The City Above the Ground

“Lay anchor here,” I said to Devitt, my first mate.  He was a red head, and also a former member of my squadron from my days as a Specter.  He wore a black stealth uniform called a chameleon cloak, which took photographs of his surroundings and displayed them on his cloak, making him appear invisible.

“You got it,” he replied, and began yelling off a series of orders to my crew.  My crew was a series of strays I had picked up over the years.  Some predated the war to end all wars, while others are survivors of the bombs and wastelands.  My ship was an old cargo ship that I had bought a couple years after joining up with the Specters.  It was a little investment I had made that paid off huge dividends, as it turned into my home after the bombs fell.  I had tricked it out with plasma cannons, rail artillery guns, and Gauss machine guns.  This was only one of three ships I had, but I kept the other two far offshore as they were not nearly as armed as this one is.  They do have enough armaments to keep pirates at bay, but their primary role is to serve as floating farmland.

As my crew bustled about, laying anchor in Boston Harbor, I made my way to one of our small, inflated power boats designed to bring me to and from shore.  I had business in the city of Boston that needed tending to. 

“Devitt!” I called to my first mate.  “I’m heading into Boston to my meeting with the mayor!  Keep the artillery primed in case I need support!”

“Gotcha!” Devitt replied. I turned to get onto the boat, but Devitt yelled, “Adam! Try to recruit some new crewmates while you’re there!”

“Will do!” I replied, feeling the sting at the loss of the two crewmates we had lost earlier in the week to a storm.

I hopped into the small motorboat and activated the winch to lower me into the water.  I grabbed the handle of the tiller, sending a surge of electricity through the electrical motor with my shimmer cloak.  I cranked the throttle on the motor and took off through the harbor to my usual landing site right by the Boston Aquarium.  The financial district in Boston had the highest density of tall buildings, so that is where the primary cluster of inhabitants reside.  It’s also where the mayor decided to set up shop.  It was about a twenty-minute trip from my ship to my landing sight, but I passed the time listening to a podcast.  It’s funny how quickly humans adapt to their environment.  When the bombs fell, I thought for sure any media of any kind would never be made again.  After all, that was the least of anyone’s concern for a time.  But as the years wore on and people became acclimated to living, they began to innovate again.  There are still inventions being created every day, no longer hindered by red tape.  On top of that, sites like YouTube never actually went down.  Many groups of people were still actively maintaining internet servers, and most satellites surprisingly remained intact. 

The podcast I was listening to was a fast-talking lawyer discussing the political situation in Boston.  He was discussing how land ownership was reserved for the established upper class, and how the majority of the population was a renting class.  He discussed how an eviction in Boston is almost certainly a death sentence.  There are no homeless anymore in Boston.  That issue was solved by the Sigma Virus.  My crew and I wanted to both study the Sigma Virus and put an end to the caste system in Boston and allow the private ownership of small parcels of land.  After all, land means power.

As I pulled my little boat out of the water and onto the shore, I heard a ragged shuffling coming from further up the shoreline.  Turning my attention to the noise, I saw the creatures meandering towards me, not having picked up my scent yet but definitely seeing me.  With a quick thought to my neural interface, I activated my shimmer cloak’s cloaking capabilities.  In a somewhat discombobulating moment, I saw my limbs vanish from sight.  The only sign I was still there were my footprints in the sand and a slight shimmer.  That shimmer was what gave shimmer tech its name.  Unlike Devitt’s chameleon cloak, my shimmer cloak did not take pictures of my surroundings and display them.  It actually bent light around my body using tiny, yet powerful, gravitational fields.  This of course took a lot of power and made the air noticeably colder around me as my cloak absorbed heat to power the cloaking function. 

The creatures continued to shuffle my way, but without seeing movement they soon drifted away from their original course.  Those creatures, the victims of the Sigma Virus, used to be human.  They were the reason why Boston became known as The City Above the Ground and also why being evicted from your rented cubicle in Boston was a death sentence.

