Ground Zero

Ground Zero.

The term referred to a zone where disaster had scoured away every living thing, leaving behind an environment so extreme that nothing could survive. The disasters themselves might vary, but the kinds of catastrophe severe enough to earn a Ground Zero designation were fairly consistent: either a colossal bombardment, or a biological disaster sweeping through.

And the Ground Zero zone spread out before us looked like it might have been both.

I already swapped the oxygen filter once on the way here, and the second we step into Ground Zero it starts dying on me like this.

I read the live environmental data scrolling across the HUD inside ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠my specialized gas-mask goggles and, at the same time, swept the surroundings in a quick, hard look. The rest of the city had been relatively intact, so I had taken the liberty of deciding there hadn't been a war here. Standing in front of a sight like this, though, it was obvious I had been thinking far too comfortably.

"Do you think there was a war?"

"Anyone looking at this would think so. I still don't believe it was a war."

I pointed at the buildings around us, lining up more evidence for Lucy.

"Indiscriminate wartime bombing doesn't care about time or place. It cares even less about what it hits. If a bombardment that enormous had come down on this spot, the buildings around it wouldn't still have a shape."

"That's true. No matter how sturdy modern buildings of reinforced steel and concrete are, if you dump enough ordnance to wipe an entire district off the map, the neighboring districts would have taken damage too. Then what do you think caused it, Leader?"

"Not a strike from outside. An internal explosion."

"Ah. That makes sense."

That was the conclusion I had reached from seeing the scene with my own eyes, and Lucy didn't seem inclined to argue. She studied the pipes and wiring torn hideously out of the wreckage.

Yes. Those traces were exactly the proof that this had been an internal blast, not an external bombardment. The debris hadn't been smashed downward from above, crushed and poured into a heap. It had been hurled skyward by a massive explosion from within, then allowed to fall back under its own weight. If someone had punched a bunker buster or a nuclear warhead into this place, the destruction would have matched the weapon. The surrounding damage, inconveniently, was extremely light. And the ground of Ground Zero hadn't slumped into a single crater — it had buckled and heaved in ugly, irregular welts.

Something enormous had gone off dozens of meters underground. That was my guess.

"Even if there was an internal explosion underground, I still think it's strange. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠The buildings around here are relatively fine. Why would anyone need to erase this spot in particular? And not by bombing it from above, but by going to the trouble of detonating it from the inside and turning the ground itself inside out?"

Lucy's question was entirely reasonable. The kind that made teaching her a pleasure.

"It's simple. If a secret base or a laboratory that must never see the light of day is about to be exposed by some unavoidable accident, how do you think most countries respond? You can use Russia, your old homeland, as the example if you want."

"They'd wipe it away. Without a trace."

In point of fact, the Soviet Union — Russia's predecessor — had been enough of a magnificent nation to set off nuclear bombs on its own soil just to check whether a canal project of national scale was even feasible. And the United States, that shining exemplar of liberal democracy? Don't even start. Those people ran nuclear tests the way other people cracked peanuts when they got bored.

The point I wanted to make was this: even countries that weren't those countries would use any means necessary to keep a national-level danger from being exposed.

"That's exactly it. Whatever was under here was dangerous enough that they had to bury it with extreme measures. But if they just poured bombs onto it in the open, they'd rile up public opinion at home and abroad. So they picked a method they could dress up as a 'gas explosion' — a cover with a long and storied tradition."

"Cunning. It's a method they used all the time back in Russia, so I'm familiar with it."

"People at the top of a country tend to think alike."

Which was exactly why we were risking our lives searching a place like this, wasn't it?

With that, instead of throwing ourselves into Ground Zero's graveyard of rubble, I started tearing through the surrounding buildings that had only barely escaped the blast. Whether this place reflected a location and an incident that had "actually" happened didn't matter. The Dark Zone would have reinterpreted and reconstructed all of it anyway.

What really mattered was finding the connective tissue that, however absurd it looked, had no choice but to make sense under the Dark Zone's system.

"There's no way the Dark Zone parked a zone like this here as decoration. The entrance will look sealed from the outside, but there will definitely be another way in, connected by a different passage. We have to find it."

"While punching through this endless field of randomly placed traps, you mean!"

Buildings like mixed-use commercial complexes, with so many entrances they were practically wide open, had no traps no matter how large they were. Buildings like these, on the other hand — few doors, tightly sealed — spat out vicious traps at the slightest provocation. It was the same logic as the hospital: bigger than a shopping complex in practice, but with fewer entrances and a closed-off layout, and absolutely crawling with traps.

Clatter-clatter-clatter! Thwack!

