Digital Exodus Chapter 19

Hi I just finished this like 30 seconds ago I hope you enjoy it!

The Exodus safe house in Crescent City was located near but not directly inside the city’s business district, right on the border between the CBD and the Bertsch industrial park. We left the building through a discrete tunnel that disgorged us onto the street out of an alley.

This close to the business district, a lot of the factories here were pretty tall, but they were dwarfed by the towers just across the freeway. It reminded me of Sydney, and judging by the way those towers pierced the clouds, probably served all sorts of similar purposes. How many clones of my parents were up there right now, making business deals that would end up destroying the lives of thousands of people, just to add a couple fractions of a percent to their profits.

The weather was awful, but that was, apparently, pretty normal for California during this time of year. I could smell the reason too, in the rain that was pouring down. Cloud seed particles, no matter what the politicians and scientists tried to claim, always left a certain chemical smell in the rain. Although, I think that California actually used humidity pumps out in the ocean, so maybe it really was all in my head.

“Alia,” David grumbled, catching hold of my hood. “Don’t walk out into the road.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, and stepped back close to him.

The road wasn’t too busy, but I guess stepping out onto the road wasn’t a good idea. The flat faces of the compact city cars and trucks could probably do some serious damage— wait, I was made of metal and polymer. It might not be so bad… but then again, it would definitely blow our cover.

How I was meant to pass as one of the poor people— uh, I mean poor as in like… well shit, I guess I meant both. Many of the folks hanging around were obviously homeless— just doing their best to survive the alleys and stuff. The workers were the second most numerous group of people, with their coveralls, desperately tired expressions, and for many, cheap cybernetic limbs. I know for a fact that the missing limbs and their substandard counterparts were due to cost cutting measures in health and safety on the factory floor. It was cheaper to give injured workers a couple hundred California Dollars and a dollar-store cybernetic limb. Were those a thing? It definitely seemed like it.

David steered me down the road while I gawked at everything around me. I’d never seen so much organised misery, and this was just… what, normal? As we walked, the sheer magnitude of what I was seeing hit home. All the numbers and percentages, impersonal reports and sales figures that had been part of everyday life at my parent’s company— this is what it’d created as a byproduct of their vaunted profits.

I wasn’t being hyperbolic, either. I could see one of my parent’s subsidiary company logos on a factory over the road. I think the full company was called SecretScan? They manufactured security systems for middle-tower areas that were designed to keep ‘the workers’ out of the vertical boulevards that housed what masqueraded as the middle class in most of global society.

I felt so shit.

Thankfully, there was a mission to concentrate on.

We weren't just wandering around the city streets, we were heading to a specific location. As a group, we slipped into a side street and began to look for our target.

The side street was overshadowed by two large factories on either side, but fronting the actual street were these small apartment stacks. A few sported dilapidated shop fronts, but mostly it was dark and dirty.

Eventually, we found a wide alley and headed down, being careful not to step in trash as we went. In the corner beside a dumpster, a man was propped up with his chin resting on his chest. It looked like he was sleeping, but my augmented android vision told me he'd been dead for twelve or so hours. He had several spent inhalers beside him, each with their serial numbers scraped off. Nobody else mentioned him, as if his existence and death didn't matter or that it was too commonplace to comment on.

With my heart aching I saved my surface level scan of him, because… I don't know, maybe out of some idea that creating a digital image of him would at least provide some evidence of his existence and ultimate end.

At the end of the alley, we found a garage door with a smaller pedestrian door set into it. Gloria strode up to it and accessed its digital lock. In moments, it recognised us, and we filed into the space beyond.

It was, as it'd appeared from the outside, a small garage. That was about where its surface normalcy fell apart, however. The door itself was reinforced, and my synthetic vision helpfully tagged an automated turret set into the ceiling. God damn, what had the Exodus been doing here that required this level of security?

The room itself contained barely anything, just a beat-up old electric van, a tool rack, and a series of wide lockers that ran the length of one wall.

“This is kinda underwhelming,” Jason said worriedly. “I was hoping the Exodus would have more than an old van and garage.”

Gloria, who'd gotten the info about this place with Elissa, just laughed and crossed the room. Pressing her palm to one of the digilocks on the old lockers opened it, and the doors swung open.

“Say again?” Gloria asked, stepping aside so we could see inside.

