." Bar thumbed at the same shell that had just done something with their antenna.

To Sean, that shell looked a bit like a frog, except skinnier. Its hands ended in four round digits. Their eyes were bulbous and round like an insect's, their chest was concave, and their legs ended in curves hooks. On top of their shell's head were two thin antennas that wobbled as they looked around. 'Sticks' turned to look at Sean but made no other indication of greeting.

The PEZ Dispenser peeked out from behind the domino and instantly caught Bar's ire. "You can call that flying dumb fuck whatever you want," Bar raised the sound of his voice to make certain he was heard by the mostly concealed drone. "They're more of a pest than they are human."

Sean didn't give a suggestion. He frankly didn't care about this at all, but naming these people would at least make identifying them more manageable.

"I don't care."

“You hear that? It’s either Dumb Fuck or Pest. Your choice.” The drone was silent for a moment before beeping back. “Pest it is.”

He then directed a finger at the domino, “Honestly, I’d call him 'Wheels.'”

Sean wanted to flick an eyebrow up at this designation, but he resisted the urge knowing full well what this would probably look like on the projector. That domino certainly didn't seem like a Wheels. Bar must've known something beyond this one's surface appearance that Sean did not.

"Cool." The word blinked into frame on the domino's screen.

A cherub walked into Sean's line of sight. One wing on its back had been removed, and the other had been wholly plucked of its metal feathers. "You've added a fuckin' Bimbot to our happy family now?" Despite their diminutive appearance, this one had a foul mouth and a very self-assured swagger.

"I am not in this body because I want to be," Sean grunted in response, but the voice of the shell simply turned husky, inviting even.

"And you think I wanted to be in this broken little shit?" The cherub scoffed and flicked its right hand out from under its chin. Sean knew what that meant, 'Fuck you.' He might as well have spit on the ground too.

“I can see you two are going to get along famously,” Bar said with great sarcasm through his cheery voice. “Hm, for this one... What about Cher? Short for cherub.”

"Pronounced like Cher from Sonny and Cher?" Sean offered. The shorty had managed to get a rise out of him.

“Exactly.”

“I'll be dead before I let any of you shit stains call me that.”

“Cher it is then,” declared Bar.

"YOU MOTHER FUCKER, I'LL KILL YOU." For the second time today, someone attacked Bar. Instead of striking him, the bartender nimbly caught the cherub in both hands and began to toss him up and down in the air.

When he started babbling in baby speak at the newly dubbed Cher, they began to go berserk.

“Who's a good baby? You are! Yes, you are!”

"PUT ME DOWN YOU PIECE OF SHIT. I'M GOING TO STRANGLE YOU IN YOUR SLEEP."

“Naughty baby!”

Cher soon stopped shouting expletives and threats upon Bar's life, choosing to instead focus on breaking the bartender's grip by pushing, punching, and kicking. They made absolutely no headway and eventually went limp.

“Alright, I give. You can call me Cher.” And with that, Bar placed the cherub upon terra firma again. Cher whispered as they walked away, “I don't even know what a Cher is.”

The last of the motley crew rolled into view. They were a sphere roughly the size of a basketball. Sean could tell that despite appearing as a dark bronze to him, the newcomer was definitely a glossy black.

"Hello," the ball quacked. Their voice had been the tinny-sounding one from before. "My name is Neo."

“Seriously?” Sean couldn't help but ask.

“No,” the ball replied.

“Be careful with this one. They like to lie,” Bar warned in a tone that meant he was mostly joking. Mostly.

“Only when they're good ones to tell," teased the ball.

"Then, if that isn't your name, what is?" Sean asked, his curiosity stoked.

"It's really 'One Who Greets With Fire,' I was named after my mother."

"You never told me that." Bar feigned disappointment with the one in the ball.

"You don't need to know everything, nosy," they chided Bar in a low crackle and then spun slightly in place. "You can just call me Fire if you'd like, Sean."

Bar coughed. "We should all sit and talk. There is a great deal for you to learn in not very much time." The bartender moved into the chamber, shuffling forward from one hand to another.

-

And so they sat together, save for the one that Bar had identified as Sticks. That one continued to stay apart from the rest, just as Sean would have done in their situation. He was beginning to feel like he'd been thrust into a freak show as the small group gathered around. Everyone here had been normalized to what had happened to them by now. At least as much as they could be, but to Sean, these people skeeved him out. He was dead set on denying his situation. To accept it would remain a bridge too far.