After I had securely grounded my little boat, I made my way off the shoreline and up a small ridge.  As soon as I did, I was yet again hit by the sheer numbers the mutants possessed.  They flooded the streets of Boston.  The massive buildings had their lower parts cemented shut or bricked off, making it impossible for the mutants to enter the buildings.  Some of the old buildings of Boston’s financial district stood unaltered since the early two thousands, but many of them had either been torn down and replaced or added on to with the innovative new building material called graphene.  A single sheet of carbon formed around porous cement.  Once the cement was dissolved away, a brick of graphene was left.  It was ultra-strong and lightweight, allowing for new heights to be reached by humanity.  Each of the reconstructed buildings stood at least three times taller than the ones they had replaced.  The modified one were less than twice as tall than the originals, but still larger than the tallest building in Boston had been before the introduction of graphene. 

Above the ground, catwalks connected the buildings together.  Some of the large windows were smashed out to provide fresh air for the inhabitants.  People were bustling about their business across the catwalks and the large platforms built out from the buildings.  In conjunction with the platforms and catwalks between the buildings, flying machines were extremely prevalent.  There were airbuses, individual flying bikes, and even a fleet of hot air balloons for the poorest of the lower class.  Those were unique as they were connected between buildings by ropes that could be pulled to and froe to guide the hot air balloons from building to building.  Everything combined gave the Boston skyline the appearance of a vast, disorganized, noisy web. 

There was live stalk in some of the buildings, but they were primarily reserved for the upper class.  The general inhabitants had a well-rounded diet of nutrient enriched vegetables grown in the indoor growth farms constructed before the war.  It was a very sustainable form of food, but often left the inhabitants skinny.  Not malnourished, but they had very little fat on their bodies.  This was a very different situation that what was found on my ships, as I did have a sort of sustainable farming method where my crew did receive rations of meat or eggs with one meal in the day.  They were not fat, but definitely had a healthy layer of warming blubber to protect them from the harsh ocean spray.

I continued my journey to the base of one of the buildings, the mutants parting before me as they felt the coldness generated from my shimmer cloak.  I put out my foot onto the wall of the building, activating the antigravity function of my cloak while quickly deactivating the cloaking function.  The two of them combined would be too much of an energy draw, and my cloak would begin to condense the oxygen and carbon dioxide around me.  Again, this transition was disorienting as my gravitational frame shifted from the ground to the wall.  I began my ascent up the side of the building, making sure to shift the color of my cloak to match the color of the building.  I didn’t want too many people seeing me scale the side of the building in this manner.

As I approached the sixteenth story, I heard a padding behind me, as if a dog were following me.  I turned to find a black wolf with bright yellow eyes and black flecks scattered in them.  He stared at me.  It would have been unusual to find a black wolf in Boston, much less in the same gravity orientation as me while I was on the side of a building.  However, this was a figment of my mind.  Some call in the inner eye, others call it a subconscious.  Whatever the hell he is, he’s a pain in my ass.

“You should enter the building here,” the wolf said to me.

“And why’s that?” I asked out loud.

“I don’t entirely know myself.  Just a feeling is all.”

“You’re really no help sometimes, you know that?”

“And yet every time I have one of these feelings, it works out to your benefit.”

“Not every time,” I muttered.

“That was different,” the wolf said.  “And if you bring it up again, I’m pissing on your leg.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” I laughed.

The wolf snorted, his eyes glinting in amusement before he faded from my sight in a curl of black smoke.

Hopping through an open window into an empty hallway, I quickly communicated to my suit to morph itself so it would appear as the clothing worn by the population here.  So, it morphed from its usual stark white, armored appearance, into the normal casual wear worn by the lower class here.  It could be jeans, sweatpants, sweatshirts, t-shirts, etc.  All of it looked more or less similar to before the war as clothing manufacturing continued once Boston was re-founded and this clothing niche needed filling.  My cloak’s visor melted off my face and congealed with the rest of itself into my clothing.  My cloak’s ability to morph like this stems from the inherent nature of shimmer tech, in that it was a form of biotechnology.  It was comprised of cells with metallic organelles incorporated into the cellular structure.  Those added organelles gave me a large degree of control over the shape, color, and consistency of the cells comprising my shimmer cloak.

