Citadel: The Concordant Sequence

by Matthew S. Cox

  “I shouldn’t touch anything in here, right?”

  “That’s a good idea.” Pet crossed the room to a door. “We are close now. Here. By the floor.”

  She walked over.

  Pet indicated a tiny shaft that carried cables into the next room through the wall. She sat and tied the satchel strap around her left ankle before pulling herself in, tugging the bag along behind her.

  “Only a kid could fit in here and it’s even tight for me.”

  Pet, inches in front of her face, emitted a happy beep. “They did not expect someone your size to do this. Go straight here.”

  She dragged herself past a four-way intersection. Cables branched off in each direction.

  “Next one, go left.”

  Fifty feet later, she squirmed around the corner and continued a short ways into a small chamber where wires connected to cabinets covered in blinking lights of red, green, and orange, saturating the room with color. She took the satchel off her leg, stood, and put it on her shoulder again. The top of her head came within an inch of the ceiling, but the room appeared to be a dead end.

  “Now what?” she whispered.

  Pet perched at her shoulder. “Up. There, at the corner.”

  She walked over, grateful for the short moment of not crawling or slithering, and pushed at the ceiling. Another hatch flipped open. Kiera grabbed the edge and pulled herself up into a huge open chamber, standing at the left side in the shadow of a bulkhead. The great door where the cops ambushed them earlier stood a little ways behind her, still closed, but she’d already gotten past it.

  A gasp of awe leaked out of her when she faced forward and stared at the spitting image of the loading screen for The Concordant Sequence. No matter how many times she’d seen it on her giant screen, a video game couldn’t convey the massiveness of physically being there. An overwhelming presence of technology pressed in on her from all sides, the air emitting a constant thrum of colossal machines. Static crackled on her tongue, filling her mouth with a coppery twang.

  She took a hesitant step forward, gazing around at everything. “Whoa. This is it… This is exactly it.”

  Pet hovered beside her head. “Are you ready?”

  Kiera thought back to her hours and hours of time spent bashing her head into a wall trying to beat the final level. She knew every room by heart. “Yeah. I’ve been practicing this for years.”

  45

  Save Games

  Kiera gazed down the first corridor of General Xax’s base, a T-junction. Two laser turrets in the ceiling waited for her around each corner, plus whatever reality would substitute for video game aliens. The turrets on level one had a short detection radius, enabling her to take them out with rifles before they even opened. She crept a few paces forward, stopping before the turrets came into view past the walls on either side.

  “My equipment was better last time… but I know the layout.” She hesitated. “And… I’m a kid, not a GSF soldier.”

  “GSF?” asked Pet.

  “Galactic Special Forces. For the game.” She shrugged. “It’s a shooter. They don’t put a lot of effort into the backstory.”

  “Why do you look angry?”

  Kiera held up the laser. “Because I want to blow something up to let off stress. I’m really mad about being locked up for… however long I was in that cell.”

  “Two hours eighteen minutes,” said Pet.

  “That’s it?” She blinked. “It felt like all day.”

  Pet rubbed against her shoulder. “Given the circumstances, that is understandable.”

  “I can’t blow the crap out of everything. The game made me keep doing it over and over until I managed to get the stealth run perfect. Blasting stuff is more fun, but real life doesn’t have save games. There’s auto-turrets, alien―I mean robots, laser grids, pressure plates. If this place really is like TCS, I’m going to die.”

  “You’re not alone.” Pet pressed against her arm. “Be smart. Be invisible. If you get spotted, Anton will know you’re loose.

  “Yes, and then he’ll hurt my parents.”

  Kiera backed up a few steps and went into a vent duct on the wall to the left. She bypassed the first intersection and edged up the grating on the other end where it met an L in the corridor. From her stealth run, she remembered an alien patroller walking back and forth in the section of hallway she observed. Pressure sensors in the floor lined up with the light fixture pairs on the wall. They looked identical to the game, so she assumed the floor would work the same way.