The instant I undid the chain someone had clearly hung across the front door of a small apartment building on purpose, the chain lunged at me like a snake. I chopped it down with the machete. A trap with a gimmick that, left unbound, would automatically throw itself at the nearest thing in order to bind it. A rather occult little number, cute enough that I could have farmed it and sold it to an antique collector or a pervert — but I had no desire to let something this vicious loose on the outside world.

The only things fit to be released outside were inanimate, "normal" items, and biological samples from the Native Species.

"Anyone trying to farm Ground Zero or find an escape route would have no choice but to trip the traps planted all around here. That's just vicious."

Whump!

Lucy grumbled as she smashed aside the welcome mat just inside the door, which had suddenly bared teeth like a bear trap and tried to take her ankle off. For now the traps were still showing off gimmicks at this adorable level, but the further we pushed the search, the more dangerous and varied they would become in their efforts to stop us.

In truth, we might not have needed to come all the way into Ground Zero and grind ourselves down hunting for a hidden entrance. We could have approached through the city's subway, or gone looking for some other escape route on the thinnest of hopes. But that was how you turned a working plan into a failure. EFD was famous for mercilessly caving in the skulls of anyone who leaned on luck.

This it?

I ignored the dark stairwell leading underground. I ignored the elevator, which for some reason still had its lights on. I closed my hand on the handle of the red indoor fire-hose cabinet set into the first-floor corridor wall of the apartment building.

Click. Click.

Locked, as expected. And the reason a fire-hose cabinet that should never be locked was locked was obvious enough.

Jackpot.

I called Lucy over quietly. She had been combing every corner of the first-floor hallway, and she came pattering toward me at a run. Her movement itself was not so different from an ordinary person's, and yet, suspiciously, I could not hear her footsteps at all. She wasn't even running a separate implant the way I was. The physical ability was so extraordinary it was almost uncanny.

Holding onto that sense of dissonance, I pointed her at the elevator with its lights still on.

"I'm going to open the hidden entrance now. Whatever comes out of there, kill all of it. Don't use a gun."

"A gun would give our position away. That would be dangerous. But I only need to kill them?"

"One more thing. No matter how safe and intact the inside of that elevator looks, do not get in. If nothing comes out, just keeping watch is enough."

The moment Lucy nodded and tightened her grip on her close-combat alloy club, I fired the Blood Flow Accelerator and pulled out the lockpick kit.

Accelerating the blood without ingesting anything temporarily increased the oxygen reaching the brain and sent secreted hormones circulating through the body that much faster. It also kicked the metabolism into a higher gear, so you could expect a full-body "awakening" effect. The price was that I would react with ugly sensitivity to even small hormonal shifts, and I would burn through a considerable number of calories — but there was no helping it. I had already used a Boost Syringe in the commercial complex, and I couldn't administer another drug that required a proper interval. The Blood Flow Accelerator, at least for a short window, could stand in for the doping power of a boost drug.

Click. Click.

The instant I carefully started working the lockpick through the keyhole set in the fire cabinet's handle, the red lamp on the unit — which had been sleeping quietly — suddenly flared to life. The only mercy was that no screaming fire alarm followed it. Otherwise the cabinet seemed to be functioning perfectly. The problem was that it had chosen to function the moment I touched it.

A door like this originally came with its own dedicated key. I was forcing a lockpick instead of using one, so of course the alarm system had kicked in. In a laboratory-themed Dark Zone, you saw the same kind of alert if you smashed through a classified-area door without the proper keycard, or tried to force your way in with a hacking tool.

I felt heat surge up through my skull and poured every scrap of concentration I had into moving the lockpick, little by little, with as much delicacy as I could manage. The real me had never picked a lock in my life, but this body, for whatever reason, seemed intimately familiar with the work. It followed experiences that existed only as my thoughts and knowledge, and it followed them well.

Clack!

First stage unlocked. And then—

Ding!

At the same instant, the elevator's arrival chime rang out.

A cold line traced itself down my spine, but I refused to look aside and kept my focus on the lock. If I had been doing this alone, I would have parked a shock drone with a stun rig nearby and worked through the prickling on my skin — but I had a far more reliable colleague now than any drone.

Trust Lucy. She's sharp. She'll have understood ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠what I meant.

Yes. I had deliberately not explained to Lucy what would come out of that elevator, or why. Spell it out in detail and the person who actually had to face the thing — Lucy — might end up in more danger, not less. Instead I had stripped the briefing to a minimum and corrected her actions just enough that she wouldn't stray too far. I had faith that would be enough.

Scrape. Click. Scrape.