Oh. Okay. Inside that one locker was a weapons rack with six rifle looking guns stacked neatly together. Below them were two shelves with loaded magazines stacked neatly on top of each other. A good third of them were missing. Below that, three more shelves had boxes of ammo. A significant chunk of the ammo boxes were empty.

Gloria continued down the row of lockers, pressing her palm to each one. There were pistols, smaller guns, bigger guns, a couple of experimental laser weapons, rail rifles, and even some bazookas or whatever the technical term was. I was Australian, I didn't know guns.

There were also lockers with varying weights of body armour. There were the obvious tactical vests and pads and stuff, but there were also small collapsible powered exo-skeletal suits. They were fairly lightweight designs, with heavy plates to protect only external facing parts of the body.

“What the fuck?” Jason squeaked, voicing the surprise that the rest of us were definitely feeling. “What kind of operation were the early Exodans running here?”

“Check this out,” Gloria said, still exuding smuggo energy.

She walked up to the van and slid the side door open. Let's just say that the interior did not match the exterior. It'd looked like your average thirty year old van… but inside it was the epitome of pre-war spy movie shit. I could see the compact housings for three hidden turrets, two on the side and one that popped out the top. The opposite wall to the sliding door had all sorts of powered down computer equipment, and the four seats in the back could swivel… oh goodness, the one beside the door had a mount of a much heavier weapon. The weapon in question was nowhere to be seen, however. It'd been torn out of the mounting at some point, severely damaging it in the process.

“O-kay,” Ed laughed nervously. “Do we really need all this firepower just to track down Jason’s folks?”

“Probably not,” Gloria chuckled as she hefted one of the bazooka things. She turned to stare directly at Ed with a goofy, slightly insane grin. “But it pays to have options.”

Gosh I really hope we didn’t need them… but Gloria was right, options were good.

“Okay everyone,” Roger said, clapping his hands together once to get our attention. “Pack whatever weapons you’re comfortable with using, but I want everyone to have a short and long ranged option. We’re going into a dangerous area, and… well, my hair is beginning to stand on end.”

I saw David nod agreement at the last part, which made me wonder what was happening that I’d missed.

“As for our plan,” Roger continued. “We’ll head into the slum once we’re done here and secure accommodations. From there, we hit up any of Jason's old contacts and try to get information. We'll see how we go from there. We're already a couple of days down on the deadline for Cherish’s arrival.”

“She's actually already been in transit for a while,” I said softly. “They've been putting the armour on her as they fly. Nobody has seen her yet because she's coming in from above the plane of the ecliptic and people always forget to look there.”

Roger nodded in my direction. “Right. I expect things to get even more hairy down on the surface here, when they see our ship. Nobody has ever built a ship as big as the Cherish, and we're about to hang her over everyone's heads. The general population could react… unpredictably.”

“Forget the general population, the governments of the world will probably act unpredictably,” David said seriously. “Thank goodness these bodies have Exodus Network Nodes. We can escape if needs be.”

“Just so long as you remember that death could still injure you,” Cerri chimed in. “These bodies are still running on the old system of partial habitation. If the wrong component gets damaged or destroyed, the whiplash will put you to sleep until someone can dig through your buffered frame data and put you back together.”

All the techno babble that Cerri was spouting was true. The bodies we were in had been designed for the lowest possible latency between thought and physical action. Thus, you had to essentially extend a portion of your digital self inside them. Normally a catastrophic disruption like Cerri was describing would outright kill a digital sapient. Thankfully, our digi-frames—The framework of code and UX elements that allowed for interaction with digital space outside of your mind—had protections built in. If the connection on the body’s end was abruptly severed for some reason, it would take the last image it had of your mindstate and save it. Essentially, your conscious state of mind would be frozen and unconscious in the buffer until someone with the technical expertise to unpack you came along.

“Good point,” Roger nodded as he made brief eye contact with each of us.

I shuffled uncomfortably when he did it to me. Stupid eye contact. Everyone treated it like it was an action that everyone automatically knew how to do, but I couldn't get it right. Like, which eye do you look at, and how did you do it without staring into the other person's soul or whatever? Maybe I could find a video on the subj—

“—you out of commission for a day, and we'll be down a person.”

Oh no, I forgot to pay attention. What did he say? Replaying the last few seconds, I heard him talk about how we shouldn't do anything too risky because if someone got broken it'd mean we were down a person. Hah. It wasn't me he had to worry about. Gloria or Ed, on the other hand…