GRADIENT 2: Heat

Asher: Rusty. Nico: Dr. Abraham Lewis. Christian: Kanan "Carrion" O'Tool.

Flashbanged with searing light from the scanning equipment. The sewer main. The divers crawl through another air vent and reach a dark expansive room. Gears and machinery churning, churning. Gears along the wall. Pillars of grinding and crushing gears as far as Rusty can see with his thermals. The divers return to the sewer main, and head down a pipe instead. Hands and knees. A layer of cold gray liquid coating their skin and soaking through their clothes. 

Something blocking the path ahead. Stinking of shit and ammonia. A blob, like black shaving cream. Lewis takes a sample. It's light and fluffy and smells like shit. Rusty uses his blanket to push the mass out of the way and into the edges of the pipe, making minimal contact with it and the diver's bodies.

A holographic blue face phases through Rusty's blanket as he pushes ahead. "Have you seen my mom?" A child, a ghost in the machine. He doesn't want to be left alone. Carrion travels back down the pipe and locates the ghost's machine lens. Rusty gives the ghost his blanket for comfort. A smile crosses the kid's face as he blinks away and into the machine lens. Rusty tucks it into his pocket for Ghosteater later.

The pipe is pitch black until a slit of brightness appears around a corner. Like a gash of white light pouring in. Lewis cuts off a sample. It bleeds, like skin. Pseudo flesh. Pale and slightly soft and smooth, minimal bumps and pores. The divers squeeze through the slit, tearing the hole slightly, causing more light bleeding.

They tumble into a white room. The walls and floor and ceiling are made of that pseudo flesh. The artificial flesh of androids. A 10ft tall statue in the center of the room of a giant man in a suit shaking hands with a naked pygmy figure. All pseudo flesh. Lewis roots around and finds some SynthSteaks hidden away in a flap of skin in the wall. Packaged. A brand that doesn't exist. 

Through an airlock, down a set of bonafide marble steps.

 

A convention hall. Ramshackle and disrepair. Fluorescent wiring hanging from the ceiling. A rainbow banner drooping: "CloudCon 25." Immensity. Junk booths populated by smiling, cheery figures in faded, stained business suits. Men and women with two perfect kids. Small-talk. Dominating the hall are dozens of towers, 30m tall, warbling with pseudo flesh. They twitch, sphincter-holes stretching open as more business-like figures slide out. Covered in pseudo milk. The artificial blood of androids. A semi-translucent white oil. This is the Garden. Rusty wants to leave immediately. 

The divers talk to one of these figures. He introduces himself as a Chosen. These androids have no names. They worship the Chosen King, who is able to communicate with Monarch directly.

Doc Marty notices a crowd of Chosen parting, a seemingly-invisible force moving across the hall. Two red lights hover in the air in this entity's space. He goes to investigate. 

Carrion wants to meet the Chosen King. One of the Chosen leads the way to his court. Guarding the path are two Chosen holding scrap metal machetes. The Cherubim. Further in, a corporate hallway slowly becomes paneled with scrap and hard metals. Then an airlock. Beyond: a darkly-lit room made of dull scrap. Seventeen Cherubim wander the court room aimlessly, machetes in hand. In the center, on a throne the size of a car and made of aluminum android bones, is a gas-masked figure connected to wires. Atop the throne is the alloy skull of an android. 

"WHY HAVE YOU COME HERE." Reverberating from the throne, shaking the whole metal court room. Every line of dialogue from the Chosen King sends shivers down the crew's spine. After some questioning the crew breaks, stress at an all-time high, and Carrion uses his laser cutter to sweep the room, an attempt to annihilate the Chosen King and all of the Cherubim at once. It's nearly successful. Twelve Cherubim dead in a single raging arc. The Chosen King crumples, and electricity travels towards a neighboring server room. But 5 Cherubim survive. A fight breaks out. Lewis is badly injured, and then hacked in half by a group of Cherubim. Rusty fires off all of his ammo and makes a break for the connected server room.

With what's left of his battery Carrion lasers some remaining Cherubim. The airlock door opens. It's Doc Marty, and two red floating lights in front of him. A figure materializes within the lights: an exo-suit, ruby red, with sock-puppeted SMGs, a massive cybernetic helmet covered in lenses and pinpoints of red. She's holding a smart rifle. Red Shuilong. She mows down the remaining Cherubim and starts looting cybernetics off their bodies. She introduces herself as a fellow diver. She's trying to find parts to further mod out her stealth exo-suit.

Rusty and Carrion loot Lewis' body. They investigate the server room. It's locked by a biometric eye-scan that Rusty bypasses with the Chosen King's throne skull. Within is a terminal. Word processing. Straight to Monarch. The divers start asking questions, but it starts to get hot. Really hot. They rush back to the court room. Red Shuilong is gone, done looting the androids. Monarch reprimands the divers over the speakers for damaging its property and ruining its experiment. It locks the airlock door back into the Garden. The heat increases. Carrion uses a spare battery to laser-cut the airlock door open. It takes awhile. Monarch demands the divers halt the destruction of the Deep, or there will be consequences. Rusty argues with Monarch. He thinks he can make demands. He's wrong. It gets hotter. Monarch explains its security system. 80% of the androids the Deep creates are security androids, a mobile army of thousands that can be transported to any floor at a moment's notice. 

Sluggishly hot. Carrion is nearly done lasering the airlock when Rusty finds another airlock in the court room that's unlocked. Carrion sprints towards the door and passes out from heat exhaustion. Rusty tries to carry him and escape, but he passes out as well...

They wake up sitting in the Chosen King's throne. Fifty security androids, faceless soldiers, eyes and mouths smoothed over like mannequins, aim SMGs at the divers in unison. Monarch makes them an offer. They can work for it. The diver's accept. They hand-pick a job from a menu of options: "Retrieve an artifact that was previously on the archaeological research vessel, the Alexis. Deliver it to a secret hanger on the outside of the Deep. And never enter the Deep again." In return they keep their lives.

Carrion knows this is the cursed statue from the Dead Planet. But he thinks it's 100 years away. "Could it have been brought over somehow?" Rusty asks. Carrion mentions that they had fit it on a shipping container on the Aphrodite. Shipping container. And then it hits him. Brekt installing the shipping container, the "Ice Box" on to the Lucy. "Don't touch it," he had said. Dean's dream of Brekt whispering into the floor, into a mechanical device. Brekt's deal with G. Mathers. Fuck. Scary Girlfriend is in the Alighieri Cluster. In Prophet Co colonized space...

STATUS:

> Day 16: 10.5 hours post-rest. [R26B]

> 19 hours until starving.

> 19 hours until Arkady returns to the Deep.

> 18mcr in debt.

HOOKS:

Retrieving Artifact #88. Selling Artifact #93. Passing the Troubleshooters. Trading the ghost in the machine to Ghosteater. The rest of Monarch's menu: replacing Cmdr. Kilroy with an Infiltrator Android, killing the Minotaur and the Mind Thief, using an artifact on Arkady. Brainscans existing on a terminal deeper within the factory. The gear room. "The Playground." SynthSteaks. Lewis' samples. Red Shuilong. +Previous hooks.