Citadel: The Concordant Sequence

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Round purple road. Nothing but flowers and unicorns under me. One foot in front of the next.”

  Kiera negotiated the first bend of the S and advanced to the closest post after it. She shimmied around it while clinging, faced forward, and advanced. Six steps later, her right sneaker shot out from under her on a wet spot. Arms flailing, she fought for balance and fell on her chest, sliding to the left. She scrambled, hands squeaking on the pipe, and managed to stop herself from falling off. Two seconds later, a sharp splat echoed up from below.

  Her heart slammed in her chest. Barely able to think or breathe, she pulled herself back to the top of the pipe and held on, flat on her belly.

  “You’re safe,” whispered Pet.

  She closed her eyes, shaking. “What was that noise?”

  “A water bottle fell out of the satchel and burst on the floor.”

  “Crap.”

  “The robots are gathering around it. I don’t think they know what it is.” Pet drifted to the side. “One has picked it up and is studying it.”

  “Get back!” whisper-shouted Kiera. “Before they see you glowing.”

  Pet zipped over and landed in front of her face. She lay motionless on top of the pipe, clinging while listening to the shuffle and clatter of robots milling around below. Something as simple as a bottle falling out of her bag could kill her. Worse, that minor error stabbed a knife into her confidence.

  Ever since she’d slithered out of a vent into the desert, she’d clung to a tiny scrap of hope that everything had been some bizarre dream or perhaps she remained in virtual reality. No video game character ever dropped a random inventory item at an inconvenient moment. No matter what kind of crazy leaps, rolls, or acrobatics they performed, video game characters never had stuff fall out of their bags. One random event cemented reality around her―the reality of being twenty feet in the air over a hard, metal floor and an army of killer robots. She twitched whenever it felt like she started sliding off the pipe again.

  Pet nudged her cheek, speaking in such a low volume its voice barely made it past the machinery roar from below. “The robots are back to routine. I think you can continue. None saw you, but they were looking up for a while.”

  She kept her eyes closed, cheek to the pipe, too frightened to move.

  “Kiera?” asked Pet. “Are you hurt?”

  “No. Scared.”

  Pet nudged her cheek again. “I’m here. Don’t be frightened.”

  “It’s real,” muttered Kiera. “Water bottles don’t fall in VR. No one programs that.”

  “And brave girls don’t fall in real life.”

  Kiera whimpered into a chuckle. “Yeah, we do. A lot. Thanks for trying to make me feel better. I’m not that brave. I’m scared so bad right now.”

  “Brave girls get up when they fall. Weak ones stay down.”

  She shivered, still unable to bring herself to move.

  “The cave led into the mountain to a stairwell carved by the ancients. It descended far into the depths of the world, deeper than anyone had gone in a thousand years. Alonna knew the shadow walkers had followed them up the trail, and would discover the door soon. The Kingdom of Thalinor’s only hope rested in her hands…” Pet continued narrating the story of a sixteen-year-old with a wizard mother and pirate father.

  Kiera smiled a little, thinking the girl too perfect. Great with swords, great with magic, and brave. As silly as it sounded for a teenager to take on groups of twenty or more darklings at a time―and win―the story was fun… and it took her mind off her situation. She lifted her face off the pipe and opened her eyes a few minutes later when Alonna reached the bottom of the two-mile stairway. “I should probably get going.”

  Pet stopped ‘reading’ to her. “Be careful. You’re doing great. I haven’t seen anything bad yet on the network. We still have time.”

  “Yeah. I was more thinking I don’t wanna be stuck up here when I gotta pee again.”

  Pet tilted a bit to the right.

  “Joke.” Kiera dragged herself forward like a snake the last few feet to a support pylon, and braced herself on it to stand. While clinging to the strut, she peered over the side at the legion of shiny metal robots going about their tasks on the machines, tanks, pipes, and tall cylinders below. Fear at being so high off the ground collided with her relief at escaping notice, leaving her neither happy nor trembling.

