Dark Blue Monstropolis

Her suspicions were right. She was stopped by two goons in heavy black boots and a body armor that made them each look like they were riding around in their own human-shaped personal tank. Their shells looked like steel, but were soft as cotton to the touch. She knew this because their hands were gloved with the stuff as the goons ran them all over her body. Several times, just to be safe.

This was something she had just gotten used to. Her body was in excellent shape given her hobby of chasing down contraband cassettes and players and hocking them on the black market. She didn’t understand why some people were so stuck on trying to get old tunes off of iPods and the like. There were still some perfectly good tunes left on the older stuff, you just had to know where (and how hard) to look.

“The Elegance of the Chase,” she called it. It was too easy just to hook an old hard drive up to your pack and dump tunes from it. There was an art to finding ancient material on cassettes, or even more rare, “fat cassettes”. She had even heard an old timer tell tales of music files being stored on large, bulky black plastic discs, but she had never seen one herself. She had no reason to believe the old timer, he seemed to be enjoying his remaining days drinking Splat and ratting artists like herself out to the authorities.

After the personal encounter with the two overly-friendly pigs, she emerged into the cold night air. The sounds of the airtrawlers screaming thousands of feet over her head. The air and the ground were wet. Another planned rainstorm from the Heavy Tech satellites that kept the weather in motion around what was left of the world. Still, she had to be thankful that she was one of the lucky ones who were “back East”. She had heard rumors of the world to the west and how desolate it was. She also heard of the mutants that still dwelled in the world to the west.

It all came down to a simple choice. Right or left.

Going straight would lead her into another building, but that would be too simple. Besides, she had had to do some finagling to get her place in the building she had just silently vacated.

Right.

Or Left.

She’d better do something soon. The Eye had a way of spotting people who didn’t have anything to do or anywhere to be and until she was out of their view, she had better look like a good little worker bee.

On a whim, she opted for Right. Right had always served her well before, hadn’t it? Ironically enough, right took her west. If she kept walking far enough, she could learn about those mutants and their life all by her lonesome.

Over the next several hours, she would randomize her walking in case the Eyes began to see a pattern to her direction matrix. She had quite a bit of distance to cover if she wanted to not have to worry about his anymore.

At one point in her journey, there was a brief, but intense rainshower that covered only about one hundred square feet. See? she thought. Not even the Heavy Tech stuff gets it right all of the time. I wonder who it found to blame that little mistake on? I wouldn’t want to be that person tonight. I hope that they have told their families that they loved them.

She continued slowly westward, varying her pattern. The sun had risen and made its own zig-zag pattern through the sky and was moving closer and closer to the western horizon when she saw the entrance to the tunnel.

No one except “artists” like her used them anymore. In fact, there was a small group of people that had taken up residence inside them. It seems that the Eye didn’t really know what went on down there and hadn’t picked up on it yet. What the tunnel dwellers couldn’t see was that, if the Eye ever found out, there was nowhere for them to run. If the Eye ever found out, it would simply seal off both ends of the tunnel with little or no warning.

She decided to stop briefly with some of these people for the night and partake of their hospitality.

She lowered her visor over her face, took a brief glance back at the skyline of the city that she had grown to love over the years, and found the building she was looking for. If there was a weakness to the Heavy Tech stuff, it was regularity. There was no room for things to be out of sequence in its world. The building she that currently held all 110% of her attention was the tallest one in the skyline. Like the other buildings it was shaped like a large knife handle sticking out of the ground. At its top was a brilliant blue beacon that also radiated a blue glow that surrounded the building from top to bottom.

She thanked her luck that she had decided to make this journey on a clear evening. She could see the top of the building very clearly. On even the lightest of cloudy days, the top ¾ of the building could be shrouded in the veil of cloud cover.

She had to pay attention. Every evening, near dusk, but never at the same time, the blue light and beacon would go out for about five seconds. She wasn’t sure what this was for, but the glow from the arc lights throughout the entire city would glow brighter during that one second. She assumed that it was to allow some kind of power switch, but had never been able to get a straight answer from anyone. What she did know was that during that brief time, the Eye was closed. It was at this time that she would have to make her dart into the tunnel.

In order to keep the Eye satisfied about her occupation during this time of waiting, she began picking up any spare trash that littered the ground around the mouth of the tunnel. She worked slowly enough to allow her enough trash to keep her busy while she waited.

After an hour, the streetlights suddenly brightened. She shot her glance to the top of the building and couldn’t see the beacon. Immediately, she grabbed her case, and dove through the tunnel’s mouth, hoping for a soft landing.