I pushed the lockpick a little deeper to take the second lock, twisting it this way and prodding it that way, but the satisfying sense of a perfect fit refused to come. When I played EFD, the internals of a lock were usually laid out on the other side of the screen, so picking one was easy. Doing it for real, even with an exceptional body and enormous concentration, was not. Well. Locks came in wildly different difficulties by stage, so it wasn't entirely incomprehensible.

Whoosh! Whoosh!

I lockpicked and, beside me, a savage club-sound kept ringing out, and cold sweat slid down my back. The force Lucy put into a full-power swing was genuinely tremendous. Person or Native Species, there would be no head left afterward. In other words: Lucy was doing just fine.

Click!

Second lock's open too.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

I had barely reached the third and final lock when the elevator chimed again. Not once. Three times in a row.

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

As if she had been waiting for it, the speed and number of Lucy's swings jumped hard. The situation was not good. I needed to get this lock open faster.

What kind of bastard builds a fire-cabinet lock like this? I want to drag that guy over here, put a lockpick in his hand, and make him do nothing but pick locks for three days and nights.

If he whined that he was hungry, I'd give him a plate of dumplings. Then it would be back to the locks. Stop calling him by his name and start calling him Lockpicker, and he'd probably love it to death.

Scrape. Scrape.

But if you really think about it, is this even my problem? It's this country that's wrong. This society, making me sit here picking locks.

Scrape. Scrape.

Ten years of that shit, and now I'm looking at another ten rotting in here. I'm the only bastard who has to die, is that it? You sons of bitches.

Scrape. Scrape.

Did I really do something that bad? Huh? Bad enough for a death sentence? Bad enough to be stuck out here pulling this circus? Bad enough to sit here struggling because I can't pick a single lock?

Scrape. Scrape. Clack.

"Ah, fuck!"

Pleasant sound from inside the lock or not, I couldn't take it anymore. I flung the lockpick aside and looked over.

The elevator doors stood wide open. That space of maybe thirty square feet, washed in the soft glow of warm beige lighting, looked positively cozy. Press those countless buttons in every color however I liked, and I could go anywhere I wanted.

Wasn't that a place out of a dream? A free pass straight into paradise. The old me, the one who used to break into a cold sweat over the toll every time he hit a highway booth, could get lost!

These buttons are short on people to press them. They want rapid transit via a burst of taps. Have a steamy encounter right this second!

"Whoa! It's free!"

Like a true Korean, ready to drop dead at the word free, I launched myself at a full sprint toward the wide-open elevator.

"What in the— Leader?!"

"Here I go, here I go, poof—I'm gone!!!!!!!!!"

The instant I tried to board that elevator with passionate commitment, some thug grabbed me from the side. But a little force like that was nowhere near enough to break a will of steel.

"Snap out of it! Leader!"

…No, wait. That might actually be plenty?

"That's quite a—! No, this is still doable, though. I'm sorry, but this may sting a little!"

"Nein!!!!!!!!"

Thuk!

Despite my firm and unambiguous refusal, the thug went ahead and drove a poisoned hand into me anyway. Poisoned fangs, maybe. Either way, something stabbed sharply into my side, and I felt my overheated head plunge as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over me.

I glanced down. The needle of a disposable syringe with nothing in it was buried in my flank.

"…Thanks, Lucy. You can let go now."

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"If I weren't, I'd be throwing you off at full power by now, exosuit and all."

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"That's true. Of course, even if you used the exosuit, I would have pinned you with raw strength."

That much power out of a frame like hers?

No. That wasn't the important part.

I clutched a head pounding with headache and shut off the Blood Flow Accelerator first, which was still spinning merrily away. Blood flow throughout my body dropped off sharply, and I returned to my original state. The aftereffects, naturally, were not small.

"Hah. That was genuinely vicious."

Only then did I remember that Crazy Clock had warned me, over and over, about the hormone-level changes. I pulled a drink pack from my backpack. Lucy and I each took one, slotted it into the intake port on our gas masks, and sucked the contents down in a single pull. A massive hit of sugar and water hit the stomach and cleared my head.

At last I could feel the Sanity Gauge, which had bottomed out, beginning to climb again. Nicotine and sugar were the easiest, fastest way to restore sanity in EFD. For someone who had just burned through calories at that rate, sugar in particular was not optional.

We rested like that for a while, staring blankly at the elevator.

The elevator had no lights on. Its doors were not open. It had been broken from the start, exactly as it was now.

"……"

"……"

Lucy on her side, I on mine — each of us felt a deep, private shame and terror at the mindless stunt we had just pulled. But I would swear it on ten years of EFD playtime: this had been the best available move.

"Let's go in."

To confirm the real thing the ruined surface was hiding, we wrenched the fire-hose cabinet open.