  In the game, one alarm equaled failure of the ‘perfect dark’ achievement. Here, one alarm equaled dead parents.

  Instead of an alien, a security robot walked into view, following the same path the video game trooper did. I hope these things are as stupid as the blobbies. The robot advanced toward her hiding place at the corner of the hallway. She tensed, holding her breath as it got closer. It kept going to her right without hesitating.

  Kiera counted five footsteps after it passed, knowing that would be the earliest point the alien wouldn’t see her. She darted out of the vent and leapt over the floor tiles between the light pairs. After two pressure-sensitive areas, she barged through a door on the right, entering an office with desks in it. She climbed up to stand on one, pushed a panel in the ceiling open, and hauled herself up into a crawlspace above the room.

  After reseating the panel, she rested a moment, dusting her hands off. “Crap, this is tiring for real.”

  Pet floated nearby. “What were you expecting?”

  “Video game characters do all this crazy stuff and never slow down. Like run six miles and climb everything and they never get tired or worn out. This is really hard.” She froze. “Oh crap. The pipe is going to suck!”

  “The pipe?”

  “I gotta walk across this ginormous room on top of a big pipe. There’s like a billion aliens on the floor. Trying to clear it Kiera-style used up all eight rockets, two demo charges and sixteen grenades, and I still barely made it out the other side with thirty hit points.”

  “Kiera?” asked Pet.

  “What?”

  “How could you possibly have carried all that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s a game.”

  Pet flickered.

  “Don’t say it.” She patted the cube. “I know this isn’t. And I don’t have any missiles, grenades, or health packs. I’m gonna stealth it.”

  Pet chirped.

  Kiera crawled across the ceiling space, bypassing several rooms before lowering herself down a hole in a dead-end corridor. She dangled from her fingertips until she stopped swinging back and forth. The drop left her no way back up into the ceiling without a ladder, but didn’t hurt much. A quick dash forward and a right turn entered the start of a U-shaped hallway with the stairs down to level two at the middle of the curve. If she went there, two turrets on either side plus a pair of huge defense robots would force a mini-boss fight before she could get to the door. However… perfect dark stealth run. She crept forward five steps and felt around the wall until she found the seam right where it ought to be.

  One push caused a concealed hatch to pop open. She shimmied into a maintenance conduit the instant approaching robot footsteps started in the hall. The hatch closed automatically a breath and a half before the robot walked by outside. Pet pressed against her back and buzzed like a smartphone on mute. Trembling?

  The duct ran parallel to the corridor, filled with exposed circuit boards and flat cables. She hurried to a left bend that connected to the stairway behind the door, skipping the combat. Kiera scrambled down the stairs, rounded the corner at the bottom, and went down the second half.

  “Stick close,” whispered Kiera. “There’s a turret in the hall that I have to sneak past. It spins back and forth. Gotta wait ’til it points to the right, then run to a doorway on the left.”

  Pet approximated a nod.

  Kiera peeked past a narrow strip of window on the side of the door. Sure enough, the turret
, a ball in the ceiling with a laser-pistol-sized mechanism sticking out of it, panned side to side. For the few seconds the sensor on the front faced away, she’d have a chance to run to the lab. Or at least, it had been a lab in the game. She didn’t care about clicking on computers for tidbits of backstory or picking up every scrap of ammunition or health packs―not that anything of the sort existed in reality.

  She watched the turret sweep three times before feeling confident the pattern matched the game. As soon as it rotated past its visibility limit a fourth time, she hit the button for the door and sprinted, sliding into the next room with two seconds to spare before the turret caught her.

  “Whoa.” She tried to catch her breath. Fear wore her out more than the actual running.

