City Mechanics and hiding in plain sight
She pushed off the plaza's polished stone, a blur of motion that defied gravity, her enhanced leg servos compressing and releasing energy in a silent, explosive burst. The retreat was not a moral victory; it was a tactical withdrawal mandated from above, confirming her status as a high-value asset, not a free agent. Lyra, never one to waste motion, was already five steps ahead, weaving through the stunned protesters.
"New threat vector confirmed: high-level telemetry lock," BDJ's cool voice synthesized in Jackie's neural stream, a spike of anxiety cutting through the low hum of her internal cooling loops. "Nexus Central Command is attempting to triangulate your unique AEF signature within the city's geo-spatial grid."
"Where are the blind spots, Lyra?" Jackie murmured, her voice barely audible over the receding shouts and the city's omnipresent ambient noise.
Lyra didn't look back. Her ruby ocular implants were flickering with rapid data ingestion, a thin, almost invisible strand of black, amorphous matter—Tally, her unique A.I. companion—was extending from her wrist to a discreet public data terminal embedded in a trash receptacle. "The 200-year-old infrastructure is our only advantage. The original Dome architects didn't account for adaptive quantum telemetry. They left gaps. We are heading for Sector G-12, the original Hydroponics hub—it's been offline for thirty years."
Jackie activated her recently evolved scrambler system. It was an involuntary upgrade, a stress response to the immediate threat of tracking. Her ocular implant, already a marvel of optical engineering, began projecting a low-power, wide-spectrum energy wave. The wave didn't block telemetry; it subtly warped the environmental data around her, feeding false feedback to the surveillance network. A heat sensor might register her as a small maintenance drone; a motion sensor might see her as static interference. This evolution was constantly adding a new target to her back.
"Deployment of Ocular-Scrambler initiated," BDJ confirmed. "Efficiency 65%. The displacement signature is consistent with a small, uncontrolled fire on level 3."
"Good enough," Lyra cut in, pulling Tally back into her wrist-mounted shell. "The older the conduit, the easier the access."
They plunged into the lower levels of the city, transitioning from the pristine, neon-drenched arteries of the Nexus core to the grimy, rust-stained veins of the old infrastructure. The air here was heavy with the smell of ozone, aged metal, and recycled water. Jackie's systems were flooded with the chaotic noise of unmanaged city sub-functions—a sensory overload of buzzing transformers, grinding hydraulics, and the distant, muffled sounds of the lower-caste citizens living outside Nexus's careful aesthetic control.
Lyra located a maintenance shaft, the entrance sealed with a thick, bolted metal grate bearing the faded logo of a long-defunct maintenance corporation. Tally, now a dense, shimmering black plug, extended from Lyra's arm, seamlessly merging with the old lock's magnetic housing.
"Tally requires three seconds to bypass the Level 5 security lock. Its code is archaic, but layered," Lyra stated, her face illuminated by the flickering data stream running across the grate.
Jackie remained vigilant, her senses filtering the noise. She used her nanobites to discreetly scan for any external access points to the maintenance grid. She briefly considered using the nanobites to contact Sura, but thought better of it.
Jackie let out a breath and forced herself to calm and focus.
The grate hissed, releasing years of pressure and dust. Lyra slipped into the darkness. Jackie followed, her scrambler system adjusting to the confined space, making her silhouette shimmer slightly as she squeezed past exposed piping.
The journey through the maintenance network was a symphony of technical hazards. They navigated corroded catwalks, bypassed active hydraulic pumps thundering below, and squeezed through ventilation shafts that smelled of burnt circuitry. Lyra, relying on Tally's real-time mapping of historical architectural schematics, moved with unnerving certainty. Jackie, despite the scrambler, felt the constant phantom touch of invisible tracers grazing her enhanced aura, a reminder that the world was now designed to contain her.
Her 360° visual arc snapped into place as the sensors rose and activated from her neck. Her ocular implant automatically engaged her data worm detection. It was all so new, and everything was happening so quickly that she didn't even know her capabilities at this point. If she was to survive, she needed to stay two steps ahead of her own upgrades. Gregor was right: she needed live combat to fully understand and utilize her systems—to understand what it meant to be a true Blue Diamond Cyborg.
Finally, Lyra stopped before a heavily reinforced blast door, marked with a decaying hazard sign. "This is it. Sector G-12. The original Hydroponics hub. Shut down after the nutrient cycle collapsed decades ago."
Tally detached and merged with the door's locking mechanism. The process took longer this time, the heavy-duty power cells requiring a full five seconds of Tally's processing power to cycle. With a painful, screeching groan of metal against rust, the blast door slid inward, revealing a cavernous, dark space.
The hub was massive, a cathedral of forgotten technology. Tiered metal shelving rose fifty meters, once holding acres of food crops, now just a network of dry, cracked tubing and silent nutrient lines. The only light came from the dome's aged solar collectors far above, casting ethereal shafts of dust-filled light. It was cold, silent, and most importantly, offline. The perfect place to hide and regroup.
"We are safe here. No active local surveillance grid. The sheer volume of metal here will disrupt most external telemetry," Lyra concluded, her tone relaxing slightly for the first time.
Jackie slumped against a support strut, her internal capacitor bank showing a 20% draw from the extended AEF and Scrambler use. She watched Lyra begin setting up a secure processing terminal using a flexible fiber cable and a specialized interface port in her forearm.
Just as Jackie was about to initiate a system check, a low-frequency pulse bypassed the scrambler. It wasn't a tracer. It was a coded, untraceable message, a digital whisper vibrating only in her neural stream.
"—It's Aiden. I saw what you did. Don't believe the ads. I can help. Meet me at the C-4-Delta airlock—midnight." The message disappeared as quickly as it arrived, leaving Jackie alone in the cavernous silence of the forgotten city, a sudden, fragile connection tethering her to the very people she was risking everything to avoid.