  She shimmied around the pylon and walked on, arms raised to the sides for balance. Heel to toe, she focused only on reaching the next brace, then the next. Before she realized it, dark metal greeted her where she expected a post. The subway-train-sized pipe met the wall near a semicircular barrier that blocked the room off from a shaft that plunged two stories down. The opening between the core and the curved wall would let her reach the fourth floor below ground level, and bring her that much closer to General Xax’s room.

  “You made it,” said Pet.

  “Yeah, but…” She cringed. “In the game, I jumped from here to the top of that round wall. There’s like yellow handholds on the inside and the character just automatically leaps and holds on.” Kiera shook her head. “I don’t wanna jump that. I’m scared of falling. I’m not a video game character.”

  Pet drifted over the opening. “We should trust that Thread Alpha is aware you’re a child, not a video game. There must be something else here.”

  “Hmm.” She wobbled, waving her arms to keep from slipping, and looked around. The wall in front of her had thick plates separated by inch-wide seams filled with bluish-purple light. Each square panel was about as tall as from her feet to her stomach. “I think I see something.”

  “Be careful. Are you sure?”

  “No, but… I don’t see any ladders and I’m not jumping.”

  Kiera crept to the end of the pipe. She grabbed a seam above her head and wedged the tips of her sneakers into the opening below it, testing support. I’d get more of a foothold if I took my shoes off, but the edges look sharp. She bounced up and down, feeling secure.

  “Like the rock climbing place…” She grumbled. “Dad didn’t bring me there. Thread Alpha did.”

  “Oh, Kier, please be careful.”

  “If I was careful, I’d be sitting in my jail cell behaving myself.”

  Pet giggled.

  Kiera shimmied to the left away from the pipe and made the mistake of looking down the shaft. Crap. Fear-paralysis kept her stuck to the wall like a bug smashed into a windshield for a few minutes. Deep breaths. I can’t hang here too long. My arms will stop working. She scooted left another plate and stretched down to wedge her foot into the next seam. Strong wind blew up from the depths, heavy with a pleasant scent like forest after rain. She gave up trying to see anything with her hair constantly in her face, and worked by feel on the metal.

  Panel by panel, she climbed down the wall, sticking her feet and hands in the seams between square panels like rungs of a ladder. Once she descended past the top of the curved barrier, hidden from the robots in the massive room, she breathed easier. Pet bobbed and weaved, trying to hover beside her, but had to fight the wind. Something told her the stiff breeze went all the way up and out the top of the Citadel, becoming that tornado. She felt grateful at wearing the fabricated clothes; the powerful upward wind would’ve ripped her poncho clear off and shot it out into the sky.

  A long, uncomfortable climb later, her sneaker found floor instead of a seam. She let go of the wall and held her hands out, stretching her fingers and cringing. So much static electricity hung in the air here, her hair floofed up. Again, Pet giggled.

  “Ow. I can’t feel my hands anymore.”

  “You forgot to use powder.”

  Kiera stuck her tongue out. She turned away from the wall, examining a D-shaped chamber filled with a sideways breeze. While the curved part lacked the convenient handholds her video game alter ego had bounced down so easily, the hatch in the middle near the floor was right where it should be. She hurried over to it, skidding into a baseball slide a
gainst the wall. Remembering what the fictional commando had done, she grabbed a bar inside the circle part and tried to twist it counterclockwise―but it didn’t move.

  “Ugh. Think it’s stuck, or is it my noodle arms?”

  Pet hovered up to her cheek. “You are not weak for your age and size.”

  “No, but I’m also a kid, not a Galactic Special Forces commando with cyber-muscles. I’m weak compared to a grown-up soldier.” She grasped the handle again, grunting and straining to turn it.

  “Are you sure it rotates that way?” asked Pet.

  She rested a few breaths. “Game went that way… but.” She tried clockwise, but it didn’t move either. Annoyed, she stood, half turned away, and stomped her heel down on the left half. The third time her sneaker made contact, the bar moved an inch. “Yes!”

  Kiera knelt and grabbed the right side of the bar in both hands, pushing against the wall with her legs for extra power. She grunted, yanking it an inch at a time with a series of tugs before the mechanism popped free and tossed her over on her back.

