Coven's Rebellion Chapter 26

Hiiii here's the Fluff link!
Also, with regards to authenticating with patreon on fluff, it would appear that the patreon app is somehow messing up the authentication process. Some fixes people have found include continuing to do it until it works, or removing the app's ability to intercept the authentication process somehow (I don't understand how this one works).

Rosa

The heavy concrete wall swung inwards with a low, eerie sigh. Beyond, was nothing but total, unrelenting darkness.

“No lights?” Ame asked from where she was crouched beside the doorway.

Rusti, who was with me on the other side of the large door, held their hand out into the open gap. “I’m getting airflow. Barely.”

He — I frowned and looked at Rusti. “Is it he, or they, right now?” I asked. The continued lack of clarity was like an intellectual burr that kept getting caught on things.

They laughed softly and winked. “Which do you think?”

Slowly, my eyes narrowed into a frustrated glare.

“Okay, okay,” they said quickly. “Default is they/them. Boy mode means I'm currently comfortable with ‘he’, and if I did girl mode, then ‘she’ would be fine too.”

“Thank you,” I said, and glanced through the door again. There was no movement. Turning on the thermal imaging camera built into my helmet, I flipped to augmented reality mode and looked again.

Strange thin rods extended vertically until they hit… ah, the ceiling. The camera slowly gained clarity as it incrementally increased its fidelity until shapes could be made out. The room beyond our door had a very homogenised temperature.

“A prison?” Ame asked, confused. “Prison bars, for sure, and old cots.”

While she puzzled through that, I flipped through various vision modes in an attempt to catch any surveillance cameras or similar gear. There were a few cameras in the corners, but based on the lack of any kind of emission they appeared to be inert. The room was honestly bare of anything besides a cheap plastic cot and a socket for a lightbulb in the ceiling.

After a full second sweep, I was satisfied that the cameras weren't on and nothing else was in the room, so I stepped through to get a better look.

Ame was right. This was a prison. The tunnel we'd used to enter it connected to the inside of a cell, and beyond its bars, we could see the rest of a large panopticon-style prison. Such prisons didn't have the most humane track records.

Like the original version that Jeremy Bentham had thought up, this place was a huge semi-circular room. All along the curved edge were prison cells with open walls facing inwards, so the security tower in the centre had an unobstructed view of every cell. The prison appeared to have multiple floors like this one, each connected only to the central tower by thin gantry bridges that could be retracted. Anybody in these cells would've had zero privacy and virtually no hope of escape.

Eyes warily on the security tower, I moved on silent feet to the edge of the cell, and again, I scanned the larger prison complex for active surveillance.

Nothing. The place was entirely devoid of life. A massive concrete and steel tomb.

A muffled clink drew my attention to the cell door, which Rusti had just opened. It slid sideways after a gentle shove from him. It was well made, but hadn't been maintained in a while and dust was caught in the bearings.

“This is creepy as fuck,” they commented once they were on the balcony and could look around.

Joining them, I looked down. Only five floors. Fifty rooms to a floor, each with four beds, meant a thousand prisoners could be housed here. Well, assuming they cared enough to make sure everyone had a bed.

“Maybe the research facility was converted from a prison? It'd explain why they aren't using this place,” Ame offered quietly.

I hummed thoughtfully. Clearly it hadn't been in use when the UN special operators came through here, because sneaking into a prison via one of the cells seemed… less than optimal.

“Let's keep moving,” Rusti said, waving us toward the bridge.

Every part of me was on edge, waiting for an alarm to sound, but I followed.

If it weren't for the stabilising algorithms and our expertly crafted boots, the bridge would have creaked and groaned alarmingly as we crossed it. When it reached the tower, the bridge became a metal grated gantry that circled the tower until it could reach out towards a set of double doors set halfway up the back wall of the prison. A locked door of metal bars separated the gantry from the inside of the guard tower, which Rusti opted to work on, because the double doors in the back wall had no discernable way to open them from this side.

Gaining access to the interior of the tower proved beyond any doubt that this place had been decommissioned a long time ago. No equipment could be found, except where it had been built into the walls.

We found the exit from there, and crept further into the facility, taking every precaution we could think of as we did so.

What we were met by, was more bland concrete, but this time it took the form of long curving corridors. We found the facilities where the prison guards had lived pretty quickly. They weren’t too much better than the prison cells, but they at least had a break room. What furniture had existed within was a mystery, because like everything else that hadn’t been built into the structure, it was gone.

The first indication that things were changing, was when the floor gained metal tiling. Pulling a tile up revealed heating pipes below. Clearly the people in this area had been a lot more important than guards or prisoners.

“Door,” Ame said, gesturing with the barrel of her rifle.

Peeking around her, I saw it. It was the most innocuous office door you could imagine, and it had my nanite hackles prickling with warning.

More cautious than ever, we approached it. Still, we found no surveillance of any kind, except for more cameras that were non-functional.

“This place is giving me the creeps,” Rusti muttered as we reached the door. “On three?”