I walked through the hallway until I came to a hot air balloon that could take me to the middle tear of the city.  I was at the lowest tear at the moment, and it consequently had the poorest residents of Boston.  I needed to work my way up to the highest floor of the tallest building where the mayor had claimed for himself. 

Paying with some copper scraps I had hidden away in my purse; I rode the hot air balloon across the gap between buildings.  It was just me and a lanky boy no older than fourteen in the basket.  I had seen this kid before, and he was always working in one balloon or another.  I leaned over the side of the basket, looking down at the writhing mass of mutants on the ground.  Mindless, disorganized.  They are a threat if you are unprepared, especially a group as big as this, but humans evolved specifically so they can prepare themselves to face impossible odds.  Drying out meats to endure difficult winters, hunting bears by hiding spears on the ground and having the bear chase you into them, and a million other examples.  Mutants are but one more trial in the story of mankind, and Boston is a prime example of how humanity can prevail. 

I was jerked out of my reverie by the balloon coming to a gentle stop.  I looked up to find it had gotten itself snagged on a hanging piece of metal from one of the catwalks.  The boy working on this balloon scrambled up the side of tit, using the rope encircling the outside of the balloon as hand and footholds.  He managed to unsnag the balloon easier than he was expecting and lost his grip.  He let out a yelp as he fell, but I quickly grabbed a rope and jumped over the side to grab him.  We fell a ways, but the rope went taught and my iron grip held us firm.

“You should have tied yourself down,” I scolded the boy, as I shifted him onto my back.

“Y-yes sir,” the boy replied.  I hauled us up the rope, back into the basket.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“I think my wrist might be broken,” he muttered miserably.  In Boston, a broken wrist was either a death sentence or a pathway into indentured servitude.  That is to say, he and his family would be evicted because they wouldn’t be able to afford rent without the extra pair of hands, or one of the upper class would provide him food, clothing, shelter, and health care which would all need to be paid back over the course of his lifetime.

“Don’t you worry about that,” I replied.  “You aren’t afraid of heights and seem to have a good work ethic.  Do you have family?”

“My mum died during the war, but my pa and I both work the balloons.”

“There is a place for you aboard my ships,” I replied.  “I happen to have need of two crewmen with strong backs.”  As I said that, I felt the sting of loss from the two crewmen I had lost once again.

“Really?” he asked excitedly.  “Are you the ghost man?”  He was referencing my shimmer cloak.  As much as I try to refrain from exposing my cloak’s true appearance to the general populous, I was forced into a difficult situation when I first returned to Boston after the bombs fell.  Long story short, everyone and their cousin saw me in my cloak along with all three of my ships in all their glory.  They hadn’t seen my face, but they do know of me and my crew.

As for why they call me the ghost man, my cloak is stark white with a hooded cloak.  The mask is also somewhat skeleton-like, having sunken cheeks and recessed eye sockets.  The cloak portion of my shimmer cloak is but one part of it.  My whole body is actually encompassed in it, but the cloak generally draws the most attention as it covers the rest of the shimmer tech.  On my body itself, the shimmer tech forms a sort of hardened body armor designed to instantly convert kinetic energy into heat, which is then absorbed by the shimmer tech encasing my body.  By doing so, it makes me almost immune to small caliber rounds.  It is not perfect though, so a high caliber rifle round will crack a few ribs.  Overall, the appearance of my cloak in its natural form makes me seem like a ghost.

“Shhh,” I said.  “That is not to be repeated.  If you do, your family and you will be in grave danger.  If you can keep quiet about this and meet me back at the hallway we were just at when night falls with your father, you two will be able to escape this place with me.”

He nodded, holding his wrist as the swelling began to take hold.

“Good.”  With that bit of business concluded, the balloon came to the top platform where we were met by who I assumed to be the boy’s father.  He was also lanky, but had firm, wiry muscles.  He seemed to be in his mid-thirties.