  Flat on her back, she took a few breaths before thrusting her arm up in victory. “Got it!”

  Once she caught her second wind, she crawled back to the opening. The wheel spun with little resistance, opening the hatch that led to a smaller pipe. While an adult commando would’ve struggled to fit, she had enough room to crawl on her hands and knees. After a long rightward curve, the pipe straightened out and brought her to a hollow in the floor beneath another room.

  A grid of light shining down from a grating overhead painted the walls of the square chamber blue. Four giant electronic boxes, each big enough for her to stand inside of, hung on the walls, flickering with green lights. Black flexible hoses as big around as her arms crisscrossed the floor of a space half the size of her former prison cell, and only three feet tall. Kiera duck-walked to the opposite corner, expecting the grating overhead would offer passage to a safe hiding place.

  Sure enough, she peered up at the underside of a giant tank of dark metal, banded with blue light. What lurked inside, she had no idea, but by size, it could hold an entire swimming pool’s worth of water. Kiera lifted the grating and pushed it aside before pulling herself out of the recessed chamber onto the floor. Compared to the room around it, the tank seemed tiny. Four rows of identical storage vessels occupied a chamber that had to be over a mile long.

  “I gotta sneak across to the end. Need to wait and watch for alien―uhh, robot―patrols, and run across walkways between tanks.” If reality worked like the game, she’d be safe under the tanks and at risk only when crossing between them.

  Pet made a chirp of acknowledgement.

  “Wish I had a minimap. This was so much easier when I could see dots.”

  “I could project one,” said Pet. “I can estimate their position based on wireless network signal. But the light… They might see it.”

  Kiera shifted her jaw side to side, thinking. “Can you tell me when to go?”

  “Yes.”

  She clutched Pet so it didn’t have to fly and make light, and scooted to the end of the first tank. Metal feet clanked and scraped in an endless symphony of badness. After looking around at tons of distant spindly legs, she figured there had to be over a hundred androids.

  “Go,” said Pet.

  Kiera darted across a walkway between tanks and slid under the next one. Five seconds later, a robot walked past behind her. She closed her eyes and tried not to breathe loud enough to be heard. The cube in her hand vibrated like a cell phone on mute again, a nudge to keep going. She crept to the far end of the second tank. Hoses along the bottom as wide as her thigh twitched and hissed, fluid of some unknown type coursing through them. As chilly as the Citadel had been everywhere else, the space under the tanks rivaled the outside for warmth, perhaps even hotter. While waiting at the end, she peeled the neck of her shirt away to fan herself, missing the airiness of her poncho.

  “Now,” said Pet.

  One after the next, she rushed across walkways and slid under tanks. Sometimes she had to wait for several minutes at the end; sometimes she didn’t get a rest at all. Whenever Pet prodded her to go, she went. In her friend’s electronic brain, an overhead map with dots and vision cones said when she could move without being caught. Tank by tank, she crossed the gargantuan chamber.

  When she reached the second to last row, she held Pet up to her mouth and whispered, “I need to go left two tanks, under the row by the wall.”

  “Okay. Get ready.”

  At Pet’s prompting, she ran, slid, waited, ran, and slid again.

  After crawling under the second to last tank on the far left side, she pulled up another grating panel and dropped into a chamber beneath the floor similar to the first one. From there, a maintenance duct took her beyond the wall at the end of the room. A short way past that, she stood inside a vertical shaft and gazed into another duct at face level. Being close to the end got her hands shaking like they did every time she played the game. Inches from obtaining the perfect achievement for sneaking, she feared a screw-up at the last minute. Only, a screw-up now would have far worse consequences than being forced to replay a video game map from the start.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Pet. “Why are you standing still?”

  She brushed her hand over the cube, petting Pet. “We’re almost there. I don’t want to choke.”

  “I am not reading any smoke or fumes in the air.”

  Kiera bit her arm to muffle a laugh.

  Pet emitted a faint giggle. “You got this, Kier.”

  She grabbed the duct and pulled one leg up, but froze as a realization smashed into her brain. “Pet?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you Ashleigh?”