Ame nodded. A stubborn part of me almost asked why I couldn’t just peek through using my nanites. Then I remembered a conversation where the two digital people in the team had categorically refused to let me go first in situations like this because of the fact that they were housed thousands of kilometres away and I was very much here in person. You get electrocuted one time, and suddenly everyone treats you like you’re made of porcelain. Honestly, with the way my nanites operated, I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligent little metal bugs had set up some sort of hyper efficient redundancy system, so that if any particular group were destroyed, there wouldn’t be any data loss. In fact, I was as certain as I could possibly be on that subject, considering that I had already used them as ablative shielding in the past.

Still, the telecommuters insisted that I stay back, so I did.

My girlfriend was first through the door, swinging it silently open and stepping through with rapid, sweeping movements of her weapon. Rusti was right behind her, with significantly less precision to their movements. It was clear that Ame had trained for this significantly more than Rusti had. Considering the different paths their lives had taken, this was not very surprising.

“It’s clear,” she said a moment later. “Rosa, you can do your sweep, but this place is like the rest. There’s nothing here worth looking at.”

Stepping into the room, I began to do as she suggested. Interestingly, this room still had furniture that clearly indicated it had once been an office. Rows of desks were split down the middle by a main thoroughfare, which terminated in a small meeting alcove on one side of the room, and a kitchen and break area on the other. Only one camera was in the room, and like all the others, it was inert.

“What the hell was going on in this place?” Rusti asked from where they had wandered to the meeting nook.

They were looking at something, so I followed behind and peeked around the room divider that was obscuring the object of his attention.

A large free standing whiteboard was up against the wall, with evidence of words and crude diagrams that had once populated the board, but which were now all but wiped away.

“I wonder…” Ame muttered, stepping up to pull the whiteboard forward. It was one of those ones on wheels, where you could also rotate the board to use the other side. When she had enough room, she did so. The back of the whiteboard was not empty like the other side had been.

Occupying the top corners were two sheets of plastic. Both held scans of a human brain, but with pen markings labelling them as ‘before’ and ‘after’. The ‘before’ one had a lot going on, with all sorts of areas lit up and… well, to my inexperienced eye, healthy. The ‘after’ scan was unsettling. It looked as though the brain had been melted slightly, and it was quite obviously dead. Whoever this was, they had not survived the ‘during’ segment of the event.

“Disturbing,” said my girlfriend, eyeing the scans.

Rusti was silent, but his eyes were sliding across each image as though he were reading it. Finally, he blinked and turned to us. “I got high resolution pictures for later. I’m sure Des and probably May are watching our feeds, so they might be able to make more sense of this.”

“Correct,” came Desmonia’s reply through a shared text chat. “May thinks she recognises the ‘after’ picture, but she can’t remember why off the top of her head.”

“Well, if they’re working on it, then we should continue our search,” said Rusti with an unsettled look towards the scans again. “So far, this place is a bust. We need something to show for all this work, besides whatever the fuck this is.”

I found myself agreeing both with their words, and the look they gave the scans. We left the office and began to tiptoe down the corridor once more. Doors began to show up more frequently, but all we found were more offices, plus bathrooms.

Then, we cautiously turned a corner to find a small elevator lobby. A lit lobby.

Hastily, the three of us ducked back around the corner, simulated hearts pumping frantically. This was the first sign of life that we’d found so far.

“I saw a camera,” I said. “Top right.”

“Top left, too,” Ame said, gesturing with a thumb back around the corner. “Looks like a door to a stairwell further left than that.”

Lifting the flap on a pouch at my hip, I said, “It appears that I’ll finally get to use these things.”

From the pouch, I pulled two cylinders that were of a similar size to a lipstick tube. I slotted one between my fingers while I used thumb and forefinger to bring the second one towards my opposite wrist.

The robotic frame I was piloting had a lot of realism to it, with soft sections, synthetic muscle, and everything else to make it look the part. However, beneath the polymer fibers, foam, and skin, it was entirely robot. A rectangle of skin opened in my wrist to reveal the barrel of a small launcher, and I carefully slotted the first cylinder into it.

My aim was more of a suggestion, but it didn't matter if I was one hundred percent accurate. The projectile sailed out towards the first camera with a soft sigh. Before it hit anything, it flipped in midair and sprouted a set of tiny rotor blades from one end. Using that, it adjusted course and slowed to a stop above the righthand camera.

“Getting a connection,” Rusti murmured, then smiled. “Their feed is getting generated images now. Do the next one.”

So, we repeated the procedure on the second one. Soon, both surveillance cameras were being fed doctored images of the hallway — not loops, mind you. When a camera was operating normally, the video it presented of a static hallway might seem like it was unchanging. However, each frame was not identical, and if a pattern began to emerge in the tiny changing details of those frames, an alarm might sound.

“Okay. Advance to the entrance, do a quick scan for anything else, then down the stairs,” Ame said when my arm launcher was safely stowed back in my wrist.

Nothing else came up on my scans, so we made it into the stairwell. From there, we began to descend further into the creepy, partially abandoned facility. To say that I was on edge would have been a gross understatement. Every ounce of intuition I possessed was screaming. This place felt deeply evil, I just couldn't pinpoint why.