Bar led the conversation for what felt like hours. In that time he gave Sean a primer on how he could bring up the overlay that Left had told him about. There was considerably more than what he expected. Built into the housing's software were hundreds of options and settings he could play with. Most of those he stumbled across seemed to do very little or were just QoL adjustments. What he found most interesting, from a purely aesthetic point, was how the display eschewed icons of pretty much any kind. It was just line after line of text that became more and more justified the further into the settings he clumsily dove.

As time passed, the crew that had stayed behind began to leave with very little fanfare until only Bar and Fire remained. He also found out why Bar called the domino 'Wheels.' As they left, that one had fallen flat on the ground and then sprouted a set of wheels before setting off.

"You'll get to know the others later," the bartender said in a reassuring tone

"Really the only three things you're going to use are the navigation controls to you know where you're headed, your credit account so you can pay off your debt, and the job punch that way you can upload logs to prove you were working."

Bar at last, blessedly, exhausted himself of information about the overlay. Yet he hadn't given Sean any information about the thing he was genuinely interested in. This stuck out as a glaring oversight.

"What about access to the Net?" Sean asked Bar.

"Ah, the Net." Bar considered what to tell Sean. "Well, the housing uses the Net. It's how our overlords at OMNITECH know where you are and what you're doing, but... Eh." He held a hand out in front of him and shifted it side to side at the wrist. "Not much besides that. However, if you really want to know about the Net, you are best off asking this one." The barkeep patted the top of Fire. So it seemed that Bar invaded the personal space of just about everyone.

"Yes, ask me." The static-filled voice of Fire was clearly excited. Apparently, they had been waiting for this moment to come. "I can tell you everything you want to know about the Net. This old codger certainly can't."

"Bah. Just because I don't understand the Net doesn't mean I'm backward." Bar crossed his arms.

"It does."

"Now wait--"

Bar was cut off by Fire, "What do you want to know about?" They then began to rattle off different topics for Sean to ask them about with such velocity that Fire sounded positively manic, "Are you interested in data harvesting, phreaking, cracking ICE, tagging servers, causing host meltdowns, forced discos?"

"Fire--"

They continued unabated naming equally bizarre and interesting concepts that Sean had never heard of, "Or are memory injections, synesthesia replication, and recall spoofing more your speed?"

"I'm not sure," Sean hesitated. Many of the options had already slipped from his mind due to how quickly Fire had shot them out. "I mainly just want to use the Net so I can get my bearings. Figure out how much time has gone by. Read up on what caused all..." He gestured around. "What caused all of this to happen."

"Oh." Fire peeped.

"What's wrong?"

"That isn't really what the Net is for."

"Not what it's for?" Sean asked, shocked. The feminine voice carried his incredulity as if it were an insult upon a maid's honor. "I don't understand. This doesn't seem like an outrageous request." Given his tech background, Sean was well versed in what you could do on the Net with a terminal at a casual and professional level. To be told that he couldn't even look up basic information was counter to everything he knew.

"Well, if you just wanted to check up on the Exchange or the News--" Bar made the quotes sign around the word 'news.' "You can do that from your overlay," he informed Sean.

"I just said I want more than that."

"There isn't more than that."

Now Sean was getting irritated. Bar was acting imbecilic, and his evasiveness only frustrated Sean further.

"You're from the '80s. You should know about the Net," he spat with venom. The synthetically produced tone made him sound particularly patronizing.

"I wrote stories about that kind of stuff, but by then, I was a septuagenarian."

"You wrote stories?" Sean questioned, unsure of what that had to do with anything. He narrowed his nonexistent eyes in anger while he appraised the ersatz bartender. What was going on here? Was this ignorance genuine, or was the Binder in Bar's head making him sidestep Sean's questions? He quickly stuffed the rage he was feeling down into a hole. Sean couldn't stand to think about what stupid faces the projector had been creating.

"Fine." He ditched interrogating Bar and opted to instead go after Fire. They at least seemed to have some technical expertise. "You, Fire, you seem to know a thing or two about a terminal - what do you mean I can't look this shit up?"

"Ter-min-al?" Fire sounded the word out one syllable at a time. This was precisely like when Left repeated his name.

"Oh, Christ." Sean reflexively lifted the shell's hand and placed it against where his forehead would have, should have, been. "Are you telling me that stuff from before was just fluff you made up?"

"Not at all," Fire said coolly, the static in their voice purred. “I'm a Netrunner. All of what I told you is very real.”