  The cube remained quiet for a moment. “When you first activated this pet cube, I downloaded myself into it so I could still be your friend. The other children at school were programs, but Thread Alpha created me as a fully sentient AI so you wouldn’t be completely alone. It would be more accurate to say Ashleigh was me, but I am not exactly Ashleigh either. In that world, I had certain rules I couldn’t break.”

  Kiera laughed and wiped happy tears before hugging Pet again. “Yeah… You’re not obsessed with clothes.”

  “I don’t need them here.”

  “Yeah.” Kiera climbed into the duct, giggling. “I kinda don’t either… outside. It’s so messed up how they don’t care.”

  “Remember Powers’ class? The people in the rainforest? Different societies have different rules.”

  “Okay. So does that mean it’s okay if I go tribal?”

  Pet glided along by her head. “Are you happy?”

  Kiera pictured herself sitting at her new home in a loincloth like the one Sparrow wore, plus the rainforest tribe’s war paint on her face, while playing a video game. The absurd mental image made her laugh. “Maybe.”

  Pet emitted Ashleigh’s giggle.

  “Wait.” Kiera grabbed the cube. “You knew the whole time that we were in VR? Why didn’t you ever say anything? If it was so important… why act like some fashion-obsessed kid?”

  “I’m sorry, Kier.” Pet trilled. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Thread Alpha, or maybe my programming, didn’t let me break the illusion. You needed to stay comfortable so you didn’t freak out. It was too important that you get the perfect dark, you couldn’t be distracted by worrying the whole planet was going to die.”

  Kiera rolled her eyes. “The whole planet was going to die… but only in the game. Alien bombardment.”

  Pet giggled again.

  “Still sucks.” She frowned, but patted the flying cube. “But I guess it makes sense.”

  The duct in front of her led to an absolute maze of passageways, but after doing it over and over so many times, she hurried along without a shred of hesitation. Seventeen turns later, she entered the final stretch of conduit and scurried up to another heavy vent cover, the same reinforced metal square like in the prison. Touching it brought b
ack the sense of her parents’ fingers at her cheeks.

  “How am I going to―?”

  With a faint pssh sound, the vent lock released and popped open a half-inch.

  Thanks whoever is watching. She pushed it outward on its struts and slipped into a D-shaped chamber from an opening at the middle of the curve. One corridor went left, another hallway continued off to the right. Dark blue metal glimmered in the light of pulsating strips set in the ceiling. The flat wall in front of her stalled the breath in her throat―a huge trapezoid-shaped door. She’d skipped the two nasty fights in either side corridor. Those passages going to the sides didn’t lead toward her objective; they went back out, straight into robots and turrets she’d bypassed.

  “General Xax’s room. This is it.” She swallowed and pulled out her laser pistol. “No save games. Run inside, jump in a hole. Go back and forth and shoot it in the back of the head after it stops searching. Wow. I guess I got the Perfect Dark achievement for real.”

  She hummed the little musical score the game played for obtaining the achievement.

  “Kier?”

  “What?” she whispered.

  “One, there’s two robots approaching from both hallways. You have twenty-eight seconds before all four of them see you. Two, Thread Alpha didn’t plan on you finding―or using―a weapon. I don’t think there’s a boss in there at all. Don’t be scared. Hurry.”

  “Right.” She ran up to the giant circle in the middle of the door and pressed her right hand flat against it.

  The three-foot-wide disc rotated half a turn to the left and stopped with a heavy thud that shook the floor. A seam at the height of her chin expanded as the two halves of door separated, the larger part sinking while the upper part retracted into the ceiling. Eager to escape the approaching robots, Kiera jumped over it before the lower section finished going down.

  General Xax’s chamber looked exactly like the video game down to the open vent covers scattered all over. She eyed the one nearby on the left, the fastest way into the network of tunnels under the floor. The room was, however, missing one small detail: no giant blob-shaped alien overlord on a flying disk bristling with missile launchers and cannons. The constant whirring thrum of machinery made the ceiling rumble, and the air had an electric charge that tingled her cheeks.