Citadel: The Concordant Sequence

by Matthew S. Cox

  They’re following me. Oh crap! Shaking, she started to sprint to the right, but stumbled to a halt after a few steps, staring at a pair of trashcans by another plain door in the middle of a dead end wall.

  With no other option at ready grasp of her brain, she ran to the door, hissing past her teeth in frustration, and pounded both fists on it.

  Please, someone let me hide.

  A panel beside the door emitted a pleasant chirp.

  “Scan authorized,” said an electronic female voice as the door opened.

  Kiera darted in and whirled around to stare at the alley, dreading the sight of robots. They hadn’t reached the corner yet. With a hiss that made her jump, the door closed before they appeared. She slouched with relief and finally allowed herself to look at where she’d gone: someone’s living room. A reddish sofa faced a small table with a metal bar on it about the size of a submarine sandwich. One small corridor went off to the right, likely to bedrooms/bathrooms, and an archway beside the bizarre television opened to a tiny kitchen.

  Since no one came running to see who’d barged into their home, she assumed the owner had gone out.

  “Whoa… Crap. This is bad. I just broke into someone’s house.”

  Pet floated up out of the satchel. “Technically, you had the key, so I’m not sure it counts as breaking in.”

  “What?” Kiera stared at Pet.

  “You’ve got an identity chip, right?”

  She clasped her right hand with her left, squeezing her palm between her thumb and fingers. “Yeah. Mom made me get it when I was little I think. Everyone had them.”

  “Well there you go.” Pet drifted in a big circle around the room. “You have permission to be here if it worked on the door.”

  Kiera slouched with a sigh. “I can’t steal someone’s apartment or raid their fridge.”

  Her stomach growled.

  She scratched at it, wandering into the kitchen. “Okay, maybe I can raid their fridge… Do you think they’d mind?”

  “I am a bad influence on you, Kiera… but they can’t mind if they don’t know.”

  Kiera laughed.

  33

  Negotiations

  Kiera found the contents of the fridge both confusing and familiar. The packaging and labels looked like she’d been sucked into a futuristic movie, but the contents all consisted of recognizable food, not strange ‘nutrient goop.’ It took her only a few minutes to figure out how to work the holographic controls of the microwave and heat a self-contained entrée of salmon with a side of roast vegetables.

  She perched on one of three black, padded stools by the kitchen counter and ate, rehearsing in her head what she might say to whoever lived here if they caught her. Fortunately, at eleven, she hoped she had enough little girl left in her to appeal to the occupant’s sense of charity and wouldn’t be thought of as a thief or a threat. Worse come to worst, she still had a laser pistol, but felt sick at the idea of having to point it at an innocent person.

  “Well, I see you decided to listen,” said a man behind her.

  Kiera screamed and nearly fell off the stool. She spun around, heart racing.

  The shimmery ghost of Anton Sokolov stood in the archway between kitchen and living room, smiling.

  How did he find me? She shivered, staring like a deer about to be hit by a truck. What is this… future-world phone calls?

  “I must say your resourcefulness impresses me. You are clearly not the tribal ragamuffin I initially took you for. In fact, with real clothing, you could pass for one of us.”

  “Please let my parents go.”

  “But you are still out on your own and at risk.” He flashed a saccharin smile. The holographic projector made the white spots in his hair above each ear glow blue. “You will be much safer and happier here in the Citadel. I’m not sure what you expect to accomplish, but again, I commend your ingenuity at somehow getting inside past the security team.” He pursed his lips. “I promise you will not be hurt. Good care will be taken of you.”

  Kiera swung her feet side to side, staring at him. “I don’t believe you. You kidnapped my parents. You killed my friend.” She swallowed the oncoming need to cry at Legacy’s death, keeping a hard, stoic face.

  “I implore you to see reason in the situation, child. I do not intend to harm you, but I must prevent you from hurting me… hurting everyone.”

