The Ascension Myth Box Set

by Ell Leigh Clark

  Maya waited as a list populated on a new holoscreen. She stuck her finger into the holoprojection and scrolled down. Paige watched over her shoulder. “I forget you’re a techie nerd sometimes.”

  Maya smiled as she worked. “So do I. That’s why I make a point of helping Brock out every few weeks on a weekend. Keeps my hand in.”

  Paige grinned. “Yeah. I never understood how you could manage that on a Sunday morning after we’d been out. But I’m grateful for it now!”

  Maya selected a few of the components in the inventory and continued scrolling through the list. “Okay, Bourne—let’s start with these ones. Can you send their locations to my wrist holo? I’ll go look at them. I’ll know more once I have them in my hands.”

  “Sure,” Bourne agreed.

  Maya headed over to the far wall where normally visitors to the workshop didn’t venture.

  She waved her hand in front of a motion sensor that Paige hadn’t even realized was there. The surface slid up and back, revealing a bank of labeled cabinets that were presumably full of parts. The cover seemed to be made of some kind of carbon polymer, which looked flat and rigid when it was in place but disappeared at the top of the array of boxes into the wall, suggesting it was more flexible than it appeared.

  Paige gasped, watching as section by section more and more boxes were revealed.

  As if it were old hat, Maya set about checking the section numbers and locating the boxes she wanted to access. Then, she started pulling them out and checking the components that she’d already selected on her wrist holo.

  “How long has this been here?” Paige asked in amazement.

  Maya muttered to herself as she read off the part numbers, tutting and returning the parts she checked that weren’t what she was looking for. “I dunno,” she said, in between mumblings. “Brock already had it installed and organized when I got here. Guess he must have done it when you guys first moved in.”

  Paige looked the units over. They ran from one side of the workshop to the Daemon door. “Well, they certainly weren’t here in the beginning. I would have noticed. There was just a load of old junk down here.” She glanced upwards, checking the shape of the ceiling. “That bit around there must be where the stage is from the old theater,” she mused.

  Maya continued to flick through the boxes, seemingly only half listening as Paige continued to talk.

  “That toe-rag I used to date said that he’d seen pictures from when the place upstairs was actually a real theater.” She sighed, shaking the thought of the painful relationship from her head as quickly as the thought had occurred to her. “Can’t have been operating for long though. Not if the Federation installed all this afterwards.”

  Maya scratched her nose as she inspected another component. “Unless they had it operating as a cover before they moved in?”

  Paige sighed. “Yeah. Who knows… I’ll be sure to ask someone if we ever get to spend time with them.”

  She was about to say something like, if they survive this, but stopped herself. The implication hung in the air. Even Maya slowed down, pulling one of the drawers out, as if she was resisting finishing the thought out loud.

  “OHHHHH!” Maya exclaimed.

  Paige hurried over to the drawer Maya was peering into. “You found it?”

  Maya beamed and fished out the component. It was the size of Rubik’s Cube. “I think so!” she said brightly, carefully turning it over to check the spec. “Yep. This is it. I hope. Bourne?” She lifted her head to call up to the workshop intercom. “Does the RTX-6767 have a programable CPU?”

  “Yes. It does. Want to plug it in to the Z-port and I’ll lay down the architecture.”

  Maya closed the drawer and carried the component over to the console on the main workbench. She found some connecting wires and plugged one into the other.

  “Okay, Bourne, do your thing!”

  Paige followed Maya back to the console. “Are you sure he’s up to this?” she asked as quietly as she could.

  Maya pulled her lips to one side. “Guess we’ll find out… I mean, he’s been on the network when Oz has done this kind of thing for Brock.”

  Paige took a deep breath. “That fills me with confidence,” she said dryly. “Mind, it kinda feels like the Estaria problem has pulled the short straw and elected the B-team all around.”