  Kiera counted seconds, timing a two-robot patrol while imagining the comic banter the alien soldiers would often share before she shot them in the head. The instant they reached the point that would give her the most time, she dashed out the door and huddled against the wall of the corridor where black metal grating ran along the floor at the edge. She stuck her fingers into the grid and lifted a section out of her way so she could slip under it into a trench full of wires and cables. Pet glided in after her, and she lowered the metal plate back in place. Safe from the view of patrolling robots, she crawled along the gutter down the corridor. In the game, this hallway had huge windows on both sides looking in on huge labs where dozens of aliens worked. Despite being weak in comparison to the soldiers, they would still ruin the Perfect Dark achievement if they spotted her, and set off an alarm.

  She didn’t bother looking to see if the lab ‘aliens’ existed, as it felt kinda pointless to have so many robots standing around for real, but the shuffle down the conduit kept her out of sight of patrollers and six turrets. Kiera crouched at the end of the trench, peering up through the grating at the next patrolling sentry. She counted it taking seven steps past her position before emerging and darting into a huge, dark room.

  Three rows of giant columns, glowing neon green―the universal video game symbol for radioactive badness―stretched to the far wall. She’d thought the game developers considered themselves slick for making a dangerous room that appeared to have no reason to go in, and using it to hide the passageway that bypassed most of the second floor. Most players who commented on the forums didn’t even bother with this room due to the radiation damage and lack of anything worth picking up, but she’d pathed the room so much she knew how to navigate the maze using wider gaps where the spacing between the towers varied ever so much. For an instant, she felt selfish for not posting her secret, but then sighed.

  None of them were real. I’m the only person who ever played TCS.

  “This better not be actual radiation or being a few inches closer won’t matter.”

  “I don’t sense any radiation, but those pillars are carrying a lot of voltage,” said Pet. “If you get too close, you may experience a dangerous shock.”

  “Bag.” She lifted the flap. “You’re not getting zapped out of the air again.”

  Pet landed in the satchel.

  She walked back and forth outside the front row of columns, trying to convince herself it matched the game. The more she looked at it, the less sure she felt. I’m overthinking. Everything has been exact. TCS didn’t exist. Thread Alpha was teaching me how to find it for years.

  Between the third and fourth columns, she crept forward, keeping her arms tight at her sides. After passing five rows, she went left one column and forward three more. Since nothing bad happened to her, confidence grew. After going left all the way to the wall, she flattened against it and advanced three rows. Back into the grid she went, past nine pillars before advancing six. Left two, and forward the last three to open space.

  “Okay. I can breathe again.”

  Pet poked out from under the flap. “Nice.”

  “What the heck are those things?” She put a hand to her chest, trying to calm down.

  “Power capacitors, I think. Huge batteries.”

  “Oh.” Kiera squatted by the hidden trapdoor. Hitting an ‘interact with environment’ button on a game controller didn’t translate well to having to find the switch in real life, but a few minutes of poking around worked. She stuck her finger in a slot between two floor tiles and pushed a rubber button.

  A hatch opened on a motorized strut. She dropped onto a ladder, climbed to the bottom, and dusted her hands off on her shirt in the middle of an empty security office. Beyond a single desk full of monitors, a large window looked out over an enormous chamber. Instead of aliens, hundreds of robots swarmed around. They appeared much different from the security units, all shiny metal with no plastic, and only vaguely human in shape. Some even had four arms.

  “Level three.” She grinned. “Now I only have to get past nine hallways and a huge pipe.”

  “You’re not alone.”

  Kiera hugged Pet. “You’re awesome. I know you’re only a little cube but… you’re my friend.”

  “I’m glad. You’re my friend, too.”

  She skipped searching the desk to see if the giant medpack would be there. The doorway opened to a metal hall that looked in no way designed for humans. No effort had been wasted on appearance, and the sight of it for real caused a shiver of dread. She may as well have been the last human left alive on a derelict spacecraft floating into a black hole.

  Pet provided the only light.

  “Wow,” she whispered. “It wasn’t this dark in the game, but the walls look just like it.”