He couldn't take it anymore. The gap between what he was being told and what he knew to be possible was too significant. Worse, they didn't even try to explain the disconnect. Sean forced the shell to bend at the knees and fold up into a squat. Both hands reached out and grasped the ball on either side and lifted it close to the head of Sean's shell.

“Then stop fucking around and tell me what you mean when you say I can't even do the most rudimentary of tasks on the Net.”

The hands began to hum, and a blurb appeared in his vision, but to Sean it was just a series of bar codes. His frustration was such that he paid no attention to either curiosity.

Bar gasped. He reached out with one hand and placed it on the closest forearm that was part of Sean's prison.

"Put them down, Sean," Bar commanded.

“It's okay,” Fire told Bar in an unexpectedly gentle voice, “He's just trying to make sense of what's going on. I am sure that today has been overwhelming. All of ours were.”

"Your god damn right, it's been overwhelming." Sean shook Fire's shell in frustration before dropping them. The humming stopped, and the bar codes disappeared from his overlay. Fire bounced on the ground once and rolled away before coming to a stop back where they had started.

“Listen,” Fire implored him. “I have to go to work now, but you should take some time to recharge. It'll help.”

“No, you can't just go. I want answers now. I want to know why this is happening. I want to know what I should do.” The hands of Sean's shell balled up into fists. “I want this to have never happened.” The weight of the shell became too much for Sean. He let the joints collapse in on themselves to form a kneeling pile of cybernetics, he had begun to hug the shell's arms tightly against itself in an attempt to self-soothe.

“I think we all want that.” Fire's synthesized voice broke with sadness as they rolled their shell up to Sean's. They lightly bounced off of the body's numb knees. Perhaps this was meant to be a hug.

"We'll finish this conversation later when I'm back. I'll even show you around the Net, but first, you need to recharge."

“Sleep is what I need, not whatever it is you do.”

"Ah, don't be like that. Eventually, you won't even remember what real sleep used to feel like," Fire told Sean encouragingly. If that was meant to be a good thing, Sean certainly didn't see it that way.

"They're right." Bar slipped a hand inside of one of the shell's fists and tugged gently. "Stand up, and I'll show you how to prepare to hibernate."

“I don't want to,” Sean growled. To do what they were encouraging meant he was taking his first step down the road of acceptance.

Bar had turned away and began to tug at the larger shell again, this time with more force. "Oh, yes, you do. You're already getting cranky, I know that look anywhere -- I had five kids and 20 grandchildren, you know."

Cranky? He must have let an emotion slip through again. He couldn't fathom why he felt so tired, then he remembered how to pull up how much battery life the shell had remaining. Sean called forth the information awkwardly, like someone still learning to use a keyboard. After the fourth attempt, he managed. The blurb that rolled into his vision said there was 18% battery life remaining.

That was far too little, he thought. In between his unceremonious entry into this terrible new world, walking here, and their conversation, it couldn't have been more than six, maybe seven hours. Yet the shell was already that low? How? Then he recalled what Right had said: "The shell is ready and powered up. As best as it is going to be anyway."

"Those fucks. I am going to kill them--" the Binder surged forth with a vengeance and applied a liberal shock to Sean's nerves. He cried out yet nonetheless managed to finish his threat, "--if it's the last thing I do."

“How cliché,” Bar remarked. "I hope that was worth the pain."

"Who will you do that too?" Fire asked, expertly sneaking past directly mentioning the promise of vengeance that Sean had made.

“The ones who put me in this horrible thing,” he breathed, lights flashed in his vision. He began to feel equal parts rage and panic. “This thing's battery is shot," Sean spat out the word 'shot' as if it were a curse he wished upon the world.

"We all have battery problems. Comes from having retired shells," Bar admitted. "Although your own is probably even worse than ours. After all, I'm only half as big as you are, and Fire is a sentient ball of polymer."

“Rude.”

“Just payback for you calling me a codger.”

“That's fair.”

Sean sunk even further down as he considered his options. If the battery pack he'd been saddled with was already so depreciated, then how was he possibly going to do anything? Getting here had taken so long. Having to walk back and forth from this place would only burn what little time he had before needing to recharge. No, not recharge, sleep. Sleep was required.

For a second time today he considered killing himself, with that thought the Binder erupted. This time, however, he wasn't given a healthy dose of pain. It just sat there, tangled around his mind, monitoring his thoughts, anticipating his actions. Somehow he knew that he absolutely did not want to find out what it would do should he try to die.

"18%."

“Hm?” Bar looked at Sean right where his eyes should have been.

“That's all I've got left.”

“Already?”

“Yeah.”

