Dark Blue Monstropolis

In the end, it was everything they expected and yet, it was nothing like they had expected. Indianapolis had possessed very little in the way of multi-story buildings. If you had a five-floor building you were doing fairly well, to be honest. What the Exodus hadn’t destroyed, the violent weather of the Bowl had finally eroded and whittled and pushed until they collapsed. The building Argo and Mayster called home–had called home, he corrected himself–had been five floors not counting the dome. And that had been pushing it.

Even though he had never seen a skyscraper before–not in real life, anyway–it wasn’t the tallest of the giant gleaming towers off in the distance that caught his eye first. Even on street level, you could see them above the tenements.

It wasn’t the buzz of skytrawlers and airseds using the roads overhead while their slower, treaded cousins moved in less auspicious ways below.

It wasn’t the people, or even the feeling of the people. While the bustle of humanity was slim here right inside the borders of the Atlantic Union, there was the overwhelming feeling of being in a real city, a real honest to God megalopolis. Argo couldn’t tell what formed that picture, that intuition of the millions of people who lived between here and the ocean. Maybe it was the smells, maybe it was all five of his senses telling him the same thing that his pack’s firewall was: Holy shit, man, what the hell?

They stepped out into the light, left the underworld of I-75 behind, and right in front of them was a tenement building. Up one corner of the structure was the most godawful shitcobble of an antenna Argo had ever seen. It was this that drew his eyes first, and then followed it down to something that looked incredibly out of place.

It was a Nodebooth. Significantly less beaten up than the one in their hometown, but it was virtually identical. And behind it, two men were stacking cases. There was a hodge of different types of cases, but a good number of them were strikingly similar to the metal storage container that they would see turn up at the Nodebooth they frequented.

“That’s right,” Welsh said, following his gaze. “Welcome to Sneakernet at the end of the world. This is where things are converted from Sneakernet 2.0 back down to version 1.0.”

“File sharing the old fashioned way,” Argo said.

“The old old fashioned way,” Welsh countered. “Hang on a second, would you?” He reached into his right coat pocket and produced a small device that looked like half of a silver pen. He held it up to the side of his face. “Yeah,” he said and paused.

“Yeah, we’re back,” Welsh continued, and Argo quickly realized he was hearing half of a conversation. “Right outside the I-75 tunnel. Yeah. Okay, well come on.”
He put the device back in his pocket.

“Cell phone?” Argo asked.

“What?” Welsh looked at him. “Oh. No, not a cell phone. There’s no cells anymore. And not a satellite phone. Because God knows there aren’t any satellites anymore. Well. Mostly. No, it just does voice over IP.” He pointed to the shitcobble antenna. “Reception’s great standing right here.”

Welsh nodded over to Threnody. “That was Simon. He’s on his way.” Threnody merely nodded back and stayed standing as she was. Argo noted that when something was going on that didn’t concern her, Threnody almost seemed to become very easy to overlook–a statue, almost. A statue that can come to life and kill dozens of skinheads while breaking very little sweat, he reminded himself. The picture in his mind of her soaring over the heads of the crowd back at the Lodge was quite clear.

Argo looked over at Mayster, who had been very quiet since stepping out of the tunnel. Argo had chalked this up initially to the shock of finally being where they had always wanted to end up.

Instead, Mayster had his visor on and his earpieces in. He looked through the readings on his visor at Argo, brow furrowed. “I’ve been tweaking my firewall. They have music on demand channels here, man. A minute ago I was listening to somebody playing some fucking twenty-four/seven polka station out of his bedroom. And then I finally found some live DJs spinning from a club over in Boston.”

“Yeah?” Argo asked.

“Yeah,” Mayster said gravely, “place is open twenty-four seven. Spinning all day and all night. Then I switched over to something called Sonic Sphere One, playing trance mashups. And then I switched to a station out of Tampa, Techno Wall to Wall.” Mayster stopped talking. Argo guessed another station was coming up.

“And?” Argo finally demanded.

“Most of it is shit,” Mayster said. “Most of it is absolute fried shit on a bun with a side of fries.” Mayster put a hand on Argo’s shoulder. “We got here just in time. This place needs us, man.”

Welsh, who had been watching all of this from behind a halo of smoke from a recently lit cig, chuckled to himself. “We’re on a mission from God,” he said.

Neither Argo or Mayster knew what the hell to make of that and Welsh, of course, refused to explain.