“Sam!” the father shouted, scuttling his boy away from me.  “I saw everything!  Sir, thank you so much,” he said quickly to me before turning his attention back to his boy.  “Are you okay?”

Sam held up his wrist for his father to see, and his face went stone cold. 

“Don’t worry, you won’t be stomaching that burden.  I know of a businessman that will sponsor your healing process.”

“Your son will assume the debt once you die,” I spoke up.  “I can—”

“No, not this time,” the man interrupted me.  “This businessman doesn’t accept generational debt.  This injury dies when I either pay it off in full or die trying.”

“Sir, I have an—” I tried to say again, but he interrupted me.

“I’ll refund you for the trouble good sir,” the man said, handing me the equivalent of the scraps of copper I paid at the bottom hallway.  “It’s the least I can do.  And mind you, you’ve made a lifelong friend in me for what you did for my boy.  Once I get this business squared away with his hand, I insist you join us for dinner tonight.”

“Okay, sir I need you to stop interrupting me for a moment,” I stated bluntly.

The man paused for a moment, the flushed red.  “Shit, my bad.  My boy’s got me all worked up is all, and I’m trying to settle into my new reality is all,” he said, referencing his future lifelong indentured servitude.  For this man, eviction was not an option.  “I would have like to retire eventually, but I don’t rightly care so long as my boy can live a good life.  If I can just—”

I held up a hand, stopping him mid-sentence.  “I’ve got an offer for the both of you.  I discussed it with your son already, but it’s best neither of us say anything.  Do not go to meet with that businessman until tomorrow.  Tonight, meet me at the lower hallway this balloon is connected to.  Understand?”

The man looked me up and down.  Instead of engaging in his chattery nature, he simply nodded and said, “I think so.”

“Good.  I must be going now.  Mention to nobody anything of this, nor that I was here.”

With that, I made my way across the platform and into this new skyscraper.  I had to duck and dodge as drones flew through the corridors and people bustled about doing their jobs or running errands.  After navigating my way through the building to another platform, I noticed a man at another building directly across from this one trying to sell a hover bike.  Thinking a bit ahead about my extraction of Sam and his father, as well as getting somewhat irritated by the increasingly thickening crowds, I decided to buy that bike.  Hover bikes were no more than small quadcopters with handlebars.  They were generally powered by electricity, although I have seen some jury-rigged combustion motors attached to some.

There was no balloon, catwalk, or form of transport to take me directly there, so I had to navigate my way through several flights of stairs, a mother yelling at her flock of children blocking my way out to a platform, and two out of service cat walks that almost gave out on me.  I finally did make it to my destination, breathing a sigh of relief after having almost lost my shit on several occasions.  I’ve never been a huge fan of crowds, although I do recognize their uses in hiding in plain sight.  The biggest issue with crowds is the people…people can just be so stupid sometimes, especially in crowds.

“Hey,” I said to the man holding the for sale sign.  “That thing still work?”

“’fraid not,” he replied gruffly.  “She quit out on me and the mechanic’s got no idea what’s wrong with her.”

“Huh.  Mind if I take a look at it?” I asked.

“By all means, but don’t expect payment if yeh can figure out what’s wrong with it.”

“Gotcha,” I said curtly.  I opened up the fuse box and began to fiddle with some of the fuses.  I wasn’t expecting that to do a lot.  I was just buying time for my shimmer cloak to snake its way through the wiring of this thing and figure out what was wrong with it for me.  After a moment, I got a mental report of what was wrong with it.  I pulled a phone out of my pocket, which was actually just a cluster of my shimmer cloak’s cells.  On it, there was a display of the bike’s schematics along with what exactly was wrong with it.  The man tried peering over my shoulder, but I made sure that he couldn’t see what I was doing.  There were three unconnected things that were wrong with the bike, all of which just required some wire splicing to fix.  I wasn’t surprised nobody was able to figure out what was wrong with the bike.  Yeah, it was a simple fix, but to identify what things actually shit the bed was a monumental task in and of itself.  It could be done, but given the looks of this man, he by no means had the money to spare to possibly get this thing fixed.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

“Do yeh know what’s wrong with it?” the man asked.