  Maya slapped her gently on the arm. “Speak for yourself, lady!” she chided her. “I think this is where we step up and shine. Come on, we’ve got this!”

  Paige bobbed her head in agreement. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Either way, we’re on it.”

  A moment later the console beeped.

  “Okay, that’s done,” Maya confirmed, unhooking the device from the console. “Now to find the other bits we might need.” She headed back to the drawers, gathering tools and cables and tiny reels of wire, and various devices that Paige had never seen before in her life.

  “No wonder you don’t bother with the nail color,” she jested as she watched Maya work. “Although Brock’s range of ultra-durable colors might stay on amongst all this.”

  Finally Maya was done packing everything into an over-the-shoulder toolkit bag. “All right, looks like we’re ready to rock.”

  Paige looked at her with a blank expression. “So? What’s next?”

  Maya smiled at her enigmatically. “Next we get down there and find a node to start making the adaptation so that Bourne can establish a continuous connection.”

  Paige’s face looked concerned. “We’ve no idea what’s going on down there. It could be chaos.”

  Maya nodded. “There’s no other way though. It’s our only chance to restore holoconnections planet-wide.”

  “But what if Molly needs us while we’re gone?”

  Maya thought for a moment. “Well I could go on my own and you can stay here? If you want?”

  Paige shook her head firmly. “No way. I’m not letting you do it on your own. Like I said, we’ve no idea what’s going on down there.”

  Maya’s eyes flickered with a touch of relief. “Okay then, let’s get to the pods.” She started moving off towards the Daemon door.

  “Okay,” Paige agreed. “Then I’ll just go get some supplies and water from the kitchen and I’ll meet you down there.”

  Maya nodded. “I should probably grab some gear from my room too. And change my shoes into something more… practical. Five minutes?”

  “Yeah, five minutes.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, a pod lifted up from the deserted hangar deck.

  Paige fiddled with her holo. It seemed that she couldn’t get a call to connect.

  “What are you doing?” Maya asked.

  “Trying to contact Bates to let her know that we’re on the case. I’m sure she’s probably aware of the situation…”

  “And her team will be working to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Yeah exactly. But if we can share what we know, then maybe we can have this cracked quicker. Except the calls aren’t connecting.”

  “Shit,” Maya said, exhaling and sitting back in her seat while the pod whipped out of the hangar door.

  “Yeah,” Paige agreed grimly. “And it looks like there are lots of patches on Spire that are dark.” She tilted her wrist holo so that Maya could see the heat map that Bourne had been keeping up to date for them. “At this rate it will only be a couple of hours before the whole of Spire is on holo darkness.”

  Maya’s gaze moved to the window as she seemed to become lost in the vastness of space ahead of them. “Well we’ll just have to get a move on and get this sorted out,” she said almost absently.

  Erring Memorial Hospital, Estaria

  A third year resident loped through the hospital, only coming to a halt once she found the attending on the clock at that point. “Dr. Beck!” she called, waving her hand over her head to get his attention. He paused and turned to face her, though he only walked over once
the look on her face made it apparent that it was urgent.

  “Jerso,” he greeted her cautiously. “What’s the problem?”

  She launched immediately into an explanation. “The first years keep forgetting to record patient data in a datapad,” she explained. “The second years and third years are trying to keep them on the ball, but there are only so many of us. We’re going to have a lawsuit on our hands at this rate.”

  Beck heaved a sigh and dragged a hand down his face. “Right,” he muttered. “Draft a few of the nurses to shadow the first years. I’ll make a few calls to see if I can get the transcriptionists to come in and act like scribes for the time being.”

  Jerso opened her mouth to reply, only to close it again with a click when an alarm went off. She and Beck whipped around as a team ran past with a crash cart.

  “What’s going on?” Beck demanded, jogging after the team with Jerso just a few paces behind him.