  Kiera leaned forward, glaring, almost shouting, “What are you afraid of? I’m eleven years old! Besides”―she thrust both arms at him, fingers splayed―“if you didn’t send your stupid robots after me in Exxo, I’d still be there, and I wouldn’t care about you. The only reason I’m a threat to you at all is because you attacked us! I don’t know why I’m so important. All I want is to go home with my parents. Please let them go and I swear I’ll go away.”

  He opened his mouth, but the hologram disappeared in a flash of static and buzz.

  Kiera blinked. “He hung up on me? Really?”

  Pet floated up beside her. “I did that.”

  “What? Why?” She pivoted to stare at the cube.

  “He was about to threaten to kill them if you didn’t surrender. I cut him off so he could not.”

  She made fists, shaking them at her sides. “He’s gonna kill them….”

  “No. He did not get the chance to threaten you with it, so they are still safe. You need to hurry up and do whatever it is he is afraid you’re going to do.”

  “I don’t know what it is!” she screamed.

  Pet drooped, emitting a sorrowful electronic trill.

  Kiera bowed her head, sighing. “I’m sorry for yelling at you. It’s not your fault.”

  The cube made another sad chirping noise.

  “I’m not angry with you. I’m scared out of my mind and I have no idea what to do. Won’t he kill them anyway even if I do whatever this great big thing is?”

  Pet tilted back up. “Well, it is a possibility, but I can help there.”

  “How?”

  “Your parents are being held in a detention facility. I can override the system and keep the cell locked so they cannot get to them.”

  Kiera paced in a circle, shaking her head. “That’s not an answer. We can’t leave them locked up forever.”

  “I agree, but you should flee this apartment right away. I’ve sent those robots out front a false order that you went somewhere else. That should give you some time, but I don’t think they will fall for it again.”

  “Crap.”

  Kiera wolfed down the rest of the salmon and vegetables on the way to the door. She left the tray on a small table by the sofa and ran outside. Pet trailed after her as she hurried out of the alley and crossed the street. She twitched every time someone on a wheeled thing shot past her, but managed not to act like a doofus and jump into the wall. Once she’d gotten far enough away from that apartment to let her guard down a touch, she stopped at the mouth of another narrow alley between two office buildings.

  “What floor is the jail on?”

  Pet’s light flickered for a few seconds. “There is a primary police facility on this level, the ground floor. It is in the northwest quadrant, close to the center.” The cube projected a hologram map, a perfect square depicting the entire first level of the Citadel. A round hollow in the middle appeared to contain nothing but a solid dot with a lot of empty space around it. Major streets split the level into four sections around the core, with smaller streets dividing each area into grids, and so on. A yellow dot flashed on the map up and left of the central hollow.

  “What’s in the middle?”

  “All citadel facilities are terraforming machines.”

  Kiera nodded. “Yeah, I got that part.”

  “It’s the primary atmosphere processing system core. A great shaft runs all the way up through the facility to the equipment below the ground. Most of the machinery that handles the environmental scrubbing is beneath the surface. The eighty-one floors above are arcology. Residences, stores, hydroponics facilit
ies, leisure centers, medical facilities, manufacturing facilities, and so on. Every citadel is a self-contained city.”

  “Right, so where are my parents?”

  “They are on the seventy-eighth floor. The Citadel’s security team has numerous operating bases throughout the arcology. The one they are in is the most secure, and smallest.”

  Kiera grumbled as Pet shifted to display the map of the upper level, easily a third the size of the ground floor. The yellow dot flashed at a point near the northeastern corner. “Do you think my skeleton hand will let me into the prison?”

  “Your hand is not skeletal.” Pet’s voice oozed confusion.

  “I mean like a skeleton key.” She winked. “If I can open some random person’s apartment, maybe I can wave and let them out?”

  Pet remained silent for a few seconds. “It may work. However, your skeleton hand won’t deactivate robots or live police personnel.”

  “Crap.” She folded her arms. “What are the odds my powers of cuteness will work on the cops?”