  The first stretch of corridor had no threats, the same as in TCS. She crawled into a round wire conduit at the corner, concealed behind a removable panel in the wall. Something she’d ran past countless times in ‘blow stuff up’ mode without ever realizing it had been there. Of course, the massive stash of ammunition and health packs hidden inside didn’t exist in reality. This looks like the game, but it’s so cramped. A soldier wouldn’t fit in here… She blinked. Thread Alpha made the game for me. It showed me a path only a kid could take! She crawled to the end, unsure if she felt special or used. If I was older, would I be shooting my way in?

  Two ducts later, she climbed into the ceiling and balance-beam walked across a metal spar between foam drop-ceiling tiles. An army of robot footsteps clicked and clattered below her. Oh, that sounds like a buttload. She glanced down at her feet. Of all the times she’d played TCS, she’d never messed up this part and fallen in. She had no idea what the room underneath her looked like, and from the sound of it, did not want to learn.

  She crept forward extra slow, holding on to bracing struts as much as possible, heading for a wide, rectangular vent in a separating wall to the next chamber. Her legs cramped up from the hunched over, careful walk, and after crawling past the hole in the wall onto the roof of a raised observation deck, she sprawled flat to rest.

  In the game, the giant room below her had two sniper aliens. She hated those since their rifles outranged hers. The pipe walk ticked her off because on a Perfect Dark run, she didn’t get to kill those annoying snipers. From her perch, she stared out at the fat purple tube wide enough for an adult to walk inside with plenty of headroom. It crossed the main chamber at the center of the third floor. The area below teemed with worker robots tending to giant machines of mysterious function. Terraforming stuff. Some appeared to be tanks of fluid, perhaps where all the animal embryos and stuff waited. Where the snipers had been in the game, reality offered a pair of large security cameras.

  Kiera sat up. “Well, at least those won’t shoot me. Okay. I’m wasting time.”

  She got to her feet and crept to the edge of the angled roof. From there, she jumped up to hang from a metal spar and climbed to a grating. It didn’t look intended as a walkway, more of a support, but it served the purpose and brought her to the start of the giant pipe.

  “Oh, crap. I guess it’s a good thing I’m not terrified of heights.”

  “That is good,” said Pet.

  Kiera smiled weakly
. “I’m terrified of falling.”

  She stepped onto the purple metal. The huge tube emerged from the wall below her and went about sixty feet into the room where it curved to the right in a short S bend before turning back to the left, connecting to the far wall. A minor detail for a video game character, but the absolute worst part of this stealth run for a real person waited at the opposite end. She’d have to jump from the pipe to the top of a wall, and climb down a shield plate surrounding some giant alien machine―which her current viewpoint suggested would likely be the terraformer core.

  “That’s gonna hurt.”

  “What?” asked Pet.

  “The jump at the end of this pipe.”

  “It will hurt if you miss?”

  Kiera chuckled. “No. If I miss, I won’t feel a thing.”

  “That’s not funny, Kier.” Pet wobbled.

  “I’m kidding. It’s only twenty or thirty feet. I’ll probably break both legs and my back and scream so hard I faint.”

  Pet pushed into her chest. “Stop then. It’s too dangerous. Thread Alpha must have made a mistake.”

  “Maybe it’s a representation. I’ll be careful. I’m too far in now. Those robots will kill me.”

  Pet trilled, sprouting its grippy claw to tug at her sleeve, trying to keep her from continuing. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

  She walked out onto the pipe, holding her arms out for balance. Warm air swirled around the machines below, occasionally blowing upward, blasting her with an overpowering chemical smell that watered her eyes. Pet stopped pulling on her shirt, retracted the grabber, and hovered close to her shoulder. Every twenty feet, a collar wrapped around the pipe connected to a telephone-pole-sized strut bracing it to the ceiling. She allowed thirty seconds of rest each time she hugged a support post. Segment by segment, she advanced, refusing to look down.