  A nurse with the team didn’t slow down at all as she started speaking. “Another nurse gave a patient painkillers for a headache. His chart didn’t list any other medications. And then the patient coded. She’s in there doing CPR. My guess is that the patient was given a new medication before the blackout hit, and before the hardcopies were updated, so it wasn’t recorded on his chart in his room.”

  Beck ground to a halt, reaching out to catch Jerso’s arm and jerk her to a stop. The crash team hurried on ahead.

  “Jerso. Collect the residents. And anyone else you can find who isn’t doing something urgent. This means we need to quiz every patient for any sort of information that doesn’t match their charts,” Beck instructed.

  Jerso paled slightly as the implications caught up with her, and then she turned on her heel and took off at a dead sprint down the hall, making a beeline for the nearest break room.

  As much as Beck wanted to help with that, he needed to keep a level head. He turned to head in the opposite direction. He needed to collect workers dedicated to keeping the files updated, or the problem was just going to keep happening.

  Senate House, Spire, Estaria

  Zenne scowled as his wrist holo refused to activate, before he threw his hands up in exasperation. “Figured we would only be safe here for so long before the blackout hit,” he groused to himself before he stalked off to find a hardline connection. The blackout didn’t mean the Senate could just fall out of contact with the authorities and the news outlets. Rather the opposite, in fact.

  As he stalked past like an angry cat, a pair of interns watched him pass. They shared an anxious look over the stacks of datapads they were ferrying through the halls.

  “He’s usually the calm one, right?” Sheryl asked, leaning her chin on top of her stack to keep it from wobbling. “If he’s losing his temper, then that means it has to be bad, right?”

  “We already knew it was bad,” Jeremy replied flippantly.

  “Well, yeah, but—I mean…bad bad,” Sheryl replied. “Like…approaching war,” she clarified. “Isn’t it common to try to disrupt communication before attacking? So then no one can plan anything effectively.”

  Jeremy scoffed and started moving again, forcing Sheryl to jog the first few steps to keep pace with him.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he snapped. “It’s just a blackout. Are you going to freak out and say we’re all going to war whenever your power goes out, too?”

  “This is a global network blackout!” Sheryl insisted sharply. “That’s not the sort of thing that just happens. Something had to have caused it.”

  Jeremy groaned and moved as if to drag his hand down his face. He then had to practically juggle his stack so that it wouldn’t all go crashing down to the floor. “You’re being such a senseless worrywart. It’s ridiculous. You’re going to give yourself an ulcer.”

  Sheryl slowed to a halt outside the Speaker of the House’s office. “Whatever, Jeremy,” she sighed as he kept walking. Hands full, she resorted to tapping her foot against the door to knock on it. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

  Jeremy sniffed dismissively and kept walking. Sheryl pushed the conversation out of her thoughts as the Speaker’s secretary opened the door to start sorting through the files she needed. She had her own job to worry about, after all.

  Chapter 8

  Uptarlung. Irk’n Quarter Estaria

  It seemed as if every news report sounded the same, Mercy reflected to herself as she offered her usual sign-off to the camera. “This has been Mercy Hazrad of—hey!” She didn’t make it to the end of her sign-off as she abruptly took off at as brisk of a run as she could manage in her heels, charging towards the car.

  “You get away from there!” she snapped, her cameraman turning to let the camera follow her. If nothing else, it was the perfect way to underscore the report about how desperate some people were getting.

  The man trying to wrench the car door open abruptly whirled towards Mercy, fumbling a gun out of his belt. His hands shook as he pointed it at her, and Mercy ground to a halt.

  “I need it,” he insisted, voice wobbling. “If we’re going to have invaders breaking our doors in any day now, I need it.”

  The camera clattered to the ground as the cameraman dropped it. Lying on its side on the ground, it only just managed to catch the action as the cameraman charged and tackled the carjacker. Mercy shrieked and ducked as the gun went off. It took out one of the car’s mirrors.

  There was the sound of shuffling from just out of the camera’s sight as the cameraman scuffled with the attempted looter and eventually managed to sit on him.