  “Marginal at best, and not at all on the robots.”

  “Double crap.” Kiera scowled.

  Pet flew into her back. “Move. I detect robots coming. Find a stairwell and go up.”

  “Not an elevator?”

  “No. They will know you’re using one.”

  Kiera ran off in a random direction. “You know I am completely lost, right?”

  “Follow.” Pet accelerated out in front of her, weaving among pedestrians.

  Whenever the cube made an unexpected turn, she followed, trusting that her friend could sense approaching security robots before they got close enough to see her, and wanted to avoid them. She ran down streets, across courtyards, and past food courts. Few people paid her any attention, and the handful who did offered smiles.

  A thick-chested man pivoted as she ran by. “Shouldn’t you be in school at this hour?”

  “Field trip,” she yelled. “Trying to catch up.”

  He seemed to buy it and walked off without a word.

  Pet zipped into a narrow alley. A heavy, wet breeze that smelled like a dumpster full of boiling diapers assaulted her nose. She gagged, but staggered after her floating friend. Near to vomiting by the time the alley ended, she swooned against the wall to catch her breath and try not to waste her meal by splattering it all over the floor.

  “Are you all right?” Pet drifted back when it realized she’d stopped.

  “What was that stink?” She gagged, coughed, and wiped her mouth.

  “Off-venting from one of the hydroponics farms.”

  She shuddered.

  “The stairs are close. Few people use them.”

  Kiera adjusted the satchel on her shoulder and loped onward. “Why? Are they like dangerous or something?”

  “Nope,” chirped Pet. “They don’t use them because elevators.”

  “Oh, yeah. So I’ll use the stairs for reasons.” She giggled along with Pet, amused that the AI spoke kid slang.

  Mirth didn’t last long when she got a look at the stairs. Kiera grumbled and started the long, crappy climb.

  34

  Criminals

  On the eighteenth floor, Kiera’s legs refused to go onward―rather, upward. She rested for a little while, sitting on the landing while gazing out an open archway at an empty street. A fair ways down the corridor, the multicolored holographic glow of an active thoroughfare shimmered. Unfamiliar techno music thumped and thudded from the distance.

  “Do these stairs go up to the seventy-whateverth floor where my parents are?”

  “No, these stop at the twentieth. If they kept going, they’d need to cut a hole in the roof. We’re inside a huge pyramid, remember? The walls are angled.”

  Kiera swallowed and stood. “Good, because I can’t walk up seventy flights of stairs.”

  “I think you could if you had to. You are in better physical condition than almost everyone inside this place. They are spoiled by technology. You’ve been living a pure, natural life.”

  “Yeah, but people who lived like that died at forty.”

  “Medieval villagers could not buy Citadel medicine.” Pet blinked on and off, perhaps a wink?

  She gazed up. “Two more stories….”

  After rounding four more sets of switchback stairs, she trudged out an archway onto the twentieth floor. A long alley stretched outward from the top, nowhere else to go but forward for longer than a city block before the passage connected to a large street. Both walls had numerous ventilation ports, but no doors. She jogged to the end and looked left at the face of a huge hospital. On her right stood an unmarked building, but the front room with tiny mailbox-like cubbies suggested an apartment complex.

  Having no specific destination―and a mind whirling with worry and fear―she walked past the hospital and kept going. Stores, restaurants, and happy citizens surrounded her. Some had variations on the ‘standard citizen uniform.’ A few women wore skirts instead of pants, the same shade of blue as everything else. Aside from that, the only real difference in attire consisted of marks at either the shoulder or the ends of long sleeves. One, two, or three white bars, sometimes diagonal lines, and one man had two dots.

  It’s like Army ranks or something. The shirt the fabricator gave her had no markings at all, which probably made sense for a child. “This is so messed up.”

  “What is?” asked Pet.

  “It’s so wrong of these people to let everyone outside live tribal while it’s like straight out of a video game in here. I keep waiting to see aliens beam in.”