“Not at all,” I lied.  I would have normally told him and found some other form of transportation, but this guy just rubbed me the wrong way.  “How much?”

“Three ounces of silver,” the man said.

For all he knew, this was a hunk of metal to be sold off.  He was definitely trying to rip me off.  Whatever.  I was already ripping him off, but I didn’t want it to be too obvious I was doing so.  “For a hunk of metal like this?  It’s worth maybe one ounce.”

The man grinned.  A bit of pushback is just what this guy needed.  “No way.  There’s great salvageable tech in there.  GPS, copper wiring, gyroscopes.  Two ounces.”

“You aren’t likely to get a buyer for that price down in the middle of Boston,” I said, referencing the level of Boston we were on.  The higher you went, the richer you were…generally.  It also so happened that the higher you went, the more indentured servants you found.  “An ounce and a half.”  This was still just above market value for bike, but not so high it would raise suspicions.  Just enough that the man would feel like he got the upper hand.

“Done,” he said quickly, ceasing any further negotiation.  “You have the metal on you?”

“I do,” I said, reaching for my purse.  It wasn’t by any means a normal purse either.  It looked more like a medium sized coin wallet, but us Specters called it a purse because of the sheer amount of stuff we could jam into them.  I handed he man the silver, making sure to appear annoyed.

The man smiled again, revealing his discolored teeth this time.  “Good doin’ business with you,” he said and scuttled away.

I shook my head and set to work stripping down the wires that needed tending and twisting them together.  After about ten minutes of work, the bike hummed to life.  The props underneath it began to rotate, creating the vacuum of air required for lift.  I popped on it and flew off up to the top of the skyscrapers where the mayor had set up his office.  Weaving through the web of ropes and catwalks, while dodging other hover bikes and hover craft was definitely a challenge, but also a welcome one.  The warm breeze in my face was refreshing as well.

The first two buildings to be replaced after the introduction of graphene were the two round towers, One and Two International Place.  One International Place was the larger of the two and rebuilt to be the tallest building in Boston.  I parked my hover bike on a platform joining the two buildings together.  There was a parking fee of course.  To give a semblance of fairness in this society, the mayor had made the parking available for all residents if they could pay the fee.  However, only the upper class could spare the money to park there, so only the upper class could come in to see the mayor.  The same fee was associated with any public transportation bringing people to the top of One International Place.  Voting was also held in the mayor’s chambers, so by having this fee associated with travel to the mayor’s chambers, it effectively made it so only the upper class could vote.  This democracy was one more akin to the roman empire under the rule of Nero.

After shutting the bike down and paying the fee with a small gold nugget, I began to walk to the entrance of the building.  I was cut off abruptly as three men barged their way past me as if I wasn’t even there.  They wore finely tailored suits.  One man looked back at me and laughed, his stark white teeth contrasting harshly with his dark skin.  He stood about a foot taller than me, and despite being dressed in a suit, I could tell that his body was extremely muscular.  He would have been handsome had it not been for the sneer he wore while looking at me.  His friends were equally as derisive and slightly shorter than him.  Their skin was pale and their clean, feathery blond hair indicating they showered and washed often.

“Who let this trash up here,” the black man said in a very deep voice.  “To think one of the rentoids could afford to come up here.  What apartment are you in boy?” he asked.  “Your rent needs to be raised.”

“I’m from out of town,” I explained, trying to avoid a confrontation if at all possible.  “I have a meeting with the mayor.  Now, if you please, I must be getting on my way.”

“No, no.  Only the elite deal directly with the mayor.  All outsiders and rentoids go through the secretaries.”

“Yeah, well I don’t particularly care,” I said callously.  My patience was running very thin when I had first gotten up here after dealing with the crowds down below.  Now I’ve got to deal with these dick heads.  “Get out of my face.”