  Slowly, Mercy began to straighten back up. Cautiously, she called, “Jack? You alright?”

  “I’m good,” the cameraman grunted. “You want to call the cops? I’m a little occupied.”

  “Y-yeah.” Mercy swallowed and fumbled for her communicator. “I’ll just—”

  The screen went black for a split second as the station cut the feed.

  For a few seconds, a stock emergency warning scrolled across the screen. When it changed again, it switched over to a frazzled young man holding a handheld manual camera out at arm’s length. He looked as if he was severely regretting every decision he had ever made that led him to his career and his current situation. It took him a few seconds to realize he should probably be speaking.

  “Ah—” He cleared his throat, and the footage began to jitter slightly as he started jogging. “This is Corey Zerin, of IQ News. We apologize for the interruption. Normally I’m a weatherman, but I have a camera and I’m not in the field, so—”

  He paused, looking over his shoulder as an alarm started to go off and light began to reflect off of the side of a building. He swallowed as he faced the camera again.

  “Um—If I had to guess, a looter has tripped a silent alarm. Some businesses—if they haven’t upgraded their alarm systems recently—have alarms that stayed active—shit.” He cut himself off emphatically and ducked into an alley between two buildings as the looter sprinted past, arms laden with stolen goods. Canned goods and gas; food that didn’t need to be cooked and fuel for an antique generator in a house that had gone dark.

  Corey stayed in the alley, but he kept his camera on the officer that went sprinting after the thief.

  Slowly, Corey turned his camera to his face again. “It’s, um…” He cleared his throat and peered out of the alley. Once the coast was clear, he stepped back out and began heading in the direction the thief and officer had come from. “It’s become a common occurrence in…light of recent events,” he explained haltingly.

  He slowed to a halt once he was standing at the scene of the crime. He turned the camera to face the shop front. The door was hanging open, twitching erratically as it tried to slide closed again, but it would only get halfway closed before jerking open again. The glass from the door’s paneling was littered across the sidewalk.

  Coming from behind the camera, Corey’s voice was slightly muffled as he said, �
��All things considered, this is a mild incident.” He turned the camera back around to look into the lens. “We urge you to be careful and to stay safe. If you haven’t been quite as impacted by the blackout, reach out to your neighbors who have. If you have to, look to your closest public shelter. If we hold together, we can come out the other side of this in one piece.”

  He looked sharply to the side when he heard shouting, before he turned his attention back to his camera again. He took a breath and sighed it out.

  “This has been Corey Zerin with IQ News. Be safe.” He reached towards the camera to turn it off.

  The emergency message began scrolling once again a second later.

  Downtown Spire, Estaria

  A police siren screamed past the end of the alley as Paige and Maya jumped out of the pod. It was early evening in Spire, and a red glow lit the sky above. Normally Paige would think it was romantic and atmospheric, but there was a strange tension that seemed to fill the air like static electricity, and she couldn’t seem to shake the feeling of foreboding.

  Maya pulled up her wrist holo as the pod door closed gently behind her and then lifted off to a safer place in the upper atmosphere to await its recall.

  Paige wrapped her arms around herself against the cold air, shifting the bag on her shoulder awkwardly. “Do we know which way yet?”

  Maya shook her head. “Not yet. I think with the holo network going down, the location finder is struggling to orient us.”

  She ambled down the alley towards the main street to find a street name, her head down, monitoring any changes on the holo map location finder.

  Paige ran her gaze up to the top of the buildings that encased them in a temporary anonymity. “Surely there must be a way for us to do this manually…” she posited.

  Maya rolled her lips together before biting the lower one on one side. She opened her holoscreen wider and turned it, glancing up for a street name on the side of the nearest building. She sighed in frustration. “Seems no one needs street names in this city anymore,” she commented, looking up to the worn, illegible plaque that would have otherwise given them a clue.