  Pet chuckled. “There are no aliens. At least, none that have made contact. If they’d been watching this planet, they probably did a mega facepalm and went home.”

  “Heh. Where did you hear that?” She giggled.

  “I have mysterious sources,” said Pet with a foreign accent.

  Flashing orange and red caught her eye on the wall up ahead. A large, holographic poster depicted a monochromatic black human figure in a sinister facemask. Bloody red lettering under the figure spelled ‘Second Dawn.’ A calm, male voice emanated from the area around the poster.

  “All citizens, be advised that Administrator Sokolov has authorized rewards of up to fifty thousand credits for anyone who supplies information leading to the discovery and arrest of Second Dawn terrorists. Do not approach these individuals as they are highly dangerous and will kill to protect their secrets.”

  Three seconds later, the message repeated.

  Kiera stared at the poster. The man or woman (an illustration of a facemask didn’t give away much clue) radiated malice, seemingly staring into her soul. She flinched and hurried off, skidding to a halt only four steps later when a man on a Segway-like device zoomed by.

  “Gah!” she yelled, flailing her arms for balance. She twisted, loaded a “Watch where you’re going!” into her lungs, but didn’t fire it. Anger leaked out of her nose.

  “Quick, go left. Robots,” said Pet.

  She raced across the street, dodging a passing one-seater electric car with wheels the size of donuts. The pitiful meeeeep its horn made wouldn’t have frightened a field rabbit―if not for their being extinct. She ignored the car, chasing Pet down a series of streets and alleys. The cube took a few turns, skidded to a stop, and backtracked, going a different way.

  Almost out of breath, she rasped, “Are they coming for us?”

  “No,” said Pet, calm. “We are avoiding patrollers.”

  “Need… rest.”

  Pet slowed to a glide once more on a smallish street with a handful of pedestrians. She fell in step beside it, trying not to look winded. At least this place had AC, so the modern clothing hadn’t become drenched in sweat. After a few minutes when the ability to breathe returned, she risked a look around. No one appeared close enough to overhear.

  “What’s the Second Dawn? Are they the friends Legacy was talking about? Or do you think they’re as bad as that poster says?”

  “They are a small gro
up who are trying to destroy the Citadel, kill Anton, and force everyone to be equal. And I mean equally tribal. They want to shut everything down because they think technology is responsible for the mess the planet’s in.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s stupid. Wouldn’t that let the Torment in? Destroying the citadel would kill everyone living in the Refuge. The clouds would fall again and melt everyone.”

  “Yes.” Pet wobbled in a manner similar to nodding.

  “So… either these Second Dawn people are idiots, or that’s a lie and it’s not what they are trying to do. Where did you find that information on them?”

  “Official archives,” said Pet.

  “That means it’s from Anton, or at least the cops.” She rolled her eyes. “So it’s probably lies.”

  Pet swerved around a speeding Segway. “Correct.”

  “Argh. What should I do? This is too much for me. All I want is to find my parents and go home. This place is so big. It’s really silly, but I miss that filthy little bedroom and the garden, and my friends. And Mom and Dad.” Again, the urge to cry knocked on the inside of her eyes. She closed them and held back her emotion. Bursting into tears in the middle of the street would attract attention. Someone merely trying to help a crying child would involve cops and she’d wind up caught.

  “Perhaps you should attempt to find people who are used to going places they do not belong.”

  She smirked. “You mean criminals.”

  “Who else would know how to break out of jail or hack into a computer network?”

  “You can hack.” She poked it.

  Pet spun side to side, a headshake. “I run programs. While I am sentient, I cannot do anything the programs do not have permission to do. Overriding the prison security system is beyond me. Unless you upload special back door routines I do not currently have or we steal someone’s password.”

  “Fine.” Kiera huffed. “So I have to find some criminals. Great. Yeah. Little girl wandering around looking for criminals. What could go wrong?”