Bar and Fire whistled in unison. Coming from the Fire's vocoder, the sound was especially creepy.

“We'll need to do something about that.” Bar rubbed the thumb of their hand across the inside of the palm of Sean's shell, trying to instill some sort of calm into him, letting him know that he wasn't alone.

“For certain,” Fire agreed.

Sean almost sobbed, despair began to flood in.

"What am I going to do?"

Bar sighed sympathetically, "You're going to get up is what you're going to do." He started to urge Sean to make the shell stand again. "And then, we're going to get rid of these damn things in our heads together. No matter how long it takes."

Sean sniffed. He sounded like a little girl. He felt repulsed.

"Okay." He sniffed again.

At last, he acquiesced to Bar and forced the shell into motion. Pushing off the ground to stand, the body's knees shook with a whinny from the servos built into the joints.

"There we go." Bar started to pull at Sean once more. This time he made the shell follow.

Fire rolled away from the two of them, "I'll be back later. You'll take care of Sean?"

"Of course. What do you think I've been trying to do? Besides, it's not as if tree stump like me--" he pointed to himself. "--can really make him--" he pointed at Sean "--go anywhere."

Fire cackled in static as they rolled down the hall behind Sean and Bar.

Bar eventually managed to tug Sean under the apparatus that hung from the ceiling. "Okay, stand, kneel, sit, lay down. Do whatever feels right." He tottered away. "I have to get a tether for you."

Uneasiness trickled into Sean's chest, or that's what he convinced himself he could still feel. This was really happening, wasn't it? Bar dragged himself back into Sean's line of sight. He was holding one of the thick cables. Attached to the end was a connection that vaguely reminded him of an oxygen mask. Except that it was opaque and well worn. The edges had started to split, and the face of it was flat. He could hear it humming in Bar's hands. Oh God, this was really happening. The fear had him now. He felt strangled by it and started to gasp for breath. The gasping turned into hyperventilating. His mind demanded that he try to suck in air that he couldn't breathe. He began to overheat. He felt a pain in his chest. He was going to die for good this time. This was just like before with Left and Right.

The eyebrows of Bar's shell flicked up in concern, "Hey, hey, hey, don't do that. Just relax."

"Relax!?" Sean screeched as he continued to try and gulp down air. The sound of his voice and the rasping would have sounded pathetic coming from anyone, but given the circumstances, he sounded even worse than he could have imagined. Further embarrassment over what the projector must have been reflecting caused him to startle and try to push past Bar. He needed air. He needed to cool down. He needed to get outside. He needed this to be over and never happen again.

Before Sean could take one step further, the bartender slapped the leading edge of the cord's head against the body's thigh. The retired shell instantly went rigid before toppling over, unable to keep balance on one leg. There was a loud thud from its collision with the floor.

"Sorry about that, but I couldn't have you running away with a battery that low," Bar said kindly, consolingly. "And you were being so brave, too."

The sudden stiffness had shocked Sean. His hyperventilating stopped abruptly, and much of the fear was swept away. Now he was filled with disbelief over what Bar had just done to his cage. Facedown, he could see nothing else besides the ground in this land of sepia. He tried to sit the shell up but found the body paralyzed

"Not this again," he whined.

Still stunned and now agitated at being locked up, Sean tried to formulate words of rage to throw at the bartender. Only to find those attempts stymied by an unannounced and unexpected trickle of warmth.

"What the hell..." Sean murmured into the ground.

"Starting to feel better?"

The trickle quickly turned into a stream of pleasure; Sean groaned involuntarily. The sound was foreign and unwelcome in his ears. He had only made sounds like that for his girlfriends, now it came out like the gasp of a whore.

"Yeah, you're feeling better." Bar laughed softly.

“Oh God,” Sean muttered as he felt the warmth suffuse every neuron in his brain. “What did you do?”

“Just applied the charger is all.”

Sean could hear the bartender step around him.

“Do you want me to turn it off?”

He was quiet for some time; this bliss was making him forget his immediate troubles.

"Off then?"

“No...” He groaned again. “Leave it. Leave me alone. So I can..." he sighed like a delicate flower. "So I can think.”

"Uh-huh. Well, Sean, you're going to want to relax while you 'think.'"

“How?”

"Just imagine the word you desire, and you shall receive."

Sleepy with the euphoria that was dragging him out into a sea of calm, he dully noticed that the Binder had retreated into whatever hole in his psyche that it had staked out for itself.

He thought the word: 'Sleep.' The screen he viewed the world through went dark, and the shell sagged.

Then he was gone.