Chapter Two: The Kinetic Solution
The glass didn't just break; it vaporized into a cloud of silica dust.
Elias didn't wait for the dust to settle. He kicked the back of his heavy oak desk, sending it toppling over just as the air where his chest had been a second ago hissed and turned a violent, superheated orange.
"Get down!" Elias roared, grabbing the stranger by the back of his oversized coat and hauling him behind the overturned desk.
The suppression drone floated into the room. It was a sleek, eyeless tear of matte-black composite, humming with the terrifying sound of a thousand angry hornets. Its sensor array swept the room—a fan of red lasers cutting through the rain-mist and gloom.
Thrum-thrum-thrum.
Three rounds from the drone's suppression cannon chewed into the wood of the desk, punching fist-sized holes through the mahogany. Splinters rained down on them. The stranger—Ren, as Elias decided to call him, simply because he looked like a wren caught in a gale—was curled into a fetal ball, hands over his ears.
Elias reached blindly under the desk frame. His fingers brushed duct tape, then cold steel. He ripped the shotgun free.
It wasn't a modern energy weapon; those had biometric locks and tracking chips. This was a Pre-Collapse localized kinetic scatter-gun. Twelve-gauge. Dumb iron. Untraceable.
"Cover your ears," Elias shouted.
He popped up from behind the desk. The drone's sensors snapped toward him, the red eye widening as it acquired a target.
Elias pulled the trigger.
The roar was deafening in the confined space. The blast didn't penetrate the drone's armor—nothing short of an anti-tank missile would—but the kinetic force of the buckshot slammed into the machine's gyroscopes. The drone violently pitched backward, its turbine screaming as it tried to overcorrect. It smashed into the ceiling, showering them with plaster and sparks.
"Move! Now!"
Elias scrambled toward the back of the office, dragging Ren up. He kicked open the door to the maintenance closet, shoving the stumbling man inside.
"It's a closet!" Ren screamed, panic raising his voice an octave.
"It's a laundry chute, you idiot!" Elias grabbed Ren and shoved him into the dark, metal opening in the floor. "Tuck your elbows!"
Ren disappeared into the blackness with a yelp. Elias didn't hesitate. He heard the drone righting itself behind him, the whine of its weapon charging up for a lethal burst. He threw the shotgun into the chute and dove in after it.
He slid through the greased darkness for three seconds that felt like three hours. The smell of old oil and damp concrete filled his nose before he was spat out onto a pile of damp, moldy laundry in the basement sub-level.
He groaned, rolling off a pile of what looked like discarded sanitation uniforms. Ren was already standing, looking frantically at the heavy steel door.
"They'll track us," Ren hyperventilated. "Thermal. Audio. They don't stop."
"Not down here," Elias said, wincing as he stood up. He checked his pocket; the amber crystal was safe. "We're three floors below street level. The magnetic interference from the subway generators scrambles their sensors. We have maybe five minutes before they switch to optical and send ground units."
Elias grabbed his shotgun from the pile of rags, checked the chamber, and racked it. "Let's go."
They moved through the labyrinth of the building's bowels. Pipes hissed steam at them, and the floor was an inch deep in sludge that Elias prayed was just water. They emerged into a service alleyway three blocks east of his office.
The rain here was heavier, a torrential curtain that drowned out the city noise. Elias pulled his collar up. He didn't head for the main streets. He stuck to the "veins"—the narrow, unauthorized gaps between the mega-structures where the sun hadn't touched the pavement in fifty years.
They walked for twenty minutes in silence, putting distance between themselves and the smoking ruin of Elias's life. Finally, Elias ducked into the hollowed-out shell of an abandoned automated kiosk.
"Sit," Elias commanded.
Ren collapsed onto a rusted metal bench. He was shivering, his skin pale and clammy.
"You need to tell me everything," Elias said, his voice low and dangerous. "That drone was a Class-4 Eraser. They don't send those for petty theft. They send those to scrub political dissidents and rogue AIs."
Ren looked up, his eyes haunted. "I told you. I found it in the Old Library."
"Don't lie to me," Elias hissed. He pulled the crystal from his pocket. It pulsed with that same rhythmic, warm light—a heartbeat in his hand. "This is dated forty-eight hours from now. That's impossible. Memory is retrospective. You can't remember the future unless..."
Elias stopped. A chill that had nothing to do with the rain went down his spine.
"Unless what?" Ren asked.
"Unless it's not a memory," Elias said softly. "Unless it's a construct. A plan."
He looked at Ren. "Who did you steal this from? Really?"
Ren swallowed hard. "I didn't steal it. I... I was a courier. For Synapse."
Elias stiffened. Synapse. The mega-corp that owned the patent on the Atmospheric Shield. They owned the air everyone breathed.
"I was moving data between secure servers," Ren continued, his voice trembling. "Physical transfer only. Air-gapped. I got curious. I peeked at the metadata. When I saw the date... I knew they'd kill me if I delivered it. Because it proves something they've been hiding."
"That the sun is still out there?" Elias asked, looking at the glowing amber stone.
"No," Ren whispered. "That the Shield isn't keeping the radiation out. It's keeping us in."
Elias stared at the man. If that was true, every history book, every news report, every memory of the last fifty years was a lie manufactured to keep the population enslaved in the dark.
And Elias was holding the proof.
Suddenly, the ambient streetlights at the end of the alley flickered and died. The hum of the city grid dropped to a low, ominous silence.
Elias gripped the shotgun.
"They found us," Elias said. "They just cut the power to the sector."
"What do we do?" Ren asked, terrified.
Elias looked at the darkness swallowing the alley. He looked at the crystal, then at the timestamp.
"Forty-eight hours," Elias said. "If this memory happens in two days, that means we have two days to get to wherever this place is. To the ocean."
"But the ocean is a dead zone," Ren argued. "It's a radioactive soup."
"According to them," Elias said, nodding at the dark skyline of the Synapse headquarters towering in the distance. "But according to this drive, it's paradise."
Elias racked the shotgun again.
"Come on, Ren. We need a car. And I know a mechanic who owes me a favor."