The man laughed again.  “It seems we’ve got to teach the outside a lesson,” he said, cracking his knuckles.  “Gentlemen, if you please.”

The two blondes came rushing at me, arms outstretched as if to grab me and hold me down.  My ability that I took to calling my Preflex kicked in.  It was like a reflex, only I did not react to what had just happened.  I reacted to what was about to happen.  It gave me the ability to sense an attack or personal injury to me before it happened and then react to the premonition instead of the actual attack.  It manifests in my feeling the attack as if it had landed, but at a small fraction of the pain.  A gunshot would feel like a really painful pinch.  There were many drawbacks to this power, one of which being that wolf that appeared earlier.  On top of that, I was only given a fraction of a second’s warning to react.  It was better than nothing, but my reflexes still needed to be fast in order to react properly.

The blondes were both going for my arms, probably to pin me down so the black man could beat me to a pulp.  I moved my arms out of the way and dodged in between them, causing them to overshoot their trajectory.  Wasting to movement, I rushed the large black man and jabbed him in the throat before he could shout at me.  Feeling a dull thud on the back of my skull, I quickly turned just as one of the blonde men was mid punch.  I moved my head just enough for the punch to miss, grabbing his outstretched arm and snapping it at the join.  Unfortunately, this did lead him to scream.  The other blonde man was more wary of me, but I closed the distance between him and I in a flash.  Two quick jabs and a haymaker to the face left him on the ground, unconscious.  I felt a tugging sensation around my midsection, so I jumped to the side just as the black man dove at me.  He tumbled to the ground.  I ran and kicked him as hard as I could in his gut, then curb stomped his head.  His body went limp.

Fuck.  Did I kill him?  I quickly bent down to check his neck for a pulse.  Feeling a firm beat, I let out a sigh of relief.  Sirens began to blare around me, and I saw the automated security system approaching me.  They were very advanced robots, breaking away from the constricting nature of human anatomy.  They resembled large balls with holes dotting their surface.  Rolling towards me, tentacles sprung out of the balls, attaching themselves to grip points.  They were completely under the control of the upper class.  That is essentially why there has been no revolt against them.  These robots made an uprising nearly impossible.

“RAISE YOUR HANDS.  YOU ARE UNDER ARREST FOR DISTURBING THE PEACE AND THE ASSAULT OF THE ELITE,” the balls emitted in unison.

Honestly, screw this.  Things had escalated far too quickly for my liking.  I would try and reason with the security system, but their AI was not incredibly advanced.  They primarily relied on the police officers back in the detention centers to deal with complex communication.  Time to exercise some de-escalation techniques.

I sent a thought to my shimmer cloak, and it re-formed to its original stark white appearance in a flash.  My visor encased my head in a snap.  I didn’t let the cloak portion of the shimmer tech to reform as that would grant an extra grip point for the security drones to grab on to.  While this would greatly diminish the heat absorption properties of my shimmer cloak, it would only be for a short time.  On top of that, the kinetic converters responsible for protecting my body would almost completely eliminate the function of my preflex. 

“COMPLY OR YOU WILL BE MET BY FORCE,” they commanded.

With a quick thought, two sharp blades sprung out from my forearms, jutting past my hands by about a foot.  The tips of them glowed with a bright light as they reached a temperature of roughly twenty-two thousand degrees.  The cells of my shimmer tech maintained a thin vacuum between themselves and the heat, protecting them from damage.

The security drones rushed me, tentacles filling most of the free space around me.  My cloak’s computer analyzed their movements and highlighted their trajectory for me.  My arms began to move in a blur as I cut the tentacles to ribbons, melting through the metal like a hot knife through butter.  After thirty seconds of the lightning-fast fight, only balls of metal were left.  The rolled towards me as if to break my ankles, but I dispatched of them quickly with my blades.  Using my blades in this manner drained my energy reserves fairly fast, but I could replenish them quickly enough. 

Now, it was time to finally deal with the mayor.